The history of this last period of the Revival would be incomplete without a survey of its Latin poetry. I shall have failed to convey a right notion of the tendencies of humanism, if I have not shown that the Italians were seeking not merely to acquire a knowledge of ancient literature, but also to effect a resuscitation of antiquity in their own writings. Regarding themselves as the heirs of Rome, separated from the brilliant period of Latin civilisation by ten centuries of ignorance, they strove with all their might to seize the thread of culture at the very point where the poets of the Silver Age had dropped it. In the opinion of Northern races it might seem unnatural or unpatriotic to woo the Muses in a dead language; but for Italians the CamoenÆ had not died; on the hills of Latium, where they fell asleep, they might awake again. Every familiar sight and sound recalled 'the rich Virgilian rustic measure' of the 'Georgics' and 'Bucolics.' Nature had not changed, nor did the poets feel the influence of Christianity so deeply as to find no meaning in the mythic phraseology of Fauns and Nymphs.

Latin, again, was far less a language of the past for the Italians than for other European nations. What risk the Tuscan dialect ran, when Dante wrote the first lines of the 'Divine Comedy' in Latin, and when Petrarch assumed the laurel crown by right of his 'Africa', is known to every student. The serious efforts of the greatest writers were for centuries devoted to Latin composition, because they believed that the nation, in the modern as in the ancient world, might freely use the speech of Cicero and Virgil. Their volgari cose they despised as trifles, not having calculated the impotence of scholars or of kings to turn the streams of language from their natural courses. Nor was this blindness so inexplicable as it seems to us at first sight. Italy possessed no common dialect; Dante's 'Italiano Illustre,' or 'Cortegiano', was even less native to the race at large, less universal in its use, than Latin.[412] Fashioned from the Tuscan for literary purposes, selected from the vocabulary of cultivated persons, stripped of vernacular idioms, and studied in the works of a few standard authors, it was itself, upon the soil that gave it birth, a product of high art and conscious culture. The necessity felt soon after Dante's death for translating the 'Divine Comedy' into Latin, sufficiently proves that a Latin poem gained a larger audience than the masterpiece of Italian literature. While the singer of a dialect, however noble, appealed to his own fellow-citizens, the Latin poet gave his verses urbi et orbi. If another proof of the artificiality of Italian were needed, we should find it in the fact that the phrases of Petrarch are not less obsolete now than in the fourteenth century. The English require a glossary for Chaucer, and even Elizabethan usages are out of date; in other words, the language of the people has outgrown the style of its first poets. But Italian has undergone no process of transformation and regeneration according to the laws of organic growth, since it first started. The different districts still use different dialects, while writers in all parts of the peninsula have conformed their style as far as possible to early Tuscan models. It may be questioned whether united Italy, having for the first time gained the necessary conditions of national concentration, is not now at last about to enter on a new phase of growth in literature, which, after many years, will make the style of the first authors more archaic than it seems at present.

The foregoing observations were requisite in order to explain why the cultivation of Latin poetry was no mere play-work to Italian scholars. The peculiar direction given by Petrarch to classical studies at the outset must also be taken into account. We have seen that he regarded rhetoric and poetry as the two chief aims of humanism. To be either a poet or an orator was the object of all students who had slaked their thirst at the Castalian springs of ancient learning. Philology and poetry, accordingly, went hand in hand through the periods of the Revival; and to this first impulse we are perhaps justified in tracing back the prominence assigned to Latin verse in our own school studies.

Poetry being thus regarded as a necessary branch of scholarship, it followed that few men distinguished for their learning abstained from versification. Pedants who could do no more than make prosaic elegiacs scan, and scholars respectable for their acquirements, but destitute of inspiration, were reckoned among the sacri vates. It would be a weariful—nay, hopeless—task to pass all the Latin versifiers of the Renaissance in review. Their name is legion; even to count them would be the same as to number the stars—ad una ad una annoverar le stelle. It may be considered fortunate that perhaps the larger masses of their productions still remain in manuscript, partly because they preceded the age of printing, and partly, no doubt, because the good sense of the age rejected them. What has been printed, however, exceeds in bulk the 'Corpus Poetarum Latinorum,' and presents so many varieties that to deal with more than a selection is impossible.[413]

The poetasters of the first two periods need not be taken into account. Struggling with a language imperfectly assimilated, and with the rules of a prosody as yet but little understood, it was as much as they could do to express themselves at all in metre. Elegance of composition was out of the question when a writer could neither set forth modern thoughts with ease nor imitate the classic style with accuracy. What he lost in force by the use of a dead language, he did not gain in polish; nor was the taste of the age schooled to appreciate the niceties of antique diction. Beccadelli alone, by a certain limpid fluency, attained to a degree of moderate excellence; and how much he owed to his choice of subject may be questioned. The obscenity of his themes, and the impudence required for their expression, may have acted as a stimulus to his not otherwise distinguished genius. There is, moreover, no stern conflict to be fought with phrases when the author's topic is mere animalism. The rest of his contemporaries, Filelfo included, did no more than smooth the way for their successors by practising the technicalities of verse and exciting emulation. To surpass their rude achievements was not difficult, while the fame they enjoyed aroused the ambition of younger rivals. Exception to this sweeping verdict may be made in favour of Alberti, whose Latin play, called 'Philodoxus,' was a brilliant piece of literary workmanship.[414] Not only did it impose on contemporaries as a genuine classic, but, even when judged by modern standards, it shows real familiarity with the language of Latin comedy and rare skill in its employment.

Poliziano is the first Latin poet who compels attention in the fifteenth century; nor was he surpassed, in fertility of conception and mastery of metre, by any of his numerous successors. With all his faults of style and crudities of diction, Poliziano, in my opinion, deserves the chief place among original poets of revived Latin literature. Bembo wrote more elegantly, Navagero more classically, Amalteo with a grace more winning. Yet these versifiers owe their celebrity to excellence of imitation. Poliziano possessed a manner of his own, and made a dead language utter thoughts familiar to the age in which he lived. He did not merely traverse the old ground of the elegy, the epigram, the satire, and the idyll. Striking out a new path for himself, and aiming at instruction, he poured forth torrents of hexameters, rough perhaps and over-fluent, yet marked by intellectual energy and copious fancy, in illustration of a modern student's learning. This freedom of handling is shown to best advantage in his 'SylvÆ.'[415]

The 'Nutricia' forms an introduction to the history of poetry in general, and carries on its vigorous stream the weight of universal erudition. From it we learn how the most accomplished scholar of his century judged and distinguished the whole body of fine literature possessed by his contemporaries. On the emergence of humanity from barbarism, writes Poliziano, poetry was given to men as a consolation for the miseries of life and as an instrument of culture; their first nurse in the cradle of civilisation was the Muse:—

Musa quies hominum, divomque Æterna voluptas.[416]

After characterising the Pagan oracles, the mythical bards of Hellas, and the poet-prophets of the Jewish race, with brief but telling touches, Poliziano addresses himself in the following lines to the delineation of the two chief epic-singers:—

... etenim ut stellas fugere undique cÆlo, Aurea cum radios Hyperionis exeruit fax, Cernimus, et tenuem velut evanescere lunam; Sic veterum illustres flagranti obscurat honores Lampade MÆonides: unum quem dia canentem Facta virum, et sÆvas Æquantem pectine pugnas, Obstupuit, prorsusque parem confessus Apollo est. Proximus huic autem, vel ni veneranda senectus Obstiterit, fortasse prior, canit arma virumque Vergilius, cui rure sacro, cui gramine pastor AscrÆus, Siculusque simul cessere volentes.[417]

Then follows the enumeration of lesser Greek and Roman epopoeists. After them the lyrists and elegiac poets, among whom Pindar is celebrated in the following magniloquent paragraph:—

AËrios procul in tractus, et nubila supra Pindarus it DircÆus olor, cui nectare blandÆ Os tenerum libÂstis apes, dum fessa levaret Membra quiete puer mollem spirantia somnum; Sed TanagrÆa suo mox jure poetria risit, Irrita qui toto sereret figmenta canistro; Tum certare auso palmam intercepit opimam Æoliis prÆlata modis atque illice formÂ. Ille Agathocle subnisus voce coronas Dixit Olympiacas, et qu victoribus Isthmos Fronde comam, Delphique tegant, NemeÆaque tesqua Lunigenam mentita feram; tum numina divum Virtutesque, virosque undanti pectore torrens Provexit, sparsitque pios ad funera questus. Frugibus hunc libisque virum CirrhÆus ab ar Phoebus, et accubitu mensÆ dignatus honoro est: Panaque pastores solis videre sub antris Pindarico tacitas mulcentem carmine silvas. Inde senem pueri gremio cervice repost Infusum, et dulci laxantem corda sopore, Protinus ad manes, et odoro gramine pictum Elysium tacit rapuit Proserpina dextrÂ. Quin etiam hostiles longo post tempore flammÆ, QuÆ septemgeminas populabant undique Thebas, Expavere domum tanti tamen urere vatis, Et sua posteritas medios quoque tuta per enses Sensit inexhaust cinerem juvenescere famÂ.[418]

Sappho is described in the following lines:—

lyricis jam nona poetis Æolis accedit Sappho, quÆ flumina propter Pierias legit ungue rosas, unde implicet audax Serta Cupido sibi, niveam quÆ pectine blando Cyrinnem, Megaramque simul, cumque Atthide pulchram Cantat Anactorien, et crinigeram Telesippen; Et te conspicuum recidivo flore juventÆ Miratur revocatque, Phaon, seu munera vectÆ Puppe tu Veneris, seu sic facit herba potentem: Sed tandem Ambracias temeraria saltat in undas.[419]

Having disposed of the lyrists, Poliziano proceeds to the dramatic poets. His brief notice of the three Attic tragedians is worthy of quotation, if only because it proves what we should suspect from other indications, that the best scholars of the earlier Renaissance paid them little attention. The facts mentioned in the following lines seem to be derived from the gossip of AthenÆus:—

Æschylus aËriÆ casu testudinis ictus, Quemque senem meritÆ rapuerunt gaudia palmÆ, Quemque tegit rabidis lacerum pia Pella molossis.[420]

Nor are his observations on the comic dramatists less meagre.[421] The Roman poets having been passed in the same rapid review, Poliziano salutes the founders of Italian literature in the following fine passage:—

Nec tamen aligerum fraudarim hoc munere Dantem, Per Styga, per stellas, mediique per ardua montis Pulchra Beatricis sub virginis ora volantem: Quique Cupidineum repetit Petrarcha triumphum: Et qui bis quinis centum argumenta diebus Pingit, et obscuri qui semina monstrat amoris: Unde tibi immensÆ veniunt prÆconia laudis, Ingeniis opibusque potens Florentia mater.[422]

The transition to Lorenzo at this point is natural. A solemn peroration in praise of the Medicean prince, himself a poet, whose studies formed the recreation of severer labours, ends the composition. This is written in Poliziano's best style, and, though it is too long to quote, six lines may be selected as indicating the theme of the argument:—

Quodque alii studiumque vocant durumque laborem, Hic tibi ludus erit; fessus civilibus actis Huc is emeritas acuens ad carmina vires: Felix ingenio, felix cui pectore tantas Instaurare vices, cui fas tam magna capaci Alternare animo, et varias ita nectere curas.[423]

We possess the whole of Poliziano in the 'Nutricia.' It displays the energy of intellect that carried him on bounding verse through the intricacies of a subject difficult by reason of its scope and magnitude. All his haste is here, his inability to polish or select, his lava-stream of language hurrying the dross of prose and scoriÆ of erudition along a burning tide of song. His memory held, as it were, in solution all the matter of antique literature; and when he wrote, he poured details forth in torrents, combining them with critical remarks, for the double purpose of instruction and panegyric. Taken at the lowest valuation by students to whom his copious stores of knowledge are familiar, the vivid and continuous melody of his leaping hexameters places the 'Nutricia' above the lucubrations of more fastidious Latinists. We must also remember that, when it was recited from the professorial Chair of Rhetoric at Florence, the magnetism of Poliziano's voice and manner supplied just that touch of charm the poem lacks for modern readers; nor was the matter so hackneyed at the end of the fifteenth century as it is now. Lilius Gyraldus, subjecting the 'SylvÆ' to criticism at a time when Latin poetry had been artistically polished by the best wits of the age of Leo, passed upon them a judgment which may even now be quoted as final.[424] 'Poliziano's learning was marvellous, his genius fervent and well-trained, his reading extensive and uninterrupted; yet he appears to have composed his verses with more heat than art, using too little judgment both in the selection of his materials and in the correction of his style. When, however, you read his 'SylvÆ,' the impression left upon your mind will be such that for the moment you will lack nothing.'

The second poem of the 'SylvÆ,' entitled 'Rusticus,' forms an induction to the study of bucolic poets, principally Hesiod and Virgil. It is distinguished by more originality and play of fancy than the 'Nutricia;' some of its delineations of landscape and sketches of country life compete not unfavourably with similar passages in the author's 'Stanze.' To dwell upon these beauties in detail, and to compare Poliziano, the Latin poet, with Poliziano, the Italian, would be a pleasant task. Yet I must confine myself to quoting the last, and in some respects the least imaginative, lines, for the sake of their historical interest. Careggi and Florence, Lorenzo and his circle of literary friends, rise before us in these verses:—

Talia Fesuleo lentus meditabar in antro, Rure suburbano Medicum, qu mons sacer urbem MÆoniam, longique volumina despicit Arni: Qu bonus hospitium felix placidamque quietem Indulget Laurens, Laurens haud ultima Phoebi Gloria, jactatis Laurens fida anchora Musis; Qui si certa magis permiserit otia nobis, Afflabor majore Deo, nec jam ardua tantum Silva meas voces, montanaque saxa loquentur, Sed tu, si qua fides, tu nostrum forsitan olim, O mea blanda altrix, non aspernabere carmen, Quamvis magnorum genitrix Florentia vatum, Doctaque me triplici recinet facundia linguÂ.[425]

The third canto of the 'SylvÆ' is called 'Manto.' It relates the birth of Virgil, to whom the Muses gave their several gifts, while the Sibyl of Mantua foretold his future course of life and all the glories he should gain by song. The poem concludes with a rhetorical eulogy of Rome's chief bard, so characteristic of Renaissance enthusiasm for Virgil that to omit a portion of it from these pages would be to sacrifice one of the most striking examples of Italian taste in scholarship:—

At manet Æternum, et seros excurrit in annos Vatis opus, dumque in tacito vaga sidera mundo Fulgebunt, dum sol nigris orietur ab Indis, PrÆvia luciferis aderit dum curribus Eos, Dum ver tristis hiems, autumnum proferet Æstas, Dumque fluet spirans refluetque reciproca Tethys, Dum mixta alternas capient elementa figuras, Semper erit magni decus immortale Maronis, Semper inexhaustis ibunt hÆc flumina venis, Semper ab his docti ducentur fontibus haustus, Semper odoratos fundent hÆc gramina flores, Unde piÆ libetis apes, unde inclyta nectat Serta comis triplici juvenalis Gratia dextrÂ.[426]

Not less ingenious than the poem itself is the elegiac introduction. Poliziano feigns that when the MinyÆ came to Cheiron's cave on Pelion, and supped with him, Orpheus sang a divine melody, and then the young Achilles took the lyre, and with rude fingers praised the poet's song. The MinyÆ smiled, but Orpheus was touched by the boy-hero's praises. Even so will Maro haply take delight in mine:—

Finis erat dapibus; citharam pius excitat Orpheus, Et movet ad doctas verba canora manus. Conticuere viri, tenuere silentia venti, Vosque retro cursum mox tenuistis aquÆ. Jam volucres fessis pendere sub Æthera pennis, Jamque truces videas ora tenere feras. Decurrunt scopulis auritÆ ad carmina quercus, Nudaque Peliacus culmina motat apex. Et jam materno permulserat omnia cantu, Cum tacuit, querulam deposuitque fidem. Occupat hanc audax, digitosque affringit Achilles, Indoctumque rudi personat ore puer. Materiam quÆris? laudabat carmina blandi Hospitis, et tantÆ murmura magna lyrÆ. Riserunt MinyÆ: sed enim tibi dicitur, Orpheu, HÆc pueri pietas grata fuisse nimis. Me quoque nunc magni nomen celebrare Maronis, Si qua fides vero est, gaudet et ipse Maro.[427]

The fourth poem, bearing the name of 'Ambra,' forms a similar induction to the study of Homer. The youth of Homer is narrated, and how Achilles appeared to him, blinding him with the vision of his heroic beauty, and giving him the wand of Teiresias. Then follow descriptions of both 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey,' and a passage of high-flown panegyric; the whole ending with these lines on Lorenzo's villa of Cajano:—

Et nos ergo illi grat pietate dicamus Hanc de Pierio contextam flore coronam, Quam mihi Cajanas inter pulcherrima nymphas Ambra dedit patriÆ lectam de gramine ripÆ; Ambra mei Laurentis amor, quem corniger Umbro, Umbro senex genuit domino gratissimus Arno, Umbro suo tandem non erepturus ab alveo.[428]

Taking into consideration the purpose fulfilled by Poliziano's 'SylvÆ' in his professorial career, it is impossible to deny their merit. The erudition is borne with ease; it does not clog or overload the poet's impulse. The flattery of Lorenzo is neither fulsome nor unmerited. The verse flows strongly and majestically, though more variety of cadence in the hexameter may be desired. The language, in spite of repetitions and ill-chosen archaisms, is rich and varied; it has at least the charm of being the poet's own, not culled with scrupulous anxiety from one or two illustrious sources. Some of the pictures are delicately sketched, while the whole style produces the effect of eloquent and fervid improvisation. For fulness and rapidity of utterance, copious fancy, and wealth of illustration, these four poems will bear comparison with Roman work of the Silver Age. The Florentines who crowded Poliziano's lecture-room must have felt as in the days of the Empire, when Statius declaimed his periods to a Roman audience, and the patrician critics clapped applause.[429]

Among Poliziano's minor poems it is enough to mention the elegiac couplets on some violets sent him by his mistress, the verses descriptive of a beautiful girl, and the lamentation for the wife of Sismondo della Stufa.[430] They illustrate the delicacy of his style and the freedom of his fancy in the treatment of occasional themes, and are far superior to his epigrams and epitaphs.[431] The numerous encomiastic elegies addressed to Lorenzo de' Medici and other patrons are wholly without value. Poliziano was a genuine poet. He needed the inspiration of true feeling or of lively fancy; on a tame occasion he degenerated into frigid baldness. Yet the satires on Mabilius, where spite and jealousy have stirred his genius, are striking for their volubility and pungency. A Roman imitator of Catullus in his brutal mood could not have produced abuse more flexible and nauseous. Taken altogether, Poliziano's Latin compositions display the qualities of fluency and abundance that characterise his Italian verses, though they have not the exquisite polish of the 'Giostra.' Their final merit consists in their spontaneity. No stylist of the age of Leo knew how to use the language of classic Rome with so much ease.

Jovianus Pontanus deserves a high place among the writers of Latin verse, whether we regard his didactic poems on astronomy and the cultivation of the orange, his epigrams, or the amorous elegies that, for their grace, may be compared almost with Ovid.[432] Even during his lifetime Pontanus became a classic, and after his death he was imitated by the most ambitious versifiers of the late Renaissance.[433] The beauty of South Italian landscape—Sorrento's orange gardens and BaiÆ's waters—passed into the fancy of the Neapolitan poets, and gave colour to their language. Nor was Pontanus, in spite of his severe studies and gravely-tempered mind, dead to the seductions of this siren. What we admire in Sannazzaro's 'Arcadia' assumes the form of pure Latinity in his love poems.[434] Their style is penetrated with the feeling for physical beauty, Pagan and untempered by an afterthought of Christianity. Their vigorous and glowing sensuality finds no just analogue except in some Venetian paintings. It was not, however, by his lighter verses so much as by the five books called 'De Stellis' or 'Urania' that Pontanus won the admiration of Italian scholars. In this long series of hexameters he contrived to set forth the whole astronomical science of his age, touching upon the mythology of the celestial signs, describing the zodiac, discussing the motion of the heavens, raising the question of planetary influences, and characterising the different regions of the globe by their relation to the sun's path across the sky. He seems to have taken the 'Metamorphoses' of Ovid for his model of versification; and though we miss the variety of Ovid's treatment, great ingenuity is displayed in adorning so difficult a subject with poetical episodes.[435] Personal interest is added to the conclusion of 'Urania' by the lamentation poured forth for his daughter Lucia by the poet:—

Ornabam tibi serta domi; Syriumque liquorem Ad thalamos geminÆ, geminÆ, tua cura, sorores Fundebant. Quid pro sertis Syrioque liquore Liquisti? Sine sole dies, sine sidere noctes, Insomnes noctes.[436]

Lucia died before her marriage-day, and her grey-headed father went mourning for her, fooled by memory, vainly seeking the joy that could not come again. Had she become, he asks, a star in heaven, and did the blessed gods and heroines enjoy her splendour? No voice replied when he called into the darkness, nor did new constellations beam on him with brightness from his daughter's eyes. All through the wakeful night he mourned, but when dawn went forth he marked a novel lustre on the sea and in the sky. Lucia had been added to the nymphs of morning. She smiled upon her father as she fled before the wheels of day; and now the sun himself arose, and in his light her light was swallowed: Hyperion scaled the heights of heaven with more than his own glory. With this apotheosis of his daughter, so curiously Pagan in feeling, and yet so far from classical in taste, the poem might have ended, had not Pontano reserved its final honours for himself. To Lucia, now made a goddess, he addresses his prayers that she should keep his name and fame alive on earth when he is dead:—

Fama ipsa assistens tumulo cum vestibus aureis, Ore ingens, ac voce ingens, ingentibus alis, Per populos late ingenti mea nomina plausu Vulgabit, titulosque feret per sÆcula nostros; Plaudentesque meis resonabunt laudibus aurÆ, Vivet et extento celeber Jovianus in Ævo.[437]

Sannazzaro's own elegies on the joys of love and country life, the descriptions of his boyhood at Salerno, the praises of his Villa Mergillina, and his meditations among the ruins of CumÆ, are marked by the same characteristics. Nothing quite so full of sensual enjoyment, so soft, and so voluptuous can be found in the poems of the Florentine and Roman scholars. They deserve study, if only as illustrating the luxurious tone of literature at Naples. It was not by these lighter effusions, however, that Sannazzaro won his fame. The epic on the birth of Christ cost him twenty years of labour; and when it was finished, the learned world of Italy welcomed it as a model of correct and polished writing. At the same time the critics seem to have felt, what cannot fail to strike a modern reader, that the difficulties of treating such a theme in the Virgilian manner, and the patience of the stylist, had rendered it a masterpiece of ingenuity rather than a work of genius.[438] Sannazzaro's epigrams, composed in the spirit of bitterest hostility towards the Borgia family, were not less famous than his epic. Alfonso of Aragon took the poet with him during his campaign against the Papal force in the Abruzzi; and these satires, hastily written in the tent and by the camp-fire, formed the amusement of his officers. From the soldiers of Alfonso they speedily passed, on the lips of courtiers and scholars, through all the cities of Italy; nor is it easy to say how much of Lucrezia Borgia's legend may not be traceable to their brief but envenomed couplets. What had been the scandal of the camp acquired consistency in lines too pungent to be forgotten and too witty to remain unquoted.[439] As a specimen of Sannazzaro's style, the epigram on Venice may here be cited:—

Viderat Hadriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis Stare urbem, et toto ponere jura mari: Nunc mihi Tarpeias quantumvis, Jupiter, arces Objice, et illa tui moenia Martis, ait: Si Pelago Tybrim prÆfers, urbem aspice utramque; Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse deos.[440]

I have already touched upon the Virgilianism of Sannazzaro's 'Partus Virginis.'[441] What the cold churches of Palladio are to Christian architecture, this frigid epic is to Christian poetry. Leo X. delighted to recognise the Gospel narrative beneath a fancy dress of mythological inventions, and to witness the triumph of classical scholarship in the holy places of the mediÆval faith. To fuse the traditions of Biblical and secular antiquity was, as I have often said, the dream of the Renaissance. What Pico and Ficino attempted in philosophical treatises, the poets sought to effect by form. Religion, attiring herself in classic drapery, threw off the cobwebs of the Catacombs, and acquired the right of petites entrÉes at the Vatican. It did not signify that she had sacrificed her majesty to fashion, or that her tunic À la mode antique was badly made. Her rouge and spangles enchanted the scholarly Pontiff, who forthwith ordered Vida to compose the 'Christiad,' and gave him a benefice at Frascati in order that he might enjoy a poet's ease. Vida's epic, like Sannazzaro's, was not finished during the lifetime of Leo. Both the 'Christiad' and the 'Partus Virginis' reflected lustre on the age of Clement.

Vida won his first laurels in the field of didactic poetry. Virgilian exercises on the breeding of silkworms and the game of chess displayed his faculty for investing familiar subjects with the graces of a polished style.[442] Such poems, whether written in Latin, or, like the 'Api' of Rucellai, in Italian, gratified the taste of the Renaissance, always appreciative of form independent of the matter it invested. For a modern student Vida's metrical treatise in three books on the 'Art of Poetry' has greater interest; since it illustrates the final outcome of classic studies in the age of Leo. The 'Poetica' is addressed to Francis, Dauphin of France, in his Spanish prison:[443]—

Primus ades, Francisce; sacras ne despice Musas, Regia progenies, cui regum debita sceptra Gallorum, cum firma annis accesserit Ætas. HÆc tibi parva ferunt jam nunc solatia dulces; Dum procul a patri raptum, amplexuque tuorum, Ah dolor! Hispanis sors impia detinet oris, Henrico cum fratre; patris sic fata tulerunt Magnanimi, dum fortun luctatur iniquÂ. Parce tamen, puer, o lacrymis; fata aspera forsan Mitescent, aderitque dies lÆtissima tandem Post triste exilium patriis cum redditus oris LÆtitiam ingentem populorum, omnesque per urbes Accipies plausus, et lÆtas undique voces; Votaque pro reditu persolvent debita matres. Interea te Pierides comitentur; in altos Jam te Parnassi mecum aude attollere lucos.[444]

After this dedication Vida describes the solace to be found in poetry, and adds some precepts on the preparation of the student's mind.[445] A rapid review of the history of poetry—the decline of Greek inspiration after Homer, and of Latin after Virgil; the qualities of the Silver Age, and the Revival of letters under the Medici at Florence—serves to show how narrow the standard of Italian culture had become between the period of Poliziano, who embraced so much in his sketch of literature, and that of Vida, who confined himself to so little. The criticism is not unjust; but it proves that the refinement of taste by scholarship had resulted in restricting students to one or two models, whom they followed with servility.[446] Having thus established his general view of the poetic art, Vida proceeds to sketch a plan of education. The qualities and duties of a tutor are described; and here we may notice how far Vittorino's and Guarino's methods had created an ideal of training for Italy. The preceptor must above all things avoid violence, and aim at winning the affections of his pupil; it would be well for him to associate several youths in the same course of study, so as to arouse their emulation. He must not neglect their games, and must always be careful to suit his method to the different talents of his charges. When the special studies to be followed are discussed, Vida points out that Cicero is the best school of Latin style. He recommends the early practice of bucolic verse, and inculcates the necessity of treating youthful essays with indulgence. These topics are touched with more or less felicity of phrase and illustration; and though the subject-matter is sufficiently trite, the good sense and kindly feeling of the writer win respect. The first book concludes with a peroration on the dignity and sanctity of poets, a theme the humanists were never weary of embroidering.[447] The second describes the qualities of a good poem, as these were conceived by the refined but formal taste of the sixteenth century. It should begin quietly, and manage to excite without satisfying the curiosity of the reader. Vain displays of learning are to be avoided. Episodes and similes must occur at proper intervals; and a frugal seasoning of humour will be found agreeable. All repetitions should be shunned, and great care should be taken to vary the narrative with picturesque descriptions. Rhetoric, again, is not unworthy of attention, when the poet seeks to place convenient and specious arguments in the mouths of his personages.

It is difficult in a summary to do justice to this portion of Vida's poem. His description of the ideal epic is indeed nothing more or less than a refined analysis of the 'Æneid;' and students desirous of learning what the Italians of the sixteenth century admired in Virgil will do well to study its acute and sober criticism. A panegyric of Leo closes the second book. From this peroration some lines upon the woes of Italy may be read with profit, as proving that the nation, conscious of its own decline, was contented to accept the primacy of culture in exchange for independence:—

Dii RomÆ indigetes, TrojÆ tuque auctor, Apollo Unde genus nostrum coeli se tollit ad astra, Hanc saltem auferri laudem prohibete Latinis: Artibus emineat semper, studiisque MinervÆ, Italia, et gentes doceat pulcherrima Roma; Quandoguidem armorum penitus fortuna recessit, Tanta Italos inter crevit discordia reges; Ipsi nos inter sacros distringimus enses, Nec patriam pudet externis aperire tyrannis.[448]

The third book treats of style and diction. To be clear and varied, to command metaphor and allusion, to choose phrases coloured by mythology and fancy, to suit the language to the subject, to vary the metrical cadence with the thought and feeling, and to be assiduous in the use of the file are mentioned as indispensable to excellence. A peroration on Virgil, sonorous and impassioned, closes the whole poem, which, rightly understood, is a monument erected to the fame of the Roman bard by the piety of his Italian pupil. The final lines are justly famous:—

O decus ItaliÆ! lux o clarissima vatum! Te colimus, tibi serta damus, tibi thura, tibi aras; Et tibi rite sacrum semper dicemus honorem Carminibus memores. Salve, sanctissime vates! Laudibus augeri tua gloria nil potis ultra, Et nostrÆ nil vocis eget; nos aspice prÆsens, Pectoribusque tuos castis infunde calores Adveniens, pater, atque animis te te insere nostris.[449]

Vida's own intellect was clear, and his style perspicuous; but his genius was mediocre. His power lay in the disposition of materials and in illustration. A precise taste, formed on Cicero and Virgil, and exercised with judgment in a narrow sphere, satisfied his critical requirements. Virgil with him was first and last, and midst and without end. In a word, he shows what a scholar of sound parts and rhetorical aptitude could achieve by the study and imitation of a single author.

Since I have begun to speak of didactic poems, I may take this opportunity of noticing Fracastoro, who seems to have chosen Pontanus for his model, and, while emulating both Lucretius and Virgil, to have fallen short of Vida's elegance. His work is less remarkable for purity of diction than for massiveness of intellect, gravity of matter, and constructive ability. Jeronimo Fracastoro was born in 1483 at Verona, where he spent the greater portion of his life, enjoying high reputation as a physician, philosopher, astronomer, and poet. During his youth he studied under Pomponazzo at Padua. The strong tincture of materialistic science he there received, continued through life to colour his thought. Among modern Pagans none is more completely bare of Christianity than Fracastoro. As is well known, he chose the new and terrible disease of the Renaissance for his theme, and gave a name to it that still is current. To speak of Fracastoro's 'Syphilis,' dedicated to Bembo, hailed with acclamation by all Italy, preferred by Sannazzaro to his own epic, and praised by Julius CÆsar Scaliger as a 'divine poem,' is not easy now. The plague it celebrates appeared at Naples in 1495, and spread like wildfire over Europe, assuming at first the form of an epidemic sparing neither Pope nor king, and stirring less disgust than dread among its victims.[450] Whether the laws of its propagation were rightly understood in the sixteenth century is a question for physicians to decide. No one appears to have suspected that it differed in specific character from other pestilent disorders; and it is clear, both from contemporary chronicles and from Fracastoro's poem, that the mal franzese, as it was popularly called, suggested to the people of that age associations different from those that have since gathered round it. At the same time more formidable and less loathsome, it was a not more unworthy subject for verse than the plague at Athens described by Lucretius. Treating the disease, therefore, as a curse common to his generation, the scientific poet dared to set forth its symptoms, to prescribe remedies, to discuss the question of its origin, and to use it as an illustration of antagonistic forces, pernicious and beneficent, in the economy of nature. To philosophise his repulsive subject-matter was the author's ambition. His contemporaries admired the poetic graces with which he had contrived to adorn it.

The exordium of the first book states the problem. Whence came this new scourge of humanity? Not, surely, from America, though it is there indigenous. Its diffusion after the disasters of 1494 was too rapid to admit of this hypothesis.[451] To the corruption of the atmosphere must be referred the general invasion of the plague.[452] The theory of infected and putrescent air is stated in a long Lucretian passage, followed by a scientific account of the symptoms of syphilis. At this point the poet diversifies his argument by an episode, narrating the sad death of a young man born on the banks of the Oglio, and leading by gradual transitions to a peroration on the wars and woes of Italy.[453] Over all the poets of this age the miseries of their country hung like a cloud, and, touch the lyre as they may at the beginning of their song, it is certain ere the ending to give forth a dolorous groan. In the second book Fracastoro enters on the subject of remedies. He lays stress on choice of air, abundant exercise, avoidance of wine and heating diet, blood-letting, abstinence from sensual pleasures, fomentations, herbs, and divers minute rules of health. By attention to these matters the disease may be, if not shunned, at least mitigated. The sovereign remedy of quicksilver demanded fuller illustration; therefore the poet introduces the legendary episode of the shepherd Ilceus, conducted by the nymph LiparË to the sulphur founts and lakes of mercury beneath Mount Etna. Ilceus bathed, and was renewed in health. The rigorously didactic intention of Fracastoro is proved by the recipe for a mercurial ointment and the description of salivation that wind up this book.[454] The third opens with an allusion to the discovery of America, and a celebration of the tree Hyacus (Guaiacum). It is noticeable that, with such an opportunity for singing the praises of Columbus, Fracastoro passed him by, nor cared to claim for Italy a share in the greatest achievement of the century. Mingling myth with history, he next proceeds to tell how the Spaniards arrived in the West Indies, and shot birds sacred to the Sun,[455] one of which spoke with human voice, predicting the evils that would fall upon the crew for their impiety. Not the least of these was to be a strange and terrible disease. The natives of the islands flocked to meet the strangers, and some of them were tettered with a ghastly eruption. This leads to the episodical legend of the shepherd Syphilus, who dared to deride the Sun-god, and of the king Alcithous, who accepted divine honours in his stead. The Sun, to requite the insolence of Syphilus, afflicted him with a dreadful sickness. It yielded to no cure until the nymph AmmericË initiated him in the proper lustral rites, and led him to the tree Hyacus. The poem ends with a panegyric of Guaiacum.

I have sketched the subject of the 'Syphilis' in outline because of its importance not only for the neo-Latin literature of the Renaissance, but also for the history of medical opinion. As a didactic poem, it is constructed with considerable art; the style, though prosaic, is forcible, and the meaning is always precise. Falling short of classic elegance, Fracastoro may still be said to have fulfilled the requirements of Vida, and to have added something male and vigorous peculiar to himself. His adulatory verses to Alessandro Farnese, Paul III., and Julius III. might be quoted as curious examples of fulsome flattery conveyed in a barocco style. They combine Papal cant with Pagan mannerism, Virgilian and Biblical phraseology, masculine gravity of diction and far-fetched conceits, in a strange amalgam, as awkward as it is ridiculous.[456]

Another group of Latin versifiers, with Bembo at their head, cultivated the elegy, the idyll, and the ode. The authors of their predilection were Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus. Abandoning the attempt to mould Christian or modern material into classic form, they frankly selected Pagan motives, and adhered in spirit as well as style to their models. Two elegiac poems of Bembo's, the 'Priapus' and the 'Faunus ad Nympeum Flumen,' may be cited as flagrant specimens of sixteenth-century licentiousness.[457] Polished language and almost faultless versification are wasted upon themes of rank obscenity. The 'Priapus,' translated and amplified in Italian ottava rima, gained a popular celebrity beyond the learned circles for whom it was originally written. We may trace its influence in many infamous Capitoli of the burlesque poets. Bembo excelled in elegiac verse. In a poem entitled 'De Amic a Viro ServatÂ,' he treated a characteristically Italian subject with something of Ovid's graceful humour.[458] A lover complains of living near his mistress, closely watched by her jealous husband. Here, as elsewhere, the morality is less to be admired than the versification; and that the latter, in spite of Bembo's scrupulous attention to metre, is not perfect, may be gathered from this line:—

Tunc quos nunc habeo et quos sum olim habiturus amicos.

After reading hexameters so constructed we are tempted to shut the book with a groan, wondering how it was that a Pope's secretary and a prince of the Church should have thought it worth his while to compose a poem so injurious to his reputation as a moralist, or to preserve in it a verse so little favourable to his fame as a Latinist. More beautiful, because more true to classic inspiration, is the elegy of 'Galatea.'[459] The idyllic incidents suggest a series of pretty pictures for bas-reliefs or decorative frescoes in the manner of Albano. Bembo's masterpiece, however, in the elegiac metre, is a poem with 'De Galeso et Maximo' for its title.[460] It was composed, as the epigraph informs us, at the command of a great man at Rome; but whether that great man was also the greatest in Rome, and whether Maximus was another name for Leo, is matter of conjecture. The boy Galesus had wronged Maximus, his master. When reproved, he offered no excuses, called no witnesses, uttered no prayers to Heaven, indulged in no asseverations of innocence, shed no tears:—

Nil horum aggreditur; sed tantum ingrata loquentis Implicitus collo dulce pependit onus. Nec mora, cunctanti roseis tot pressa labellis Oscula coelitibus invidiosa dedit, Arida quot levibus florescit messis aristis, Excita quot vernis floribus halat humus. Maxime, quid dubitas? Si te piget, ipse tuo me Pone loco: hÆc dubitem non ego ferre mala.[461]

Bembo's talent lay in compositions of this kind. His verses, to quote the phrase of Gyraldus, were uniformly 'sweet, soft, and delicate.' When he attempted work involving more sustained effort of the intellect and greater variety of treatment, he was not so successful. His hexameter poem 'Benacus,' a description of the Lago di Garda, dedicated to Gian Matteo Giberti, reads like an imitation of Catullus without the Roman poet's grace of style or wealth of fancy.[462] Among Bembo's most perfect compositions may be reckoned his epitaphs on celebrated contemporaries. The following written for Poliziano, deserves quotation.[463] Not only is the death of the scholar, following close upon that of his patron, happily touched, but the last line pays a proper tribute to Poliziano as an Italian poet:—

Duceret extincto cum mors Laurente triumphum, LÆtaque pullatis inveheretur equis, Respicit insano ferientem pollice chordas, Viscera singultu concutiente, virum. Mirata est, tenuitque jugum; furit ipse, pioque Laurentem cunctos flagitat ore Deos: Miscebat precibus lacrymas, lacrymisque dolorem; Verba ministrabat liberiora dolor. Risit, et antiquÆ non immemor illa querelÆ, Orphei TartareÆ cum patuere viÆ, Hic etiam infernas tentat rescindere leges, Fertque suas, dixit, in mea jura manus. Protinus et flentem percussit dura poetam, Rupit et in medio pectora docta sono. Heu sic tu raptus, sic te mala fata tulerunt, Arbiter AusoniÆ, Politiane, lyrÆ.[464]

More richly endowed for poetry than Bembo was his fellow-countryman Andrea Navagero. Few Latin versifiers of the Renaissance combined so much true feeling and fancy with a style more pure and natural. Some of his little compositions, half elegy, half idyll, have the grace and freedom of the Greek Anthology.[465] There is a simple beauty in their motives, while the workmanship reminds us of chiselling in smooth waxy marble; unlike the Roman epigrammatists, Navagero avoided pointed terminations.[466] The picture of Narcissus dead and transformed to a flower, in the elegy of 'Acon,' might be quoted as a fair specimen of his manner:—

Magna Parens, quÆ cuncta leves producis in auras, Totaque diverso germine picta nites; QuÆ passim arboribus, passim surgentibus herbis, Sufficis omnifero larga alimenta sinu; Excipe languentem puerum, moribundaque membra, Æternumque tu fac, Dea, vivat ope. Vivet, et ille vetus Zephyro redeunte quotannis In niveo candor flore perennis erit.[467]

The warnings addressed to his mistress in her country rambles, to beware of rustic gods, and the whole eclogue of 'Iolas,' are written in a rich and facile style, that makes us wonder whether some poet of the GrÆco-Roman period did not live again in Navagero.[468] Only here and there, as in the case of all this neo-Latin writing, an awkward word or a defective cadence breaks the spell, and reminds us that it was an artificial thing. A few lines forming the exordium to an unfinished poem on Italy may be inserted here for their intrinsic interest:—

Salve, cura DeÛm, mundi felicior ora, FormosÆ Veneris dulces salvete recessus: Ut vos post tantos animi mentisque labores Aspicio, lustroque libens! ut munere vestro Sollicitas toto depello e pectore curas![469]

Navagero, we are told, composed these verses on his return from a legation to Spain. Born in 1483, he spent his youth and early manhood in assiduous study. Excessive application undermined his health, and Giovio relates that he began to suffer from atra bilis, or the melancholy of scholars. The Venetian Senate had engaged him to compose the history of the Republic in Latin; this work was already begun when illness forced him to abandon it. He was afterwards employed in an unsuccessful mission to Charles V. and in diplomatic business at the Court of France. He died at Blois of fever, contracted in one of his hurried journeys. He was only forty-six when he perished, bequeathing to immediate posterity the fame of a poet at least equal to the ancients. In that age of affectation and effort the natural flow of Navagero's verse, sensuous without coarseness and highly coloured without abuse of epithets, raised a chorus of applause that may strike the modern student as excessive. The memorial poems written on his death praise the purity of sentiment and taste which made him burn a copy of Martial yearly to the chaste Muses.[470] One friend calls upon the Nereids to build his tomb by the silent waters of the lagoons, and bids the Faun of Italy lament with broken reeds.[471] Another prophesies that his golden poems will last as many years as there are flowers in spring, or grapes in autumn, or storms upon the sea, or stars in heaven, or kisses in Catullus, or atoms in the universe of Lucretius.[472]

A place very close to Navagero might be claimed for Francesco Maria Molsa, a nobleman of Modena, who enjoyed great fame at Rome for his Latin and Italian poetry. After a wild life of pleasure he died at the age of forty-one, worn out with love and smitten by the plague of the Renaissance. The sweetest of his elegies celebrate the charms of Faustina Mancini, his favourite mistress. In spite of what Italians would call their morbidezza, it is impossible not to feel some contempt for the polished fluency, the sensual relaxation, of these soulless verses. A poem addressed to his friends upon his sick bed, within sight of certain death, combines the author's melody of cadence with a certain sobriety of thought and tender dignity of feeling.[473] It is, perhaps, of all his compositions the worthiest to live. The following couplets describe the place which he would choose for his sepulchre:—

Non operosa peto titulos mihi marmora ponant, Nostra sed accipiat fictilis ossa cadus; Exceptet gremio quÆ mox placidissima tellus, Immites possint ne nocuisse ferÆ. Rivulus hÆc circum dissectus obambulet, unda Clivoso qualis tramite ducta sonat; Exiguis stet cÆsa notis super ossa sepulta, Nomen et his servet parva tabella meum: Hic jacet ante annos crudeli tabe peremptus Molsa; ter injecto pulvere, pastor, abi. Forsitan in putrem longo post tempore glebam Vertar, et hÆc flores induet urna novos; Populus aut potius abruptis artubus alba Formos exsurgam conspicienda comÂ. Scilicet huc diti pecoris comitata magistro Conveniet festo pulchra puella die; QuÆ molles ductet choreas, et veste recinct Ad certos nÔrit membra movere modos.[474]

The Paganism of the Renaissance, exchanging Christian rites for old mythologies, and classic in the very tomb, has rarely found sweeter expression than in this death song. We trace in it besides a note of modern feeling, the romantic sense of community with nature in the immortality of trees and flowers.[475]

Castiglione cannot claim comparison with Navagero for sensuous charm and easy flow of verse. Nor has he those touches of genuine poetry which raise Molsa above the level of a fluent versifier. His Latin exercises, however, offer much that is interesting to a student of Renaissance literature; while the depth of feeling and the earnestness of thought in his clear and powerful hexameters surpass the best efforts of Bembo's artificial muse. When we read the idyll entitled 'Alcon,' a lamentation for the friend whom he had loved in youth—

Alcon deliciÆ Musarum et Apollinis, Alcon Pars animÆ, cordis pars Alcon maxima nostri—[476]

we are impelled to question how far Milton owed the form of 'Lycidas' to these Italian imitations of the GrÆco-Roman style. What seemed false in tone to Johnson, what still renders that elegy the stumbling-block of taste to immature and unsympathetic students, is the highly artificial form given to natural feeling. Grief clothes herself in metaphors, and, abstaining from the direct expression of poignant emotion, dwells on thoughts and images that have a beauty of their own for solace. Nor is it in this quality of art alone that 'Lycidas' reminds us of Renaissance Latin verse. The curious blending of allusions to Church and State with pastoral images is no less characteristic of the Italian manner. As in 'Lycidas,' so also in these lines from Castiglione's 'Alcon,' the truth of sorrow transpires through a thin veil of bucolic romance:—

Heu miserande puer, fatis surrepte malignis! Non ego te posthac, pastorum adstante coronÂ, Victorem aspiciam volucri certare sagittÂ; Aut jaculo, aut dur socios superare palÆstrÂ. Non tecum posthac molli resupinus in umbr Effugiam longos Æstivo tempore soles: Non tua vicinos mulcebit fistula montes, Docta nec umbrosÆ resonabunt carmina valles: Non tua corticibus toties inscripta Lycoris, Atque ignis Galatea meus nos jam simul ambos Audierint ambÆ nostros cantare furores. Nos etenim a teneris simul usque huc viximus annis, Frigora pertulimusque Æstus noctesque diesque, Communique simul sunt parta armenta labore. Rura mea hÆc tecum communia; viximus una: Te moriente igitur curnam mihi vita relicta est? Heu male me ira DeÛm patriis abduxit ab oris, Ne manibus premerem morientia lumina amicis.[477]

Castiglione's most polished exercises are written on fictitious subjects in elegiac metre. Thus he feigns a letter from his wife, in the style of the 'Heroidum EpistolÆ,' praying him to beware of Rome's temptations, and to keep his heart for her.[478] Again he warns his mistress to avoid the perils of the sea-beach, where the Tritons roam:—

Os informe illis, rictus, oculique minaces, Asperaque anguineo cortice membra rigent: Barba impexa, ingens, alg limoque virenti Oblita, oletque gravi lurida odore coma.[479]

In these couplets we seem to read a transcript from some fresco of Mantegna or Julio Romano. Two long elegies are devoted to the theme of marine monsters, and the tale of Hippolytus is introduced to clinch the poet's argument. Among Castiglione's poems of compliment, forming a pleasant illustration to his book of the 'Courtier,' may be mentioned the lines on 'Elisabetta Gonzaga singing.'[480] Nor can I omit the most original of his elegies, written, or at least conceived, in the camp of Julius before Mirandola.[481] Walking by night in the trenches under the beleaguered walls, Castiglione meets the ghost of Lodovico Pico, who utters a lamentation over the wrongs inflicted on his city and his race. The roar of cannon cuts short this monologue, and the spectre vanishes into darkness with a groan. During his long threnody the prince of Mirandola apostrophises the warlike Pope in these couplets:—

O Pater, O Pastor populorum, O maxime mundi Arbiter, humanum qui genus omne regis; JustitiÆ pacisque dator placidÆque quietis, Credita cui soli est vita salusque hominum; Quem Deus ipse Erebi fecit Coelique potentem, Ut nutu pateant utraque regna tuo![482]

When the spiritual authority of the Popes came thus to be expressed in Latin verse, it was impossible not to treat them as deities. The temptation to apply to them the language of Roman religion was too great; the double opportunity of flattering their vanity as Pontiffs, and their ears as scholars, was too attractive to be missed. In another place Castiglione used the following phrases about Leo:—

Nec culpanda tua est mora, nam prÆcepta Deorum Non fas, nec tutum est spernere velle homini: Esse tamen fertur clementia tanta Leonis Ut facili humanas audiat ore preces.[483]

Navagero called Julius II. novus ex alto demissus Olympo Deus (a new God sent down from heaven to earth), and declared that the people of Italy, in thanksgiving for his liberation of their country from the barbarians, would pay him yearly honours with prayer and praise:—

Ergo omnes, veluti et Phoebo Panique, quotannis Pastores certis statuent tibi sacra diebus, Magne Pater; nostrisque diu cantabere silvis. Te rupes, te saxa, cavÆ te, Maxime Juli, Convalles, nemorumque frequens iterabit imago. At vero nostris quÆcumque in saltibus usquam Quercus erit, ut quÆque suos dant tempora flores, Semper erit variis ramos innexa coronis; Inscriptumque geret felici nomine truncum. Tum quoties pastum expellet, pastasve reducet Nostrum aliquis pecudes; toties id mente revolvens Ut liceat, factum esse tuo, Pater optime, ductu; Nullus erit, qui non libet tibi lacte recenti, Nullus erit qui non teneros tibi nutriat agnos. Quin audire preces nisi dedignabere agrestes, Tu nostra ante Deos in vota vocaberis omnes. Ipse ego bina tibi solenni altaria ritu, Et geminos sacr e quercu lauroque virenti Vicino lucos Nanceli in litore ponam.[484]

It will be remembered that the oak was the ensign of the Della Rovere family, so that when the poets exalted Julius to Olympus, they were not in want of a tree sacred to the new deity. To trace this Pagan flattery of the Popes through all its forms would be a tedious business. It will be enough to quote Poliziano's 'Sapphics' to Innocent VIII.:—

Roma cui paret dominusque Tibris, Qui vicem summi geris hic Tonantis, Qui potes magnum reserare et idem Claudere coelum.[485]

A more quaint confusion of Latin mythology and mediÆval superstition, more glibly and trippingly conveyed in flimsy verse, can hardly be imagined; and yet even this, I think, is beaten by the ponderous conceits of Fracastoro, who, through the mouth of the goat-footed Pan, saluted Julius III. as the mountain of salvation, playing on his name Del Monte:—

Hoc in Monte Dei pecudes pascentur et agni, Graminis Æterni pingues et velleris aurei; Exsilient et aquÆ vivÆ, quibus ubera caprÆ Grandia distendant, distendant ubera vaccÆ.[486]

The mountain soon becomes a shepherd, and the shepherd not only rules the people, and feeds the sheep of God, but chains the monsters of the Reformation to a rock in Caucasus, and gives peace and plenty to Italy:—

Æternis illum numeris ad sidera tollent, Heroemque, deumque, salutiferumque vocabunt.[487]

Returning to Castiglione: I have already spoken of his epitaph on Raphael and his description of the newly-discovered 'Ariadne.'[488] The latter exercise in rhetoric competes with Sadoleto's laboured hexameters on the Laocoon. These verses, frigid as a prize poem in our estimation, moved Bembo to enthusiasm. When they appeared he wrote to Sadoleto, 'I have read your poem on Laocoon a hundred times. O wonder-working bard! Not only have you made for us, as it were, a second statue to match that masterpiece; but you have engraved upon my mind the very statue itself.' This panegyric stirs a smile when we compare it with Sadoleto's own prolusion, the fruit of a grave intellect and cultivated taste rather than of genius and inspiration.[489]

Time would fail to tell of all the later Latin poets—of La Casa's polished lyrics in the style of Horace, of Amalteo's waxen eclogues, of Aonio Paleario's fantastic hexameters upon the 'Immortality of the Soul,'[490] of Strozzi's elegies, of Ariosto's epigrams, and Calcagnini's learned muse. When I repeat that every educated man wrote Latin verses in that century, and that all who could committed their productions to the press, enough has been said to prove the impossibility of dealing more than superficially with so vast a mass of meritorious mediocrity.

One name remains to be rescued from the decent obscurity of the 'DelitiÆ Poetarum Italorum.' Marcantonio Flaminio was born at Seravalle in 1498. He came, while yet a young man, to the Court of Leo armed with Latin poetry for his credentials. No better claim on patronage from Pope or cardinal could be preferred in that age of twanging lyres. At Rome Flaminio lived in the service of Alessandro Farnese, whose hospitality he afterwards repaid with verses honourable alike to poet and patron by their freedom from vulgar flattery. The atmosphere of a Court, however, was uncongenial to Flaminio. Fond of country life, addicted to serious studies, sober in his tastes, and cheerful in his spirits, pious, and unaffectedly unambitious, he avoided the stream of the great world and lived retired. Community of interests brought him into close connection with the Cardinals Pole and Contarini, from whom he caught so much of the Reformation spirit as a philosophical Italian could assimilate; but it was not in his modest and quiet nature to raise the cry of revolt against authority.[491] The most distinguished wits and scholars of the age were among his intimate friends. Both his poems and his correspondence reflect an agreeable light upon the literary society of the late Renaissance. The Latin verses, with which we are at present occupied, breathe genuine piety, healthful simplicity, and moral purity, in strong contrast with the neopaganism of the Roman circle. These qualities suit the robust style, clear, terse, and nervous, he knew how to use. It is pleasant to close the series of Italian Latinists with one who combined the best art of his century with the temper of a republican and the spirit of a Christian.

The most prominent quality of Flaminio as a poet is love of the country. Three little compositions describing his own farm are animated with the enthusiasm of genuine affection.[492] We feel that no mere reminiscence of Catullus makes him write—

Jam vos revisam, jam juvabit arbores Manu patern consitas Videre, jam libebit in cubiculo Molles inire somnulos.[493]

Nor is it an idle prayer he addresses to the Muses in these lines:—

At vos, o HeliconiÆ puellÆ, Queis fontes et amoena rura cordi, Si car mihi luce cariores Estis, jam miserescite obsecrantis, Meque, urbis strepitu tumultuosÆ Ereptum, in placido locate agello.[494]

He is never tired of contrasting the pleasures of the country with the noise and weariness of Rome:—

Ipse miser tumultuos Urbe detinear; tibi benignus Dedit Jupiter in remoto agello Latentem placid frui quiete, Inter Socraticos libros, et inter Nymphas et Satyros, nihil profani Curantem populi leves honores.[495]

Flaminio's thought of the country is always connected with the thought of study. The picture of a tranquil scholar's life among the fields, diversified by sport and simple pleasures of the rustic folk, gives freshness to his hendecasyllables, whether addressed to his patron Alessandro Farnese, or to his friends Galeazzo Florimonte and Francesco Torriani:[496]—

Inde ocellos Ut primum sopor incubans gravabit, Jucundissime amice, te sub antrum Ducam, quod croceis tegunt corymbis Serpentes hederÆ, imminensque laurus Suaviter foliis susurrat: at tu Ne febrim metuas gravedinemve; Est enim locus innocens: ubi ergo Hic satis requieveris, legentur Lusus Virgilii, et Syracusani Vatis, quo nihil est magis venustum, Nihil dulcius, ut mihi videtur. Cum se fregerit Æstus, in virenti Convalle spatiabimur; sequetur Brevis coena; redibis inde ad urbem.[497]

One of Flaminio's best poems is written from his friend Stefano Sauli's villa near Genoa.[498] It describes how he spends his time between the philosophy of Aristotle and the verses of Catullus, while Sauli at his side devotes himself to Cicero. The fall of evening lures them from their study to the sea-beach: perched upon a water-girded rock, they angle with long reeds for fishes, or watch the white sails on the purple waves. The same theme is repeated in a copy of hexameters addressed to Sauli.[499] Flaminio had fallen ill of fever at Rome. To quit the city was his cure:—

Scilicet ut RomÆ corruptas fugimus auras, Et riguos patriÆ montes saltusque salubres Venimus, effoetos venit quoque robur in artus: Diffugit macies, diffugit corpore pallor; Et somnus vigiles irrepsit blandus ocellos, Quem neque desiliens crepitanti rivulus undÂ, Nec Lethea mihi duxere papavera quondam.[500]

Sauli, for his part, is congratulated on having exchanged the cares of Church and State for Ciceronian studies among his laurel groves and gleaming orange gardens.

Flaminio's intimate relations with the ablest men of the century, those especially who were engaged in grave and Christian studies, add extrinsic interest to his fugitive pieces. In one poem he alludes to the weak health of Cardinal Pole;[501] in another he compares Plato's description of the ideal republic with Contarini's work upon the magistrates and commonwealth of Venice:—

Descripsit ille maximus quondam Plato Longis suorum ambagibus voluminum, Quis civitatis optimus foret status: Sed hunc ab ips sÆculorum origine Nec ulla vidit, nec videbit civitas. At Contarenus optimam rempublicam Parvi libelli disputationibus Illam probavit esse, plus millesima Quam cernit Æstas Adriatico in mari Florere pace, litteris, pecuniÂ.[502]

When Vittoria Colonna died, Flaminio wrote a lamentation on the loss he had sustained, and on the extinction of so great a light for Italy. These verses are remarkable for their sobriety and strength:—

Cui mens candida, candidique mores, Virtus vivida, comitasque sancta, Coeleste ingenium, eruditioque Rara, nectare dulciora verba, Summa nobilitas, decora vultÛs Majestas, opulenta sed bonorum Et res et domus usque aperta ad usus.[503]

The same firm and delicate touch in the delineation of character gives value to the lines written on his father's death:—

Vixisti, genitor, bene ac beate, Nec pauper, neque dives, eruditus Satis, et satis eloquens, valente Semper corpore, mente sanÂ, amicis Jucundus, pietate singulari. Nunc lustris bene sexdecim peractis Ad divÛm proficisceris beatas Oras; i, genitor, tuumque natum Olympi cito siste tecum in arce.[504]

At the risk of extending this notice of Flaminio's poetry beyond due limits, I must quote from a copy of verses sent to Alessandro Farnese, together with a volume containing the Latin prolusiones of the North Italian scholars:—

Hos tibi lepidissimos poetas Dono, tempora quos tulere nostra, Fortunata nimis, nimis beata Nostra tempora, quÆ suos Catullos, Tibullos, et Horatios, suosque Marones genuere. Quis putasset, Post tot sÆcula tam tenebricosa, Et tot AusoniÆ graves ruinas, Tanta lumina tempore uno in una Tam brevi regione Transpadan Oriri potuisse? quÆ vel ipsa Sola barbarie queant fugat Suum reddere litteris Latinis Splendorem, veteremque dignitatem.[505]

There is the whole of humanism in this passage—the belief in the unity of Italian civilisation, the conviction that the Middle Ages were but an interruption of historic continuity, the confidence in the restoration of classic literature, and the firm hope that Latin would never cease to be the language of culture. Flaminio says nothing, unless parenthetically, about the real woes of his country. The tyranny of the Spaniard and the violence of the German are reckoned with the old wrongs of the Goth and the Vandal in one phrase—'tot graves ruinas.' He does not touch upon the dismemberment of Italy into mutually jealous and suspicious States: for him the Italian nation, even in a dream, has no existence. He is satisfied with a literary ideal. Too fortunate, too blessed, are these days of ours, in spite of Florence extinguished, Rome sacked, Milan devastated, Venice curbed, because, forsooth, Bembo and Fracastoro have made a pinchbeck age of poetry. Here lay the incurable weakness of the humanistic movement. The vanity of the scholar, determined to seek the present in the past, building the walls of Troy anew with borrowed music, and singing in falsetto while Rome was burning—this blindness to the actual situation of Italy was scarcely less pernicious, scarcely less a sign of incapacity for civil life than the selfishness of the Despots or the egotism of the Papacy. Italy was foredoomed to lose her place among the nations at the very moment when she was recovering culture for the modern world; and when that culture was recovered through her industry and genius, not she, but the races of the North, began to profit by the acquisition—not her imitations of the Latin Muse, but the new languages of Europe were destined to prevail and lead the age.

Another point for observation is that the centre of humanistic studies has shifted.[506] Florence, disillusioned, drained of strength, and sucked dry by the tyrants, holds her tongue. The schools of Naples and of Rome are silent. Lombardy is now the mother of poets, who draw their inspiration no longer from Valdarno or the myrtle groves of Posilippo, but from the blue waves of Garda.[507] The university where science still flourishes is Padua. The best professors of the classics, Celio Calcagnini and Lilius Gyraldus, teach at Ferrara. Bembo, the dictator of letters for his century, Navagero, the sweetest versifier, Contarini, the most sober student, are Venetians. Stefano Sauli, the author of a Ciceronian treatise on the Christian hero, is a patrician of Genoa. Sadoleto and Molsa are Modenese. Verona claims Fracastoro and the Torriani. Imola is the mother city of Flaminio. Castiglione and Capilupo are natives of Mantua; Amalteo and Vida of Forli and Cremona; Bonfadio and Archio of Lake Garda. If we seek the causes of this change, we find them partly in the circumstance that Venice at this period was free, while Ferrara still retained her independence under native princes; partly also in the fact that Florence had already overtaxed her intellectual energies. Like a creeping paralysis, the extinction of liberty and spiritual force was gradually invading all the members of the Italian community. The Revival of Learning came to an end, as far as Italy was concerned, in these Transpadane poets.

To trace the history of philosophic thought, set in motion by the Renaissance and stamped out by the Counter-Reformation, and to describe the aftergrowth of art and literature encouraged by the Catholic reaction, must form the subject of a separate inquiry.

I hope, if I have time and strength, after the completion of my work on the Renaissance, to trace this sequel in a volume on 'Italy and the Council of Trent.' To this chapter of Italian history will also belong the philosophy of the sixteenth century, the poetry of Tasso, the painting of the Bolognese masters, and the new music of Palestrina.

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