IV.

OF THE OTHER PRINCIPAL SONNET-WRITERS OF ITALY.

OR a considerable time after the death of Petrarca, few sonnets but his own appear to have been heard from the lutes of poets. Emulation of them was thought so hopeless, that imitation itself became daunted. Literary ambition, too, at that period was turned into new directions by the novels of Petrarca's friend Boccaccio, by the increasing discoveries of ancient classics, by the substitution of the Greek language itself for transferences of its authors through Arabic and Latin versions, and lastly, by the disturbed condition of Italy in Church and State, the rise of petty sovereignties, and the downfall of republics. It was not till near a century from the time of Petrarca's being in flower with his sonnets, that the first regular crop of imitations of them made its appearance in those of a Roman gentleman of the name of Giusto de' Conti, who collected them under the title of "The Beautiful Hand,"

La Bella Mano.

I would fain have discovered some merit in this earliest and not least enthusiastic imitator of the great sonnetteer; but I can only mention and dismiss him, as the type of all the poet's imitators; who, whatever

may have been their popularity for a time, owing to the absolute passion of Italy for this kind of writing, lost it, as sheer matter of superfluity, when they had nothing else to distinguish them from the crowds by whom they were emulated. Every one of these gentlemen sighed and died to such an excess for some Laura-like idol, who was at once the sweetest and cruellest of her sex, that you wonder they did not all burst out a-laughing some morning, by one common impulse, at the ridiculous figure they were making; as indeed now and then the critics did for them. Fortunately, the ladies whom they addressed are understood, for the most part, to have laughed in self-defence; for what were common mortals to say to adulations that took them out of the category of humanity, and rendered it ridiculous in them to eat their figs and maccaroni? The title of Giusto's book is not a mere title. The beautiful Hand which he worshipped forms the main subject of it; and the reader may judge what a small source of inspiration a lover must own to, when he represents a hand, however beautiful, as the main cause of his passion. You seem never to see the lady's face, though he mentions that also, or to think it can be worth seeing. Giusto sighs, and weeps, and talks of his miseries and his grave, like the rest of his despairing brethren, and it is all owing to this "Beautiful Hand"; which he represents as so unspeakably cruel and tormenting, and as giving such dreadful squeezes and grips to his heart, that you begin to think there is something as bad in it as in the beautiful hand of Madame de Brinvilliers, which was in the habit of despatching people out of the world with poison.

Giusto died in the year 1449; and in the year preceding was born the first writer of sonnets, after Petrarca, that combined with a coloring from that poet an impulse and character of his own. This was no less a person than Lorenzo de' Medici,-a man to whose abilities and accomplishments, as an advancer of the accomplishments of others, as a statesman, social philosopher, wit, and poet, I cannot think that justice has yet been done. His biographers, notwithstanding their elegance and their good-will, appear to have wanted both depth of insight and sufficient animal spirits for the task. To-day this extraordinary person was communing with Plato, and to-morrow dancing with his fellow-citizens: to-day ruling the state, a very difficult state to rule, laying down the laws of a sonnet: to-day patronizing Politian or Michael Angelo, to-morrow testing the accounts of his factors, enjoying a cargo of antiques and new books, making merry with Pulci, discussing philosophy with Ficinus, originating a new form of satire or species of pastoral, or corresponding with popes and kings, and arbitrating the affairs of all Italy.

- to-morrow

But the Sonnet is the business of this book ; and we must not be tempted to dilate on the collateral merits of its writers.

The sonnets of Lorenzo for the most part betray, it must be confessed, the too common misfortune of almost all the writers of sonnets in Italy; they are injured by the fact of their being imitations: otherwise the style natural to him is so racy, and some of them exhibit so much of it, that it is evident he might have been as charming a model in this class of poetry as he was of

the pastoral above intimated, or of the songs for people to dance to on the First of May.*

I have given this distinguished writer of sonnets precedence in point of time to another, who was born fourteen years earlier, but who does not appear to have made his productions known so soon to the world. This was Boiardo, author of the Orlando Innamorato, a poet

whose singular good fortune it is delightful to contemplate; for he was rich, noble, prosperous, cheerful, admired, and beloved. His sonnets partake of Petrarca's, like the rest, and he devotes the requisite portion of them to sighs and tears, not without intimation that these clouds were but sets-off to his sunshine. The remainder are so much of a piece with the prosperity of his life, that they are remarkable for a brightness like that of glad

* I allude to the May Songs in the editions of his works devoted wholly to himself, and not to those in the carnival-song collections, which may or may not be his, and which I have heard charged with licentiousness, I have never happened to see them. -The manners in Lorenzo's time were much freer than in ours, and its writers are to be judged accordingly; nor are the edited works above mentioned exempt from objection in passages. With respect to Lorenzo's maintenance of the power of his house in Florence, which, having said so much of him, I feel bound, as a lover of liberty, to notice, - my conscientious opinion of it is, after a close perusal of Napier's Florentine History, - himself a lover of liberty, and an honest denouncer of Lorenzo, that the turbulent and everquarrelling Florentines had never understood real liberty, or cared for it; that, next to merchandise, and a good deal of ordinary enjoyment, little but a struggle for power was ever going on among them; that Lorenzo, great man as he was, and a lover of the prosperity of all classes, was not himself great enough to be the founder of the highest kind of free state, but thought that, as some Florentine house or other must finally rule, his own had better be that house, both for self-interest's sake and the people's.

eyes, and for a sweetness amounting to the honeyed. His style has been accused of being a little too off-hand and colloquial; but this, which Ginguené seems to think incompatible with elegance, and which Boiardo's countryman Panizzi justly thinks otherwise, or perhaps it should rather be said, with grace, only serves to complete the charm of its felicity by testifying to its truth. The poet was a Lombard, and often spoke as happily in his Lombardisms as Homer and Chapman did in provincialisms of Greece and England.

The Orlando Innamorato is one of the four great poetic romances of Italy: the Morgante Maggiore of Lorenzo's friend Pulci, which appeared a little before it, is another. The natural idiomatic style of these poets, without putting an end to the worship of the common idol, caused unintentionally a reaction against the style of Petrarca, and this reaction was so increased by the influences of wars and commerce, which enriched uneducated men, and raised peasants and common soldiers to princely power, that, about thirty years after the production of the sonnets of Boiardo, Bembo, subsequently cardinal, an accomplished philologist, who like Petrarca had been bred in courts, and who, though a Venetian, had been much in Florence and fallen in love with the elegances of the Tuscan poet, set all his wits to the restoration of the latter's authority, an enterprise in which he succeeded so fatally to himself, that his quondam fame as a Petrarchist of genius is now degraded into that of having been a servile imitator. The little spark of originality within him occasionally shows itself; but you are forced as Pulci might have said to poke at it and blow it up, like a spark in ashes.