porary success of Prospero Bonarelli's Solimano, which we have seen Menzini parallel with Tasso's Torrismondo, may be taken to denote an exception. The Phillis of Scyros of Bonarelli's brother Giudubaldo was the one achievement in pastoral drama. The novelette languished, and chivalric fiction had but one representative in Italy, the Caloandro of Giuseppe Ambrogio Marini, an excellent romance nevertheless, ending with five marriages, where monarchs and warriors play the part of the antiquated knights-errant, and so superior in sanity to the unwieldy fictions of the Clélie type that Caylus thought it worth translating into French in the following century. The Eudemia of J. V. Rossi (Nicius Erythræus), in Latin, is a good specimen of the Argenis class of romances. The same author's Pinacotheca, in three parts, a most entertaining repertory of biographies, chiefly more or less literary, of the early part of the century, is further remarkable as indicative of a perception of the growing needs of the world, and an unconscious foreshadowing of a culture as yet afar off. And this is broadly the character of the seventeenth century in Italy, a poor and barren time if paralleled with the past, but pregnant with the seeds of future harvests, repressed for a time by ungenial circumstances. Comparing the Italian literature of the seventeenth century with that of England and France, we see that all ran through substantially the same stages, but that, while these are vigorous alike in their aberrations and their reforms, Italian literature is languid in both, a circumstance sufficiently accounted for by its absolute enslavement, and their comparative freedom.
