Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/140

122 the literature of his day, partly by his war against classical and Renaissance culture, and partly by the impulse which he gave to the pamphlet, precursor of the newspaper press. Cristoforo Landino's Camaldolese Dialogues would have been important contributions to the national literature if they had been written in Italian.

The first writer of prose who presents us with a perfect example from which the new period may be dated is, as much as Politian the nursling of a court; to whom we are also indebted for the first example of the pastoral romance, and the first proof that excellent Italian prose could be written outside Tuscany. Sannazaro, born in 1458, was a Neapolitan of Spanish descent, as it is said, and the statement seems to be corroborated by the peculiar independence and dignity of character which distinguish him from the supple literati of his time. Even Pontano, whose obligations to the royal house of Naples were so extreme, played an ambiguous part upon the ephemeral French conquest of 1495. Sannazaro's loyalty not only sustained that brief ordeal, but when four years later the cause of the Neapolitan dynasty was irrevocably lost, he accompanied his fallen master to France, and spent several years in exile. Returning to Naples, he inhabited a beautiful villa at Mergellina, and devoted himself to the poetry of which we shall have to speak in another place. After witnessing the destruction of his retreat in the French war (1528), he died in 1530 in the house of Cassandra, Marchesa Castriota, whom he had vainly defended against her husband's attempt to repudiate her. Few of his contemporaries deserve equal respect as a man; and although as a writer but of the second rank, it was granted to him, alike in prose and verse, to mark