Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/157

Rh Before parting with the predecessors of Ariosto, a word should be said of Boiardo's minor poems. Besides a comedy, Timone, to be noticed hereafter, he wrote numerous canzoni and sonnets. Of these Panizzi justly says: "Boiardo's poetry, although in the manner of Petrarch, has all the marks of originality, and resembles more the character of the predecessors of the Bard of Laura than of his successors. His poetry was not written to be read, but to be sung, and was submitted to those musical as well as metrical laws by which that of Petrarch had been governed. In his day, music was still subject to poetry, and the inanimate instruments were designed to support, not to drown, the human voice." Panizzi, therefore, seems to consider Boiardo the last of the truly melodious lyrists of Italy; though it is just to point out that his remark respecting the predominance of the instrument over the voice did not become applicable until the seventeenth century, and that he elsewhere seems to confine the decay of Italian melody to the two centuries immediately preceding his own time (1830). His edition of Boiardo's lyrics is almost inaccessible but he has quoted enough in his memoir of the author to confirm his favourable judgment of their literary qualities.