Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/200

182 argumentation might well have suggested the machinery of Dryden's Hind and Panther; even as that of Gelli's Capricci, where Giusto disputes with his own soul, was very probably copied in Smollett's Adventures of an Atom.

One of the most characteristic writers of the time is (1497–1547), an authority "on the form and colour of the ear, and the proper way of wearing ornamental flowers," whose elegant and frequently licentious stories, idiomatically Tuscan in style, fresh in humour, and brilliant in description, are interwoven with his Dialoghi d'Amore, and who also gained fame by his comedies, and as the translator, or rather adapter, of Apuleius. As the combination of the photographic portraits of several members of any class of society gives the mean average of its physiognomy, so Firenzuola represents the average constitution of such men of letters of his day as wrote with a real vocation for literature. It is doubtful whether any such vocation can be credited to another satirist who greatly surpassed him in celebrity, the notorious (1492–1556). Aretino was merely a literary blackmailer, whose profligate and venal pen was employed to extort or cajole money from the great men of the age. His indubitable success is difficult to understand, except as the irrepressible and irreversible decree of fashion. Apart from his comedies and his letters, an amazing record of the abasement of rank before impudence, only one of his works has any literary merit, and the genuineness of this is questionable. His other immoralities are as insipid as his moralities, and his personalities are of the kind best answered by a cudgel. Notwithstanding, he became a power in public life as well as in literature, rivalled the opulence and the pomp of his