Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/220

202 allusion remains to be made, the period has little to show apart from the lyric, with the exception of some didactic poems—the Balía and the Podere of Luigi Tansillo, the Nautica of Baldi, the Caccia of Valvasone, and two others modelled after Virgil, the Coltivazione of Luca Alamanni, and the Api of Giovanni Rucellai, both excellent examples of the description of poetry which owes most to artifice and least to inspiration. This might perhaps pass for a general character of the poetry of the period, which ranks with the ages of Augustus and Anne as an example of what exquisite culture can and cannot effect in the absence of creative power. It was of high value to succeeding periods by bequeathing to them a norm and standard of good taste by which to chasten their frequent aberrations; and, notwithstanding its almost academical character, it was actually in vital relation with the literary appetite of its limited but highly accomplished public. There was not, says Dolce, a cultivated person in Italy who could not repeat before it was in print Bernardo Tasso's sonnet resigning his mistress to his successful rival, a fact which proves not only the existence of a general appreciation of poetry independent of the machinery of reviewing and the printing-press itself, but also a general preference for its most refined and dignified examples.

The didactic poems of which we have spoken claim the less attention, inasmuch as they were in no respect national. The rules for good didactic poetry are the same in all languages, and any accomplished versifier will instruct in agriculture or the chase in much the same manner in any country, however his local colouring may vary with his climate. It is otherwise with satirical, familiar, and mock-heroic poetry. In all these