Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/221

Rh styles Italian work is individual and characteristic. Satiric traits are frequent enough in the contemporaries of Dante, and from one point of view Dante himself may be regarded as a great satirist. The professed satire, nevertheless, of modern Italy derives from Horace rather than Juvenal; it aims at good-humoured raillery rather than scathing vehemence or corroding virulence; and its impetus is further moderated by its being generally composed in the easy and garrulous terza rima. Alessandro Vinciguerra (born 1480) appears to have first imparted this stamp; but the great exemplar is Ariosto, whose satires are not the least ornament of his poetic crown, yielding little in facetious urbanity to his model Horace.

The vigorous satires of Luigi Alamanni, imitated in English by Sir Thomas Wyat, evince a remarkable freedom of speech. Bentivoglio, Aretino, Anguillara, and other writers of note followed in his track with varying success. The first to employ blank verse in satire was Lodovico Paterno, who is perhaps more exceptionally distinguished for having achieved an epithalamium to Queen Mary of England without the least allusion to her restoration of the Roman Catholic religion. The Decennali of Machiavelli, a highly-condensed sketch in verse of the events of his time, may also be regarded as a satire; but his reputation as a poet rather arises from his Capitoli, disquisitions in verse in which Tansillo and many others also excelled, and whose easy familiarity is hardly to be paralleled in any other literature, and from his elegant versification of portions of Apuleius's Golden Ass. (1510–1554), an excellent writer of sonnets, extended the domain of poetry by constituting himself the first laureate of the feline species. His ode on the loss of his cat (di tutta la