Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/28

10 sestet. The ballata is less confined by strict rules. "It is properly a lyric of two or more stanzas, in the first of which is set out the theme to be amplified in the following" (Boswell). It often terminates with an envoy or quasi summing-up, as is frequently the case with the canzone also. The octave, familiar to English readers as the metre of Don Juan, was generally reserved for narrative poetry, but was also converted by the Sicilian poets into a lyrical form by merging the final couplet in the preceding sestet, as described and exemplified by an English imitator:

The sestine, a favourite form with the Provençals, and frequently used by Dante and Petrarch, is too complicated to be well understood without an example.

The same phenomenon is observed in Italian literature as in English—the decay, after the language had begun to receive a high scholastic cultivation, of the simple spontaneous melody which had originally characterised it. Italian prose probably never possessed the majestic rhythm and sonorous cadences which came unsought to English poets of the time of Elizabeth and James; but Italian verse had its Campions, and these, like ours, left no successors. Without disparaging the tunefulness of late writers like Chiabrera, it must still be owned that this is in a measure artificiai, and that the cause is the