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278 The former are set compositions of great pomp and magnificence; not like Marini's poems, depending upon verbal beauty alone, but upon a real if formal grandeur of style. They are less like the notes of Apollo's lyre than orchestras of all sorts of instruments, "flute, violin, bassoon," but more particularly bassoon. They are splendidly sonorous, and exhibit great art in heightening ordinary ideas by magnificent diction. Of the wild, untutored graces of the woods and fields they have absolutely nothing; their sphere is the court, save for the feeling which Chiabrera, as becomes a Ligurian, occasionally manifests for the sea; and the ideas are seldom absolutely novel, though they often seem so. But there is true elevation of thought and majesty of diction: a lyrical afflatus seems to descend upon the poet and whirl him on, sped, in the absence of a really inspiring subject, by his own excitement, as a courser is urged along by the thunder of his own hoofs. Yet there is no factitious emotion, the theme is really for the moment everything to the poet, while he remains sufficiently master of himself to turn every strong point to the best account.

Like the surviving lyrics of his model Pindar, his odes are usually addressed to particular persons or prompted by some event. Among the best are the long series he poured forth on occasion of the trifling victories gained by the Italian galleys over the Turks, which prove how fine a patriotic poet he might have been if his age had given him anything better to celebrated. His Anacreontics precisely correspond to his Pindarics, brilliant effusions with more glitter than glow, but ingenious, felicitous, and transcending mere rhetoric by the exquisite music of the versification. Chiabrera is not an Italian Pindar or Anacreon, and his natural gift for poetry was inferior