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280 effect even without any considerable opulence or striking novelty of thought. They are usually on subjects personal to himself, sometimes depicting the miseries of court life with the feeling that comes from experience, sometimes affecting a philosophical tranquillity to which he was really a stranger. One stands out from the rest, the poem which he addressed in his youth to the Duke of Savoy, exhorting him to deliver Italy from the Spaniards. Testi was not alone in the prophetic foresight that the redemption of Italy would come from Savoy. Campanella, Chiabrera, and others of the best Italians of the day shared it with him, but no other has given it such direct and eloquent expression. The genius of Italy appears in vision to the poet, enumerates her wrongs, denounces her oppressor, and calls for vengeance in a series of most animated octaves, equally impressive and persuasive.

Marini's school continued to dominate literary circles, although Rossi assures us that Testi's simplicity was more acceptable to readers at large. "The sun," says Vernon Lee, "cooled itself in the waters of rivers which were on fire; the celestial sieve, resplendent with shining holes, was swept by the bristly back of the Apennines; love was an infernal heaven and a celestial hell, it was burning ice and freezing fire, and was inspired by ladies made up entirely of coral, gold thread, lilies, roses, and ivory, on whose lips sat Cupids shooting arrows which were snakes." Poetry worthy of the name seemed extinct after Testi's death, and the literature of England being then unknown beyond her own borders, the sceptre over every department of intellectual activity except science passed into the hand of France. After a while, however, signs of revival became