Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/313

Rh was raised not as author but as editor. The publication of twenty-seven folio volumes of mediæval Italian historians displays a man singly equal to many learned societies. No one has stamped his name more deeply on the historical literature of his country than he has done by this publication, by his Antiquitates Italicæ Medii Ævi, and by his Annali from the Christian era to 1749. One of his original writings has an abiding place in literaure, the Della perfetta Poesia, which indicates the high-water mark of good taste at the time of its publication. The affected style of the preceding century was then entirely out of fashion. On the negative side Muratori's taste is almost faultless, and he often manifests great discrimination in the appreciation of exquisite beauties. Unfortunately he is all for the delicate and graceful, and has little feeling for the really great, of which the Italy of the eighteenth century saw hardly so much as the counterfeit until, late in the secular period, Cesarotti produced his version of Ossian. Muratori venerates Dante rather than admired him; like Confucius, he respects the gods, but keeps them at a distance. The learning and industry of Muratori were almost rivalled by Marquis (1675–1755), the sovereign of contemporary Italian, almost of European archæologists, author of the famous tragedy of Merope and of the equally famed Verona Illustrata; and by Count Giovanni Maria Mazzuchelli (1707–65), who should have been the biographer-general of Italian men of letters, but who began his work on too large a scale for completion. (1731–94), librarian of the Duke of Modena, is the standard Italian literary historian. His great work has immortalised his name: