Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/314

296 it will nevertheless disappoint those who resort to it in the expectation of encountering a history on the modern plan. It is not, strictly speaking, so much a history of literature as a history of learning. The fortunes of schools and universities, the rise and decay of particular branches of study, are narrated very fully, while there is little literary criticism, and the lives of great men are recounted with astonishing brevity, except when some personal or intellectual circumstance regarding them has become the theme of erudite controversy, when the incident overshadows the life. One of the most potent literary influences of the age was the Giornale de' Letterati, founded early in the century by Apostolo Zeno, which long served as a rallying-point for Italian literary men.

The number of historical works published in Italy during the eighteenth century was considerable, but they are chiefly monographs on local history, and, unless Verri's history of Lombardy be an exception, none gained the author the character of a philosophical historian save Rivoluzioni d'Italia (1768–72), a work so superior to the writer's other performances that it has been doubted whether he really wrote it. A valuable history of another description was produced by the ex-Jesuit (1732–1811), also celebrated as an Etruscan scholar, in his Storia Pittorica dell' Italia, long ago superseded by more accurate research, but excellent for the time. Art criticism was promoted by (1712–1764), chamberlain and friend of Frederick the Great, Carlyle's "young Venetian gentleman of elegance in dusky skin and very white linen," a most voluminous writer, "who," says the unmusical Carlyle, "took up