Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/349

Rh The causes of the decadence of "secentist" literature are too complex and subtle to be discussed here. It would be rash to attribute them too entirely to the political condition of the country and the depressing influence of Jesuitism. To the latter is due rather the fact that the poetry of the "Seicento" proper was succeeded by the tame and conventional work of the "Arcadia," that Italy notwithstanding her great men of science did not share fully in the rationalist movement of the later seventeenth and of the eighteenth century, and that she therefore found no new and great inspiration until Rousseau awakened her to the enthusiasm for nature and humanity.

Of the poets mentioned, the most popular and the most influential both in Italy and abroad was Giovanni Battista Marino, the Neapolitan (1569-1625). His work excited as great enthusiasm in Italy as had Tasso's, or greater. Lope de Vega declared that he was the day to which Tasso had been the dawn; just as Denham considered that Jonson's and Shakespeare's graces were united and perfected in Fletcher. In France he was the idol of Richelieu and of the critical Chapelain, who