Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/359

Rh A purer if hardly less artificial taste than that for Marinistic love-poetry was ministered to by the elaborate and tumid odes of Gabriello Chiabrera (1552-1638), a native of Savona, and fond of comparing his adventures into new regions of poetry with the achievements of his townsman Columbus. Chiabrera visited most parts of Italy in his lifetime, and enjoyed the patronage of cardinals and princes, including Carlo Emanuele; but though he was eager to have his compliments repaid with pensions, he shunned the complete immersion in court life which demoralised Marino, and the diplomatic career that gave Testi so much trouble. His works include heroic poems, tragedies, and pastorals, but his reputation rests upon his Pindaric odes, the scherzi and canzonette in which he followed Anacreon and Ronsard, his dignified epitaphs, and genial satires.

In the canzone of Dante and Petrarch the Italians possessed a noble and elaborate lyric which was so firmly established that, like the sonnet and the epic, it was modified but not superseded at the Renaissance by classical models. The canzoni of the cinquecento may be divided into those which, as Cariteo's and Tasso's, fill the Petrarchian form with the sentiments, imagery, and mythology of classical elegy, and others, such as those of Sannazaro, Bembo, and Ariosto, which