Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/386

366 "wit" is only an exaggeration of what had been a complaint, and a beauty, of Renaissance poetry throughout. Euphuism is older than Euphues, and Secentismo than the seventeenth century. Their characteristic artifices have been traced through the rhetorical studies of the Middle and Dark Ages back to classical models. And if the Renaissance, in its general heightening and embellishment of style in verse and prose, often accentuated rather than corrected artifice, was it not because the first enthusiasm for the classics flowed quite naturally in the traditional rhetorical channels? It was only gradually that taste discriminated between more florid beauties and those deeper and purer qualities which we associate with the word classical. In the poetry of the first half of the seventeenth century we have the final phase of this phenomenon, but the form which it took in different countries was determined by special circumstances. The extravagant conceits of Marino and his followers in Italy were the result of that exaggeration of a fashion which so frequently precedes its disappearance, the search for novelty, undirected by a new inspiration, and issuing merely in the bizarre and outrageous. In France and Holland, Germany, and even England (as we have seen in cases such as Drummond, Crashaw, and Cowley), the cultivation of conceit was in part an outcome of the admiration of Italian literature. But in France the aberrations of the "précieux" and "précieuses" were part of the movement towards the refinement and