Page:The National Idea in Italian Literature.djvu/29

 No such clear vision is found in the other political writers of the Cinquecento. If we turn to the poets, Ariosto reveals a certain sense of nationality, in his impassioned denunciation of all Italy's invaders, Frenchman and Spaniard, Swiss and German alike, and vaguely anticipates a time when Italians will have the power to repay them in kind. He gives the answer to Boiardo's dying cry of dismay, in his pictured pageant of the French invasions of Italy and their results:—

But Ariosto's Italian feelings are inevitably coloured by the politics of his sovereign, the Duke of Ferrara, and he finally acclaims the saviour of society in the Emperor Charles V. In general the poets of the Cinquecento, however inconsistent their actual politics may be, bear eloquent witness to the patriotic aspirations that all the mighty armies of Europe could not quench, to the conviction that Italy, in virtue of the Roman idea and the Latin tradition, represented something imperishable, something immeasurably beyond the power of her conquerors to touch or comprehend. Thus, Francesco Maria Molza, in his sonnets on the sack of Rome, taunts the uncouth barbarian with the mighty life of the Romans in the tongue that scorns age and time, and warns him that the noble Latin blood cannot remain long under the vile yoke of Germany and Spain:— 17