Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/20

INTRODUCTION natural solace of cultivated minds condemned to exist in a world of strife or tyranny; and it was to this enchanted precinct that the poets of Italy fled for refuge in the gloomy closing years of the Cinquecento.

O bella età dell'oro Quand'era cibo il latte Del pargoletto mondo, e culla il bosco...

The idyllic genre soon became as anæmic and affected as every other kind of poetry in Italy during the Seicento, but at any rate it rose to its finest height in the Aminta or Tasso, and its elegiac element is conspicuous throughout the Gerusalemme. Guarini's Pastor Fido, which resembles the Aminta in being a lyric recited by various characters rather than a drama of action, is the other famous memorial of this idyllic form of poetry.

The burlesque verses of Berni and his followers are remarkable for the perfection of their style and for their unblushing obscenity; the spirit of Boccaccio is still alive in them and in the ‘macaronic’ poetry of Folengo—the Merlinus Coccaius whose effusions were so well known to Rabelais. Elsewhere, the sorriso italiano, the ironical smile that dawned upon the lips of Ariosto even while he wrote his most pathetic or heroic lines, forsakes literature for the popular song and the pasquinade, and we look for it in vain in the ‘epic’ of the Jesuit-trained Tasso.

Meanwhile, Italy had become the battlefield for Charles-Quint and Francis I, for Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Frundsberg. Rome was sacked in 1527; Florence, after a heroic resistance under Ferrucci for ten months, was captured by the combined armies of Pope and Emperor 20