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INTRODUCTION Italian reaches the climax of melodious utterance, and then dies away in music; the lyric is lost in the opera libretto. His dramas, in spite of all their melodious felicity of diction, really continue the worship of shadows inaugurated by the poets of the Seicento; their aim is to amuse, not to stir the deeper emotions of the audience; they end gently and happily, and their villains are far too mild to horrify even the heart of an Arcadian. They are still pleasant to read, but the note of reality is entirely absent from their pages. After 1750, however, there are many signs of a general recrudescence of mental vigour in Italy. Her people began to mix more freely with other nations—to share the general spirit of unrest that was beginning to agitate Europe. They read Voltaire and Condillac, Locke and Pascal. Baretti returned from London a Shakespearian enthusiast; Cesarotti translated poor discredited Ossian; Young's melancholy Night Thoughts were greatly admired. Besides these foreign influences, there was a revival of interest in Dante, whom the Arcadians had voted vulgar; a fierce literary strife raged about the Divina Commedia, of which Gaspare Gozzi was the most redoubtable protagonist. The great dramatists of France and the earliest poets of the Romantic revival in England became popular, and at last, fostered by influences as different from each other as those of Molière and Thomson, reality revives in the comedy of Goldoni and Gozzi and the poetry of Parini.

In the serenity, the absence of all affectation, of ‘words for words’ sake’, that are the distinctive qualities of his verse, Parini bears a certain resemblance to Wordsworth. Like the English poet, he has a wide love of nature and 26