Aretino is only one among a host of letter-writers, who included the most accomplished men of the age. Bembo appears as its typical representative, here as elsewhere, although the unfortunate historian Bonfadio is held to have written best. All wrote with an eye to the publication of their epistles, and asked themselves what Cicero would have said in their place. None had the delightful candour and exuberance of Petrarch; they are in consequence much less national, interesting, and human; and their letters, stripped of the complimentary phrases which eke them out, are in general brief. Yet it would be hard to refuse any among them the praise due to two excellent qualities, good style and good sense. Such were the general characteristics of the age, a period, but for Ariosto, almost devoid of creative power in letters, yet fully worthy to be ranked with the other great eras of artificial literature, the eras of Augustus, and Anne, and Louis XIV. Its truest praise is perhaps afforded by a comparison of it with the other contemporary literatures of Europe, then, the French excepted, which is immensely indebted to the Italian, almost equally destitute of genius and of art, although the magnificent rhythm of English prose even then showed what an instrument had been provided for performers yet to come. But temporal and spiritual tyranny were fast destroying the elementary requisites of great literature in Italy. The hare was lamed, and the tortoises were overtaking her. A little while yet, and it would be needful to look beyond Alp and sea for the true Italy, and find her in the bosoms of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney. CHAPTER XIV THE PETRARCHISTS We have seen that the definite result of the literary ferment which accompanied the revival of vernacular Italian literature after the long torpor of the fifteenth century was the recognition of literary form, rather than intellectual substance, as the principal object of cultivation, a conclusion completely in harmony with the national genius as well as the national traditions. Had this been otherwise, revolt would soon have made itself evident. On the contrary, however, we meet with scarcely any manifestation of the existence of a romantic spirit in Italian literature until Manzoni begins to be inspired by Scott and Byron, and Foscolo by Rousseau. The consequence is a great lack of richness and variety in comparison with a literature like the English, where all descriptions of tendencies have been allowed ample scope, and now one, now another, has successively seemed to be predominant; but none, except now and then for a time, has attained an absolute mastery.