The one writer, however, whom it is possible to admire without qualification, and who has preserved his freshness to our own day, is a traveller, PIETRO DELLA VALLE, who between 1614 and 1626 explored Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Persia, and part of India. Apart from the prejudices inevitable in his age and country, Della Valle is the model of an observant and sagacious voyager, and the letters in which his observations are recorded form most delightful reading. Later in the century excellent letters on scientific subjects were written by Magalotti and Redi. The illustrious naturalists who in some measure redeemed the intellectual barrenness of the epoch, do not fall within the domain of literary history, which, except for some poets, is one of ever-augmenting inanity and insipidity, culminating in absolute sterility. A second Greece had been enslaved, but this time the fierce conqueror refused to be himself led into captivity. Spain and the Papacy and their victim were equally useless to culture, which would have perished from the earth had it still been confined to the fair land _Begirt by wall of Alp and azure sea, And cloven by the ridges Apennine._ CHAPTER XX THE POETRY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY The blight that fell upon Italian literature near the close of the sixteenth century was in the main to be ascribed to tyranny, temporal and spiritual. Yet there was another source of ill for which neither monarch nor priest was responsible: this was the malady which necessarily befalls every form of literature and art when the bounds of perfection have been reached, the craving to improve upon what is incapable of improvement; first, perhaps, distinctly evinced in this age by the Spanish bishop Guevara, author of the _Dial of Princes_ (1529), who invented what he called the _estilo alto_, which, if not absolutely the predominant, had by the end of the century become a conspicuous element in every European literature. The true course would have been a new departure like that made by the Spanish and Dutch masters when Italian art had fulfilled its mission; but this requires not only genius, but the concurrence of favourable social and political circumstances, without which nothing is possible but servile repetition or preposterous exaggeration. Genius born amid inauspicious surroundings is more prone to elect the latter than the former alternative, and the greater the natural gift, the more outrageous the abuse likely to be made of it.