As the great questions which had divided the preceding century became settled, and political interests narrowed more and more, the spirit of the age naturally turned to satire. Menzini is its best satirist; but at an earlier period Chiabrera, Soldani, and the impetuous and unequal Salvator Rosa had exercised themselves in this department of literature, and the century’s last literary sensation was the successive appearance of the Latin satires of Sergardi (Sectanus), models of composition, which for nearly a decade kept the reading portion of the Roman public in an uproar. It might have been thought that comedy would have flourished, but some promising beginnings died away, while opera progressed steadily. Tragedies continued to be written on the classical system, but there was no power to breathe life into the old forms, unless the great temporary success of Prospero Bonarelli’s _Solimano_, which we have seen Menzini parallel with Tasso’s _Torrismondo_, may be taken to denote an exception. The _Phillis of Scyros_ of Bonarelli’s brother Giudubaldo was the one achievement in pastoral drama. The novelette languished, and chivalric fiction had but one representative in Italy, the _Caloandro_ of Giuseppe Ambrogio Marini, an excellent romance nevertheless, ending with five marriages, where monarchs and warriors play the part of the antiquated knights-errant, and so superior in sanity to the unwieldy fictions of the Clélie type that Caylus thought it worth translating into French in the following century. The _Eudemia_ of J. V. Rossi (Nicius Erythræus), in Latin, is a good specimen of the _Argenis_ class of romances. The same author’s _Pinacotheca_, in three parts, a most entertaining repertory of biographies, chiefly more or less literary, of the early part of the century, is further remarkable as indicative of a perception of the growing needs of the world, and an unconscious foreshadowing of a culture as yet afar off. And this is broadly the character of the seventeenth century in Italy, a poor and barren time if paralleled with the past, but pregnant with the seeds of future harvests, repressed for a time by ungenial circumstances. Comparing the Italian literature of the seventeenth century with that of England and France, we see that all ran through substantially the same stages, but that, while these are vigorous alike in their aberrations and their reforms, Italian literature is languid in both, a circumstance sufficiently accounted for by its absolute enslavement, and their comparative freedom. FOOTNOTES: [20] It is not improbable that the “three feet long and two feet wide,” which brought such ridicule upon Wordsworth, may be a reminiscence of Chiabrera’s description of his house, “Di cui l’ampiezza venticinque braccia Forse consume.” CHAPTER XXI THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY