The learning and industry of Muratori were almost rivalled by Count SCIPIONE MAFFEI (1675-1755), the sovereign of contemporary Italian, almost of European archæologists, author of the famous tragedy of _Merope_ and of the equally famed _Verona Illustrata_; and by Count Giovanni Maria Mazzuchelli (1707-65), who should have been the biographer-general of Italian men of letters, but who began his work on too large a scale for completion. GIROLAMO TIRABOSCHI (1731-94), librarian of the Duke of Modena, is the standard Italian literary historian. His great work has immortalised his name; it will nevertheless disappoint those who resort to it in the expectation of encountering a history on the modern plan. It is not, strictly speaking, so much a history of literature as a history of learning. The fortunes of schools and universities, the rise and decay of particular branches of study, are narrated very fully, while there is little literary criticism, and the lives of great men are recounted with astonishing brevity, except when some personal or intellectual circumstance regarding them has become the theme of erudite controversy, when the incident overshadows the life. One of the most potent literary influences of the age was the _Giornale de’ Letterati_, founded early in the century by Apostolo Zeno, which long served as a rallying-point for Italian literary men. The number of historical works published in Italy during the eighteenth century was considerable, but they are chiefly monographs on local history, and, unless Verri’s history of Lombardy be an exception, none gained the author the character of a philosophical historian save CARLO DENINA’S _Rivoluzioni d’Italia_ (1768-72), a work so superior to the writer’s other performances that it has been doubted whether he really wrote it. A valuable history of another description was produced by the ex-Jesuit LUIGI LANZI (1732-1811), also celebrated as an Etruscan scholar, in his _Storia Pittorica dell’ Italia_, long ago superseded by more accurate research, but excellent for the time. Art criticism was promoted by FRANCESCO ALGAROTTI (1712-1764), chamberlain and friend of Frederick the Great, Carlyle’s “young Venetian gentleman of elegance in dusky skin and very while linen,” a most voluminous writer, “who,” says the unmusical Carlyle, “took up the opera in earnest manner as capable of being a school of virtue and the moral sublime,” but whose chief title to fame is rather his popular exposition of the physics of Newton, a modest but meritorious service. Two miscellaneous writers deserve considerable attention. One is GIUSEPPE BARETTI (1719-86), “a wonderful, wild, coarse, tender, angry creature,” says Vernon Lee; endeared to Englishmen as the friend of Johnson and of Reynolds, and the imitator of the _Spectator_ in his _Frusta Litteraria_, although an Ishmael whose hand was against every contemporary, and who carried personality to lengths which Addison would have highly disapproved.