The most entertaining of his writings are his lively letters from Spain and Portugal. The other is GASPARE GOZZI (1715-86), brother of the famous dramatist, who also imitated the _Spectator_ in a periodical, wrote excellent stories in prose and verse, and rendered a durable service to literature by his defence of Dante against the aspersions of Bettinelli, preluding the Dantesque revival of the next century. Contemporaneously with this development of moral and economical science, another active movement went on which created far more agitation among Italian literati, and which, if it scarcely enriched the national literature with a single work of merit, at all events kept up the tradition of poetry. This was the universal itch for rhyming which seized upon the nation about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and dates from the foundation of the Arcadian Academy in 1692. This epoch-making event is related with unsurpassable verve in the brilliant pages of Vernon Lee, who rekindles for us the chief lights of the institution and the time: the frigid and sardonic, but really illustrious jurist Gravina, instructor of Montesquieu and of the Academy; the uncouth pedant but excellent administrator Crescimbeni, whose history of Italian poetry is a more valuable book than Vernon Lee allows; the fluent versifiers, not without gleams of a genuine poetical vein, Rolli and Frugoni; the marvellous improvisatore Perfetti, a sounding brass, but no tinkling cymbal, who actually received in the Capitol the crown awarded to Petrarch and designed for Tasso. The seriousness with which these Alfesibeo Carios and Opico Erimanteos took themselves, their crooks and their wigs, is astonishing. But they got accepted at their own valuation, and none disputed their claims as the sovereign arbiters of elegant literature until, about 1760, Giuseppe Baretti arose to demonstrate that, as shepherds, they must be the representatives of the ancient Scythians. Settembrini in our own day rather opines that they were created by the Jesuits, just as the Cobbett of the _Rejected Addresses_ denounces “the gewgaw fetters of rhyme, invented by the monks in the Middle Ages to enslave the people.” Every city in Italy had its offshoot of the Arcadia; every member did something to approve his literary taste, were it but one of the hundred and fifty elegies, in all manner of languages, on the decease of Signor Balestrieri’s cat (1741). The result was a deluge of insipid verse, preferable at any rate to the extravagance of the preceding century.