The licentious poems of the Abate GIOVANNI BATTISTA CASTI (1721-1803) deserve attention from their influence on Byron’s _Don Juan_, and also from the veiled political character of many of them. Casti, an accomplished traveller and acquainted with many distinguished men, belongs, like Talleyrand, both to the old time and to the new. Attached by habit and taste to the polished and frivolous society of the ancient régime, his sympathies were nevertheless liberal. He satirised Catherine the Second, and when exiled from Vienna on that account, had the spirit to resign his Austrian pension. The _Animali Parlanti_ a satire upon the rule of the stronger in political life, and thus an interesting revival of the old conception of Reynard the Fox, is his best work. It is remarkable that the age of Richardson and Fielding in England, and Marivaux and Prevost d’Exiles in France, should have produced no novelist of reputation in Italy. The imitation of even such world-famed books as the _Nouvelle Héloise_ and _Werther_ was reserved for a later generation. One romancer acquired some celebrity--Count ALESSANDRO VERRI (1741-1816), who hit upon, or borrowed from Wieland, the idea of resorting for his themes to antiquity. His _Notti Romane_, _Saffo_, and _Erostrato_ are all works of merit, and the first-named was probably not without influence upon Landor. On the whole, the history of the Italy of the eighteenth century is in most departments, intellectual and political, that of a patient recovering from a formidable malady by slow but certain stages. Much is lost, never to return. The relation of Italy to the rest of Europe is no longer that of Athens to Sparta or Bœotia, as in the sixteenth century; but neither, as in the seventeenth, is she estranged from the general current of European thought. Her intellectual position may be read in the very portraits of her eminent men, who in general display the placid eighteenth-century type, and might as well have been Frenchmen or Englishmen as Italians. They were writers of signal merit and utility, but, Vico excepted, not men of creative genius, and the national mind might easily have degenerated into mediocrity but for the tremendous convulsions of the end of the century. In one province, however, she stood apart and supreme during nearly the whole of the age--the drama, with or without musical accompaniment, which must form the subject of our next chapter. CHAPTER XXII THE COMEDY OF MASKS--THE OPERA--DRAMA OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY