Italian literature subject to new influences--The academies--Federigo Comandino--Guidobaldo del Monte--The Paciotti--Leonardi--Muzio Oddi--Bernardino Baldi--Girolamo Muzio--Federigo Bonaventura. "For a long lapse of years, Italy had been an organised body of highly civilised states, different in their origin, laws, and constitutions, divided by local jealousies and opposite interests, constantly engaged in their endeavours to establish a political equilibrium by the manoeuvres of a wary and even unprincipled diplomacy, baffled oftentimes in their ambitious schemes, and brought into sudden collision, but still deriving new energies from their very rivalry, and promoting, with their own, the interests of social progress."[131] [Footnote 131: MARIOTTI'S _Italy_, II., p. 177.] It was in a state of things thus happily described that letters and art attained their zenith of glory in the Peninsula. But the close of the fifteenth century had introduced elements of change, which a fatal policy permitted to spread. Those foreign aggressions and domestic convulsions which we have seen extirpating nationality and crushing independence were not less destructive to mind and its efforts. A struggle of thirty-five years against her ultramontane invaders,--a series of unavailing because ill-directed and discordant efforts,--closed with the coronation of Charles V., and left Italy for nearly two centuries at the mercy of Spain. The states which escaped the direct miseries of that iron domination, and retained a nominal independence under the papal sway or their native dynasties, sank unresisting before an influence affecting at once their politics, their manners, and their literature. The pride of the Spaniard had long been proverbial, and was little susceptible of modification even in a new country. The conquered race quickly conformed to fashions which they could neither shake off nor exclude. They aped a pompous bearing that sat with singularly bad grace upon a vanquished people, and the affectation which at first loaded their language with fulsome epithets, soon corrupted their writings by elaborate adulation. It is difficult for those whose taste has been formed upon the models of a less copious language to judge fairly of Italian ornamental literature, for its authors, in availing themselves of the resources at their command, are prone to lavish them too unsparingly. When tried by such a standard their prose may seem tedious or tumid verbiage, their epics may teem with overstrained hyperbole, and even their lighter poetry may appear to substitute subtle conceits and elaborate epithets for graceful ease and flexibility. But these idiomatic peculiarities are but echoes of the national genius, and ought not perhaps in fairness to be subjected to canons of criticism unknown to their authors. Yet it cannot be denied that facilities such as the language of Italy affords to flowery composition are virtually premiums on feebleness,