Of these a number were translations, chiefly from Arabic and other Oriental tongues. It is evident that his own preference lay towards his compositions in verse, a judgment which wants confirmation if continued popularity be the test. Yet several of his fugitive poems, and especially some sonnets on the ruins of Rome, possess much lyric beauty; and, though his epic on the Deluge is but a wretched attempt at novelty in versification, that on the Art of Navigation is a work of merit for the age which produced it. Hallam, after classing it with Bernardo Tasso's _Amadigi_, as two of the most remarkable productions of that sort then written in Italy, pronounces the _Nautica_ "a didactic poem in blank verse, too minute sometimes, and prosaic in detail, like most of its class, but neither low, turgid, or obscure, as many others have been. The descriptions, though never very animated, are sometimes poetical and pleasing. Baldi is diffuse, and this conspires with the triteness of his matter to render the poem somewhat uninteresting. He by no means wants power to adorn his subject, but does not always trouble himself to exert it, and is tame where he might be spirited. Few poems bear more evident marks that their substance had been previously written down in prose." But what he wanted in genius--for therein lay his great deficiency--he in some degree supplied by wonderful versatility. Whichever of his many subjects he took up seemed that in which he was born to excel. Of his painstaking diligence we have said much, but we may add the pertinent remark of Grossi, "that so extensive was his reading as apparently to leave no time for writing, and yet that he wrote about as much as it seemed possible for any one to read." To this Tiraboschi adds the more flattering testimony that "his praises would be appropriate to almost each chapter of this history, for there was scarcely any department of literature and science in which he did not apply himself and attain excellence."