In literature, the humorous Bernesque school had passed; Tasso had long been dead; and the Neapolitan Marini, called the Corrupter of Italian poetry, ruled from his grave the taste of the time. This taste was so bad as to require a very desperate remedy, and it was professedly to counteract it that the Academy of the Arcadians had arisen. The epoch was favorable, and, as Emiliani-Giudici (whom we shall follow for the present) teaches, in his History of Italian Literature, the idea of Crescimbeni spread electrically throughout Italy. The gayest of the finest ladies and gentlemen the world ever saw, the _illustrissimi_ of that polite age, united with monks, priests, cardinals, and scientific thinkers in establishing the Arcadia; and even popes and kings were proud to enlist in the crusade for the true poetic faith. In all the chief cities Arcadian colonies were formed, “dependent upon the Roman Arcadia, as upon the supreme Arch-Flock”, and in three years the Academy numbered thirteen hundred members, every one of whom had first been obliged to give proof that he was a good poet. They prettily called themselves by the names of shepherds and shepherdesses out of Theocritus, and, being a republic, they refused to own any earthly prince or ruler, but declared the Baby Jesus to be the Protector of Arcadia. Their code of laws was written in elegant Latin by a grave and learned man, and inscribed upon tablets of marble. According to one of the articles, the Academicians must study to reproduce the customs of the ancient Arcadians and the character of their poetry; and straightway “Italy was filled on every hand with Thyrsides, Menalcases, and Meliboeuses, who made their harmonious songs resound the names of their Chlorises, their Phyllises, their Niceas; and there was poured out a deluge of pastoral compositions”, some of them by “earnest thinkers and philosophical writers, who were not ashamed to assist in sustaining that miserable literary vanity which, in the history of human thought, will remain a lamentable witness to the moral depression of the Italian nation.” As a pattern of perfect poetizing, these artless nymphs and swains chose Constanzo, a very fair poet of the sixteenth century. They collected his verse, and printed it at the expense of the Academy; and it was established without dissent that each Arcadian in turn, at the hut of some conspicuous shepherd, in the presence of the keeper (such was the jargon of those most amusing unrealities), should deliver a commentary upon some sonnet of Constanzo. As for Crescimbeni, who declared that Arcadia was instituted “strictly for the purpose of exterminating bad taste and of guarding against its revival, pursuing it continually, wherever it should pause or lurk, even to the most remote and unconsidered villages and hamlets”--Crescimbeni could not do less than write four dialogues, as he did, in which he evolved from four of Constanzo's sonnets all that was necessary for Tuscan lyric poetry.