[Footnote 411: 'Quod Romæ, hoc est in sentinâ omnium rerum atrocium et pudendarum deprehensi fuerimus.' Quoted by Gregorovius, _Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. p. 598, note 3.] CHAPTER VIII LATIN POETRY Special Causes for the Practice of Latin Versification in Italy -- The Want of an Italian Language -- Multitudes of Poetasters -- Beccadelli -- Alberti's 'Philodoxus' -- Poliziano -- The 'Sylvæ' -- 'Nutricia', 'Rusticus', 'Manto', 'Ambra' -- Minor Poems -- Pontano -- Sannazzaro -- Elegies and Epigrams -- Christian Epics -- Vida's 'Christiad' -- Vida's 'Poetica' -- Fracastoro -- The 'Syphilis' -- _Barocco_ Flatteries -- Bembo -- Immoral Elegies -- Imitations of Ovid and Tibullus -- The 'Benacus' -- Epitaphs -- Navagero -- Epigrams and Eclogues -- Molsa -- Poem on his own Death -- Castiglione -- 'Alcon' and 'Lycidas' -- Verses of Society -- The Apotheosis of the Popes -- Poem on the Ariadne of the Vatican -- Sadoleto's Verses on the Laocoon -- Flaminio -- His Life -- Love of the Country -- Learned Friends -- Scholar-Poets of Lombardy -- Extinction of Learning in Florence -- Decay of Italian Erudition. The history of this last period of the Revival would be incomplete without a survey of its Latin poetry. I shall have failed to convey a right notion of the tendencies of humanism, if I have not shown that the Italians were seeking not merely to acquire a knowledge of ancient literature, but also to effect a resuscitation of antiquity in their own writings. Regarding themselves as the heirs of Rome, separated from the brilliant period of Latin civilisation by ten centuries of ignorance, they strove with all their might to seize the thread of culture at the very point where the poets of the Silver Age had dropped it. In the opinion of Northern races it might seem unnatural or unpatriotic to woo the Muses in a dead language; but for Italians the Camoenæ had not died; on the hills of Latium, where they fell asleep, they might awake again. Every familiar sight and sound recalled 'the rich Virgilian rustic measure' of the 'Georgics' and 'Bucolics.' Nature had not changed, nor did the poets feel the influence of Christianity so deeply as to find no meaning in the mythic phraseology of Fauns and Nymphs.