O decus Italiæ! lux o clarissima vatum! Te colimus, tibi serta damus, tibi thura, tibi aras; Et tibi rite sacrum semper dicemus honorem Carminibus memores. Salve, sanctissime vates! Laudibus augeri tua gloria nil potis ultra, Et nostræ nil vocis eget; nos aspice præsens, Pectoribusque tuos castis infunde calores Adveniens, pater, atque animis te te insere nostris.[449] [Footnote 449: 'Hail, light of Italy, thou brightest of the bards! Thee we worship, thee we adore with wreaths, with frankincense, with altars; to thee, as duty bids, for everlasting will we chaunt our holy hymns. Hail, consecrated bard! No increase to thy glory flows from praise, nor needs it voice of ours. Be near, and look upon thy votaries; come, father, and infuse thy fervour into our chaste hearts, and plant thyself within our souls.'--_Poemata Selecta_, p. 266.] Vida's own intellect was clear, and his style perspicuous; but his genius was mediocre. His power lay in the disposition of materials and in illustration. A precise taste, formed on Cicero and Virgil, and exercised with judgment in a narrow sphere, satisfied his critical requirements. Virgil with him was first and last, and midst and without end. In a word, he shows what a scholar of sound parts and rhetorical aptitude could achieve by the study and imitation of a single author. Since I have begun to speak of didactic poems, I may take this opportunity of noticing Fracastoro, who seems to have chosen Pontanus for his model, and, while emulating both Lucretius and Virgil, to have fallen short of Vida's elegance. His work is less remarkable for purity of diction than for massiveness of intellect, gravity of matter, and constructive ability. Jeronimo Fracastoro was born in 1483 at Verona, where he spent the greater portion of his life, enjoying high reputation as a physician, philosopher, astronomer, and poet. During his youth he studied under Pomponazzo at Padua. The strong tincture of materialistic science he there received, continued through life to colour his thought. Among modern Pagans none is more completely bare of Christianity than Fracastoro. As is well known, he chose the new and terrible disease of the Renaissance for his theme, and gave a name to it that still is current. To speak of Fracastoro's 'Syphilis,' dedicated to Bembo, hailed with acclamation by all Italy, preferred by Sannazzaro to his own epic, and praised by Julius Cæsar Scaliger as a 'divine poem,' is not easy now. The plague it celebrates appeared at Naples in 1495, and spread like wildfire over Europe, assuming at first the form of an epidemic sparing neither Pope nor king, and stirring less disgust than dread among its victims.[450] Whether the laws of its propagation were rightly understood in the sixteenth century is a question for physicians to decide. No one appears to have suspected that it differed in specific character from other pestilent disorders; and it is clear, both from contemporary