amed, the great powers of his imagination, and the
incomparable force of his style, were neither admired nor imitated.
Arimanes had prevailed. The Divine Comedy was to that age what St.
Paul's Cathedral was to Omai. The poor Otaheitean stared listlessly for
a moment at the huge cupola, and ran into a toyshop to play with beads.
Italy, too, was charmed with literary trinkets, and played with them for
four centuries.

From the time of Petrarch to the appearance of Alfieri's tragedies, we
may trace in almost every page of Italian literature the influence of
those celebrated sonnets which, from the nature both of their beauties
and their faults, were peculiarly unfit to be models for general
imitation. Almost all the poets of that period, however different in
the degree and quality of their talents, are characterised by great
exaggeration, and as a necessary consequence, great coldness of
sentiment; by a passion for frivolous and tawdry ornament; and, above
all, by an extreme feebleness and diffuseness of style. Tasso, Marino,
Guarini, Metastasio, and a crowd of writers of inferior merit and
celebrity, were spell-bound in the enchanted gardens of a gaudy and
meretricious Alcina, who concealed debility and deformity beneath the
deceitful semblance of loveliness and health. Ariosto, the great Ariosto
himself, like his own Ruggiero, stooped for a time to linger amidst
the magic flowers and fountains, and to caress the gay and painted
sorceress. But to him, as to his own Ruggiero, had been given the
omnipotent ring and the winged courser, which bore him from the paradise
of deception to the regions of light and nature.

The evil of which I speak was not confined to the graver poets. It
infected satire, comedy, burlesque. No person can admire more than I do
the great masterpieces of wit and humour which Italy has produced. Still
I cannot but discern and lament a great deficiency, which is common to
them all. I find in them abundance of ingenuity, of droll naivete, of
profound and just reflection, of happy expression. Manners, characters,
opinions, are treated with "a most learned spirit of human dealing." But
something is still wanting. We read, and we admire, and we yawn. We look
in vain for the bacchanalian fury which inspired the comedy of Athens,
for the fierce and withering scorn which animates the invectives of
Juvenal and Dryden, or even for the compact and pointed diction which
adds zest to the verses of Pope and Boilea