al
Interbreathings--Sustained Contrast of Parody and Pathos--The Poet
Testi.

Soon after 1600 it became manifest that lapse of years and
ecclesiastical intolerance had rendered Italy nearly destitute of great
men. Her famous sons were all either dead, murdered or exiled; reduced
to silence by the scythe of time or by the Roman 'arguments of sword and
halter.' Bruno burned, Vanini burned, Carnesecchi burned, Paleario
burned, Bonfadio burned; Campanella banished, after a quarter of a
century's imprisonment with torture; the leaders of free religious
thought in exile, scattered over northern Europe. Tasso, worn out with
misery and madness, rested at length in his tomb on the Janiculan;
Sarpi survived the stylus of the Roman Curia with calm inscrutability at
S. Fosca; Galileo meditated with closed lips in his watch-tower behind
Bello Sguardo. With Michelangelo in 1564, Palladio in 1580, Tintoretto
in 1594, the godlike lineage of the Renaissance artists ended; and what
children of the sixteenth century still survived to sustain the nation's
prestige, to carry on its glorious traditions? The list is but a poor
one. Marino, Tassoni, the younger Buonarroti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in
literature. The Bolognese Academy in painting. After these men expand
arid wildernesses of the Sei Cento--barocco architecture, false taste,
frivolity, grimace, affectation--Jesuitry translated into culture. On
one bright point, indeed, the eye rests with hope and comfort.
Palestrina, when he died in 1594, did not close but opened an age for
music. His posterity, those composers, lutists, violists and singers,
from whom the modern art of arts has drawn her being, down to the sweet
fellowship of Pergolese, Marcello and Jomelli, of Guarneri, Amati and
Stradivari, of Farinelli, Caffarielli and La Romanina, were as yet but
rising dimly heralded with light of dawn upon their foreheads.

In making the transition from the _Gerusalemme_ to the _Adone_, from the
last great poem of the Cinque Cento to the epic of the Sei Cento, it is
indispensable that notice should be taken of the _Pastor Fido_ and its
author. Giambattista Guarini forms a link between Vasso and the poets of
the seventeenth century. He belonged less to the Renaissance, more to
the culture of the age created by the Council of Trent, than did Tasso.
His life, in many of its details similar, in others most dissimilar, to
that of Tasso, illustrates and helps us in some measure to expl