e life. Yet eight out of the eighteen pages of his biography
are devoted to comically solemn details regarding the honors paid him
by Italian princes. The Grand Duke of Florence, Ferdinand I., noticed
him standing with uncovered head at a theatrical representation in the
Pitti Palace. He bade the poet put his cap on and sit down. Cosimo, the
heir apparent, showed the same condescending courtesy. When he was at
Turin, Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, placed a coach and pair at his
disposal, and allowed him 300 lire for traveling expenses to and from
Savona. But this prince omitted to appoint him lodgings in the palace,
nor did he invite him to cover in the presence. This perhaps is one
reason why Chiabrera refused the duke's offer of a secretaryship at
Court. Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, on the contrary, allotted him
rooms and always suffered him to keep his hat on. The Pope, who was an
old college friend of Chiabrera, made him handsome presents, and on one
delightful occasion allowed him to hear a sermon in the Papal pew. The
Doge of Genoa, officially particular in points of etiquette, always took
care to bid him cover, although he was a subject born of the Republic.

Basely insignificant as are these details, they serve to show what value
was then ascribed even by men of real respectability to trifling
princely favors. The unction with which Chiabrera relates them, warming
his cold style into a glow of satisfaction, is a practical satire upon
his endeavor to resuscitate the virtues of antique republics in that
Italy. To do this was his principal aim as a moralist; to revive the
grand style of Pindar was his object as an artist. Each attempt involved
impossibility, and argued a visionary ambition dimly conscious of its
scope. Without freedom, without the living mythology of Hellas, without
a triumphant national cause, in the very death of independence, at the
end of a long age of glorious but artificial culture, how could
Chiabrera dare to pose as Pindar? Instead of the youth of Greece
ascending with free flight and all the future of the world before it,
decrepit Italy, the Italy so rightly drawn by Marino in his _Pianto_,
lay groveling in the dust of decaying thrones. Her lyrist had to sing of
pallone-matches instead of Panhellenic games; to celebrate the heroic
conquest of two Turkish galleys by a Tuscan fleet, instead of Marathon
and Salamis; to praise S. Lucy and S. Paul with tepid fervor, instead of
telling how