r poets to whom this chapter is devoted, Guarini, Marino, and
Tassoni were successful, Chiabrera was a respectable failure. The reason
of this difference is apparent. In the then conditions of Italian
society, at the close of a great and glorious period of varied culture,
beneath the shadow of a score of Spaniardizing princelings, with the
spies of the Inquisition at every corner, and the drill of the
Tridentine Council to be gone through under Jesuitical direction, there
was no place for a second Pindar. But there was scope for decorative
art, for sensuous indulgence, and for genial irony. Happy the man who
paced his vineyards, dreaming musically of Arcadia! Happy the man who
rolled in Circe's pigsty! Happy the man who sat in his study and
laughed! Therefore the most meritorious productions of the time,
Boccalini's _Ragguagli di Parnaso_, Bracciolini's _Scherno degli Dei_,
have a touch of Tassoni's humor in them; while Achillini and Preti limp
somewhat feebly after Marino's Alcibidean swagger, and endless pastorals
pullulate from Guarini's tragi-comedy. We need not occupy our minds with
these secondary writers, nor do more than indicate the scholarly
niceness with which Filicaja in the second half of the seventeenth
century continued Chiabrera's tradition. But one word must be said in
honor of Fulvio Testi, the Modenese poet and statesman, who paid for the
fame of a Canzone with his head. He has a double interest for us: first,
because Leopardi esteemed him the noblest of Italian lyrists after
Petrarch; secondly, because his fate proved that Tasso's dread of
assassination was not wholly an illusion. Reading the ode addressed to
Count Raimondo Montecuccoli, _Ruscelletto orgoglioso_, the ode which
brought Testi to the block in a dungeon of the Estensi, we comprehend
what Leopardi meant by his high panegyric. It is a piece of poetry,
lofty in style, grave in movement, pregnant with weighty thought, stern
and rugged, steeped in a sublimity of gloom and Stoicism which remind us
of the author of _La Ginestra_. The century produced little that bore a
stamp so evident of dignity and greatness.

CHAPTER XII.

PALESTRINA AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN MUSIC.

Italy in Renaissance produces no National School of Music--Flemish
Composers in Rome--Singers and Orchestra--The Chaotic Indecency of
this Contrapuntal Style--Palestrina's Birth and Early
History--Decrees of the Tridentine Council upon Church Music--T