profession. His treatises on Duels and the Point of Honour were suited to the spirit of the age, and had in consequence a considerable run of popularity, now of course long ago past. The like fate has befallen his didactic poem on the Art of Poetry, in the literature of his own country. What most concerns us are his Lives of Dukes of Urbino. That of Federigo is dedicated to Guidobaldo II., and the original is deposited in the Vatican Library. Having been compiled with considerable care, it continues our best narrative of his reign, and has been greatly drawn upon by Baldi and Riposati. The edition printed at Venice in 1605 is but an abridgment, containing less than half the original matter. His Life of Francesco Maria I. was left unfinished, and remains unedited in the Vatican.* We shall mention but one more prose writer of Urbino. FEDERIGO BONAVENTURA was born in 1555, and owed to Cardinal Giulio della Rovere a fashionable education at Rome. On his return home, the marked favour of Francesco Maria II. was attracted by his good sense and winning manners; but finding his courtly accomplishments unequal to the profound pursuits of that young prince, he laboured assiduously to supply his own deficiencies. By close application, his progress in Greek, mathematics, and natural philosophy was amazingly rapid; but these studies were happily blended with the business of life, and, directing his powerful judgment to political affairs, he established his reputation by a work on public polity, which, for the first time in Italy, methodised the principles of government. These talents his sovereign turned to account by sending him on various diplomatic missions. Conforming in many respects to the maxims inculcated by the Corteggiano, he filled in the Duke's court somewhat the same place which Castiglione had done in that of Guidobaldo I., and died in 1602. • Vat. Urb. MSS. No. 1011., and No. 1023. f. 50. "All diluted into harmony by that profuse and irresistible wordiness which lubricates and weakens the whole structure of their style." - FRANCIS JEFFREY. THE liquid vocabules of the Italian language flow in melody with a facility perilous to genius, fatal to mediocrity: its stream is equally apt to dilute Castalian inspiration, or to quench poetic fire. Hence the poets of Italy are far outnumbered by its versifiers; and hence among the laureats of Urbino we find but few historic names. But, in absence of native bards, the dukes of the second dynasty attracted to their court several of those most conspicuous on the Ausonian Parnassus, under whose influence a great change came over the manner and spirit of national poetry. Hitherto their predecessors had before them two models, whose excellence is still universally admitted. Dante, in founding an epic literature, chose the grandest and most difficult theme ever dared by man, and his success, by immeasurably distancing his few competitors, has deterred competition. Petrarch addressed himself to passions and sympathies essentially earthly, and constructed a lyrical versification de - manding no sustained exertion; whose trammels sufficed, in his melodious and pliant idiom, to stimulate ingenuity without imposing labour; whose perfection depended rather upon elaborate polish than upon originality or vigour. Thus, while Dante continued a model, Petrarch became a snare; and hence, to borrow the words of Mr. Glassford, than whom none could better judge, — a "multitude of imitators, satisfied with copying the latter in his defects; who could easily follow him in the choice of his subject, but not in the beauty of his style, the variety of his knowledge, and the elegance of his imagery." Sonnets are indeed the most peculiarly Italian form of poetry, but they are avowedly ill-suited to the naive expression of pure and artless feelings. Their laboured strain and studied melody are adapted to an artificial cast of sentiment; they encourage exaggeration and tend to mannerism and common-place. Singly they are charming, but "when taken collectively we become indifferent to their unity, felicity, and grace, and accuse them of what under other circumstances we might possibly commend, their recurring metaphors, their uniform structure, and the unfailing sweetness of their versification."* Yet in their complex form, a prolonged repetition of the same rhyme tends, like the return to a simple air amid difficult variations, touchingly to renew the feeling originally and pleasingly evoked; and thus is it that sonnets often possess a charm of which, in their ambitious attempts, their authors were probably quite unconscious.† It is not now our object to analyse the varied metrical arrangements to which the fertile language of Italy willingly lent itself, and which its minstrels, "A mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease," delighted to mingle and multiply. Enough, in addition to the polished sonnet, to name noble canzoni, sublime odes, and tender elegies. But the absence of ballad poetry, with its wide British and Foreign Quarterly Review, xi. 376. circling echoes of long antecedent events and feelings, is remarkable, and has been imputed to an early addiction of the nation to prosaic habits of trade. This solution is, however, little satisfactory in itself, and is equally at variance with the genius and the language of the people. Perhaps it would be more just to assign a diametrically opposite cause, and to seek in their vivid imaginations, and in the exuberant facility of their melodious tongue, that universality of versification which tended to depreciate its quality, or, at all events, to diminish the estimation bestowed even on their most popular compositions. It is accordingly in nations among whom poetry is a rare gift, and whose idiom can embody it in terse and simple diction, that we find those lyrics which, possessing a traditional popularity, are at once the germ and index of national sentiment. We seek in vain for such among the recognised literature of Italy; and though the dulcet chants of the Venetian gondolier, and the monotonous lazzaroni ditties of Naples, may be deemed of that class, their infinite and ever-changing variety appears to divest them of the historic charm that attaches to the chivalric redondillas of Spain, and to the pensive minstrelsy of our fatherland. In poetry alone did the age of the della Rovere excel that of the Montefeltri, and among the great names whom it was their pride to shelter were Ariosto and Tasso, the only ones worthy to rival those of the bards of Hell and of Love. LUDOVICO ARIOSTO was born of noble parentage at Reggio, in 1474, and, after a precocious struggle against the uncongenial legal career for which he was intended, was left by his father to follow the bent of his genius in favour of general literaFrom an early age he had composed dramas on Thisbe and similar themes, and had secretly drilled his brothers and sisters to perform them; but when about seventeen, his youthful inclination was gratified by accompanying Duke Ercole I. to Pavia and Milan, for diversion, and to enact certain comedies. These boyish efforts have not been preserved, but the Cassaria |