The first Edition of the celebrated _Dictionary of the Accademia della Crusca_ was published in 1613. It is curious that with the universal attention it aroused, it did not raise the standard of taste and scholarship, for truth to tell, the average run of inferior writers produced works incredibly bad.
There was a dearth of really good writers of stories in prose in the Seventeenth Century. The _Stories_ of CELIO MALASPINI are racy and amusing, and give a graphic idea of the manners and customs of the early part of the Century, but they are often indelicate and have few graces of style to recommend them. TRAJANO BOCCALINI wrote some vivacious political and literary squibs which had a wide circulation in an age long before the introduction of newspapers, where alone writings on such ephemeral topics now appear.
Florence could boast of a select band of philosophers, MAGALOTTI, VIVIANI, REDI and DATI, but their influence does not seem to have extended beyond Tuscany. AUTON MARIA SALVINI was a laborious grammarian and one of the chief compilers of the Dictionary above named.
Probably the most eminent man of letters of the last ten years of the Seventeenth Century was CRESCIMBENI, the historian of Italian poetry, and the founder of the Arcadian Academy, still flourishing in Rome. He was a writer of great talent and judgment, and he was more alive than his contemporaries to the evils resulting from the exaggerated metaphors and wild hyperboles introduced by the followers of Marino. He looked out for a perfect model of poetry, and he found it in the works of Angelo di Costanzo, and certainly that writer's equable sweetness and refinement are unruffled by tempestuous passion or towering sublimity. Crescimbeni might, we think, with greater propriety have selected Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto to reform the degraded taste of the age; but still, the beauties of Costanzo are of a high order, and the recommendation bore good fruit.
If it cannot be said of any writer of the Seventeenth Century that he rises to the highest pinnacle of Art, yet, on a review of the whole period, there remains an impression of much ingenuity and much vigour of thought.
[Footnote 1: His poems, chiefly Sonnets, are in Italian.]