In comparing the poetry of the Seventeenth Century with that of the Sixteenth, we are struck by the curious fact that its authors have a more old-fashioned air than their predecessors. This is partly to be-accounted for by their search for ingenious conceits, which prevents them from being as flowing and natural as the contemporaries of Ariosto and Tasso. Their style, too, is more cumbrous. They are fonder of long and complicated periods than the poets of the Sixteenth Century. But they have many compensating qualities. Their very fault of being too artificial in thought and imagery argues the possession of no little imagination and fertility. A man cannot pervert into strange and fantastic forms his thoughts and conceptions without being at considerable pains to do so. None of these writers spare themselves any trouble, and they often choose the most difficult metres which the language can present. Their great defect is conventionality of phraseology, which began with Tasso and only ended in the Nineteenth Century with Monti. They bedeck themselves with the rags of Ancient Mythology, and do not seem for a moment to suspect that they would look much better in unborrowed garments. Instead of talking of the wind, they talk of Boreas. Instead of mentioning the sea, they mention Neptune and Thetis. All this makes even the best of them unnatural and pedantic to a degree, and it is only in their very finest passages that they are enjoyable to the modern reader. The intense love for Classical Antiquity had died out with the Renaissance, and the allusions to the Gods of Greece and Rome were but the outcome of habit and convention. Instead of adorning their works, these allusions positively make them dry, for it is only Marino who uses them as they should be used: for the display of brilliant pageants of description and imagery. He conjures up a fairyland of his own as Keats did two hundred years later.
[Footnote 1: Lord Somers was a great admirer of Filicaia. See Lord Campbell's _Lives of the Chancellors,_ and Macaulay's _History._]
GALILEO AND THE PROSE WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
In enumerating the Prose Writers of the Seventeenth Century, we are confronted with the illustrious name of GALILEO GALILEI, which will continue to be remembered as long as Science is cultivated.