characteristic of the Nolan's genius and spirit—La Cena del le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper'), dedicated to Castelnau de Mauvissière, French ambassador in London; the Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante ('The Driving out of the Triumphant Beast'); and Gli Eroici Furori (The Heroic Furies'), the latter two dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. All are in dialogue, and the last-named contains much verse. Although he excuses himself for part of what appears in Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante by saying that it is the personages who speak in their character, not he, the dialogue form (the most difficult perhaps of all in literature) does not appear to me to be well managed. There is too much of the Nolan, and the other personages are apt to be too obviously dummies, who either repeat him, or are put up merely to be knocked over. But this in itself is typical of the author. The dialogues are the literary expression of the very remarkable human being who was Giordano Bruno, the most volcanic and fuliginous of men. He is for ever bursting into rockets of rhetoric, while the epithets fly out in sheets as of sparks from an anvil. What he means or is endeavouring to prove is far from being always clear, not because his language is obscure, for on the contrary his sentences are commonly simple enough, but because there was always far more passion and emotion in Giordano Bruno than reasoning power. The title of his dialogues, 'The Heroic Furies,' is in a way a description of his whole work. There is in him a constant heroic fury of effort towards some vaguely indicated manifestations of individual force

and greatness. This of itself is attractive. With all his smoky obscurity there is a very real fire in Giordano Bruno, which finds its best expression in verse. Whether he is profitable to read is perhaps doubtful, but he is most interesting to look at. He was a real Faust, who strove to grasp―

"Was die Welt

Im Innersten zusammenhält;"

who thought he had read the riddle, and who justified an illimitable intellectual arrogance, often superbly expressed, by his imaginary discovery.

The fall from Tasso and Bruno to any of their contemporaries is very great. There was abundant interest of a kind in literary matters, there was no want of criticism, and the Academies were active. The long controversy over the Jerusalem in which Tasso allowed himself to be entangled is, if valuable for nothing else, at least a proof that Italians read poetry, and could talk about it. What they could not at this period do was to produce anything original and valuable-with the exception of Tasso himself, and of Bruno. The once famous Pastor Fido of Giambattista Guarini (1537-1612) is in fact a terrible example of what may happen to a literature when its writers have become extremely cultivated in all that is mere matter of language, but have unfortunately nothing to say-or, if they have something to

1 This controversy has its place in every life of Tasso, and is told at length by Serassi, Vita de Tasso: Bergamo, 1790. My own trifling acquaintance with it has given me the impression that it can be profitable to no mortal, except perhaps a historian of criticism.

say, are cowed into insignificance by the fear of compromising themselves.1

Guarini was a man of character, a little querulous, and afflicted by a vanity which caused him to be for ever comparing himself to Tasso, and complaining of his contemporary's greater fame, but by no means without parts or knowledge. Yet his Pastor Fido is a mere echo of the Aminta. Guarini's play - if play it can be called was first acted at Turin in 1585, and was published in Venice in 1590. From the Aminta, and through the Pastor Fido, came the line of the Italian literary opera of later times. The verse is flowing with touches of a somewhat sensual lusciousness but withal it is nerveless and imitative.

1 Il Pastor Fido. Verona, 1735.

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CHAPTER XIII.

CONCLUSION.

THE wealth of the period which we here call the Later Renaissance makes the task of giving the results of a survey of its manifold activities one of extreme difficulty. It is, indeed, sufficiently easy to point out the common element of the time-namely, the revival or the development of the literary genius of Spain, England, and France, under the influence of the classic models, and of Italy. In Italy itself the classic impulse had been felt earlier and had borne its best fruits before the middle of the sixteenth century. The time there was one of decadence. Tasso and Giordano Bruno are unquestionably, though in widely different ways, writers of original force. But the author of the Jerusalem Delivered was a survivor,-one, too, who had lived into an unhappy time. His weakness of health and character may have or rather must have-made him suffer with exaggerated acuteness from the forces which were weighing on the intellect of Italy. Yet on that

very account he shows only the more clearly the exhaustion of the race, and the deadening influence of the Roman Catholic revival. As for Bruno, interesting, and in a way attractive, figure as he is, it is doubtful whether he can be said to have had any literary influence at all. His modern fame is even not quite legitimate, since he owes it in some measure to the circumstances of his death. In his own age he fell rapidly into obscurity. He also had lived into an unhappy time, though he bore himself in it very differently from Tasso. Too Italian to reconcile himself to Calvinism or Lutheranism, too independent in mind to be an obedient son of the Church, from the moment he was asked for more than mere outward conformity to ceremonies, he was destined to be crushed between hammer and anvil in an age of religious strife. There was no room for independence of mind in Italy, and there was to be none for long, as the lives of Galileo and of Fra Paolo Sarpi were to show. It required all the power, and the strong political anti-papal spirit of Venice, to preserve Fra Paolo. In literature nothing was any longer quite safe except the more or less elegant presentment of harmless matter. Tasso did the utmost which it was now allowed to an Italian poet to achieve. Beyond him there could only be mere echo, as in the case of Guarini. Beyond Guarini the downward path of Italian literature led only to the preciosities and affectations of Marini.

The difficulty of summing up and defining becomes really sensible when an attempt has to be made to