and barren in thought: he was all the more a precious antidote to the dissolute lusciousness of a Marini, and his example exercised a salutary influence throughout the whole of the seventeenth century. So late as 1740, Spence, travelling in Italy, was told that the Italian lyrical poets of the day were divisible into Petrarchists and Chiabrerists. The popularity of so bold an innovator, and the honours and distinctions showered upon him by princes and potentates, are creditable to the age. He wrote his brief autobiography at eighty, and died at eighty-five, exulting to the last in his sanity of mind and body; distinguished also, according to Rossi (Nicius Erythræus), as the ugliest of the poets: "Quis enim qui ejus faciem aspexisset, arbitiatus asset, ex illius ore subnigro, tetrico, invenusto, tam candidula, tam vinula, tam venustula carmina posse prodere?" A man congenial to Wordsworth, who has translated some of his stately metrical epitaphs with corresponding dignity.[1] |He has many traits of those great modern masters of form, Landor and Platen, but, though no mean sculptor of speech, falls much behind them in perfection of classic mould, as he surpasses them in productiveness.
Chiabrera wrote several epics, dramas, poems on sacred history, and other pieces, and the mass of his poetry is of formidable extent; but apart from his Sermoni, felicitous imitations of Horace, he lives solely by his lyrics. These fall into two classes, which he would have described as Pindaric and Anacreontic.
- ↑ It is not improbable that the "three feet long and two feet wide," which brought such ridicule upon Wordsworth, may be a reminiscence of Chiabrera's description of his house, "Di cui l'ampiezza venticinque braccia Forse consume."
