English sonnet, even when dealing with a light theme, is apt to be ponderous. The Italian, even when serious, is tuneful, and buoyant on the wing.
Filicaja fixed the model of the Italian canzone for a long time, for the innovations of his successor Alessandro Guidi (1650–1712), a protégé of Queen Christina, and one of the founders of the "Arcadia," had more admirers than imitators. They consisted in the irregularity and sometimes the disuse of rhyme, interesting as experiments, but unfavourable to the stately march of the most dignified form of lyrical composition. Guidi was nevertheless a fine poet, and manifests a peculiar fire and dignity when hymning the glories and tragedies of Rome. He must have been a very ermine among authors, if it be true that he died of disgust at a misprint in one of his books.
Three other poets who did not aspire to the elevation of Filicaja and Guidi, aided to re-enthrone sound taste, and did honour to the end of the seventeenth century. Benedetto Menzini (1646–1704), another protégé of Christina's, and in some sense a pupil of Redi, wrote caustic satires, graceful Anacreontics, respectable odes, and an Art of Poetry as sound as could be expected from one whose knowledge of modern literature was so limited. To see, more than half a century after Shakespeare, the Solimano and the Torrismondo propounded as the highest modern examples of tragic art certainly inspires cogitation touching the serviceableness of the light within, supposing that light to be darkness. Within his limits, however, Menzini is most judicious, and his own compositions do credit to his maxims; witness the following keen satiric apologue in sonnet form:
