"A tender slip of laurel I of late
Implanted in fair soil, and Heaven besought
To prosper till it might, to fulness brought,
Enshade the brow august of Laureate;
And Zephyrus to boot did supplicate
To fan with soothing wing, lest harm in aught
By bitter breath of Boreas should be wrought,
Loosed from the cave where Æolus holds state.
Tardy and difficult, full well I know,
The upward striving of Apolllo's spray,
Matched with frail growths that lightly come and go;
Yet chide we not the fortunate delay,
If, when the bay is worthy of the brow,
Brow there be also worthy of the bay."
Carlo Maria Maggi (1630–99), without soaring high, did excellent work in ode, sonnet, and madrigal. Francesco Lemene (1634–1704) was more ambitious, but his tumid religious poetry has fallen into oblivion, and he only lives by his pretty Anacreontics.
As the great questions which had divided the preceding century became settled, and political interests narrowed more and more, the spirit of the age naturally turned to satire. Menzini is its best satirist; but at an earlier period Chiabrera, Soldani, and the impetuous and unequal Salvator Rosa had exercised themselves in this department of literature, and the century's last literary sensation was the successive appearance of the Latin satires of Sergardi (Sectanus), models of composition, which for nearly a decade kept the reading portion of the Roman public in an uproar. It might have been thought that comedy would have flourished, but some promising beginnings died away, while opera progressed steadily. Tragedies continued to be written on the classical system, but there was no power to breathe life into the old forms, unless the great tem-
