were nevertheless liberal. He satirised Catherine the Second, and when exiled from Vienna on that account, had the spirit to resign his Austrian pension. The Animali Parlanti, a satire upon the rule of the stronger in political life, and thus an interesting revival of the old conception of Reynard the Fox, is his best work.
It is remarkable that the age of Richardson and Fielding in England, and Marivaux and Prevost d'Exiles in France, should have produced no novelist of reputation in Italy. The imitation of even such world-famed books as the Nouvelle Héloise and Werther was reserved for a later generation. One romancer acquired some celebrity—Count Alessandro Verri (1741–1816), who hit upon, or borrowed from Wieland, the idea of resorting for his themes to antiquity. His Notti Romane, Saffo, and Erostrato are all works of merit, and the first-named was probably not without influence upon Landor.
On the whole, the history of the Italy of the eighteenth century is in most departments, intellectual and political, that of a patient recovering from a formidable malady by slow but certain stages. Much is lost, never to return. The relation of Italy to the rest of Europe is no longer that of Athens to Sparta or Bœotia, as in the sixteenth century; but neither, as in the seventeenth, is she estranged from the general current of European thought. Her intellectual position may be read in the very portraits of her eminent men, who in general display the placid eighteenth-century type, and might as well have been Frenchmen or Englishmen as Italians. They were writers of signal merit and utility, but, Vico excepted, not men of creative genius, and the national mind might
