Greek predecessors, may have been surpassed in the minute elaboration of detail, not in truth or feeling. Spenser affords a still better example, for—the multitudinous melodies of his peculiar stanza excepted—this is the one point in which he transcends his Italian models. In propriety of plan, in human and dramatic interest, in terseness and polish of style, he is greatly their inferior; but the natural descriptions of Ariosto and Tasso, beautiful as they often are, fall far behind his in rich warmth and glowing splendour.
This national gift fell into abeyance in the later half of the seventeenth century: there is scarcely a vestige of it in Dryden except where he reproduces Chaucer. Thomson's Seasons mark its revival, and were not without their effect in Europe; yet it must be owned that its modern herald and hierophant is not a Briton, but a Swiss justly reckoned among French authors—Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was the mission of this extraordinary man to inaugurate not merely the naturalistic, but the sentimental movement also, which, taken up by Sterne and Goethe, filled Europe with imitators, and, among other consequences, gave a great impulse to the novel at the expense of the drama. Neither the description of nature nor the analysis of feeling is peculiarly congenial to the Italian character, and it may be doubted whether the latter impulse would have been very deeply felt but for the unhappy politic al circumstances of the country, which engendered a mong the noblest minds a prevailing disgust and despair cond ucive ta the diffusion of morbid sentiment and a generally mournful cast of thought. Both the naturalistic and the sentimental tendencies inaugurated by Rousseau found a powerful representative in Ugo Foscolo.
