or Antonio Longo at the prospect of being forced to remain behind in the country after their gay friends, who had come for the villeggiatura, had returned to town. An economic revival was out of the question till more settled conditions prevailed; and the general stagnation of public life gave no outlet for the energy of the inhabitants of the peninsula in other directions.

Hence the period found its fullest scope in the Arcadian Academy, founded under the auspices of Queen Christina of Sweden, which still continues to exist in its old headquarters on the Janiculum. Italy has always been the home of academies, but hitherto their influence had rarely extended beyond the walls of the town that gave them birth. This one, however, soon gathered within its fold virtually the whole cultivated society of the peninsula. Branches sprang up in every town of importance, even in remote Gorizia. Its very artificiality harmonised completely with the needs of the day.

6

Rhyming is easy in Italian; and the ability to turn a sonnet was almost as necessary an accomplishment for a gentleman as was some knowledge of fencing to his more virile ancestors. The dainty volumes with the laurel wreath round the Pan pipes and Gli Arcadi,' that contain the results of the Olympic Games in which the members displayed their intellectual nimbleness in honour of some illustrious patron in Rome, seldom rise above the level of the contributions to the Batheaston vase, which owed its origin, as Horace Walpole saw, to Lady Miller's travels in Italy. Great literature could not be produced in an atmosphere so hopelessly divorced from all that constitutes life as we understand it. Arcadia reached its zenith in Metastasio, whose 'Ode to Nice' may be called the love poem of the 18th century. The feeling it expresses is perfectly genuine, shallow though it sounds to us now after the storms of the Romantic movement; and Carducci does well to remind us that the 'settecento' had every right to serve up its 'dear heart' as it pleased. The ode was translated into all the languages of Europe; every one with the most elementary knowledge of Italian could repeat it in the original; and it is praised even by Baretti, the sworn foe of Arcadia. With it stands Rolli's gentle, melancholy

'Solitario bosco ombroso,' which the boy Goethe learnt from hearing his mother sing it, long before he understood a word of Italian.

But Metastasio was Cæsarean poet at the court of Vienna; and the great work of his life was the perfection of the melodrama. In his hands the libretto touched high-water mark. The score was little more than an accessory; and his 'Didone Abbandonata' or his' Adriano in Siria' might be set to music by a dozen masters. Yet it is easy to see that Metastasio's contemporaries were wrong in their estimate of the relative importance of the two arts, though it was not till the end of the century that Casti wrote his clever 'Prima la musica, poi le parole,' in which he gave vent to his indignation at being asked to provide the words for a finished score by Salieri. The very exuberance of this great creative impulse brought with it its own nemesis. In the rapid rush forward of Italian music, in the tremendous vortex of new compositions, the work even of an eminent composer was rarely performed more than one season in the same place,' when it was discarded 'like last year's almanack,' and was therefore rarely thought worth printing. So much Vernon Lee tells us; and the pages describing the musical life are perhaps the best in her 'Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy,' which is now a work of such authority in the peninsula that it is read even by a heroine of the latest war-novel. Many of Metastasio's beautiful phrases have not yet lost their magic; but who could dissociate from Pergolesi's setting what is perhaps the most beautiful of them all :

'Nei giorni tuoi felici
Ricordati di me'?

Venice, with his four conservatories, its great church festivals and its nightly serenades on the canals, was the real home of Italian music. Naples was its only rival. From the city of the lagoons or from Naples came all the great singers. At Venice music seemed to be part of the very air men breathed. They sing in the squares, in the streets and on the canals,' says Goldoni. 'The shopkeepers sing as they set out their wares, the workmen sing as they leave their work, the gondoliers sing while they are waiting for their masters.' Even to-day

one hears more singing in the canals of Venice than one does in any other large town in Italy. The marriage of the stern old patrician Marcello, the acknowledged leader of the musical world, to Rosanna, a girl of the people, whose magnificent voice he chanced to hear as she passed in a gondola along the canal, is as truly symbolical of 18th-century Venice as was the wedding of the sea by the Doge in the great days of old, though the ceremony lingered on to the last year of the Republic.

But, apart from its music, what is the secret of the spell which the 'Settecento' undoubtedly casts upon many people to-day? It lies, we imagine, as in the case of the 18th century almost everywhere else in Europe, in the charm of its social life. France, of course, led the way. The tragedy-writing abate turned to Voltaire or Corneille for inspiration as instinctively as the Venetian zentildonna on her way to the promenade of the liston looked to the doll in the Merceria to instruct her in the latest Paris fashions. But Italian life was nevertheless as individual as was our own in England. Cut off both by upbringing and by circumstances from all that we are in the habit of regarding as the serious business of life, the men and women of the leisured classes could devote all their energies to the pursuit of pleasure and to their social duties. Art and literature were useful in so far as they served to decorate and amuse. But music formed the most effective setting for a world which had lost the habit of thinking; and the music of the period charms and soothes us to-day by its very lack of passion. Life was essentially feminine, for woman rules in the drawing-room. The ideal shepherd of Arcadia is the clever, superficial, polished abate, a thorough man of the world, who has dabbled in everything, can turn a neat verse or a complimentary letter on any conceivable subject, and is welcome in every capital in Europe. 'I will not meddle with the "Spectator," wrote Swift to .Stella; let him fair-sex it to the end.' And the Spectator' became the fashion for a season or two, especially in Venice, the home of Gaspare Gozzi, its most successful Italian imitator.

There was another side of life in which Venice held a unique supremacy. She was the Mecca of the man

of pleasure. Though visibly aging, she remained Italian to the core. Her gaiety had lost its spontaneity and had taken on something of a professional tone. It was a mask put on for the amusement and exploitation of the foreigner, not the irrepressible outburst of a heart bubbling over with merriment. Its very frenzy suggests that those who were leading it were afraid to stop lest they should begin to think. Yet the carnival of Venice was a thing unique in Europe. No gambler had completed his education till he had tried conclusions with the suave patricians who alone were deemed worthy to make the banks at the faro tables or to appear unmasked within the sacred precincts of the Ridotto at San Moisè. It is not for the sake of their vanished splendour that our eyes linger upon the ruins of the villas which once lined the banks of the Brenta canal, and of which Strà is the one noble survival, but for the gorgeous entertainments of which they were the scene and the jolly parties that gathered in their beautiful formal gardens for the villeggiatura. We try in vain to recapture the indefinable glamour of those last years of the old régime, of which little more than the dust and ashes remain in the collections of the Museo Carrer at Venice, with its Longhis and its Goldoni room, its fading costumes and the puppets for performing Goldoni's plays—a glamour as elusive as the charm of one of Longhi's own beauties in hoop and wig and patch, the brilliant red of her lips almost clashing with the dead white of her complexion.

Antonio Longo tells us of a masquerade which he organised at La Mira. All the masks appeared at his villa about two hours before midday, where a couple of barges were awaiting them on the Brenta. In one of these were a dozen musicians dressed as Moors, in the other twenty-four countrymen masked as Quakers. The whole company went on board and started for Dolo, where a large crowd had gathered, which was kept back by the Quakers drawn up in two lines. After a meal the barges were illuminated and started back for the Casino dei Nobili, which would correspond to the Assembly Rooms in an English town of the day. On the way they passed the villa of the Senator Giambattista Corner. To their surprise the windows were lit up with wax candles, while the statues, the gardens, and the

grounds were illuminated with pitch flares. Their band struck up and was answered by a full orchestra which had been brought from Venice. They landed and were met by the Senator and a large body of friends. Dancing was kept up till midnight. They were all invited to dinner for the next day, when the dessert represented the figures of their own masquerade. As several pheasants were untouched, Corner signed to a servant to keep them for the morrow. Marco Gradenigo, also a Senator, remarked that it was a mean thing to do. Corner retorted that Gradenigo was always dining out, but never himself gave any one so much as a drink of water from a bucket. Gradenigo, who was famed for his hospitality, instantly invited all those present to dine with him on the morrow, and promised that no food that was left over should ever appear at his table again. In the end each of these Senators entertained the party at no less than six dinners.

These last years of the old order in Italy attract us not a little by the limitations that seem to raise them above the cares of everyday life. But they are altogether lacking in the solid qualities which we associate with the age of our own great Doctor. Even Horace Walpole's letters possess a manly vigour for which we look in vain in a typical Italian letter-writer of the period. This deficiency is largely due to the society they reflect, for no one would have made a more perfect drawing-room abate, or a more punctilious and devoted cicisbeo, than Horace Walpole, had he been born south of the Alps. Italy can offer us nothing so satisfying as the life that centred round Swift and Pope and Addison, or round Johnson and his friends. Arcadia is a garden where one may while away an afternoon pleasantly and even profitably, but it would hardly tempt one to make a long stay.

Yet under all this artificiality and frivolity good work was being done in more than one field. The names of Volta and Galvani are known to every student of science, while Benedetto Croce has revived interest in Giambattista Vico. But the 18th century is, above all, the age of the great archivists, when the masses of material concerning the Middle Ages that lay buried in the Italian libraries were first sifted and arranged. This is a realm