How different was this adolescence from that of Marino!  Both youths grew to manhood without domestic influences; and both were conspicuous in after life for the want of that affection which abounds in Tasso.  But here the parallel between them ends.  Marino, running wild upon the streets of Naples, taking his fill of pleasure and adventure, picking up ill-digested information at hap-hazard, and forming his poetic style as nature prompted; Chiabrera, disciplined in piety and morals by Jesuit directors, imbued with erudition by an arid scholar, a formal pedant and an accomplished rhetorician, the three chief representatives of decadent Italian humanism:  no contrast can be imagined greater than that which marked these two lads out for diverse paths in literature.  The one was formed to be the poet of caprice and license, openly ranking with those

    Che la ragion sommettono al talento,

and making s’ei piace ei lice his rule of conduct and of art.  The other received a rigid bent toward decorum, in religious observances, in ethical severity, and in literature of a strictly scholastic type.

Yet Chiabrera was not without the hot blood of Italian youth.  His uncle died, and he found himself alone in the world.  After spending a few years in the service of Cardinal Cornaro, he quarreled with a Roman gentleman, vindicated his honor by some act of violence, and was outlawed from the city.  Upon this he retired to Savona; and here again he met with similar adventures.  Wounded in a brawl, he took the law into his own hands, and revenged himself upon his assailant.  This punctilio proved him to be a true child of his age; and if we may credit his own account of both incidents, he behaved himself as became a gentleman of the period.  It involved him, however, in serious annoyances both at Rome and Savona, from which he only extricated himself with difficulty and which impaired his fortune.  Up to the age of fifty he remained unmarried, and then took a wife by whom he had no children.  He lived to the ripe age of eighty-four, always at Savona, excepting occasional visits to friends in Italian cities, and he died unmolested by serious illness after his first entrance into the Collegio Romano.  How he occupied the leisure of that lengthy solitude may be gathered from his published works—­two or three thick volumes of lyrics; four bulky poems of heroic narrative; twelve dramas, including two tragedies; thirty satires or epistles; and about forty miscellaneous poems in divers meters.  In a word, he devoted his whole life to the art of poetry, for which he was not naturally gifted, and which he pursued in a gravely methodical spirit.  It may be said at once that the body of his work, with the exception of some simple pieces of occasion, and a few chastely written epistles, is such as nobody can read without weariness.