Before investigating Chiabrera’s claim to rank among Italian poets, it may be well to examine his autobiography in those points which touch upon the temper of society.  Short as it is, this document is precious for the light it casts upon contemporary custom.  As a writer, Chiabrera was distinguished by sobriety of judgment, rectitude, piety, purity of feeling, justice toward his fellow-workers in literature, and an earnest desire to revive the antique virtues among his countrymen.  There is no reason to suppose that these estimable qualities did not distinguish him in private life.  Yet eight out of the eighteen pages of his biography are devoted to comically solemn details regarding the honors paid him by Italian princes.  The Grand Duke of Florence, Ferdinand I., noticed him standing with uncovered head at a theatrical representation in the Pitti Palace.  He bade the poet put his cap on and sit down.  Cosimo, the heir apparent, showed the same condescending courtesy.  When he was at Turin, Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, placed a coach and pair at his disposal, and allowed him 300 lire for traveling expenses to and from Savona.  But this prince omitted to appoint him lodgings in the palace, nor did he invite him to cover in the presence.  This perhaps is one reason why Chiabrera refused the duke’s offer of a secretaryship at Court.  Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, on the contrary, allotted him rooms and always suffered him to keep his hat on.  The Pope, who was an old college friend of Chiabrera, made him handsome presents, and on one delightful occasion allowed him to hear a sermon in the Papal pew.  The Doge of Genoa, officially particular in points of etiquette, always took care to bid him cover, although he was a subject born of the Republic.

Basely insignificant as are these details, they serve to show what value was then ascribed even by men of real respectability to trifling princely favors.  The unction with which Chiabrera relates them, warming his cold style into a glow of satisfaction, is a practical satire upon his endeavor to resuscitate the virtues of antique republics in that Italy.  To do this was his principal aim as a moralist; to revive the grand style of Pindar was his object as an artist.  Each attempt involved impossibility, and argued a visionary ambition dimly conscious of its scope.  Without freedom, without the living mythology of Hellas, without a triumphant national cause, in the very death of independence, at the end of a long age of glorious but artificial culture, how could Chiabrera dare to pose as Pindar?  Instead of the youth of Greece ascending with free flight and all the future of the world before it, decrepit Italy, the Italy so rightly drawn by Marino in his Pianto, lay groveling in the dust of decaying thrones.  Her lyrist had to sing of pallone-matches instead of Panhellenic games; to celebrate the heroic conquest of two Turkish galleys by a Tuscan fleet, instead of Marathon and Salamis; to praise S. Lucy and S. Paul with tepid fervor, instead of telling how Rhodes swam at her god’s bidding upward from the waves.