One example will serve as well as many to illustrate the false attitude assumed by Chiabrera when he posed as a new Pindar in the midst of seventeenth-century Italians.  I will select the Ode to Don Cesare d’Este.  There is something pathetically ridiculous, in this would-be swan of the Dircean fount, this apostle of pagan virtues, admonishing the heir of Alfonso II to prove himself an obedient son of the Church by relinquishing his Duchy of Ferrara to the Holy See.  The poet asks him, in fine classic phrases, whether he could bear to look on desecrated altars, confessionals without absolving priests, chapels without choristers, a people barred with bolt and lock from Paradise.  How trivial are earthly compared with heavenly crowns!  How vulgar is the love of power and gold!  The exhortation, exquisite enough in chastened style, closes with this hypocritical appeal to Cesare’s aristocratic prejudices: 

    Parli la plebe a suo volere, e pensi—­
    Non con la plebe hanno da gir gli Estensi.

That is to say, nobility demands that the House of Este should desert its subjects, sacrifice its throne, crawl at a Pontiff’s feet, and starve among a crowd of disthroned princes, wrapping the ragged purple of its misery around it till it, too, mixes with the people it contemns.

Hopeless as the venture was, Chiabrera made it the one preoccupation of his life, in these untoward circumstances, to remodel Italian poetry upon the Greek pattern.  It was a merit of the Sei Cento, a sign of grace, that the Italians now at last threw orthodox aesthetic precepts to the winds, and avowed their inability to carry the Petrarchistic tradition further.  The best of them, Campanella and Bruno, molded vulgar language like metal in the furnace of a vehement imagination, making it the vehicle of fantastic passion and enthusiastic philosophy.  From their crucible the Sonnet and the Ode emerged with no resemblance to academical standards.  Grotesque, angular, gnarled, contorted, Gothic even, these antiquated forms beneath their wayward touch were scarcely recognizable.  They had become the receptacles of burning, scalding, trenchant realities.  Salvator Rosa, next below the best, forced indignation to lend him wings, and scaled Parnassus with brass-bound feet and fury.  Marino, bent on riveting attention by surprises, fervid with his own reality of lust, employed the octave stanza as a Turkish Bey might use an odalisque.  ‘The only rule worth thinking of,’ he said, ’is to know how and when and where to break all rules, adapting ourselves to current taste and the fashions of the age.’  His epic represents a successful, because a vivid, reaction against conventionality.  The life that throbs in it is incontestable, even though that life may be nothing better than ephemeral.  With like brutality of instinct, healthy because natural, the barocco architects embraced ugliness, discord, deformity, spasm, as an escape from harmony and regularity