as to have the intellectual life of the nation squandered in the
trivialities of the academies--in their debates about nothing, their
odes and madrigals and masks and sonnets; and the greatest politeness
you could show a stranger was to invite him to a sitting of your
academy; to be furnished with a letter to the academy in the next city
was the highest favor you could ask for yourself.

In literature, the humorous Bernesque school had passed; Tasso had
long been dead; and the Neapolitan Marini, called the Corrupter of
Italian poetry, ruled from his grave the taste of the time. This
taste was so bad as to require a very desperate remedy, and it was
professedly to counteract it that the Academy of the Arcadians had
arisen.

The epoch was favorable, and, as Emiliani-Giudici (whom we shall
follow for the present) teaches, in his History of Italian Literature,
the idea of Crescimbeni spread electrically throughout Italy. The
gayest of the finest ladies and gentlemen the world ever saw, the
_illustrissimi_ of that polite age, united with monks, priests,
cardinals, and scientific thinkers in establishing the Arcadia; and
even popes and kings were proud to enlist in the crusade for the true
poetic faith. In all the chief cities Arcadian colonies were formed,
"dependent upon the Roman Arcadia, as upon the supreme Arch-Flock",
and in three years the Academy numbered thirteen hundred members,
every one of whom had first been obliged to give proof that he was a
good poet. They prettily called themselves by the names of shepherds
and shepherdesses out of Theocritus, and, being a republic, they
refused to own any earthly prince or ruler, but declared the Baby
Jesus to be the Protector of Arcadia. Their code of laws was written
in elegant Latin by a grave and learned man, and inscribed upon