II

In such a world Arcadia nourished; into such a world that illustrious
shepherd, Carlo Innocenze Frugoni, was born. He was the younger son of
a noble family of Genoa, and in youth was sent into a cloister as a
genteel means of existence rather than from regard to his own wishes
or fitness. He was, in fact, of a very gay and mundane temper, and
escaped from his monastery as soon as ever he could, and spent his
long life thereafter at the comfortable court of Parma, where he sang
with great constancy the fortunes of varying dynasties and celebrated
in his verse all the polite events of society. Of course, even a life
so pleasant as this had its little pains and mortifications; and it is
history that when, in 1731, the last duke of the Farnese family died,
leaving a widow, "Frugoni predicted and maintained in twenty-five
sonnets that she would yet give an heir to the duke; but in spite
of the twenty-five sonnets the affair turned out otherwise, and the
extinction of the house of Farnese was written."

Frugoni, however, was taken into favor by the Spanish Bourbon who
succeeded, and after he had got himself unfrocked with infinite
difficulty (and only upon the intercession of divers princes and
prelates), he was as happy as any man of real talent could be who
devoted his gifts to the merest intellectual trifling. Not long before
his death he was addressed by one that wished to write his life.
He made answer that he had been a versifier and nothing more,
epigrammatically recounted the chief facts of his career, and ended by
saying, "of what I have written it is not worth while to speak"; and
posterity has upon the whole agreed with him, though, of course, no
edition of the Italian classics would be perfect without him. We know
this from the classics of our own tongue, which abound in marvels of