There had been reading and praising of odes and
sonnets the whole blessed afternoon, and now he cried out to the
complaisant, canorous company, "Behold Arcadia revived in us!"
This struck everybody at once by its truth. It struck, most of all, a
certain Giovan Maria Crescimbeni, honored in his day and despised in
ours as a poet and critic. He was of a cold, dull temperament; "a mind
half lead, half wood", as one Italian writer calls him; but he was an
inveterate maker of verses, and he was wise in his own generation. He
straightway proposed to the tuneful _abbes, cavalieri serventi_, and
_precieuses_, who went singing and love-making up and down Italy in
those times, the foundation of a new academy, to be called the Academy
of the Arcadians.
Literary academies were then the fashion in Italy, and every part of
the peninsula abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque,
such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or
The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray,
The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the
production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think
of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of
the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of
the inane formalities of their sessions.
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