Leigh Hunt names among Englishmen who were made Shepherds of Arcadia,
Mathias, author of the "Pursuits of Literature", and Joseph Cowper,
"who wrote the Memoirs of Tassoni and an historical memoir of Italian
tragedy", Haly, and Mrs. Thrale, as well as those poor Delia Cruscans
whom bloody-minded Gifford champed between his tusked jaws in his
now forgotten satires. Pope Pius VII. gave the Arcadians a suite of
apartments in the Vatican; but I dare say the wicked tyranny now
existing at Rome has deprived the harmless swains of this shelter, if
indeed they had not been turned out before Victor Emmanuel came.
In the chapter on the Arcadia, with which Vernon Lee opens her
admirable Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, she tells us of
several visits which she recently paid to the Bosco Parrasio, long the
chief fold of the Academy. She found it with difficulty on the road to
the Villa Pamphili, in a neighborhood wholly ignorant of Arcadia and
of the relation of Bosco Parrasio to it. "The house, once the summer
resort of Arcadian sonneteers, was now abandoned to a family of
market-gardeners, who hung their hats and jackets on the marble heads
of improvvisatori and crowned poetesses, and threw their beans, maize,
and garden-tools into the corners of the desolate reception-rooms,
from whose mildewed walls looked down a host of celebrities--brocaded
doges, powdered princesses, and scarlet-robed cardinals, simpering
drearily in their desolation," and "sad, haggard poetesses in
sea-green and sky-blue draperies, with lank, powdered locks and meager
arms, holding lyres; fat, ill-shaven priests in white bands and
mop-wigs; sonneteering ladies, sweet and vapid in dove-colored
stomachers and embroidered sleeves; jolly extemporary poets, flaunting
in many-colored waistcoats and gorgeous shawls.
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