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 insipidity and emptiness.
But all this does not make him less interesting as
a figure in that amusing literarified society; and
we may be glad to see him in Parma with Signor Torelli’s
eyes, as he “issues smug, ornate, with his well-fitting,
polished shoe, his handsome leg in its neat stocking,
his whole immaculate person, and his demure visage,
and, gently sauntering from Casa Caprara, takes his
way toward Casa Landi.”
I do not know Casa Landi; I have never seen it; and
yet I think I can tell you of it: a gloomy-fronted
pile of Romanesque architecture, the lower story remarkable
for its weather-stained, vermiculated stone, and the
ornamental iron gratings at the windows. The porte-cochere
stands wide open and shows the leaf and blossom of
a lovely garden inside, with a tinkling fountain in
the midst. The marble nymphs and naiads inhabiting
the shrubbery and the water are already somewhat time-worn,
and have here and there a touch of envious mildew;
but as yet their noses are unbroken, and they have
all the legs and arms that the sculptor designed them
Copyrights
Modern Italian Poets from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
