Such literary institutions, prevalent in Italy, are the spurious remains of those numerous academies which simultaneously started up in that country about the sixteenth century.  They assumed the most ridiculous denominations, and a great number is registered by Quadrio and Tiraboschi.  Whatever was their design, one cannot fairly reproach them, as Mencken, in his “Charlatanaria Eruditorum,” seems to have thought, for pompous quackery; neither can we attribute to their modesty their choice of senseless titles, for to have degraded their own exalted pursuits was but folly!  Literary history affords no parallel to this national absurdity of the refined Italians.  Who could have suspected that the most eminent scholars, and men of genius, were associates of the Oziosi, the Fantastici, the Insensati?  Why should Genoa boast of her “Sleepy,” Yiterbo of her “Obstinates,” Sienna of her “Insipids,” her “Blockheads,” and her “Thunderstruck;” and Naples of her “Furiosi:”  while Macerata exults in her “Madmen chained?” Both Quadrio and Tiraboschi cannot deny that these fantastical titles have occasioned these Italian academies to appear very ridiculous to the oltramontani; but these valuable historians are no philosophical thinkers.  They apologise for this bad taste, by describing the ardour which was kindled throughout Italy at the restoration of letters and the fine arts, so that every one, and even every man of genius, were eager to enrol their names in these academies, and prided themselves in bearing their emblems, that is, the distinctive arms each academy had chosen.  But why did they mystify themselves?

Folly, once become national, is a vigorous plant, which sheds abundant seed.  The consequence of having adopted ridiculous titles for these academies suggested to them many other characteristic fopperies.  At Florence every brother of the “Umidi” assumed the name of something aquatic, or any quality pertaining to humidity.  One was called “the Frozen,” another “the Damp;” one was “the Pike,” another “the Swan:”  and Grazzini, the celebrated novelist, is known better by the cognomen of La Lasca, “the Roach,” by which he whimsically designates himself among the “Humids.”  I find among the Insensati, one man of learning taking the name of STORDIDO Insensato, another TENEBROSO Insensato.  The famous Florentine academy of La Crusca, amidst their grave labours to sift and purify their language, threw themselves headlong into this vortex of folly.  Their title, the academy of “Bran,” was a conceit to indicate their art of sifting; but it required an Italian prodigality of conceit to have induced these grave scholars to exhibit themselves in the burlesque scenery of a pantomimical academy, for their furniture consists of a mill and a bakehouse; a pulpit for the orator is a hopper, while the learned director sits on a mill-stone; the other seats have the forms of a miller’s dossers, or great panniers,