[1008] This purification of English comedy has sometimes been attributed to the effects of a famous essay by Collier on the immorality of the English stage. But if public opinion had not been prepared to go along, in a considerable degree, with Collier, his animadversions could have produced little change. In point of fact, the subsequent improvement was but slow, and, for some years, rather shown in avoiding coarse indecencies than in much elevation of sentiment. Steele’s Conscious Lovers is the first comedy which can be called moral; Cibber, in those parts of the Provoked Husband that he wrote, carried this farther, and the stage afterwards grew more and more refined, till it became languid and sentimental.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE, FROM 1650 to 1700.
Sect. I.
Italy—High Refinement of French Language—Fontenelle—St. Evremond—Sevigné—Bouhours and Rapin—Miscellaneous Writers—English Style—and Criticism—Dryden.
Low state of literature in Italy. 1. If Italy could furnish no long list of conspicuous names in this department of literature to our last period, she is far more deficient in the present. The Prose Florentine of Dati, a collection of what seemed the best specimens of Italian eloquence in this century, served chiefly to prove its mediocrity, nor has that editor, by his own panegyric on Louis XIV. or any other of his writings, been able to redeem its name.[1009] The sermons of Segneri have already been mentioned; the eulogies bestowed on them seem to be founded, in some measure, on the surrounding barrenness. The letters of Magalotti, and still more of Redi, themselves philosophers, and generally writing on philosophy, seem to do more credit than anything else to this period.[1010]
[1009] Salfi, xiv. 25. Tiraboschi, xi, 412.
[1010] Salfi, xiv. 17. Corniani, viii. 71.
Crescimbeni. 2. Crescimbeni, the founder of the Arcadian Society, has made an honourable name by his exertions to purify the national taste, as well as by his diligence in preserving the memory of better ages than his own. His History of National Poetry is a laborious and useful work, to which I have sometimes been indebted. His treatise on the beauty of that poetry is only known to me through Salfi. It is written in dialogue, the speakers being Arcadians. Anxious to extirpate the school of the Marinists, without falling back altogether into that of Petrarch, he set up Costanzo as a model of poetry. Most of his precepts, Salfi observes, are very trivial at present; but at the epoch of its appearance, it was of great service towards the reform of Italian literature.[1011]
[1011] Salfi, xiii. 450.