cts of the footnote.

On the poetry of the sixteenth century Mr. Symonds has, of course, a
great deal to say, and on such subjects he always writes with ease,
grace, and delicacy of perception. We admit that we weary sometimes of
the continual application to literature of epithets appropriate to
plastic and pictorial art. The conception of the unity of the arts is
certainly of great value, but in the present condition of criticism it
seems to us that it would be more useful to emphasise the fact that each
art has its separate method of expression. The essay on Tasso, however,
is delightful reading, and the position the poet holds towards modern
music and modern sentiment is analysed with much subtlety. The essay on
Marino also is full of interest. We have often wondered whether those
who talk so glibly of Euphuism and Marinism in literature have ever read
either Euphues or the Adone. To the latter they can have no better guide
than Mr. Symonds, whose description of the poem is most fascinating.
Marino, like many greater men, has suffered much from his disciples, but
he himself was a master of graceful fancy and of exquisite felicity of
phrase; not, of course, a great poet but certainly an artist in poetry
and one to whom language is indebted. Even those conceits that Mr.
Symonds feels bound to censure have something charming about them. The
continual use of periphrases is undoubtedly a grave fault in style, yet
who but a pedant would really quarrel with such periphrases as sirena de'
boschi for the nightingale, or il novella Edimione for Galileo?

From the poets Mr. Symonds passes to the painters: not those great
artists of Florence and Venice of whom he has already written, but the
Eclectics of Bologna, the Naturalists of Naples and Rome. This chapter
is too polemical to be pleasant. The one on music is much better, and
Mr. Symonds gives us a most interesting description of the gradual steps
by which the Italian genius passed from poetry and painting to melody and
song, till the whole of Europe thrilled with the marvel and mystery of
this new language of the soul. Some small details should perhaps be
noticed. It is hardly accurate, for instance, to say that Monteverde's
Orfeo was the first form of the recitative-Opera, as Peri's Dafne and
Euridice and Cavaliere's Rappresentazione preceded it by some years, and
it is somewhat exaggerated to say that 'under the regime of the
Commonwealth the national growth o