r evening psalms; for a story has come down to
us, to record that the hypocritical brotherhood did not always care to
sing unless they were heard![304]

ON THE RIDICULOUS TITLES ASSUMED BY ITALIAN ACADEMIES.

The Italians are a fanciful people, who have often mixed a grain or two
of pleasantry and even of folly with their wisdom. This fanciful
character betrays itself in their architecture, in their poetry, in
their extemporary comedy, and their _Improvisatori_; but an instance
not yet accounted for of this national levity, appears in those
denominations of exquisite absurdity given by themselves to their
Academies! I have in vain inquired for any assignable reason why the
most ingenious men, and grave and illustrious personages, cardinals, and
princes, as well as poets, scholars, and artists, in every literary
city, should voluntarily choose to burlesque themselves and their
serious occupations, by affecting mysterious or ludicrous titles, as if
it were carnival-time, and they had to support masquerade characters,
and accepting such titles as we find in the cant style of our own vulgar
clubs, the Society of "Odd Fellows," and of "Eccentrics!" A principle so
whimsical but systematic must surely have originated in some
circumstance not hitherto detected.

A literary friend, recently in an Italian city exhausted by the
_sirocco_, entered a house whose open door and circular seats appeared
to offer to passengers a refreshing _sorbetto_; he discovered, however,
that he had got into "the Academy of the Cameleons," where they met to
delight their brothers, and any "spirito gentil" they could nail to a
recitation. An invitation to join the academicians alarmed him, for with
some impatient prejudice against these little creatures, vocal with
_prose e rime_, and usually with odes and sonnets begged for, or
purloined for the occasion, he waived all further curiosity and
courtesy, and has returned home without any information how these
"Cameleons" looked, when changing their colours in an "_accademia_."

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 po