Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885

When I think on the pains I have proved.

The homage of her countrymen, however, did much to enliven her despondency; and she complacently records in her journals some of the compliments paid her by her fellow-members of the “Oziosi.” They used to address her in this style: —

E'en so when Parsons pours his lay,
Correctly wild, or sweetly strong,
Or Greathead charms the listening day,
With English or Italian song,
Or when, with trembling wing I try,
Like some poor wounded bird, to fly,
Your fostering smiles you ne'er refuse,
But are the Pallas and the Muse!

The Parsons and Greathead of this all-round panegyric of Merry's were two members of the “Oziosi” clique: Parsons, a bachelor with a tendency to flirt, to “trifle with Italian dames,” as Mrs. Piozzi poetically put it; Greathead, the newly-married husband of a beautiful wife. Both Parsons and Greathead were voluminous contributors to the society's Album, which soon assumed formidable dimensions. The staple of the contents consisted of high-flown compliments in verse. Parsons, for instance, would write to Greathead's wife: —

O blest with taste, with Genius blest,
Sole mistress of thy Bertie's breast,
Who to his love-enraptured arms are given
The rich reward his virtues claim from Heaven.

And Bertie, as in duty bound, would reply in kind, bidding the sallow Arno pause and listen to the lays of Parsons. As an alternative to these panegyrics, they wrote Dithyrambics to Bacchus, Odes to the Siroc, or lines on that latest novelty, Montgolfier's air-balloon. Mrs. Greathead was, in fact, as Parsons informs us, the only member of the society who contributed nothing but the inspiration of her charms.

Some of these poems were printed in an Arno Miscellany, of which only a few copies were privately circulated. It was a subsequent and larger collection, published in 1785, under the name of The Florence Miscellany, which first made its way to England, and drew the attention of the English public to the rising school of versifiers. Horace Walpole characterized their productions as “mere imitations of our best poets,” that is to say, of Milton, Gray, and Collins. How justly, may be inferred from the opening stanza of Merry's Ode on a distant prospect of Rome: —

When Rome of old, terrific queen,
High-placed on Victory's sounding car,
With arm sublime and martial mien,
Brandished the flaming lance of war,
Low crouched in dust lay Afric's swarthy crowd,
And silken Asia sank, and barbarous Britain bowed.

The imitations of Milton and Collins are of a like description. Such as it was, the book was a success, and samples of its contents were reproduced, after the fashion of the day, in the newspapers and magazines – the Gentleman's, the European, the Universal Magazine, and so forth. Of the quality of the poems, critically considered, and of the Della Cruscan poetry generally, I shall have something to say farther on. In the meantime, it may, perhaps, be worth while to disinter a ludicrous passage in one of Merry's contributions to the Florence Miscellany. The “Oziosi” had one day agreed that each of them should produce by the evening a story or poem which should “excite horror by description.” Mrs. Piozzi's production will be found in her Autobiography, and is by no means devoid of merit. Merry brought a poem (“a very fine one,” says Mrs. Piozzi), in which he introduced the following remarkable ghost, which I commend to the attention of the new Psychical Society: —

While slow he trod this desolated coast,
From the cracked ground uprose a warning ghost;
Whose figure, all-confused, was dire to view,
And loose his mantle flowed, of shifting hue;
He shed a lustre round; and sadly pressed
What seemed his hand upon what seemed his breast;
Then raised his doleful voice, like wolves that roar
In famished troops round Orcas' sleepy shore,—
“Approach yon antiquated tower,” he cried,
“There bold Rinaldo, fierce Mambrino, died,” etc.

But I must not linger over the Florence Miscellany, which was but the prelude to those melodious bursts which filled the spacious times of George III. with the music of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda. A year or two after its publication the Florence coterie broke up, and returned to England.

The first note of the concert was struck by Robert Merry, who, in June 1787, sent to the World a poem entitled The Adieu and Recall to Love, subscribing himself Della Crusca, a nickname which had been given to him at Florence, on account of his connection, already mentioned, with the Italian Academy. The World was a daily morning paper, price threepence, which in more than one respect resembled its modern namesake. A contemporary satirist, writing under the modest pseudonym of “Horace Juvenal,” describes how the young lady of 1787 —

Reluctant opes her eyes, 'twixt twelve and one,
To skim the World, or criticise the Sun,
And when she sees her darling friend abused
Is half enraged, yet more than half-amused.

And another poet portrays two unlucky baronets, Sir Gregory Turner and Sir John Miller – husband of Lady Miller of Bath Easton vase celebrity – lamenting the ridicule with which the same newspaper had overwhelmed them: —

Woe wait the week, Sir John, and cursed the hour,
When harmless gentlemen felt satire's power,
When, raised from insignificance and sloth,
The World began to ridicule us both.

“In this paper,” says Gifford, “were given the earliest specimens of those audacious attacks on all private character, which the town first smiled at for their quaintness, then tolerated for their absurdity; and now that other papers, equally wicked and more intelligible, have ventured to imitate it, will have to lament to the last hour of British liberty.” That literary history is self-repeating, and that prophecies are mostly mistaken, are not new reflections; yet it is difficult to avoid making them when we compare those days with these.

But beyond its function as a purveyor of social gossip, no newspaper was then considered complete without a Poet's Corner, consecrated to sentimental effusions and labored impromptus – “Complimentary verses to the brilliancy of the Hon. Mrs. N – h's Eyes,” or “Lines on Lady T – e – l's Ring.” In publishing his poem in the World, Della Crusca did but select the natural and recognized arena of the eighteenth-century poet. It may be as well to quote the greater part of The Adieu and Recall to Love, in order to give some notion of the calibre of the verses which were to found a school: —

Go, idle Boy, I quit thy bower,
The couch of many a thorn and flower;
Thy twanging bow, thine arrow keen,
Deceitful Beauty's timid mien;
The feigned surprise, the roguish leer,
The tender smile, the thrilling tear,
Have now no pangs, no joys for me,
So fare thee well, for I am free!
Then flutter hence on wanton wing,
Or lave thee in yon lucid spring,
Or take thy beverage from the rose,
Or on Louisa's breast repose;
I wish thee well for pleasures past,
Yet, bless the hour, I'm free at last,
But sure, methinks, the altered day
Scatters around a mournful ray;
And chilling every zephyr blows,
And every stream untuneful flows.

Alas! is all this boasted ease
To lose each warm desire to please,
No sweet solicitude to know
For others' bliss, or others' woe,
A frozen apathy to find,
A sad vacuity of mind?
Oh, hasten back, then, heavenly Boy,
And with thine anguish bring thy joy!
Return with all thy torments here,
And let me hope, and doubt, and fear;
Oh, rend my heart with every pain,
But let me, let me love again.

I suppose what will strike most readers with regard to these lines is that they are decidedly fluent, and utterly commonplace. That, however, is not the light in which a critic of the last quarter of the eighteenth century would regard them. Amid the dead level of sing-song couplets, the milk-and-water decency of Hayley, the chill and prolix classicism of Pye, the ineffable mediocrity of a thousand Pratts and Polwheles – the fluency of Merry passed, according to the critic's leanings, for fire or for fustian; and the phraseology, which afterwards became hackneyed, was then startling. Take, for instance, Horace Walpole's criticism of the new poetic departure. “It is refreshing to read natural easy poetry, full of sense and humor, instead of that unmeaning, labored, painted style now in fashion of the Della Cruscas and Co., of which it is impossible ever to retain a couplet, no more than one could remember how a string of emeralds and rubies were placed in a necklace. Poetry has great merit if it is the vehicle and preservative of sense, but it is not to be taken in change for it.” Poetry the vehicle and preservative of sense – that is the critical canon which would have made Walpole as blind to Della Crusca's merits, had he happened to possess any, as it made him keen-sighted for his defects.

It may, nevertheless, be doubted whether Della Crusca would have caused so great a stir in literature, had it not been for several collateral circumstances, of which the first and most important was the appearance in the World, some ten days later, of “Anna Matilda,” with a poem entitled To Della Crusca, the Pen.