INTRO

of Guazzo's life, can mention only one blot-if it be a blot -on the generally exemplary conduct of the author of DUCTION the Civile Conversation: he was a courtier during a great portion of his life; and, to put it shortly, he did as courtiers have to do. Guazzo, he tells us, was made for frankness and for truth, but the spirit of the time was against him, and under its compelling influence he lowered himself in his own eyes to forms of blandishment and flattery which he would have done well to avoid. His biographer, however, finds some excuse for him in that Guazzo has told us himself, on several occasions, that he was painfully cognisant of the slavery of his official position. It should be remembered too, that after the death of the Duchess Margarita, and the suppression of the independence of Casale, Guazzo made his home far from the Mantuan Court, and was no longer engaged in any State employment. His real views, at a time when he was more at liberty to speak openly concerning subjectes and their conversation with Princes,' are well expressed thus:

'And though there bee nowe and then some one which mainteineth himselfe still in credite, and yet the poore soule alwayes liveth with an unquiet mind, and his maister doth continually loade him like a good horse, with some burden or other, and never leaveth untill hee have quite tyred him, so that hee findeth that saying true, That whether thy Prince love thee, or hate thee, it is all one evill. Whereupon I thinke not amisse to followe the fable of the earthen vessell, whiche in no wise woulde have the company of the brasen vessell. And you know wel, that in their companie a man cannot utter his minde freely nor doe any thing contrarie to their pleasure if hee doe, hee shalbe no friende of Cæsars' (Bk. ii. 209-10).1

1 See also Bk. III. 94-5.

INTRODUCTION

When Professor Canna comes to deal with Guazzo as a writer, he dwells regretfully, as an Italian should, on the sad decline of good taste in literature which had set in towards the closing years of the sixteenth century. The art and elegance which flourished in such luxuriant strength, in both prose and poetry, in the early and middle periods of that century were then rapidly disappearing; and accompanying this downward move was a corresponding falling off in the national standards of behaviour ('costume') and in the vigour of Italian study. Guazzo's own work suffered in the change; for, admirable as his ideas were on style, lucidity, and grace in literary composition, his practice was not invariably in complete accord with the high level of his own standards. Further, the Professor tells us 'that the art of Dialogue, a form chosen by Guazzo himself to suit the taste of the time, was not successful in ' his hands, lacking the simplicity of natural variety shown 'by such masters as Baldassare Castiglione and Torquato Tasso in works of a kind similar to his own. He gives too easy admittance to the commonplace, to what is vulgar, and, at times, unseemly; mars a witty tale with something that offends; uses strange verbiage based on 'Spanish models; and, seeking to soar, too often drops ' into triviality. Looked at from this standpoint, Guazzo ' is a sixteenth-century writer in whom the seventeenth century shows itself in too marked a fashion.'1

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1 It must of course be understood that Professor Canna speaks only of the Italian of the original work; and that, when contrasting Guazzo's style with that of Castiglione and Torquato Tasso, he is taking a rather high standard for comparison. Whatever faults Guazzo may be guilty of in his writing of the language of his day, they are, so far as English readers are concerned,

'Nevertheless, his biographer continues, with all INTRO'these defects there is much in his works that can be read DUCTION 'with pleasure and advantage, where the traces of such 'disfigurement are either slight or non-existent; and after all, Stefano Guazzo is well entitled to a fair measure

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of thanks and praise for being one of those who devoted 'his best energies to the advancement of the Italic spirit in the literary studies of Piedmont, a district so long the 'battleground of warring nations, and too often seques⚫tered from the culture of greater Italy.'

In addition to other works, the author of the Civile Conversation dipped occasionally into poetical composition, though his efforts in that direction never rose beyond mediocrity. Indeed, he has himself told us that he wrote more to follow the fashion of the period, and to satisfy the urgent appeals of his friends, than from any instinctive promptings of his own nature, which rebelled against poetry of every kind. He was the author of five books, two being collections of Letters, and three in dialogue form. The earliest of these was A Collection of Letters of Gentlemen of Montferrat, published in Brescia in 1566. It included some of his own letters, but it is chiefly interesting as a picture of the life, mind, and manners of the time.

This was followed in 1586 by a volume entitled Dialoghi Piaccevoli del Sig. Stefano Guazzo, dedicated to Ludovico

completely done away with by the fine Elizabethan vivacity and grace in which Pettie has re-dressed the French and Italian versions from which he was translating. Canna does not seem to have been aware of Pettie's translation, for there is no mention of it anywhere in the Discorso-a typed copy of which has been supplied to me by the courtesy of the Librarian of the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele in Rome.

INTRO- Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, which ran into many editions. DUCTION The subjects treated of are various, having to do with Rulers, Judges, Magistrates, Imprese,' Latin and Tuscan poetry, Honour, and Death. In Professor Canna's opinion some of these Dialogues are perhaps the best of all Guazzo's writings. He certainly shows both strength and frankness in dealing with the administration of law in those times, denouncing the iniquity of servile justices with a whole-hearted honesty. An interesting feature of the twelve dialogues of which this volume is composed consists in the large number of Italian proverbs, which are continuously cited in its pages. Guazzo was, indeed, perhaps the most industrious collector of proverbial sayings in his day, strong evidence of which is very clearly furnished by the Civile Conversation itself.

In 1590 he published in Venice a collection of his own letters, which he dedicated to Vincenzo Gonzaga, the new Duke of Mantua and Montferrat. They possess no special interest for us beyond showing more of the man, and of the times he lived in; yet there were no less than seven editions published before 1614.

Another work, typical of the taste of a declining century, was La Ghirlanda della Contessa Angela Maria Beccaria, which was printed, after Guazzo's death, at Genoa in 1595. It consists of some sixty-eight‘Madrigali' in laudation of the Countess, to whom the collection is addressed, composed by friends of Guazzo at his own invitation, for the whole of which he supplied explanatory interpretations as editor-in-chief. The volume is useful only as representing the artificial habits and curious literary idiosyncrasies

of the period. It was dedicated to Guazzo's daughter, INTROOlimpia Curioni.

Five examples of Madrigals of a similar type may be read in the Civile Conversation.1 The commendations of them which follow in the text exhibit the all-powerful tendency to adulation that pervaded the atmosphere of courtly society at that time. La Ghirlanda was not reprinted.

Guazzo also contributed some poems to a work entitled La Lacrime degli Academici di Casale, on the death of Margarita Palaeologa, Duchess of Mantua and Marchioness of Monferrato, Turin, 1567.2

By far the most important of Guazzo's works, La Civile Conversatione, was first published at Brescia in 1574. I put off consideration of its contents to the section which deals with George Pettie and his translation. The book obtained an immediate popularity in Italy, where edition after edition was eagerly taken up. Ten of them had appeared by the year 1621. Two French versions came out in France in 1579, one by Gabriel Chappuys and the other by François Belleforest; and both were reprinted a good many times. In 1581 Pettie's translation into English of the first three books was printed; in 1586 these books were reprinted with the addition of Book IV. translated by Bartholomew Young; and not long after, two Latin renderings of the whole work made their appearance.

Canna, as already mentioned, does not speak in any spirit of enthusiasm of the Civile Conversation as an

1 Bk. IV. 191-2.

For further information on the academies of Casale see Flavio Valerani's Le Academie di Casale nei secoli xvi. e xvii. Alessandria, 1908.

DUCTION