Della Cruscan School.

Della Cruscan School. About the year 1785, a number of English residents at Florence endeavoured to amuse their lagging hours by writing verses, which they published under the title of The Florence Miscellany. The insipidity, affectation, and fantastic silliness of these productions transcend belief; yet such was the poetic poverty of the time, that they soon found a crowd of admirers and imitators. Taking the name of a Florentine Academy (q.v.), the Della Cruscan now began to print their precious lucubrations in England, chiefly in two daily newspapers called the World and the Oracle. 'While the epidemic malady was spreading from fool to fool,' as Gifford pungently says, one of the brotherhood, a Mr Robert Merry, came over from Florence, and 'immediately announced himself by a sonnet to Love.' It was answered by one, 'Anna Matilda' (Mrs Cowley), who (as was the custom) praised it immoderately in language even more absurd than Merry's own. 'The fever now turned to a frenzy: Laura, Maria, Carlos, Orlando, Adelaide, and a thousand other nameless names, caught the infection; and from one end of the kingdom to the other all was nonsense and Della Crusca.' But retribution followed, for Nemesis watches the course of poetry as sharply as that of politics. In 1794 Gifford produced his Baviad, and in 1796 his Maviad. Rarely has literature witnessed such a scalping. It completely killed the school, and, indeed, it is only in these two poems that the memory of most of the unhappy Della Cruscan songsters has been preserved—an immortality which may be compared with that conferred by the Newgate Calendar.