The Doge of Genoa, officially particular in points of etiquette, always took care to bid him cover, although he was a subject born of the Republic.
Basely insignificant as are these details, they serve to show what value was then ascribed even by men of real respectability to trifling princely favors.

The unction with which Chiabrera relates them, warming his cold style into a glow of satisfaction, is a practical satire upon his endeavor to resuscitate the virtues of antique republics in that Italy.

To do this was his principal aim as a moralist; to revive the grand style of Pindar was his object as an artist.

Each attempt involved impossibility, and argued a visionary ambition dimly conscious of its scope.

Without freedom, without the living mythology of Hellas, without a triumphant national cause, in the very death of independence, at the end of a long age of glorious but artificial culture, how could Chiabrera dare to pose as Pindar?
Instead of the youth of Greece ascending with free flight and all the future of the world before it, decrepit Italy, the Italy so rightly drawn by Marino in his _Pianto_, lay groveling in the dust of decaying thrones.