Art Artistic Endowment of the Italians Poetry is impassioned language, and its modulation is melody.

While in this sense no people is without poetry and music, some nations have received a pre-eminent endowment of poetic gifts.

The Italian nation, however, was not and is not one of these.

The Italian is deficient in the passion of the heart, in the longing to idealize what is human and to confer humanity on what is lifeless, which form the very essence of poetic art.

His acuteness of perception and his graceful versatility enabled him to excel in irony and in the vein of tale-telling which we find in Horace and Boccaccio, in the humorous pleasantries of love and song which are presented in Catullus and in the good popular songs of Naples, above all in the lower comedy and in farce.