The Original Della Cruscans and the Florence Miscellany

Abstract

T HE DELLA CRUSCANS were damned by nineteenth-century critics to a contemptuous footnote in the history of Romanticism as a particularly affected and silly group of sentimental versifiers who were annihilated by William Gifford's satires, the Baviad (I79I) and Maeviad (1794). Until recently the judgment has not been questioned. Most modern scholars who have had to deal with the Cruscans have been content to accept the findings of their nineteenth-century predecessors, who in turn appear to have taken their information and evaluation of the group from Gifford himself. There is an amusing irony about this for, in general, critics of romanticism have little use for Gifford's judgment, primarily because of the part he played as editor of the Quarterly Review in the attacks on Keats and Shelley; yet the grounds and methods of attack on the Cruscans and on Keats were much the same. An interesting minor question of literary history is, why have the Cruscans been so unanimously sacrificed as scapegoats. After all, they were thoroughgoing Romanticists and, one would think, deserved at least the same right as Keats to an independent investigation of Gifford's charges. It remained for Roderick Marshall to point out in 1934 that there were really two groups of Cruscans: the contributors to the Florence Miscellany in 1785, and the contributors to the correspondence in the World beginning in I 787.2 Robert Merry as Della Crusca was a leader in both groups, but otherwise the members of the first group had almost nothing to do with the second. Mr. Marshall has called the Miscellany probably the most important book of poetry on Italian themes to appear in the eighteenth century.3