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In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist" dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time. In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait, a friend and not a scoffer:
He was induced to undertake this work in order to triumph over his truculent critics, the Della Cruscans, who had condemned the former version. In the Imperial Library at Vienna is preserved the manuscript of this version, with its numerous alterations and erasures, showing how laborious the task of remodelling must have been. He suppressed the touching incident of Olinda and Sophronia.
The poem probably explains, however, what has always seemed a little difficult to comprehend, the extreme personal bitterness with which Gifford, at the close of his career, regarded Hunt, since the slayer of the Della Cruscans was not the man to tolerate being treated as though he were a Della Cruscan himself.
Dante: allusion in Anthology, 31; rank, 202, 320; times mentioned, 382. Dartmouth College, oration, 131-135. Darwin, Charles, Origin of Species, 105. Dawes, Rufus, Boyhood Memories, 44. Declaration of Independence, intellectual, 115. Delirium, imaginative, easily produced, 238. Delia Cruscans, allusion, 152. Delos, allusion, 374. Delphic Oracle: of New England, 72; illustration, 84.
Most of the learned men patronised by Lorenzo probably quarrelled with him on account of it, plaguing him in somewhat the same spirit, though in more friendly guise, as the Della Cruscans and others afterwards plagued Tasso; so he banters them in turn, and takes refuge from their critical rules and common-places in the larger indulgence of his friend Politian and the laughing wisdom of Lorenzo.
A man should surely be a little less apt to take the pinchbeck poetry of his own day for gold when he remembers the Della Cruscans and Sentimentalists, the Montgomerys and the Tuppers; the terror-novel and the Minerva Press should surely be useful skeletons to him at his feast of fiction in kinds which it would be beyond my province to describe more particularly.
It is divided into three parts. The first, in trochaic ballad metre, telling the story, is one of the poet's weakest things. You may oft see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia Cruscans. The second, describing the church where the duke and duchess sleep, in an eight-line stanza of good fashion, is satisfactory but nothing more.
A really acute critic could hardly have mistaken the difference between Scott's verse and the fustian or tinsel of the Della Cruscans, the frigid rhetoric of Darwin, or the drivel of Hayley. Only Southey had as yet written ballad verses with equal vigour and facility; and, I think, he had not yet published any of them. It is Scott who tells us that he borrowed
Up to the year 1814 the Della Cruscans assembled in the Palazzo Riccardi, the ancient palace of the Medici; but that stately building being required for Government purposes, the members have since been accommodated in San Marco, where they have sunk into obscurity, many of the inhabitants of Florence being altogether ignorant of the existence of such an institution in their city.
This squib was published in Florence, and at once aroused the hostility of the Della Cruscans.
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