Note 52 — THE FIFTY COURTESIES FOR THE TABLE, OF FRA BONVESINO[13] DA RIVA.

That most capital and characteristic book, the Autobiography of the tragedian Alfieri, contains a reference to the Galateo, which, longish as it is, I am tempted to extract. ‘My worthy Paciaudi was wont to advise me not to neglect, amid my laborious readings, works in prose, which he learnedly termed the nurse of poetry. As regards this, I remember that one day he brought me the Galateo of Della Casa; recommending me to ponder it well with respect to the turn of speech, which assuredly is pure Tuscan, and the reverse of all Frenchifying. I, who in boyhood had (as we all have) read it loosely, understood it little, and relished it not at all, felt almost offended at this schoolboyish and pedantic advice. Full of venom against the said Galateo, I opened it. And, at the sight of that first Conciossiacosachè, to which is trailed-on that long sentence so pompous and so wanting in pith, such an impulse of rage seized me that, hurling the book out of window, I cried like a maniac: “Surely a hard and disgusting necessity, that, in order to write tragedies at the age of twenty-seven, I must swallow down again this childish chatter, and relax my brain with such pedantries!” He smiled at my uneducated poetic furor; and prophesied that I would yet read the Galateo, and that more than once. And so it turned out; but several years afterwards, when I had thoroughly hardened my neck and shoulders to bear the grammatical yoke. And I read not only the Galateo, but almost all our prose writers of the fourteenth century, and annotated them too: with what profit I cannot say. But true it is that, were any one to give them a good reading as regards their turn of phrase, and to manage availing himself with judgment and skill of their array, rejecting the cast clothes of their ideas, he might perhaps afterwards, in his writings as well philosophic as poetic or historic, or of any other class, give a richness, brevity, propriety, and force of colour, to his style, which I have not as yet seen fully gracing any Italian writer.’ A word or two may be spared to the formidable-looking vocable Conciossiacosachè which so excited Alfieri’s bile. It might be translated literally as ‘Herewith-be-something-that;’ and corresponds in practice to the English ‘Forasmuch as’—or more briefly ‘since,’ or ‘as.’ The Italian word poichè serves all the same uses, save that of longwindedness. But Conciossiacosachè itself is not lengthy enough for some Italian lips: and I believe that even the phrase into which it has sometimes been prolonged—‘Con ciò sia cosa fosse massimamente che’—has been used for other than burlesquing purposes.