ABSTRACT
Mario Praz's writing has always been by turns profound and maddening, vigorous, never tedious, essentially original despite lardings of received opinion. Professor of English at Rome for two generations, he is a comparativist by instinct rather than by training or conscious election of the comparative discipline. As such, his life-work, to which Mnemosyne is no exception, is in part paradigm and in part warning to the rest of poets. Praz writes that a "general likeness" exists among all works of art of a given period. The productions of one given artist display a "manifest unity", and that "traditions exert a differentiating influence not only between one art and another, but also within the same art". At one extreme in Praz's range of analysis and allusion is Architecture. At the other extreme is Costume. Between those extremes lies the bulk of the analysis, which refers centrally to Literature and Painting.
