The prose of Monti is distinguished for the ease, the clearness, the harmony, and the metaphorical richness which characterise his verses; but the style is unequal, and now and then infected with Gallicisms. The poetical diction of Italy has, by the efforts of many great writers, retained its purity through the revolutions of five centuries; but the prose has been subject to the changes of time, and to the invasion of foreign arms and foreign literature. Monti has been lately occupied with a laborious work, meant to supply the void left by the Cruscan academicians in their dictionary, and to counteract the prejudices of the too rigorous adherents of the old school, and the bold dogmas of licentious innovators. It is thought that in this work, the offspring of his cooler reflection and directed to aims more useful, he will avoid those inaccuracies of haste and passion which disfigured his previous performances, and degraded them into mere personal controversies. An exception should be made in favour of two or three discourses, published when he was professor at Pavia. One of them is much praised, and perhaps not a little owing to the subject of which it treats, namely, Of the scientific discoveries which foreigners have usurped to themselves, to the prejudice of the Italian inventors. Monti showed his patriotism in this treatise, but much could not be said of his knowledge or of his equity. Even his eloquence was more lively than vigorous. He threw down his glove in defiance of all foreigners, but more especially of the French, and was backed by his countrymen, who have fallen into the absurdity of depreciating the present merit of other nations, by comparing it with the past glories of their ancestors.

Monti has never been wise enough to laugh at silly criticisms, nor was he ever known to spare a powerless adversary. Having been rudely attacked, he has always defended himself rudely. He seems to have looked upon a censure of his writings as an obstacle thrown maliciously in the way of his fortune. In this temper he told the Abate Bettinelli, "It is not the poet that these people want to attack; no, it is the

historiographer of Napoleon; and they conspire to make me appear in his eyes a contemptible writer."

He tried, therefore, to persuade the court and the ministers to prosecute his adversaries: but it should be told that he employed the same influence in the promotion of his friends. Towards them Monti is truly the warmest and the most devoted of men, and is ready for every generous sacrifice as long as he feels assured that he has no reason to suspect the loyalty of their attachment.

His violent literary disputes with his distinguished contemporaries, with Mazza, Cesarotti, and Bettinelli, have all terminated by a solicitation of their friendship; and he has not refused to restore his confidence to others who, having grievously offended him, have intreated to be reconciled. It has happened to him to quarrel with and to pardon the same individual several times.

The habit of writing on temporary topics may explain, perhaps, the care which he takes to acquire renown by efforts which, in the end, frequently terminate in the loss of it. He is afraid of the very newspaper writers, and is ambitious of their suffrages. He keeps up a regular correspondence with all the men of letters in Italy, and barters with them the usual commodity of mutual adulation. He is, however, sincere enough with those young writers who ask his advice, and contrives to encourage them without flattery and to instruct them without arrogance. He repeats verses inimitably: he is eloquent in his conversation, which is generally of the softer kind; but the slightest contradiction provokes him to a vehement defence of positions which he abandons the next day with perfect indifference.

It is probable that the inconstancy, as well as the momentary eagerness of certain individuals, is to be attributed less to education than to nature. The life of Dryden can

*Lettera all' Abate Bettinelli,' Milano, 1809.

scarcely be compared in a single instance with that of Monti; nor is the poetry, nor even the character of the English laureate, at all similar to that of the Italian. The above disgraceful quality they have, however, in common with each other. Both of them have degraded the literature to which they owe their fame, by making it subservient to their private interests, at the expense of truth and of honour. Both of them have been systematic flatterers of the powerful and the great, and both of them have wanted the requisite consolations of old age.

Monti had pursued the Austrians with the war of words, after each of their repeated defeats. When they re-appeared as conquerors, they deprived him of almost all his pensions; but they bargained at the same time for a cantata from his pen, which was set to music and sung in the theatre, to welcome their return to Italy. It is neither a hazardous nor a severe reflection to assert that this poet must look back with feelings of bitter regret upon sixty years of laborious and brilliant exertions, which are about to end for ever, and which have left him in the enjoyment neither of an independent fortune nor of a spotless reputation, nor of those fixed principles without the possession of which no one can, without trembling, dare to contemplate the close of his career.

A splendid example and a warning for an apostate generation

"Petite hinc juvenesque senesque Finem animo certum, miserisque viatica canis.”

HUGO FOSCOLO.

When the revolution of 1795 gave a shock to principles for ages established in Italy, and set in motion the spirits and the interests of the inhabitants of every province, the writers before mentioned had all of them published those works which gave them a fixed reputation with their country

men.

Hugo Foscolo was at that time a youth, but not too young to profit by the friendship and the example of his distinguished contemporaries. The total change in the political condition of his country, his military education, and the part which he played in public affairs, developed, however, his talents, and formed his character in a manner quite different from that of his predecessors: besides, the circumstances under which he wrote arrived too late to form their style, and being now gone by, may perhaps require a course of ages to reproduce.

Foscolo laid it down for a principle that Italian poetry had expired with Tasso, and had been re-resuscitated only in the present day. Hear his own words :

"Senza l'Ossian del Cesarotti, Il Giorno del Parini, Vittorio Alfieri, e Vincenzo Monti, la nostra poesia si giacerebbe tuttavia sepolta con le ceneri di Torquato Tasso. Da indi in quà un secolo la inorpellò, e l'altro la immiserì. L'Ossian può far dare nello strano; il Parini nel leceato; l'Alfieri nell' aspro; e il Monti nell' ornato ma le umane virtù non fruttano senza l'innesto d'un vizio. I grandi ingegni emuleranno: i mezzani scimiotterrano: e coloro che esplorano i propri meriti nelle altrui colpe, si getteranno simili a corvi sovra le piaghe de' generosi cavalli."

This passage, extracted from his Preface to an experiment for translating the Iliad, printed at Brescia in 1807,* may serve for a specimen of his style and of his literary opinions.

He commenced his career a year before the fall of the Venetian republic, with a tragedy called Thyestes.' Being angry at the little attention paid by the Venetians to the tragedies of Alfieri, and at the corrupted taste which made them prefer and applaud those of the Marquis Pindemonte and of Count Pepoli, he resolved that his drama should have only four personages; and that the simplicity and severity of his whole composition should rival Alfieri and the Greek tragedians. With this hardy project, he

contrived that his play should be acted on the same night when two new pieces from the pen of the above Marquis and Count were to be represented at other theatres of the same town. The courage and the youth of the author enabled him to triumph over his rivals, and his Thyestes' received more applause than perhaps it deserved. The actors published it in the tenth volume of the Teatro Italiano Applaudito,' subjoining to it an account of its great success, and a criticism written in favour of the author. Foscolo himself adopted the extraordinary proceeding of publishing a severe censure of his own work, the success of which he attributed solely to its conformity with the great models of antiquity. The pamphlet was ill received by the public, and the Venetians painted the por-. trait of the young poet in the drop-curtain of the Fenice Theatre, among those who had a better claim to this distinction. The Thyestes' is still occasionally acted, and is sustained by the warmth of the dialogue and the strength of the dramatic passions, but the style is so harsh as to be insupportable to the reader.

The learned of Italy speak neither well nor ill of the 'Letters of Ortis,' which, however, has been more frequently reprinted in his own country than any other of Foscolo's works, and is certainly much more known on the other side of the Alps. The Germans have exhausted upon this little book all the metaphysics of criticism; they have translated it twice, and a certain professor Luden has accompanied his version with a whole volume of dissertations. After all, it is but an imitation of Werter. There is, however, this striking difference, that the object of the Italian is solely political. There is indeed something for all tastes in the politics, and the poetry, and the love of Ortis. The allusions to the downfall of the Venetian republic, and the introduction of living interlocutors, such as Parini at Milan, give a reality to the fable which must be highly interesting to the Italians, and is attractive even to strangers. There is a melancholy patriotism in every word in which he mentions Italy, that makes the author