67. Nor do we attach a diminished, but, on the contrary, an enhanced, importance to these considerations, from the circumstance that he has himself eagerly protested against the supposition that his sufferings affected his speculations. He writes from Florence on the 24th of May 1832, suddenly using the French language, as if that he might be heard throughout the great theatre of the civilised world:

"Quels que soient mes malheurs, qu'on a jugé à propos d'étaler et que peut-être on a un peu exagérés dans ce journal, j'ai eu assez de courage pour ne pas chercher à en diminuer le poids ni par des frivoles espérances d'une prétendue félicité future et inconnue, ni par une lâche résignation. Mes sentiments envers la destinée ont été et sont toujours ceux que j'ai exprimés dans Bruto Minore. Ç'a été par suite de ce même courage, qu'étant amené par mes recherches à une philosophie désespérante, je n'ai pas hésité à l'embrasser toute entière: tandis que, de l'autre côté, ce n'a été que par effet de la lâcheté des hommes, qui ont besoin d'être persuadés du mérite de l'existence, que l'on a voulu considérer mes opinions philosophiques comme le résultat de mes souffrances particulières, et que l'on s'obstine à attribuer à mes circonstances matérielles ce qu'on ne doit qu'à mon entendement. Avant de mourir, je vais protester contre cette invention de la faiblesse et de la vulgarité, et prier mes lecteurs de s'attacher à détruire mes observations et mes raisonnements plutôt que d'accuser mes maladies."*

68. It is not, however, simply to his maladies that we refer. Bodily indisposition, however severe and varied, has been and may be borne; but the great resisting force necessary to neutralise its attacks cannot, consistently with the laws of our nature, be applied in all directions at once; from some of them must be drawn the energy, that is to be spent in others. Neither his home, nor his country, nor

* Epist. II. 190,

his fortune, nor his church offered to the mind of Leopardi the support that the heavy pressure on it required; but each, on the contrary, appears to have been, in its degree, an ever-fresh blister to his sores. Exhaustion under the combined force of bereavements such as these is no sign of a cowardly or a vulgar spirit. It may with some truth be said that one, whose mental action could remain undisturbed by them, would show an insensibility quite out of the common range of human nature, and diverging from it on the side of what is brutish, rather than of what is divine.

Under such fiery trials the commonplace and every-day Christianity of the lip will not suffice; a man will either go on to something of the faith which removes mountains, or he will go backwards into misery and despair.

69. As to his domestic relations, the attempt has been made by his editors to veil them with a delicate reserve; but it has been ineffectual, as it could not be uniformly sustained. It is too plain, notwithstanding the mere formulæ of attachment (copious as they are) and probably the honest effort to cherish the dying flame, that between his father and himself there was from an early date a want of all real confidence, together with many active causes of irritation and estrangement. Though he was even fondly attached to other members of his family, yet his intellectual wants were in no degree, it would appear, met by them. For he was, from age, and yet more from precocity, too far in advance of even his next brother; and they seem to have had from an early date, with a warm reciprocal attachment, great differences of opinion. Until he was twenty-five, he had to choose between something like imprisonment at home, and dependence on himself for the supply of all his wants in the event of his leaving it; in

a country, too, where it was impossible to live by literature until he had made his reputation, and where he must starve while labouring to make it. The generous efforts made by Niebuhr and Bunsen to obtain public employment for him in the Papal States, failed on account of his being a layman; and he had not physical strength to brave the German climate. At home, however, he was in possession of the comforts rendered necessary by his wretched health; yet his letters teem with passages showing how he detested it. There are, indeed, references to the climate which he disliked, but it was the moral and social atmosphere that he acutely hated.

70. Once he calls Recanati a hermitage, but more generally a desert, a cage, a cavern, a prison, a dark hole, a Tartarus, a tomb. "The March is," he says, "the darkest part of Italy, and Recanati of the March: its literature consists of neither more nor less than the alphabet." It is true that he was ill satisfied with Rome; but whenever he got back to Recanati, though he certainly loved many members of his family, a sentiment of disgust at once returned upon him. Even while there he had not money to buy books; or to take horse exercise, though this was very needful for his health. In short, he felt the pinch of poverty, and that sharply. Nor was the scale of his wishes extravagant: from two hundred to two hundred and fifty crowns a year was all that he sought in his ambitious mood: twelve crowns a month was what in his extremest need he begged of his father. "I will submit," he said, "to such privations, that twelve scudi shall suffice for me. Death would be better; but for death I must look to God." In his fast expiring days, therefore, when he was at Castellamare, he could not possibly consult a physician, because it would have cost some fifteen ducats to have brought

one from Naples. It appears, indeed, that the fortune of the family was at the time below its rank. Yet it also appears, as though the daughter was to have a portion of forty thousand francs on her marriage. Giacomo was the eldest son. On the whole it seems probable that the argumentum a crumena was put in operation against his unruly opinions, and with no other effect than that of maddening them.

71. In considering, however, a case so remarkable, it will occur to the mind to ask whether the study of pagan antiquity is probably to be reckoned among the causes of his religious desolation? and the question is too nearly related to the dearest interests of England, whose choicest youth are trained almost from infancy to read and to digest both the thoughts and the diction of Latin and Greek authors, to be dismissed without notice; the more so as there is an opinion floating, so to speak, though it can scarcely be said to be current among ourselves, that the religious tendencies of our own established method are questionable. In our view the answer may be said to lie in a single sentence, and it is this, that classical studies require the powerful corrective, which Christian studies supply; that with this corrective they afford not only the most admirable discipline to the understanding, taste, and power of expression, but likewise the strongest secondary assurances of the truth and the need of the Gospel; but that without it they are full of danger. And the corrective lies not merely in the knowledge of Christian doctrine by rote; not merely in being acquainted, as we cannot doubt that Leopardi was in his youth acquainted, with its technical distribution according to the current theology; but in the true and living knowledge of it, in the application of the mind to Christian study with the

same energetic tension, under which pagan philosophy, history, poetry, and languages are studied.

72. Such application of the mind the practical system of the Church of Rome in Italy regulates and fetters even on the part of the clergy, dreads and utterly discourages on the part of the laity. "Prove all things: hold fast that which is good," is a precept which England has fearlessly accepted, and from the universal application of which she has not shrunk; alive to the serious dangers of her course, but bent upon reaping its transcendent and inestimable advantages. It is, we believe, to this cause that we may refer the unquestionable fact that classical studies in this country are not found to have any sceptical tendency, and that the University of Oxford finds in Aristotle one of her most powerful engines of ethical, and indirectly of Christian, teaching. But then there must be real and vital activity of the mind upon the subject matter of religion, as there is upon the subject matter of pagan learning. Greece and Rome present to us great and masculine developments of our common nature, and wonderful triumphs achieved by them in every department both of mental and of practical effort. The mind cannot embrace them, cannot reap its reward in the appreciation of them, without the exertion of its powers at their topmost bent. 73. We should begin to shudder for the consequences, if our Christian studies were to become shackled, dry, formal; and if thought were to owe its richness, and taste its refined discernment, above all, if mental freedom and enjoyment were to refer their recollections either wholly or principally to those heathen sources. But, too plainly, thus it was with Leopardi. It was not from the Genius of the Gospel that he had learned to mould the accents of his mind, to exercise the high prerogatives of

and