his own genius; it was on the mount of the Parthenon, and not of Sion; by the waters of Ilissus, not by the brook of Cedron. Homer and Hesiod, and Plato most of all, were to him for patriarch and for prophet; and to those works, which he latterly translated, we are persuaded that he went as with a sentiment of religion, as seeking for a Gospel in their generally high-toned though narrow morality, and as recognising in them not only the beautiful dream of his imagination, and the rich food of his powerful understanding, but the whole substance of his inner life. He exactly reversed the Christianised invocation of Tasso, and enthroned the muse of Helicon again.*

74. Politics occupy the very smallest space in his works; and there is only enough of them to show that he was dissatisfied with the tone of the Legitimist party, to which his father belonged, while he was no friend to revolutions, which took the bread, scanty enough in his case, out of the mouths of literary men. As to religion, the way in which he commonly refers to it suggests that there must have been some most serious original error in the mode of presenting it to his mind. He seems not like a man casting it off, but like one who had never put it on. Sometimes we find its language used in that half-vague and halfjesting tone, which suggests that he adhered to it by mere custom, and without more thought of a meaning than his less instructed countrymen when they adjure their favourite Corpo di Bacco. Sometimes, when it comes in connexion with some idea of pain, calamity, or death, it almost seems as if he had been taught it in the sense of those savage tribes who believe in a good spirit and a malignant one, but worship the latter only because the

*Ger. Lib., I. 3.

first, they say, will do them no harm, but the other must be continually entreated not to afflict, torment, or destroy them. This was not from unacquaintance with religious. persons. Con tutta la poca eta, he says at eighteen, ho molta pratica di devoti.* And without resorting to any invidious supposition, we may state that his father was known by his published papers to be a man of extreme opinions even in the Romish Church.

75. We have now before us a work of the elder Leopardi, printed at Lugano in 1841, and bearing the title La Santa Casa di Loreto; Discussioni Istoriche e Critiche del Conte Monaldo Leopardi. It would be impossible to give, except by much detail, an adequate idea either of the unsuspecting bona fides, or of the anile imbecility, combined with a certain perverse ingenuity, of this pseudo-critical production. The old Count had no "blank misgivings, questionings." He had just reason enough to guide him to the perception that the current hypotheses concerning the Santa Casa must be false but his lamp then went out, and, secure in the midst of murky Erebus, he sets up one which even the faintest twilight must have sufficed to dispel; namely, that the House of the Annunciation, which undoubtedly had disappeared from Nazareth in the first Christian ages, and which arrived in Italy, he conceives, about the middle of the twelfth century, lay concealed in some unknown place, by the special command of the Almighty, for the period of between a thousand and twelve hundred years before that miraculous event. Nor is this unexampled, he says, in the providential order of things: for as He was pleased to conceal Australia for six thousand years, so He might

* Op. vol. v. p. 31,

very well have hidden the Santa Casa for a fifth or a sixth part only of that time! And yet this same critical investigator-after reading the Operette Morali, which come as near to pure atheism as any work of the human mind can, and that not here and there, but in the grain

-was content, it appears, to suggest corrections of it for the next edition, which the son freely promised to adopt!*

76. We have felt this publication to be really and painfully illustrative both of the domestic relations of a man constituted like Giacomo Leopardi, and of his violent reaction in the matter of religious belief. What a measureless interval must have separated at every point the mental framework of these two men, so closely allied in blood! And what a repelling influence must the mind of the son have experienced in its early and ductile stages, from being accustomed to contemplate conscientious piety under the disguise, if not of these, yet of similar extravagances, and to identify it with them! Nor will our labour have been wholly without fruit, if it shall serve to bring into view the fearful dangers of that abuse of reasoning, and that contempt of history and of the laws of sound criticism which is so painfully characteristic of modern devoteeship in the Church of Rome, and which receives but too much of toleration, and even of encouragement, at the hands of her authorities, on account of the powerful agencies which, by these means, they are enabled to bring to bear upon the popular mind. There will thus be left upon the mind of the reader a deeper persuasion of the truth that the God of Revelation is also the God of Reason, that the laws of prudence and common sense are laws of religion

* Epist. II. p. 220.

as well as of life, and that he who in one generation lifts up belief to the edge of a giddy precipice, does but prepare the way for another to dash it at a single stroke into the cold, and dark, and cheerless void ever yawning at its foot.

77. Yet another word before we close. We have endeavoured in these pages to do justice without fear, not only to the genius, but to the virtues of this great, and greatly unhappy, genius. The readiness in these slippery times. to argue, from every conjunction of high gifts and amiable qualities with unbelief, against the authority of religion, constrains us to observe what we would willingly have passed by. Although he was, we believe, naturally as well as conventionally noble, there are things almost base in the letters of Leopardi; as when he writes to his sister, who it seems had shown a reluctance to an union with a profligate young man, in a tone not of admiration, not even of tenderness and sympathy, but of reproving argument, to tell her that all young men are profligate, that the one in question is now satiated, and will probably make a good husband, and that though he may be occasionally unfaithful, he will always maintain the appearance of fidelity. But further we must observe that, whether from an original fault of character or from a bad education, he had but little strictness in his view of the great cardinal virtue of truth. We may notice this in small things, as when he writes to his publisher to warn him that he had given a recommendatory letter to a friend for a translation from Tibullus, to which, as it was written under the friend's eye, no weight is to be attached.

78. We may notice it also in far greater matters. On the subject of religion in his intercourse with his father, he was -the words are wrung from us—nothing less than systema

tically disingenuous. Eighteen days before his death,* he tells his father that the period decreed by God for the close of his life is approaching, and hopes that he is going to eternal repose: but in a thousand places he had denied the doctrine of a Providence, and he was then, as Gioberti tells us expressly-and with this the account of Ranieri so far as it is in point agrees-composing the last canto of the Paralipomeni, which, going beyond even his wont, turns into sheer ridicule the doctrine of a future state, and of responsibility in connexion with it. But in lieu of all others, we will give another single instance. We have already quoted his memorable letter to De Sinner, who resided in Paris; it was written in French with a view, as is conjectured, to its being known. It was dated May 24, 1832. But on the 8th of July 1831,† he had written to his father that he could swear his works were mere poetry in prose, following one mythology or another ad libitum, as was allowed to poets, without being therefore called Buddhists, Pagans, Mahommedans, and so forth. And on the 28th of May 1832, he gave a positive assurance that, though he did not agree precisely in the principles of the father, his principles had never been irreligious in theory or in fact. He apprises us elsewhere that no French or English journal ever reached Recanati; and it seems impossible to avoid supposing that he reckoned upon Count Monaldo's seclusion to secure him against discovery.

79. It would be easy, but is also needless, to pursue the exhibition of this duplicity in detail. And what inference do we draw from these and like points established in evidence? Certainly not that we are to assume a liberty of denouncing him as a reprobate: not that we

* Epist. II. 235.

t Ibid. 163.

Ibid. 192.