are to obliterate or forget the traces of goodness, any more than the proofs of greatness, which his works exhibit: but that we are to protest in limine against the title he attempts to vindicate for himself of a dispassionate inquirer, who has arrived, by the full and undisturbed force of his intellect, at given results. If disease, difficulty, privation, nervous depression so acted upon his mind as to sap there the foundations of virtue in some of its first elements, it is too much that we should be called upon to believe that in his renunciation of principles both lying at the root of all revealed religion, and sustained, as he admits, by the universal voice of Nature, he is to be estimated simply as a Pure Intelligence not swayed to the right hand or to the left either by the agony that tore, or the disgust and moral nausea that oppressed, his mind. But, having said thus much, and having desired to say it gently, let us leave him with thoughts only of the pity which his great sorrows solicit, and of the admiration that his genius challenges. Some, indeed, may be disposed to regret that his editors have been unable to keep back the matter to which we have last adverted. Their performance of their task, though inspired with a devoted love, is certainly open to the remark that they have omitted either too little or too much. The gaps in the letters are ́most numerous, and are commonly so placed as to suggest that the missing passages relate to the most critical points of opinion, character, and life. But without doubt it was better for a generation like our own, which, even amidst the increase of religious feeling, seems insensibly to relax its grasp upon objective truth, and to decline into feebler conceptions of its authority, that the case of Leopardi should be stated with, at the least, that degree of fulness in which we now possess it. Lest in our desire to do

justice to feeling and to taste, and lofty genius finding for itself a way to martyrdom through privation and intense and unremitting toil, we should have forgotten the verse with which he himself supplies us

"Deh quanto in verità vani siam nui!”

Lest we should have become unmindful of the temptations, the infirmities, and the deep degeneracy of our race, and should have left a single reader predisposed even for one moment to the belief that any other waters than those which flowed from the bleeding side of the Redeemer can heal its plagues; any other wisdom than the "foolishness" of the Gospel give it permanent, uniform, or consistent elevation.

Rapidly surveying the character of Leopardi as a writer, we cannot hesitate to say that, in almost every branch of mental exertion, this extraordinary man seems to have had the capacity for attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest excellence. Whatever he does, he does in a manner that makes it his own; not with a forced or affected but a true originality, stamping upon his work, like other masters, a type that defies all counterfeit. He recalls others as we read him, but always the most remarkable and accomplished in their kind; always by conformity, not by imitation. In the Dorian march of his terza rima the image of Dante comes before us; in his blank verse we think of Milton (whom probably he never read); in his lighter letters, and in the extreme elegance of touch with which he describes mental gloom and oppression, we are reminded of the grace of Cowper; when he touches learned research or criticism, he is copious as Warburton, sagacious and acute as Bentley the impassioned melancholy of his poems largely

recalls his less, though scarcely less, deeply unhappy contemporary Shelley: to translation (we speak however of his prose translations) he brings the lofty conception of his work, which enabled Coleridge to produce his Wallenstein; among his 'Thoughts' there are some worthy of a place beside the Pensées of Fascal, or the Moral Essays of Bacon; and with the style of his philosophic Dialogues neither Hume nor Berkeley need resent a comparison. We write for Englishmen : but we know that some of his countrymen regard him as a follower, and as a rival, too, of Tasso and of Galileo in the respective excellences of verse and prose. Some of his editors go further, and pronounce him to be a discoverer of fundamental truths: an error in our view alike gross, mischievous, and inexcusable. Yet there are many things in which Christians would do well to follow him: in the warmth of his attachments; in the moderation of his wants; in his noble freedom from the love of money; in his all-conquering assiduity. Nor let us, of inferior and more sluggish clay, omit to learn, as we seem to stand at his tomb, beside the Bay of Naples, in the lowly church of San Vitale, yet another lesson from his career; the lesson of compassion, chastening admiration, towards him: and for ourselves, of humility and self-mistrust.

III.

TENNYSON.*

1. MR. TENNYSON published his first volume, under the title of Poems chiefly Lyrical,' in 1830, and his second, with the name simply of Poems,' in 1833. In 1842 he reappeared before the world in two volumes, partly made up from the débris of his earlier books; and from this date forward he came into the enjoyment of a popularity at once great, growing, and select. With a manly resolution, which gave promise of the rare excellence he was progressively to attain, he had on this occasion amputated altogether from the collection about one-half of the contents of his earliest work, with some considerable portion of the second; he had almost rewritten or carefully corrected other important pieces, and had added a volume of new compositions.

2. The later handiwork showed a great advance upon the earlier; as, indeed, 1833 had shown upon 1830. From the very first, however, he had been noteworthy in performance as well as in promise, and it was plain that, whatever else might happen, at least neglect was not to

* Reprinted from the Quarterly Review, October 1859. Art. V. 1. Tennyson's Poems. In Two Volumes. London, 1842. 2. The Princess; a Medley. London, 1847. 3. In Memoriam. London, 1850. 4. Maud, and other Poems. London, 1855. 5. Idylls of the King. London, 1859.