cannot entirely dispel, but am obliged to let them pass like dark clouds over my mind."*

We may add, that so early as in 1837, he had penned with fearful clearness an idea which is terrible only when dissociated from an upholding arm of Power and Love:—

"I feel as if an eternal existence was already an insupportable burden laid upon my soul."+

And he says again, in 1840,—

"I feel oppressed by the notion of eternal existence, even when the absence of evil is made one of its conditions."‡

74. It is true, indeed, as we have already said, that he retained his resignation; and it was not altogether that of Stoic pride. It had also features of a Christian tenderness. So much the more is it remarkable, so much the more is his example useful for our warning, when we find that resignation itself had lost the power which it never fails to exert on behalf of the Christian: it could not take the sting from death, nor the victory from the grave; it could not engender hope. Little, then, as we have to fear from the posthumous influence of Mr. Blanco White, through the medium of his arguments, if they be carefully and calmly sifted, we have as little to apprehend from any appeals which his touching and afflictive history may make to our passions and our grosser nature. To a blinded pride, doubtless, it may offer incense; but it brings with it no small corrective in the mental oppression and misery which it records.

75. Upon the whole, we are very deeply impressed with the value and importance of the lessons which this history of a sceptical mind imparts and enforces. We have indeed exhibited only a few of the incongruities of its philosophy;

* Life, III. p. 55.

† II. p. 323.

+ III. 289.

but as they stand in the original, if not as they appear in our pages, they afford a strong collateral witness to the truth by showing the self-destructive character of infidel speculations. It may well increase our humility to mark the fall of a man to whom many of us will be ready to own themselves morally inferior; and the letters of that golden text, "Be not high-minded, but fear," seem as if they stood forth from every page. It may well fortify our hold on Divine truth, when we observe the desolating and exhausting power with which unbelief lays waste the mind of its victim, and the utter shipwreck that it made of happiness along with faith. It is not, however, only in favour of the general notion of Christianity as against those who deny it, that Mr. Blanco White bears his strong though negative and involuntary witness: it is in favour of Christianity unmutilated and entire, as against the generalised and enfeebled notion of it; of that Christianity in which the Word and the Church, the supreme law and the living witness and keeper of that law, apply to the one inveterate malady of the race of Adam its one divine unfailing remedy. For this much we conceive is clearly proved, with regard to his life in this country, by the work before us, if it were previously in doubt: the faith of the English Church he never left, for he had never held it. He joined himself indeed, and we doubt not with sincere intention, to her communion, and he subscribed her formularies; but he never mastered the idea which they at least represent, if it be more faintly discernible in the practice of her children; the idea of a Reformed Catholic Christianity.*

* [A few months after the publication of this paper, there appeared in the Christian Remembrancer a lengthened essay by Dr. Mozley,

lately deceased, which shows that that most remarkable man had so soon as the year 1844, already reached, in most respects, the full development of his powers. It would be difficult to point to a more close and searching, and almost relentless, analysis of a human mind and life. On this profound study of character is thrown all along the light of the highest Christian philosophy, and of occasional passages of splendid eloquence. It has been reprinted in the second volume of his Essays.-W. E. G., 1878.]

1. GENIUS, unless guided by a malignant spirit, has an indefeasible claim to our sympathy in its reverses, and in its achievements to our fervid admiration: nor is there any more touching, any more instructive lesson, than such as are afforded by its failures in the attempt to realise, out of its own resources and without the aid of Divine revelation, either intellectual contentment or a happy life.

In the writings of Leopardi there are other sources of pathetic interest: the misfortunes of his country, both its political and social, and its religious misfortunes, and his own personal difficulties and calamities, have stamped their image indelibly upon his works, and may be traced, not only in the solemn and impassioned verses, or in the mournful letters, of which they are more or less directly the theme, but in the tone which pervades the whole.

2. We believe it may be said without exaggeration, that he was one of the most extraordinary men whom this century has produced, both in his powers, and likewise

*Reprinted from the Quarterly Review for March 1850, Art. I. 1. Opere di Giacomo Leopardi. Tomi II. Firenze, 1845. Vol. III., 1845. Vol. IV., 1846. 4. Epistolario di Giacomo Leopardi. Tomi II. Firenze, 1849. 5. Poesie di Giacomo Leopardi. Napoli, 1849.

in his performances, achieved as they were under singular disadvantage. For not only did he die at thirty-eight, almost nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, and at the time when most great men have but been beginning the efforts which were to stamp them with that character; but likewise, "Heaven's unimpeached decrees" in his case nearly

"Made that shortened span one long disease."*

By the time he was seventeen, he had destroyed, through the ardour and intensity of his studies, the very foundations of health and strength. From that year forward he was an invalid, with intervals of remission, progressively growing shorter, and very frequently under acute pain or most severe nervous depression; and his sight fell into so deplorable a state, that for more than a twelvemonth from March 1819 he was totally unable to read, and nearly so to write.

3. The life, thus piteously wasted by disease, was moreover frightfully oppressed by melancholy; not a melancholy ad libitum, gentle and manageable, but one that was deeply seated both in physical and moral causes. He writes at eighteen: A tutto questo aggiunga l'ostinata, nera, orrenda, barbara malinconia, che mi lima e mi divora, e collo studio s'alimenta, e senza studio s'accresce. Nor, as we shall see, did advancing time bring with it any alleviation. With a life thus limited, and with only the first moiety of it available in the ordinary degree for study, Count Giacomo Leopardi amassed great stores of deep and varied learning, proved himself to be possessed of profound literary judgment, exquisite taste, and a powerful imagination; and earned in his own country the character summed

* From Mr. Canning's verses on the death of his eldest son.