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up in the words of one of his editors, as sommo filologo, sommo poeta, e sommo filosofo.

4. He was born on the 29th of June 1798, at Recanati in the March of Ancona; the eldest son of Count Monaldo Leopardi, himself in some sense a man of letters, but of temperament and opinions the most opposite to those of Giacomo. He had for his tutors two priests, who instructed him in Latin and in the elements of philosophy; but he had no teacher or adviser of any kind in his studies after his fourteenth year, and it is plain that he had outstripped his nominal guides long before it. A French writer asserts that he began Greek at eight, his tutors rendering him no aid, but with the grammar of Padua in his hand. He continues with naïveté, and we doubt not with truth: l'enfant jugea cette grammaire insuffisante, et, décidé à s'en passer, il se mit à aborder directement les textes qu'il trouvait dans la Bibliothèque de son père.* We are involuntarily reminded of Hermes, respecting whom it is recorded in the Homeric hymn that—

ήφος γεγονώς, μέσῳ ἤματι ἐγκιθάριζεν,

ἑσπέριος βοῦς κλέψεν ἑκηβόλου Απολλῶνος

5. He says himself that, not later than when he had just completed his tenth year, he commenced the course of study which he calls matto e disperatissimo, not only without a teacher, but without the faintest suggestion for his guidance, without encouragement, without sympathy, Yet at sixteen years of age he had become master, not merely of the whole range of the literature properly termed classical, but of a large portion of the works of the later Greek and Latin authors of different schools

Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept. 15, 1844.

and he was also extensively conversant, at least in certain departments, with the works of the Fathers of the Church. That is to say, he had not merely read and understood these authors, but he composed in 1815 a work entitled Saggio sopra gli Errori Popolari degli Antichi, and forming the fourth volume of this collection, which showed that he had a mastery of their contents and a facility in the use of them, such as few men of any generation have attained even in their mature years.

6. In the meantime the study of other languages was not neglected. In his own tongue, above all except the Greek, he was training his exquisite critical faculties, and was growing to be profoundly acquainted with its scholarship and one of its very best prose writers. But he also gathered as he went along a knowledge of French, English, Spanish, German, and Hebrew. The volumes before us contain evidence that he composed with ease, at any rate in the two first of these languages. In or about his eighteenth year, his critical collections in MS. amounted to six or seven large volumes; and though it is unsafe in general to measure by quantity, any reader of his works will be aware that he was absolutely incapable of writing trash. In 1817 he heard that some literary foreigner, whose name is not mentioned, had sent him word that he might become a great philologian. Before this time he was solely sustained and stimulated by that inborn consciousness of genius, which lives and works long before it speaks, and by a presentiment of greatness from which modesty was by no means excluded. Thus he writes in September of the same year to Giordani ::

"Sure I am that I have no disposition to live in the crowd: mediocrity frightens me to death; my wish is to soar, and to be come great and immortal by genius and by study: an enterprise

arduous, and perhaps for me visionary; but man must not be fainthearted nor despair of himself."

May his words be as a spark to light up similar aspirations in the breasts of English youth, but under better auspices, with better safeguards, and for a happier end.

7. To estimate aright the magnitude of his efforts and successes, particularly with regard to Greek, the literary atmosphere, so to speak, in which he lived must be taken into account. From the volumes before us it would appear that this noble study, so widely spread in some countries of Europe, is not only neglected, but is within a few degrees of utter extinction in Italy. Giordani, in giving his reasons for not reprinting a remarkable work of Leopardi's, states that "in Italy it would be rather hopeless than simply difficult to find a competent printer for a work almost wholly Greek; and to find so many as five readers for it quite impossible." The errors in the Greek typography of the volumes before us, and even of the errata appended to them, give some colour to the statement. Another of Leopardi's editors, Pellegrini, assures us that not only the works but the names of the German philologians were unknown throughout Italy at the time, and seems to speak of a thorough knowledge of Greek as being still next door to a miracle in that Peninsula.

8. There is probably some shade of exaggeration in these testimonies, and it is fair to observe that the very work to which Giordani refers was twice printed at Rome; while the Chronicle of Eusebius, on which it was a commentary, proceeded from the Milanese press. Leopardi himself, however, writes from Rome to his father in 1822, that all learning except such as is archæological was utterly neglected in that city, which it is plain is very far from being the literary capital of Italy; and adds,

"the best of all is, that one does not find a single Roman who is really master of Latin and Greek," though he has met with some learned foreigners-ben altra cosa che i Romani. The most pungent evidence of all perhaps is, that when preparing the Preface to his 'Saggio' in 1815, the boy takes care to apprise his readers, that he has translated exactly from the original into Italian all his Greek citations, putting those from the poets into verse. He dealt with them, as in this country a writer would deal with citations from the Sanscrit; and it is scarcely too much to say, that in order to estimate aright the energy of character and of intellect required for efforts such as his, not merely in Italy but at Recanati, we must conceive a child among us scarcely yet in trousers, setting himself to Sanscrit, and acquiring it without a master in less than half the time that the most promising pupils would generally spend upon it, with all the apparatus and all the inspiring associations of learned society and of suitable establishments to assist them.

9. His literary life divides itself into two great periods: the first of them occupied by his philological labours, and by translations from the classical poets, the second chiefly by poetry and philosophy. The division is not minutely accurate; but his first poem of any note was written in 1817, when he touched nineteen: he only published three of his odes before the year 1824, and he had then written but little poetry; he had for some years before that, from the state of his sight as we suppose, almost entirely ceased from his philological labours, and had already designated them as the studies of his boyhood. And all his efforts in philosophy belong to the later division of his life, which begins about the last-named year.

10. The earliest composition among his published works is

the Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients, dated in the year 1815, and written, therefore, in his seventeenth or early in his eighteenth year. It is remarkable not only for the amount of erudition, classical and patristic, which he had even then accumulated-his editor has appended a list of near four hundred authors whom he cites-but for the facility with which he handles his materials, and philosophises upon them. Homage is emphatically rendered, in this work, to the Christian religion. The youthful author tells us that unbelief had generated worse prejudices than had ever sprung from credulity, and that the name of philosopher had become odious with the sounder part of mankind. He declares Christianity to be the second mother of our race, and asserts that the true Church had ever condemned superstition, against which she is the true and the only bulwark. And yet we see a baleful shadow projected even at this early period over his future, where he eulogises Voltaire as "that standard-bearer of bold minds, that man so devoted to reason and so hostile to error." The time was too near at hand when he would be prepared to subscribe that scoffer's words :

O Jupiter, tu fis en nous créant

Une froide plaisanterie.

But what strange idea, and stranger practice, of education must prevail, where the admiration of Voltaire as an apostle of true reason grows up peacefully in the mind of a boy, side by side with the admiration of the Church of Rome as the unsparing foe of superstition!

11. The only specimens of original composition in Greek verse (in Latin there are none) which these volumes afford, are two Anacreontic odes, written in 1817. We doubt whether they justify the panegyric of Giordani;

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