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scholar, Creuzer, upon Plotinus. It was followed in the same year by his 'Commentary on the Life and Writings of Rhetoricians of the First and Second Centuries of the Christian era,' and by a 'Collection of Fragments of Early Fathers and Historians of the Church before Eusebius,' with his own notes.

18. But we will pass on from these, which remain unpublished, to his 'Annotations on the Chronicle of Eusebius,' which had been just edited by Mai from the Armenian version. They were written at twenty years of age, and printed in 1823, and it is their singular merit which has mainly engendered the existing dissatisfaction at the nonappearance of his other works of the same kind. The judgment of Niebuhr upon the author of this work, it has been properly observed, may suffice for those who have not the opportunity of examining it. He says, in a publication of 1823 :

"The very learned persons, of the results of whose admirable labours I make use, are Bluhmius, now distinguished among legists, and Count Giacomo Leopardi of Recanati, whom I hereby introduce to my fellow-countrymen as already a conspicuous ornament of Italy, his native land, and who, I answer for it, will rise progressively to still greater eminence; I, who am attached to the illustrious youth not more for his singular learning than for his remarkably ingenuous nature, shall rejoice in all his honours and advancements.”—Præf. ad Flavii Merobaudis Carmina, ed. 2, p. 13.

It is even more interesting to quote, as we are enabled to do on the best authority, the words of Niebuhr to his friend and successor the Chevalier Bunsen, when, upon hearing that the author of these Annotazioni was in Rome, he had with difficulty discovered his apartment. "Conceive my astonishment when I saw standing before me, pale and shy, a mere youth, in a poor little chamber, of

weakly figure, and obviously in bad health; he being by far the first, rather indeed the only real Greek philologian in Italy, the author of Critical Observations which would have gained honour for the first philologian of Germany, and only twenty-two years old.* He had grown to be thus profoundly learned without school, without teacher, without help, without encouragement, in his father's sequestered house! I understand too that he is one of the first of the rising poets of Italy. What a nobly-gifted people!"

19. Until the occasion when Niebuhr saw him in Rome, Leopardi had never quitted his father's house at Recanati. While prosecuting his studies in the library of the house, and almost living there, he had to bear not only the negative evil of the absence of positive sympathy and aid, but the slights often due, and always rendered, to boy-critics and philosophers. From the editor of the Biblioteca Italiana, to which he first made the offer of some contributions, he could scarcely obtain any notice of his letters; and he gives a most lively description of the usual treatment de haut en bas, which he had met with tra questa vilissima plebe marchigiana e romana.

"After all, I am a child, and treated like one: I do not mean at home where they treat me like a baby-but out of doors. Whoever is acquainted with my family, when he gets a letter from me and sees this new Giacomo-if indeed he does not take me for the ghost of my grandpapa, dead thirty-five years ago, that bore this name-makes up his mind that I am one of the house-dolls, and thinks that, if he, a full-grown man (be he but a bailiff), replies to a chicken like me, he does me a favour. So he serves me out with two lines, of which one contains his compliments to my father.

Leopardi was at this time twenty-four, but only twenty when he wrote the Annotations.

Thus in Recanati I am taken for what I am, a pure and sheer lad; and most people add the nick-names of petit savant, wiseacre, and so forth. So that if I venture to urge any one to buy a book, either he replies by a grin, or he puts on a serious face and tells me that the time is past; that when I am a little older I shall see; that he too at my age had this fancy for buying books, which went away when he got to years of discretion; that the same will happen to And then, being a boy, forsooth, I cannot lift up my voice and cry, 'Race of asses! if you think I have got to grow like you, you are much mistaken; for I will not leave off loving books until sense leave me off, which you never had at all, so far from its having come to you when you ceased to like books.""

me.

20. This, however, was one of his rare and short outbreaks of vivacity; for which indeed it is quite plain that he had all the natural materials in plenty, but they were crushed both by the real weight of his calamities and by the magnified power with which his acute sensibilities invested them. He never, says Viani, could hold long the strain of merriment. A distinguished person who knew him well, and, like all apparently who so knew him, loved him. well, during his later years, assures us that he never saw Leopardi either laugh or smile. His friend and editor Ranieri states that he never sought compensation for mental sorrow, or tried to benumb its sting, by the brute force of sensual enjoyment. So that in every meaning he could have adopted the motto

"Ich gehöre nicht den Freuden an.'

21. Whatever may be thought of the real causes of his unhappiness, it will be plain to all readers of his works and letters that nothing little and paltry ever found a place in his mind or would have given him a moment's care. An

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intense sensibility and craving for love, and for the signs of love, is visible throughout, and with it a real modesty and trustfulness, a genuine indifference to wealth and luxury, a spirit too lofty, perhaps too proud, for anything so poor as vanity. We take this exemption to be more clearly shown in no way than by the absence of anything like soreness of feeling about the defects of his personal appearance, while he was aware in full of the disadvantage they entailed. Describing the effect of his excessive studies, he says :

"My appearance is become wretched, and in me all that large part of man most contemptible, which is the only part regarded by the generality, and it is with the generality that we must deal in this world. . . . With these and other unhappy circumstances has fortune surrounded me; giving me such developments of the understanding that I might see them clearly and perceive just what I am, and of the heart, that by it I might feel that joy has no part or lot in me."

In this letter, written at nineteen, the reader may notice his great powers of expression, his tendency to philosophise, and a gloom as remarkable as his wonderful mental endowments. From a later passage in it, where he refers to another event that must happen, and had already happened in part, una cosa più fiera di tutte, we gather that he had already lost all hold of Christianity, and that he felt, more acutely than any other evil, the pain and shame of a continued exterior profession of it, together with the fear of making the disclosure of his sentiments.

22. In addition to the hiatus in his works, which we have already noticed, they are presented to us in a confused and irregular series, and there is nothing that assumes the name of a biography attached to them, while each of four

Editors has prefixed to separate portions some sketch of his own, and other piecemeal testimonies and panegyrics are given in different parts of the collection. Nothing can be more unfavourable to the formation of a just and careful judgment upon either the works or the life of the author.

23. In the absence, however, of a regular biography, the Epistolario, containing between five and six hundred of his letters, supplies, though with great lack both of connexion and of explanation, many records both of his life and studies, and is of high interest on various accounts. He seems to have been from the first a master, as in other things that he touched, so also in letter-writing. When only eighteen he addressed the following to Monti, with a copy of his version of the second Æneid. Its ideas of course must not be considered according to English manners, but mutatis mutandis.

"Recanati, 21 Febbraio 1817.

"Stimatissimo Sig. Cavaliere,-Se è colpa ad uomo piccolo lo scrivere non provocato a letterato grande, colpevolissimo sono io, perchè a noi si convengono i superlativi delle due qualità. Nè altro posso allegare a mia scusa, che la smania incomprensibile di farmi noto al mio principe (poichè suddito le sono io certo, come amatore quale che sia delle lettere) e il tremito che provo scrivendo a lei, che scrivendo a Re non mi avverrebbe di provare. Ricevrà per mia parte dal Sig. Stella, miserabilissimo dono, la mia traduzione del secondo libro della Eneide; anzi non dono, ma argomento di riso al traduttore della Iliade primo in Europa, e al grande amico del grande Annibal Caro. Ed ella rida; che il suo riso sarà di compassione, e la sua compassione più grata ed onorevole a me, che l'invidia di mille altri. Non la prego che legga il mio libro, ma che non lo rifiuti: ed, accettandolo, mi faccia chiaro che ella non si tiene offeso dal mio ardimento, con che verrà a cavarmi di grande ansietà.

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