agreeable impression on him. He found the ritualistic twaddle, and the small ecclesiastical talk of the great Catholic city, altogether intolerable, and his amour propre was hurt when he found that he did not take the place in its regards which he thought he merited. In Rome, however, he became acquainted with Niebuhr, who saw his capabilities, and offered him, when only four-and-twenty, a Greek chair in the University of Berlin. This he thought proper to decline, wishing to remain in Italy, but his want of success in obtaining some small office which he desired, sent him back to Recanati in wretched spirits, and his misanthropic tone of mind grew ever darker and darker. The miserable bigotry of his home, his own dreary Voltairianism and broken health, together with a growing sense of his ugliness (for he was terribly deformed), made him see everything from the saddest point of view, and leaving his father's home, he wandered hither and thither through Italy, doing work little better than that of a literary hack, for bare subsistence. At length his failing eyesight obliged him to give up philology, his favourite study, and from this time forward his works, if less agreeable to himself, were more conducive to his fame, at least beyond the limits of learned circles. He was, however, obliged to be dependent for his livelihood, to a great extent, upon the attachment of friends, for the remainder of his existence.

Ere long his affairs got into a condition of hopeless confusion, when Ranieri, le plus admirable ami qui ait vécu de nos jours,' as M. Marc Monnier truly says, carried him off to Naples, where for seven years he kept him alive and tended him with an affection for which no parallel occurs to us.

The un

happy object of so much love sunk, however, at last, on the 14th of June, 1837, while the cholera was raging at Naples. It was not, however, of cholera that he died, but of a combination of consumption and dropsy. The Jesuits had the inconceivable folly to publish a

minute account of the reconciliation of Leopardi to the Roman churcha reconciliation of which one Francesco Scarpa, suborned for this purpose, professed to have been the instrument. The whole story, from the first word to the last, was a pure fabrication, and the only result was to draw from Ranieri a narrative of the real circumstances of the poet's death, which is published for the first time by M. Monnier. The principal facts were, however, given by Ranieri to Gioberti, to be used in his famous attack on what was once the 'Great Order.' Those who wish for an example of the crushing style of reply, may find one in the long extract from Gioberti, given by M. Marc Monnier, which begins with these words:-The Historiette which is set forth in the letter of Francesco Scarpa is a tissue of lies and of insolent fictions from the first word to the last,' and proceeds to demolish each assertion of the worthy father, small as well as great.

The more valuable works of Leopardi-indeed all those by which his name will be remembered-are comprised in two volumes, published after his death at Florence, under the superintendence of Ranieri. Four subsequent volumes are of little value. The two of which we speak are composed chiefly of poems, of dialogues, and other short pieces in prose. While we cannot go all lengths with M. Marc Monnier in praising the poems of Leopardi, and are constrained to believe that a good dose of what we call English minor poets would cure him of his tendency to the use of the superlative in speaking of modern Italian literature, and while we enter a caveat even with regard to Leopardi's prose, we must say that it is difficult to overrate the importance of the study of his works as showing one side of Italian beliefs and feeling. Why does no one who is well acquainted with the political and religious condition of England, Italy, and Germany, if any such person there be, give us an exhaustive essay upon Sterling, Leopardi, Märklin?

Such a work would be worthy of the pen, and would need all the power, of our very ablest thinkers.

Next to Leopardi, the most celebrated of this honoured company was Niccolini, who was born at the Baths of San Giuliano, in 1782, and was descended on the mother's side from Filicaja. The old man still survives, having seen the Guelfic illusions of 1847 vanish into that limbo out of which, in spite of his remonstrances, the heated imagination of his countrymen had called them. He was educated at the University of Pisa, and was intimate with Ugo Foscolo before the flight of the latter to England. Some have even supposed that the character of Lorenzo, in the Letters of Ortis, was intended for him. Passing over several of his earlier works, we arrive at Matilda, which was imitated from Home's tragedy of Douglas, and his translations of the Seven against Thebes and the Agamemnon. These we mention because they indicate two of the chief influences which acted on his mind. His first political drama was Nabucco, in which Napoleon figures as Nebuchadnezzar, and Marie Louise as his wife Amiti. In 1830 came Giovanni da Procida, of which the Austrian Minister said to his colleague of France, "The letter is addressed to you, but 'tis for me that it is intended.' His chief work, however, was Arnaldo da Brescia, which appeared in 1843, a quick and tremendous answer to Gioberti's Primato. At first, although widely known, it was not popular. The hour belonged to the philosophic dreamer, but time the avenger' has left the victory in the hands of the poet.

Our readers remember the story of Arnold. Born at Brescia, in 1105, pupil of Abelard, foe and victim of S. Bernard, tribune of the Brescians in their contest with their bishop, fugitive in Switzerland and France, declared a schismatic, playing over again in Rome the game of Brescia, betrayed by Frederick Barbarossa to our English Pope, Adrian IV., and finally put to death in 1156. A glance is enough to show how well suited is such a story for a

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poetical philippic against the Anarch of the Seven Hills.

Ranieri, whom we have already mentioned as the benefactor and worshipper of Leopardi, and as the antithesis of Troja, was the intimate friend of that erudite and somewhat feeble person. A Neapolitan by birth, he made his début by a novel called Ginevra, in which he attacked the atrocious mismanagement of the great foundling hospital at Naples; but his principal work is the history of Italy from Theodosius to Charlemagne, in which he attempts to sustain the good right of Italian independence against both Pope and Emperor.

The last of this group whom we shall mention is the satirist Giuseppe Giusti. His style has no

affinity with that of the classic and somewhat pedantic Niccolini. He is essentially the poet of the lingua volgare, of the graceful and racy dialect of the Val d'Arno. Born in 1809, near Pescia, of a good family, he passed a careless youth, but employed his middle age in rousing his countrymen from their lethargy. When 1848 arrived, he became alarmed at his own work, and ere he died he was classed, rather harshly, amongst the reactionaries. 'He helped us to destroy,' said his friends, but he is frightened at the ruins. "They forget,' replied Giusti, 'that I spoke out when the best of them were silent.'

Terenzio Mamiani, the philosophical adversary of Rosmini, is a metaphysician pur sang. A short but valuable notice of the phases of philosophical faith through which he passed, is given in a letter addressed to M. Marc Monnier by himself. We will not enter into this, but briefly note the chief events of his life, relying on the authority of Saredo, whom we know to be well informed. Mamiani was born in 1800, at Pesaro. He made his first appearance in the literary arena as a poet, and in the political arena, as a member of the provisional government which was constituted at Bologna during the movement which resulted from the disgust of the Liberals at the elevation of Gregory XVI. This

soon

revolutionary attempt was crushed by Austria, and Mamiani fled to Paris, where he devoted himself to philosophy and poetry, publishing the Confessioni di un Metafisico, and many other works. He declined accepting the amnesty offered by Pio Nono, but went to Piedmont on the invitation of Charles Albert-an invitation which was most distasteful to the foolish old bigot, Solar della Margharita, who was then minister of foreign affairs. From Piedmont he went to Rome in 1848, when he could return without retracting any of his opinions, was minister for a short time, and offered his old opponent, the good Rosmini, a seat in his cabinet. He resigned only when the action of 'the reds' on one side and of the 'blacks' on the other made his position impossible. It is unnecessary to trace his history in the interval between his leaving Rome and his reappearance as Minister of Public Instruction in the Cabinet of Cavour.

We pass over the chapters which contain the story of the Poerios; nor can we linger to examine the light and brilliant sketches of the altogether unique varieties of poetry, music, and dramatic entertainments which are found amongst the common people at Naples, and to some extent also in Rome. They are full of information, and are only one more proof added to the many which we already possess, that there is a whole world of interest to be disentombed in Southern Italy as soon as the strong hand of progress has cleared away the rubbish which the systematic wickedness of the Bourbons has piled over whatever is best in the country.

A literature of a higher kind has, however, always maintained itself in Naples, although wofully hampered by the restrictions of the censorship and by the persecutions. of the police. Strange that it should be so, when a man could not write upon galvanism without being suspected of adherence to the doctrines of Calvin; when the word eziandio, which means 'also,' might be struck out of an article because it ended in Dio. Secret

presses, foreign publishers, books bound with false names on the back, veiled allusions and epigrams

-these were the order of the day. Under these disguises and amidst such difficulties wrote Pasquale de Virgilii, the imitator of Byron, and Niccola Sole, both names new to us, but of whom M. Marc Monnier speaks with much praise, and a dozen more, equally unfamiliar, but for all of whom he has a good word. The jurist Imbriani, the economist Scialoia, the advocates Conforti, Pisanelli, and Mancini, are more famous, chiefly through their exile in Piedmont and their share in recent events.

Sicily has also her group of literati. The purely insular school, whose great glory is the modern Theocritus, Giovanni Meli, and who wrote, not in Italian, but in the Greco-Moorish Sicilian dialect, has given way to another which uses the pure Italian. Of these, Amari, the historian of the Sicilian Vespers, is the most celebrated; but Ferrara the statistician, and a few others, have no inconsiderable reputation beyond the Alps.

There is also scattered about in Italy a more modern cohort of writers, a few of whom we must just name in passing. Carlo Cattaneo of Milan, the bitter foe of the Piedmontese Constitution, a violent and impracticable politician, but the editor of the Politechnico, a scientific periodical of very great merit, and in our opinion one of the most hopeful signs of the times to be met with in Italy. Ferrari, the philosopher whose speeches on the question of annexation, delivered on the 8th and 11th October, 1860, now lie beside us an orator of an eccentric

type, and heartily laughed at by his brethren behind the Palazzo Carignan, but who may nevertheless have the laugh one day on his side. Aleardo Aleardi, a poet who has passed half his life in Austrian prisons. Add Guerrazzi and Montanelli, so famous in 1848, Dall Ongaro, Átto Vannucci, and some few more. Of all of these there are notices in this excellent book, where also will be found ac

coln's-inn; and his perplexity is increased when he learns that, though the codes administered at both of these seats of justice are of English origin, at Doctors' Commons another species of law is known, not English at all, but that of the Romans, who, he had been wont to believe, vanished from our island, leaving only a few hotwater apparatuses behind them, long before the advent of Hengist and Horsa. He asks if our laws are not made by Parliament, and hears with despair that they have many other sources.

A very little learning of course decomposes this nebulous entanglement into its constituent systems; and even the youthful lawyer sees that the object of his studies, though still heterogeneous, has a method in its madness, and a reason for its eccentricities.

The fact is, that the growth of English law has been beyond precedent spontaneous. Spontaneity, the great characteristic of our history in general, is in our law positively rampant. Based upon no consistent ground-plan of systematic jurisprudence, upon no doctrinaire theories of right, it has grown out of fact, out of religion, out of daily want, into its present most cumbrous though most useful shape; and we have never till very recently consciously turned round to criticize as a whole the product of the wisdom of so many ages. We have looked upon our law with something of the veneration expressed by Lord Coke :

If all the reason that is dispersed into so many several heads, were united into one, yet could he not make such a law as the law in England is; because by many successions of ages it hath beene fined and refined by an infinite number of grave and learned men, and by long experience growne to such a perfection for the government of this realme, as the old rule may be justly verified of it- neminem oportet esse sapientiorem legibus; no man out of his own private reason ought to be wiser than the law, which is the perfection of reason.

We have been satisfied with adding to, without remodelling it, much

less resting it upon new foundations.

English law bears the traces of many generations, many forms of beliefs, many social changes. We might compare its various stages to various strata of a geological formation, each preserving to the present day the defunct fauna and flora of a past age; or rather to some vast palace, whose foundations are huge Cyclopean blocks quarried by hoar antiquity, whose superstructure exhibits samples of every order of architecture; the rude Saxon arch, the decorated medieval window, with bastard Latin pillars of the Renaissance, and ugly useful repairs and adaptations in modern mason-work; the whole moss-grown with quaint ceremonial, and ivy-tressed with verbiage.

The popular notion of parliament is that of a body which, in its supreme wisdom (besides many other things), after considering what the law should be-about land, for instance, or will making, or commerce-expresses its opinion in a law: That such laws when bound up in the statute book constitute the Englishman's code of right and wrong, and that any man who has mastered these fifty and odd quarto volumes and guides his steps thereby, must be in the right. Such a man, however, soon finds that law libraries, besides the 'statutes at large,' contain most ominously elongated shelves of smaller but still formidable volumes labelled 'reports,' and he hears that these contain the decisions of the judges on points where the law is not quite clear. To this he probably resigns himself as a necessary consequence of the multiplicity of human actions, and the inadequacy of human language ; but loses all heart when he is told that the judges in forming these decisions are chiefly guided by rules not to be found in the 'statutes' at all, but resting merely on long custom, and preserved nominally by tradition, really now in innumerable text-books upon the separate branches of jurisprudence.