In the interval between Monti’s withdrawal from Rome and the brilliant position which under the Imperial auspices he acquired at Milan, he had produced his _Prometheus_, one of the finest examples of Italian blank verse, but a curious mixture of things ancient and modern; his _Musologia_, charming octaves on the Muses; _Caius Gracchus_, a tragedy betraying imitation of Shakespeare’s _Coriolanus_, celebrated for the force of the fifth act; _Mascheroniana_, a palinode for the _Bassvilliana_, notwithstanding the art with which the poet manages to assert his consistency. Disfigured as it is by adulation of Napoleon and senseless abuse of England[21], this is perhaps Monti’s finest poem. It is the offspring of a genuine poetic _œstrum_, which whirls the stuff of a party pamphlet into sublimity, like a rag in a hurricane. It was never finished. Incomplete too is the _Bard of the Black Forest_, a poem on Napoleon’s exploits, unequal to the subject, but remarkable for its concise rapidity of expression. Monti was now Napoleon’s official laureate for the Italian department, and it is sufficiently amusing to find him expressing his apprehensions lest he should be so far carried away by his patriotism as to offend the reigning powers, and breathing a superfluous prayer for prudence in his vocation. There was little danger; patriotism, though a genuine, was a weaker emotion with him than respect for dignities, as he sufficiently evinced by his obedience to the Austrian mandate to celebrate the expulsion of the French, although he never abased himself so far as to assail Napoleon. He lost his office of historiographer, and retiring into private life, devoted himself mainly to critical and philological work. He had a short time previously published a translation of the _Iliad_, commenced in 1790, highly admired by his countrymen, and certainly a remarkable performance when it is considered that he scarcely knew a word of Greek; whence Foscolo wittily called him _gran traduttor dei traduttor d’Omero_. So much more important to the translator is flexibility of mind than exactness of scholarship. Monti’s later days, now embittered by controversies and pecuniary embarrassments, mitigated by the generosity of friends, now brightened by successful work on his unfinished _Feronia_, a youthful production in which he had celebrated the draining of the Pontine marshes, or by the production of some fine lyric, passed on the whole tranquilly until his death in 1828 from the effects of a paralytic stroke.