Though solaced by the affection of his brother Carlo and his sister Paolina, Leopardi’s position was most uncomfortable, and the chief external events of his history for many years are his temporary escapes and his enforced returns. He sought refuge successively at Rome, Bologna, and Florence, meeting with friends everywhere, especially at Rome, where he won the esteem and excited the wonder of Niebuhr and Bunsen. His craving for deeper sympathy twice involved him in love affairs, both fruitful in humiliation and disappointment. Nothing else, indeed, could be expected for the suit of the pallid, deformed youth, whose blood barely circulated, whose indigestion almost deprived him of nourishment, whose feeble limbs bent beneath the weight of a body even so attenuated, and whose heart and lungs scarcely discharged their office. All active life seemed concentrated in his brain, which throve and energised at the expense of every other organ. He executed some work for the booksellers, especially his condensed but invaluable comment on Petrarch, and from time to time gave expression to some slowly-maturing thought, in literary form meet for immortality, but unvalued and unrecompensed by his contemporaries. Neither Leopardi’s patriotic sentiments nor his speculative opinions could be disclosed under the pressure of Austrian and Bourbon despotism; the King of Sardinia had not yet declared himself on the side of liberty, and there was literally no spot in Italy where an Italian could write what he thought. Emigration to France or England would have been forbidden by his parents, upon whom he was entirely dependent. At length, in September 1833, he was able to establish himself at Naples, where for a time his health and spirits seemed marvellously improved; but from the summer of 1836 these retrograded, and he succumbed to a sudden aggravation of the dropsy which had long threatened him, on June 14, 1837. His unpublished philological writings were bequeathed to a Swiss friend, Professor de Sinner, who neglected his trust. The MSS., however, were bought from his heirs by the Italian Government, and have been partially published. Leopardi’s other works were faithfully edited by Antonio Ranieri, a friend whose devoted kindness to him during his life renders it utterly incomprehensible how he should have sought to blacken his memory after his death by the publication of a number of painful and humiliating circumstances, which, if they had been facts, should have been consigned to oblivion, but which Dr. Franco Ridella has shown to be mere invention.