While he still posed as Leopardi’s Pythias, Ranieri summed up his friend’s titles to renown as, “first a great philologer, next a great poet, at the last a great philosopher.” Great poet he unquestionably was; his refined classical scholarship might have earned him the distinction of a great philologer in a sense disused since comparative philology has taken rank among the exact sciences; if he was a great philosopher, so Voltaire and Lucian must be esteemed. The keen sensibility to pain which dominated his mental constitution was as little associated with any constructive faculty or capacity for systematic thought as was their hatred of pretence and perception of the ludicrous; but while their endowments were brilliantly serviceable to mankind, Leopardi’s moral pathology, if it had any potency at all, could operate only for ill. Mischievous attempts have indeed been made to accredit the pessimism of our times by exalting the cries wrung by anguish from a wretched invalid into the last and ripest fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever may be the case in Oriental countries, there has seldom been a pessimist in the West without some moral or physical malady which ought to have withheld him from assuming the part of an instructor of mankind; but Leopardi’s pessimism is not only morbid, but unmanly. The stress which he lays upon merely physical evils, such as heat and cold, hunger and thirst, would have moved the contempt of an ancient sage of any sect; and the contemporary of so many martyrs for their country admits no spring of human action but naked egotism. The grandeur and beauty of material nature, the sublime creations of man’s spirit, the teeming harvest of human virtues and affections, the tranquillising recognition of eternal order and controlling law, the marvellous course of the world’s history, when not ignored, are treated as the mere mockery and aggravation of the entirely imaginary background of blackness--a shining leprosy upon a hideous countenance. And yet the real nature of the man was quite different; his pessimism and egotism are simply the product of bodily suffering, of the wounded self-esteem and disappointed affections which followed in its train, and of the absence of any outlet for his surpassing intellectual powers.