It was a cruel injury to Italy that her greatest modern genius should have done so little for her regeneration, and that his writings, instead of inspiring a healthy public spirit, should rather tend to foster the selfish indifference and the despair of good which continue to be her principal bane. In two points of view, nevertheless, Leopardi rendered his country essential service. His sufferings, and the moral infirmities which they entailed, enabled him to represent in his own person, as no soundly-constituted man could have done, the unhappy Italy of his day. He seemed the living symbol of a country naturally favoured beyond all others, but racked and dismembered by foreign and domestic tyrants, the counterparts in the body politic of the maladies which crippled Leopardi’s energies, and distorted his views of man and nature. At the same time the transcendent excellence of his scanty literary performances raised Italian literature to a height which, Alfieri and Monti notwithstanding, it had not attained since Tasso, and in the midst of an epoch of servitude and subjugation gave Italians at least one thing of which they might justly be proud. The bulk of Leopardi’s writings, indeed, is diminutive, and the range of his ideas narrow; but within these limits he has approached absolute perfection more closely, not only than any other Italian, but than any modern writer. He is one of that small and remarkable class of men who have arisen here and there in recent Europe to reproduce each some peculiar aspect of the ancient Greek genius. As Shelley is a Greek by his pantheism, Keats by his feeling for nature, Platen by the architectonic of his verse, so is Leopardi by his impeccability. All the best Greek productions, whether of poetic or of plastic art, have this character of inevitableness: they can neither be better nor other than they are. It is not the same in romantic poetry. Shakespeare no doubt always chose the best path, but he always seems to have had the choice among a thousand. In almost everything of Leopardi’s, whether verse or prose, form and thought appear indissolubly interfused without the possibility of disjunction. This is eminently the case with his poems, perfect examples of lofty and sustained eloquence entirely uncontaminated by rhetoric. There are few thoughts which strike by their novelty, few elaborated similes, few phrases which stand forth in isolation from the environing text. All seems of a piece; but the words chosen are invariably the most apt to express the idea sought to be conveyed, and the stream of sentiment is as pellucid as it is impetuous. The same mastery is evinced in the descriptive passages, which never appear to exist for their own sakes, but as depicting the inner feeling of the poem by a visible symbol. Be the subject small or great, from the disappearance of a vast landscape at the setting of the moon, or the terrified peasant listening sleeplessly