Leopardi’s prose works, his correspondence and philological essays excepted, are, like his poetry, limited in extent and in range of subject, but incomparable for refinement and beauty of form. He deemed a perfect prose more beautiful and more difficult of achievement than poetry of like rank, and related to it as the undraped figure to the figure clothed. The most remarkable of his prose writings are the Dialogues, which almost all turn upon the everlasting theme of the misery of mankind, varied in the exposition with a grace and fanciful ingenuity recalling the little apologues in Turgenev’s _Senilia_. In one, Mercury and Atlas play at ball with the earth, become light as tinder by internal decay and the extinction of life; in another, the earth and the moon compare notes on the infelicity of their respective inhabitants; in another, Momus and Prometheus descend to earth to investigate the success of the latter’s philanthropic inventions, which have answered Momus’s expectations better than his; in another, Tasso’s familiar genius promises to make him happy in the only possible manner, by a pleasing dream. Comparison is continually suggested with two great writers, Lucian and Pascal, and Leopardi sustains it worthily. Inferior to Lucian in racy humour, to Pascal in keenness of sarcasm, he surpasses both in virtue of the poetical endowment which nature had utterly denied to them. In form he comes nearest to Lucian, in spirit to Pascal. Lucian, a healthy four-square man, robust in common-sense, little given to introspection and untroubled by sensitiveness, is constitutionally very unlike Leopardi; but it might be difficult to establish a closer parallel than between the Italian and the French recluse; both very sparing but very choice writers; exquisite scholars in classics and mathematics respectively; both hopeless pessimists because hopeless invalids; the keenest and most polished intellects of their time, and yet further astray on the most momentous subjects than many a man “whose talk is of bullocks.” Leopardi has the advantage in so far that his scorn of man never degenerates into misanthropy, and his negation is better than Pascal’s superstition.