_Poor souls! far off from all that they hold dear, And in a land that hates them! Who shall say That at the bottom of their hearts they bear Love for our tyrant? I should like to lay They’ve our hate for him in their pockets! Here, But that I turned in haste and broke away, I should have kissed a corporal, stiff and tall, And like a scarecrow stuck against the wall._ Affinities with Browning may be observed in these stanzas, and Browning meets Giusti half-way in _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_. Another popular poet claims a high and exceptional place in Italian letters, not so much from his poetical gift as from his vivid and uncompromising realism. The peculiar domain of GIOACCHINO BELLI (1791-1863) is the populace of Rome, whose humours, joys, and tragedies he has made his own. He has indeed competitors, but, as his editor Morandi observes, these are but as rivers to the sea in comparison with the fabulous opulence of Belli, who has depicted the life around him in more than two thousand sonnets, each in its way a little masterpiece. Almost all represent some scene in the life of the people, observed in his daily ramble, and versified upon his return home. For spirit and truth to nature most of them are almost comparable to Theocritus’s portrait of Praxinoe, and there is probably not another instance in the world of the life of a great city so perfectly delineated in verse, or of such an enormous collection of sonnets of so high an average of merit. The drawback to their general enjoyment is their inevitable composition in the Roman dialect, lively, coloured, and full of comic phrases, but uncouth and corrupt. Another important division of Belli’s work is the political sonnet, full of mordant satire on the abuses of the Papal government under Gregory XVI., not the less veracious because the author wished to recall it when the Catholic in him ultimately overcame the Liberal.