Conscious of the immense reputation he already possessed of vast erudition, his parents formed the hope that he would embrace the ecclesiastical career and rise to high dignities in the Roman Curia. When at last their consent was obtained for his departure from home in the hope that change would benefit his shattered nerves, it was to Rome that he was sent, doubtless with the desire that he should make acquaintances useful to him in the future. He resided with his maternal uncle, the Marquis Carlo Antici. But no sooner had he arrived in Rome than he regretted Recanati, and it became apparent that wherever he went, one of his most striking oddities was an intense horror of his place of residence, an utter loathing which he neither moderated nor concealed. If he called Recanati a dungeon, he called Rome a gigantic sepulchre. His shattered nerves could ill bear the concourse of people around him, and he saw in society, not its vivacity and animation, but its frivolity and emptiness. For the literary men of Rome he entertained immeasurable contempt. He despised them for their devotion to Antiquarian minutiæ. But this reproach came with ill-grace from Leopardi, who had himself devoted years of laborious study, who had even squandered the precious possession of health in laborious elucidation of grammatical and philological problems, hardly more important than the coins and inscriptions of Roman Antiquarians. He made, however, some agreeable acquaintances, pre-eminent among whom was the historian Niebuhr, at that time Prussian Ambassador to the Vatican. Niebuhr conceived the most intense admiration for his genius and spoke of him in the highest terms to Cardinal Consalvi, Secretary of State to Pius VII. The Cardinal offered him the prospect of valuable preferment, but only on condition that he should embrace the ecclesiastical career. To this, however, Leopardi offered invincible repugnance. Neither his own interests nor the persuasion of friends could induce him to yield. Pius VII died in 1823, and Consalvi retired from the direction of public affairs. So favourable an opportunity never returned. Niebuhr offered Leopardi an appointment in Prussia, but he refused, dreading the long journey and the severe climate of Berlin. Great as his reputation was, no other opening offered itself. It is curious to reflect on the vicissitudes of literary fame. Leopardi is now valued for his lyric poems and for his dialogues and thoughts in prose; but his laborious studies in philology, studies to which he sacrificed health and happiness, are rapidly sinking into oblivion. When he first went to Rome, he had hardly written a line of that which has conferred immortality upon him. All the esteem he enjoyed was lavished upon him for the fruits of his juvenile industry. The grammarian who could solve the most difficult passages in the ancient writers of Greece and Rome, who was as well versed in the Talmud as in