His _Operette Morali,_ as his Prose Works were not very appropriately entitled, did not receive that cordial welcome which their extraordinary beauties should have commanded. In his youth he was extolled up to the skies for his laborious erudition, but when he offered the public works of real originality and value, both in prose and verse, his gift was appreciated only by very gradual degrees. This may be partly explained by the fact that a great wave of Utilitarianism was passing over the country, a tendency against which he exclaims in a letter written to Giordani from Florence in 1828. "I am weary," he says, "of the haughty contempt which people here profess for the beautiful and for literature, especially as I do not think that the summit of human wisdom consists in the knowledge of politics and of statistics. On the contrary, when I consider philosophically the utter uselessness of the endeavours to obtain perfection of governments and happiness of nations, even from the days of Solon to our own, I cannot help smiling at this mania for political and legislative schemes and calculations, and I humbly ask how the happiness of nations can be obtained without the happiness of individuals? We are condemned to unhappiness by Nature, and not by our fellow-creatures or by Fate; and to console us for this inevitable unhappiness, I think nothing is better than the study of the beautiful, the cultivation of che affections, the flights of imagination, and the pleasures of our illusions. Therefore, I consider that all that pleases the mind is useful beyond ordinary things of use, and that literature is more truly useful than all those dry subjects which, even if they fulfilled their objects, would little help the true felicity of human beings, who are individuals, and not masses; but when do they really fulfil their objects?. . . . . . I hold (and not accidentally) that human society has inborn and necessary principles of imperfection, and that its condition can be more or less bad, but never perfect. From every point of view, to deprive men of that which is most delightful to the mind, appears to me the infliction of a real injury upon the human race." These words may be taken to heart at the present day as much as at the time when they were written. There are far too many people ready to cry down the pursuits of art and poetry, and it would be well to answer them with these arguments of one of the most powerful and original intellects that the human race has ever produced. CHAPTER XX. MANZONI.