There has been a tendency to indulge in glaring, tawdry effects, from which the Eighteenth Century was commendably free. But, on the whole, it would be unjust to deny that the Nineteenth Century offers a striking panorama of stirring events and great and memorable authors. CHAPTER XIX. LEOPARDI. It is not often that a writer towers so immeasurably above his contemporaries, that we can point him out, without fear of contradiction, as the greatest of his century. We can, however, unhesitatingly do so in the case of Leopardi. The works to which he owes his immortality are, indeed, few in number and short in extent, but their perfection gives them a dignity which more voluminous productions might emulate in vain. GIACOMO LEOPARDI was born at Recanati, a town of the March of Ancona, on the 29th of June, 1798, the eldest son of Count Monaldo Leopardi and Adelaide, his wife, daughter of the Marquis Antici. He had three brothers, Carlo, Luigi, and Pierfrancesco, and one sister, Paolina. His father was a man of literary tastes and had a magnificent library, in which the future poet quenched his thirst for knowledge with as much ardour as did Magliabecchi, in a former age, in the library of Cardinal Medici. He soon outstripped in learning the priests who were entrusted with his education. His eager and independent mind spurned direction and disdained moderation. He acquired many languages, and he soon endeavoured to put on paper the result of his studies. Some of his injudicious admirers tried to make an infant prodigy of him, and the stimulus of vanity was added to his passion for knowledge. He toiled day after day in his intellectual quarry, with no relaxation except the absolute necessities of food and sleep. The result may be imagined. His sight failed him from the merciless strain put upon it by reading till late hours of night, often by a flickering candle burnt down to its socket. His spine became curved from constantly bending over the huge folios that formed the staple of his reading. His lungs craved in vain for dilation in his cramped chest and for the freshness of the open air. His nerves gave way, his food failed to nourish him, and his strength at last collapsed so completely that he could neither read nor write, nor even think or speak. From the age of sixteen to twenty-one the mischief was done. The duty of his parents was plain. They should from the beginning have sternly forbidden the overwork, and have compelled him to take requisite exercise and rational amusement. Unhappily, they seem rather to have encouraged the overwork, and actually to have discountenanced all amusement and all intercourse with the outer world. They cannot be acquitted of grave errors of judgment, but it would be harsh to charge them with cruelty. Monaldo was devotedly attached to his children, but it would have been better if he had sent them to school and college, where they would have