these graces, are found in prose, how can you defend it? what is but vague in the one becomes unmeaning in the other. The crowd of common ideas, that your poets embellish by melody and by figures, is served up cold in your prose, with the most fatiguing pertinacity. The greatest portion of your present prose writers use a language so declamatory, so diffuse, so abounding in superlatives, that one would think they all dealt out the same accepted phrases by word of command, or by a kind of convention. Their style is a tissue, a piece of mosaic. They possess in its highest degree the art of inflating an idea, or frothing up a sentiment; one is tempted to ask them a similar question to that put by the negress to the Frenchwoman, in the days of hoop-petticoats, 'Pray, Madam, is all _that_ yourself?' Now, how much is real, beneath this pomp of words, which one true expression might dissipate like an idle dream?"--"You forget," interrupted Corinne, "first Machiavel and Boccaccio, then Gravina, Filangieri, and even, in our own days, Cesarotti, Verri, Bettinelli, and many others, who knew both how to write and how to think.[1] I agree with you, that, for the last century or two, unhappy circumstances having deprived Italy of her independence, all zeal for truth has been so lost, that it is often impossible to speak it in any way. The result is, a habit of resting content with words, and never daring to approach a thought. Authors, too sure that they can effect no change in the state of things, write but to show their wit--the surest way of soon concluding with no wit at all; for it is only by directing our efforts to a nobly useful aim that we can augment our stock of ideas. When writers can do nothing for the welfare of their country; when, indeed, their means constitute their end; from leading to no better, they double in a thousand windings, without advancing one step. The Italians are afraid of new ideas, rather because they are indolent than from literary servility. By nature they have much originality; but they give themselves no time to reflect. Their eloquence, so vivid in conversation, chills as they work; besides this, the Southerns feel hampered by prose, and can only express themselves fully in verse. It is not thus with French literature," added Corinne to d'Erfeuil: "your prose writers are often more poetical than your versifiers."--"That is a truth established by classic authorities," replied the Count. "Bossuet, La Bruyére, Montesquieu, and Buffon can never be surpassed; especially the first two, who belonged to the age of Louis XIV.; they are perfect models for all to imitate who can;--a hint as important to foreigners as to ourselves."--"I can hardly think," returned Corinne, "that it were desirable for distinct countries to lose their peculiarities; and I dare to tell you, Count, that, in your own land, the national orthodoxy which opposes all felicitous innovations must render your literature very barren.