imagination, in the wilds of French and Spanish romance, then recently thrown open to their countrymen by Pulci and Boiardo. However enriched his mind in earlier youth might have been with knowledge of the dead languages--and we are required to believe that he had made a very promising Latin oration while he was a mere boy--he found, on returning to them, that he had lost so much as to need the help of a master to construe a fable of Æsop. But what he lost at law, he recovered at leisure, and added so much more to his stock; that he speedily became eminent among his contemporaries (at a time when Latin was more cultivated than Italian) for the critical skill; or, more probably; the quickness of apprehension and delicacy of taste; with which he elecidated obscure passages in Horace and Ovid. These appear to have been his favourite authors; and each of them; in the sequel; he not a little resembled; in their very dissimilar excellences. Under the tuition of Gregorio da Spoleti; a scholar of high repute; whom he has gratefully celebrated in the epistle to Bembo (Satire VI.); he so far perfected himself in the language of ancient Rome; that his verses in it were admired and commended by the greatest adepts in that factitious style of composition. It was the folly of the learned of that age and the preceding, to make Latin the universal language of writers who aimed at the honours of literature; a scheme so preposterous, that none but the learned could ever have stumbled upon it in their ignorance of every thing but what the relics of ancient books could teach them. To men of practical knowledge, it must have occurred, that all the fragments of Roman authors could, at the most, furnish a vocabulary comparatively small, and utterly inadequate to meet the demands of extending science, through new and ever-changing forms of society. Under such a servitude as made the Roman tongue itself pass under the Roman yoke, no phrase unauthorised by classic precedent could be hazarded, nor might a foreign word be engrafted upon the pure stock without appearing a barbarism. Meanwhile the very rhythm, accent, and pronunciation of the original being lost, scholars in every country were obliged to adapt these to the vernacular sounds of vowels and consonants among themselves; so that an Oxonian and a Tuscan, though they might understand each other by the eye on paper, would be nearly unintelligible by the ear and the living voice. It is manifest that nothing better than everlasting patchwork, of the same unchangeable materials, how diversely soever combined (like the patterns produced by the kaleidoscope, ever variable, yet little distinguishable from another), would have constituted the eloquence, poetry, and polite literature of modern Europe. No people would have suffered more than the Italians themselves, by employing a defunct and unimproveable tongue, in which their brightest geniuses must have been