very antipodes of his immortal master, Petrarch. Alfieri is a great tragedian: it is impossible to read his best dramas without being carried away by the eloquence and passion of the dialogue, and deeply interested by the situations of struggle or peril in which his personages are placed. The rapidity of the action, and the earnestness and life with which every scene is instinct, renders it impossible to close the volume till the catastrophe ends all. Alfieri was also an excellent prose writer: his treatise on "Princes and Literature" is full of power; the style is correct, flowing, yet simple, and without meretricious ornament. The pure spirit of independence burns like a holy lamp throughout, and gives a charm to every sentiment and expression. But never was line so distinctly drawn between the poetry of circumstance, so to speak, and ideal poetry: In all the pages of Alfieri there is not one imaginative image; and we feel this most in his lyrics, since ideality is the soul of lyric poetry. He seems never to have been conscious of this defect. He would readily have admitted that Dante and Petrarch were superior to him in genius; but he seems unaware that they possessed a quality of which not one glimmering ray is to be found in the whole course of the flood of rhymes to the composition of which he alludes frequently as being the overflowings of poetic inspiration. It is possible that Alfieri might have been a great novelist, had he ever turned his attention to that species of composition. Or had he continued to invent, instead of drying his brain up with the irksome task of correcting what he had already written, he might have bestowed on us tragedies finer than any we have of his, or, at least, several equal to the "Saul." But, with all his philosophy and self-examination, he did not understand the texture and capabilities of his intellect.