"Now harsh and crabbed, mild and pleasant soon; Always irascible, no malignant foe; My head and heart and I never in tune; Sad for the most part, then in such a flow Of spirits, I feel now hero, now buffoon; Man, art thou great or vile?--die, and thou 'It know."] MONTI 1754-1828. Monti is, without question, the greatest Italian poet that has appeared since the golden days of its poetry: he alone emulates his predecessors in the higher flights of the imagination. It has been pronounced of Dryden, that if each of the princes of poetry surpassed him in their peculiar vein, yet his fire and originality give him a near place beside them. Thus Monti has not the sublimity of Dante, nor the tenderness of Petrarch; neither the inventive flow of Ariosto, nor Tasso's epic conception and voluptuous grace: but he has a fervour, a power of imagery, an overflowing and redundance of ideal thought, that mark the genuine poet. He came to revive the languid and unnatural style that flourished under the reign of the Arcadians. Some few real poets had sprung up in Italy in the interval between Ariosto and Monti: they are recorded in this volume. Chiabrera and Filicaja are the chief. These men found in the inspiration of their own minds the power that led them to adopt a style of their own, and to bestow originality--which, in one shape or another, is the vivifying soul of composition,--on their productions. Metastasio carried clearness and grace of expression to a great perfection, but he wanted strength and daring: Alfieri had not a trace of that sunshiny and rainbow-like (so to speak) colour-giving power of fancy, without which there is no real poetry. For the rest, the poets of those days were Arcadians; the very word seems to express volumes of inane affectation, and turgid, yet soulless, language. It is thus that a clever Italian critic of the present day speaks of them:--"To the hyperboles and conceits of the seicentisti, succeeded the follies and pastorals of the Arcadians. The subject treated by these poets were restrained in narrow limits; they were all futile, trite, vulgar, or silly,--adulatory, or false. A new-married pair, a nun,--the new-born babe of some sovereign or noble,--the election of a cardinal, or a bishop, or even of an abbé--a funeral or a feigned love; such were the favourite themes of the Arcadians. Was a marriage in question,--Hymen was adjured to bring its chains to link two hearts; and a new Hercules or Achilles was prognosticated as the future result of the union. If a girl shut herself up in the cloister, the poets expatiated on her happiness; they described the heavenly bridegroom as descending and stretching out his hand to her, while the mischievous Cupid angrily threw away his golden quiver; a censurable mixture of sacred and profane imagery was thus introduced, and their ideas were steeped in two fountains, in contradiction one to the other, the Bible and mythology. The most