valuable privilege to bestow help upon those in want of the necessaries of life, and Vincenzo in particular inherited from them a warm heart and a tenderness of feeling that caused him to be idolised in his domestic circle. Monti passed his early boyhood in this rural retirement. To the end of his life he remembered with fondness the days of his childhood, which were spent gaily amidst a large family of three brothers, older than himself, and five sisters. The reward for good behaviour among them was a permission to distribute charity among the indigent,--a sacred, soul-saving duty with catholics. The well-known benevolence of his parents drew numbers to their house, where portions of food were distributed to them. His mother never felt so happy as when thus engaged; and it is related of her that, when, a few years after, the family removed to Majano, where their charitable habits were at first unknown, she complained in a sort of alarm that they were no longer visited by the poor. The same biographer relates a story of Vincenzo. On one occasion he was permitted to distribute the portions of food to mendicants, who entered at one door and went out at the other: some among them fancied that they could deceive the child, and returned twice; and he, with ingenuous shame, turned away, and gave to them twice without looking, that he might not be obliged to accuse them of their trick. "An anecdote," continues his biographer, "perhaps scarcely worth relating, only that it describes the character, or rather, it may be said, the whole life of Monti, who, even in old age, frequently suffered himself voluntarily to be imposed upon." Were a philosophical analysis of Monti's disposition to be attempted, it might be discovered how this sensitiveness to the shame of others, this sparing of their feelings in preference to the assertion of truth and honesty, makes a part of the same weakness that led him always to regard as a secondary consideration moral truths and political integrity, when put in competition with the happiness and welfare of his domestic circle. We call this sort of sensibility weakness, because, though usually united to great private rectitude of character, it is incompatible with the heroism of the patriot and the martyr.