Yet it is, perhaps, matter of regret that Monti should have been thus employed. It is very difficult to make rules for the education of genius, when, on the one hand, care and want may fetter, and even crush, its loftiest aspirations; or too much case and leisure wean it from habits of industry, and foster the dissipation of thought and feeling which too frequently accompanies the poetic temperament. Monti's muse had surely not been silent if he had remained in his father's farm, surrounded by the luxuriant beauty of nature, and supported by conscious worth and independence. But no people need so much sympathy as poets. The interchange of thought and feeling, the fresh spirit of inquiry and invention, that springs from the collision or harmony of different minds, are with them a necessity and a passion. And though solitude is named the mother of all that is truly sublime, yet this solitude ought not to be that of desolation, but retirement to meditate on the stores heaped up in our intercourse with our fellow-creatures. Monti, among the uncultivated peasantry of Romagna, might have found his glowing enthusiasm grow cool from the absence of appreciation, and the want of sympathy and equal intercourse. Yet servitude at the court of Rome was no good moral school. To the years he spent in the service of the pope's nephew, the habits of dependence, and his daily intercourse with courtiers, may be attributed that want of political integrity, and ready worship of ruling powers, which was the great blot of Monti's character. The genuine glow of real talent, the ambition natural to conscious genius, and the instinct of one, in whom invention and the power of expression were indigenous, to pour forth his ideas and sentiments, qualities which indefeasibly belonged to him, would, in almost any situation, have made Monti a writer. He might have been less refined in the farms of Romagna, but more useful as a moral and dignified asserter of truth and independence. Yet we must reflect that the germ of each man's character is born with him, to be checked or fostered by education, but still there to colour the tide of thought and influence the motives of conduct. And as independence and strength of principle never displayed themselves as a part of Monti's character, temptation might have found him as willing a slave in the poverty of his farm as in the luxurious servitude of papal Rome.