We wonder as we read. There is fire, sublimity, and power in every line. Can these be inspired, as we are assured by Monti's friends, by the mere desire of acquiring the loaves and fishes, if not for himself individually, for his wife and daughter? Are the shadowy forms which he invests with so much beauty--the conceptions into which he infuses so much energy and seeming sincerity--the mere playthings of his thought, and not the genuine offspring of a mind teeming and overflowing with a sense of usefulness and truth? We cannot believe it; we are so apt to forget what our feelings were when the occasion that called them forth has vanished like morning mist. When Napoleon fell, men forgot the wonder and admiration with which they had regarded him during his prosperity. He had come on the time-worn world like an incarnation of the memories of antiquity. The greatest sovereigns, who traced their descent from the middle ages--the thrones of the world, so long the objects of worship and fear--the crowns and sceptres which had been looked upon as the sacred and inviolable symbols of divine right--were all at his feet, dispossest, transferred, and broken. It could be no wonder that men looked upon the cause of these things as something prodigious and superhuman. Monti may be excused that he joined in the common feeling of awe and admiration; while, afterwards, seeing how little good arose from the breaking up of the ancient tyrannies, and how the indomitable will of one man was enforced by means of treachery and slaughter, he might forget that he could ever have been so blinded, and fancy that acknowledged fear was the cause of an inspiration which really sprung from the slavish worship of success, which is too naturally inherent in human beings. Although Monti brought forward this disingenuous plea to excuse his celebration of the hero of the age, he was sincere in one feeling,--an attachment to the offspring of his brain, and in the indignation he felt against those who depreciated his poetic merits. The "Sword of Frederic" was attacked by the critics with great asperity, and he replied with still greater acrimony. He had been charged with mannerism and sameness, especially in the machinery of his poems, in which visions, spectres, and cloudy spiritual essences play for ever a principal part. He would not allow this to be a defect, and railed at the unimaginative minds who conceived it to be such. He tries to be jocose in his indignation, but his laugh is bitter; and he heaps the accusations of ill faith and envy, as well as of ignorance and bad taste, on those who attack him. There may be justice in this, but there is no dignity. There is always a degree of degradation in noticing the enmity of a race of ephemera, and not calmly relying on the award of the public.