In fact, Monti must have felt the extreme difficulty of the question. In England and France it is just to say, that the language of the well educated all over the country may serve for authority as to language. But the nobility and higher classes in Lombardy and Romagna all speak their unintelligible dialects among themselves; it is only with strangers, and when they write, that they have recourse to Italian. It is impossible, therefore, that what they compose by rule, after study and practice, can be the living language of a people in opposition to a dialect, if you will, which, with few omissions and some change of pronunciation, is the admiration of all who can appreciate the true beauties of style; which is remarkable for passion and fervour combined with concision and sweetness; for idiomatic phrases that realise and stamp as it were the thought, instead of a periphrastic expression which speaks of an idea or notion rather than giving expression to these themselves. Monti was right in throwing aside the classical shackles of the Della Crusca; but there is token in his letters that, in his heart, he at last acknowledged that there was more of the living spirit of true Italian abroad in the colloquial idiom of Tuscany, than in all the well-turned sentences and set phrases of the well educated of the rest of Italy. We cannot help thinking that Monti must have been very happy during the prosecution of these labours. An active mind abhors repose, when it must "cream and mantle like a standing pool." The aid and sympathy of his amiable and cultivated son-in-law must have shed an infinite charm over his labours, the zeal of his partisans have flattered, the attacks of his enemies have animated him. He believed that he was delivering his country from a superstition which clogged the springs of her literature, and choked up its free course. To a great degree he was in the right, and the proof is in the original and beautiful use made of his theory by the Italian authors of the present day.