In his interpretation of nature he is literal, but withal truly poetic: he worships her in the concrete, but vituperates her in the abstract, as representative to him of omnipresent Deity, creative, but also destructive. The two or three poems that may be termed satirical, are at the same time half elegiac. In them he ridicules and censures the folly of his contemporaries, and mourns over the mystery of things. To these, however, there is one exception, the longest of all his poems. This is known as the "Continuation of the Battle of the Frogs and Mice," It consists of eight cantos, comprising about three thousand lines, and was first published posthumously. The abruptness of its ending gives the idea, erroneous or not, of incompleteness. Leopardi had, several years before, translated and versified Homer's "Batrachomyomachia," and this satire takes up the story where Homer ends. It is exclusively a ridicule of the times, with especial reference to his own country and her national enemy, Austria. In style and treatment it has been compared with Byron's "Don Juan," from which, however, it totally differs in its intrinsic character. It abounds in beauties of description, sentiment, and expression, and well deserves to be considered his _chef d'oeuvre_. Leopardi thus describes his method of poetic composition:-- "I compose only when under an inspiration, yielding to which, in two minutes, I have designed and organised the poem. This done, I wait for a recurrence of such inspiration, which seldom happens until several weeks have elapsed. Then I set to work at composition, bub so slowly that I cannot complete a poem, however short, in less than two or three weeks. Such is my method; without inspiration it were easier to draw water from a stone than a single verse from my brain." Leopardi's reputation was firmly established by the appearance of his "Operette morali," as his prose writings were termed. Monti classed them as the best Italian prose compositions of the century. Gioberti compared them to the writing of Machiavelli. Giordani, with his usual tendency to extravagance, gives his friend the following pompous panegyric:--"His style possesses the conciseness of Speroni, the grandiloquence of Tasso, the smoothness of Paruta, the purity of Gelli, the wit of Firenzuola, the solidity and magnificence of Pallavicino, the imagination of Plato, and the elegance of Cicero." Leopardi has been aptly termed an aristocrat in his writing. Too much of a reasoner to be very popular with the masses, who do not care for the exertion of sustained thought, his logic is strikingly clear to the intelligent. His periods are occasionally as long as those of Machiavelli or Guicciardini, but their continuity and signification are never obscure. Ranieri bears witness to the fact that his prose was the fruit of very great labour.