The biography of Cellini, it is commonly said, is more interesting than any romance. It _is_ a romance, with the character of the hero fully brought out. Cellini lived in all the fulness of inward vigor, all the variety of outward adventure, and passed through all the signs of the Zodiac, in his circling course, occasionally raising a little vapor from the art magic. He was really the Orlando Furioso turned Goldsmith, and Angelicas and all the Peers of France joined in the show. However, he never lived deeply; he had not time; the creative energy turned outward too easily, and took those forms that still enchant the mind of Europe. Alfieri was very different in this. He was like the root of some splendid southern plant, buried beneath a heap of rubbish. Above him was a glorious sky, fit to develop his form and excite his colors; but he was compelled to a long and terrible struggle to get up where he could be free to receive its influence. Institutions, language, family, modes of education,--all were unfit for him; and perhaps no man was ever called to such efforts, after he had reached manly age, to unmake and remake himself before he could become what his inward aspiration craved. All this deepened his nature, and it _was_ deep. It is his great force of will and the compression of Nature within its iron grasp, where Nature was so powerful and impulsive, that constitutes the charm of his writings. It is the man Alfieri who moves, nay, overpowers us, and not his writings, which have no flow nor plastic beauty. But we feel the vital dynamics, and imagine it all. By us Americans, if ever such we really are to be, Alfieri should be held sacred as a godfather and holy light. He was a harbinger of what most gives this time its character and value. He was the friend of liberty, the friend of man, in the sense that Burns was--of the native nobleness of man. Soiled and degraded men he hated. He was, indeed, a man of pitiless hatred as of boundless love, and he had bitter prejudices too, but they were from antipathies too strongly intertwined with his sympathies for any hand less powerful than that of Death to rend them away. But our space does not permit us to do any justice to such a life as Alfieri's. Let others read it, not from their habitual, but an eternal point of view, and they cannot mistake its purport. Some will be most touched by the storms of his youth, others by the exploits and conquests of his later years; but all will find him, in the words of his friend Casella, "sculptured just as he was, lofty, strange, and extreme, not only in his natural characteristics, but in every work that did not seem to him unworthy of his generous affections. And where he went too far, it is easy to perceive his excesses always flowed from some praiseworthy sentiment." Among a crowd of thoughts suggested to the mind by reperusal of this book, to us a friend of many years standing, we hastily note the following:--