It was the fortune of Monti, as I have said, to sing all round and upon every side of every subject, and he was governed only by knowledge of which side was for the moment uppermost. If a poem attacked the French when their triumph seemed doubtful, the offending verses were erased as soon as the French conquered, and the same poem unblushingly exalted them in a new edition;--now religion and the Church were celebrated in Monti's song, now the goddess of Reason and the reign of liberty; the Pope was lauded in Rome, and the Inquisition was attacked in Milan; England was praised whilst Monti was in the anti-French interest, and as soon as the poet could turn his coat of many colors, the sun was urged to withdraw from England the small amount of light and heat which it vouchsafed the foggy island; and the Rev. Henry Boyd, who translated the _Bassvilliana_ into our tongue, must have been very much dismayed to find this eloquent foe of revolutions assailing the hereditary enemy of France in his next poem, and uttering the hope that she might be surrounded with waves of blood and with darkness, and shaken with earthquakes. But all this was nothing to Monti's treatment of the shade of poor King Louis XVI. We have seen with how much ceremony the poet ushered that unhappy prince into eternal bliss, and in Mr. Boyd's translation of the _Bassvilliana_, we can read the portents with which Monti makes the heavens recognize the crime of his execution in Paris. Then from their houses, like a billowy tide, Men rush enfrenzied, and, from every breast Banished shrinks Pity, weeping, terrified. Now the earth quivers, trampled and oppressed By wheels, by feet of horses and of men; The air in hollow moans speaks its unrest; Like distant thunder's roar, scarce within ken, Like the hoarse murmurs of the midnight surge, Like the north wind rushing from its far-off den. * * * * * Through the dark crowds that round the scaffold flock The monarch see with look and gait appear That might to soft compassion melt a rock; Melt rocks, from hardest flint draw pity's tear,-- But not from Gallic tigers; to what fate, Monsters, have ye brought him who loved you dear? It seems scarcely possible that a personage so flatteringly attended from the scaffold to the very presence of the Trinity, could afterward have been used with disrespect by the same master of ceremonies; yet in his Ode on Superstition, Monti has later occasion to refer to the French monarch in these terms: The tyrant has fallen. Ye peoples Oppressèd, rise! Nature breathes freely. Proud kings, bow before them and tremble; Yonder crumbles the greatest of thrones! (_Repeat_.) There was stricken the vile perjurer Capet, (He will only give Louis his family name!)