THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-1. Opere di Giacomo Leopardi. Edizione accresciuta, ordinata, e corretta, secondo l' ultimo intendimento dell' autore, da Antonio Ranieri. Tomi II. Firenze. 1845. 2. Di Giacomo Leopardi Volume Terzo. Studii Filologici, raccolti e ordinati da Pietro Pellegrini e Pietro Giordani. Firenze. 1845. 3. Di Giacomo Leopardi Volume Quarto. Saggio sopra gli Errori Popolari degli Antichi. Pubblicato per cura di Prospero Viani. Firenze. 1846. 4. Epistolario di Giacomo Leopardi. Raccolto e ordinato da Prospero Viani. Tomi II. Firenze. 1849. 5. Poesie di Giacomo Leopardi. Napoli. 1849. GE ENIUS, unless guided by a malignant spirit, has an indefeasible claim to our sympathy in its reverses, and in its achievements to our fervid admiration: nor is there any more touching, any more instructive lesson, than such as are afforded by its failures in the attempt to realise, out of its own resources and without the aid of Divine revelation, either intellectual contentment or a happy life. In the writings of Leopardi there are other sources of pathetic interest: the misfortunes of his country, both its political and social, and its religious misfortunes, and his own personal difficulties and calamities, have stamped their image indelibly upon his works, and may be traced, not only in the solemn and impassioned verses, or in the mournful letters, of which they are more or less directly the theme, but in the tone which pervades the whole. We believe it may be said without exaggeration, that he was one of the most extraordinary men whom this century has produced, both in his powers, and likewise in his performances, achieved as they were under singular disadvantage. For not only did he die at thirty-eight, almost nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, and at the time when most great men are but beginning the efforts which have stamped them with that character; but likewise, Heaven's unimpeached decrees' in his case nearly— 'Made that shortened span one long disease.'* * From Mr. Canning's Verses on the Death of his Eldest Son. VOL. LXXXVI. NO. CLXXII. X By By the time he was seventeen, he had destroyed by the ardour and intensity of his studies the very foundations of health and strength. From that year forward he was an invalid, with intervals of remission, progressively growing shorter, and very frequently under acute pain or most severe nervous depression; and his sight fell into so deplorable a state, that for more than a twelvemonth from March, 1819, he was totally unable to read, and nearly so to write. The life thus wasted by disease was moreover frightfully oppressed by melancholy-not a melancholy ad libitum, gentle and ladylike, but one that was deeply seated both in physical and moral causes. He writes at eighteen: A tutto questo aggiunga l' ostinata, nera, orrenda, barbara malinconia, che mi lima e mi divora, e collo studio s' alimenta, e senza studio s'accresce ; and, as we shall see, advancing time brought with it no alleviation. With a life thus limited, and only the first moiety of it available in the ordinary degree for study, Count Giacomo Leopardi amassed great stores of deep and varied learning, proved himself to be possessed of profound literary judgment, exquisite taste, and a powerful imagination; and earned in his own country the character summed up in the words of one of his editors, as sommo filologo, sommo poeta, e sommo filosofo. He was born on the 29th of June, 1798, at Recanati in the March of Ancona, the eldest son of Count Monaldo Leopardi, himself in some sense a man of letters, but of temperament and opinions the most opposite to those of Giacomo. He had for his tutors two priests, who instructed him in Latin and in the elements of philosophy; but he had no teacher or adviser of any kind in his studies after his fourteenth year, and it is plain that he had outstripped his nominal guides long before it. A French writer asserts that he began Greek at eight, his tutors rendering him no aid, but with the grammar of Padua in his hand. continues with naïveté, and we doubt not with truth: l'enfant jugea cette grammaire insuffisante, et décidé à s'en passer, il se mit à aborder directement les textes qu'il trouvait dans la Bibliothèque de son père. We are involuntarily reminded of Hermes, respecting whom it is recorded in the Homeric hymn that— * ἠφος γεγονώς, μέσῳ ἤματι ἐγκιθάριζεν, ἑσπέριος βοῦς κλέψεν ἑκηβόλου Απολλῶνος. He He says himself that not later than when he had just completed his tenth year, he commenced the course of study which he calls matto e disperatissimo, not only without a teacher, but without the faintest suggestion for his guidance, without encouragement, * Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept. 15, 1844. without without sympathy. Yet at sixteen years of age he had become master, not merely of the whole range of the literature properly termed classical, but of a large portion of the works of the later Greek and Latin authors of different schools-and he was also extensively conversant, at least in certain departments, with the works of the Fathers of the Church. That is to say, he had not merely read and understood these authors, but he composed in 1815 a work entitled Saggio sopra gli Errori Popolari degli Antichi, and forming the fourth volume of this collection, which showed that he had a mastery of their contents and a facility in the use of them, such as few men of any generation have attained even in their mature years. In the meantime the study of other languages was not neglected. In his own tongue, above all except the Greek, he was training his exquisite critical faculties, and was growing to be profoundly acquainted with its scholarship and one of its very best prose writers. But he also gathered as he went along a knowledge of French, English, Spanish, German, and Hebrew. The volumes before us contain evidence that he composed with ease, at any rate in the two first of these languages. In or about his eighteenth year, his critical collections in MS. amounted to six or seven large volumes; and though it is unsafe in general to measure by quantity, any reader of his works will be aware that he was absolutely incapable of writing trash. In 1817 he heard that some literary foreigner, whose name is not mentioned, had sent him word that he might become a great philologian. Before that time he was solely sustained and stimulated by that inborn consciousness of genius which lives and works long before it speaks, and by a presentiment of greatness from which modesty was by no means excluded. Thus he writes in September of the same year to Giordani :— 'Sure I am that I have no disposition to live in the crowd: mediocrity frightens me to death: my wish is to soar, and to become great and immortal by genius and by study: an enterprise arduous, and perhaps for me visionary-but man must not be faint-hearted nor despair of himself.' May his words be as a spark to light up similar aspirations in the breasts of English youth, but under better auspices, with better safeguards, and for a happier end. To estimate aright the magnitude of his efforts and successes, particularly with regard to Greek, the literary atmosphere, so to speak, in which he lived must be taken into account. From the volumes before us it would appear that this noble study, so widely spread in some countries of Europe, is not only neglected, but is within x 2 · within a few degrees of utter extinction in Italy. Giordani, in giving his reasons for not reprinting a remarkable work of Leopardi's, states that in Italy it would be rather hopeless than simply difficult to find a competent printer for a work almost wholly Greek; and to find so many as five readers for it quite impossible.' The errors in the Greek typography of the volumes before us, and even of the errata appended to them, give some colour to the statement. Another of Leopardi's editors, Pellegrini, assures us that not only the works but the names of the German philologians were unknown throughout Italy at the time, and seems to speak of a thorough knowledge of Greek as being still next door to a miracle there. There is probably exaggeration in these testimonies, and it is fair to observe that the very work to which Giordani refers was twice printed at Rome, while the Chronicle of Eusebius, on which it was a commentary, proceeded from the Milanese press. Leopardi himself, however, writes from Rome to his father in 1822, that all learning except such as is archæological was utterly neglected in that city, which it is plain is very far from being the literary capital of Italy; and adds, 'the best of all is, that one does not find a single Roman who is really master of Latin and Greek,' though he has met with some learned foreigners-ben altra cosa che i Romani. The most pungent evidence of all perhaps is, that when preparing the Preface to his Saggio' in 1815, the boy takes care to apprise his readers, that he has translated exactly from the original into Italian all his Greek citations, putting those from the poets into verse. He dealt with them as in this country a writer would deal with citations from the Sanscrit; and it is scarcely too much to say, that in order to estimate aright the energy of character and of intellect required for such efforts as his, not merely in Italy but at Recanati, we must conceive a child among us scarcely yet in trowsers, setting himself to Sanscrit, and acquiring it without a master in less than half the time that the most promising pupils would generally spend upon it, with all the apparatus and all the inspiring associations of learned society and of suitable establishments to assist them. His literary life divides itself into two great periods: the first of them occupied by his philological labours and by translations from the classical poets, the second chiefly by poetry and philosophy. The division is not minutely accurate; but his first poem of any note was written in 1817: he only published three of his odes before the year 1824, and he had then written but little poetry; he had for some years before that, from the state of his sight as we suppose, almost entirely ceased from his philological labours, labours, and had already designated them as the studies of his boyhood. And all his efforts in philosophy belong to the later division of his life, which begins about the last-named year. The earliest composition among his published works is the 'Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients,' dated in the year 1815, and written therefore in his 17th or early in his 18th year. It is remarkable not only for the quantity of erudition, classical and patristic, which he had even then accumulated-his editor has appended a list of near four hundred authors whom he cites-but for the facility with which he handles his materials, and with which also he philosophises upon them. Homage is emphatically rendered in this work to the Christian religion: the youthful author tells us that unbelief had generated worse prejudices than had ever sprung from credulity, and that the name of philosopher had become odious with the sounder part of mankind; he declares Christianity to be the second mother of our race, and asserts that the true Church had ever condemned superstition, against which she is the true and the only bulwark. And yet we see a baleful shadow projected even at this early period over his future, where he eulogises Voltaire as that standard-bearer of bold minds, that man so devoted to reason and so hostile to error.' The time was too near at hand when he would be prepared to subscribe that scoffer's words : O Jupiter, tu fis en nous créant But what strange idea and stranger practice of education must prevail, where the admiration of Voltaire as an apostle of true reason grows up peacefully in the mind of a boy, side by side with the admiration of the Church of Rome as the unsparing foe of superstition! The only specimens of original composition in Greck verse (in Latin there are none) which these volumes afford, are two Anacreontic odes, written in 1817. We doubt whether they justify the panegyric of Giordani, Per verità neppure esso Anacreonte le potrebbe discernere tra le sue proprie figliuole. They would, we suppose, when cleared of some inaccuracies, probably due to defective typography, be termed good exercises at Eton, but no more; and this is among the easiest descriptions of Greek composition. More remarkable, we think, were his translations from the Greek. In 1815 he published a complete translation of Moschus, with a learned and acute discourse prefixed to it, containing among other things a severe criticism upon the affected and licentious manner of certain French translations of his works and those of Anacreon. He was, however, at all times a sharper critic to himself than to any other author. He says, while yet a youth, |