other. If Racine had shown himself the weak slave of vanity and self-seeking during his secular career, he was really an humble Christian when he retired to Port Royal and the Jansenist doctors; and if Madame de Longueville had gratified both passion and pride at the expense of principle while shining on the world's stage, under the severe rule of the Jansenist confessor, M. Singlin, she largely atoned for her sins. We earnestly recommend M. Sainte-Beuve's work to all who desire to be more thoroughly and impartially acquainted with the society of the seventeenth century in France. They persuade us still more of the truth of M. Cousin's expression, "Dans un grand siècle tout est grand," and show also how diametrically the reverse of anything grand is the present age in France. 3 vols. ART. XII.-Opere di UGo FOSCOLO: Prose Letterarie. 4 vols. Prose Politiche. 1 vol. Epistolario. Poesie. 1 vol. Firenze: Felice Le Monnier. ONE day in the autumn of 1827, a Spanish ecclesiastic, two Englishmen, and two Italians followed the mortal remains of an illustrious stranger to the churchyard of Chiswick. They witnessed the decent but humble burial; and one of them caused a slab inscribed with the name of the deceased and the date of his birth and death to be placed over the grave. Such were the obsequies of a poet who had celebrated the sanctities of the tomb with an eloquent pathos such as endears the muse of Gray, who had touched and fired countless hearts in his youth by the romance of patriotism, and won the earnest attention of scholars in his prime by developing the innate felicities of a beautiful language, illustrating the best significance of a national literature, and weaving the classic imagery of Greece into the most fervid and finished expression of sentiment, fancy, and reflection; of one who had battled for Italian freedom and progress with sword and pen, had known fame and indigence, love and exile, admiration and calumny, luxury and bereavement, honors and isolation, intellectual triumph and social ostracism, hopelessness and resignation, like many of the gifted and the unfortunate, but felt them like the few; and who had signalized a life of remarkable vicissitudes by not less remarkable memorials, having scattered as he roamed and sojourned the Sibylline leaves of genius, - here a romance and there an elegy, now a political address and again a masterly translation, one day a tragedy and another a criticism, sometimes a sonnet full of tender beauty and then a satire of keen invective. These waifs and landmarks of genius, scholarship, and patriotism have at length been garnered up, and are eminently worthy of an appreciative examination. For, independently of their intrinsic claims, the places where their author lived and wrote, the persons with whom he associated, and the events in which he took part, make his literary bequest remarkably suggestive; while the wild, perverse, and morbid temperament of the man precluded entire justice to the author, until death had hallowed the memory of the one, and time established the merits of the other. The uniform series of his writings named at the head of this article has but recently appeared. In order to perform this act of justice to departed genius, the indefatigable editor went through a process such as we might imagine requisite only in the case of some ancient or obsolete writer,—the effect of vicissitude, censorship, wandering, exile, and a peculiar chirography, having been to scatter, mutilate, and modify the literary remains of Foscolo to such an extent, that infinite patience and assiduity alone could reconstruct, arrange, and make complete his writings. Not only were his works published in various places, one at Milan, another at Lugano, this in London and that at Zurich, with numerous unauthorized and spurious editions elsewhere; but his manuscripts were sought in different public depositories, and from widely-separated friends. The collation of these printed and written materials was a labor of no ordinary duration, and demanded the utmost skill and zeal for its accomplishment. Extinct periodicals, letters, scraps of reference in one place, and the suggestion of a friend in another, gradually supplied an hiatus or reconciled a discrepancy; and thus was brought together, in chronological order, and with the needful illustrations, the written testimony whereby we can estimate and enjoy the intellectual trophies of a life and a mind as extraordinary as they are suggestive and interesting. The associations of traffic, so wide and strong in this commercial era, have made the name of one of the Ionian Islands familiar in our large maritime cities; the very children soon learn that the saccharine little plums which stud their holiday cakes are imported from Zante. Of the fair group it is the fairest in aspect and not the least productive. From the fortress which rises above the town an almost Sicilian landscape greets the eye,-green and golden with orange-groves, vineyards, and olive-orchards, with patches of volcanic soil that nourish mineral tar and petroleum and sulphur, — an undulating surface, here uplifted into picturesque hills, and there lapsing into emerald valleys, a soil warmed by intense summer heats, more prolific in wine and oil, cotton and silk, than in corn, which latter harvest is inadequate to the wants of the population, a mixed race, at the beginning of the century including many Italians and Jews, their common language long a corrupt idiom of the Italian, but now modern Greek. The coast is rugged; the climate variable. Earthquakes have left their sullen traces there, so that the dwellings, from considerations of safety, are constructed low, in part of light and in part of substantial materials. A fine harbor invites commerce. With the Southern fertility and warmth there is the Southern superstition. For centuries the Venetians held Zante, and, after being taken successively by the French and Russians, the island was merged in the socalled Ionian Republic, under the protecting banner of St. George. The Greek and Italian elements, both of nature and character, the picturesque isolation, the long and intimate relation to the old city of the sea, with its grand trophies of conquest and of art, the mingled tongues, the political vicissitudes of Zante, not inadequately symbolize the career and the genius of Ugo Foscolo, whose mother was a native of the island, whose childhood was passed there, and in whose temperament and character we can trace both the wildness and the exuberance, the Italian glow and the Greek precision, the volcanic energy and the serene expression, impassioned yet harmonious, which as it were assimilate the genius and disposition of the scholar and the poet with the human and the local traits of his early home. As if to complete the analogy, it was on board a ship, during her transit from Venice to Zante, that Foscolo was born. His father was a surgeon of the latter city, who practised his vocation in the former; and thus the future bard and critic derived from his parentage the old Italian republican blood, the insular quickness and fire, the associations and the language which connect the highest ancient with the richest modern culture. Thus he might be justly regarded as a Greek; but however strong his Grecian affinities as a scholar, his development, like his nativity, was Italian, for such were his education and his sympathies, while the name is derived from an ancient family of Venice; her flag waved over his birth, and he was proud to claim her as his country. The maternal isle had long been severed from Greece, though his mother was an Ionian, and with her he lisped Romaic in childhood. But independent of the mere local accidents of birth, Foscolo's devotion to Italy, her traditions, her regeneration, her literature, was so absolute, that, had he no lineal claim to rank among her sons, he might be so classed by virtue of his representative character; for it is difficult to indicate a modern writer of that nation who, by his style, aspirations, and sentiment, so distinctly embodies the national genius in literature, and revives, under an original guise, the scholarship and the muse consecrated from Dante to Alfieri. We can appreciate the complacency with which he alludes to the memorable waters between the natal shores of his father and mother, ebbi in quel mar la culla. - Four years elapsed. The father died, and young Foscolo with his surviving parent returned to Venice. Amid the Byzantine architecture and the silent canals, the palaces radiant with Titian's color, the piazza alive with intrigue and comedy, the mysterious political traditions, the mercurial life, the music, marbles, and decay of that unique city, he passed a boyhood singularly contrasted with the infancy so remote from metropolitan civilization,― guarded and warmed by maternal love, nourished by magnificent memorials of the past, such as kindle in imaginative natures a profound nationality of sentiment, which in this case was hallowed by domestic sanction. Then the youth repaired to Padua for academic education. Although Continental travellers seldom remain more than a few hours at this once regular halting-place on the road to Venice, even that brief period, if judiciously employed, reveals singular attractions to one alive to literary and local associations. The scholar remembers with delight that Livy was born in Padua. Perchance in the spacious café, which in Italy combines the conveniences of the club with the social charm of the conversazione, he meets a professor or student, who affably enacts the cicerone. But, even if left to his solitary stroll and his pedantic guide-book, he cannot fail to note with zest the architecture of the University, designed by Palladio, the monument to Petrarch in the Cathedral, and the Madonna by Giotto, of which Petrarch was the fond proprietor, or to linger before his portrait, which, with those of the other canons, graces the sacristy; nor will the statue of Cardinal Bembo in the Church of St. Antonio fail to win his regard, or Shakespeare's allusions to the scene to haunt his memory. When from these trophies and fancies he reverts to the intellectual discipline which a youth, half a century ago, received here, it may appear too scholastic and technical, in contrast with the more varied culture of our day, to exert any special influence upon a select intelligence. When Foscolo began his studies at Padua, the minds even of cloistered students were stirred by the new civic life of the age; the spirit of innovation and of reform had penetrated the most conservative nooks of study; fresh and fervid minds found the materials and the motive for original achievement; and the ardent and gifted neophyte, free in his aspirations as the element whereon he first drew breath, by a happy coincidence, met teachers above the despotism of routine. It is true that this new range was rather in the medium than in the substance of learning; it dealt with language more than with thought; but so intimate is the relation of the two, that intrepidity of expression is closely VOL. XCI. NO. 188. 19 |