1861.]

far from being stationary, is borne over land and sea, to be reproduced in every quarter of the globe, and to endure, we may suppose, so long as the earth itself shall endure.

To some minds there is a justifiable cause for alarm in this intense love of investigation and this wide diffusion of knowledge. They are in perpetual dread lest the discoveries of physical science should come into collision with divine revelation. But while we advocate ever a reverential investigation into the secret things of the material world, we would venture to ask whether the very sensitiveness of such men, springing though it does out of a good motive, may not in its excess injure the very cause of divine truth which they are so anxious to maintain? We will not call this, as Lord Macaulay does in the well-known anecdote of the missionary, a blundering piety; but it is often prejudicial in its effects. There will be found no discrepancy whatever between the terms of revelation and the discoveries of physical science which the sincerest Christian may not willingly allow. It resolves itself mainly into a question of words. It is not the purpose of divine

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revelation to teach the laws of physical science. Revelation, strictly speaking, is concerned only with matters above the investigation of unaided reason: the hidden things of creation are properly left for the exercise of the reasoning faculties alone. Why reveal what is not essential to our eternal welfare, and what our intellect can sufficiently explore for any needful purpose? Whatever statements are made in Scripture on natural laws are but incidental to the main design, and were clearly intended to be in consistency with the intellectual advancement of the people to whom they were addressed. Could it have been otherwise? Would not scientific explanations have been the means of darkening spiritual knowledge? Should we not have suspected the genuineness of a writing which propounded certain minute laws of astronomy, for example, in scientific terms some thousands of years before they could be comprehended? The language of Scripture in the merely subordinate description of natural phenomena is evidently addressed to the eye, and senses, and comprehension of men in their existing state.

R. L.

1861.]

Ghibeline; the other romantic, and wholly Guelf. The seat of the second, and till 1848 perhaps the most important of these schools, was the capital of Lombardy. Fast bound by the chains of Austria, the intelligent men of Milan were prone to remember only the evils which were nearest to them. They had no experience of Roman tyranny, and forgot that, bad as the soldierruler is, the priest in power is even more detestable. The greatest of modern Guelfs is Alessandro Manzoni. Born in 1784, he still survives, and the Government of Victor Emmanuel has treated the illustrious old man with the respect which he so well merits. His name takes us far back, for his mother was the daughter of Beccaria. In 1810 he married a native of Geneva, and came under the religious influence of that remarkable little city. The result was curious, though sufficiently intelligible. His wife abandoned the Protestant faith, while Manzoni accepted Christianity in the form of Roman Catholicism, and has ever since been the head of the Italian movement which corresponds to that of Novalis, La Motte Fouqué, or Frederick Schlegel in Germany, and of the year 1833 in England. He was the greatest but not the first romanticist in Italy. Berchet, the translator of Bürger's Leonora, and the author of Marco Visconti, was the first Italian who declared himself against the traditions of the eighteenth century. To this distinguished company belong also Grossi, the poet and novelist — Pellico, best known in this country by a book which was written after his spirit was broken by Austrian brutality-and Giorgio Pallavicino, whose name has, in these last months, again become famous, though happily no longer as a martyr, with whom we may class the whole group of eminent men who were hurried by the events of 1820 into exile or captivity.

But the Guelfic school was not confined to Lombardy. Its influence spread. The Piedmontese Gioberti was one of its most ardent disciples. This eminent man, whose

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statue now looks proudly across the Piazza Carignano to the meeting-place of the first Italian Parliament, was one of those who, living in times of rapid changes, never attain quite to see their way, and whose views in consequence soon become out of date. He began as a zealous Catholic. He hated Byron-he hated France. He believed that the regeneration of Italy, and the establishment of its political and moral supremacy, was to come from the Vatican. For a short period after the appearance of his book Del Primato, he was eulogized even by the Jesuits. Everywhere the clergy were on his side. 'See,' they said to the Tuscan peasants as he passed through their villages, 'there is the teacher of Pius the Ninth.' But Gioberti, although he loved the Roman Church, loved Italy even better. He was himself undeceived, even perhaps before the Pope had ceased to read Del Primato; and before he died he had wandered far away from his old beliefs, while his books were one and all placed in the Index Expurgatorius-even those which had been approved by Gregory XVI.

Balbo, who belongs to the same category as Gioberti, published his Speranze d'Italia in 1844, and the brilliant Massimo d'Azeglio, sonin-law to Manzoni, fought by their side, with weapons slighter indeed, but of more ethereal temper. We should have added to the Lombards the historian Cesare Cantù, somewhat Liberal, but very Catholic, and for this reason not much loved or respected, although he too had his year of imprisonment.

Far away from Milan and Piedmont, under other influences, the virtuous Rosmini worked in the same direction. Born of a noble race in the Tyrol, he became a priest in opposition to the wishes of his family, but declined the offer of a Cardinal's hat, which was made to him while he was still young, preferring a less conspicuous career. Charitable and devoted, he went about doing good in a humble sphere, till the death of his father, when he established

himself in Rome, where his numerous philosophical works soon made him famous. His dream was a universal theocracy, uniting in the bonds of love the whole human race. Strange that this gentle enthusiast should have helped on the Italian movement! Yet he certainly did so. Always, when old systems begin to look out for new arguments to defend them, a change is about to come.

The Jesuits took alarm, and Rosmini was treated as little better than a heretic. Denounced by them, he was of course defended by the Liberals; but it required the intervention of his private friend, Gregory XVI., to call off the bandogs of orthodoxy. After the flight of Pius IX. to Gaeta, and the triumph of the reactionary party, Rosmini had to suffer many petty persecutions. He died in 1855, his friend Manzoni standing by his bed.

To the same group of Catholic thinkers belongs a very different man-Niccolo Tommaseo, the colleague of Manin in the immortal defence of Venice. He it was who said 'that one single tear of Pius IX. was worth more for the liberty of Italy than all the blood of her children; and although he has ceased to believe in the temporal power of the Pope, he still remains a Catholic in spite of Pius IX.' A voluminous and versatile writer, he is perhaps best known by his Dictionary of Synonyms, and by his endeavours to enrich the written Italian with the racy idioms of the spoken language. Tommaseo converted to Catholicism and filled with Guelfic ideas the Neapolitan Alessandro Poerio, the elder brother of that Carlo Poerio whose name all men know. Gifted with a remarkable talent for languages, and with some poetic powers, this man might have made a name for himself in the world of letters, but the doom of a Poerio was upon him. Repeatedly exiled and imprisoned, he was mortally wounded in a skirmish at Mestre, during the defence of Venice, and died five days after.

Another Neapolitan was also

famous among the Guelfs. This was Carlo Troya, son of the king's physician, who followed the exiled Court to Palermo, and was, soon after the fall of Murat, made governor of the province of Basilicata. He had, however, become imbued with constitutional opinions, and during the revolution of 1820, fought with the pen in the columns of the Minerva. When the reaction came, he was obliged to remain concealed, and spent his time in reading Dante-apparently for the first time. The great Ghibeline poet made him a Ghibeline, and he started for a tour in Italy, meaning to write the life of Dante from the Ghibeline point of view. He arrived in Rome with many letters of introduction to members of the Prelatura, and they soon contrived to change his ideas. He did make his tour in Italy, and he did write on Dante, but by no means as he had origi nally intended. Nay, it was he who in his turn converted Balbo, who thereupon gave up the idea of writing the history of Italy. Troya, who had left Naples almost proscribed, returned under the high patronage of Gregory XVI. The royal printing office was put at his disposal, and he set about publishing the history which Balbo no longer had heart for. His first

three volumes were devoted, somewhat after Mr. Buckle's fashion, to the history of the barbarians before their invasion; and after publishing 3401 pages, he only got down to the times of Alboin. In 1848 he publicly gave in his adhesion to the Constitution, faithful to the political traditions of his youth. He became a minister, and had the boldness to say to the king, It is in Lombardy that you will win back Sicily. When the reaction came, King Ferdinand, who was less of a fool and more of a villain than most people suppose, laughed at the idea of prosecuting one who was, in spite of politics, so good an ally; and he died in 1858 in the odour of sanctity. The Sicilian Padre Ventura, who rose so high in 1848 to sink so low in succeeding years, must not be forgotten; nor

the honoured company of Monte Casino, on whom the hand of the reaction fell so heavily.

It was in Florence, amidst the recollections of republican greatness and of enduring opposition to Pontifical encroachments, that the nineteenth century Ghibelines continued, from 1820 onwards, the work of their great predecessors. The Grand-Duke, though dependent on Austria and full of sympathy for his relatives beyond the Alps, was a good-natured man, who allowed things to take their course. The Lombard exiles of 1821 fled, most of them to France and England-fearing the long arms of their enemy-but many of the Piedmontese and Neapolitans came to Florence. Some of the latter had been sent, by the Royal perjurer of that day, fresh from the Congress of Laybach, to be kept in safe custody at Gratz, in Styria, but they were allowed, after a year's detention, to leave the dominions of the Kaiser, and returned forthwith to the only tolerably safe spot upon Italian soil. What with native-born Tuscans and exiles from other parts of Italy, a goodly array of talent was collected. Florence, in 1825, had something of the character of Turin in 1858.

At Florence, in the spacious rooms of the Palazzo Buondelmonte, under the presidency of the GeneveseItalian Jean Pierre Vieussieux, half editor, half head of society, the best men of the Peninsula met and conferred their learningsColletta, the Neapolitan, who wrote the black history of his unhappy land-Gino Capponi, descendant of that Gino Capponi who saw the lances of France gleam through the defiles of the Alps,' and said to Charles VIII., 'Sound your clarions, if you dare, we will ring our bells in answer-Pietro Giordani, Gabriele Pepe, who fought the duel with Lamartine, and must not be confounded with the more famous Guglielmo Pepe-Ridolfi, whose name has lately emerged again as that of a benefactor to his country, and many more to whom we cannot allude. On the names, however, of a few of the habitués of the

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Palazzo Buondelmonte we must pause a little longer. The most notable of all was the young Leopardi. M. Marc Monnier, in approaching the history of this distinguished man, is seized with a fearful fit of the rabies biographica, and claims for his hero the distinctive merits of Voltaire and André Chenier, of Byron and Paul Louis Courier. When the North is converted to Italian literature he will, we hope, modify his praise. Yet, Leopardi had no every-day genius, and we all know far too little about him. A good many years ago there was an article upon his life and works in the Quarterly Review, which gossip connected with a very eminent name, but we do not remember having met with any other account of him in English.

Giacomo Leopardi was born at Recanati, a little mountain town in the province of Ancona, on the 29th of June, 1798. His father was a man of rank, but poor and narrow-minded. The boy showed from his earliest years an intense love for study, and read, indeed, in a way which would have soon ruined a far stronger constitution. He started with a fine mental but a miserable bodily organization, and the result was what might have been anticipated-years of misery and disease, closed by an early death. His wretchedness was aggravated by the folly of his father, who was a bigot of a very odious type. In spite of all difficulties, however, he learnt English, French, Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew; wrote Latin as easily as his mother tongue, published and commented upon fragments of the classics hitherto unknown to the world of letters, to say nothing of minor achievements and all this before he reached nineteen. At the age

when our best scholars are thinking about the Balliol Scholarship,' he was famous, even in foreign countries, and in correspondence with many of the most learned men in Europe. At length he emerged from his solitude, and went to Rome, but the real world, partly through his own fault, and partly from its shortcomings, made a dis