James Montgomery

“ The young noble of fortune at once became attached to the young noble of genius, and a friendship, so natural to kindred minds early associated—the dawn of affection preceding the day-star of passion in the order of Providence—speedily sprang up, and amidst all the splendour of station which through life distinguished the one, and the sufferings by adversity which were the subsequent lot of the other, was never forsworn or forgotten by either. ”

“ In Lisbon he had been acquainted with the abate Caluso, a man of learning and talent, who had, in some degree, awakened in him a desire for knowledge, while, with the utmost forbearance and kindness, he tried to lighten the shame inspired by every glimmering light that displayed his excessive ignorance. They had passed many long evenings together, and Alfieri preferred his instructive but unpretending conversation to the gaieties of society; and here he felt an awakening of that dormant power of composition which afterwards was to expand into worthy and perennial fruit. ”

“ The senators display great talent during peace—the cavaliers valour in war: their aim is glory—their support liberty. The form of the government is mixed, like that of Sparta, but better than that. For the kingdom is neither oppressed by the tyranny of one, nor the insolence of a few, nor the baseness of the many; but having mingled the best parts of all three modes of government, one has resulted, in which the kingly power cannot intrench upon liberty, nor licence endanger the monarchy. The nobles cannot oppress the people, nor the people injure the nobles. ”

“ The interchange of thought and feeling, the fresh spirit of inquiry and invention, that springs from the collision or harmony of different minds, are with them a necessity and a passion. And though solitude is named the mother of all that is truly sublime, yet this solitude ought not to be that of desolation, but retirement to meditate on the stores heaped up in our intercourse with our fellow-creatures. Monti, among the uncultivated peasantry of Romagna, might have found his glowing enthusiasm grow cool from the absence of appreciation, and the want of sympathy and equal intercourse. ”

“ I do not blame the reasons of state, through which nations are sold like flocks of sheep; it was ever so, and so will it ever be: but I grieve for my country, which I have lost. 'He was born Italian, and will one day regenerate his country:' others may believe this,—I never can. I replied, and shall always reply, 'Nature made him a tyrant, and a tyrant cares not for his country, nor does he possess one.'"
Ruminating on all these violent and bitter feelings, the offspring of patriotism and adversity, Foscolo took the road to Tuscany. ”

“ Many of our countrymen imagine that freedom can be bought with money. They fancy that foreign nations come from a disinterested love of justice to slaughter each other mutually on our fields, for the sake of liberating Italy. But will the French, who have rendered the divine theory of public liberty execrable, become Timoleons for our sakes? Many, meanwhile, confide in the young hero, sprung from Italian blood, born where our language is spoken. ”

“ Carlo was born in the midst of all the bustle and hilarity attendant on a predilection for actors and acting: his first pleasures were derived from plays; his first recollections were of histrionic gaiety; and his future life retained the colouring imparted by the amusements of his early years.
He was the delight of the family. His mother devoted herself to his education, and his father to his amusement. He made a puppet theatre for him, and, with two or three friends, drew the cords and acted plays to the boy's infinite delight. ”

“ This mixture of idleness and change—of solitude and independence—soothed his disturbed mind. He was given up to endless reverie, now engrossed by melancholy and moral trains of thought; now possessed by images wild, terrible, or gay. He knew no language, and could express nothing that he felt—all was confused and vague, and mingled with violent transports of grief and despair. He spoke to no one; and his taciturn, self-devouring misery irritated him almost to madness. ”

“ But Italian poetry, born of a glad and happy sky, is mad when she would robe herself in clouds, and study to paint a nature of which she can form no idea except from imagination. And besides, should poetry, whose chief use is to delight (and, in the miserable state of human beings, to delight is to serve) , ought she to appear rough and frowning, ruled by pedantry and crabbed philosophy? Is it possible that no one knows how to distinguish {Pg 341} the office of poet from that of philosopher? It is one thing to speak to the senses, another to speak to the intellect. ”

“ Any one who has visited Italy must at once censure, and deeply deplore, the social system there carried on—a system which blights the affections, degrades the moral feeling, and causes almost universal unhappiness. But it is unjust to heap the censure of a system belonging to a whole country, and carried on for centuries, on the head of an individual, whose virtues, we may presume to say, redeemed an error, the very existence of which is, after all, uncertain. ”

“ Are the shadowy forms which he invests with so much beauty—the conceptions into which he infuses so much energy and seeming sincerity—the mere playthings of his thought, and not the genuine offspring of a mind teeming and overflowing with a sense of usefulness and truth? We cannot believe it; we are so apt to forget what our feelings were when the occasion that called them forth has vanished like morning mist. When Napoleon fell, men forgot the wonder and admiration with which they had regarded him during his prosperity. ”

“ He shook off these trammels, and adopted every possible mode of versification, and even bent the dialect of Petrarch and Tasso to new and unknown forms of expression. He was no lover of rhyme, preferring to it a majestic harmony in the arrangement of syllables and sound, which he found more musical and expressive than the mere jingle of a concluding word. His style thus became at once novel and exalted. He adorned his verses with pompous epithets and majestic turns of expression: he was harmonious and dignified, fervent and spirited. ”

“ The machinery is mythological, the imagery drawn from the same source; and it is rather the work of one imbued with the poetry of the ancients, and translating remembered ideas into his native language, than the outpourings of a mind inspired by passion and nature. It is strange that Foscolo should have found time to compose verses at a period when the town he inhabited was being bombarded by the English fleet, when the Austrians were making daily assaults, and the streets were filled by a famished and dying multitude. ”

“ It was while Italy yet reposed submissive and mute, that a poet was born, who dedicated all the powers of his mind to the awakening his countrymen from their lethargy—to strengthening their enervated minds, and spreading such knowledge and such sentiments abroad among them, as would at once reveal their degraded state, and give them energy to aspire to a better. ”

“ His command of language is singularly great, and he adapted poetic diction to dramatic dialogue with wonderful felicity. A long and profound study of the genius of his native tongue gave him such extreme facility, that the perfection of art takes the guise of the most unadorned nature; and the flow and clearness of his verses so excite our sympathy, as to make us feel as if the thoughts and sentiments which we find in his pages were the spontaneous growth of our own minds. ”

“ The current of Galileo's life had hitherto flowed in a smooth and unobstructed channel. He had now attained the highest objects of earthly ambition. His discoveries had placed him at the head of the great men of his age; he possessed a professional income far beyond his wants, and even beyond his anticipations; and, what is still dearer to a philosopher, he enjoyed the most perfect leisure for carrying on and completing his discoveries. ”

“ The enthusiasm he felt, made him disregard the melancholy generated by the gloomy climate, and the ruinous expense of living. He observes, and with justice, that Italy and England are the only countries in which it is desirable to live: the former, because there nature vindicates her rights, and rises triumphant over the evils produced by the governments; the latter, because art conquers nature, and transforms a rude ungenial land into a paradise of comfort and laughing abundance. ”

“ The idea that Cæsar was the father of Brutus is so totally devoid of foundation, and so little in consonance with the simple majesty of the character of the patriot, that it deteriorates from the interest of the drama, and, instead of exalting him, the discovery, the resolution he declares nevertheless to persist in the assassination, the sympathy and admiration he gains, is all so feeble, so puerile, and so false, that it is astonishing that Alfieri did not detect his mistake. ”

“ I possess in Italy the objects dearest to my heart—my child, my mother, brothers, friends, studies, habits; all, in short, that renders life dear. I pant, therefore, to return; and I implore you to send me assistance in the shape of a remittance for my journey, and to discharge my debts here. Every delay injures my interests, particularly at this moment. Direct to 'Citizen Vincenzo Monti, Post-office, Paris.' I shall count the days and moments—make my account short, if my happiness is dear to you. ”

“ Few men can be excited by a mere abstraction, by the images of their own mind, and the desire of communicating them for the benefit of their fellow-creatures. Pride or vanity mingle essentially in the fabric of a writer's mind: the pride which leads him to desire to build up an enduring monument for his name, formed from his own compositions; or the vanity that leads him to introduce himself to the reader, and to court the notoriety which usually attends those who let the public into the secret of their individual passions or peculiarities. ”

“ The account which we have now given of the trial and the sentence of Galileo, is pregnant with the deepest interest and instruction. Human nature is here drawn in its darkest colouring; and in surveying the melancholy picture, it is difficult to decide whether religion or philosophy has been most degraded. While we witness the presumptuous priest pronouncing infallible the decrees of his own erring judgment, we see the high-minded philosopher abjuring the eternal and immutable truths which he had himself the glory of establishing. ”

“ These considerations were a notion he formed that her beauty was of a delicate, evanescent species, and that she would soon fade and become old, while he remained in the pride of youth. Such was the force of his first passion, that it was at once overcome by selfish foresight, and the habit, innate in him, of dissecting the materials of life, despoiling them of their sunny gloss, and handling the most frail, yet precious, among them with a roughness that iron and rock could not have resisted. ”

“ His father, a celebrated jurisconsult, was desirous of bringing up his son to the same profession; but the youth felt an unconquerable distaste to the career of the law. Marini possessed a fervid and lively imagination, and a facility in the composition of poetry which determined, without a question, his destiny in life. There are many poets even, we may say, of a higher class than Marini—many more sublime, more earnest, more pathetic—but, in his degree, Marini is a genuine poet, and gave himself up with confidence and ardour to the pursuit of that fame of which he reaped so large a harvest. ”

“ But the nobility and higher classes in Lombardy and Romagna all speak their unintelligible dialects among themselves; it is only with strangers, and when they write, that they have recourse to Italian. It is impossible, therefore, that what they compose by rule, after study and practice, can be the living language of a people in opposition to a dialect, if you will, which, with few omissions and some change of pronunciation, is the admiration of all who can appreciate the true beauties of style; which is remarkable for passion and fervour combined with concision and sweetness ”

“ Her heart opens itself readily to hope; while that of her lover is impassive to every delusion, and he regards with terror and grief the peril to which, in her generous trustingness of nature, she heedlessly exposes herself.
As the genius of Alfieri led him to depict the passions in their simplest though most energetic form, unaccompanied by the influence of manners, the metaphysical subtleties of Shakspeare, or the wild, but deeply interesting intricacy of plot of Calderon and our old dramatists, so classical subjects were treated by him with peculiar felicity. ”

“ To the years he spent in the service of the pope's nephew, the habits of dependence, and his daily intercourse with courtiers, may be attributed that want of political integrity, and ready worship of ruling powers, which was the great blot of Monti's character. The genuine glow of real talent, the ambition natural to conscious genius, and the instinct of one, in whom invention and the power of expression were indigenous, to pour forth his ideas and sentiments, qualities which indefeasibly belonged to him, would, in almost any situation, have made Monti a writer. ”

“ The national spirit died away in after times. The devastating wars carried on in the Peninsula by France and the emperor, the rise of minor principalities, and the struggles of rival states, so excited the passions and absorbed the interests of the Italians, that they became incapable of enlarged views for the good of their country. The depressing influence of courtly servitude checked the free spirit of the writers; Ariosto and Tasso were both conspicuous for personal independence of character; but they did not extend their love of liberty to any exertions for the redemption of Italy. ”

“ Goldoni found plenty of amusement here, for there was a company of comedians; and he also fell in love. He assures us that this was his first passion, and a sincere one; but the future writer of comedies had not that tenderness and passion of soul which creates a profound and engrossing attachment. He made parties of pleasure for the lovely girl, who returned his affection, and got up a tragedy for her amusement, which did not amuse her at all; for, too bashful to act herself, with all the delicacy of love, she was pained at witnessing her lover's familiar conduct with other women. ”