Dragoons, and so on. They have succeeded in giving to twelve hundred men as many different uniforms, and different kinds of arms as are to be found in France or Austria. The enormous expense which this military pomp entails upon the country has in former years been severely censured by the opposition in the Chambers, but in these days the government does not care much for either Chambers or opposition; the country pays whatever the ministry demands.

But it must be said to the credit of the Hannoverian military that the officers are distinguished above their comrades in most other states of Germany, by their excellent behavior, refinement of manners, and the healthy tone of their intercourse with other classes. The good old spirit, descended from those glorious times when a large part of those who now hold high rank fought in the Peninsula, as the Anglo-German legion, against Napoleon, has not been expelled by all the efforts of the present government; nay, it has even descended to a younger generation. From the circumstances of those times, it has also resulted, that a large part of the officers of the Hannoverian army are commoners by descent; this fact, in a country where the nobility enjoy so much preference, is apt to create surprise. But on the battle-fields of Talavera and Victoria there were no questions asked about noble lineage and great ancestors; and many of the sons of noble houses chose rather in those days to accept lucrative posts in the luxurious court of Jerome at Cassel, than to encounter danger and fatigue in the camps of Spain. And when these officers of the legion returned home, many of them by dint of merit rose to the highest places, and the then viceroy of the kingdom, the Duke of Cambridge, was far too noble-minded to allow any difference of birth to operate to their disadvantage. Now, on the contrary, it is the aim of the government to purify the army, and no commoner, unless as the son of an officer he is entitled to a commission, would find it easy to procure one.

But in order to guard the corps of officers as much as possible from all intercourse with other classes, there appeared a short time since a general order respecting the marriage of officers, of which Europe has never seen the equal. Every lieutenant who wishes to marry must prove by undeniable documents, that he possesses a private income of at least eight hundred dollars a year, every captain a thousand, and every staff-officer twelve hundred. Then there is a commission appointed for the express purpose of watching that an officer shall only marry in his own rank. No officer

of noble descent, for instance, is allowed to marry the daughter of any one but an officer, a person of high official rank, or in short of one who is not presentable at court. It would, for example, be quite an exception if a lieutenant should be permitted to marry the daughter of a wealthy merchant or manufacturer; and very recently it happened that a young officer who, after several years, obtained leave to marry the daughter of one of the richest bankers in Vienna, was removed, as a mark of displeasure, from the capital to the garrison of a distant country town. This measure has accomplished its purpose of isolating the army from all other classes of society. Every father who has a grown-up daughter must close his door to an officer, in the fear that an attachment might spring up which cannot lead to any honorable and happy result. In the civil service, the prejudice in favor of the nobility has during the last few years become equally apparent. Since the accession of the present king there has not been any instance of a commoner being advanced to one of the higher posts. Those offices which require much knowledge and industry, and upon which the burden of business falls, are open to him; but to the higher ones, which bring honor and emolument, nothing but a long line of ancestors can procure admission.

With the exception of the favor of the government and their own pride, it cannot be said that the Hannoverian nobility enjoy any very great advantages. They are in general too poor to be very influential. There are single merchants in Hamburg, who own more property than all the nobility of Lüneburg put together. Hence there is a simplicity and even poverty apparent which is very striking to one who enters the country from Hamburg or Bremen, the richest towns in Germany. But, on the other hand, social life is in a much better footing than in the Hansetowns, where it rests so entirely upon a material basis. There is in all classes a great degree of solid refinement, together with simple elegance and hearty hospitality. Strangers are always pleased with the e Hannoverian towns, and cheerfully dispense with the advantages which great cities afford.

The picture which has here been lightly sketched, would represent any town in the country of Hannover. A few words must be devoted to a description of Lüneburg. The stillness and desolation, which are so striking a feature in all Hannoverian towns, reign here in full force. The carrying trade into the interior of Germany, all of which at one period passed through the town, has now been

of his addenda: thus the learned German, who had labored many years of his life at this subject, found materials in the work of a boy of sixteen !

Leopardi's mental history is crowded with striking contrasts. We see him learned even among the erudite, and, at the same time, a great poet; at one period grubbing like an archæologist, covered with the dust of folios; at another, borne away on the irresistible wings of upward-soaring imagination. Nor is this all. The man who, with exquisite taste, appreciated the severe simplicity of the great works of Grecian art, first learned to know Greece through the tawdry rhetoric of the Fathers; and the bard who, of all others, deserves to be called the "poet of despair" whose scepticism exceeds that of Manfred or even Lélia - began by planning sacred hymns of fervent piety.

Leopardi was self-taught. The limited instruction which he gained from two ecclesiastics was insignificant by the side of that which he acquired for himself. Unaided, he studied French, Spanish, English, Greek, and even Hebrew; the latter sufficiently to enter upon disputations with some learned Jews at Ancona. His studies had not, however, that desultoriness which is usually noticeable among self-taught men, but were almost exclusively philological. Thus, before he attained maturity, we find him compiling commentaries on the rhetoricians of the second century; writing his erudite little treatise on the vulgar errors of the ancients; collecting the fragments of the Fathers of the second century; translating and dissertating on the Batrachomyomachia; throwing new light upon the life of Moschus, and translating the Idylls; translating the Odyssey, Hesiod's Theogony, and the second book of the Eneid. A strange preparation for a poet! As examples of mere erudite industry, such exploits would have done honor to a long career; as the productions of a boy, they excite unmingled astonishment.

The love of mystification joined to a consciousness of power, which dictated the forgeries of Chatterton, Macpherson, and Allan Cunningham, seduced Leopardi into the scholar's trick of publishing a pretended Greek hymn to Neptune. The translation was accompanied by notes, in which erudite dust was thrown in the eyes of the public, so as to deceive the most suspicious. This production is included in his works; as well as the two Odes of Anacreon, which he published at the same time, and which were said to have been found in the same place. These odes are capital

* Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli Antichi,

forming vol. iv. of his Opere.

imitations. The first is but another variation of the old theme, Love crowned with Roses, but it has the true Greek naïveté in it. The second, "To the Moon," is longer, and generally preferred; but, to our taste, though a better ode, it is not so happy an imitation. He was only nineteen when he played this trick, a circumstance which must be taken in exteЛuation of the offence.

Although so ardent in pursuit of learning, his faculties were not wholly engrossed by it; for amidst these dry recondite studies he was groping his way in a far more arduous and important path-the study of his own being. The seeds of decay had early been sown in his constitution; and now a hump grew out on his back, adding a source of moral anguish to his physical pains. It is easy to understand the poignant humiliation which very sensitive nature must endure from such a deformity; but by one other cruel contradiction in Leopardi's fate, this grief was heightened beyond the common lot; the energetic nature of his soul prompted him, above all things, to a life of action. To such a spirit, deformity would have operated only as one stimulus the more; but accompanied as it was with acute suffering and bodily debility, it made Leopardi feel that he was powerless and despised. Nevertheless, the chained eagle is an eagle still — his thoughts are with the sun. Leopardi could say of himself, in seriousness, that Nature had made him for suffering:

A te la speme Nego, mi disse, anche la speme; e d'altro Non brillin gli occhi tuoi se non di pianto :

for she had thrown him helpless upon the world; but the eagle was only chained, not subdued.

Unfitted for a life of action, he sought activity in burrowing amidst the dust and obscurity of the past. He lived a life of Thought; and at his side sat Sorrow, as a perpetual enigma and as a constant monitress,-"La parte più inesplicabile dell' inesplicabile mistero dell' universo." He suffered, and asked himself if others suffered in the same way, asked himself whether it was just that he should suffer, having done no wrong. He looked abroad in the world, and saw sadness painfully legible or its face; he looked far into the past, and still the same mournful aspect met his eye. Of his own soul he asked the explanation of this mys-" tery, and he became a poet.

on

His two first canzoni were published in 1818. '! They are on the same theme-the degradation of Italy; and it would be idle to speak of the author's youth, because no trace of youth or

While at Rome he published some of his most important philological researches; and had to endure the jealousies and tracasseries of a certain Mangi, the librarian, whom he lashed in two satirical sonnets under the name of Manzo (an ox).* But to a poet the Eternal City could not be made vulgar by any petty jealousies; Rome was one continued inspiration to Leopardi. He walked amidst its ruins, and felt that even in its ruins it was sacred ground. "Vagando tuttavia solitario," says Ranieri, "interogò lungamente quei silenzi e quelle ruine, e lungamente in sul tramonto del dì, pianse, al lontano pianto delle campane, la passata e morta grandezza." No one ever felt more thoroughly the real grandeur of Rome, and he saw, in the recent discovery of Fronto's Letters and Cicero's Republic, the signs of a complete resuscitation of ancient writers, which would force the moderns to catch something of their spirit. In the first Revival of Letters, how great was Italy! Shall there be a second Revival, and no response be heard? The first produced a Dante, a Petrarch, an Ariosto, a Tasso, a Columbus; the second will produce a new race, of whom Alfieri is the chief. Nothing can be more natural than that a poet and a scholar should look to literature as the regenerator of his country; and, consequently, to a second Revival of Letters as the one thing needful. So long as the love of letters survives, he says, Italy will not be dead; and, as a commentary on this text, we refer to his noble ode to Angelo Maï. The lines in it on Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso, are worthy of the names they commemorate.

The date of this canzone, as St. Beuve pertinently remarks, is the same as that of Manzoni's Carmagnola (1820). "Le drapeau d'une réforme littéraire flottait enfin, toute une jeune milice s'ebranlait à l'entour;" and this period will form one of the most instructive epochs in the history of literature, characterized as it is by the rising of five great nations against the despotism of a system, and the spontaneous recurrence of each to its early writers. The court of Louis XIV. had long domineered over the literature of Europe. Taste in the fine arts was religiously accepted from French critics, and the critics could see nothing but le grand siècle. The rude strength and healthy vigor of the early poets were universally pronounced barbarous, because they were (undeniably) against "good taste." The luxuriant foliage of luxuriant trees was thought

The reader will doubtless recall Paul Louis' celebrated quarrel with the Librarian Puccini, and his change of the name into Puzzini. See that marvel of wit, pleasantry, and polemics, his Lettre à M. Renouard.

inelegant, and was clipped; the naïveté of nature was ridiculed, and was banished: in fact, health and simplicity were sacrificed to artificial refinements. The Court was everything, and nature labored under the disadvantage of never having been "presented." The few masterpieces which genius produced in spite of the trammels of the reigning taste, and which are masterpieces because created by men of genius, were cited as splendid examples of the truth of what critics taught; and to Europe the argument seemed conclusive, because men did not understand that great works are the products of genius, not of system. Certain it is, that wherever you cast your eyes during the close of the seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries, the perruque of Louis XIV. is before you, stiff and pompous. The trees and groves are not allowed their natural proportions, but are trimmed into rigidity. The muses are wigged.

Was

The reaction came. Lessing, the brilliant, restless, irregular, but intrepid captain of his age, harassed the imperial forces on all sides, routed, and finally drove them ignominiously from the field. Germany began to have a literature of her own. England returned to Shakspeare, Spenser, and her ballad literature; so great was the reaction, so strong the feeling against the French School, that even eminent poets could discuss, and without final agreement, too, the astonishing question, Pope a poet? Spain made an effort to throw off the yoke of France, and began to inquire about Lopes de Vega, Calderon, and the cancionero. France rose up against her own glory, and the école romantique sounded the tocsin of revolt. In Italy the standard was as openly raised. Everywhere men fought in this quarrel as if their liberties were inseparably connected with the abrogation of the unities, as if on the permission to use familiar and even trivial language in poetry was staked the whole interests of society.

The outlines of the history of this reaction have often been sketched, but one point has not, we believe, hitherto been insisted on, and it is this: not only was the reaction against le grand siècle felt throughout Europe, but in each country the tendency of the New School was the same. This identity of principle is suggestive, and nothing can be easier than the proof of its universality. A strong predilection for the early national literature-a blind reverence for the great Immortals who had early thrown around the nation the lustre of their genius- a preeminence given to Nature and the so-called Natural above all conditions of Art such were the characteristics of the New School in each country.