Some future Herring, who, with dauntless breast, Rebellion's torrent shall, like him, oppose, Some mute, unconscious Hardwicke here may rest,

Some Pelham dreadful to his country's foes, From prince and people to command applause, 'Midst ermined peers to guide the high debate, To shield Britannia's and Religion's laws, And steer with steady course the helm of state,

Fate yet forbids; nor circumscribes alone

Their growing virtues, but their crimes confines,

Forbids in Freedom's veil to insult the throne, Beneath her masque to hide the worst designs; To fill the madding crowd's perverted mind, With "pensions, taxes, marriages, and Jews," Or shut the gates of heaven on lost mankind, And wrest their darling hopes, their future views.

Far from the giddy town's tumultuous strife, Their wishes yet have never learned to stray; Content and happy in a single life,

They keep the noiseless tenor of their way. E'en now, their books from cobwebs to protect, Inclosed by doors of glass in Doric style, On polished pillars raised with bronzes deckt, They claim the passing tribute of a smile: Oft are the authors' names, though richly bound, Misspelt by blundering binders' want of care, And many a catalogue is strewed around, To tell the admiring guest what books are

there.

For who, to thoughtless ignorance a prey, Neglects to hold short dalliance with a book? Who there but wishes to prolong his stay,

And on those cases casts a lingering look? Reports attract the Lawyer's parting eyes,

Novels Lord Fopling and Sir Plume require, For Songs and Plays the voice of Beauty cries, And Sense and Nature Grandison desire. For thee, who, mindful of thy loved compeers, Dost in these lines their artless tale relate, If chance, with prying search, in future years, Some antiquarian should inquire thy fate; Haply some friend may shake his hoary head, And say, "Each morn unchilled by frosts he

"The next we heard that in a neighboring shire,
That day to church he led a blushing bride,
A nymph whose snowy vest and maiden fear
Improved her beauty while the knot was tied.

"Now, by his patron's bounteous care removed, He roves enraptured through the fields of Kent,

Yet, ever mindful of the place he loved,
Read here the letter which he lately sent."

THE LETTER.

In rural innocence secure I dwell,

Alike to fortune and to fame unknown;
Approving conscience cheers my humble cell,
And social quiet marks me for her own.
Next to the blessings of religions truth,

Two gifts my endless gratitude engage,
A wife the joy and transport of my youth,
Now with a son- the comfort of my age.

Seek not to draw me from this kind retreat,

In loftier spheres unfit, untaught to move, Content with calm domestic life, where meet The sweets of friendship and the smiles of love.

SIBERIAN COLD.-A traveller in Siberia during the winter is so enveloped in furs, that he can scarcely move; and, under the thick fur hood, which is fastened to the bear-skin collar, and covers the whole face, one can only draw in, as it were, by stealth, a little of the external air, which is so keen that it causes a very peculiar and painful feeling in the throat and lungs. The distance from one halting-place to another takes about ten hours, during which time the traveller must always continue on horseback, as the cumbrous dress makes it insupportable to wade through the snow. The poor horses suffer at least as much as their riders, for, besides the general effect of the cold, they are tormented by ice forming in their nostrils, and stopping their breathing. When they intimate this by a distressed snort, and a convulsive shaking of the head, the driver relieves them by taking out the piece of ice, to save them from being suffocated. When the icy ground is not covered by snow, their hoofs often burst from the effects of the cold.

The caravan is always surrounded by a thick cloud of vapor; it is not only living bodies which produce this effect, but even the snow smokes. These evaporations are instantly changed into millions of needles of ice, which fill the air, and cause a constant slight noise, resembling the sound of torn satin or thick silk. Even the reindeer seeks the forest to protect himself from there is no shelter to be found, the whole herd the intensity of the cold. In the Tundras, where little warmth from each other, and may be seen crowd together as close as possible, to gain a standing in this way quite motionless. Only the dark bird of winter, the raven, still cleaves the icy air with slow and heavy wing, leaving behind him a long line of thin vapor, marking the track of his solitary flight.

This sketch, which many of his admirers would consider as scarcely doing justice to the Tuscan poet, will give the English reader an idea of his general scope and characteristic qualities.

It is not, however, very easy to classify him as a writer, or to give a notion of his poems by description or designation. When their popularity as circulated in manuscript, the publication of the foreign spurious editions, and some relaxation of the rules in the censorship, led him first to print a collection, he gave them no other than the modest name of "Verses." We may call them lyrical satires.

The class to which these poems belong is one which has not, at least of late years, been common in England. Attempts, indeed, have not been wanting, but some time has passed since real poetic genius has cared to manifest itself in this form. An admirable facility and humor characterize the versified politics of the author of the Twopenny Post Bag, and some of these assume the lyric form; but they do not come up to the idea of lyrical satire, either in depth of feeling, in passion, in ironic force, or in beauty. The only political verses which have of late years excited much attention, were those contributed to the cause of disorder by the patriots of the Nation. Like their authors, these poems met with somewhat more indulgence than they merited. They were indifferent enough, though decidedly more successful than the rebellion to which they incited. In fact, in a really free country, all the multiplied shapes of free discussion supersede the necessity, without exactly performing the functions of a satirical poet. A song can be remembered and can circulate even where the censorship leaves blanks in the journal, or where a stricter inspection prohibits not only speech, but even such evidence of silenced speech. There is indeed a degree of tyranny, under which verse and prose, the speech of the debates, and the mot of the saloons, are alike silenced by an impartial because all-reaching terrorism. But the state of things in which society is, and the leading article is not, has often been regarded as the very state in which the epigram of conversation is most in demand, and consequently most fully supplied. The commercial principle is verified even in ..the airy manufacture of witticisms, and a

similar principle may in some degree apply to the yet subtler essence of poetry. A poet, indeed, is born, and it is fortunately as impossible as it would be undesirable, to pre scribe rules for the birth of this or that kind of poet or poetry. The spirit does not always come when it is called for; you cannot create it by calling; but if it is there, it is the more likely to come because it is called for.

Accordingly, it is not in England that we can look for any parallel to Giusti in any writings which may seem, by comparison, to illustrate his style and character as a poet. The two contemporary writers who most nearly resemble him, are Béranger in France. and Heine in Germany. To Béranger in particular he has been compared, not only as to a similar writer, but as to his prototype and model. Yet he would form a most incorrect conception of Giusti who should attempt to create one to himself out of his recollections of Béranger or of Heine. These names are mentioned, not so much to illustrate his individual character as to express the class to which he belongs. Of the two, widely as they differ, he approaches more nearly in form and style to Béranger; yet no view can be more incorrect than that which regards him as having made the French poet his model. Italian critics disclaim even the similarity; we concur with them in rejecting altogether the idea of plagiarism or copying. Giusti is thoroughly Italian; far too emphatically Italian to be regarded as an Italianized Béranger. He had undoubtedly read Béranger; and the influence of a great contemporary writer is necessarily felt more or less by men of genius, and sometimes manifested in their works. It will be most directly and naturally displayed, of course, by those whom similarity of genius or circumstances directs into the same line of composition, unless they should, as is sometimes the case, studiously avoid any likeness, however natural, and so perhaps sacrifice some real beauty to the possible suspicion of plagiarism. To this extent, and no more, does Giusti remind us of Béranger. The two have indeed common to them this consequence of their genuine worth as poets that many of their simplest verses, though devoted only to subjects of contemporary interest, will outlive the more ambitious efforts on higher themes of most or all their poetic rivals. But Béranger in no way bears to Giusti the relation of the master in a school in which Giusti is a pupil.

The real master, the constant study, we will not say the model, of the Tuscan poet, was a far greater than Béranger; the bitterest of political satirists, the greatest perhaps, save one, of European poets - the Florentine Dante,

We shall not be misunderstood as advancing

for him a claim which he would have himself treated as sacrilege --a claim to any station on that level, where the voice of mankind has throned almost unapproached L'Altissimo Poeta. But this much may be truly said, that the devoted student of Dante was a learner from Dante; and in particular that he had learnt from him that great merit, almost lost among his countrymen of modern times -the merit of condensation. In him, more than in any recent Italian writer, do we find the short description, which, as it were, emphatically outlives the object, the single line which brands, the single indelible epithet which recalls, and seems to comprise, the character.

It must not, however, be supposed that Giusti is a personal satirist. His satire, as is observed by Gualterio, in the passage which we have quoted, never assailed individuals, except such as by their high place were necessarily public characters, and therefore proper objects for criticism. And "to them, as to the people, he was more liberal of censure than of praise." Let these italicized words be noted. Giusti, as we shall hereafter see more fully, flattered no one. The triumph of the popular cause raised up for him no idol. A demagogue in his eyes might be as hateful as a vigorous tyrant, as ridiculous as an effete despot, and would meet with similar or sharper treatment.

His poetry, simple and even severe in its form, yet constructed with the most careful selection of words and attention to versification, assuming, when possible, the plainest and most popular expressions of the Tuscan dialect, condensed, vivid, familiar, was, in the strongest sense of the word, original. The novelty of the means which he employed consistently enforced the directly practical character of his object. Attacking falsehood and conventions, he used no conventional language. In the strongest language of common life, he told his countrymen how base, how hateful, was much of the life around them. Perhaps we might truly describe him by saying that very few poets have been less of "versifiers." Nothing is ever put in for mere ornament; the exact words are used for the exact thought; thought and language are not separable; they are interfused and one. This union in its various degrees characterizes all poetry worth the name; in perfection, it is found only in the highest; its presence, or absence, is the easiest and most infallible test by which to distinguish versified commonplace from genuine poetry; it is certainly among the prominent characteristics of Giusti. He was not a careless writer, because he was natural; he was a consummate, all the more because not a conventional,

artist.

Holding that Italian had been corrupted by

recent writers through the intermixture of foreign terms, he used, whenever it was possible, the spoken or vernacular phrase and idiom in preference to book language. "Others," as he said, “put on their dress coats whenever they sit down to write; I take off my frock coat and put on a blouse." His consequently frequent use of purely Tuscan words and idioms, combined with the necessarily allusive nature of satirical writing, makes him for foreign readers a singularly difficult author. This character is the main cause of the hitherto limited circulation of his works in England; and it will probably continue to prevent them from becoming, so to speak, popular out of Italy. Of the leading peculiarity of his style of thought, the deep seriousness which underlies his hearty ridicule, his biographer gives, in a passage which we translate, perhaps as good an idea as can be given by mere description.

Giusti laughs indeed, and that so powerfully, that woe be to him who is smitten by that immortal ridicule; but in the midst of the song rushing clothed in gladness from the soul of the poet, ever and anon one word of profound melancholy slips involuntarily over the chords of his lyre, and draws a momentary veil of sadness over the brilliant gleam of his smile, with such effect that the reader, utterly lost in the fresh sentiment which he experiences, without being able to explain it to himself, can only exclaim, in this intoxication of his feelings, That is sublime! Giusti weeps and laughs at once; his smile is born of his melancholy; and through that alone can it be explained and rendered intelligible and plain.

All earnest irony is born of this conflict of deep feelings; the smile may in part express contempt perhaps, or a sense of the vanity of things, but the root of it is sadness and indignation which can find no adequate direct ex pression. In his own beautiful words

In quanta guerra di pensier mi pone

Questo che par sorriso ed è dolore !

It was not among mere laughers that Giusti sought his audience; he wished them to be more fit, though they might therefore be few. "If your tendency is only to amusement," he says to his reader, in a short and most characteristic preface to one edition of his works," do not go beyond this page; for a laugh springing from melancholy might. possibly stick in your throat; and I should be sorry for that, both on your account and my own.

This depth of feeling it was, which at once sharpened the edge of that trenchant ridicule, and raised the poet into the element of true lyric passion. This, combined with the singular force of his expressions and brief vividness of his imagery, renders Giusti not

less superior to all modern Italian writers as a lyric poet, than he is unique as a satirist: if we are not to admit one doubtful exception in the single poem "Il Cinque Maggio.'

It will be seen, from what has been said, how intimately connected are the peculiar character of this poet and the circumstances of his time. The more naturally will our notice of his works blend itself with some account of his life, and of the Italy in which he was born. For the former the biography named at the head of our article furnishes some, though hardly satisfactory, materials.

It is somewhat meagre as to facts, and deficient in traits or anecdotes, and in those life-like touches which bring in real presence the subject of a narrative before us, and make us know the man, or at least form the idea of him, as he lives in the memory of his friends. He was born in May, 1809, at a castle in the Val di Nievole, near the high road from Florence to Pescia, with which place his family were connected as rich proprietors. Among them was at least one man of considerable eminence his grandfather Giuseppe Giusti, the friend and minister of justice to the reforming Archduke Leopold, one of the princes who, at the head of small states, have achieved something like greatness.

We catch glimpses of a lively, clever, spirited boy, difficult to manage, di spirito irrequieto e vivacissimo," growing happily up into youth; learning not too much of Latin, and no Greek -a neglect of opportunities which (be it observed) he afterwards regretted, and tried to repair by earnest study of the Latin classics. Finally, he is sent to the University of Pisa with the object of studying lawan object which, in his case, as in that of other Italian poets, from the time of Petrarch downwards, was destined to merge in other aspirations. He was, we fear, no very steady student of the Pandects; he "crammed" ("beccava," is his own word, as good an Italian as English college-phrase) for his examination in a fortnight. But he has left us in the verses entitled "Memorie di Pisa," those happy touches and records of his college life, which prove that to him, as to many others, its indirect were worth more than its direct influences. Every one who has himself been a collegian, must read these verses with a pleasure more than half melancholy. "I too was once in Arcadia." There is a deep truth and tenderness in the tone in which Giusti recalls those four happy years spent without care; the days, the nights, "sinoked away" in free gladness, in laughter, in uninterrupted talk, the aspirations, the free, open-hearted converse, as it was then, of some who are not now disguised as formal worldlings; all the delights of that life, whether at Cambridge or at Pisa, which comes not again. All that was to be had, all that was to be enjoyed from

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converse with the world around him, Giusti made his own; and if he somewhat neglected the Pandects, he familiarized himself with the classical writers whose value he was now more capable of appreciating. Virgil, Horace, and Dante were his most familiar studies. After the usual course, he left Pisa, and settled himself in the capital, Florence, as a law-student in the chambers of Capoquidi, a noted advocate, since Minister of Grace and Justice.

One can fancy that his relations hoped to see another Giuseppe Giusti great in jurispru dence, under another Leopold; but he had a different destiny before him. We can suppose him entering into the world with at least a fair allowance of the common youthful disposition to quarrel with much of its cold formalism and smooth-faced quackery. And the Italian world, as he saw it, contained more than the ordinary proportion of iniquities against which such a spirit could not but rebel. Of the Italy of Giusti's opening manhood — the Italy of Gregory XVI. — so much has lately been said, that it is unnecessary to dwell more than summarily on the subject now.

The great wave of the French revolution passed over Italy as over the rest of Europe, burying the old landmarks. It subsided, and they generally reäppeared, so far as territorial divisions were concerned. The shadow of a King of Rome vanished, and the States of the Church passed again under the worst of human governments. The Austrians held Lombardy, with the addition of Venice; in several other states, modified by a certain amount of cutting and carving, the old Houses reentered untaught and unimproved. The people had not, any more than their rulers, learnt to correct some of their most characteristic faults; but the great deluge had destroyed much, and had left something behind it. The Italians had borne their share in historic events, if not as freemen, yet as the subjects of an energetic will. They had shown that under good leading they could be good soldiers; and they saw, with the feeling which might be expected, that the first act of liberated Europe was to fling them back into the old dull servitude. They remonstrated vainly they acquiesced in a resistless necessity. But, from 1815 onwards, ideas not conducive to the permanence of such governments as Italy saw restored, were fermenting in many minds. On the other hand, the weakest and worst of the restored governments could adopt so much of modern progress as consisted in a keener and more extensive spy-system, and in a greatly increased political activity of the police. The old veneration, even the old acquiescence, were gone, mutual distrust and hatred remained. Bad governors and disaffected subjects were the staple of the Peninsula.