and in the libraries of the kings of Europe. And yet, these extensive countries have not been conquered; it is not the stranger who has despoiled them of their riches, wasted their population, destroyed their laws, their customs, and their national spirit. The poison was within them, it developed itself, and has annihilated all. Who knows, if, some centuries hence, this same Europe, to which the reign of literature and sciences is now transported, which shines with so great lustre, which judges so well of times past, which compares so well the successive influence of ancient literature and morals, may not be deserted, and wild as the hills of Mauritania, the sands of Egypt, and the valleys of Anatolia? Who knows, whether in a country entirely new, per haps, in the highlands whence flow the Oronoko and the Amazon; perhaps, in the now impenetrable inclosure of the mountains of New Holland, there may not be formed nations with other morals, other languages, other thoughts; nations, who shall again regenerate the human race; who shall, like ourselves, study the times past, and, who, seeing with astonishment that we have existed, and that we have known what they shall know, that we have believed like them, in durability and glory, shall compassionate our impotent efforts, and shall recal the names of the Newtons, the Racines, the Tassos, as examples of the vain struggles of man, to attain an immortality of renown which fate denies him. FRAGMENTS ON ITALIAN LITERATURE. From the French of SISMONDI's Literature of the South. Translated by JOHN S. SMITH, Esq. of Baltimore. attached himself to a natural daughter of king Robert, called Maria, who had been for seven or eight years married to a Nea John Boccaccio, born in Paris in 1313, was the natural son of a merchant of Florence or rather of Certaldo, a small fortress of the Val d'Elsa in allegiance to Flo-politan nobleman and whom he rence. His father destined him to commerce, but previously gave him a literary education. At the age of seven years Boccaccio showed his taste for literature, and began writing verses whilst he manifested an extreme repugnance to business-He was in like manner opposed to an apprenticeship to commerce and to the study of the canon law which his father wished him to undertake. However, to satisfy the latter he made several voyages, but returned having acquired more extensive knowledge and a strong passion for study, instead of the inclination for trade with which it was wished to inspire him. He at last obtained permission to devote himself wholly to a literary career; he established himself at Naples where king Robert extended a powerful protection to letters; he engaged in all the sciences which were then taught; he learnt also the first rudiments of the Greek which was then spoken in Calabria, but which the learned scarcely studied at all. He was present in 1341, at the glorious examination of Petrarch which preceded his coronation at Rome; and from that time he was connected with this great poet by a friendship which lasted to the end of their lives. At the same epoch, Boccaccio, who was of a very elegant figure, of a lively and agreeable wit, and passionately devoted to pleasure, has celebrated in his writings under the name of Fiammetta. In his love for her, we must not look for the purity or delicacy of that of Petrarch for Laura. The princess Maria had been brought up in the most corrupt court of Italy; she had imbibed its spirit, and it is to her depraved taste that we must attribute all that is most blameable in the Decameron, a work composed by her orders, and for her amusement. On his side, Boccaccio loved her more perhaps from vanity, than from true feeling; and, although she was as eminent in beauty, grace, and wit, as in rank, we do not observe that she exercised a great influence over his life. The conduct, no less than the writings of Boccaccio, show a heart not deeply touched, and an attachment not very profound. Boccaccio left Naples in 1342, to proceed to Florence; he returned to the former, in 1344, and went back again to the latter, for the last time, in 1350. He then fixed himself in his own country, where his reputation had already assigned him a distinguished rank. From this time, his life was spent between public employments, particularly the embassies with which he was charged, the duties of friendship towards Petrarch, for whom he had always the tenderest attachment, and the constant, indefatigable labours to which he devoted him ture; the search after manuscripts, the elucidation of antiquities, the introduction of the Greek language into Italy, and the composition of voluminous works. He took the ecclesiastical habit in 1361; and died at Certaldo, in the house of his ancestors, the 21st December, 1375, at the age of sixty-two. self, for the advancement of litera- | the deepest impression, and which, bringing into view the most horrible objects, without exciting disgust, the emotion of the writer, which is always visible, but never obtruded on you, give this piece the character of genuine historical eloquence, like that, which in Thucydides, animates the picture of the plague of Athens. Boccaccio had this model before him, but he had still nearer, the events themselves, of which he had been a witness, and it is the faithful portraiture of what he had seen, and not the classic imitation, which has most advantageously displayed his powers. The Decameron, the work to which, at this day, Boccaccio owes his highest celebrity, is a collection of a hundred novels, which he has arranged in an ingenious manner, by supposing, that during the terrible plague in 1348, a society of young, modest, and enlightened women, and intelligent men, had retired to a charming country residence, to avoid the plague, where they imposed on themselves an obligation to relate for ten days together, each one a tale a-day. The society consisted of ten persons; and the number of novels is, of course, a hundred. The description of the delicious country around Florence, where these joyous hermits established themselves, that of their walks, their banquets, their repasts, has given Boccaccio an opportunity of displaying all the opulence of a style, the most copious, flexible, and graceful. The novels, which are varied with infinite art, both as to subject and manner, from the most touching and tender, to the most playful and, unfortunately, also, to the most licentious, exhibit his talent for recounting in every form and tone: In fine, the description of the plague of Florence, which serves as the introduction, has been ranked with the finest historic paintings which any age has left us. The perfect truth of the description, the choice of those circumstances which make As to the tales themselves, it would be difficult to make our readers acquainted with them by means of extracts, and still more difficult, in a translation, to render perceptible a merit which belongs especially to the language. That which constitutes the glory of Boccaccio, is, the perfect purity of diction, the elegance, the grace, and above all, the naivete, which is the highest merit of narration, and the peculiar charm of the Italian language. Unfortunately, Boccaccio did not adhere to the same purity in the ideas and images, which he employed in the language. The form of his work was light and sportive; it contained a number of love tales: it deals out unmerciful ridicule on duped husbands, on corrupt and corrupting monks, and on things which he himself considered nevertheless, as sacred, as for example, morality and religion, by which he has acquired a reputation in no way accordant with his own life. The Decameron however, published about the middle of the fourteenth century, (in 1352, or 1353,) when Boccaccio was, at least, thirty-nine years of age, cir culated freely throughout Italy, and, from the period of the invention of the art of printing, until the council of Trent, which proscribed it, in the middle of the sixteenth century. At the solicitation of the grand duke of Tuscany, and after two singular negotiations between this sovereign and the popes Pius V. and Sixtus V. the Decameron, corrected and revised, was printed in 1573, and 1582. The fifteenth century, so poor in Italian literature, was still a highly literary age; it was in this more, perhaps, than in any other, that the ardour for study was the most general; when it was the most powerfully seconded by princes and people; when it procured for those who devoted themselves to it, the most celebrity;and when the monuments of ancient languages, multiplied by the art of printing then discovered, had the strongest and most durable influence on the whole human race. All sovereigns, at this brilliant epoch, gloried in the protection which they accorded to literature, often in the classic educations which they had themselves received, and in their profound know. ledge of the Greek and Latin languages. The popes, who, in preceding times, had directed all the power of superstition against learning, were, on the contrary, in the fifteenth century, the friends, the zealous patrons, and magnificent remunerators of men of letters. Two of them were, themselves, literati of high distinction. Thomas de Sarzane, afterwards Nicholas V. (1447, to 1455,) and Eneas Sylvius, since, Pius II. (1458, to 1464,) who, after gaining great names in the literary world for their immense erudition, were raised, in consequence of this very merit, to the chair of St. Peter. The dukes of Milan, the men whom political history represents as the perturbators and tyrants of Lombardy, Philip-Maria, the last of the Visconti, of the Visconti, and Francis Sforza, the founder of a warlike monarchy, were, in their capitals, surrounded with the most distinguished savans, to whom they gave the most generous recompenses, and confidential employments. The discovery of a classic manuscript, was to them, as it was to their subjects, an occasion of rejoicing; and they were as deeply interested in questions of antiquity, and the quarrels of philologists, as they were in affairs of state. Two less powerful sovereign families, the marquis of Gonzaga at Mantua, and the marquis of Este at Ferrara, endeavoured to supply the want of power, by the active zeal and constant protection which they allotted to literature; they sought after and invit ed the learned from one end of Italy to the other; they disputed the possession of them by the offer of the richest recompenses, and the most flattering distinctions; they entrusted them exclusively with the education of their children, and we might perhaps, seek in vain for men, in our most learned academies, who wrote Greek verse with as much purity and elegance, as several of the princes of Mantua and Ferrara. At Florence, a rich merchant, Cosmo de Medici, who shook the constitution of the state, and whose children were soon to establish in their country, the power of an individual, in lieu of that of the people; in the midst of the vast projects of his ambition and policy, master of all the monetary credit of Europe, and the equal of kings with whom he negotiated, gave, in his own house, an asylum to all the learned, and to every artist; converted his gardens into an academy, and produced a revolution in philosophy, by substituting the authority of Plato for that of Aristotle. At the same time, his counting houses, spread over the whole of Europe and the Mussulman States, were consecrated as well to letters as to commerce; his clerks collected manuscripts, and sold spices: the vessels which came to him, from Constantinople, Alexandria, Smyrna, and filled the ports of Italy, were loaded with rich harvests of Greek, Syriac, and Chaldean manuscripts. Cosmo de Medici opened public libraries at the same time at Venice and Florence. In the south of Italy, an Arragonese king, Alphonso V. rivalled the kings of the North, and the princes of Italian extraction, in his love of the sciences. His secretaries, his friends and counsellors, were men whose names will ever remain illustrious in the republic of letters, and his reign is intimately connected with the literary history of all Italy. After the year 1470, the academies of literature and some poets of Rome, undertook, for the more complete revival of the ancients, to represent in the original some of the comedies of Plautus; this example was soon followed. The taste for the theatre was renewed with a vivacity proportioned to the view taken of it, as an essential part of classic antiquity; they had not yet thought of sup porting it by the contributions of the spectators; and it was, as at Rome and in Greece, a part of the public, often of religious festivals. The sovereigns, who, at epoch, made it their glory to protect literature and arts, struggled to eclipse each other, in erecting on solemn occasions, theatres, to be used but for one representation; men of letters, and the grandees of the court, contended for the characters of the piece to be played, which was sometimes translated from the Greek or Latin, and sometimes composed by a modern poet in imitation of the ancient masters. Italy was elated, when it could boast of two theatrical representations in the same year, one at Ferrara or Milan, the other at Rome or Naples. All the neighbouring princes eagerly repaired to these places with their courts. The magnificence of the representation, the enormous expense which it occasioned, and gratitude for a gratuitous pleasure, prevented the public from being severe in its criticisms. The chronicles of each city, in recording these representations, speak only of the universal applause which they excited. The first merit of Tasso is, his having chosen the finest subject possible, to inflame the genius of a modern poet. There exists in history but one solitary example of a great struggle between the nations who were to carry the human species to the highest point of civilization, and those who were to reduce it to the most degrading servitude. This example is furnished by the crusades. At the moment when the Latins embarked in them, the Arabs were still greatly superior in literature, in the arts, and even in virtue, to the crusaders who came to attack them; but they had passed the meridian of their glory; the vices of their religion and government, with the barbarism of the Turks, were rapidly propelling them to their present wretched condition. |