through the window is now obsolete and unknown. Attendance passes for merit; time, terms, and the archbishop, confer academical rank.

"How infinitely more important are private schools scattered over the country than institutes like this, which young men seldom enter till they are able to teach themselves! In universities the very multitude of helps only tends to relax, to dissipate, or embarrass the attention. Neither Pisa, nor any academical city in Italy, has given birth to a man of transcendent genius, if we except Galileo, who was dropped here by chance.

"That excluding spirit which prevails in other universities is here unknown. No religion is proscribed. All degrees, except in divinity and canonical law, are open to heretics and Jews. Such liberality must win a number of volunteers. Others are forced to attend as a qualification for legal practice; for in Tuscany every attorney's clerk is a doctor.

Pisa, though long posterior to Bologna, was the second school of law in Italy. Some ascribe this early eminence to her possession of the Pandects; but this celebrated manuscript was so hoarded, both here and at Florence, that instead of restoring the Roman law, it remained useless and lost to study, till Politian was allowed by Lorenzo the Magnificent to collate it with the Pandects first published at Venice. Politian's collated copy of that edition escaped the sack of the Medici library in 1494, and after a long train of travels and adventures, it at last re-appeared at Florence in 1734. "Pisa lays some claim to the introduction of algebra, which Bonacci is said to have transplanted hither from the east; while the Florentines contend that their Paolo dell' Abbaco was the first to use equation. Algebra was certainly known in Europe before 1339, the date of this university.

"The professorships are in general reduced to one-fourth of their original emolument. Francesco Bartolozzi, in a paper read at the Accademia Economica, states their mean salary to have been 2000 crowns, at a time when the great Macchiavel received only 180, as secretary to the Florentine Republic. Such was the encouragement that drew the celebrated Decius so often back to Pisa from contending powers; for this great oracle of the laws appeared so important a possession to Louis XII. and to Venice, that they threatened hostilities on his account."

We have hinted to our readers Mr. Forsyth's proficiency in Italian literature, and we cannot but think that his charac

* " Bartolozzi calculates from a curious fact

-that for four centuries wheat was bartered in Tuscany for its weight of butcher's meat, of oil, of flax, or of wool, however the money prices might fluctuate.

teristical display of the modern bards of Hesperia will amply justify our eulogy.

"Italian poetry has for some time revived from the torpor of two centuries, and seems bookshop, every circle, swarms with poets; now to flourish in a second spring. Every and the Pisan press is now selecting a Parnassus of the living, as a rival to that of the dead.

which multiplies poets so incalculably in "Where should we seek for the principle this country? Is it in the climate or in the language? Is it education, or leisure, or fashion, or facility, or all these together? Interest it cannot be. No where is poetry so starving a trade; nor do its profits, rare books as from dedication fees. Gianni prints as they are, arise so much from the sale of his flattery in very small retail. In a single duodecimo he gives thirteen dedications, twelve of which were lucrative, and one was thrown away on sensibility, A certain Count lives by this speculation: his works serve only as a vehicle to their inscriptions.

poets, write under other discouragements :-"Satirists, perhaps the most useful of all the censure of the press, and the sacredness of public men and measures. Hence their cles, where they come out with hesitation brightest things are confined to private cirand fear from the pocket-book. Hence the necessity of masking their satire has led some to a beauty, when they sought only a defence.

"In reviewing some of these bards, I shall begin with Pignotti, as he still belongs to Pisa. So little does this elegant fabulist owe to genius, that his very ease, I understand, is the result of severe study; and, conscious of his own faculty, he seems to describe it in these lines;

"Pignotti admires and resembles Pope. Both seem confined to embellish the thoughts of others; and both have depraved with embellishment the simplicity of the early Greeks. Pope's Homer is much too fine for the original; and Pignotti, for want of Esop's naïveté, has turned his fables into tales. Some of his best novelle are reserved for private circles. I heard him read one on the art of robbing,' which could not be safely published by a Tuscan placeman. In the man himself you see little of the poet, little of that refined satire which runs through his fables and has raised those light-winged, loose, little things to the rank of Italian classics.*

*Pignotti, who is now engaged on a history of Tuscany, once repeated to me, with great satisfaction, what Gibbon says of the Italian historians, among whom he anticipates a niche for himself. This led him to compare Mr. Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo with Fabroni's history of the same great man, when Monsig

"Bertola is, perhaps, a more genuine fabulist than Pignotti. He does not labour to be easy; for he has naturally the negligence, and sometimes the vacuity of a rhyming gentleman. His fugitive pieces are as light as the poetical cobwebs of his friend Borgognini. His sonnets run upon love or religion, and some inspire that mystic, unmeaning tenderness which Petrarch infuses into such subjects. Bertola is too fond of universality and change. He has been a traveller, a monk, a secular priest, a professor in different universities and in different sciences, an historian, a poet, a biographer, a journalist, an improvvisatore. "Bondi has also been bitten by the 'estro' of sonnet, though more conspicuous as a painter of manners. His conversazioni' and alla moda' expose some genteel follies with great truth of ridicule. His 'giornata villareccia' is diversified, not by the common expedient of episodes, but by a skilful interchange of rural description, good natured satire, and easy philosophy. The same subject has been sung by Melli in Sicilian, a language now the Doric of Italian poetry, and full of the ancient Theocritan dialect. "Cesarotti is the only Italian, now alive, that has shown powers equal to an original epic; powers which he has wasted in stooping to paraphrase the savage strains of Ossian, and in working on Homer's unimprovable rhapsodies. The Iliad he pulls down and rebuilds on a plan of his own. He brings Hector into the very front, and re-moulds the morals and decoration of the poem; modernes too freely the manners, and gives too much relief to its simplicity.

"Parini has amused and, I hope, corrected his countrymen by the Mattina and the Mezzogiorno, for the other two parts of the day he left imperfect. An original vein of irony runs through all his pictures, and brings into view most of the affectations ac@redited in high life or in fine conversation. He lays on colour enough, yet he seldom caricatures follies beyond their natural distortion. His style is highly poetical, and, being wrought into trivial subjects, it acquires a curious charm from the contrast. He is thought inferior to Bettinelli in the structure of blank verse; but the seasoning and pungency of his themes are more relished here, than the milder instruction of that venerable bard.

"Fantoni, better known by his Arcadian name Labindo, is in high favour as a lyric poet. This true man of fashion never tires his fancy by any work of length; he flies from subject to subject, delighted and delighting. You see Horace in every ode, Horace's modes of thinking, his variety of measures, his imagery, his transitions. Yet

nore himself entered the room and stopped his parallel. Why does that prelate write modern lives in an ancient language? Is he ashamed, in this silver age of Italian letters, to appear a Fabro del parlar materno?!

some

Labindo wants the Horatian ease; he is too studious of diction, and hazards' taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,' which remind us of our late Della Crusca jargon.

"Pindemonte was connected with some of our English Cruscans, but he cannot be charged with their flimsy, gauzy, glittering nonsense. He thinks, and he makes his readers think. Happy in description, sedate even in his light themes, generally melancholy and sometimes sublime, he bears a fine resemblance to our Gray, and, like Gray, has written but little in a country where most poets are voluminous.

"Casti* is the profligate of genius. He rivals La Fontaine in the narrative talent, and surpasses him in obscenity. His late work, Gli Animali parlanti,' though full of philosophy and gall, must soon yield to the fate of all political poems. Its form and its agents are tiresome. We can follow a satirical fox through a short fable, but we nauseate three volumes of allegorical brutes connected by one plot. His novelle' are, on the contrary, too attractive, too excellently wicked. Such also is their reverend author. He has lived just as he wrote, has grown old in debauchery, and suffered in the cause: yet is he courted and caressed in the first circles of Italy, as the arbiter of wit, and the favourite of the fair.

"All these gentlemen seem to have renounced that epic chivalry, both serious and burlesque, which forms the principal poems in the language. Most of them have imbibed the philosophical spirit of the present day, a spirit destructive of the sublime, which it poorly compensates by the terse, the correct, the critical. They borrow language, imagery, and allusions incessantly from science. They affect the useful and the didactic. Some have sung the rights of man; others the topography and economics of their country; a few have attempted the scientific themes which the Physiocritics of Siena introduced into poetry.

"Such subjects naturally led their poets into blank verse, which, from its very facility, has grown into a general abuse. Many Italians could go spinning versi sciolti' through the whole business of the day; though it is more difficult to excel in these than in rhyme. I heard some unpublished heroïds flow with such ease from that benevolent chemist, the Marquis Boccella, that I forgot he was reading verse. Blank verse requires a certain poetical chemistry to concentrate, to fuse, to sublime the style, and to separate its measures from the rhythm of periodical prose."

We shall conclude our quotations upon Pisa with the short but sensible remarks of Mr. Forsyth upon the climate of Tuscany.

*Casti, and several persons mentioned in this and some of the following articles as living, have died since I left Italy,

"The great evil of this climate is humidity. Both the Arno and its secondary streams glide very slowly on beds which are but little inclined, and nearly level with the surface of the Pisan territory. Hence their embankments, however stupendous, cannot ultimately protect the plain. They may confine to these channels the deposite of earth left by floods; but an accumulation of deposites thus confined has, in many parts, raised those channels above the level of the country. Should any water, therefore, escape through breaches into the plain, the difficulty of draining it must yearly increase; for even the bed of the sea has been rising for ages on this coast, and has stopped up some ancient outlets.

Drainage, however, made very important conquests during the last century, and has greatly improved the climate. Scotto, with the spirit of a merchant accustomed to wholesale success, lately attempted to drain his part of the marshes between Pisa and Leghorn; but the villas which he built for his future tenantry were filled the first winter with water. The Ferroni, who have doubled their rental by their colmate near Pescia, are now pursuing a still grander design on the lake of Bientina.

"We may calculate the mischief of inundations in this country from the violence of the rain; for its annual height (47 inches,) is about double that of our climate, while its duration is not one half. It generally falls in large round drops direct to the ground: it never breaks into mists, nor dims the air, nor penetrates the houses, nor rusts metals, nor racks the bones, with the searching activity of an English shower.

"Winter is by far the finest season at Pisa, and fully as mild as our spring. The east wind, indeed, being screened only by the Verrucola, is exceedingly sharp, and freezes at 35°. The southwest, being flat, lies open to the Libecci, which is therefore more felt than the other winds, and is fully as oppressive on the spirits as the leaden sirocco of Naples.

"Some Pisans feel the climate colder, and I should suppose it drier too, since the neighbouring Apennines were cleared of their woods. Others compare the quantity of snow on these with that on the mountains of

Corsica; and, if the former exceed the latter, they expect fair weather; if the reverse, rain but I remained here long enough to find the prognostic fallible. One reverend meteorologist accounted to me more philo. sophically for a chill which I once complained of in Lent. This cold (said the priest) is a mortification peculiar to the holy season, and will continue till Easter; because it was

cold when Peter sat at the High-priest's fire

on the eve of the crucifixion."

"The spring is short, for violent heat generally returns with the leaf. In summer, the mornings are intensely hot; at noon the sea breeze springs up; the nights are damp, close, suffocating, when not ventilated by

mer.

"The Lung' Arno di mezzo giorno, which is in fact the north side of the river, is usually recommended to invalids as the healthiest quarter of the city. The hottest it certainly is, for its curve tends to concentrate the meridian rays; but on that very account it appears to me scarcely habitable in sumOn this side, the house fronts are baked by a powerful sun, which throws into the chambers a close fetid warmth, and more than their proportion of the moisture which it pumps up. On the oppe te side the houses are all damp, and many are covered with lichens. On both sides, the exhalations from the river seem unable to clear the lofty tops of the palaces which line it; for, walking at night on the quays, I have often perceived my stick and my hair moistened with the descending vapours. Convinced, therefore, that the general temperature of Pisa is mild enough for any constitution, I should prefer the quarter of Santo Spirito, or Via Santa Maria, as sharing only the common weather of the place, and being free from adventitious heat, or humidity."

LUCCA, to which city Mr. Forsyth paid. a passing visit on his way to Florence, is in a state of miserable decay-commerce, the very life-blood of the hundred busy and flourishing communities into which Italy was divided in the second golden age of her prosperity, has long deserted her walls, and the mournful consequences of her absence are but too visible in the

gloom and silence of her lonely streets. In the period we have alluded to, her citizens were distinguished for the dignity of their deportment, and the splendour of their domestic œconomy-the title of Signori, peculiarly applied to them, emphatically announces their former importance-and the vanished opulence of the Lucchesi is still attested by the magnificent villas that rise on the eminences of the surrounding plain. The petty territory of Lucca, however, is richly cultivated, but the system of renting in fashion here, which gives to the landlord twothirds of the produce of the soil, keeps the peasantry in a state of the most wretched indigence. The land is subdivided into farms of very small extentbut it seems dubious whether a contrary. system would better the condition either of the country or the people. Virgil, Pliny, and Columella, are all in favour of small farms, and the deplorable poverty of the Roman peasants, does not seem to say much in recommendation of large ones.-The fact is, we suspect, that the

naturé and exorbitancy of rent is the true cause of the general misery in which the Italian peasantry is involved,—if the farmer were accustomed to reap from his labours a handsome and proportional profit, not only would the agricultural wealth of the country be incalculably increased, but the comfort and respectability of her people would experience a sensible amelioration, and thus-in the only secure and pacific way-would be laid the foundations of that prosperity to which we would, even yet, indulge the hope that Italy may look forward.

sense

Mr. Forsyth's remarks on the "Tusean Republics" are the essence of good their comparison with the Grecian commonwealths is eminently just-and to the observation which we have put in italics, every candid reader will, we presume, lend his assent.-In a country like Italy, where the benefits of education are so slenderly diffused, only the strong, though conciliating energies of the ruler can, by any possibility, counteract the destructive effects of a spurious patriotism, and drown the petty distinctions of Pisans-Pistoians-Lucchesi, &c. in the nobler title of ITALIANS.

"Every city in Tuscany having been once a separate republic, still considers itself a nation distinct from the rest, and calls their inhabitants foreigners. If we compare these little states with those of ancient Greece,

we shall find that in both countries the re

publics emerged from small principalities; they shook off the yoke by similar means, and they ended in a common lord who united them all. In both we shall find a crowd

ed population and a narrow territory; in both, a public magnificence disproportionate to their power; in both, the same nursing love of literature and of the arts, the same nice and fastidious taste, the same ambitious and excluding purity of language.

"Viewed as republics, the Tuscans and the Greeks were equally turbulent within their walls, and equally vain of figuring among foreign sovereigns; always jealous of their political independence, but often negligent of their civil freedom; for ever shifting their alliances abroad, or undulating between ill balanced factions at home. In such alternations of power, the patricians became imperious, the commons bloodthirsty, and both so opposite, that nothing but an enemy at the gates could unite them.

"But in no point is the parallel so striking as in their hereditary hatred of each other. This passion they fostered by insulting epithets. The Tuscans called the Pisans traditori, the Pistoians perversi, the Senese pazzi, the Florentines* ciechi, &c.

*The Florentines themselves account for their nicknamę ciechi, by the whiteness of their

"La rabbia Florentina, che superba
"Fù a quel tempo sì, com' ora è putta.

umph the chains of the unfortunate harbour, "The Florentines brought home in triand suspended them in festoons over the two venerable columns of porphyry, which Pisa had presented in gratitude for a former service. The Pisan chains hang like a fair trophy on the foreign bank of Genoa; but to place them at Florence over those pledges of ancient friendship, betrayed a defect of moral taste; and to expose them still at that sacred door, which Michael Angelo thought worthy of Paradise, tends only to keep up the individuality of those little states, which it is the interest of their common governor to efface. No trifle should be left to record their separate independence, or to excite that repulsive action, that tendency to fly off from their present cluster, which is doubly fatal in an age and a country so prone to partition."

At Florence he associated with most of the eminent literary and scientific characters of that celebrated city. Among others

houses which blinds so many of the inhabitants; but the other Tuscans contend that the epithet of Blind, applied nationally to Florence, should mean what it meant at Chalcedon.

*"E liete, in cambio d'arrecarle aiuto
"L'Italiche città del suo periglio,
"Ruzzavano tra loro, non altrimenti
"Che disciolte poledre a calci e denti.

"TASSONI:

he was introduced to Fontana, brother of the Abatte,-Fontana is known as the reviver of a very useful art-the lectures of the anatomical professors of Europe are frequently illustrated by specimens of imitative anatomy-and the writer of this article has seen some exquisite proofs of Fontana's plastic skill in the extensive private museum of Mr. Brookes, in London.-Fontana is described as a man rather of excursive, than profound, knowledge-but Mr. Forsyth represents him as taking the lead in science, by the junction of considerable worldly talent with respectable professional acquirements ;by bringing forth upon the topic in discussion his whole stock of information, and dexterously eluding the dangers of close combat,-by improving and adopting as his own the inventions of others, and by rendering their abilities subservient to bis own views and reputation;-a talent, by the way, which signor Fontana shares in common with greater and meaner men than himself with heroes and conquerors, with empirics and sciolists;-but what solid reputation can be built upon so frail and disgraceful a foundation? The character once understood, ceases to impose -the imposture detected, we despise the impostor-and strip the faded and fraudful laurel from the unblushing brow that so shamelessly assumed it.-Fontana is, however, evidently a person of talents-his diligence is astonishing and he appears to have brought imitative anatomy to a perfection truly wonderful.

"He readily detailed to me," says Mr. Forsyth, "the history of imitative anatomy, an art invented by Zumbo, and revived," said Fontana, "by me. I began with a very young artist, whom I instruct ed to copy the human eye in wax. This I showed to Leopold, who, pleased with the attempt, and desirous that his sons should learn anatomy without attending dissections, ordered me to complete the whole system.

"I stood alone in a new art, without guide or assistants. Anatomists could not model, and modellers were ignorant of interior anatomy. Thus obliged to form workmen for myself, I selected some mechanical drudges, who should execute my orders without intruding into my design. Superior artists are too full of their own plans to follow patiently another's, too fond of embellishing nature, to toil in the slavish imitation which I required. Such difficulties I surmounted; but before I finished the system, the funds had failed." "This active Prometheus is creating a decomposable statue, which will consist of VOL. 11.-No. 1.

5

ten thousand separate pieces, and three millions of distinct parts, both visible and tangible. I saw only the head and upper region of the trunk; but this machine appeared to me as sensible to the weather as its fleshy original is. The wood is so warped by the heat, that the larger contours are already perceptibly altered, and the pieces are connected by pegs, which become unfit on every change of the atmosphere. When I suggested this to the cavalier- The objection is nothing. Ivo ry is too dear: papier mâché has been tried, but it failed.'

Some of the works of Zumbo are reposited in the museum, and the passage in which Mr. Forsyth alludes to them, is a striking example of his powers in the delineation of the repulsive and horrid In perusing it the blood seemed to chill in our veins, and the flesh to creep on our bones.

"Wax was first used in imitating anatomy by Zumbo, a Sicilian of a melancholy, mysterious cast, some of whose works are preserved here. Three of these bear the gloomy character of the artist, who has exhibited the horrid details of the plague and the charnel-house, including the decomposition of bodies through every stage of putrefaction-the blackening, the swelling, the bursting of the trunk-the worm, the rat, and the tarantula at work-and the mushroom springing fresh in the midst of corruption."

"The Royal Gallery," at the periód of Mr. Forsyth's visit to Florence, was stripped of those treasures of art with which it had been enriched by the Medici and their Austrian successors. At that. time they contributed to the splendour of that immense assemblage of the works of human genius which the triumphs of France had concentrated in the Louvre; -we cannot here refrain from expressing our surprise at Mr. Eustace's disapproba tion of this measure on the part of the French-to us appears so perfectly Roman, that to an admirer of the "lords of humankind" we should have supposed it a proceeding of a most seducing nature, and that all the sympathies of such a person would have been roused in favour of a people who knew so well how to tread in the steps of his classical favourites ;-for our parts, we reprobate this spoliating system -and however advantageous it may be to the progress of the arts that their chefsd'œuvres should be collected in some central spot-we should be the first to execrate the piratical spirit which takes advantage of victory to rob the vanquished of the purest monuments of their glory.