which absolve and punish without love or hatred.  He said upon occasion of those ecclesiastical disputes which so much employed the Greek emperors and Christians, that theological disputes, when they are not confined to the schools, infallibly dishonor a nation in the eyes of its neighbors:  in fact, the contempt in which wise men hold those quarrels does not vindicate the character of their country; because, sages making everywhere the least noise, and being the smallest number, it is never from them that the nation is judged.

We look upon that special interest which M. de Montesquieu took in the (Encyclopedic) as one of the most honorable rewards of our labor.  Perhaps the opposition which the work has met with, reminding him of his own experience, interested him the more in our favor.  Perhaps he was sensible, without perceiving it, of that justice which we dared to do him in the first volume of the ‘Encyclopedic,’ when nobody as yet had ventured to say a word in his defense.  He prepared for us an article upon ‘Taste,’ which has been found unfinished among his papers.  We shall give it to the public in that condition, and treat it with the same respect that antiquity formerly showed to the last words of Seneca.  Death prevented his giving us any further marks of his approval; and joining our own griefs with those of all Europe, we might write on his tomb:—­

     “Finis vita ejus nobis luctuosus, patriae tristis, extraneis
     etiam ignotisque non sine cura fuit.”

VITTORIO ALFIERI

(1749-1803)

BY L. OSCAR KUHNS

Italian literature during the eighteenth century, although it could boast of no names in any way comparable with those of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, showed still a vast improvement on the degradation of the preceding century.  Among the most famous writers of the times—­Goldoni, Parini, Metastasio—­none is so great or so famous as Vittorio Alfieri, the founder of Italian tragedy.  The story of his life and of his literary activity, as told by himself in his memoirs, is one of extreme interest.  Born at Asti, on January 17th, 1749, of a wealthy and noble family, he grew up to manhood singularly deficient in knowledge and culture, and without the slightest interest in literature.  He was “uneducated,” to use his own phrase, in the Academy of Turin.  It was only after a long tour in Italy, France, Holland, and England, that, recognizing his own ignorance, he went to Florence to begin serious work.

At the age of twenty-seven a sudden revelation of his dramatic power came to him, and with passionate energy he spent the rest of his life in laborious study and in efforts to make himself worthy of a place among the poets of his native land.  Practically he had to learn everything; for he himself tells us that he had “an almost total ignorance of the rules of dramatic composition, and an unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of writing well and handling his own language.”