worthy of a countryman of Theocritus; and his mock-heroics, Don Quixote, and the Origin of the World, though evincing less of poetical inspiration, are effluences of genuine humour. His employment of the Sicilian dialect was highly favourable to his genius by exempting him from all obligation to write with academical constraint. It is most interesting to find Wordsworth's plea for a return to nature anticipated by a Sicilian of the generally stiff and affected eighteenth century. One of the most marked features of his poetry is its lively and dramatic character, arising from the close observation of national types, apparently just as they were observed by the ancient writers of Sicilian mimes, Sophron and Epicharmus. "As in antiquity," says Paul Heyse, "so at this day, idyll, song, and mime are the species of poetical composition allotted as the Sicilian heritage." Meli represented the national genius to perfection. His life was uneventful. He is represented as an amiable, sensible, unassuming man, as much of a Bacchus as consistent with sobriety, and as much of an Anacreon as comported with an utter ignorance of Greek, an abate of the old school, attached, but not in a perverse or bigoted manner, to the ancient social order, which, by the aid of British ships and troops, maintained itself better in Sicily than elsewhere in Italy.
The licentious poems of the Abate Giovanni Battista Casti (1721–1803) deserve attention from their influence on Byron's Don Juan, and also from the veiled political character of many of them. Casti, an accomplished traveller and acquainted with many distinguished men, belongs, like Talleyrand, both to the old time and to the new. Attached by habit and taste to the polished and frivolous society of the ancient regime, his sympathies
