and laudable aim, because in harmony with the genius of the people and the language. As It has been said that what is not clear is not French, so it might be added that what is not refined is not Italian.
Notwithstanding the production of much inferior work, this character still appertains to the literature in its best contemporary examples, the only ones with which posterity is likely to concern itself. The enormous recent development, nevertheless, of the sphere of human interests; the creation of new arts and sciences, necessitating a corresponding expansion of the resources of language; the facility of intercourse among peoples, tending to a cosmopolitanism which continually threatens to obliterate national distinctions; the formation of an immense and imperfectly trained reading class, to whose tastes the majority of authors must or at all events will condescend—these are trying circumstances for every literature, and especially for one whose special claims are polish and dignity. But if it be true that these latter qualities are not imported, or imposed by external pressure, but inherent in the constitution of the nation itself, it may well be hoped that they will adapt themselves to the circumstances of the present, without breach of continuity with the past. Up to the present time this continuity appears to us unbroken, and we have been able to conceive, of the history of Italian literature as biography, not so much of individual writers as of a single fair spirit living through them all, which has moulded, animated, and laid aside all in their turn. Like other finite existences, this spirit has known infancy, adolescence, and maturity, and must one day know decay and death; but the phenomena accompanying her present development seem to us rather to
