gable, could not keep pace with his invention. Flauto Magico,' 'La Clemenza di Tito,' and a requiem, which he had scarcely time to finish, were among his last efforts. The composition of the requiem, in the decline of his bodily powers, and under great mental excitement, hastened his dissolution; he was seized with repeated fainting fits, brought on by his extreme assiduity in writing, in one of which he expired. A few hours before his death took place, he is reported to have said, 'Now I begin to see what might be done in music.""

In the sister art of painting, the great RAPHAEL, whose works astonish not more by their excellence than their number, lived only till he was thirtyseven, dying, like our own Shakspeare, on the anniversary of his birth. His distinguished contemporary, CORREGGIO, was only two or three years older, when, having completed his great work, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, which is painted on the ceiling of the dome of the Cathedral at Parma, he suddenly met with his death, under circumstances never to be remembered without sorrow. So ignorantly, we are told, was his masterly performance appreciated by the canons his employers, that they not only refused the unfortunate artist the price that had been agreed upon, but paid him five hundred crowns, which was all they would allow, in copper. Correggio was carrying home this money to his family, who were living in great poverty in a neighbouring village, when, overcome by the heat of the weather and the weight of his load, he was unfortunately tempted to slake his thirst at a spring by the way-side, and the consequence was an inflammatory attack, which soon proved fatal. The destiny of the picture itself had nearly been the same with that of the artist. It is said that the canons were just about to efface it, when the illustrious

Titian, happening to pass through Parma, expressed himself with regard to it in terms of such high admiration, as to induce them to forego their intention. Titian, in this case, imitated Alexander's speech to Diogenes: "If I were not Titian," said that great painter, "I should wish to be Correggio." It is Correggio of whom it is told, that, upon seeing one of the works of Raphael, he could only express his feelings by exclaiming, with a noble pride in their common art, "And I also am a painter !"

In the same country, and nearly at the same period with Raphael and Correggio, lived Angelo Politian, and Giovanni Pico, Prince of Mirandola, two of the most learned men of an age abounding in great scholars; the former of whom died at forty, and the latter at thirty-two. POLITIAN, in particular, has scarcely been excelled, by any scholar of later times, in that combination of profound erudition and elegant taste in which he so conspicuously surpassed all his contemporaries. We may imagine how actively his short life must have been spent, when we reflect on his extensive literary labours, and the variety and amazing exactness of his acquirements. The works he has left us are not so voluminous as those of some other writers; but it would be unfair and absurd to measure the industry of such a mind as his by the mere bulk of its productions. The works, however, which he wrote and published constitute but a small part of the services he rendered to literature. In that age, the recovery of the lost works of the ancients was, in reality, by far the most important occupation to which a scholar could devote himself; and, fortunately, it was also looked upon as the most honourable. It occupied, accordingly, a large portion of the time of Politian and all his distinguished contemporaries. The celebrated Lorenzo de' Medici, the wealthy and munifi

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cent patron of all the liberal arts, and himself a scholar and writer of no mean order, was one of the most ardent among the collectors of ancient manųscripts; and Politian was often despatched by him to different parts of Italy, to search for those fastperishing treasures, and to purchase them for his library. "I wish," said Lorenzo to his friend, as he was proceeding on one of his expeditions for this purpose, "that the diligence of Picus and yourself would afford me such opportunities of purchasing books, that I should be obliged even to pledge my furniture to possess them." It was in the collating and correcting of these manuscripts that the literary labours of Politian principally consisted. His studies were extended to all the various departments of ancient literature. As a clergyman (for he held the office of a canon in the Metropolitan Church of Florence), he had made himself conversant with Divinity, Hebrew, and the Canon Law; and Civil Jurisprudence is known to have occupied a large share of his attention. He had acquired so perfect a familiarity with the two classic languages, that he wrote both in Latin and Greek almost with the facility of one using his native tongue; and with a purity and elegance that would have done no dishonor, it has been thought, to the most learned of the ancients themselves. The few compositions he has left us, too, in his native Italian, still rank with the most exquisite in that beautiful language. It was, long after the revival of letters, the reproach of some of the greatest scholars of Europe, that they neglected their mother tongue to such a degree as to be incapable of expressing themselves in it with ordinary gracefulness, or even perspicuity. This was certainly less the case with the learned of Italy than of other countries, owing principally to the mighty influence which had been exerted some time before the

era we are speaking of, in refining, fixing, and giving celebrity to the Italian language by the great Dante, and his successors, Petrarch and Boccaccio; and partly, perhaps, to that resemblance to its parent, Latin, which would naturally give to this language a peculiarly classic character in the estimation of the students of ancient learning, and incline them to favour and cherish it accordingly. But in France, more than a century after this, the greatest ignorance of their native language was often exhibited, even by those scholars who wrote most elegantly in that of the Greeks or Romans. Thus, the celebrated Sebastian Castalio, whose Latin version of the Bible has been already mentioned as remarkable for its purity, and whose other works in the same language are all eminently deserving of the same praise, in afterwards translating the Scriptures into French, expressed himself in so vulgar and barbarous a manner, that his style has been described as no better than the jargon of the beggars. In Germany, so late as even a century after the time of Castalio, the illustrious Leibnitz composed almost all his works either in Latin or French, the little which he composed in German being very ill written; and although, in the variety of his schemes, he proposes one for the improvement of that language, he only shows, by the remarks he makes on it, his ignorance of its true character and resources. Our own noble tongue was, even up to a very recent period, scarcely recognised, by many of our most learried scholars, as a suitable vehicle either for elegant literature or philosophy; and that, too, strangely enough, long after it had been adorned by some of the greatest works, both in verse and prose, that any nation has yet had to boast of. The English tongue was both a refined and copious one so early as the time of Chaucer, who lived in the fourteenth century, and was the

contemporary of Petrarch and Boccaccio. In the earlier part of the sixteenth century, as may be seen from the poems of Surrey and Wyatt, it had attained, in regard to both its words and its idioms, very nearly the form it still has; and the latter part of that century, and the beginning of the following, was the time of its greatest richness and glory, being that in which flourished Spenser, and Hooker, and Bacon, and Shakspeare, and many others whom even their greatness has not obscured, and in which Jeremy Taylor and Milton were born and educated. Yet, after all these writers had produced their immortal works, we find not only some of our most distinguished scholars continuing to write their native tongue with an awkwardness and inaccuracy that, in a Latin composition, would have been considered disgraceful, but trace our most polite and popular authors themselves affecting almost universally to despise their mother English as an unformed and barbarous dialect, scarcely to be used except in works of the most ephemeral description, or in addressing the vulgar who understood no other. Thus, to omit many similar evidences of the general state of feeling, Waller, the poet, who died the year before the Revolution, tells us that

Poets, that lasting marble seek,

Must carve in Latin or in Greek.

It is delightful to contrast with this most discreditable insensibility the enthusiastic admiration which some of our older writers express for this golden growth of our island-the best representative and picture of our national manners, intellect, heart, and history. The works of Chaucer, who, Waller informs us,

His sense can only boast,

The glory of his numbers lost,

are, in Spenser's estimation, the " well of English un