delight, at the very period of transition from
boyhood to youth, sealed no doubt the peculiar character of his
mind, and taught him, too soon for his peace, to sound those
depths of thought and feeling, from which, after this time, all
that he wrote was derived. He had, when he passed the Alps, only
a moderate acquaintance with the Italian language; but during
his residence in the country he came to speak it with perfect
fluency, and with a pure Sienese pronunciation. In its study he
was much assisted by his friend and instructor, the Abbate
Pifferi, who encouraged him to his first attempts at
versification. The few sonnets, which are now printed, were, it
is to be remembered, written by a foreigner, hardly seventeen
years old, and after a very short stay in Italy. The Editor
might not, probably, have suffered them to appear, even in this
private manner, upon his own judgment. But he knew that the
greatest living writer of Italy, to whom they were shown some
time since at Milan, by the author's excellent friend, Mr.
Richard Milnes, has expressed himself in terms of high
approbation.

"The growing intimacy of Arthur with Italian poetry led him
naturally to that of Dante. No poet was so congenial to the
character of his own reflective mind; in none other could he so
abundantly find that disdain of flowery redundance, that
perpetual preference of the sensible to the ideal, that
aspiration for somewhat better and less fleeting than earthly
things, to which his inmost soul responded. Like all genuine
worshippers of the great Florentine poet, he rated the _Inferno_
below the two latter portions of the _Divina Commedia_; there
was nothing even to revolt his taste, but rather much to attract
it, in the scholastic theology and mystic visions of the
_Paradiso_. Petrarch he greatly admired, though with less
idolatry than Dante; and the sonnets here printed will show to
all competent judges how fully he had imbibed the spirit,
without servile centonism, of the best writers in that style of
composition who flourished in the 16th century.

"But poetry was not an absorbing passion at this time in his
mind. His eyes were fixed on the best pictures with silent
intense delight. He had a deep and just perception of what was
beautiful in this art, at least in its higher schools; for he