any sense of the memory of the creator of
their language, whose immortality had become a portion of their own
glory. Boccaccio, impassioned by all his generous nature, though he
regrets he could not raise a statue to Dante, has sent down to posterity
more than marble, in the "Life." I venture to give the lofty and bold
apostrophe to his fellow-citizens; but I feel that even the genius of
our language is tame by the side of the harmonised eloquence of the
great votary of Dante!

"Ungrateful country! what madness urged thee, when thy dearest citizen,
thy chief benefactor, thy only poet, with unaccustomed cruelty was
driven to flight! If this had happened in the general terror of that
time, coming from evil counsels, thou mightest stand excused; but when
the passion ceased, didst thou repent? didst thou recall him? Bear with
me, nor deem it irksome from me, who am thy son, that thus I collect
what just indignation prompts me to speak, as a man more desirous of
witnessing your amendment, than of beholding you punished! Seems it to
you glorious, proud of so many titles and of such men, that the one
whose like no neighbouring city can show, you have chosen to chase from
among you? With what triumphs, with what valorous citizens, are you
splendid? Your wealth is a removable and uncertain thing; your fragile
beauty will grow old; your delicacy is shameful and feminine; but these
make you noticed by the false judgments of the populace! Do you glory in
your merchants and your artists? I speak imprudently; but the one are
tenaciously avaricious in their servile trade; and Art, which once was
so noble, and became a second nature, struck by the same avarice, is now
as corrupted, and nothing worth! Do you glory in the baseness and the
listlessness of those idlers, who, because their ancestors are
remembered, attempt to raise up among you a nobility to govern you, ever
by robbery, by treachery, by falsehood! Ah! miserable mother! open thine
eyes; cast them with some remorse on what thou hast done, and blush, at
least, reputed wise as thou art, to have had in your errors so fatal a
choice! Why not rather imitate the acts of those cities who so keenly
disputed merely for the honour of the birth-place of the divine Homer?
Mantua, our neighbour, counts as the greatest fame which remains for
her, that Virgil was a Mantuan! and holds his very name in such
reverence, that not only in public places, but in the most private, we
see his sculpt