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praise which Dante has bestowed on Aristotle, that he is 'maestro di color che sanno,' the master of all the learned, it is Alexander von Humboldt. In the second volume of his Kosmos he has stated that the Divine Comedy may be said to form an epoch in the history even of natural sciences, from the interest and the charms which the poet's descriptions lent to natural scenery. And the most faithful and spirited translation that has yet appeared is the German version of a reigning European sovereign, King John of Saxony.

In speaking of the practical element in Italian literature, we have said that the first great Florentine writers were not mere writers, that they were either statesmen or judges, or diplomatists or warriors; but they were all something else. Without a single exception they all were merchants. A nominal connexion

at least with commerce was deemed a necessary qualification for office in a great commercial State. A nobleman who was nothing but a nobleman, was formally excluded from power and place. Strange as the thing may seem to us, very foreign to our traditions and experience, his only chance of advancement lay in entering one of the guilds or trading companies of his native city. He must publicly renounce the habits of his order-the good old feudal customs of robbing and ravishing, and burning and murdering-and he must publicly profess his willingness to contribute to the wants, and facilitate the intercourse, of his fellow-men. Dante himself, the father of modern poetry, the bard of hell, of purgatory, and of paradise, was a chemist and druggist before he became, and in order to become, a diplomatist. Doubtless he, with the greatest of his countrymen, felt what, four centuries later, Addison so beautifully expressed:

I look upon high-change to be a great council, in which all considerable nations have their representatives. Factors in the trading world are what ambassadors

are in the politick world-they negotiate affairs, conclude treaties, and maintain a good correspondence between those wealthy societies of men that are divided from one another by seas and oceans or live on the different extremities of a

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continent. I have often been pleased to hear disputes adjusted between an inhabitant of Japan and an alderman of London, or to see a subject of the Great Mogul entering into a league with one of the Czar of Muscovy. I am infinitely delighted in mixing with these several ministers of commerce, as they are distinguished by their different walks and different languages.

Assuredly these old Florentine 'ministers of commerce,' as Addison would have termed them, obtained

in their counting-houses a peculiar aptitude for the conduct of State affairs. The story is well known of Pope Boniface the Eighth, who, on finding that all the thirteen ambassadors sent by different governments to his court were Florentines, exclaimed, 'Why these Florentines form a fifth element in creation!'

An examination of the influence of the literature of Italy upon that of England within such narrow limits as those of the present article, can do little more than hastily record the names of the chief writers, mark the epochs of their authority amongst us, and suggest a few of the inquiries to which it would lead, and which it is likely to illustrate. It necessarily embraces the influence of the two earliest and greatest Italian poets, Dante and Petrarch, on the whole course of English poetry. The influence of Boccaccio and the other novelists both on our prose literature and on our dramatic and narrative poetry. The influence of Ariosto and Tasso and the other writers of poetical romance on Spenser and his contemporaries in former times, on Scott and his imitators in our own age.

The influence of the Italian pastoral dramfa, of the Aminta of Tasso and the Pastor Fido of Guarini, as reflected above all in such poems as the Masque of Ben Jonson, and in all poems of that class, in which Milton's Comus shines forth with surpassing brightness. The influence (not of the most beneficial kind) of Marini and his school, all glare and glitter, all antitheses and point, never, happily, so dominant with us as in France, where it fell under the lash of Molière, yet strong enough to mar the effect of Habington's pathos, to exaggerate and distort the play of Cowley's fancy.

The influence of the drama, which must not be overlooked, when we remember that the Adamo of Andreini contributed, if not to suggest the idea, certainly to exhibit to Milton the scheme of, and even to furnish many of the incidents in, the Paradise Lost. When we add to this the influence of Machiavelli and the Italian political writers on political speculation throughout Europe and in England, as elsewhere, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; that of Sarpi on the ecclesiastical history of all Protestant countries since the Reformation; and of Giannone on the historical inquiries of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon in the last century, the turn given to Mr. Bentham's speculations, and the formulæ which he derived from Beccaria's treatise on rewards and punishments, these all combine to show that graver as well as lighter themes are included in this inquiry.. We have already referred to the Italian tastes and studies of the father of our own poetry-of Chaucer-and to the admiration which he expresses for Dante and Petrarch; but his obligations to Boccaccio are even greater. From the ninth tale of the seventh day he took the Merchant's tale; the first tale of the eighth day is the source of the Shipmanne's tale; the fifth tale of the last day is the original of the Merchant's tale, and the last of that day and of the whole Decameron, the story of Griselda, is the one assigned by Chaucer to the Clerke of Oxenford, perhaps the most touching in the Canterbury Tales. It was not, however, till two centuries later that the Italian influence on our literature reached its height. In a passage often quoted from Puttenham's Arte of English Poesy, published in 1589, it is said that

In the latter end of King Henry the Eighth's reign sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains; who, having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of poetry.

Surrey and Wyatt found in their Italian models something far higher and nobler than 'sweet and stately measures.' Dante and Petrarch, the two great founders, are the two great representatives of modern poetry. They stand to their readers in a position of direct individuality. In the ancient world the man was lost in the citizen. You would contrast rather than compare the Divine Comedy with the Iliad or the Odyssey. Sing, O Goddess! the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus,' is the invocation of the Grecian bard, and he then vanishes for ever from our sight: he speaks no more, he no more is heard, but the prayer has been heard and answered, and forth from heaven the goddess pours her celestial strain. How different with Dante. All things in heaven and earth-all that can be dreamt of in his philosophy-are brought into direct relation with himselfDante the scholar, Dante the lover, Dante the partisan, Dante the Christian. For he is the poet of religion, of internal religion, of the religion of the heart, of personal responsibility. His poetry-high, grave, solemn, authoritative, monitory-never was, never could be extensively popular, for Dante is the poet of the thinker, while Petrarch is the poet of the lover, and Ariosto the poet of the people. It is in the pages of Petrarch that we best see what love has done for modern poetry. It has given a wholly dif ferent colouring to female life. In antiquity, the ideal, the poetic side of life was all the man's; hard, heavy drudgery was woman's inexorable fate. How completely all this was reversed; how the old Gothic veneration for the female sex, the increasing worship of the Virgin, the associations of cloistral life, combined to create a relation directly opposed to that of the Greek and Roman world-all this is best seen in the verse of Petrarch. Whilst the poems of Ariosto reflect the first in a gay and sportive, the second in a serious style-the great struggle of the Middle Ages between the Moslem and Christian powers, and the popular feelings and traditions which transformed the real into a mythical Charlemagne. It would be unjust, how.

untold romance is suggested by the mere title of these poems. What a life of adventure, for example, was that of Robert Dudley, the able and inventive son of the haughty Leicester, who carried to the Tuscan Court the blighted fortunes of his family, and an engineering talent that proclaimed him the Brunel or Stephenson of his own age. What a strange wild story is that of Antonio de Dominis-De Dominis, in the plural,' as old Bishop Halket says,

for he could serve two masters, or twenty, if they would all pay him wages!' who came over to England, was installed Dean of Windsor, and admitted Master of the Savoy Hospital in the Strand, was thence decoyed over to Italy, the eagle flying away with the buzzard, and dropping him at Rome.' There he died in prison, whether by fair death

or by strangling was uncertain, but his body was publicly burnt as that of a heretic.

The Englishwoman in Italy has been no less worthily represented than the Englishman,-Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the last, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the present century, have furnished us with the most faithful pictures of Italian life and manners, of Italian aims and aspirations. Indeed, we do not scruple to affirm that the Casa Guidi Windows of Mrs. Browning gives both a truer narrative of the last Italian revolution, displays a deeper insight into the causes of its failure, and reflects more vividly the political and religious state of the Italian populations, than all the works of Farini, Gualterio, and all their followers or adversaries put together.

J. MONTGOMERY STUART.

E pur si muove.' What if, when

starry Galileo uttered these memorable words to the bigoted and unbelieving Inquisitors, the globe had moved, not, indeed, in the sense that the philosopher meant, but quaked under the influence of those mysterious and unknown causes which produce the astounding and terrific phenomena of Earthquakes? Then, indeed, the sceptical Jesuits -if they had not been whelmed in yawning gulphs, or crushed beneath falling columns-might have admitted that the all-powerful Being producing such phenomena might also cause the globe to revolve. And it is worthy of remark, that an earthquake of great severity occurred in Italy during the very year (1633) in which Galileo was brought before the Inquisition at Rome. At Mantua and Naples much damage was done, and the village of Nicolosi, at the foot of Etna, was totally destroyed. For Galileo, a bright light amidst his fellows, lived in an age when storms and tempests, thunder and lightning, flashing meteors, and, above all, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, were regarded either as instruments of punishment or as

awful portents of the fall of kingdoms or the destruction of tyrants. Earthquakes were especially dreaded on account of their destructiveness. 'We know, indeed,' says Butler, in his Analogy of Religion, several of the general laws of matter, and a great part of the behaviour of living agents is reducible to general laws, but we know nothing in a manner by what laws earthquakes become the instruments of destruction to mankind.' The progress of science and education has stripped astronomical phenomena of many of the superstitions which the vulgar and uneducated attach to them. The lightning has been controlled, electricity made to obey our mandates, and storms have been brought in a great measure under certain wellestablished physical laws, but it is only very recently that volcanic and earthquake phenomena have been investigated by exact science; and although theory and speculation must still enter largely into all attempts to fathom the cosmical laws connected with earthquakes, still much has been done to enable us to arrive at a tolerably just knowledge of the nature of these phenomena.

Earthquakes have long engaged

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the attention of philosophers. The works of Aristotle and Pliny contain many passages and allusions to them; and innumerable books and tracts, some abounding with extraordinary, and curious, and occasionally with shrewd speculations, testify how interesting the study of earthquake phenomena has always been considered.

But, numerous as these investigations have been, it is equally certain that the bibliography of earthquakes is singularly deficient in scientific results of any value, the staple of earthquake stories being made up of gossip and accidents that befel men, animals, and buildings, rather than of the phenomena themselves.

This loose and inconclusive method led the Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to devote a sum of money for the purpose of investigating earthquake phenomena, and drawing up a report on their principal features. The labour has been excessive, and the results, for which we are mainly indebted to Mr. Robert Mallet, F.R.S., are extremely interesting. Four valuable Reports have been made. The last consists of a large volume containing records of nearly seven thousand earthquakes, observed over every known part of the globe, both on land and ocean, from 285 years B.C. to A.D. 1850.

As may be supposed, the records of early observed earthquakes do not present that scientific exactitude desired by modern physicists anxious to explain earthquake phenomena; but nevertheless, the great mass of observations has enabled Mr. Mallet to arrive, by careful discussion, at results of great interest, and to him are we mainly indebted for the fact that seismology (from σepos, an earthquake) has become an exact science.

Before, however, giving any ac count of the deductions from the 6831 recorded earthquakes, we purpose laying before our readers some of the most striking phenomena noted in the Catalogue.

During the first three centuries of historic time-according to our commonly accepted chronologythere are no earthquake records;

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and while between A.C. 1700 and A.C. 1400 there are a few scattered facts, there is again, from A.c. 1400 to A.C. 900, nearly a period of five hundred years of perfect blank, followed again, with a few exceptions, by another blank from A.c. 800 to A.c. 600. Even in the succeeding century, but two earthquakes are recorded; so that in fact, records of any value for scientific analysis may be said to commence at the five hundredth year before the Christian era.

The sacred writings abound with allusions to earthquakes which occasioned the destruction of cities; and Thucydides, Tacitus, Josephus, Livy, Pliny, and Julius Obsequens, make frequent mention of disasters arising from these phenomena. Thus, in the year a.c. 33 an earthquake occurred in Palestine, by which 30,000 persons were killed. Thirteen important cities were destroyed in Asia Minor six years before the Crucifixion of our Saviour; and Matthew, Luke, and Eusebius have told us how the earth quaked during that awful tragedy. Passing on to the fifth century, we find that the whole of Europe was convulsed about that period. In the year 446, earthquakes, which lasted six months, desolated the greater part of the civilized world; and in 494 Laodicea, Hierapolis, Tripolis, and Agathicum, were overwhelmed. In the middle of the sixth century (562), bellowing noises proceeded from mountains adjoining the Rhone, and from the Pyrenees, followed by the falling of huge rocks and subterranean commotions. In 684 the Japanese province of Josa was visited by a terrible earthquake, causing great destruction of life, and the loss of 500,000 acres of land, which sank into the sea. 801 the Basilica of St. Paul at Rome was destroyed by an earthquake felt over France, Germany, and Italy. In 842 the greater part of France was convulsed by shocks, attended by awful subterranean noises; and it is worthy of remark, that on this occasion we have the first record of the phenomenon having been followed by a very severe epidemic, of which many persons died. In 859 we read that upwards

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