From the Bassvilliana I have translated the passage descriptive of Louis XVI.'s ascent to heaven; and I offer this, perhaps not quite justly, in illustration of what I have been saying of Monti as a poet. There is something of his curious verbal beauty in it, and his singular good luck of phrase, with his fortunate reminiscences of other poets; the collocation of the different parts is very comical, and the application of it all to Louis XVI. is one of the most preposterous things in literature. But one must remember that the poor king was merely a subject, a theme, with the poet.

As when the sun uprears himself among

The lesser dazzling substances, and drives

His eager steeds along the fervid curve,-

When in one only hue is painted all

The heavenly vault, and every other star

Is touched with pallor and doth veil its front,

So with sidereal splendor all aflame

Amid a thousand glad souls following,

High into heaven arose that beauteous soul.

Smiled, as he passed them, the majestical,

Tremulous daughters of the light, and shook

Their glowing and dewy tresses as they moved,

He among all with longing and with love

Beaming, ascended until he was come

Before the triune uncreated life;

There his flight ceases, there the heart, become

Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled,

And all the urgence of desire is lost;

There on his temples he receives the crown

Of living amaranth immortal, on

His cheek the kiss of everlasting peace.

And then were heard consonances and notes

Of an ineffable sweetness, and the orbs

Began again to move their starry wheels.

More swiftly yet the steeds that bore the day

Exulting flew, and with their mighty tread,

Did beat the circuit of their airy way.

In this there are three really beautiful lines; namely, those which describe the arrival of the spirit in the presence of God:

There his flight ceases, there the heart, become

Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled,

And all the urgence of desire is lost;

Or, as it stands in the Italian:

Ivi queta il suo voi, ivi s'appunta

In tre sguardi beata, ivi il cor tace,

E tutta perde del desio la punta.

It was the fortune of Monti, as I have said, to sing all round and upon every side of every subject, and he was governed only by knowledge of which side was for the moment uppermost. If a poem attacked the French when their triumph seemed doubtful, the offending verses were erased as soon as the French conquered, and the same poem unblushingly exalted them in a new edition;-now religion and the Church were celebrated in Monti's song, now the goddess of Reason and the reign of liberty; the Pope was lauded in Rome, and the Inquisition was attacked in Milan; England was praised whilst Monti was in the anti-French interest, and as soon as the poet could turn his coat of many colors, the sun was urged to withdraw from England the small amount of light and heat which it vouchsafed the foggy island; and the Rev. Henry Boyd, who translated the Bassvilliana into our tongue, must have been very much dismayed to find this eloquent foe of revolutions assailing the hereditary enemy of France in his next poem, and uttering the hope that she might be surrounded with waves of blood and with darkness, and shaken with earthquakes. But all this was nothing to Monti's treatment of the shade of poor King Louis XVI. We have seen with how much ceremony the poet ushered that unhappy prince into eternal bliss, and in Mr. Boyd's translation of the Bassvilliana, we can read the portents with which Monti makes the heavens recognize the crime of his execution in Paris.

Then from their houses, like a billowy tide,

Men rush enfrenzied, and, from every breast

Banished shrinks Pity, weeping, terrified.

Now the earth quivers, trampled and oppressed

By wheels, by feet of horses and of men;

The air in hollow moans speaks its unrest;

Like distant thunder's roar, scarce within ken,

Like the hoarse murmurs of the midnight surge,

Like the north wind rushing from its far-off den.

* * *

Through the dark crowds that round the scaffold flock

The monarch see with look and gait appear

That might to soft compassion melt a rock;

Melt rocks, from hardest flint draw pity's tear,-

But not from Gallic tigers; to what fate,

Monsters, have ye brought him who loved you dear?

It seems scarcely possible that a personage so flatteringly attended from the scaffold to the very presence of the Trinity, could afterward have been used with disrespect by the same master of ceremonies; yet in his Ode on Superstition, Monti has later occasion to refer to the French monarch in these terms:

The tyrant has fallen. Ye peoples

Oppressèd, rise! Nature breathes freely.

Proud kings, bow before them and tremble;

Yonder crumbles the greatest of thrones!

(Repeat.) There was stricken the vile perjurer Capet,

(He will only give Louis his family name!)

Who had worn out the patience of God!

In that pitiless blood dip thy fingers,

France, delivered from fetters unworthy!

'T is blood sucked from the veins of thy children

Whom the despot has cruelly wronged!

O freemen to arms that are flying,

Bathe, bathe in that blood your bright weapons,

Triumph rests 'mid the terror of battle

Upon swords that have smitten a king!

This, every one must allow, was a very unhandsome way of treating an ex-martyr, but at the time Monti wrote he was in Milan, in the midst of most revolutionary spirits, and he felt obliged to be rude to the memory of the unhappy king. After all, probably it did not hurt the king so much as the poet.