pens in Italy, the country people, who had no money, were scen to throw into the purse their rings and ear-rings, ordinary jewels, it is true, and of but little value, but the sacrifice of them showed to what an extent their owners were capable of having their feelings wrought upon. One can scarcely conceive a si milar movement among our peasants of Gonesse or Villejuif, I was fortunate enough to know at Rome one of the men who confer the greatest honour on the Italian pulpit, the reverend Fra Jabalot, procureur-général of the Dominicans of the Minerva, a Frenchman by origin, who would even have shone in France; he died in 1837. An ardent and most evangelical orator, Fra Jabalot was besides an able logician; I was told that he had learned English in three months, that he might translate a very fine sermon on faith, hope, and charity, delivered at the dedication of the catholic chapel of Bradford, in Yorkshire, by Mr. Baines, bishop of Siga, a very excellent and most lucid recapitulation of the chief proofs of the truth of catholicism, and throughout full of the tenderest charity towards the protestants. The Italian translation of Fra Jabalot is very correct, and it evinces that the original author, in more than one respect, resembles his eloquent interpreter. CHAPTER IX. his death belonged to Galeas Visconti, fifth duke of Milan, as may be seen by his name, now almost effaced, written on the leaf detached in 1795 by the abbe | Mazzucchelli." The Another inscription by Petrarch, less noticed, regards the death of his natural son Giovanni, at the age of twenty-five, canon of Verona, who had robbed his father and given him much trouble. This Virgil seems the depository and confidant of Petrarch's sorrows. curious miniatures, by the celebrated painter of Siena, Simon Memmi, as we are informed by a Latin distich, represent Virgil seated, invoking the muses, and Eneas in a warrior's costume; a shepherd and husbandman typify the Bucolics and the Georgies, and Servius, the commentator, is drawing back a thin curtain to indicate his explaining and removing the difficulties of the Latin poet. Though rather incorrect in the design, these miniatures, very probably executed from the ideas of Petrarch, a friend of the artist's, are deficient in neither originality, colour, nor truth: the figure of Æneas is one of the best. An inhabitant of Pavia succeeded in abstracting this precious volume, and in concealing it when that town was taken and the library carried away by Louis XII., in 1499; three centuries after it did not escape the commissioners of the republic: if it had made part of the literary booty of the monarchy, it would have remained with us like the Ambrosian Library.-Petrarch's Virgil.-Palimp- Sforzeide and other valuable articles of sesti.-Letters and hair of Lucrezia Borgia.-Mysterious catalogue. the same library now deposited in the Bibliothèque du Roi, and so well described by the good, learned, and everto-be-regretted Vanpraet; but this pillage by the revolution had not twenty years' date; that kind of political prescription which renders every thing legi I went several times every year to the Ambrosian Library, which was shown me by the abbes Mazzucchelli, Bentivoglio, and Mancini, director, subdirector. and clerk; men full of learning, modesty, and politeness. It contains sixty thou-timate was not acquired, so the volume sand printed volumes, and about ten thousand manuscripts. The famous Virgil of Petrarch, in which is his impassioned note on Laura, after was taken back in 1815. The marginal notes of Petrarch, and those on the bottom of the pages, seem in the same handwriting as the note on Laura; but 1 An apoplectic attack had produced on the abbe Mazzucchelli, in his latter days, a most extraordinary effect; it had untaught him how to read. I went one evening to his house, the day previous to one of my visits to the library, whither he no longer went; however, on the morrow he would be there. but he acknowledged that he could not even spell | previously given the text. See t. 1, p. 358. the name of Petrarca, and to his death this learned librarian was unable to read. "A fac simile of the eight lines of letrarch's note is given in the edition of the Rime, published at Padua by Professor Marsatid (1819-20, 2 vol.); it is followed by some historical remarks and very accurate criticisms, in which the professor rectifies several errors committed by the writers who had these lengthy and numerous notes, with quotations from other ancient authors and critical collations, must be little worthy of this erudite poet, since S. Mai has not thought them of sufficient importance to publish. Perhaps they are of Petrarch's youth, when his father snatched from him, and threw into the fire, the Virgil he was secretly reading, instead of studying the Decretales. The Josephus, translated by Ruffin, a priest of Aquilea, but which Muratori for good reasons thinks the work of one of the literati employed by Cassiodorus to translate from the Greek the works of antiquity, is perhaps, with the Gregorian papyrus of Monza, the most singular of the manuscripts written on papyrus and on both sides; according to Mabillon, it is now about twelve hundred years old. A Greek manuscript of a life of Alexander, without the author's name, thought by Montfaucon to be Callisthenes, at first inspired me with unfeigned respect. I only knew Callisthenes by the Lysimaque of Montesquieu, that admirable portrait of Stoicism, of which Callisthenes is as the hero and representative. The Ife of Alexander by a man of such talent and virtue, who had been so cruelly the victim of Alexander's wrath, seemed to me a veritable monument. The learned de Saint-Croix has since demonstrated that Callisthenes was only a rebellious courtier; being Alexander's historiographer, he had servilely maintained bis pretensions to divinity by a thousand fables, and subsequently, not thanking himself adequately rewarded, be became a conspirator. The History of Alexander, attributed to Callisthenes, copies of which are not scarce, S. Mai baving published it, is nothing in fact but a long and wearisome romance full of improbabilities and absurdities. I could not suppress a species of lite The manuscripts of Saint Colomban de Bobbio amustard to seven hundred in number; half of them were sold to Cardinal Frederick; the rest Wend to 'Le Vatican, ↑ Every body has read the elegant translation of the Republica by M. Villemain, with his eloquent premisary discourse. The learned labours of ProRetur Le Cere, in reality the first editor of Cicero's complete works on the Fragments, increased by these new discoveries, are almost a creation, from the order and connection which he has effected wing those scattered shreds, so confusedly thrown suge her to preceding ed ions. Another French grafemer not less distinguished, M. Cousin, bas rary emotion, on seeing, in a large square wooden chest, the celebrated palimpsesti of the pleadings of Cicero for Scaurus, Tullius, and Flaccus,-on the writing of which the poems of Ledulius, a priest of the sixth century, had been transcribed, as well as several unpublished sentences of the discourses against Clodius and Curio, till lately covered over with a Latin translation of the acts of the council of Chalcedon; the first discoveries of S. Mai, and the prelude of his successful labours. In contemplating these old sheets, black and calcined, perforated in some parts by the action of oxygenised muriatic acid, I loved to see modern science rushing to the rescue of ancient eloquence and philosophy, and chemistry stripping off and annihilating the ignoble text which concealed a sublime original. It was impossible not to be struck at the sight of this second species of ruins, and this determined searching, if one may be allowed the expression, of the monuments of thought and genius, relics of the greatest orator of Rome, found again after more than ten centuries, under the Gothic lines of a versifier of the middle ages and the protocol of ecclesiastical decrees. The palimpsesti of the Ambrosian Library proceeded in part from the monastery of Saint Colomban de Bobbio, situated in the recesses of the Apennines, where, as well as at mount Cassino, a mass of precious manuscripts were stored; in those barbarous times the cloister and the mountains were the asylum of letters; these learned remnants, published, annoted, translated by clever writers and experienced editors of our times, are gloriously promulgated throughout the civilised world; and Cicero, in bis eloquent orations, is again listened to by a greater number than ever heard bim in the forum or the Comitia." The manuscripts of the Ambrosian also found in the manuscripts of the Ambrosian many various readings to the commentary of Proclus on the first Alcibiades. See tome ii, et lii. of his edition of Procius, published in 1820. Though the ground has been passed over by such librarians as Muratori, who has given four quarto volumes of his Anecdota ex Ambrosiana bibitoth, codicibur, and S. Mal, the Ambrosian may still furnish new discoveries of ancient authors. As to the moderns, what might not be the importance, for the history of the revival of letters which has yet to be written, of the collection forming more than twenty volumes of manuscript letters in Latin and Italian, of a great number of the literati and illustrious personages of the sixteenth afforded S. Mai at a later period a part of his happier and more complete discovery, the Letters of Marcus Aurelius and of Fronto,-found under a history of the council of Chalcedon, which also came from the monastery of Saint Colomban de Bobbio,-a curious monument of Roman manners, history, and literature, in which the young prince, so enamoured of philosophy, so virtuous, pure, and gentle, appears very superior to his master, who remained a sophist and rhetorician, notwithstanding the praise he had formerly obtained and the celebrated inscription beneath his statue: Rome, the mistress of the world, to Fronto, the king of orators! tenth are wanting; but S. Rosmini has made them sufficiently known. The Joca et Seria remind us much more of the licence of Horace than of his simplicity, grace, and judgment; and Philelphus, a necessitous suppliant, a badly paid pensioner, a scheming father, has not, in his panegyrics, the address, ease, and almost familiarity of the opulent and voluptuous flatterer of Augustus and friend of Mæcenas. One manuscript, which forms a contrast with the violent and abusive manners of Philelphus as a man of letters, is a kind of elegy entitled Lamento or Disperata, composed by Virginia Accaramboni, on the murder of her husband But there is a manuscript less imposing by banditti; this unhappy woman herthan these palimpsesti, namely, ten let-self perished with her brother by the ters from Lucrezia Borgia to cardinal hand of Ludovico Orsini, her brotherBembo, at the end of which is a piece of in-law. Spanish verse by the latter, breathing an exalted spirit of the purest Platonism; the answer of the lady is much plainer, and she accompanied it with a lock of her flaxen hair. Thus does the bottom of this mysterious portfolio, this strange pedantic medley of poetry, philosophy, and sensualism, offer a striking characteristic monument of the corrupiness of Italian manners in the sixteenth century. This lock of a lady's hair, in a great library, in the midst of old manuscripts, is a striking singularity; one would scarcely have expected to find it there, and it seems strange to confide the custody of such a charge to the doctors of the Ambrosian Library. I perused the manuscript of Philelphus De Jocis et Seriis, a collection of serious and humorous epigrams, epistles to princes and nobles, which consist of ten thousand verses equally divided into ten books; of this manuscript, said to be unique, the first book and part of the century? We are indebted to M. Renouard for the edition of the Lettres de Paul Manuce, published at Paris in 1834. The verses of Bembo are printed in the follo edition of his works; Venice, 1729, t. ii. p. 51. Yo pienso si me muriese. The letter of Lucrezia Borgia is given verbatim at the end of Foscolo's Essays on Petrarch, p. 255 of the Italian translation of S. Camillo Ugoni, to whom we are indebted for the publication of this singular document. The librarians of the Ambrosian have the title of doctors; but, although priests, they are relieved by the founder of a part of their ecclesiastical functions, to enable them to attend more closely to their duty in the library. The seventy miniatures, the remains of a fine manuscript of the Iliad in uncial letters, published by S. Mai and printed in the royal office at Milan, have that kind of artless fidelity which bespeaks their great antiquity, and they are one of the monuments which prove the unintermitted study of the pictorial arts in Italy. The five large volumes of flowers so pleasingly painted, appear to be by Giambattista Morando, an artist of the early part of the seventeenth century. I should have liked to find at the Ambrosian the sketches of some new plays which Saint Charles Borromeo had engaged the provost of Saint Barnabas to examine, and on which he had himself written marginal notes. These dramatic criticisms of Saint Charles would be a curiosity at this day; one can scarcely conceive the licentiousness of the first Italian farces. It is very likely that the manuscripts of these comedies were be 3 Vita di Filelo. See the various rejected quotations in the Monumenti inediti of the three volumes. 4 It appears that one of the daughters of Philelphus was particularly anxious to get married, for he is continually begging a dowery for her, whether be address his verses to Francesco Sforza, the dachess Bianca Maria his wife, Gentilis Simonetta, knight of the Golden Fleece, or even Gaspardo di Pesaro, the duke's physician. Nam sine dote quidem, quam multum ponderet au- queathed by Saint Charles, with his other books, to the chapter of Milan, the library of which was suppressed in 1797, when, probably, they were lost in the confusion. It is moreover, particularly difficult to make researches at the Ambrosian. Would it be believed that its illustrious founder, cardinal Federico Borromeo, has forbidden the making of a catalogue? It is said that it cannot be effected without a dispensation from Rome. The existing apology for a catalogue is truly a mere cipher; the authors are arranged by their Christian names, which in Italy certainly have more importance than with us; in this list there is a crowd of Johns, Jameses, and Peters, and to find Petrarch, one must look for Francis. To increase the perplexity still more, there is no title on the backs of the books; the aspect of these nameless volumes covering the walls of the immense ball, is somewhat intimidating, and were it not for the good fame of the founder, one might think ill of all this occult science. The librarians, however, know preity well what they have and what they have not; but they only consult their memory, and the catalogue is purely traditional. It is not easy to explain the prohibition of cardinal Federico; he bai sought and collected at great expense books and manuscripts in all Europe and even in the East, had appointed learned men to explain and publish them, had attarbed to the Ambrosian an excellent printing-office no longer in existence, and yet be timidly concealed a part of these very discoveries; it is impossible to show at the same time more zeal and love for learning, and to take more precautions against it. Of the physico-mathematical manuscripts of Leonardo Vinci, there only remains now at the Ambrosian a single volume, which is of great size, called the Codics Atlantico, containing machines, Borromeo tutorno agli spettacoli, Bergamo, 1759. to quarto which I read at Milan, and which I regret is not to be found in the libraries of Paris. * The numerous manuscripts of Leonardo Vinci we now dupersed: the Trivulzio library has some of them furteen small volumes and some loose aberta of the same kind are in the library of the Institut at Paris, and have been well described in lher essay read to the first class in 1797, by M. J. B. Temari Paris, Duprat, 1797), who has remarked flat Leonardo Vinci bad pointed out the motion of "be earth. before Copernicus, from the fall of beavy figures, caricatures, and notes collected by Pompeo Leoni. The letters are written from right to left, in the Eastern manner, and can only be read with a mirror. Like his worthy rival Michael Angelo, Leonardo Vinci was also scholar, sculptor, architect, engineer, chemist, mechanician, and man of letters; with such men the multiplicity of accomplishments, instead of injuring each other, seems, on the contrary, to extend and strengthen them. The sight of this singular manuscript, with its reversed characters, proves by its manner, how the influence of the East was reflected on Italy in Leonardo's age, and to how great an extent the genius of Italy was indebted to it for warmth and brilliancy." There is a small but rich museum in the Ambrosian library, in which may be seen the cartoon of the School of Athens, the first simple and sublime sketch of that inmortal composition. M. de Chateaubriand, standing before that painting, said, "I like the cartoon as well." And the latter, having been carefully restored, seems likely to outlast the painting, which is daily falling to decay. A portrait of Leonardo Vinci, in red crayon. done by himself, is a true patriarchal countenance; the features are calm and mild, notwithstanding the bushiness of the eyebrows and the vast exuberance of beard and hair. Several charming paintings by Bernardino Luini, such as the young St. John playing with a lamb, the Virgin at the rocks, which were brought back from Paris, are also at the Ambrosian; there is likewise a very fine fresco of the Crowning with thorns, which in my opinion has less reputation than it merits; its figures pass for the portraits of the deputies of Santa Corona, a charitable institution to which these premises originally belonged. A monument has been erected at the Ambrosian to the ingenious Milanese painter and writer, Joseph Bossi; the de bodies. The most important of Leonardo's manuscripts is the one which belonged to the library of king George III., given by his son to the British Museum, this manuscript offers divers figures, heads of horses and other animals, subjects in optics, perspective, artillery, bydraulis, mechanics, and some drawings with the pen, among which is a sketch of his own Last Supper, regarded by Canova as more precious than any thing else he had seen in England. There are also some of Leonardo's manuscripts in Earl Spencer's library. sign and basso-relievos are by SS. Palagi and Marchesi, and the bust, which is colossal, is a work of Canova's, full of life and expression. CHAPTER X. Library of Brera.-Observatory.-Oriani. The library of Brera is principally composed of the old library of the Jesuits, and others proceeding from convents and religious houses suppressed in 1797, of a part of Haller's books, Count Firmian's, and the small but precious collection bequeathed by cardinal Durini. The cabinet of medals occupies a very handsome apartment; it has a numismatic library tastefully selected by the conservator, S. Cattaneo; this arrangement is very convenient for students, as they are not obliged to have recourse to the great library for the books they may require, and which probably might not be in their places. The library of Brera has only a thousand manuscripts, among which are the famous choir books of the Chartreuse of Pavia; but it contains a hundred and seventy thousand volumes, and is the best furnished of all the Italian libraries with modern books of science, natural history, and voyages. The great number of readers is another resemblance between Milan and Paris, and in crossing the great hall with its superb bookshelves, one might almost fancy oneself at the library in the rue de Richelieu. The elegant palace of Brera was formerly a college; its architecture is by Ricchini, except the front by Piermarini. In one of the porticoes, among other illustrious Milanese, is the bust of Parini, with an inscription which is exceedingly touching, when we remember that it was there that this excellent poet performed the duties of a professor, and formed youth to eloquence and virtue. The observatory of Brera, founded in 1766, after the plans of the learned Father Boscovich, and well supplied with the best of instruments, has been ornamented in these latter days by the discoveries of the great astronomer and mathematician Barnabas Oriani, who for more than fifty It is said that Oriani was foud of pointing out at Linterno near Milan, (see liv. IV chap. i.) a little wall at which he had worked when a mason, | years assiduously watched the s there; he was a man not less superio his virtues and simplicity than his geni Oriani was created count and senato Napoleon, but he continued a scholar a priest. He died at the age of eig on the 12th of November 1832, and div his property into two portions, one charitable purposes, the other for advancement of science. CHAPTER XI. Private libraries.-Trivulzio library.-Verses In Milan there are many remark. private libraries; as the Fagnani, wi has a fine collection of Aldine editio the Melzi, rich in Italian works of fifteenth century; the Reina, Litta, chinto, Trivulzio. By a kindnes which I shall preserve a lasting mem I obtained access to the last mention which does not count less than th thousand volumes and about two thous manuscripts. A minute detail of Trivulziolibrary, transmitted by its ow to M. Millin, was inserted in the nales encyclopédiques, of 1817, t. T but it is not exactly correct now, a of the books having passed into anot branch of the family, and the enlighter zeal of the last marquis Jacopo Trivul: who died in 1831, one of those Itali that have accorded the noblest encoura ments to letters, having been continu making additions to the part which mained. Lady Morgan has likev given a description of some articles; s as the book of Hours, or primer for use of the young Maximilian, son of Lo the Moor, with some beautiful vigne by Leonardo Vinci,-characteristic p tures, which are a kind of portraiture princely education at that epoch; in of them the young duke is represen on horseback, contemplated by the lad il principe contemplato dalle donn The Trivulzio library is rich in man scripts and early editions of Dante, B caccio, and Petrarch. A very fine m uuscript of the last is of his own tim and may be in his own hand, as writing is exactly like the note in t Virgil at the Ambrosian; the Padu edition (1472) is ornamented with char ing miniatures of Mantegna's schoo Lady Morgan mentions an edition of t |