The talent with which Dumont performed his task is as generally acknowledged, as the perfect disinterestedness which led him to employ so much talent in expounding the opinions and enlivening the reasonings of others. It is due to him to say, that he always considered the system as a model, to be indeed always consulted and approached, but never imposed without a cautious regard to circumstances. It must also be observed, that however entirely he adopted the speculations, delighted in the method, and even acquiesced in the language of Bentham, that for which he really felt a warm zeal, and consecrated the labour of his life, was the practical establishment of that grand reformation of law, which owes, indeed, much to the writings of Bentham, and to the discussions which they daily contribute to spread and keep up, but which, so far from being peculiar to him, is zealously supported by those who most dissent from his moral theories, and was common to him (at least in that more obvious part of it which relates to criminal law) with the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who pursued the same object, though with less distinctness of view, less precision of language, and less knowledge of the abuses to be reformed. The mind of Dumont moved onward with that of the reformers of jurisprudence throughout Europe. He does not needlessly question the singularities of his venerable master. But his attachment was to the main stock of reforming principle. Those who knew him need not be reminded, that if its principles have any tendency to a cold and low morality, they were in that respect altogether defeated by the nature of Dumont; a man of the utmost simplicity and frankness, of a most unusually affectionate and generous disposition. A man of so much letters and wit could not have worked into his practical nature any indifference to art and accomplishment, to real learning, or to the only eloquence which deserves the name. No man ever less adopted the Epicurean contempt for love of native country as a prejudice. When Geneva was blotted from the list of commonwealths, his heart clung to her more closely. Those who met him at a remarkable party, at the seat of an English nobleman, in the autumn of 1813, cannot fail to remember with what patriotic as well as friendly pride he exulted in the brilliant superiority of a lady of Genevese extraction, with an amiable simplicity at which his friends ventured to smile. On the day that the intelligence of the restoration of Geneva was known, he dined with an invalid friend, and gave a sample of that unaffected fervour in the love of his native country, which can be felt only by the citizen of a small republic. He was immediately chosen a member of the Supreme Council of his native city, where, conciliating opponents by moderating partizans and by gaining the confidence and respect of all, he became in time its chief leader and ornament, as he would have been in more conspicuous and powerful assemblies. He had brought to a close the code of law, which, as chairman of a committee appointed for that purpose, it would have been his duty to present to the Supreme Council, when it assembled after its vacation. At the moment when he was thus about to engrave his name on the annals of his beloved country, to honour her by rendering her, as he hoped, an example to Europe, he was cut off in the full vigour of his faculties, and on the eve of their most conspicuous exertion. His labours will not be defeated; and they will show his wariness as well as his courage. He will not be deemed singular or extravagant, and it will be seen that he wore the badge of a sect, in order, as he believed, to obtain better means for serving his country and the world. He was wholly untainted by political or philosophical bigotry, which has corrupted so many of those who inveigh against every form of that vice. His friends at Geneva, at Paris, or in London, were very far from sharing his peculiar opinions. Surrounded by fifty-three nephews or nieces, in the first or second degree, the issue or progeny of three sisters, he treated them with a patriarchal tenderness very foreign from the scorn of some Epicureans for "the charities of father, son, and brother." In his will he leaves legacies to all; touchingly assuring them that they must not measure his kindness by his bequests. In every instance of the youngest child, he seems, with the most affectionate solicitude, to have weighed the needs and desires of each, and to have considered all their little claims as worthy of conscientious consideration. His will, which is dated in May, 1826, opens with an acknowledgment worthy of him. "I begin this Testamentary Disposition by an act of gratitude towards God, for having blessed me with a peaceable and independent life, which has owed its chief happiness to the charm of study and the enjoyments of friendship." He died at Milan, on a journey to Venice, in October, 1829, in the seventy-first year of his age. CRITICAL SKETCHES. ART. XIV.-1. Arminio, Tragedia d' Ippolito Pindemonte, coll' aggiunta di tre' discorsi. 8vo. Verona. 1819. 2. Epistole in versi. 8vo. Verona. 1818. 3. Sermoni. 8vo. Verona. 1819. 4. Il Colpo di Martello del Campanile di San Marco in Venezia. 8vo. Verona. 1820. 5. Elogi di Letterati. 2 vols. 8vo. Verona. 1826. 6. L'Odissea tradotta in isciolti. 2 vol. 12mo. Milano. 1827. WE feel we have omitted too long noticing the death of this distinguished writer, who was, at the same time, one of the most worthy and amiable characters Italy has in modern times produced. Ippolito Pindemonte was born in 1753, of one of the principal families of Verona, in the Venetian States. His education was such as was becoming a young patrician, but he early showed a firmness of moral principle that enabled him to withstand the temptations to which men of his rank and station in life are too often exposed, especially amidst the dissipation of a gay Italian city. Young Ippolito courted the company of the learned of his time, and particularly that of his countrymen, Torelli and Pompei, and he applied himself zealously to the study of the classical as well as of the modern languages. This course of education being completed, he travelled through Italy and Sicily, and thence to Malta, where being received into the order of St. John, he went to cruise on board the ships of the Order, performing the regular period of his caravana, the name given to the apprenticeship which the young knights had to serve. In the midst of his military duties he found leisure, however, to cultivate literature, and he wrote some poems, which as juvenile productions he afterwards destroyed. Having returned home, and feeling his constitution weakened by a chronic and at one time alarming infirmity, he retired to his villa at Avesa, where he wrote his Prose e Poesie Campestri, which were afterwards published together in 1795. In these he paints himself, and imparts his feelings to the reader with the most delightful naiveté. A spirit grave yet tender, pensive yet satisfied, philosophical yet pious, pervades every sentence of these and his successive compositions. A rare exception among Italian poets, he did not sing of love, although he was attached by constant friendship to several accomplished ladies, of whom he speaks in his poems, especially Countess Mosconi and Isabella Albrizzi. În 1788 he began his tour of Europe, during which he visited Switzerland, Germany, France, and England, passing the greater part of the year 1789 in Paris, at that most memorable epoch. He also spent several months in England, of which country ever after and throughout all political vicissitudes he retained a friendly and favourable impression for he had found in it minds congenial to his own. He did not, however, like more vulgar travellers, learn to slight his own country while among foreigners, but fostered to the last a sentiment of warm affection for the land of his birth. He related to a friend, that, on arriving at Paris he feared he would have little opportunity of cultivating Italian literature. "But," added he, " I found myself agreeably disappointed; for meeting with Alfieri, and living in familiar intercourse with him, we read to each other our mutual compositions, and I may say that I never applied with so much fervour to our national studies, as in the midst of the French capital." On his return he wrote a small poem on his travels, "I Viaggi," and a moral and political tale, " Abaritte." The French invasion found Pindemonte in his native home. At that most critical period he did not emigrate, like others, to a safer spot, deeming that his duty required him to share the dangers, and to try to avert or alleviate the calamities of his countrymen. His extreme moderation, and his irreproachable conduct, bore him safe throughout the storm, but he keenly felt the desolation of his unfortunate country. A stranger to violent party politics, he felt the degradation of Italy, driven to the desperate course of expecting regeneration from the rude hands of a conqueror. "Words had changed their meaning;" he wrote afterwards in his Epistles, speaking of those disastrous times, "fidelity to one's government became revolt, the sacred names of country and liberty, of laws and rights, a mockery, and, as in a cauldron of boiling impurities, the dregs of the land, patricians and plebeians, rose to the summit, and the good remained sunk and obliterated." The town of Verona suffered most cruelly in that crisis. Being forcibly occupied by French troops in 1796, although then at peace with the republic of Venice, a rash attempt of the country-people in the following year to rise against the military drew upon the devoted city the vengeance of the commander-in-chief, Bonaparte. The town was retaken and pillaged, and several of the inhabitants put to death. After the fall of Venice, the fortifications of Verona, the work of San Micheli, were razed to the ground. Pindemonte's favorite villa on the hill of Avesa was also destroyed. All these disasters our poet laments in his Epistole, which were published in 1805. In the successive occupations of his country by Austrians and French, Pindemonte kept aloof from the political scene: "I moved my steps away from our new masters and their ministers; I did not aspire to any of the vacated seats of office; I struck not a single chord of servile flattery from my harp; and I spent my days in solitude and silence, wishing to keep uncontaminated by the common servitude." But his was not the proud, unsociable misanthropy of Alfieri; he hoped and trusted in Providence for happier, or at least quieter, days, and was thankful when such were granted to his afflicted country. Pindemonte had in early youth attempted the walk of the drama; he produced at a more mature age a tragedy on the subject of Arminius, Epistola a Scipione Maffei, 1801. the German patriot and avenger of his country. This play contains some brilliant passages, and is remarkable for a certain boldness and freedom of style, which partakes of the romantic spirit, although the unities are preserved, and for the introduction of choruses, or lyric strains, to be sung between the acts, an attempt which has been since repeated by Manzoni. To the publication of his Arminio, Pindemonte joined some well-written essays on tragedy and on the French and Italian theatres. He wrote afterwards a beautiful little poem, I Sepolcri, in reply to Foscolo's much admired effusion under the same title, which the latter had addressed to our author. But in this, as well as in all his other compositions, Pindemonte's melancholy is softened by a ray of religious confidence which reconciles the reader to the otherwise gloomy subject. In 1818 Pindemonte published his Sermoni, a species of the milder satire, after the Horatian model, on the follies of his contemporaries. The most remarkable of these are, the one on "Political Opinions," which begins by a paraphrasis of Goldsmith's well-known lines, "In ev'ry government, though terror reigns," &c. and the other" on Travelling," in which he exposes the pretensions, the shallowness, and the affectation of certain travellers, his countrymen. His next production, Il Colpo di Martello, published in 1820, is written in a tone of loftier inspiration. A watch having been posted on the summit of St. Mark's lofty tower at Venice, in order to give the alarm whenever fire breaks out in any part of the city, the men on duty, as a token of their vigilance, strike the great bell every quarter of an hour. From this circumstance the poet draws a warning moral for the citizens on the swiftness of time, and the manner in which it ought to be, but is not, generally spent. The poet ends his verse by a retrospective glance at his career through life, now drawing to a close, in which he shows himself to have been no stern intractable ascetic, but one who shared in the joys and sorrows of this world, although he considered it but as a land of passage. "Troppo mi piacque quest' esiglio, è vero, He published a few years since a translation of the Odyssey in blank verse, which has been much applauded in Italy. His latest work, brought out shortly before his death, consists of eulogies of Italian literati. In this manner our good Pindemonte's old age continued to be engrossed by the favourite studies of his earlier years, and in corresponding with most of his learned contemporaries. The deaths of Monti and of Cesari grieved him much, and added to his habitual melancholy. At length, on the 18th of November, last year, he himself, after a short illness, was removed from this world, at the age of seventy-five. He died as he had lived, like a sage and a Christian. The whole popula |