In noticing Giusti's poetry I have a difficulty already hinted, for if
I presented some of the pieces which gave him his greatest fame among
his contemporaries, I should be doing, as far as my present purpose is
concerned, a very unprofitable thing. The greatest part of his poetry
was inspired by the political events or passions of the time at which
it was written, and, except some five or six pieces, it is all of a
political cast. These events are now many of them grown unimportant
and obscure, and the passions are, for the most part, quite extinct;
so that it would be useless to give certain of his most popular pieces
as historical, while others do not represent him at his best as a
poet. Some degree of social satire is involved; but the poems are
principally light, brilliant mockeries of transient aspects of
politics, or outcries against forgotten wrongs, or appeals for
long-since-accomplished or defeated purposes. We know how dreary this
sort of poetry generally is in our own language, after the occasion
is once past, and how nothing but the enforced privacy of a desolate
island could induce us to read, however ardent our sympathies may have
been, the lyrics about slavery or the war, except in very rare cases.
The truth is, the Muse, for a lady who has seen so much of life and
the ways of the world, is an excessively jealous personification, and
is apt to punish with oblivion a mixed devotion at her shrine. The
poet who desires to improve and exalt his time must make up his mind
to a double martyrdom,--first, to be execrated by vast numbers of
respectable people, and then to be forgotten by all. It is a great
pity, but it cannot be helped. It is chiefly your