Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/353

Rh when the Austrians prevailed he fled to Paris. He came back as the courtier and flatterer of Napoleon; and yet this versatility seems less the effect of self-interest than of ductility of character, and his countrymen laughingly talked of the three periods of the abate, the citizen, and the cavalier Monti. This sensitiveness was serviceable to his lyric genius, for he thrilled with the emotion he wished to express, and in expressing it approved himself a perfect master of language and metre.

In the interval between Monti's withdrawal from Rome and the brilliant position which ynder the Imperial auspices he acquired at Milan, he had produced his Prometheus, one of the finest examples of Italian blank verse, but a curious mixture of things ancient and modern; his Musologia, charming octaves on the Muses; Caius Gracchus, a tragedy betraying imitation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, celebrated for the force of the fifth act; Mascheroniana, a palinode for the Bassvilliana, notwithstanding the art with which the poet manages to assert his consistency. Disfigured as it is by adulation of Napoleon and senseless abuse of England, this is perhaps Monti's finest poem. It is the offspring of a genuine poetic æstrum, which whirls the stuff of a party pamphlet into sublimity, like a rag in a hurricane. It was never finished, incomplete too is the Bard of the Black Forest, a poem on Napoleon's exploits, unequal to the subject, but remarkable for its concise rapidity of expression. Monti was now Napoleon's official laureate for the Italian department, and it is sufficiently amusing to find him expressing his apprehensions lest he should be so far carried away by his