Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/484

 464 L E L E it suddenly rushes upon it and tears it to ground with its powerful claws and teeth. It preys upon almost any animal it can overcome, such as antelopes, deer, sheep, goats, monkeys, peafowl, and is said to have a special liking for dogs. It not unfrequently attacks human beings in India, chiefly children and old women, but instances have been known of a leopard becoming a regular &quot;man-eater.&quot; When favourable opportunities occur, it often kills many more victims than it can devour at once, apparently to gratify its propensity for killing, or only for the sake of their fresh blood. It generally inhabits woody districts, and can climb high trees with facility when necessary for its safety when hunted, but usually lives on or near the ground, among rocks, bushes, and roots and low branches of large trees. The present geographical range of the leopard is very extensive, as it is met with in various suitable localities, where not too much interfered with by human cultivation, throughout the greater part of Africa from Algeria to the Cape Colony, and through the whole of the south of Asia from Palestine to China, including all India south of the Himalayas, and the islands of Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo. Fossil b^nes and teeth, indistinguishable from those of existing leopards, have been found in cave de posits of Pleistocene age in Spain, France, Germany, and England. The evidence of the former existence of the leopard in England is described at length by Boyd Daw- kins and Sanford in their British Pleistocene Mammalia ( Palseontographical Society, 1872). (w. H. F.) LEOPARDI, GIACOMO (1798-1837), the one Italian poet of the 19th century who has taken an uncontested place among the classics of the language, was born at llecanati in the March of Ancona, June 29, 1798. All the circumstances of his parentage and education conspired to foster his precocious and sensitive genius at the expense of his physical and mental health. His family was ancient and patrician, but so deeply embarrassed as to be only rescued from ruin by the energy of his mother, who had taken the control of business matters entirely into her own hands, and whose engrossing devotion to her undertaking seems to have almost dried up the springs of maternal tenderness. Count Monaldo Leopardi, the father, a mere nullity in his own household, secluded himself in his exten sive library, to which his nervous, sickly, and deformed son had free access, and which absorbed him exclusively in the absence of any intelligent sympathy from his parents, any companionship except that of his brothers and sister, or any recreation in the dullest of Italian towns. The lad spent his days over grammars and dictionaries, learning Latin with little assistance, and Greek and the principal modern languages with none at all. Any ordinarily clever boy would have emerged from this discipline a mere pedant and bookworm. Leopardi came forth a Hellene, not merely a consummate Greek scholar, but penetrated with the classical conception of life, and a master of antique form and style. At sixteen he composed a Latin treatise on the Roman rhetoricians of the 2d century, a commentary on Porphyry s life of Plotinus, and a history of astronomy ; at seventeen he wrote on the popular errors of the ancients, citing more than four hundred authors. A little later he imposed upon the first scholars of Italy by two odes in the manner of Anacreon. At eighteen lie produced a poem of considerable length, the &quot; Appressamento alia Morte,&quot; which, after being lost for many years, has recently been discovered and published by Signor Zanino Volta. It is a vision of the omnipotence of death, modelled upon Petrarch, but more truly inspired by Dante, and in its conception, machinery, and general tone offering a remarkable resemblance to Shelley s &quot;Triumph of Life, written six years subsequently, and of which Leopardi probably never heard. This juvenile work was succeeded (1819) by two lyrical compositions which at once placed the author upon the height which he maintained ever afterwards. The ode to Italy, and that on the monument to Dante erected at Florence, gave voice to the dismay and affliction with which Italy, aroused by the French Revolution from the torpor of the 17th and 18th centuries, contemplated her forlorn and degraded condition, her political impotence, her degeneracy in arts and arms, and the frivolity or stagnation of her intellectual life. They were the outcry of a student who had found an ideal of national existence in his books, and to whose disappointment everything in his own circumstances lent additional poignancy. But there is nothing unmanly or morbid in the expression of these sentiments, and the odes are surprisingly exempt from the failings characteristic of young poets. They are remarkably chaste in diction, close and nervous in style, sparing in fancy, and almost destitute of simile and metaphor, antique in spirit, yet pervaded by modern ideas, combining Laudor s dignity with a consider able infusion of the passion of Byron. These qualities continued to characterize Leopardi s poetical writings throughout his life. A third ode, on Cardinal Mai s discoveries of ancient MSS,, lamented in the same spirit of indignant sorrow the decadence of Italian literature. The publication of these pieces widened the breach between Leopardi and his father, a well-meaning but apparently dull and apathetic man, who had lived into the 19th century without imbibing any of its spirit, and who provoked his son s contempt by a superstition unpardonable in a scholar of real learning. Very probably from a mistaken idea of duty to his son, very probably, too, from his own entire dependence in pecuniary matters upon his wife, he for a long time obstinately refused Leopardi funds, recreation, change of scene, everything that could have contributed to combat the growing pessimism which eventually became nothing less than monomaniacal. The affection of his brothers and sister afforded him some consolation, and he found intellectual sympathy in the eminent scholar and patriot Pietro Giordani, with whom he assiduously corresponded at this period, partly on the ways and means of escaping from &quot; this hermitage, or rather seraglio, where the delights of civil society and the advantages of solitary life are alike wanting.&quot; This forms the keynote of numer ous letters of complaint and lamentation, as touching but as effeminate in their pathos as those of the banished Ovid. It must be remembered in fairness that the weakness of Leopardi s eyesight frequently deprived him for months together of the resource of study. At length (1822) his father allowed him to repair to Rome, where, though cheered by the encouragement of Bunsen and Niebuhr, he found little satisfaction in the trifling pedantry that passed for philology and archeology, while his sceptical opinions prevented his taking orders, the indispensable condition of public employment in the papal states. Dispirited, and with exhausted means, he returned to Recanati, where he spent three miserable years, brightened only by the production of several more lyrical masterpieces, which appeared in 1824. The most remarkable is perhaps the Bruto Minore, the condensation of his philosophy of despair. In 1825 he accepted an engagement to edit Cicero and Petrarch for the publisher Stella at Milan, and took up his residence at Bologna, where his life was for a time made almost cheerful by the friendship of the countess Malvezzi. In 1827 appeared the Operftte Morali, consisting principally of dialogues and his imaginary biography of Filippo Ottonieri, which have given him a fame as a prose writer hardly inferior to his celebrity as a poet. Modern literature has few productions so eminently classical in form and spirit, so symmetrical in construction and faultless in style. Lucian is evidently