Page:The Diary of Dr John William Polidori.djvu/197

Rh In questi tempi senza onore e merto Lavora Sgricci in vano, ha un altro il serto."

[The translation of this couplet is—" In these times without honour and merit Sgricci labours in vain—another man wears the wreath." It will be seen that the epigram, if such it can be considered, runs in favour of Sgricci. He was a native of Arezzo, and, as our text shows, a renowned improvisatore. I happen to possess a printed tragedy of his, Ettore, which is notified as having been improvised in the Teatro Carignano, Turin, on June 13, 1823. Shelley in January 182 1 attended one of Sgricci's improvisations, and was deeply impressed by it as a wonderful effort, and even, considered in itself, a fine poetic success. In 1869, being entrusted with some MS. books by Shelley through the courtesy of his son the late Baronet, I read a tribute of some length which the great English poet had paid to the Italian improvisatore: it has not yet been published, and is included, I suppose, among the Shelley MSS. bequeathed to the Bodleian Library. The subject on which Shelley heard Sgricci improvise was Hector (Ettore). One rather suspects that the Ettore improvised in 1823 may have been partly reminiscent of its predecessor in 1821. The portrait of Sgricci, a man of some thirty-five years of age, appears in the book which I possess: it shows a costume of the fancy-kind that Polidori