gh, to be reaped by mind, must grow out of
Reality.

RICHARD HENRY WILDE AND DANTE.

It appears that our accomplished and lamented countryman, Richard Henry
Wilde, whose "Researches and Considerations concerning the Love and
Imprisonment of Tasso" have been made use of with so discreditable a
freedom by a recent English biographer of that poet, is--if another
pretender prove not less successful--to be deprived also of the fame he
earned by his discoveries in regard to Dante. A correspondent of _The
Spectator_, under the signature of G. AUBREY BEZZI, writes as follows:--

"The questions are, what share Mr. Kirkup had in the recovery of
the fresco of Giotto in the chapel of the Palazzo del Podesta at
Florence, and whether directly or indirectly I have been the means
of depriving him, or any of the cooeperators in that good work, of
the merit due to their labors. I shall best enable those who take
an interest in this matter to arrive at a fair conclusion, by
giving a short history of the recovery of that beautiful fresco. It
was Mr. Wilde, and not Mr. Kirkup, who first spoke to me of this
buried treasure. Mr. Wilde, an American gentleman respected by all
that knew him, was then in Florence, engaged in a work on Dante and
his times, which unfortunately he did not live to complete. Among
the materials he had collected for this purpose, there were some
papers of the antiquarian Moreni, which he was examining when I
called one day, (I had then been three or four months in Florence,)
to read what he had already written, as I was in the habit of doing
from time to time. It was then that a foot-note of Moreni's met his
eye, in which the writer lamented that he had spent two years of
his life in unceasing and unavailing efforts to recover the
portrait of Dante, and the other portions of the fresco of Giotto
in the Bargello, mentioned by Vasari; that others before him had
been equally anxious and equally unsuccessful; and that he hoped
that better times would come, (verranno tempi migliori,) and that
the painting, so interesting both in an artistic and historical
point of view, would be again sought for, and at last recovered. I
did not then understand how the efforts of Moreni and others could
have been thus unsuccessful; and I thought that with common energy
and diligence they might have