, and contortions; then I descend to their level,
associate once more with my neighbour, assure him that we are all alike
ridiculous, and try to make him laugh at himself no less than at me by
the proofs I give him of my proposition.

I do not need to study astronomy in order to discover whether there are
planets which control the course of human thought. The natural seeds of
levity, inconsistency, ennui, thirst for new sensations, with which our
brains are crowded, when they begin to germinate, suffice to change the
thoughts of mortals, and occasion fits of fashion, which not all the
cables of all the dockyards in the world can check before their course
is run. When one fashion is exhausted, the seeds I have described above
set others in motion; and without interrogating the stars--unless indeed
it be the vogue to do so--any patient student of past history may easily
arrive at the conclusion that an unbroken chain of such manias and fits
of fashion, due to the same natural causes, have always swayed, and will
always sway, the stupidity of man; and man in his stupidity is always
blind, always possessed of the assurance that his glance is eagle-eyed.

What our forefathers saw, we see, and our posterity is doomed to see--a
constant ebb and flow of opinions, determined in some part by a few bold
thinkers, who publish to the world discoveries now useful and now
useless, now frivolous and now pernicious. Let not, however, these
thinkers flatter themselves that when they have contrived to set a
fashion going, their most clamorous supporters will take and stick to it
more firmly than they do to the vogue created by the opening of some new
magnificent caffe or by Blondi's magazine of novelties, that very
phoenix of fashion-makers in things our butterflies of human frailty
think the most important.

As regards literature, in the middle of this century, and under the
rising sun of Signor Bettinelli, we were condemned to behold a decided
change for the worse. All that had been done to restore purity and
simplicity, after the decadence of seventeenth-century taste, was swept
away by a new and monstrous fit of fashion. The Granelleschi cried out
in vain for sound principles and cultivated taste; contended in vain
that, Italy being a nation which could boast a mother-language, with its
literary usage, its vulgar usage, and its several dialects, reason bade
us hold fast by the Della Cruscan vocabulary, and seek to enrich that,
inste