sly insinuations of Catullus
and of Flaccus.

_Alfieri._ We are the least witty of men because we are the most
trifling.

_Salomon._ You would persuade me then that to be witty one must be
grave: this is surely a contradiction.

_Alfieri._ I would persuade you only that banter, pun, and quibble are
the properties of light men and shallow capacities; that genuine
humour and true wit require a sound and capacious mind, which is
always a grave one. Contemptuousness is not incompatible with them:
worthless is that man who feels no contempt for the worthless, and
weak who treats their emptiness as a thing of weight. At first it may
seem a paradox, but it is perfectly true, that the gravest nations
have been the wittiest; and in those nations some of the gravest men.
In England, Swift and Addison; in Spain, Cervantes. Rabelais and La
Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have been _reveurs_. Few
men have been graver than Pascal; few have been wittier.

* * * * *

That Shakespeare was gay and pleasurable in conversation I can easily
admit; for there never was a mind at once so plastic and so pliant:
but without much gravity, could there have been that potency and
comprehensiveness of thought, that depth of feeling, that creation of
imperishable ideas, that sojourn in the souls of other men? He was
amused in his workshop: such was society. But when he left it, he
meditated intensely upon those limbs and muscles on which he was about
to bestow new action, grace, and majesty; and so great an intensity of
meditation must have strongly impressed his whole character.

* * * * *

_Salomon._ Certainly no race of men upon earth ever was so unwarlike,
so indifferent to national dignity and to personal honour, as the
Florentines are now: yet in former days a certain pride, arising from
a resemblance in their government to that of Athens, excited a
vivifying desire of approximation where no danger or loss accompanied
it; and Genius was no less confident of his security than of his
power. Look from the window. That cottage on the declivity was
Dante's: that square and large mansion, with a circular garden before
it elevated artificially, was the first scene of Boccaccio's
_Decameron_. A boy might stand at an equal distance between them, and
break the windows of each with his sling. What idle fabricators of
crazy systems will tell me that climate is the creator o