f genius? The
climate of Austria is more regular and more temperate than ours, which
I am inclined to believe is the most variable in the whole universe,
subject, as you have perceived, to heavy fogs for two months in
winter, and to a stifling heat, concentrated within the hills, for
five more. Yet a single man of genius hath never appeared in the whole
extent of Austria, an extent of several thousand times greater than
our city; and this very street has given birth to fifty.

_Alfieri._ Since the destruction of the republic, Florence has
produced only one great man, Galileo, and abandoned him to every
indignity that fanaticism and despotism could invent. Extraordinary
men, like the stones that are formed in the higher regions of the air,
fall upon the earth only to be broken and cast into the furnace. The
precursor of Newton lived in the deserts of the moral world, drank
water, and ate locusts and wild honey. It was fortunate that his head
also was not lopped off: had a singer asked it, instead of a dancer,
it would have been.

_Salomon._ In fact it was; for the fruits of it were shaken down and
thrown away: he was forbidden to publish the most important of his
discoveries, and the better part of his manuscripts was burned after
his death.

_Alfieri._ Yes, Signor Salomon, those things may rather be called our
heads than this knob above the shoulder, of which (as matters stand)
we are rather the porters than the proprietors, and which is really
the joint concern of barber and dentist.

_Salomon._ Our thoughts, if they may not rest at home, may wander
freely. Delighting in the remoter glories of my native city, I forget
at times its humiliation and ignominy. A town so little that the voice
of a cabbage-girl in the midst of it may be heard at the extremities,
reared within three centuries a greater number of citizens illustrious
for their genius than all the remainder of the Continent (excepting
her sister Athens) in six thousand years. My ignorance of the Greek
forbids me to compare our Dante with Homer. The propriety and force of
language and the harmony of verse in the glorious Grecian are quite
lost to me. Dante had not only to compose a poem, but in great part a
language. Fantastical as the plan of his poem is, and, I will add,
uninteresting and uninviting; unimportant, mean, contemptible, as are
nine-tenths of his characters and his details, and wearisome as is the
scheme of his versification--there are more th