Abstract
Mr. Gladstone's enthusiasm for Italian literature is perhaps best exemplified in the essay on the life and works of Leopardi which first appeared in the Quarterly Review for March, 1850, and was afterwards reprinted in his Gleanings from Past Years, Vol. II, 1879. The article itself, when we consider that it was only the second piece of Leopardi criticism to be published in English, appears as a strikingly lucid and intelligent essay, even if many of Gladstone's conclusions have, after a century, been superseded. Gladstone is less interested in the biography of Leopardi than in an attempt to appreciate his poetry and explain his atheism. He declares that Leopardi's only contemporary rival as a poet in Italy is possibly Manzoni, and even this may be doing an injustice to Leopardi. He calls him eminently a subjective poet, whose power consists more in the reflective than in the strictly creative.
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