Even
the stone-carver is not permitted to use his chisel until they have
decided how far love or pride may go in commemoration of the dead. They
mutilate, with equal sovereignty of will, the printed pages of a classic
and the manuscript of an unknown scribbler,--sit in judgment upon Botta
and Laplace, as their predecessors sat in judgment upon Guicciardini and
Galileo,--and, in the fervor of their undiscriminating zeal, condemn
Robertson and Gibbon, Reid and Hume, the skeptic Bolingbroke and the
pious Addison, to the same fiery purgation. That Italian literature was
not crushed by them long ago is, perhaps, the strongest proof of the
irrepressible vigor and marvellous vitality of the Italian mind. Not to
be on the "Index" would call a blush to the cheek of the most
unambitious of authors,--would carry a presumption of worthlessness with
it from which even the penny-a-liner would shrink with dismay,--and to
the poet and historian would sound like a sentence of perpetual
exclusion from all those cherished hopes which irradiate with heavenly
light the steep and thorny paths of intellectual renown.
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