CURRENT LITERATURE.
Sketches and Studies in Italy, By John Addington Symonds. (Smith and Elder.)—There is little need to speak of these sketches, which have been widely read and admired on their first appearance in the Fortnightly and the Cornhin. Our impression is that the two most ambitions efforts (" Lucretius " "and Antinous") are the least successful. The latter especially, with all its ingenuity and research, seems to us little better, if ,Nve may be allowed the phrase, than the elaborate discovery of a mare's-nest. There is little reason to doubt that Hadrian's account of the yonth's death, Eli vlw NeiXoy ittrect4Y, was correct. If Mr. Symonds likes to believe that the relation between Emperor and favourite was blameless, we can only hope that he is right. As for the deification, what could be easier than to make even such a plant grow in the fertile soil of Egypt ? Gibbon would have disposed of the whole matter in a paragraph, culmin- ating in an elaborate sneer at Christianity. For Mr. Symonds's descriptions of art and nature in Italy, no praise could be too high. To some tastes, indeed, they will seem too gorgeous and overloaded with colour ; but that they are extraordinarily vivid and powerful, all must confess. A very fine example of these qualities is to be found in the first sketch, "Amalfi, Paestum, Capri." Of another kind, but equally meritorious, is the historical essay on "Florence and the Medici." We must take leave to say that the volume would have been all the bettor without the paper on the "Italian Popular Poetry of the Renaissance." Mr. Symonde's trans- lations are remarkably facile, are, in fact, admirable of their kind. But his literary skill is wasted in reproducing verse which has no substantial claim to live,—which the student may consult, because it represents only too faithfully the manners of the age, but which, for the rest of the world, had best be forgotten. To us, it is quite in- conceivable how any man could deliberately spend all the labour that must evidently have been bestowed on such a poem as that which appears on pp. 193-201. But then we have not risen to the serene region of "art for art's sake."
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