SOURCE: Wallace, W. B. “A Tuscan Horace.” Westminster Review 159, no. 4 (April 1903): 410-14.

In the following essay, Wallace finds the spirit of Carducci's writing comparable to that of Latin poet Horace.

It is an open secret that Italy, our good friend and faithful ally, can only maintain her present position as a Great Power at the cost of tremendous sacrifices; her history, even in our own days, has been checkered with disasters, if not humiliations; but under all these discouragements the golden shell of poesy has never fallen from her grasp, and the swans of song have never utterly forsaken the banks of her Eridanus. The genius of Greece, the most splendid development of the intellectual potentialities of humanity that the world has yet witnessed, expired with her freedom—an Englishman acknowledged and deplored the fact in the burning strophes of a hymn worthy of an Alcman or a...