A few illustrious scholars have indeed escaped the fate reserved for most of their brothers.  A long life, and the art of multiplying that life not only by an early attachment to study, but by that order and arrangement which shortens our researches, have sufficed for a MURATORI.  With such a student time was a great capital, which he knew to put out at compound interest; and this Varro of the Italians, who performed an infinite number of things in the circumscribed period of ordinary life, appears not to have felt any dread of leaving his voluminous labours unfinished, but rather of wanting one to begin.  This literary Alexander thought he might want a world to conquer!  Muratori was never perfectly happy unless employed in two large works at the same time, and so much dreaded the state of literary inaction, that he was incessantly importuning his friends to suggest to him objects worthy of his future composition.  The flame kindled in his youth burned clear in his old age; and it was in his senility that he produced the twelve quartos of his Annali d’Italia as an addition to his twenty-nine folios of his Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, and the six folios of the Antiquitates Medii AEvi!  Yet these vast edifices of history are not all which this illustrious Italian has raised for his fatherland.  Gibbon in his Miscellaneous Works has drawn an admirable character of Muratori.

But such a fortunate result has rarely accompanied the labours of the literary worthies of this order.  TIRABOSCHI indeed lived to complete his great national history of Italian literature; but, unhappily for us, WARTON, after feeling his way through the darker ages of our poetry, and just conducting us to a brighter region, in planning the map of the country of which he had only a Pisgah view, expires amid his volumes!  Our poetical antiquary led us to the opening gates of the paradise of our poetry, when, alas! they closed on him and on us!  The most precious portion of Warton’s history is but the fragment of a fragment.

Life passes away in collecting materials—­the marble lies in blocks—­and sometimes a colonnade is erected, or even one whole side of a palace indicates the design of the architect.  Count MAZZUCHELLI, early in life, formed a noble but too mighty a project, in which, however, he considerably advanced.  This was an historical and critical account of the memoirs and the writings of Italian authors; he even commenced the publication in alphabetical order, but the six invaluable folios we possess only contain the authors the initial letters of whose names are A and B!  This great literary historian had finished for the press other volumes, which the torpor of his descendants has suffered to lie in a dormant state.  Rich in acquisition, and judicious in his decisions, the days of the patriotic Mazzuchelli were freely given to the most curious and elegant researches in his national literature; his correspondence is said to consist of forty volumes; with eight of literary memoirs, besides the lives of his literary contemporaries;—­but Europe has been defrauded of the hidden treasures.