IV

In dealing with this poetry, I naturally seek to give its universal
and aesthetic flavor wherever it is separable from its political
quality; for I should not hope to interest any one else in what I had
myself often found very tiresome. I suspect, indeed, that political
satire and invective are not relished best in free countries. No
danger attends their exercise; there is none of the charm of secrecy
or the pleasure of transgression in their production; there is no
special poignancy to free administrations in any one of ten thousand
assaults upon them; the poets leave this sort of thing mostly to the
newspapers. Besides, we have not, so to speak, the grounds that such
a long-struggling people as the Italians had for the enjoyment of
patriotic poetry. As an average American, I have found myself very
greatly embarrassed when required, by Count Alfieri, for example, to
hate tyrants. Of course I do hate them in a general sort of way; but
having never seen one, how is it possible for me to feel any personal
fury toward them? When the later Italian poets ask me to loathe spies
and priests I am equally at a loss. I can hardly form the idea of a
spy, of an agent of the police, paid to haunt the steps of honest
men, to overhear their speech, and, if possible, entrap them into a
political offense. As to priests--well, yes, I suppose they are bad,
though I do not know this from experience; and I find them generally
upon acquaintance very amiable. But all this was different with the
Italians: they had known, seen, and felt tyrants, both foreign and
domestic, of every kind; spies and informers had helped to make
their restricted lives anxious and insecure; and priests had leagued
themselves with the police and the oppressors until the Church, which