stone's-throw away--of one's own little duchy or province, and the
printers everywhere stole a book as soon as it was worth stealing, it
is not likely that he made great gains by a volume of verses which,
later in life, he repudiated. Baretti had then returned from living in
London, where he had seen the prosperity of "the trade of an author"
in days which we do not now think so very prosperous, and he viewed
with open disgust the abject state of authorship in his own country.
So there was nothing for Parini to do but to become a _maestro in
casa_. With the Borromei he always remained friends, and in their
company he went into society a good deal. Emiliani-Giudici supposes
that he came to despise the great world with the same scorn that shows
in his poem; but probably he regarded it quite as much with the amused
sense of the artist as with the moralist's indignation; some of his
contemporaries accused him of a snobbish fondness for the great, but
certainly he did not flatter them, and in one passage of his poem he
is at the pains to remind his noble acquaintance that not the smallest
drop of patrician blood is microscopically discoverable in his veins.
His days were rendered more comfortable when he was appointed editor
of the government newspaper,--the only newspaper in Milan,--and yet
easier when he was made professor of eloquence in the Academy of Fine
Arts. In this employment it was his hard duty to write poems from time
to time in praise of archdukes and emperors; but by and by the French
Revolution arrived in Milan, and Parini was relieved of that labor.
The revolution made an end of archdukes and emperors, but the liberty
it bestowed was peculiar, and consisted chiefly in not allowing one
to do anything that one liked. The altars were abased, and trees of
liberty were planted; for making a tumult about an outraged saint a
mob was severely handled by the military, and for "insulting" a tree
of liberty a poor fellow at Como was shot. Parini was chosen one of
the municipal government, which, apparently popular, could really do