THE VANITY AND SUFFERING OF LIFE.
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Baltazar Gracian also brings the misery of our existence before our eyes in the darkest colours in the "Criticon," Parte i., Crisi 5, just at the beginning, and Crisi 7 at the end, where he explicitly represents life as a tragic farce.
Yet no one has so thoroughly and exhaustively handled this subject as, in our own day, Leopardi. He is entirely filled and penetrated by it: his theme is everywhere the mockery and wretchedness of this existence; he presents it upon every page of his works, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such wealth of imagery that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, is through out entertaining and exciting.
