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450 Scholars shop.and helped in 1825 to bring over Garcia's troupe, which introduced Italian opera to New York. His own Don Giovanni was performed with great eclat. He published several volumes of Italian verse, gave lectures and conversazioni upon Italian literature; read and expounded Alfieri, Metastasio, Tasso, and Dante to his pupils, and in 1825 published in The New York Review interpretative notes upon several passages of the Inferno. This was the first time Dante had been taught or commented upon in America ; Ticknor's classes in Dante did not begin until 1 83 1. In 1829, upon Da Ponte's offer to give instruction in Italian gratis at Columbia College, he was named professor — inane munus, for he had neither salary nor fees nor pupils. Two months before his death in 1838 he wrote in a piteous letter to a friend in Paris; "The author of thirty-six dramas; the poet of Joseph II, of Salieri, of Martini, and of Mozart ; after having given to America the Italian language, literature, and music; after having taught about three thousand pupils, imported thirty thousand volumes of precious treasiu^es; established libraries, public and private; formed professors; given to the college three hundred volumes of classic verse; having finaUy reached the age of eighty-nine years, and lavished away all he had in the world; now remains deserted, neglected, and for- gotten, as if his voice had never been heard, or as if he were a fugitive escaped from the galleys." Da Ponte's fatal facility in verse — ^for he was an improvisa- tore of the old stripe — of coiu-se prevented his ever becoming a poet, yet the writer of Batti batti and of La ci darem la mano ought surely not be forgotten. His Memoirs, published in New York in 1823, also belong in the great Venetian eighteenth- century tradition with those of Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, and bring back the merry time of ridotti and cicisbei, of petits abbes, theatrical cliques and claques, and wandering adventurers. How this echo of the days of Cagliostro and Casti and Casa- nova happened to be first heard in the New York of 1823 is one of the curiosities of literature. That American scholarship owes Da Ponte no great debt is not his fault. The time and the ground were not prepared for him. He is significant rather as the most brilliant of the group which transmitted to America the traditions of an urbane — a humane — Latin culttire. After 181 5 the stream of Romanic culture seems not to have VOL. Ill — 29