IM PROVISATORE, an Italian word, signifying a person who has the talent oi composing and reciting a suite of verses on a given subject immediately and with out premeditation. This peculiar talent, thus restricted, appears to belong, almost exclusively, to the Italian language and people. Much, no doubt, of the facility of these improvisatori, which appears al most preternatural to one unaccustomed to hear them, arises from the peculiar ease and flexibility of their language, and its richness in rhymes. hut this circum stance will not wholly account for so sin gular a national faculty ; for, about the time of the revival of letters, Italy pos sessed improvisatori in Latin as well as Italian. Many poets have enjoyed con siderable celebrity in their day from their success in this mode of composition ; but we are not aware that any of their poems have acquired a permanent celebrity, al though often taken down from their reci tation. Tuscany and the Venetian states have been most famous for the production of improvisatori, especially Sienna and Verona ; in which latter city the talent seems to have been perpetuated by suc cession. The chevalier Bernardino Per fetti, the most famous of all these reciter:, was of Sienna : he flourished in the first half of the 17th century. Ile is sail to
hare possessed unbounded erudition, and to have been able to pour forth extem pore poetical essays on the most abstivuse questions of science. There have been many distinguished females possessed of this talent, (improvisatrici.) Corilla, the most celebrated of them, was of Pistuift iu Tuscany. She was the original of Madame de Stael's Corinne. She re ceived in 1776 the laureate crown at Rome, an honor which had also been ac corded to l'erfctti. Germany is said to have produced one noted improvisatrice, Anna Louisa Earsch. There appears no reason why the term improvisation should not also he applied to the delivery of un premeditated discourses in prose. It is the exertion of a very similar faculty, perfected in the same manner by habits to a degree almost inconceivable by those not accustomed to witness its exercise. It is, however, much more general. The North American Indians are represented to possess it in a high degree. In By rope, it is most generally to be found in the pulpit. Public secular oratory of this unpremeditated description is far more common in England, and the power much more sedulously cultivated, than in any continental country.