TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The following selections from Lampedusa’s Letteratura inglese, a series of lectures on English literature delivered, in his Palermo apartment, to a private audience in 1953-54, are for the most part fragments of longer, more continuous discussions. Eschewing of necessity any attempt to represent the text as it stands in the original, I have chosen passages where Lampedusa digresses from the more standard literary-historical material of his lectures. Since this often involved removing passages from their contexts, here and there I was forced to add a word or two for reference, or to elide irrelevant references. Yet rather than burden the present text with brackets around my editorial additions or subtractions (which are in any case minimal and purely functional), I have chosen to incorporate them directly into Lampedusa’s text. Likewise the breaks between sections and extra spacing between paragraphs, as well as the section titles, are almost always my own.—Stephen Sartarelli

Izaak Walton

In London there is a street, St. James’s Street, that is almost entirely filled with luxury shops for men. Ties, shoes, polo mallets, and golf clubs adorn the windows of these tiny shops, the quality of whose merchandise has been tested with the same meticulous care as that with which a poet examines the lyrics that might adorn his volume. Stupendous hunting rifles for hunting everything from thrush to elephants; cartridges of every kind, from the very light ones for killing birds without marring their plumage to