ciple by his clear separation of the legislative and the judicial functions. Filangieri combats in particular the excessive interference of governments, while he foreshadows the logic and simplicity of a universal code in the future, realised in some measure by the Code Napoleon. Antonio Genovesi (1712–69), the first. to show the necessity of Italian unity, besides making important contributions to ethics and metaphysics, expounded freedom of trade and the laws that govern prices, in his Lezioni di Commercio, o sia d'Economia Civile. Free trade in corn had also a powerful champion in the witty Abate Ferdinando Galiani (1728–87), whose most important works, however, were written in French. Galiani adorned the circles of the encyclopaedist philosophers at Paris, whose views on many points he soundly refuted, and who avenged themselves by comparing the explosive little Neapolitan to a pantomime incarnate. His discourse upon trade in corn was speedily translated into Italian, and gave him rank as an Italian classic; the best known of his vernacular writings is probably his humorous account of the alarm created by an eruption of Vesuvius.
After this group of economists—to whom the historian Pietro Verri may be added—should be recorded another of literary historians, eminently useful though not brilliant writers, and consummate men of letters. Of Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, the historian of Italian poetry, we shall have to speak in mentioning the Arcadian Academy, which he so largely contributed to found and maintain. He may be justly termed a pedant, but neither his book nor himself can be spared from Italian literary history. A much greater name is Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1745), but his imperishable monument
