first representative of both the sentimental and the national tendencies in modern Italian hterature. He had denounced tyranny and extolled libertyl while the Bastille had yet many years to stand; and if he could not write like Goethe or Rousseau, he had practically lived, and recorded in his autobiography, a life of sentimental passion. The air of the Revolution, nevertheless, was needed to bring these germs to maturity. Its stimulating influence is especially conspicuous in the tone of Madame de Staël's Corinne, compared with that of the letters of Goethe and Beckf ord. The landscape is the same, but is beheld in quite another light. Thus encouraged by general European sympathy, the revolutionary and sentimental movements overpower the pliable Monti, and find a genuine representative in the moody and malcontent Foscolo. The romantic movement, which Italy would hardly have originated for herself, necessarily came later, and found its leader in Manzoni. Silvio Pellico and others acceded, and connected these currents of feeling with the more decided revolutionary impulse of a later generation, typified in Leopardi, Giusti, and Mazzini.
Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828) is indeed no representative of the Revolution, for the most celebrated of his poems is a denunciation of it, and although he afterwards changed sides, the Republic was for him merely a transition to the Empire. THc nevertheless in a measure personifies Italy herself amid the gusts of the revolutionary tempest, tossed to and fro between contending influence, her sails spread to the sky, her anchor still cleaving to earth. Born in the district of Ferrara, and having gone through the ordeal, so often exacted from poets, of distasteful law-study, he repaired to Rome as
