but over one which had taken the idea of national unity to its heart. The effect oh literature is illustrated by a passage in one of Byron's letters from Italy: "They talk Dante, write Dante, and think and dream Dante to an extent that would be ridiculous but that he deserves it." It was not so much the recognition of Dante's literary desert which occasioned this reaction from eighteenth century neglect, as the incarnation of the sufferings and the genius of his country in his person.
A generation thus nurtured on Dante, and on Dante studied from such a point of view, could not but grow up serious and patriotic. Nor were other literary influences wanting. The fourth canto of Childe Harold, and even more Madame de Staël's Corinne, contrasted in the most forcible manner the past artistic and intellectual glories with the actual political degradation, and showed Italy how far she had fallen, but also how high she might hope to reascend. Such influences imbued the youthful generation with a more impassioned and enthusiastic character than its fathers. The new aspirations embodied themselves most distinctly in three men—Mazzini, type of physical resistance to oppression; Giusti, of relentless opposition in the intellectual sphere; Leopardi, of the passive protest of martyrdom. In him, as by an emblem, the beauty and the anguish of the suffering country are shown forth, and on this account no less than from the superiority of his literary genius, though no active insurgent against the established order of things, he claims the first place in his hapless but glorious generation.
The tragical yet uneventful life of Giacomo Leopardi was little else than ardent cultivation of the spirit and constant struggle with the infirmities of the body. Born in 1798 at Recanati, a small dull town near Rimini,
