he has done what no other inhabitant of these isles ever did in begetting two great poets. His claims to the gratitude of his countrymen are of quite another sort, resting chiefly upon the spirit and fluency of his political poems, which helped to keep the flame of patriotism alive at home, while the exiled author was teaching Italian at King's College. His life is well known as an appendage to the biography of his more celebrated son. It is one of the most interesting speculations imaginable what kind of poetry Dante Gabriel Rossetti would have written if he had been born and brought up in Italy; certain it is that no prefigurement of his singular alliance of purity and transparency of feeling with intricacy of thought and opulence of illustration, or of his objectivity and marvellous pictorial gift, is to be found in his father's simple, natural, rather overfluent verse. The elder Rossetti may, nevertheless, be ranked among the poets of the romantic school; and a similar place belongs to the amiable Luigi Carrer (1801–53) on account of his ballads, the most successful of his works. Francesco dall' Ongaro, a good lyric poet in other departments, applied the popular stornello to the purposes of patriotic poetry with eminent success.
Two poets of more importance enjoyed for a time great renown, but their reputation, without becoming extinct, has considerably declined. Giovanni Prati (1815–54), a native of the Italian Tyrol, gained great reputation in 1841 by a narrative poem in blank verse, Edmenegarda, founded upon a tragic event in the family of the great Venetian patriot Daniele Manin. It is a poor apology for adultery, but in sentimentality, though not in morality, belongs to the school of Lamartine, whose Jocelyn was then at the meridian of its celebrity.
