being the elaborate description of the plague which devastated Milan in 1630 (See Chaps, xxxi-xxxvii). The novel has taken a place as the most distinguished novel of modern Italy, and has been translated into nearly all the literary languages.
The age-long dispute as to which dialect should be used as the standard language of Italian prose engaged the interest of Mansoni in his later years; and, becoming convinced of the claims of Tuscan, he rewrote the entire novel in order to remove all traces of non-Tuscan idiom, and published it in 1840. This proceeding had the effect of rekindling the discussion on the question of a national Italian literary language—a discussion which still goes on. Along with the revised edition of "I Promessi Sposi," he published a kind of sequel, "La Storia della Colonna infame," written more than ten years before; but this work, overloaded with didacticism, is universally regarded as inferior. Both at home and abroad, Mansoni's fame rests mainly on the novel here printed, a work which has taken its place among the great novels of the world, not merely for its admirable descriptions of Italian life in the seventeenth century, but still more for its faithful and moving presentation of human experience and emotion.
Mention has been made above of a so-called sequel to "I Promessi Sposi"; and since this publication is less easily accessible than Manzoni's more famous works, being properly regarded as unworthy of a place beside his great novel, it may interest the reader to have some account of its contents.
At the end of Chapter xxxii of "I Promessi Sposi," Manzoni refers to the affair of the anointers of Milan, men who were suspected of smearing the walls of the houses with poison intended to spread the pestilence; but he relegates to another place a full account of the incident. It is this matter which he takes up in "La Storia della Colonna infame."
One morning in June, 1630, a woman standing at a window in Milan saw a man enter the street della Vetra de Cittadini. He carried a paper on which he appeared to be writing, and from time to time he drew his hands along the walls. It occurred to her that he was perhaps an "anointer," and she proceeded to spread her suspicion, with the result that the man was arrested. He was found to be one Piazza, a Commissioner of the Tribunal of Health, who was able to give such an account of himself as,