consequence be abolished by the Italians, "who by then, being all united and illumined, will have learned to act together and to consider themselves one single people." The form of government, then to be introduced, he declares elsewhere to be a question which must be solved by the best Italians living at the time of this liberation. But Alfieri's gift to the nation was not his political reflections, but his poetry. The passion for liberty and hatred of oppression, with the belief in the power of literature as an instrument for national and social regeneration, is the animating spirit of his tragedies. For him the drama, as he says in one of his letters, should be a school in which "men may learn to be free, strong, generous, impelled by true virtue, intolerant of all violence, lovers of their native land, fully conscious of their own rights, and in all their passions ardent, upright, magnanimous." The aim of the poet in his dramas was the creation of characters of rigid strength and inflexible wills, to inspire and form men and women of virile temper for the popolo italiano futuro, "the generous and free Italians of the future,"—to whom he dedicated his latest tragedy, the Bruto secondo, in 1789, the year that marks the beginning of the French Revolution (5).
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