Gioberti accomplished infinitely more for the national cause by his great book, _Il Primato d’Italia_ (1845), which dissuaded Italy from abortive conspiracies, and preached spiritual as a preparation for political unity. It also, by its own merits and the reputation which the author had already gained as a thinker, compelled men of intellect to look into her case. Unfortunately, Gioberti had not grasped the necessity of absolute administrative concentration, and advocated confederacy among the various Italian states; an idea irreconcilable with that of unity, and moreover utterly impracticable on account of the centrifugalism of the sovereigns concerned. This made it possible for Gioberti, when at length he had himself become minister at Turin, to propose that Piedmont should anticipate the inevitable restoration of the sovereigns of Central Italy by Austria or France by restoring them herself; a step which would have ruined the house of Savoy in public opinion, and consequently have destroyed all hope of an united Italy. Gioberti soon retired to Paris, where he died suddenly in 1852, just as a new chapter of events was opening, in which, taught by experience, he would probably have performed a more efficient part. It would have been well for the political, though not the literary reputation of Mazzini if he had died about the same time in the good odour of the courage and capacity he had shown in the defence of Rome against the French. Although he had a great advantage over Gioberti in his perception of the need of national unity, he was unable to conceive of this otherwise than under Republican forms. He was hence almost as ready to thwart the Piedmontese as to expel the Austrian; he opposed every practical scheme for the redemption of Italy, from the Crimean expedition downwards; and his public career down to his death in 1872 is a series of lamentable mistakes. He could not see that his mission was performed when he had once breathed life into the dry bones, and he had no appreciation of the practical genius of a man like Cavour, fully as indispensable to the common cause as his own ideal enthusiasm. Happily there was another and more extensive field in which this enthusiasm was perfectly in place. Mazzini was much more than a conspirator, more even than a patriot. As a man of letters, he concerned himself with German, English, and Slavonic literature, and opened up new horizons to Italian thought. Polish literature was especially congenial to him, for at that period its inspiration came from worlds beyond mortal ken, and Mazzini, recoiling from the prosaic common-sense of the eighteenth century, possessed the vein of mysticism common to contemporaries otherwise so dissimilar as Lamennais, Balzac, George Sand, Newman, Mickiewicz. This gave a singular elevation to his ethical thought. A severe thinker, he meditated much on human rights and human duties, and assigned precedence to the latter. “Think less