Another excellent historian has been almost lost to Italy by the circumstances attending the publication of his book. GIOVANNI BATTISTA TESTA, an exile in England, published in 1853 his history of the Lombard League, at Doncaster, a place better affected to the horse of Neptune than to the olive of Pallas, and, thus producing _invita Minerva_, has been almost ignored. In fact, he is an admirable historian, lucid and delightful in his narrative, and his style is so fashioned upon the purest models, that he might seem to have come straight out of the sixteenth century. This might be reprehended as affectation, but the objection, if in any respect well founded, has no application to the excellent English version (1877), a book which cannot be too strongly recommended to historians desirous of acquiring the pregnant brevity so essential in this age of multiplication of books to all who would catch and retain the ear of posterity. The friend and biographer of Manzoni, and imitator of his style in a successful novel, _Margherita Pusterla_, CESARE CANTÙ was a long-lived and industrious, and consequently a voluminous author. His position is well marked as almost the only considerable writer of his time who favoured political and ecclesiastical reaction, and the resulting unpopularity has led him to be unjustly depreciated as a man of letters; he is always interesting, always individual, and his principal works, the _History of Italy from 1750 to 1850_ and his _History of Italian Heretics_, though disfigured by party spirit, are important books. The latter is still the standard authority on the subject, though it will hardly be allowed to continue so. An unique position among Italian historians is occupied by MICHELE AMARI (1805-89), the Orientalist and national historian of Sicily. Detesting the Neapolitan oppression of his native island, he look up the investigation of the Sicilian Vespers, and depicted this great event as not the consequence of a conspiracy subtly organised by John of Procida, but as a spontaneous uprising against intolerable oppression. The allusion did not escape the Neapolitan Government, and Amari found it expedient to withdraw to Paris, where he studied Arabic as a preparation for his yet more important _History of Sicily under Moslem Dominion_, published between 1854 and 1872. In the interim he had taken part in the Sicilian insurrection, and after the final expulsion of the Bourbons, was successively Minister of Public Instruction and professor of Arabic at Florence, continuing to write and edit books on his favourite subjects. No historian has a higher reputation for erudition and sagacity. GIUSEPPE MICALI (1780-1844) devoted himself to a subject even more difficult than Amari’s, and one incapable of an authoritative solution of its numberless problems. His _Storia degli Antichi Popoli Italiani_ is nevertheless a highly important work, which exploded much error, if it did not establish much truth.