The period immediately preceding the establishment of Italian unity brought forth many novels, mostly of the Manzonian school. The most important of these have been already mentioned. FRANCESCO DOMENICO GUERAZZI (1804-73), of infelicitous memory as a politician, had sufficient force as an historical novelist to deviate from the Manzonian model, and to obtain for a while an European reputation with his _Battle of Benevento_, _Siege of Florence_, and _Pasquale Paoli_. He was a man of powerful but unregulated character, and the inequality extends to his writings; his diction is extolled, his style condemned. Italian fiction had a serious loss in Ippolito Nievo, drowned on his return from Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily. “Perhaps,” says Vernon Lee, “no better picture could be given of Italy in the last years of the eighteenth century than that contained in Nievo’s _Confessioni di un Ottuagenario_.” The literary period which we have been traversing in the last two chapters may be approximately described as that extending from the fall of Napoleon the First (1814) to the intervention of Napoleon the Third in Italian politics (1859). It saw the later works of Monti and Foscolo, all the chief productions of Manzoni, and everything of Leopardi’s. Apart from these, it produced no great genius, but a number of highly distinguished writers who did honour to their own literature without producing any marked effect upon the literatures of foreign nations. The main reason of this circumscription of Italian influence was the legitimate preoccupation of Italy with her own affairs. The main aspiration of every Italian breast was the expulsion of the foreigner and the constitution of the national unity, whether as monarchy, federation, or republic. This common thought gave a noble unity to the authorship of the period, but could not materially affect contemporary literatures, although Mazzini’s English writings, Mr. Gladstone’s Neapolitan pamphlets, Sydney Dobell’s _Roman_, Mrs. Browning’s _Casa Guidi Windows_ and _Poems before Congress_, and divers poems of Robert Browning, and Algernon Swinburne, and Dante Rossetti, show that England was not uninfluenced by it. In the next generation, Italian letters, though, except for the poets Carducci and D’Annunzio, rather retrograding than advancing in merit, became more influential by becoming more cosmopolitan. CHAPTER XXVI CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN LITERATURE