ALESSANDRO MANZONI, the most popular writer of the first half of the Nineteenth Century, was born at Milan on the seventh of March, 1785. His mother was the daughter of Beccaria, whose philanthropic endeavours to abolish the worst abuses of criminal procedure have received recognition in a previous chapter. He received his education from the Fathers of the Somaschi Order, and in 1805 he accompanied his mother to Paris. There he had the advantage of mixing with the most brilliant and intellectual Society that France could produce. At that epoch he seems first to have attempted composition, and a poem he wrote on the death of a friend obtained sufficient encomiums to encourage him in further efforts. In 1808 he returned to Italy and married Mademoiselle Blondel, daughter of a banker of Geneva. She was a Protestant, but soon joined the Church of Rome, and ere long filled her husband, who had hitherto been indifferent to religion, with the fervour that animated her soul. As in Paris, so in Milan, he enjoyed the society of those most eminent for their intellectual powers, and he was a frequent visitor in Monti's house. Silvio Pellico and Tommaso Grossi were among his friends, and Luigi Tosi, afterwards Bishop of Pavia, did much to confirm him in the ardent piety instilled by his wife. Winter and Spring he passed in Milan, Summer and Autumn at a beautiful villa of his at Brusiglio, four miles out of the town. In 1812 he began writing his Sacred Hymns, and if they do not rise above a spirited, though somewhat conventional, piety, they are nevertheless an enormous advance on the mythological platitudes that formed so long the staple of Italian poetry. In 1819, he finished his tragedy, _Il Conte di Carmagnola,_ which had occupied him for more than three years. Manzoni entirely abandoned the trammels of the unities of time and place to which Alfieri rigidly adhered; his play has consequently much of the picturesqueness and variety of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans; and it is distinguished by that thoroughness of historical study which marked everything he wrote; but on the other hand, it must be admitted that he is not inspired by the genuine spirit of tragedy in nearly so high a degree as Alfieri, nor has he his predecessor's remarkable gift of writing sonorous and impressive blank verse. His verse is clear and flowing, but rather wanting in colour. His characters say what they ought to say, but they do not say it in a striking manner. Even more than for its merits as a play, it deserves to be read for the accurate picture it presents of the Venice of the Fifteenth Century. In 1820 he wrote the most spirited verses he ever produced, _Il Quinto Maggio,_ a poem on the death of Napoleon, full of fire and originality.