Far and away the most important of his works is _Le Mie Prigioni,_ the record of his weary years of cruel captivity. The book was a prodigious success, and was read wherever freedom was loved and tyranny detested. No literary production of the age was more welcome to Italian patriots, because it furnished them with so forcible a justification for rising against their oppressors. Indeed, the marvel is that a nation like the Italian bore the yoke of foreign invaders so long. Italy was not like Poland, without natural frontiers to act as a barrier against the aggression of powerful neighbours. Nor was she, like Poland, distracted by internal faction and discord. Why, therefore, did she submit so long? The only answer, in my opinion, is that the system in the Middle Ages of hiring venal condottieri and their followers to fight their battles demoralised the Italians until they failed to realise their own inherent strength. When once the nation resolved to be free, the task was not so stupendously difficult. It was a fortunate circumstance for Italy that neither Spain nor Austria ever attempted to effect settlements of their own subjects on her soil, as England did in Ireland and as Russia is now doing in Poland. Thus, when the hour of freedom struck, the Italians had only to overcome hostile garrisons, they had not to uproot a settled population. The style of Silvio Pellico is eminently clear and direct, and his work is on that account a great favourite with foreigners beginning the study of the language. He has considerable powers of description, and he succeeds admirably in reproducing the colouring and the atmosphere of the scenes he went through. He is occasionally too sentimental, and the tears he sheds are out of all proportion to the fortitude he displays. But a great wave of sentimentality was passing over Italy at that time, and it was perhaps wanted to bring men back to nature after the artificiality of the past. His gaolers seem to have been as kind to him as they dared; but the rules of the prison were terribly rigorous, and they were not relaxed for Silvio and his confederates, blameless though their characters were known to be. Maroncelli had to submit to the amputation of a leg owing to the mortification resulting from the friction of his heavy fetters, and Pellico himself was prostrated by illness from his excessive hardships, so that for a while his life was in danger, and great indeed would have been the loss to Literature had a fatal termination prevented him from leaving to posterity the record of a cruel captivity and of a lofty and unsullied patriotism. CHAPTER XXII. POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.