In Italy, as elsewhere, the extreme popularity of the novel has overshadowed every other branch of literature. To enumerate the various authors and their works would be like counting the sands of the sea-shore and the stars of the Heavens, suffice it to observe that everywhere skill and ingenuity are manifest, and if some authors become repulsive from excess of realism, others, and those the most recent, have, in emulation of Gabriele d'Annunzio, thrown over their realism the garb of fancy and imagination, thus presenting a happy augury for the future. CHAPTER XXIV. CONCLUSION. In this History of Italian Literature I have endeavoured, to the best of my ability, to trace its progress and development. That it has progressed, cannot, I think, be denied. Poetry has freed itself from conventionality. Prose has given birth to works which former ages could not even have conceived. Compare the magnificent creations of Gabriele d'Annunzio to the stories of Bandello and the _Novelline_ of MASACCIO. The advance is prodigious. Much, however, remains to be done. Italy has not yet given the world a philosopher so profound as Kant or Schopenhauer, or a tragic poet so great as Sophocles or Shakespeare. There is still room for an Italian Burns, for a really original and striking poet in dialect. The Sicilian GIOVANNI MELI is, perhaps, the nearest approach to such a writer, indeed, he is the most genuine poet that Sicily has ever produced. There is every reason to hope that the free and united Italy of the present will see writers as brilliant as those of the enslaved and divided Italy of the past. THE END. INDEX. A Addison Adriani Alamanni, Luigi Aleardi Alexander VII, Pope Alfieri Algarotti Amaltei, the Brothers Amicis, Edmondo de Annunzio, Gabriele d' Ariosto B Balbo, Cesare Bandello Barett Bartoli, Daniele Beccaria Belcari Bellotti Bembo, Cardinal Bentivoglio, Cardinal Berchet, Giovanni Berni, Francesco Bertola Bettinelli Bevilacqua, Cardinal Boccaccio, Giovanni Boccalini, Trajano Boileau Bojardo Boniface VIII, Pope Borghi, Giuseppe Botti Binda, Madame Rachele Browning Bruno, Giordano Bunsen Byron, Lord C Campanella Campbell, Lord Cantù, Cesare Caro, Annibal Carducci, Giosuè Carlyle Carrer, Luigi Casa, Monsignor G. della Castelvetro Casti Castiglione, Baldassarre Catherine, Saint, of Siena Cattignano, Giovanni, da Catullus Cavalcanti Cavour Cesari, Antonio Cesarotti, Melchiorre Chaucer Chiabrera, Gabriele Christina, Queen of Sweden Claudian Clement VII, Pope Clement VIII, Pope Clement XI, Pope Clement XII, Pope Colonna, Vittoria Compagni, Dino Corneille Cossa, Pietro Costanzo, Angelo di Crescimbeni Crudeli, Tommaso D