“The confessor came, and he communed with him half an hour, speaking, as usual, from a mind calm and clear. After the confessor left the room, Manzoni called his friends and said to them: 'When I am dead, do what I did every day: pray for Italy--pray for the king and his family--so good to me!' His country was the last thought of this great man dying as in his whole long life it had been his most vivid and constant affection.” SILVIO PELLICO, TOMASSO GROSSI, LUIGI CAREER, AND GIOVANNI BERCHET I As I have noted, nearly all the poets of the Romantic School were Lombards, and they had nearly all lived at Milan under the censorship and espionage of the Austrian government. What sort of life this must have been, we, born and reared in a free country, can hardly imagine. We have no experience by which we can judge it, and we never can do full justice to the intellectual courage and devotion of a people who, amid inconceivable obstacles and oppressions, expressed themselves in a new and vigorous literature. It was not, I have explained, openly revolutionary; but whatever tended to make men think and feel was a sort of indirect rebellion against Austria. When a society of learned Milanese gentlemen once presented an address to the Emperor, he replied, with brutal insolence, that he wanted obedient subjects in Italy, nothing more; and it is certain that the activity of the Romantic School was regarded with jealousy and dislike by the government from the first. The authorities awaited only a pretext for striking a deadly blow at the poets and novelists, who ought to have been satisfied with being good subjects, but who, instead, must needs even found a newspaper, and discuss in it projects for giving the Italians a literary life, since they could not have a political existence. The perils of contributing to the _Conciliatore_ were such as would attend house-breaking and horse-stealing in happier countries and later times. The government forbade any of its employees to write for it, under pain of losing their places; the police, through whose hands every article intended for publication had to pass, not only struck out all possibly offensive expressions, but informed one of the authors that if his articles continued to come to them so full of objectionable things, he should be banished, even though those things never reached the public. At last the time came for suppressing this journal and punishing its managers. The chief editor was a young Piedmontese poet, who politically was one of the most harmless and inoffensive of men; his literary creed obliged him to choose Italian subjects for his poems, and he thus erred by mentioning Italy; yet Arnaud, in his “Poeti Patriottici”, tells us he could find but two lines from which this poet could be suspected of patriotism, and he altogether refuses to class him with the poets who have promoted revolution. Nevertheless, it is probable that this poet wished Freedom well.