The first political tragedy of Niccolini was the _Nebuchadnezzar_, which was printed in London in 1819, and figured, under that Scriptural disguise, the career of Napoleon. After that came his _Antonio Foscarini_, in which the poet, who had heretofore been a classicist, tried to reconcile that school with the romantic by violating the sacred unities in a moderate manner. In his subsequent tragedies he seems not to have regarded them at all, and to have been romantic as the most romantic Lombard of them all could have asked. Of course, his defection gave exquisite pain to the lovers of Italian good taste, as the classicists called themselves, but these were finally silenced by the success of his tragedy. The reader of it nowadays, we suspect, will think its success not very expensively achieved, and it certainly has a main fault that makes it strangely disagreeable. When the past was chiefly the affair of fable, the storehouse of tradition, it was well enough for the poet to take historical events and figures, and fashion them in any way that served his purpose; but this will not do in our modern daylight, where a freedom with the truth is an offense against common knowledge, and does not charm the fancy, but painfully bewilders it at the best, and at the second best is impudent and ludicrous. In his tragedy, Niccolini takes two very familiar incidents of Venetian history: that of the Foscari, which Byron has used; and that of Antonio Foscarini, who was unjustly hanged more than a hundred years later for privity to a conspiracy against the state, whereas the attributive crime of Jacopo Foscari was the assassination of a fellow-patrician. The poet is then forced to make the Doge Foscari do duty throughout as the father of Foscarini, the only doge of whose name served out his term very peaceably, and died the author of an extremely dull official history of Venetian literature. Foscarini, who, up to the time of his hanging, was an honored servant of the state, and had been ambassador to France, is obliged, on his part, to undergo all of Jacopo Foscari's troubles; and I have not been able to see why the poet should have vexed himself to make all this confusion, and why the story of the Foscari was not sufficient for his purpose. In the tragedy there is much denunciation of the oligarchic oppression of the Ten in Venice, and it may be regarded as the first of Niccolini's dramatic appeals to the love of freedom and the manhood of the Italians.