With the restoration of the Austrians, there came a tranquillity to Milan which was not the apathy it seemed. It was now impossible for literary patriotism to be openly militant, as it had been in Alfieri and Foscolo, but it took on the retrospective phase of Romance, and devoted itself to the celebration of the past glories of Italy. In this way it still fulfilled its educative and regenerative mission. It dwelt on the victories which Italians had won in other days over their oppressors, and it tacitly reminded them that they were still oppressed by foreign governments; it portrayed their own former corruption and crimes, and so taught them the virtues which alone could cure the ills their vices had brought upon them. Only secondarily political, and primarily moral, it forbade the Italians to hope to be good citizens without being good men. This was Romance in its highest office, as Manzoni, Grossi, and D'Azeglio conceived it. Aesthetically, the new school struggled to overthrow the classic traditions; to liberate tragedy from the bondage of the unities, and let it concern itself with any tragical incident of life; to give comedy the generous scope of English and Spanish comedy; to seek poetry in the common experiences of men and to find beauty in any theme; to be utterly free, untrammeled, and abundant; to be in literature what the Gothic is in architecture. It perished because it came to look for Beauty only, and all that was good in it became merged in Realism which looks for Truth. These were the purposes of Romance, and the masters in whom the Italian Romanticists had studied them were the great German and English poets. The tragedies of Shakespeare were translated and admired, and the dramas of Schiller were reproduced in Italian verse; the poems of Byron and of Scott were made known, and the ballads of such lyrical Germans as Bürger. But, of course, so quick and curious a people as the Italians had been sensitive to all preceding influences in the literary world, and before what we call Romance came in from Germany, a breath of nature had already swept over the languid elegance of Arcady from the northern lands of storms and mists; and the effects of this are visible in the poetry of Foscolo's period.