Of especial interest are the subjects of Alfieri's tragedies, all of them having a political or social tendency. They all express the theories of the French philosophers then so popular in Italy, concerning freedom and the rights of the people in opposition to the divine right of kings. His heroes--Virginius, Brutus, Timoleon--all proclaim the liberty of man. It is interesting to note that he dedicated one of his plays to George Washington. To the reader of the present day even his best plays--Virginia, Orestes, Agamemnon, Myrra, and Saul--seem conventional, monotonous, and unreal. The characters are mere types of passion or sentiment; there is no variety of action, no episodes, and no poetical adornments. Yet in his own age Alfieri was regarded as a great tragic poet, not only in his own country, but beyond the Alps. His influence on Italian literature was very great. For the next two generations there was scarcely a poet who did not admire and imitate him. Parini, Foscolo, Monti, Manzoni, Leopardi, and Pellico, all looked up to him as their master. Alfieri was the first to speak of a fatherland, a united Italy; he practically founded the patriotic school of literature which has lasted down to the present time. Hence he is even more important from a political standpoint than from a literary one. He himself looked on his tragedies as a means of inspiring new and higher political ideas in his fellow-countrymen, degraded as they had been by the long oppression of Spain. "I wrote," he says, "because the sad conditions of the times did not allow me to act." The literature of the first half of the nineteenth century was dominated by this political and patriotic spirit; Monti, Foscolo, Manzoni, and Pellico, all wrote dramas in the spirit of Alfieri. Most of them, however, are better known in other accounts. Foscolo, through his letters of Jacopo Ortis, the Italian Werther, and his literary essays; Pellico for his My Prisons; Manzoni for his Betrothed, one of the great novels of modern times. Greater than all of these, however, is Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), who alone is worthy to be placed beside the four great Italian poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, the last three of whom, at least, he might under happier circumstances have equaled. The story of his life is a pathetic one. Born of a family noble but poor, with a sensitive and melancholy temperament, the circumstances of his life only added to his morbid tendency, and after a brief existence, passed in sickness, poverty, and gloom, he died. Leopardi was great as a poet, a philosopher, and scholar. His Ode to Italy is one of the noblest poems in the language, and his Solitary Shepherd of Asia, is full of incomparable beauty.