De Sanctis, like a medical student, follows step by step the corruption of Italy, gradually growing with the decay of religious and political consciousness, above all when Humanism, having reached its climax in the works of Poliziano, stopped providing a sincere feeling to the scholars who ceased to worship antiquity some fifty years after him. De Sanctis was a man of the Risorgimento he had laboured and suffered for the independence of his country, hoped and despaired of the future greatness of his countrymen. He was aware that in spite of Machiavelli, of Vico, of Alfieri, of Cuoco, of Mazzini, the greatest number of his countrymen had, so to speak, no souls. Knowing as he did that religion was the basis of all relation and the first cause of all real social progress, seeing in it the keystone of man’s recognition of the exterior world, he refrained in all his books from attacking not only religion, but the Church as well; although he was a staunch anti-clerical in politics until Rome was taken from the Pope. He drew such a graph of the development of Italy’s mind that from Dante’s onwards it shows all the forces of corruption preparing the series of invasions that made of his countrymen’s shame a byword, and the forces of reconstruction from Machiavelli onward. To the reading public he presented it as a mirror, in the transparency of Art showing the whole spiritual life of the people with its political consequences. He bade them realise that corruption had been the cause of foreign rule and tyranny, not foreign rule and tyranny the cause of corruption.