BY RUPERT SARGENT HOLLAND WITH EIGHT PORTRAITS NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1908 Copyright, 1908 , BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Published, August, 1908 THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS RAHWAY, N. J. To That Spirit of Italy Which Calls to Men in All Lands Like the Charmed Voice of Their Own History There is no history more alternately desperate and hopeful than that of the scattered Italian states in their efforts to form a united nation. Many forces fuse in the progress of such a popular move

Alfieri was more than a great poet, he was the discoverer of a new national life in the scattered states of Italy. Putting aside consideration of his tragedies as literature, no student of the eighteenth century can fail to appreciate his influence over Italian thought. It was as though a people who had forgotten their nationality suddenly heard anew the stories of their common folk-lore. The race of Dante, of Petrarch, and of Tasso spoke again in the words of Alfieri. It was high time that disu

The position of Manzoni in modern Italian life and literature is doubly interesting, both because his work in poetry and the drama marks the vital turning point in the historic battle of Classicism with Romanticism, and because his romance “I Promessi Sposi” is the greatest achievement in all Italian letters in the field of the novel. Walter Scott gave the country north of Tweed a history in the “Waverley Novels,” and Alessandro Manzoni’s writing a little later, at a time when Scott’s work was a

Gioberti’s signal gift to his countrymen was his great book, “II Primato d’Italia,” a statement of the causes of Italy’s early primacy among European nations, and a philosophic theory for her regeneration. Like Savonarola he flayed the vices of his time and preached redemption through Christian living, but, unlike the great Fra, he undertook to teach that the Church was no less fitted to be the seat of statecraft than of religion. It was this that gained him the ear of Rome as well as that of Pi

The story of Venetian glory seemed closed with the last years of the Eighteenth Century. The proud Queen of the Adriatic had seen her jewels stolen one by one, and had finally become the toy of wanton powers. Venice was no longer self-reliant, no longer coldly virtuous, her grandeur had sunk into a memory, her civic honor been bedimmed by gross corruption. “Venice was,” said the world, and France, parceling out the conquests of the young Napoleon, handed Venetia and the City of the Doges to Aust

Some men become legendary during their own lives. Their personalities have a certain detachment from the rest of the world so that common standards have no value as applied to them. They are poets or seers or philosophers, and often their mystic quality is of little use to the great mass of men, and is only to be appreciated by the few. Sometimes the whole world understands them. Mazzini had become a legend to the people of Europe long before his death, but a legend that carried the strongest pe

Cavour planned united Italy; his career is a shining example of what may be done by a man with one definite purpose to which he adheres without digression. Just as Disraeli seems from his early manhood to have aimed at becoming Prime Minister of England so Cavour appears to have aimed at the union of Italy under the leadership of Piedmont. There were a thousand and one points at which he could have turned aside, a dozen times when a brilliant temporary success was held before him, but he preferr

When Mazzini had stirred men’s minds to fever-heat in the great cause of Italian liberty, and Cavour had so manipulated events that political progress was possible, came Garibaldi, to lead with all the fire of a crusader the new race of Italian patriots. He was a hero of legends as soon as he took the field. He cannot be compared to any modern general, nor his army to any other army of recent centuries; he was the personal hero whose red shirt and slouch hat became symbols of liberty, and whose

Few royal families in Europe possess as proud a record as the House of Savoy. Legend carries their race as Princes back to 998, when an exiled noble of Saxon birth settled in Burgundy, and ultimately built a family stronghold at the pass of Moriana on the frontier of Savoy. This prince was known as Humbert of the White Hand. He was followed by a series of fighting, ambitious, able descendants, who gradually carved for themselves the Dukedom of Savoy, and married into the most powerful of contemp