Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/362

344 for all felt that he had done his best by Italy. His death at the age of eighty-eight evoked such a unanimity of sentiment as has perhaps accompanied that of no great author of modern times except Sir Walter Scott. Goethe had hostile detiractors, Settembrini and the few others who presumed to criticise Manzoni urged their scruples in a spirit of becoming reverence.

Manzoni's claim to this universal veneration was threefold. In the first place, he was really a great writer; in the second, he was the standard-bearer of Italian literature, the one contemporary author of his nation who could be named along with Goethe and Byron; thirdly and chiefly, he represented the most important intellectual movement of the post-Napoleonic age, the romantic and mediæval reaction—a necessity, for justice demanded it. The Middle Age was indeed no model for the nineteenth century, as the romanticists and reactionaries thought, but it did possess elements indispensable for the enrichment of the national life; and although the Italian mind was probably less in harmony with these than the mind of any other people, no Italian could forget that the greatest of his countrymen was also the greatest and most representative writer of the Middle Ages. It had been one of Monti's chief merits to have emulated and revived the style of Dante, to the disgust of Pope Pius VI., who asked him why on earth he could not write like Metastasio. After the form came the spirit of the Divine Comedy, commended to the nation by the misfortunes and deceptions which succeeded the fall of Napoleon, when the exile of Florence appeared more than ever a symbol of his country. The worshippers of Dante were indeed divided, some seeing in him the Ghibelline, the enemy of the temporal power no less than