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376 authors, no doubt, especially in England, more or less favoured this tendency, but their literary practice was commonly inconsistent with their political principles. Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Chateaubriand, might be reactionary as politicians, but in the literary sphere they were innovators and iconoclasts. The study of their writings could not but engender a habit of mind entirely inconsistent with the deference to authority required for the perpetuation of the ancient regime in State and Church. No man, for example, more sincerely deplored the tendencies of his times than Niebuhr, but he should have thought of them before he meddled with the history of Rome. By proving its legendary character, he had done more to unsettle allegiance to tradition than could have been accomplished by the wit and malice of a hundred Heines. We are thus justified in regarding the literature of the nineteenth century as in the main a great liberating force, and in the long-run favourable to sound conservatism also, since it aimed at procuring that liberty for the human spirit without which renovation was as impossible as demolition.

If there was any country in Europe where literature might be expected to be unequivocally on the side of Liberty, it was Italy; for Italy alone had to reckon with foreign as well as domestic oppressors. In fact, the general tendency of Italian literature during the period under review is more uniformly liberal than that of any other; but at the same time its expression is more restrained than that of any other, for the conclusive reason that an Italian writer could only obtain liberty of speech at the price of exile. Love of country is, nevertheless, the dominant thought, which colours it throughout as the soil colours the flower. The men of greatest