Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/399

Rh author, but succeeded in imparting classic form to his work by dint of infinite labour and careful imitation of Tacitus, for which the imperious brevity natural to him, intensified by the habits of military life, admirably qualified him. His work is one of the most marrowy and sinewy of histories, and is especially valuable where he speaks as an eye-witness. It deals fully with financial and economical as well as political and military affairs.

Another excellent historian has been almost lost to Italy by the circumstances attending the publication of his book,, an exile in England, published in 1853 his history of the Lombard League, at Doncaster, a place better affected to the horse of Neptune than to the olive of Pallas, and, thus producing invita Minerva, has been almost ignored. In fact, he is an admirable historian, lucid and delightful in his narrative, and his style is so fashioned upon the purest models, that he might seem to have come straight out of the sixteenth century. This might be reprehended as affectation, but the objection, if in any respect well founded, has no application to the excellent English version (1877), a book which cannot be too strongly recommended to historians desirous of acquiring the pregnant brevity so essential in this age of multiplication of books to all who would catch and retain the ear of posterity.

The friend and biographer of Manzoni, and imitator of his style in a successful novel, Margherita Pusterla, was a long-lived and industrious, and consequently a voluminous author. His position is well marked as almost the only considerable writer of his time who favoured political and ecclesiastical reaction, and the resulting unpopularity has led him to be