Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/400

382 unjustly depreciated as a man of letters; he is always interesting, always individual, and his principal works, the History of Italy from 1750 to 1850 and his History of Italian Heretics, though disfigured by party spirit, are important books. The latter is still the standard authority on the subject, though it will hardly be allowed to continue so.

An unique position among Italian historians is occupied by (1805–89), the Orientalist and national historian of Sicily. Detesting the Neapolitan oppression of his native island, he took up the investigation of the Sicilian Vespers, and depicted this great event as not the consequence of a conspiracy subtly organised by John of Procida, but as a spontaneous uprising against intolerable oppression. The allusion did not escape the Neapolitan Government, and Amari found it expedient to withdraw to Paris, where he studied Arabic as a preparation for his yet more important History of Sicily under Moslem Dominion, published between 1854 and 1872. In the interim he had taken part in the Sicilian insurrection, and after the final expulsion of the Bourbons, was successively Minister of Public Instruction and professor of Arabic at Florence, continuing to write and edit books on his favourite subjects. No historian has a higher reputation for erudition and sagacity.

(1780–1844) devoted himself to a subject even more difficult than Amari's, and one incapable of an authoritative solution of its numberless problems. His Storia degli Antichi Popoli Italiani is nevertheless a highly important work, which exploded much error, if it did not establish much truth. A Neapolitan, (1784–1858) was to have