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392 his one comedy, Plautus and his Age, a lively picture of Roman society in Plautus's time.

The period immediately preceding the establishment of Italian unity brought forth many novels, mostly of the Manzonian school. The most important of these have been already mentioned, (1804–73), of infelicitous memory as a politician, had sufficient force as an historical novelist to deviate from the Manzonian model, and to obtain for a while an European reputation with his Battle of Benevento, Siege of Florence, and Pasquale Paoli. He was a man of powerful but unregulated character, and the inequality extends to his writings; his diction is extolled, his style condemned. Italian fiction had a serious loss in Ippolito Nievo, drowned on his return from Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily. "Perhaps," says Vernon Lee, "no better picture could be given of Italy in the last years of the eighteenth century than that contained in Nievo's Confessioni di un Ottuagenario." The literary period which we have been traversing in the last two chapters may be approximately described as that extending from the fall of Napoleon the First (1814) to the intervention of Napoleon the Third in Italian politics (1859). It saw the later works of Monti and Foscolo, all the chief productions of Manzoni, and everything of Leopardi's. Apart from these, it produced no great genius, but a number of highly distinguished writers who did honour to their own literature without producing any marked effect upon the literatures of foreign nations. The main reason of this circumscription of Italian influence was the legitimate preoccupation of Italy with her own affairs. The main aspiration of every Italian breast was the expulsion of the foreigner and the