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 forth on forlorn hopes to die for Italy, on the scaffold as conspirators or in hopeless struggles against overwhelming numbers; in this spirit he prepared the way for the national uprising of 1848, when, as George Meredith writes: "Italy reddened the sky with the banners of a land revived." It was then that one of his disciples, the young poet Goffredo Mameli, who fell "tra un inno e una battaglia" under Garibaldi in the defence of Rome, wrote the battle-hymn of the Risorgimento, the hymn that was sung again, in the early days of the European war, by the soldiers of United Italy on their way to the front:—

Mazzini wrote of Dante: "L'Italia cerca in lui il segreto della sua Nazionalità; l'Europa, il segreto dell' Italia e una profezia del pensiero moderno." And it is in Dante, so to speak, that Mazzini finds the starting point of his own political creed. He is with Dante in associating the national aspirations of Italy with a philosophical theory of the function of nationality in human civilisation. Like Dante, he looked for a restored unity of civilisation, and assigned to Italy a leading part therein. But there is this difference. Dante started from the 26