They have watched, they have starved, by grim discipline driven,
And hauberk and helm have been battered and riven,
And arrows around them have whistled in showers.
And deem ye, poor fools! that the meed and the guerdon
That lured from afar were to lighten your burden,
Your wrongs to abolish, your fate to reversed
Go! back to the wrecks of your palaces stately,
To the forges whose glow ye extinguished so lately,
To the field ye have tilled in the sweat of your curse!
The victor and vanquished, in amity knitted,
Have doubled the yoke to your shoulders refitted;
One tyrant had quelled you, and now ye have twain.
They cast forth the lot for the serf and the cattle,
They throne on the sods that yet bleed from their battle,
And the soil and the hind are their servants again."
If Manzoni was surpassed as a dramatist and equalled as a lyrist by others among his countrymen, he has hitherto found no competitor as a novelist. I Promessi Sposi (1825) was the first great Italian romance, and it remains the greatest. It would be difficult to transcend its capital merits, the beauty and truth of description, the interest of its leading characters, and its perfect fidelity to life, if not in every respect to the place and period where and when the scene is laid—Milan under the dreary Spanish rule of the seventeenth century—yet to the universal feelings and instincts of humanity. As a picture of human nature the book is above criticism; it is just the fact, neither more nor less. "It satisfies us," said Goethe, "like perfectly ripe fruit." It has, notwithstanding, a weak side, which Goethe did not fail to point out—the prominence of the historical element, and the dryness with which the writer exhibits his authorities, instead of dissolving them in the flow of his narrative. "The German translator," said Goethe, "must get rid
