Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/411

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
ITALIAN AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
393

constitution of the national unity, whether as monarchy, federation, or republic. This common thought gave a noble unity to the authorship of the period, but could not materially affect contemporary literatures, although Mazzini's English writings, Mr. Gladstone's Neapolitan pamphlets, Sydney Dobell's Roman, Mrs. Browning's Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress, and divers poems of Robert Browning, and Algernon Swinburne, and Dante Rossetti, show that England was not uninfluenced by it. In the next generation, Italian letters, though, except for the poets Carducci and D'Annunzio, rather retrograding than advancing in merit, became more influential by becoming more cosmopolitan.