himself to the literary schemes he still cherished,—a history of religious ideas, a popular history of Italy, and the editing of a series of the great dramas of the world. But the burden of his country's woe lay too heavily on him to be long forgotten. It was no time now for Dante studies or play-writing. Sadly and unwillingly he convinced himself that at such a time pure literature was no patriot's first task, that the writer, who would not shirk his duty, must make his work political. Not but what the literary critic still appears on every page; but the whole gist of his teaching is that the value of a book is in proportion to its power to inform the reader's soul to love of country and mankind, and impel him to serve his fellows by political action in the sight of God. He held it wasted effort to do, what Manzoni had tried to do,—to school the individual to a smug life of cloistered virtue, a life which in a vicious or torpid society was impossible to the many. No religion, no morality, he taught, is worth the writer's labours, unless it dedicates men to be workers in the public cause, to hold comfort, and, if need be, home and life itself as cheap, while oppression and wrong are stunting other lives, and men and women round are crying to be freed.

He found his opportunity in the controversy between Romanticists and Classicists, which then divided the literary world of Italy into hot factions. Not that he held Romanticism to be any final or faultless form of literature. But when a theory of literary servitude, like Classicism, lent itself to political oppression and depressed the vital and spiritual forces of the country, when a young and vigorous movement was making literature free and stood for liberty all round, he necessarily took his stand for the latter. There could be no political or social regeneration for Italy, till she had a literature that made for freedom and progress. "These literary disputes," he urged, "are bound up with all that is important in social and civil life"; "the legislation and literature of a people always advance on parallel lines," and "the progress of intellectual culture stands in intimate relationship with the political life of the country." It was the aim of the Romanticists "to give Italians an original national literature, not one that is as a sound of passing music to tickle the ear and die, but one that will interpret to them their aspirations, their ideas, their needs, their social movement." And thus, while generously recognising Manzoni's worth, he looked rather to Alfieri and Foscolo, who had scourged political wrong-doing and preached resistance to tyranny; he praised the writers of the Conciliatore, the short-lived Milanese journal of Silvio Pellico and Confalonieri, which, like himself, had turned Romanticism to political purposes. Here and there in his writings of this time a more or less direct political allusion manages to escape the censor's eye. He speaks for the first time of "Young Italy," a name soon to ring through Europe; he pays his tribute to the political exiles; he slips in a remark that the spirit of a state cannot be changed without recasting its institutions. More than this he could not do in a censor-ridden press; perhaps literature was struggling still with politics to command his mind.

As it was, he had trouble enough with the censors. His first published articles appeared in the Indicatore Genovese, a commercial paper issuing at Genoa, whose editor was persuaded to admit short notices of recent books, which gradually swelled into literary essays. Among his later contributions were an article on the historical novel and reviews of Friedrich Schlegel's History of Literature and Guerrazzi's Battle of Benevento. They do not read very well. They are juvenile and exaggerated, and it is amusing to find the twenty-three years' old author telling his coeval Guerrazzi, the young Leghorn novelist, that he had not drunk enough of the cup of life to be a pessimist. The Indicatore gradually became a literary paper, and for a few months the censorship did not see what it was tending to. At the end of 1828, however, about a year after Mazzini began to write in it, it was suppressed. Mazzini easily transferred his energies. Guerrazzi had founded another paper at Leghorn much on the same lines, the Indicatore Livornese, and asked Mazzini to send contributions. Mazzini readily responded; he wrote, besides minor papers, an article on Faust, and attacked the defects of the Romanticist School in an essay on Some Tendencies of European Literature. His writing is still effusive, and generally dogmatic and sententious, but the style has improved. The censorship was comparatively lenient in Tuscany, and though the young writers were barred from direct reference to politics, they were able to make the political allusions sufficiently transparent. But the paper grew too daring even for the somnolent Tuscan censors, and, like its predecessor, it was snuffed out after a year of life. Mazzini and Guerrazzi parted, to go on very different ways, and meet again nineteen years later when both were famous.

In the meantime Mazzini had with some difficulty got a footing on the Antologia, the one Italian review of the time that ranked among the great European periodicals. It had been founded some ten years before, in the hope that it might become an Italian Edinburgh Review, by Gino Capponi, the blind Florentine noble who traced his race from the Capponi who bearded Charles VIII., and Vieusseux, a Swiss bookseller who had settled at Florence and opened the one circulating library of any note in Italy. Most of the leading Italian writers of the day contributed to it; and though its aim was avowedly nationalist, and in a sense Liberal, it had succeeded so far, thanks probably to its influential patrons, in eluding the censor's ban. Mazzini wrote for it three articles On the Historical Drama and another On a European Literature. His work had rapidly matured, and there is no trace now of the juvenilities of his earlier efforts. Every page has the mark of the strong, original thought, which made him one of the greatest critics of the century.

Meanwhile he was practising at the bar in a desultory fashion. Sometimes he pleaded in the lower courts as an "advocate of the poor," and was much in demand for his attention and skill. According to the etiquette of the profession, he read in the rooms of a barrister, who limited his interest to seeing that his pupils sat with a book in front of them. The vacations were generally spent in a little country villa at San Secondo, in the Bisagno valley, within sight of a house which the Ruffinis occupied; and he shared in attentions to the Ruffinis' mother, who was now his spiritual guide and dearest friend, or went on botanical walks or shooting expeditions in the lovely hill country. He did not do much of the shooting himself, and when he was more than fifty, he remembered with remorse a thrush that he had mangled when sixteen.

His interests became more and more absorbed by politics. His Genoese home no doubt encouraged this, for the nobles and the working-classes were still unreconciled to Piedmontese rule, while the liberals of the middle classes looked on the annexation only as a step to some wider Italian state. But the local environment was only a minor influence, and Mazzini would doubtless have become a conspirator, had he lived in any other town of Italy. About the time that he began to write in the Indicatore Genovese, he was admitted into the Society of the Carbonari. The Carbonari were at this time suffering from the decadence, which sooner or later palsies every secret society. They had grown out of Neapolitan Freemasonry in the days of the French rule, and when, after Napoleon's fall, reaction came and the old dynasties returned, they