A PRIMER A NEW HISTORY OF PENNSYLVANIA By BARR FERREE Secretary of the Pennsylvania Society. A book of facts. The whole history of Pennsylvania admirably condensed and conveniently arranged. It contains more information than many larger books and is intended at once as a book of reference and a book that will tell the reader every essential fact in the history of Pennsylvania. "Every reader will learn much that he cannot find as easily elsewhere."-The Athenaeum (London).-"The best and most concise story of the origin, progress and development of our Commonwealth that has so far been written. Its value as a book of reference can hardly be over-estimated.”—New Era (Lancaster, Pa).—" We can only wish that every State in the Union had its merits described with so much fullness and detail."-The Sun (New York).—"Remarkably valuable."-Public Ledger (Philadelphia.)—" It would be difficult to find its equal for compactness, clarity, completeness of information and reliability as a ready reference work."-Post (Boston).—" Unusually comprehensive."-North American (Philadelphia) “Remarkably interesting and valuable contains a vast amount of information to be found in no other single volume."-Transcript (Boston)."The essential facts of Pennsylvania affairs and history."-Pittsburg Gazette.-"Contains primary facts in a way that meets the approval of those who want to get at the meat of the subject."-Philadelphia Inquirer.-"A handy book of reference."-The Nation (New York).-"It covers a a much broader field than many larger histories."-WilkesBarre Record." Concise and authoritative and well adapted for practical general use.”—Book News (Philadelphia).-Governor Pennypacker says:-"You have done good work: I congratulate you upon its success.” 164 ILLUSTRATIONS LEONARD SCOTT PUBLICATION and a Warren Street : COMPANY : New York THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. No. 415.-APRIL, 1908. Art. I.-GIOSUE CARDUCCI. Juvenilia (1850-1860) e Levia Gravia (1861-1871), second edition, 1903; Giambi ed Epodi (1867-1879) e Rime Nuove (1861-1887), second edition, 1903; Odi Barbare, Rime e Ritmi, second edition, 1907; Discorsi Letterari e Storici, third edition, 1905; Primi Saggi, second edition, 1903; Studi Letterari, 1893; Studi, Saggi e Discorsi, 1898. By Giosue Carducci. Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli. THERE are certain writers whose privilege it seems to give to the contemporary genius of their country an adequate expression in literature. They neither follow public opinion nor lead it, for their minds are so constituted that they are almost certain to find themselves in accord with their countrymen. Tennyson is an instance in England, and in France Victor Hugo. Tennyson united the gifts of an incomparable literary artist with the convictions of an average Englishman under Queen Victoria. In boyhood he rang the church bells to celebrate the first Reform Act, and he lived long enough to become an ardent Imperialist. Victor Hugo, even while he denounced the bourgeois, was never really out of touch with the French middle class. Brought up as a Catholic and Legitimist, he lived to be a zealous champion of republicanism and free thought. In less tangible matters also than religious and political opinion, in that general outlook on life in which differences and likenesses elude classification, these men were inwardly at one with their fellow-citizens. The very moderation of Tennyson is national; so is the vehemence of Victor Vol. 208.-No. 415. X Hugo. Such authors may be regarded from two main standpoints-firstly, as literary artists, a quality that can be properly estimated only by men whose language is theirs; secondly, as interpreters of their age, an aspect which tends to become the most prominent to historians and foreigners. Italy has recently lost a man of this representative type in Giosue Carducci, who was born in 1836, and died in 1907. Yet, while fully representing the Italian genius in many ways, Carducci was almost free from that quality in it which tends more than any other to repel the taste of northerners, the quality which the Italians themselves praise under the name of morbidezza. From the time of the Catholic revival, and even earlier, this melting mood seems to cling about the atmosphere of Italy. Already traceable in the later artists of the Renaissance, in Correggio, in Luini, in Andrea del Sarto, it becomes unbearably cloying in the devotional paintings of the Bolognese school, and in the insipid pastorals of Marini. When the Romantic movement revitalised the literature of Europe an unwholesome tinge of selfpity tainted its Italian exponents. Absent from the fiery Alfieri, it appears strongly both in Manzoni and in Leopardi. The great Italian novelist of reaction lacked the manliness of Walter Scott; and the virtue of 'I Promessi Sposi' is pathetic resignation, not the strong self-reliance of Henry Morton or Jeanie Deans. Great poet as he was, Leopardi was not untouched by the national malady. Scepticism in the Italian Shelley took a shape quite as unhealthy as piety in Manzoni. The title of one of his poems, 'Amore e Morte,' might well describe the whole work of his later years, when ill-health and political embitterment had deepened his inborn pessimism. Indeed Goethe's well-known saying, that classic art is healthy art, romantic art is sickly art, is perhaps truer of Italian literature than of any other. For in Italy the Romantic movement failed to permeate, as in Germany and France, the inmost being of the nation. It found neither, as in Germany, a fallow soil unencumbered by classical tradition, nor, as in France, a national consciousness palpitating with mighty cataclysms and achievements, with the upheaval of the Revolution and the epic campaigns of the First Empire. Being the outcome of foreign influences, it only affected isolated men of letters, as Carducci himself contended in an interesting essay on the Renewal of the National Literature.' Like Matthew Arnold, Carducci was a historian and teacher of literature as well as a poet; and this didactic side of his career has an important bearing on his poetry. His appreciations and studies have the twofold interest that always belongs to those of a creative artist; we read them as much for the light they reflect on the critic as for that which they throw on the subject of his criticism. As is natural in an Italian, the touchstone of his literary sympathies and insight is best found in his apprehension of Dante. On the one hand, as a southerner and a poet, he was in touch with aspects of Dante's mind which have perplexed Teutonic professors. To him there is no contradiction between the ethereal platonism of the 'Vita Nuova' and the fiery purgation on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise; for, to the more analytic, as well as more impulsive, southern temperament, the juxtaposition of one love purely of the intellect with many loves wholly of the senses scarcely offers a problem. On the other hand, when he says that the object of Dante's love is not the living woman, Beatrice Portinari, but an idea, surely the modern critic is severing the two elements, human and divine, actual and ideal, which it was the genius of the medieval poet to unite. Of course, like every one endowed with a feeling for literary art, Carducci, a literary artist to the backbone, admired the manner of Dante, the dolce stil nuovo, which reinaugurated literature in Europe after its eclipse in the dark ages; in Dante's subject-matter what aroused his enthusiasm was the love for Italy rather than the love for Beatrice. With what was allegorical, mystical, distinctively medieval, in Dante he is never in emotional, as distinct from intellectual, contact. When he repeats, more than once, that Dante should be regarded, not so much as the poet of Florence, but rather as the supreme exponent of the mind of medieval Christendom, we feel that he speaks from the brain, not from the heart. His inmost soul was with Dante, the Italian patriot; it was not with Dante, the cosmopolitan mystic. This partial, not to say unsound, view of Dante was |