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I t is the boast of the Italians that their literature has flourished with unequal but uninterrupted brilliancy from the thirteenth century to the present day. The progress of time alone would naturally have produced and obliterated many innovations, but the frequent domestic revolutions, the repeated irruptions, the arms and the arts of strangers, succeeding each other rapidly and imperceptibly, and bringing with them new laws, and manners, and opinions, have occasioned in Italy more vicissitudes than are to be found in the literature of any other country. Thus it is that their critics have been able to point out at least ten different epoques when it has assumed certain characteristics, or, to use a single word, a physiognomy, altogether distinct from that of any preceding or subsequent period. The average duration assigned to each of these epoques has been laid down at about half a century. This is the utmost length that any individual taste and mode of writing can be discovered to have prevailed. The above remark is purposely premised to a short account which it is intended to give of the present state of Italian literature; that is to say, of the character of the actual epoque, which embraces not only those writers at present in existence, but others who have powerfully contributed to form the taste and the tone which will continue to prevail until succeeded by another revolution in the republic of letters.
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