Italian; yet, though Monti's verse abounds, like Ossian, in phantoms
and apparitions, they are not northern specters, but respectable
shades, classic, well-mannered, orderly, and have no kinship with
anything but the personifications, Vice, Virtue, Fear, Pleasure, and
the rest of their genteel allegorical company. Unconsciously, however,
Monti had helped to prepare the way for romantic realism by his choice
of living themes. Louis XVI, though decked in epic dignity, was
something that touched and interested the age; and Bonaparte, even in
pagan apotheosis, was so positive a subject that the improvvisatore
acquired a sort of truth and sincerity in celebrating him. Bonaparte
might not be the Sun he was hailed to be, but even in Monti's verse he
was a soldier, ambitious, unscrupulous, irresistible, recognizable in
every guise.

In Germany, where the great revival of romantic letters took
place,--where the poets and scholars, studying their own Minnesingers
and the ballads of England and Scotland, reproduced the simplicity and
directness of thought characteristic of young literatures,--the life
as well as the song of the people had once been romantic. But in
Italy there had never been such a period. The people were municipal,
mercantile; the poets burlesqued the tales of chivalry, and the
traders made money out of the Crusades. In Italy, moreover, the
patriotic instincts of the people, as well as their habits and
associations, were opposed to those which fostered romance in Germany;
and the poets and novelists, who sought to naturalize the new element
of literature, were naturally accused of political friendship with
the hated Germans. The obstacles in the way of the Romantic School at
Milan were very great, and it may be questioned if, after all, its
disciples succeeded in endearing to the Italians any form of romantic
literature except the historical novel, which came from England, and