significance were not new; and the poet was "a Christian without
fanaticism, a Roman Catholic without bigotry, a zealot without
hardness."

The tragedies had no success upon the stage. The Carmagnola was given
in Florence in 1828, but in spite of the favor of the court, and the
open rancor of the friends of the Classic School, it failed; at Turin,
where the Adelchi was tried, Pellico regretted that the attempt to
play it had been made, and deplored the "vile irreverence of the
public."

Both tragedies deal with patriotic themes, but they are both concerned
with occurrences of remote epochs. The time of the Carmagnola is the
fifteenth century; that of the Adelchi the eighth century; and however
strongly marked are the characters,--and they are very strongly
marked, and differ widely from most persons of Italian classic tragedy
in this respect,--one still feels that they are subordinate to the
great contests of elements and principles for which the tragedy
furnishes a scene. In the Carmagnola the pathos is chiefly in the
feeling embodied by the magnificent chorus lamenting the slaughter of
Italians by Italians at the battle of Maclodio; in the Adelchi we are
conscious of no emotion so strong as that we experience when we
hear the wail of the Italian people, to whom the overthrow of their
Longobard oppressors by the Franks is but the signal of a new
enslavement. This chorus is almost as fine as the more famous one in
the Carmagnola; both are incomparably finer than anything else in the
tragedies and are much more dramatic than the dialogue. It is in the
emotion of a spectator belonging to our own time rather than in that
of an actor of those past times that the poet shows his dramatic
strength; and whenever he speaks abstractly for country and humanity