dled license of the former,
strong in his men-at-arms, castle battlements, and retainers; the
disinterested benevolence, charitable institutions, and paternal
beneficence of the latter, resting on the affections and experienced
benefits of mankind, are admirably depicted. His descriptions of the
plague, famine, and popular revolt at Milan, are masterpieces which never
were excelled. The saintlike character of Cardinal Borromeo, strong in the
sway of religion, justice, and charity, in the midst of the vehemence of
worldly passion and violence with which he is surrounded, is peculiarly
striking. It is fitted, like Guizot's _Lectures on History_, to illustrate
the incalculable advantage which arose, in an age of general rapine and
unsettled government, from the sway, the disinterestedness, and even the
superstitions, of religion.

But the greatest merit of the work is to be found in the admirable
delineation of the manners, ideas, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, of
humble life with which it abounds. The hero of the piece is a silk-weaver
named Renzo, near Lecco, on the Lake of Como; the heroine Lucia, his
betrothed, the daughter of a poor widow in the same village; and the story
is founded on the stratagems and wiles of an unbridled baron in the
vicinity, whose passions had been excited by Lucia's beauty, first to
prevent her marriage, then to obtain possession of her person. In the
conception of such a piece is to be seen decisive evidence of the vast
change in human affairs, since the days when Tasso and Ariosto poured
forth to an admiring age, in the same country, the loves of high-born
damsels, the combats of knights, the manners, the pride, and the
exclusiveness of chivalry. In its execution, Manzoni is singularly
felicitous. He is minute without being tedious, graphic but not vulgar,
characteristic and yet never offensive. His pictures of human life, though
placed two centuries back, are evidently drawn from nature in these times:
the peasants whom he introduces are those of the plains of Lombardy at
this time; but though he paints them with the fidelity of an artist, it is
yet with the feelings of a gentleman. His details are innumerable--his
finishing is minute; but it is the minute finishing of Albert Durer or
Leonardo da Vinci, not of Teniers or Ostade. In this respect he offers a
striking contrast to the modern romance writers of France--Victor Hugo,
Janin, Madame Dudevant, and Sue--by whom vice and licentious