memory, he who for his cruelties in that city had been dubbed the "hyena
of Brescia," who tortured these martyrs of Mantua and signed their
death-warrants.

All these things were happening during those ten years of heavy silence
when Fogazzaro was a child. We can fancy how eagerly he listened to the
accounts of these horrors, and to the long and animated discussions his
father (Franco Maironi of _The Patriot_) and his uncle (Uncle Piero)
held with the brilliant company that assembled at Casa Fogazzaro. His
father took an active part in the defence of Vicenza in 1848, while his
mother, whom he has portrayed for us in the lovely character of Signora
Luisa Rigey, busied herself with scraping lint and making cockades for
the soldiers. These events and scenes, which so deeply impressed the
child, were ever present to the mind of the man, and the long cherished
project of immortalising those personages and places which were both
familiar and dear to him, was at last realised in the pages of _The
Patriot_, in which, evoking personal memories of the past, he gives us a
stirring account of the petty persecutions and base meanness to which
the mighty Austria stooped during that period of suspense and anxiety.
The intrigues of the rogue Pasotti, the skirmishes of the wicked old
Marchesa with the adjutant of the great Radetzky himself, fill us with
indignation and contempt, while we thrill with patriotic emotion when
Luisa raises her glass and whispers: "Hurrah for Cavour!"--_whispers_
the words, because in those days the very walls had ears, and in her
toast there breathed sedition!

As the years passed and peace and prosperity settled over United Italy,
another question, that of the religious life, began to occupy the
master-mind of Antonio Fogazzaro. Intensely but broadly religious
himself, he could not fail to introduce into his work the burning
question of belief or unbelief which, from long contemplation and study,
had become, as it were, a part of himself. The artistic motive of the
book, the struggle between an unbelieving wife and an intensely
religious husband, came to the Italian reader as a new revelation. Had
Fogazzaro been influenced by certain works which had already excited
much comment and discussion in England and America? Perhaps so; but at
all events he has treated the subject differently, and in his own
masterly fashion; he has spared us the long and tedious tirades of
personages who are, after all, simply m