CONCLUSION.
In this History of Italian Literature I have endeavoured, to the best of my ability, to trace its progress and development. That it has progressed, cannot, I think, be denied. Poetry has freed itself from conventionality. Prose has given birth to works which former ages could not even have conceived. Compare the magnificent creations of Gabriele d'Annunzio to the stories of Bandello and the Novelline of Masaccio. The advance is prodigious. Much, however, remains to be done. Italy has not yet given the world a philosopher so profound as Kant or Schopenhauer, or a tragic poet so great as Sophocles or Shakespeare. There is still room for an Italian Burns, for a really original and striking poet in dialect. The Sicilian Giovanni Meli is, perhaps, the nearest approach to such a writer, indeed, he is the most genuine poet that Sicily has ever produced. There is every reason to hope that the free and united Italy of the present will see writers as brilliant as those of the enslaved and divided Italy of the past.