Part 22

MAZZINI, GIUSEPPE (1805-1872), Italian patriot, was born on the 22nd of June 1805 at Genoa, where his father, Giacomo Mazzini, was a physician in good practice, and a professor in the university. His mother is described as having been a woman of great personal beauty, as well as of active intellect and strong affections. During infancy and childhood his health was extremely delicate, and it appears that he was nearly six years of age before he was quite able to walk; but he had already begun to devour books of all kinds and to show other signs of great intellectual precocity. He studied Latin with his first tutor, an old priest, but no one directed his extensive course of reading. He became a student at the university of Genoa at an unusually early age, and intended to follow his father's profession, but being unable to conquer his horror of practical anatomy, he decided to graduate in law (1826). His exceptional abilities, together with his remarkable generosity, kindness and loftiness of character, endeared him to his fellow students. As to his inner life during this period, we have only one brief but significant sentence; "for a short time," he says, "my mind was somewhat tainted by the doctrines of the foreign materialistic school; but the study of history and the intuitions of conscience--the only tests of truth--soon led me back to the spiritualism of our Italian fathers."

The natural bent of his genius was towards literature, and, in the course of the four years of his nominal connexion with the legal profession, he wrote a considerable number of essays and reviews, some of which have been wholly or partially reproduced in the critical and literary volumes of his _Life and Writings_. His first essay, characteristically enough on "Dante's Love of Country," was sent to the editor of the _Antologia fiorentina_ in 1826, but did not appear until some years afterwards in the _Subalpino_. He was an ardent supporter of romanticism as against what he called "literary servitude under the name of classicism"; and in this interest all his critiques (as, for example, that of Giannoni's "Exile" in the _Indicatore Livornese_, 1829) were penned. But in the meantime the "republican instincts" which he tells us he had inherited from his mother had been developing, and his sense of the evils under which Italy was groaning had been intensified; and at the same time he became possessed with the idea that Italians, and he himself in particular, "_could_ and therefore _ought_ to struggle for liberty of country." Therefore, he at once put aside his dearest ambition, that of producing a complete history of religion, developing his scheme of a new theology uniting the spiritual with the practical life, and devoted himself to political thought. His literary articles accordingly became more and more suggestive of advanced liberalism in politics, and led to the suppression by government of the _Indicatore Genovese_ and the _Indicatore Livornese_ successively. Having joined the Carbonari, he soon rose to one of the higher grades in their hierarchy, and was entrusted with a special secret mission into Tuscany; but, as his acquaintance grew, his dissatisfaction with the organization of the society increased, and he was already meditating the formation of a new association stripped of foolish mysterious and theatrical formulae, which instead of merely combating existing a