MARGHERITA PUSTERLA, for many years the most popular historical novel in Italy with the exception of Manzoni's masterpiece, promessi sposi,> was written between 1833 and 1834 while the author, Cesare Cantu, lay in prison charged with political offenses against the Austrian authorities. Composed under great difficulties, suppressed by the foreign op pressors who felt themselves attacked through this work, the novel was not published till 1838. The theme deals with the period of the Italian despots of the 14th Century,— a period which had already been treated in Tonunaso Grossi's
tion of the impulsive and engaging Alpinolo, the sardonic court-jester Grillincervello and the saintly Fra Buonvicino, the characterization is mediocre. The book owes its success to the splendid pictures of mediaeval life and to the pathos and horror of its situations. The exe cution of Margherita Pusterla, a powerful but revolting scene, has been much admired. For a historian of no mean ability, Candi, as has been justly pointed out by Mazzoni, makes curi ous blunders and takes singular liberties with his sources. Written when Romanticism was supreme in Italy,
Pusterla' is an imitation of combined with an attempt to rival the vast panoramas, the highly colored realism and the violent contrasts of