Guerrazzi.

Guerrazzi. FRANCESCO DOMENICO, Italian patriot and brilliant writer, was born at Leghorn, 12th August 1804, and, educated for the legal profession, won a great reputation among his countrymen by his political fictions, which exercised an immense influence on contemporary Italian events by their exalted strain of patriotic enthusiasm. Guerrazzi's own words are, 'he wrote a book when impotent to fight a battle.' On the eve of the definite breach between the people and the Grand-duke of Tuscany in 1849, Guerrazzi was induced to accept office in the ministry. On the flight of the Grand-duke he was proclaimed member of the provisional government, and subsequently dictator. During this crisis of the state he energetically refused his adhesion to 'the substitution of republicanism for monarchy;' and preserved the strict autonomy of Tuscany until the return of the grand-ducal rule. Then he was immediately seized and imprisoned on the grounds of having neglected due measures of repression when the revolution first gathered strength during his ministry. His defence, entitled Apologia della vita Politica di F. D. Guerrazzi (1857), is a masterpiece. After an imprisonment of three years, he was condemned for life to the galleys, but was subsequently permitted to select Corsica as the refuge of his perpetual banishment. Restored to liberty and action by later events, Guerrazzi sat in the parliament of Turin in 1862 and 1865. He died 23d September 1873. His chief works of fiction are La Battaglia di Benevento, remarkable for exquisite expression and beautiful poetic imagery (1827, fifty times reprinted); L'Assedio di Firenze, a magnificent historical novel, treating of the downfall of the republic of Florence (1836, more than thirty times reprinted); Isabella Orsini (1844); Beatrice Cenci (1854); L'Asino (1857). There are works on Guerrazzi by Cerona (1873), Fenini (1873), and Bosio (1877); and Carducci has edited his Letters (2 vols. Leghorn, 1880-82).