LONGMAN, REES, ORME, BROWN, GREEN AND LONGMAN; RICHTER AND CO., SOHO SQUARE; MILLIKEN AND SON, DUBLIN;

ADAM BLACK, EDINBURGH.

MDCCCXXXIV.

LONDON:

BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

LIFE

OF

SILVIO PELLICO.

IT is from a deep conviction of the importance of the great moral held up to our view in the life and writings of Silvio Pellico, (I mean, the pructical truth of the christian religion,) that I am induced, at this moment, to bring the subject more fully and circumstantially before the English public. For not only do I conceive this moral to be of equal importance to individuals and to mankind, but that it applies with peculiar force to existing times and circumstances, when the rapid growth of population, and of popular energy and power, promise, at no distant period, to merge former institutions in a more christian and comprehensive system, and render them better adapted to national wants and interests. It is from this consideration that I undertook to present "THE DUTIES OF MEN" to my fellow-countrymen, and

to illustrate them, in all their strength and nobleness, from the life of their generous, high-minded, and truly patriotic author.

It is now almost universally admitted by all parties, in civilised communities, that, without education, without a more liberal diffusion of knowledge, and cultivation of the social duties and affections in the great mass of the people, the most serious evils may be apprehended. In the impending changes, which the state of the human mind-half unshackled by the press from its old political bondage, and which political knowledge renders inevitable,-there cannot be otherwise any durable peace, any security to life and property, any safeguard or barrier powerful enough to resist the torrent of popular revolutions-a torrent of opinion far wider and more resistless in its course than that of brute, barbaric force, which plunged the world into the long-enduring darkness of the middle ages.

But a new era, in connexion with national and social education, and, consequently, with political institutions, is at length drawing nigh: the grand experiment is being made, whether alterations and improvements in the character of man and of society can be effected without undergoing the