My Ten Years' Imprisonment

Silvio Pellico was born at Saluzzo, in North Italy, in the year of the fall of the Bastille, 1789.   His health as a child was feeble, his temper gentle, and he had the instincts of a poet.   Before he was ten years old he had written a tragedy on a theme taken from Macpherson’s Ossian.   His chief delight as a boy was in acting plays with other children, and he acquired from his father a strong interest in the patriotic movements of the time.   He fastened upon French literature during a stay of some years at Lyons with a relation of his mother’s.   Ugo Foscolo’s Sepolcri revived his patriotism, and in 1810, at the age of twenty-one, he returned to Italy.