UGO FOSCOLO (1778-1827), the second eminent poet of the revolutionary period, successively Monti’s champion and his adversary, is in most respects a violent contrast to him. It would have been well had he been merely his complement. Monti’s pliant character greatly needed an infusion of vigour and independence; but Foscolo, though a self-restrained artist in his poems, in his life required the curb as much as Monti required the spur. Worse, his tempestuous vehemence and crabbed indocility were no tokens of real strength; he was at bottom weak and whimsical, the slave of passion, physical and intellectual. His countrymen, nevertheless, have forgotten his faults and follies for the sake of his untarnished patriotism, most unjustly suspected in his own day; he is the first very distinguished modern Italian whose consistency in this particular is a source of national joy and pride. Alfieri’s resentment against the French, though sufficiently excusable, blinded him to the real tendency of his times; other well-meaning men were either too intimately associated with the temporary makeshift of the despotic Empire, or too amenable to clerical pressure. Foscolo was untainted by either influence, and might be deemed not only absolved but canonised by his countrymen when Garibaldi made a pilgrimage to his tomb at Chiswick, and when, in 1871, his remains were transferred to the cemetery at Florence, the inspiration of the most famous of his poems. Alike in personal character and the quality of his productions, Foscolo may be compared with Landor, but with the capital distinction that Landor was a man of the past, and Foscolo, for all his Greek erudition and classical enthusiasm, a man of his own time. His romance, _Jacopo Ortis_ (1798), perhaps the most celebrated of his productions, is a reminiscence of _Werther_ and a forerunner of _René_, but adds to the merely personal sorrows of these tragic autobiographies the nobler motive of despair at the ruin and enslavement of the hero’s country. Foscolo, though born at Zante, was prouder of his Venetian descent than of his Greek nativity, and the ignominious end of so glorious a history as the Republic’s not unnaturally or ignobly drove him to despair. At the same time he was usually under the spell of some woman; one of his genuine letters, indeed, written at a much later date, surpasses his romance in the eloquence of unhappy passion. Both motives combine to drive Ortis to suicide. Apart from its impressive style, the book is weak and unwholesome, but it powerfully depicts an unquestionable tendency of the age, and as such has a right to live, apart from its influence on Leopardi, George Sand, and other more recent writers of genius. Foscolo’s melancholy, fretful and egotistic as it is, is not pessimism; it is not grounded in the nature of things, but is always remediable by a change in external circumstances.