Adversity meanwhile was hanging over the head of the poet. The fall of Venice, which occurred in the autumn of the same year, deprived him of the very name of country. Hatred of the Austrian is a sentiment profoundly engraved in every Italian heart; and when Venice was made over by treaty to the German despot, Foscolo became a voluntary exile. Whether he was in danger of being marked out in any of the lists of proscription does not appear; but as it is evident that he is the hero of his "Letters of Jacopo Ortis," we gather from that book, that his friends feared for his personal liberty if he remained, and besought him to shelter himself, while there was yet time, from the enmity of the new government. "I have left Venice," Ortis writes, "to avoid the first and most violent persecutions. How many victims remain! We Italians ourselves bathe our hands in Italian blood. Let what will happen to me! Since I despair of good, either for myself or my country, I can await in tranquillity a prison or death." All these letters are full of the indignant struggles, and the sorrow, as well as of the opinions which ruled the heart of Foscolo, as he found himself driven a wanderer from his home, sometimes lamenting his own misfortunes, sometimes those of his country. "How many of our fellow-citizens repent their flight from home," he writes, "and mourn! for what can we expect except indigence and indignity--or, at the best, that brief and sterile compassion which uncivilised nations offer to the stranger exile? And where shall I seek an asylum--in Italy? Unhappy land! and can I behold those who have robbed, scorned, and sold us, and not weep with rage? Oh! if the tyrants were one only, and if the slaves were less abject, my hand would suffice. But those who now blame me for cowardice would then accuse me of crime; and the prudent would lament over, not the heroism of one resolved, but the frenzy of a desperate man. What can be done between two powerful nations, who, from being sworn, ferocious, and eternal enemies, colleague to enslave us? and where force alone does not avail, the one cajoles us with the name of liberty, the other with that of religion; and we, debased by ancient servitude and new-born licence, groan, betrayed, enslaved, famished, and yet not roused, either by treason or famine. Ah! if I could, I would destroy my house and all dear to me, and myself with them; I would leave nothing for the tyrants to triumph over. Were there not people who, to escape the Romans, robbers of the world, gave to the flames their dwellings, their wives, their children, and themselves, burying their sacred independence among the glorious ashes of their country?"