Who had worn out the patience of God! In that pitiless blood dip thy fingers, France, delivered from fetters unworthy! 'T is blood sucked from the veins of thy children Whom the despot has cruelly wronged! O freemen to arms that are flying, Bathe, bathe in that blood your bright weapons, Triumph rests 'mid the terror of battle Upon swords that have smitten a king! This, every one must allow, was a very unhandsome way of treating an ex-martyr, but at the time Monti wrote he was in Milan, in the midst of most revolutionary spirits, and he felt obliged to be rude to the memory of the unhappy king. After all, probably it did not hurt the king so much as the poet. IV The troubled life of Ugo Foscolo is a career altogether wholesomer than Monti's to contemplate. There is much of violence, vanity, and adventure in it, to remind of Byron; but Foscolo had neither the badness of Byron's heart nor the greatness of his talent. He was, moreover, a better scholar and a man of truer feeling. Coming to Venice from Zante, in 1793, he witnessed the downfall of a system which Venetians do not yet know whether to lament or execrate; and he was young and generous enough to believe that Bonaparte really meant to build up a democratic republic on the ruins of the fallen oligarchy. Foscolo had been one of the popular innovators before the Republic perished, and he became the secretary of the provisional government, and was greatly beloved by the people. It is related that they were so used to his voice, and so fond of hearing it, that one day, when they heard another reading in his place, they became quite turbulent, till the president called out with that deliciously caressing Venetian familiarity, _Popolo, ste cheto; Foscolo xe rochio_! “People, be quiet; Foscolo is hoarse.” While in this office, he brought out his first tragedy, which met with great success; and at the same time Napoleon played the cruel farce with which he had beguiled the Venetians, by selling them to Austria, at Campo-Formio. Foscolo then left Venice, and went to Milan, where he established a patriotic journal, in which a genuine love of country found expression, and in which he defended unworthy Monti against the attacks of the red republicans. He also defended the Latin language, when the legislature, which found time in a season of great public peril and anxiety to regulate philology, fulminated a decree against that classic tongue; and he soon afterward quitted Milan, in despair of the Republic's future. He had many such fits of disgust, and in one of them he wrote that the wickedness and shame of Italy were so great, that they could never be effaced till the two seas covered her. There was fighting in those days, for such as had stomach for it, in every