This tendency was opposed by the enthusiastic young students of social and political matters at Naples at the end of the eighteenth century, preparing themselves for an active part in the imminent revolution. Among them Vico came to be considered as an anti-clerical and anti-Catholic, and the legend arose, mentioned elsewhere in this volume, that Vico purposely and deliberately made his work obscure in order to escape ecclesiastical censure. These young men applied themselves to the study and praise of the _Scienza Nuova;_ they proposed to reprint it, since it had become rare, together with the other works and unpublished manuscripts of the author; they prepared expositions and criticisms of Vico's philosophical and historical system; some like Pagano tried to work it up afresh by adding to it the ideas of French sensationalism, others like Filangieri did not let their admiration of it dispel their rosy dreams of reform. In 1797 the German Gerning on coming to Naples noted the zeal with which Vico was studied, and projected a translation or at least a summary of the _Scienza Nuova_ in German. When the fall of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799 drove these young men, or rather those of them who escaped the massacres and the gallows of the Bourbon reaction, into exile in Northern Italy and especially in Lombardy, the cult of Vico was for the first time ardently propagated. Vincenzo Cuoco, Francesco Lomonaco, Francesco Salfi and other southern patriots passed the knowledge of the _Scienza Nuova_ to Monti, who mentioned it in his inaugural lecture at Pavia in 1803, to Ugo Foscolo, who absorbed many of its ideas into his poem the _Sepolcri_ and his critical essays: to Alessandro Manzoni, who was later to institute in his _Discorso sulla storia longobarda_ a famous comparison between Vico and Muratori: and to others of less importance. Cuoco introduced Vico's work to Degérando, then at work on his _Histoire comparée des systèmes philosophiques_; another exile, De Angelis, put the _Scienza Nuova_ into the hands of Jules Michelet; Salfi mentioned Vico in articles in the _Revue Encyclopédique_ and in books and minor works in French. It was also through the suggestion of these Neapolitans that the _Scienza Nuova_ was reprinted at Milan in 1801; and other editions and collections of Vico's smaller works were not long in appearing. Thus in the first decade of the nineteenth century Vico's reputation, which had till then been merely local to Naples, spread over the whole of Italy.