It was while in this state of mind that he fell in with Goethe's romance of Werther; and on this he modelled the strange rhapsodical story of Jacopo Ortis, in which the hero, disappointed in love and politics, takes refuge, like Werther, in suicide. But while the German romance was merely the expression of a passing feeling, which the author took pleasure in throwing into an artistic form, the Italian story was the deliberate expression of Foscolo's most permanent state of mind, and was accepted as the embodiment of the feelings of many other Lombard youths. Foscolo, after fighting for the independence of Italy against the Austrian invasion of 1815, withdrew in disgust to England; but some of those who would gladly have welcomed him as a fellow-worker still remained in Lombardy, and tried to form a nucleus of free Italian thought. Of these, the most remarkable was Alessandro Manzoni, best known to foreigners as the author of "I Promessi Sposi." Manzoni's influence was more widely felt in Italy at a later period; but the presence of such a man among the Lombard patriots of 1816-20 is too remarkable a fact to pass without notice. He, like so many other young nobles, had gone through a phase of eighteenth-century scepticism. But in 1808 he had been attracted by a beautiful Protestant lady, who, after her marriage to Manzoni, drifted into Roman Catholicism, and eventually led her husband to accept the same faith. Many of his old comrades denounced his conversion, and some even attributed it to evil motives. But they soon discovered that his new faith, far from weakening his Italian feeling, had strengthened, while in some sense, it softened it. The hard classicism of which Alfieri had set the fashion, and which Foscolo could not shake off, was repugnant to Manzoni, who desired to become the sacred poet of Italy, and who was recognized by Goethe as being "Christian without fanaticism, Roman Catholic without hypocrisy." Manzoni disliked Eugène Beauharnais for wishing to derive his title to the kingdom of Italy from Alexander of Russia; but he sympathized with the attempt of Murat, and was ready to act with those Lombards who wished to rouse Italian feeling in literature and politics.