The poets who belong to this time are numerous enough, but those best known are Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo. These men were long the most conspicuous literati in the capital of Lombardy, but neither was Lombard. Monti was educated in the folds of Arcadia at Rome; Foscolo was a native of one of the Greek islands dependent on Venice, and passed his youth and earlier manhood in the lagoons. The accident of residence at Milan brought the two men together, and made friends of those who had naturally very little in common.

They can only be considered together as part of the literary history of the time in which they both happened to be born, and as one of its most striking contrasts.

In 1802, Napoleon bestowed a republican constitution on Lombardy and the other provinces of Italy which had been united under the name of the Cisalpine Republic, and Milan became the capital of the new state. Thither at once turned all that was patriotic, hopeful, and ambitious in Italian life; and though one must not judge this phase of Italian civilization from Vincenzo Monti, it is an interesting comment on its effervescent, unstable, fictitious, and partial nature that he was its most conspicuous poet. Few men appear so base as Monti; but it is not certain that he was of more fickle and truthless soul than many other contemplative and cultivated men of the poetic temperament who are never confronted with exigent events, and who therefore never betray the vast difference that lies between the ideal heroism of the poet's vision and the actual heroism of occasion. We all have excellent principles until we are tempted, and it was Monti's misfortune to be born in an age which put his principles to the test, with a prospect of more than the usual prosperity in reward for servility and compliance, and more than the usual want, suffering, and danger in punishment of candor and constancy.

He was born near Ferrara in 1754; and having early distinguished himself in poetry, he was conducted to Rome by the Cardinal-Legate Borghesi. At Rome he entered the Arcadian fold of course, and piped by rule there with extraordinary acceptance, and might have died a Shepherd but for the French Revolution, which broke out and gave him a chance to be a Man. The secretary of the French Legation at Naples, appearing in Rome with the tri-color of the Republic, was attacked by the foolish populace, and killed; and Monti, the petted and caressed of priests, the elegant and tuneful young poet in the train of Cardinal Borghesi, seized the event of Ugo Bassville's death, and turned it to epic account. In the moment of dissolution, Bassville, repenting his republicanism, receives pardon; but, as a condition of his acceptance into final bliss, he is shown, through several cantos of terza rima, the woes which the Revolution has brought upon France and the world. The bad people of the poem are naturally the French Revolutionists; the good people, those who hate them. The most admired episode is that descriptive of poor Louis XVI.'s ascent into heaven from the scaffold.

{Illustration: VINCENZO MONTI.}

There is some reason to suppose that Monti was sincerer in this poem than in any other of political bearing which he wrote; and the Dantesque plan of the work gave it, with the occasional help of Dante's own phraseology and many fine turns of expression picked up in the course of a multifarious reading, a dignity from which the absurdity of the apotheosis of priests and princes detracted nothing among its readers. At any rate, it was received by Arcadia with rapturous acclaim, though its theme was not the Golden Age; and on the Bassvilliana the little that is solid in Monti's fame rests at this day. His lyric poetry is seldom quoted; his tragedies are no longer played, not even his Galeoto Manfredi, in which he has stolen almost enough from Shakespeare to vitalize one of the characters. After a while the Romans wearied of their idol, and began to attack him in politics and literature; and in 1797 Monti, after a sojourn of twenty years in the Papal capital, fled from Rome to Milan. Here he was assailed in one of the journals by a fanatical Neapolitan, who had also written a Bassvilliana, but with celestial powers, heroes and martyrs of French politics, and who now accused Monti of enmity to the rights of man. Monti responded by a letter to this poet, in which he declared that his Bassvilliana was no expression of his own feelings, but that he had merely written it to escape the fury of Bassville's murderers, who were incensed against him as Bassville's friend! But for all this the Bassvilliana was publicly burnt before the cathedral in Milan, and Monti was turned out of a government place he had got, because "he had published books calculated to inspire hatred of democracy, or predilection for the government of kings, of theocrats and aristocrats." The poet was equal to this exigency; and he now reprinted his works, and made them praise the French and the revolutionists wherever they had blamed them before; all the bad systems and characters were depicted as monarchies and kings and popes, instead of anarchies and demagogues. Bonaparte was exalted, and poor Louis XVI., sent to heaven with so much ceremony in the Bassvilliana, was abased in a later ode on Superstition.

Monti was amazed that all this did not suffice "to overcome that fatal combination of circumstances which had caused him to be judged as the courtier of despotism." "How gladly," he writes, "would I have accepted the destiny which envy could not reach! But this scourge of honest men clings to my flesh, and I cannot hope to escape it, except I turn scoundrel to become fortunate!" When the Austrians returned to Milan, the only honest man unhanged in Italy fled with other democrats to Paris, whither the fatal combination of circumstances followed him, and caused him to be looked on with coldness and suspicion by the republicans. After Bonaparte was made First Consul, Monti invoked his might against the Germans in Italy, and carried his own injured virtue back to Milan in the train of the conqueror. When Bonaparte was crowned emperor, this democrat and patriot was the first to hail and glorify him; and the emperor rewarded the poet's devotion with a chair in the University of Pavia, and a pension attached to the place of Historiographer. Monti accepted the honors and emoluments due to long-suffering integrity and inalterable virtue, and continued in the enjoyment of them till the Austrians came back to Milan a second time, in 1815, when his chaste muse was stirred to a new passion by the charms of German despotism, and celebrated as "the wise, the just, the best of kings, Francis Augustus", who, if one were to believe Monti, "in war was a whirlwind and in peace a zephyr." But the heavy Austrian, who knew he was nothing of the kind, thrust out his surly under lip at these blandishments, said that this muse's favors were mercenary, and cut off Monti's pension. Stung by such ingratitude, the victim of his own honesty retired forever from courts, and thenceforward sang only the merits of rich persons in private station, who could afford to pay for spontaneous and incorruptible adulation. He died in 1826, having probably endured more pain and rungreater peril in his desire to avoid danger and suffering than the bravest and truest man in a time when courage and truth seldom went in company. It is not probable that he thought himself despicable or other than unjustly wretched.

Perhaps, after all, he was not so greatly to blame. As De Sanctis subtly observes: "He was always a liberal. How not be liberal in those days when even the reactionaries shouted for liberty-of course, true liberty, as they called it? And in that name he glorified all governments.... And it was not with hypocrisy.... He was a man who would have liked to reconcile the old and the new ideas, all opinions, yet, being forced to choose, he clung to the majority, with no desire to play the martyr. So he became the secretary of the dominant feeling, the poet of success. Kindly, tolerant, sincere, a good friend, a courtier more from necessity and weakness than perversity or wickedness; if he could have retired into his own heart, he might have come out a poet." Monti, in fact, was always an improvvisatore, and the subjects which events cast in his way were like the themes which the improvvisatore receives from his audience. He applied his poetic faculty to their celebration with marvelous facility, and, doubtless, regarded the results as rhetorical feats. His poetry was an art, not a principle; and perhaps he was really surprised when people thought him in earnest, and held him personally to account for what he wrote. "A man of sensation, rather than sentiment," says Arnaud, "Monti cared only for the objective side of life. He poured out melodies, colors, and chaff in the service of all causes; he was the poet-advocate, the Siren of the Italian Parnassus." Of course such a man instinctively hated the ideas of the Romantic school, and he contested their progress in literature with great bitterness. He believed that poetry meant feigning, not making; and he declared that "the hard truth was the grave of the beautiful." The latter years of his life were spent in futile battle with the "audacious boreal school" and in noxious revival of the foolish old disputes of the Italian grammarians; and Emiliani-Giudici condemns him for having done more than any enemy of his country to turn Italian thought from questions of patriotic interest to questions of philology, from the unity of Italy to the unity of the language, from the usurpations and tyranny of Austria to the assumptions of Della Crusca. But Monti could scarcely help any cause which he espoused; and it seems to me that he was as well employed in disputing the claims of the Tuscan dialect to be considered the Italian language as he would have been in any other way. The wonderful facility, no less than the unreality, of the man appears in many things, but in none more remarkably than his translation of Homer, which is the translation universally accepted and approved in Italy. He knew little more than the Greek alphabet, and produced his translation from the preceding versions in Latin and Italian, submitting the work to the correction of eminent scholars before he printed it. His poems fill many volumes; and all display the ease, perspicuity, and obvious beauty of the improvvisatore. From a fathomless memory, he drew felicities which had clung to it in his vast reading, and gave them a new excellence by the art with which he presented them as new. The commonplace Italians long continued to speak awfully of Monti as a great poet, because the commonplace mind regards everything established as great. He is a classic of those classics common to all languages-dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to the air.