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 part of Italy; and Foscolo, being enrolled in the Italian Legion, was present at the battle of Cento, and took part in the defense of Genoa, but found time, amid all his warlike occupations, for literature. He had written, in the flush of youthful faith and generosity, an ode to Bonaparte Liberator; and he employed the leisure of the besieged in republishing it at Genoa, affixing to the verses a reproach to Napoleon for the treaty of Campo-Formio, and menacing him with a Tacitus. He returned to Milan after the battle of Marengo, but his enemies procured his removal to Boulogne, whither the Italian Legion had been ordered, and where Foscolo cultivated his knowledge of English and his hatred of Napoleon. After travel in Holland and marriage with an Englishwoman there, he again came back to Milan, which he found full as ever of folly, intrigue, baseness, and envy. Leaving the capital, says Arnaud, "he took up his abode on the hills of Brescia, and for two weeks was seen wandering over the heights, declaiming and gesticulating. The mountaineers thought him mad. One morning he descended to the city with the manuscript of the Sepoleri. It was in 1807. Not Jena, not Friedland, could dull the sensation it imparted to the Italian republic of letters."