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.”
It is doubtful whether this poem, which Giudici calls
the sublimest lyrical composition modern literature
has produced, will stir the English reader to enthusiastic
admiration. The poem is of its age—declamatory,
ambitious, eloquent; but the ideas do not seem great
or new, though that, perhaps, is because they have
been so often repeated since. De Sanctis declares
it the “earliest lyrical note of the new literature,
the affirmation of the rehabilitated conscience of
the new manhood. A law of the Republic—“the
French Republic”— prescribed the
equality of men before death. The splender of
monuments seemed a privilege of the nobles and the
rich, and the Republicans contested the privilege,
the distinction of classes, even in this form ...
This revolutionary logic driven to its ultimate corollaries
clouded the poetry of life for him.... He lacked
the religious idea, but the sense of humanity in its
progress and its aims, bound together by the family,
the state, liberty, glory—from this Foscolo
drew his harmonies, a new religion of the tomb."....
He touches in it on the funeral usages of different
times and peoples, with here and there an episodic
allusion to the fate of heroes and poets, and disquisitions
on the aesthetic and spiritual significance of posthumous
honors. The most-admired passage of the poem is
that in which the poet turns to the monuments of Italy’s
noblest dead, in the church of Santa Croce, at Florence:
