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From anecdotes, however, and from the poet's writings, we gather the nature of the man; and this appears to have been very amiable. There is an aristocratic tone in his poem, when speaking of the sort of people of whom the mass of soldiers is wont to consist; and Foscolo says, that the Count of Scandiano writes like a feudal lord.
Nor were the generous exile's humble surroundings alien to these impressions: the effigies of his country's poets were the favorite ornaments of his sitting-room; a volume of Foscolo on the table, or a fresh letter from Silvio Pellico under his snuffbox, the grim, old-fashioned type of his Sentenza, as it was originally distributed through Austrian Italy, and hanging in its black frame, a memorial of startling import to a freeman's eyes, a landscape representing the Castle of Ferrara, the far-away scene of his youthful life, and a primitive engraving from one of the old masters of that city, dedicated to him in one of those euphonious inscriptions peculiar to Italian artists, these and such as these tokens of his experience and tastes gave interesting significance to his companionship.
Bedlams have been filled with such horrors; thousands, nay millions of feeble minds are suffering by them or from them, at this minute, all over the world. Dante's best critic, Foscolo, has said much of the heroical nature of the age in which the poet lived; but he adds, that its mixture of knowledge and absurdity is almost inexplicable.
'Tis the way of the world eternal progress is eternal change." "Very possibly," said Signor Tirabaloschi, who understood nothing of what was said. "Nay, it is extremely profound; on reflection, it is beautiful superb! you English are so so in short, it is admirable. Ugo Foscolo is a great genius so is Monti; and as for Rossini, you know his last opera /cosa stupenda/!"
With Foscolo, his literary predecessor Alfieri must be mentioned as having helped in rekindling the embers, of patriotic feeling, because, though dead, he spoke; and his plays, one of which was prophetically dedicated al libero Popolo Italiano, had never been so much read.
Mme. d'Albany had changed into quite another being between 1803 and 1824; the friend of Sismondi, of Foscolo, of Mme. de Staël, the worldly friend of many friends, seemed to have no connection with the lady who had wept for Alfieri in the convent at Rome, who had borne with all Alfieri's misanthropic furies after the Revolution, any more than with the delicate intellectual girl whom Charles Edward had nearly done to death in his drunken jealousy.
In the case of Italy, in all our bards, philosophers and leaders, from Alfieri to Foscolo, from Leopardi to Manzoni, from Mazzini to Gioberti, we are able to pick up the threads of a new fabric, which is a new kind of thought, a new kind of soul, a new kind of Italy.
Mme. d'Albany wrote back in a way which showed that she believed the assertions of Foscolo's enemies; that she ascribed to cowardice, to meanness, to a base desire to make himself conspicuous, the self-inflicted exile which he had taken upon him: a letter which the editor of Foscolo's correspondence describes to us in one word unworthy. This letter came upon Foscolo like a thunder-clap.
The indirect, but most emphatic utterance of this deep, latent self-respect of the nation we find in Alfieri, whose stern muse revived the terse energy of Dante; and in our own day, this identical inspiration fired the melancholy verse of Leopardi, the letters of Foscolo, the novels of Guerrazzi, and the tender melody of Bellini.
The story of the Countess and Foscolo is an even sadder instance of those melancholy little psychological dramas which go on, unseen to the world, in a man's soul; little dramas without outward events, without deaths or partings or such-like similar visible catastrophes, but the action of which is the slow murder of an affection, of an ideal, of a belief in the loyalty, sympathy, and comprehension of another.
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