Yet it would not be well to conjure up too heroic an image of Italian
revolutionary society: we know what vices fester and passions rage
in war-time, and Italy was then almost constantly involved in war.
Intellectually, men are active, but the great poems are not written in
war-time, nor the highest effects of civilization produced. There is
a taint of insanity and of instability in everything, a mark of
feverishness and haste and transition. The revolution gave Italy a
chance for new life, but this was the most the revolution could do.
It was a great gift, not a perfect one; and as it remained for the
Italians to improve the opportunity, they did it partially, fitfully,
as men do everything.


II

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