Oppressed, rise! Nature breathes freely.
Proud kings, bow before them and tremble;
Yonder crumbles the greatest of thrones!
(_Repeat_.) There was stricken the vile perjurer Capet,

(He will only give Louis his family name!)

Who had worn out the patience of God!
In that pitiless blood dip thy fingers,
France, delivered from fetters unworthy!
'T is blood sucked from the veins of thy children
Whom the despot has cruelly wronged!
O freemen to arms that are flying,
Bathe, bathe in that blood your bright weapons,
Triumph rests 'mid the terror of battle
Upon swords that have smitten a king!

This, every one must allow, was a very unhandsome way of treating an
ex-martyr, but at the time Monti wrote he was in Milan, in the midst
of most revolutionary spirits, and he felt obliged to be rude to the
memory of the unhappy king. After all, probably it did not hurt the
king so much as the poet.


IV

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,