Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/503

 F O S - - F O S 471 duke of Milan to intercede for him, and purposely left the letter open and discoverable. It was presented to the council of ten, and his end was gained, for he was immedi ately summoned to his native city to answer the charge of seeking foreign intercession. For the third time he was examined before his father, the doge. This time he con fessed the crime of which he was accused. He was never theless put on the rack no less than thirty times with a view to extort a declaration of innocence, and this in his father s presence. But it was in vain, and the wretched man, torn and dislocated, was once more banished. He died .shortly afterwards iu Candia. The father henceforth remained in retirement, incapable of discharging the duties of his office. At length through the intrigues of Giacopo Loredano, a member of a family which had a hereditary feud with the Foscari, the council were induced to request his abdication. He pleaded his oath not to resign which they had compelled him to take ; but they discharged him of it, declared the dogate vacant, gave him a pension, and expelled him from the palace (1457). They wished him to withdraw by a private staircase to escape the notice of the people, but this he firmly refused to do. Supported by his brother, he slowly descended the giants stairs, and with the parting words-&quot; My services brought me within these walls, the malice of my enemies drives me away,&quot; ho took his leave (Oct 25). A decree of the council pro hibited any mention of his name, under penalty of death, thus suppressing all expression of popular regret. On the 30th of the same month his successor was elected, and the announcement of the election by the bell of the campanile agitated him so violently that he ruptured a blood-vessel and died in a few hours. One year after his death it was declared that the council of ten had exceeded their authority. The melancholy story of the Foscari furnished Byron with a theme for a tragedy, and is narrated by Rogers in one section of his Italy the two poems being published within a few days of each other (1821). FOSCARINI, MARCO (1696-1763), doge of Venice, historian, was born January 30, 169G. He was of an illustrious patrician family, and his fine character and superior abilities opened for him at an early age the path of public service and advancement. He rose through the regular stages of office to be cavaliers and procuratore of St Mark, and was nominated historiographer of the republic. It was intended that he should take up and continue the story from the point to which it had been brought by Michele Foscarini and the sanator Garzoni. But his services were turned into another channel. He was entrusted successively with important embassies to the courts of Vienna, Rome, and Turin, his task being to main tain the strict neutrality of Venice in the wars between the French and the imperialists. During these embassies he drew up, after the manner of Venetian ambassadors, reports of his negotiations and proceedings, and also of his obser vations of affairs at the various courts. Thus removed from Venice and from access to the public archives, from which the materials of his projected history must have been drawn, it was impossible for him to write it. He under took, however, to collect materials for a literary history of his country, proposing to treat the subject under two heads, first the useful (or scientific) literature, and secondly the more strictly literary works. In 1752 appeared the first volume of the first division, in four books ; and this remains a fragment, no more having been published. Foscarini after his return from Turin was placed at the head of the university of Padua, in the conduct of which he brought about some important reforms. In 17G2 he rose to the highest dignity of the state, being elected to succeed Francesco Loredano as doge. Among the other literary remains of Foscarini are an oration on the adminis tration of Dalmatia, not published till 1831 ; an account of the imperial court and administration, published in 1843 ; a report on his Sardinian embassy, &c. ; besides several unpublished pieces. He held the dogate for ten months only, dying on the 31st of March 1763. He left a large collection of books and manuscripts, the latter now forming part of the Imperial Library, Vienna. FOSCARINI, MICHELE (1632-1692), Venetian histo rian, was born in 1632. By the deaths of his father and mother he became head of his house at the age of nineteen. Of patrician rank, he entered upon official life in 1657, and after filling various posts became in 1662 one of the avoya- dori of the republic. Two years later he was appointed governor of Corfu with the title of proweditore and captain. Returning to A 7 enice in 1668, he was selected to fill some of the most honourable offices of the republic. On the death of BattistaNani in 1678, Foscarini was called to suc ceed him as historiographer of Venice. He continued the history begun by Benibo, and carried on by other writers, from 1669 to 1690, but had not quite completed his work when he died suddenly, March 31, 1692. The Istoria della Repubiica Veneta was published by his brother Sebastiani in 1696, and has been several times reprinted. Foscarini was author also of two Novelle written in his youth ; and he annotated Caramella s Museum illustriorum Poetarum (1653). FOSCOLO, UGO (1778-1827), the Italian writer who next to Alfieri has most contributed to free, the literature of his country from the pedantries and affectations of the 17th and 18th centuries, was born at Zante on the 26th of January 1778. On the death of his father, a physician at Spalatro, in Dalmatia, the family removed to Venice, and in the university of Padua Foscolo prosecuted the studies begun in the Dalmatian grammar school. The fact that amongst his Paduan masters was the Abb6 Cesarotti, whose version of Ossian had made that work highly popular in Italy, was not without influence on Foscolo s literary tastes, and his early knowledge of modern facilitated his studies in ancient Greek. His literary ambition revealed itself by the appearance in 1797 of his tragedy Tieste a production which obtained a certain degree of success. Foscolo, who from causes not clearly explained, had changed his Christian name Niccolo to that of Ugo, now began to take an active part in the stormy political discussions which the fall of the republic of Venice had provoked. He was a prominent member of the national committees, and addressed an ode to Napoleon the liberator, expecting from the military successes of the French general, not merely the overthrow of the effete Venetian oligarchy, but the establishment of a free republican government. The treaty of Campo Formio (17th Oct. 1797), by which Napoleon handed Venice over to the Austrians, gave a rude shock to Foscolo, but did not quite destroy his hopes. The state of mind produced by that shock is reflected in the letters of Jacopo Ortis, a species of political Werther, for the hero of Foscolo embodies the mental sufferings and suicide of an undeceived Italian patriot just as the hero of Goethe places before us the too delicate sensitiveness embittering and at last cutting short the life of a private German scholar. The story of Foscolo, like that of Goethe, had a groundwork of melancholy fact. Jacopo Ortis had been a real personage ; he was a young student of Padua, and committed suicide there under circumstances akin to those described by Foscolo. At this period Foscolo s mind appears to have been only too familiar with the thought of suicide. Cato and the many classical examples of self- destruction scattered through the pages of Plutarch ap pealed to the imaginations of young Italian patriots as they had done in France to those of the heroes and heroines of the Gironde. In the case of Foscolo as in that of Goethe,