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INTRODUCTION falls, the restored Austrian government in Italy becomes the target for his adulatory shafts. Critics of Italian literature unite in affirming that this master of the palinode was sincere in all his startling changes of attitude, and continued to worship liberty under many dubious aspects. At any rate, he had a remarkable gift of expression and infused new life into various outworn forms of verse. He reflects faithfully the mental oscillations of a people in travail; whether or no an individual should sway in this manner is a question that does not concern us here. IV

When the zealous Milanese burnt the Bassvilliana in their Piazza del Duomo, a young man named Ugo Foscolo wrote a vigorous essay in defence of its author. A year or two later this young man published a series of letters purporting to be written by a certain Jacopo Ortis, and was thenceforward able to enjoy the distinction of having produced one of the most melancholy works in any literature. Le Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis has often been called an imitation of Goethe's Werther, and certainly resembles that youthful indiscretion in many points; actually, however, Foscolo seems to have read the notorious German chronicle of sentimentalism after the greater part of Ortis had been written, and it is to Rousseau—the Rousseau of the Nouvelle Héloïse—that he is Indebted for the plan and the spirit of his book.

In spite of its inherited vices this very morbid and mournful cauchemar de jeunesse is interesting because it 29