bitterness of
the betrayal of Campo Formio, he wrote, in 1823, from London, where he
was slowly dying, to his sister Rubina: "I am now nearly forty-six;
and you, although younger than myself, can recollect how miserable,
how unquiet and uncertain our lives have always been ever since our
childhood." Poor, vain, passionate and proud, torn between the selfish
impulses of an exactingly sensuous and imaginative nature, and the rigid
sense of duty of a heroic and generous mind, Ugo Foscolo was one of the
earliest and most genuine victims of that sickness of disappointed hope
and betrayed enthusiasm, of that _Weltschmerz_ of which personal
misfortunes seemed as but the least dreadful part, that came upon the
noblest minds after the Revolution, and which he has painted, with
great energy and truthfulness, in his early novel _Jacopo Ortis_. His
career broken by his determination never to come to terms with any
sort of baseness, his happiness destroyed by political disappointment,
literary feuds, and a number of love affairs into which his weaker, more
passionate and vainer, yet not more ungenerous temper was for ever
embroiling him, Foscolo came to Florence, ill and miserable, in the year
1812. The Countess of Albany, recognising in him a something--a mixture
of independence, of passion, of vanity, of truthfulness, of pose--which
resembled Alfieri in his earlier days (though, as she was unable to
see, a nobler Alfieri, wider-minded, warmer-hearted, born in a nobler
civilization and destined to give to Italy a nobler example, the pattern
for her Leopardi, than Alfieri had been able to give)--the Countess of
Albany received Foscolo well. His letters are full of allusions to the
hours which he spent seated at the little round table in Mme. d'Albany's
drawing-room, opposite to the "Muse" newly bought of Canova, narrating
to her his many and tangled love affairs; love affairs in which he left
his heart on all the briars, and in which, however, by an instinct which
shows the very nobleness of his nature, he seems to have been impelled
rather towards women whom he must love sincerely and unhappily, than
towards Marchesa di Prie and Lady Ligonier, like Alfieri; love affairs
in which, alas, there was also a good dose of the vanity of a poet and a
notorious beau. Mme. d'Albany, as we have seen, loved gossip; and, being
a kind, helpful woman, she also sincerely liked becoming the confidant
of other folk's woes. She took a real affection fo