In his first youth, Foresti imbibed the creative spirit breathed into
the social and civic life of Italy by Napoleon's victories and
administration; it was at that vivid epoch when the military,
political, artistic, and literary talent of the land, so long repressed
and thwarted by superstition and despotism, broke forth, that his
studies were achieved. We have only to compare what was done, thought,
and felt in the Peninsula, during the ten years between the coronation
of Bonaparte at Milan and his overthrow at Waterloo, with the
subsequent dearth of national triumphs in every sphere, and with the
inert, apprehensive, baffled existence of the Italians in the grasp of
reinstated and reinforced imbecile, yet tyrannic governments, to
appreciate the feelings of a young, well-born, gifted citizen, when
suddenly checked in a liberal and progressive career, and remanded, as
it were, from the bracing atmosphere of modern civilization and
enlightened activity, to the passive, silent endurance of obsolete
feudalism. It was the inevitable and deliberate protest against this
wicked and absurd reaction which gave birth to the political
organization of the _Carbonari_; wherein the noblest men and the wisest
princes of that day enrolled themselves; and the inefficiency of whose
far-reaching, secret, and solemn aims can be accounted for only by the
fatal error of trusting in the magnanimity of an order born to
hereditary power, and overlooking, in their municipal fraternities, the
vast importance of the more scattered, but not less capable and
patriotic agricultural class.
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