Then from their houses, like a billowy tide, Men rush enfrenzied, and, from every breast Banished shrinks Pity, weeping, terrified. Now the earth quivers, trampled and oppressed By wheels, by feet of horses and of men; The air in hollow moans speaks its unrest; Like distant thunder's roar, scarce within ken, Like the hoarse murmurs of the midnight surge, Like the north wind rushing from its far-off den.
Through the dark crowds that round the scaffold flock The monarch see with look and gait appear That might to soft compassion melt a rock; Melt rocks, from hardest flint draw pity's tear,-- But not from Gallic tigers; to what fate, Monsters, have ye brought him who loved you dear?
It seems scarcely possible that a personage so flatteringly attended from the scaffold to the very presence of the Trinity, could afterward have been used with disrespect by the same master of ceremonies; yet in his Ode on Superstition, Monti has later occasion to refer to the French monarch in these terms:
The tyrant has fallen. Ye peoples Oppressèd, 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.