To what is the difference of national character due? Is it to climate? Is the Negro a barbarian by a law of nature? Do his fiery sunshine and his luxuriant soil, his magnificent forest shades, or his mighty rivers, hiding their heads in inaccessible solitudes, and winding for thousands of miles through fields of the plantain and the sugar-cane, condemn him to perpetual inferiority of intellect? Was the brilliancy of the ancient Greek only an emanation from the land of bright skies and balmy airs?—was it the spirit of the sounding cataracts, and the impulse of the vine-covered hills? Was the northern tempest the creator of the northern character? and the perpetual dash of the ocean on the Scandinavian shore, or the roar of the thunder and the sweep of the whirlwind over the Tartar steppe, the training of the tribes which burst in upon the iron frontier of the Great Empire, and left it clay?

The controversy has never yet been settled. Yet, on the whole, we are strongly inclined to think that the mightier impression is due to the operation of man on the mind of man. To our idea, "the globe, with all that it inherits," is but a vast school-room, with its scholars. The nations may enter with different propensities and capacities, but the purpose of the discipline is, to train all in the use of their original powers, to modify the rougher faculties, to invigorate the weaker; and perhaps, in some remoter period of the world and its completion, to educate a universal mind for the duties of a universal family.

What education is to the individual, institutions are to the nation. Why was it that the ancient Roman was the conqueror, the legislator, the man of stern determination, and the example of patriot virtue? Why was he the man of an ambition to be satisfied with nothing narrower than the supremacy of the globe—the defier of the desert, the master of the ocean, the ruler of all the diadems of all mankind?

Yet what is the contrast in the history of his successors,—millions living under the same sky, with the same landscape of hill and dale before them—even with the bold recollections of their ancestry to inspire them, and with frames as athletic, and intellects as vivid as those of the days when every nation brought tribute to the feet of the CÆsars? Why is it that the man of ThermopylÆ and PlatÆa has now no representative but the "cunning Greek," and the land, once covered with trophies, is now only the soil of the trafficker and the tomb? Why has even our own island, so memorable and so admirable, exhibited a contrast to the early terrors and capricious bravery of the Briton in the time of the Roman? For the charioteers and spearmen who fought CÆsar on the shore were chiefly foreigners from Gaul and Germany, defending their own beeves and merchandise, while the natives fled into the forest, and submitted, wherever they were pursued. Why was Russia, for a thousand years, the constant prey of the "riders of the wilderness," who now offer so feeble a resistance to her firm sovereignty? Or, to come to the immediate instance, why have the fiercest tribe of Scandinavia, perhaps the most warlike of mankind in their day, sunk into the feeble flexibility of the Italian, in whom resistance is scarcely more than the work of exasperation, and the boldest hostilities probably deserve no more than the name of a paroxysm?

The name of the Lombards was famous as far back as the sixth century and the reign of Justinian. The camp of Attila had collected the chieftains of the barbarian tribes on the northern bank of the Danube, and his death had left them to divide the vast inheritance which had been won in the briefest period, and by the most remorseless slaughter, in the memory of the world. Hungary and Transylvania were seized by the roving warriors of the GepidÆ. The fears or the policy of Justinian contracted the boundaries of the empire; and whether despising the power, or relying on the indolence, of the barbarians, he stripped the southern bank of its garrisons, for the defence of Italy. The GepidÆ were instantly in arms, the river was crossed in contempt or defiance of the imperial revenge; and this daring act was not less daringly followed by a message to Constantinople, that "as the emperor possessed territories more than he knew how to govern, or could desire to retain, his faithful allies merely anticipated his bounty in taking their share." The emperor suffered the insult in silence, but resolved on revenge. With the artificial policy which always increases the evils of an unprepared government, he invited a new race of barbarians to act as the antagonists of the invader.

In the country between the Elbe and the Oder, about the time of Augustus, a tribe had settled, of a singularly savage aspect, and, by the exaggerations of national terror, described as having the "heads of dogs," as lapping the blood of the slain in battle, and exhibiting at once the ferocity of the animal and the daring of the man. On the summons of Justinian, they instantly plucked up their spears and standards from the graves of the Heruli, whom they had slaughtered in Poland, crossed the Danube with the whole force of their warriors, and finally, after a long and bloody war, extinguished the GepidÆ in a battle in which forty thousand of the enemy were slain round their king. The conqueror, with characteristic savageness, made a drinking-cup of the skull of the fallen monarch, and in it pledged his chieftains to their future fame.

This victory at last had taught the imperial court the hazards of its policy; but the deed was done, and Italy lay open to a race whose strange aspect, ferocity of habit, and invincible courage, had already wrought the Italians to the highest pitch of terror.

Among the effeminacies of Italy, the classic arrangement of the hair and beard seem to have held a foremost place. But, in their new invaders, the nation saw a host of athletic warriors, indifferent to every thing but arms, wearing their locks wild as nature had made them, and with visages and manners which almost justified the popular report, that they had the heads of dogs, and lapped up the blood of their enemies. From this length and looseness of hair they had their name. Savage as they were, they exhibited something of that spirit which from time to time tinges barbarism with romance. Alboin, the prince of the Longobards, young, handsome, and a hero, resolved to possess at once the two great objects of the passions, love and glory. To accomplish the first, he seized on Rosamunda, the beautiful daughter of the fallen monarch; and for the second he made a royal banquet, and, covering the tables with the fruits and wines of Italy, demanded of his chieftains whether the land which produced such things was not worth their swords? We may justly conceive that he was answered with acclamation. Their trumpets were heard through every tribe of the North, and the multitude were instantly in arms under a leader whose name was a pledge of possession. His vanguard scaled the Julian Alps. All the roving warriors of Gaul and Germany, with a column of twenty thousand Saxons, instantly joined the Lombard banner. Italy, exhausted by a long continuance of disease and famine, and now accustomed to yield, had lain at the mercy of the first invader, and Alboin, with his sword in the sheath, marched through a fugitive population, and finished his bloodless triumph within the impregnable ramparts and patrician palaces of Verona. From the Trentine hills to the gates of Ravenna and Rome, all was the easy prize of Lombard victory.

It is singular to hear, at the interval of more than a thousand years, the same names of the cities which then became the possession of the invaders, and to see the warlike movements of the present hour following the track of the warriors of the sixth century. Alboin conquered Milan by fear, and Pavia by famine; but the bold barbarian disdained to reside in a city, however splendid, which had yielded without a battle, and he fixed the Lombard throne in Pavia, which had earned his respect by a siege of three years.

It is a striking illustration of the superiority of institutions to climate, that the Lombard, even in Italy, continued the same bold, restless, and resistless man of iron, which he had been in the barren plains of Prussia, or on the stormy shores of the Baltic. With all the luxuries of Italy to soften him, and even with all the fervours of an Italian sun to subdue him into indolence, he was still the warrior, the hunter, and the falconer. Leaving tillage to the degraded caste of the Italian, he trained horses for war and the chase, in the famous pastures bordering the Adriatic. He sent to his native Scandinavia for the most powerful falcons; he trained the hound, that could tear down alike the stag and the wolf; and prepared himself hourly by the chase through the forests, which were now rapidly covering the depopulated plains of Italy, for the hardships and enterprises of actual war. The favourite distinctions of the Lombard noble were the hawk on the wrist and the falchion by the side.

We now give a rapid sketch of the subsequent periods.

From the tenth century, when Germany assumed the form of a settled state, its connexion with Italy was always exhibited in the shape of mastery. The modern Italian character is evidently not made for eminence in war. The hardships of German life, contrasted with the easy indolence of Italy, have always given the Northern ploughman the superiority over the vine-dresser of the South; and from the time when Charlemagne first moved his men of mail over the Alps, Italy has been a fair and feeble prize for German vigour and German intrepidity.

On the general dissolution of the empire of Charlemagne, Italy naturally followed the fate of all vassal kingdoms. At the close of the ninth century its provinces had been made a common field of battle to the multitude of dukes, counts, and captains of banditti, who suddenly started into a brief celebrity as spoilers of the great German empire. A terrible period of almost a century of intestine war followed, which covered the land with corpses, and made Northern Italy but one capacious scene of blood and desolation. At length, a German conqueror, Otho of Saxony, fortunately came, as of old, crushed all rivalry, drove the peasantry from the field, commanded the nobles to do him homage, and by the combined operation of the sceptre and the sword, partially compelled his fierce feudatories to learn the arts of peace. Still, perhaps, there was not upon the earth a more disturbed district than Lombardy. In the lapse of centuries, it had grown opulent, notwithstanding its spoilers. The native talent of the Italian, his commercial connexion with Egypt and the East, and his literary intercourse with the fugitives from Constantinople, and the eagerness of the Western nations, even at that early period, to obtain the produce of Italian looms and pencils, gave the nation wealth, and with it constitutional power. This power resulted in the formation of small commonwealths, which, though frequently at war with each other, often exhibited a lustre and spirit worthy of the vivid days of antique Italy.

The feudal system, the natural product of barbarian victory, by which the land had been divided among the conquerors, was strongly opposed by the commercial cities; and the most successful of all resistance, that of popular interests, rapidly broke down the system. The first struggle was by the class of the inferior nobles against the great proprietors. The close of the eleventh century found the principle of resistance advancing, and the populace now mingled in the contest.

The dissension was increased by the papal violences against the married clergy in the middle of the century. This dispute gave rise to one of the most important changes in the Romish discipline, and one of the longest contests between the Pope and the people. The Church of Milan, dating its liturgy from the times of the memorable Bishop Ambrose, had continued almost wholly independent of the discipline and the authority of Rome. By its especial rule, the priest who was married before his ordination retained his wife; but, if unmarried, he was not suffered to marry afterwards. This unfortunate compromise with superstition naturally produced the loss of the original right. The Jewish priesthood had been married under the direct sanction of a code confessedly divine. Peter, and apparently others of the apostles, were married; and there is no mention of any remonstrance on the part of our Lord against this most essential of all relationships. St Paul's wish "that the disciples should remain unmarried" in the time of a threatened persecution, was evidently limited to the persecution; and instead of denying the common right of the Christian clergy to marry, he expressly insists on his personal right to marry if he should so please, as well as any other of the brethren. The recommendation not to marry at the time was also addressed not to the peculiar teachers of Christianity, but to the whole body of the Christians—a generalisation which of itself shows that it was merely for the period; as it must be wholly irrational to suppose that the gospel desired the final extinction of marriage among all mankind.

The contest continued with great violence until the accession of the well-known Gregory VII., who, finding it impossible to overcome the resistance of the clergy, while they were sustained by their archbishop, dexterously dismantled the See, by annexing its suffragans gradually to Rome. The power of the archbishops of Milan thus sank, until they condescended to receive investiture from the Bishop of Rome. The See lost its independence; and the law of celibacy—one of the most corrupting to the morals of the priesthood, but one of the most effective to establish the domination of the papacy throughout Europe—became the law of Christendom.

The history of the Italian republics is an unhappy record for the advocates of republicanism. It was a history of perpetual feuds among the higher ranks, and perpetual misery among the people. The mediÆval annals of Italy, with all their activity and lustre, might be wisely exchanged by any nation on earth for the quiet obscurity of a German marsh, or the remote safety of an island in the heart of the ocean. The only palliation was in the stimulus which all republics give to human energy, by relaxing all impediments to the exertion of the individual. But this good is strangely counteracted by the habitual uncertainty of republics. No man's fortune can be safe while it remains under a popular government. A decree of the party in power may strip him of his property in a day. The general object of the rule of the rabble is the seizure of property, and the man of wealth to-day may be the beggar to-morrow. The most despotic monarchy seldom preys on the individual, and still seldomer takes him by surprise. For the long period of five hundred years, Lombardy was one of the most unfortunate countries in the world, from its republican propensities. Factions, of every degree of tyranny and vice, tore it asunder. The names of the Torriani, the Visconti, and the Sforze, are seen successively floating on the tide of blood and misery which covered this noblest of the Italian provinces; and each faction, at its sinking, left little more than a new evidence of the guilt of profligate governments, each exceeding the other in professions of public virtue. A single, vigorous sceptre—a settled constitution, however stern—a dynasty even of despots, which had the simple merit of stability, would have rescued Lombardy from a condition scarcely to be envied by a galley-slave. The historians of Italy recur to this period in words of horror. The romancers find in it an exhaustless fund of their darkest scenes. The poets revert to it for their deepest-coloured images of national destruction. What must be the condition of a country, when a military despotism, and that too the despotism of a foreign power, was a desirable change?

In the middle of the sixteenth century this change occurred, in the transfer of Lombardy to Charles V. After a century and a half of subjection to the Spanish dynasty, it again passed, by the failure of the line, into the hands of Austria. But at length, under the well-intentioned government of the Empress Maria Theresa, property became secure, the factions were suppressed by the strong hand of authority, commerce felt new confidence, and the natural advantages of climate, soil, and talent suddenly raised the country into a new and vigorous prosperity; within a quarter of a century, its population rose from less than a million to nearly a million and a quarter; and the produce of the soil not only fed its population, but was largely exported.

The French Revolution of 1789, which startled every kingdom of Europe, shook Italy to its centre. The religion of Rome, while it fills the eye with ceremonies, and the ear with dogmas, makes but little impression on the heart, and none on the understanding. The boundless profligacy of Italian manners had long corrupted public life. The opera and the billiard-table were the only resources of an overgrown nobility, pauperised by their numbers, and despised for their pauperism. The facility of dispensing with oaths, in a religion which gives absolution for every crime, and repeats it on every repetition of the crime, practically extinguishes all sense of allegiance; and, at the first offer of what the French pronounced liberty, every province was ready to rush into republicanism.

The campaigns of Napoleon, in 1796 and 1797, incomparably conducted by the genius of the French general, and wretchedly mismanaged by the inveterate somnolency of the councils of Austria, gave a new stimulus to the frenzy of revolution. Lombardy, already resolved on self-government, was constituted a republic by the treaty of Campo Formio in 1797—Austria receiving Venice as a compensation for Milan, Mantua, and Belgium. The Venetian outcry against this compact was bitter, but it was helpless. Napoleon had the sword which settled all diplomatic difficulties; and she had good reason to rejoice in her release from the perpetual robbery of her republican masters. The coronation of Napoleon in 1804, followed by the memorable Austrian campaign, which ended with the fatal fight of Austerlitz, again changed the destinies of the north of Italy. By the treaty of Vienna, Venice and Lombardy were united under France, and Napoleon assumed the crown of Charlemagne, as King of Italy!

On the exile of Napoleon to Elba, the Austrian Emperor again became master of Milan, Mantua, and Venice, combined under the name of the Lombardo-Veneto kingdom, which was annexed to the imperial crown—the whole being divided into nine Lombard provinces, and eight Venetian; and the population of the entire, by the census of 1833, being somewhat more than four millions and a half.

It cannot now be necessary to enter into the detail of the national government; but it was of a much more popular order than might be conceived from the formalities of Austria. Each of the great provinces—Lombardy and Venice—had a species of administrative council, consisting of deputies from the minor provinces, each returning two, the one a noble and the other a plebeian, with a deputy from each of the royal towns, the whole being elected for six years. Those bodies, though not entitled to make laws, had yet important functions. They settled the proportion of the taxes, superintended the disbursements for roads, and had the especial care of the charitable establishments. Nor were these all. In every chief town there was a local administration, especially superintending the finance of their respective districts; and the general taxation seemed to have been light, and but little felt, and scarcely complained of.

Burke, in one of his prophetic anticipations, pronounced that the first ruin of Europe would be in its finance, and that every kingdom was, even in his day, wading into a boundless ocean of debt. Austria, of course, had felt its share; and after the desperate wars of 1805 and 1809, nothing is more wonderful in the history of finance, or more honourable to the great statesman who for forty years presided over her fate, than that she should have escaped bankruptcy.

But her liberality to her Italian provinces never failed. Some of the details, which have already reached the public, give an extraordinary conception of the almost prodigality with which Austria has lavished her means upon the bridges, roads, and general public communications of Lombardy.

We give those items in francs.

Five millions spent in repairing and constructing dikes in the Mantuan province.

Four millions in completing the canal of the Naviglio.

A million and a half for roads in the mountains of the Bergamesque.A million and a half for the great commercial road of the Splugen.

Two millions and a half for the road over the Hiffer Jock.

Three millions for continuing it along the shore of the lake Como.

Three millions and a quarter for completing the cathedral of Milan.

A million for improvements in the city.

Half a million for the fine bridge over the Ticino.

Twenty-four millions for cross-roads, between 1814 and 1831, besides miscellaneous expenditure;—the whole being not less than sixty-six millions in the fifteen years preceding 1834, in the mere matter of keeping up the means of intercourse in a country where, half a century ago, the cross-roads were little more than goat-tracks; besides the annual expense of about a million and a quarter on the repair of the roads since. And this munificent liberality was expended in Lombardy alone. The expenditure in Venice in the latter period of its possession has been nearly equal. The first French conquest had given it the name of a constitution, and nothing else. The famous republic was plundered to the last coin. On its second seizure its treasury was again emptied by its French emancipators; and when it was restored to Austria in 1814, its population presented a pauper list of fifty-four thousand individuals. Its commerce was in a state of ruin; its palaces and public buildings were in a state of decay; its charitable establishments were without funds; and a few years more must have filled its canals with the wrecks of its houses. Within the next twenty years the reparations cost the Austrian treasury not less than fifty-three millions of francs! Thus Venice rose from a condition which all our travellers, immediately after the peace of 1815, pronounced to be irreparable ruin, and is now one of the first commercial cities of Italy.

But the Austrian government had not been contented with a mere improvement of the soil or of the modes of communication—it had employed extraordinary efforts in giving education to the people. We are to remember the difficulties which impede all such efforts in Romish countries. Where the priest regulates the faith, he must always be jealous of the education. But the German habits of the government predominated over the superstition of Rome, and a species of military discipline was introduced, to compel the young Italians to learn the use of their indolent understandings. Within a few years after the peace of 1815 a national school system was put in action in Lombardy. Within a few more years it had spread over the whole country, with such effect, that there was scarcely a commune without its public place of education. The schools for boys amounted to upwards of two thousand three hundred, and for girls to upwards of twelve hundred. Nearly a hundred of the schools for boys taught a very extensive course of practical knowledge. The higher classes learned architecture, mechanics, geography, drawing, and natural history, in the vigorous, useful way for which German education is distinguished. Still higher schools, or portions of the former, were placed in the chief towns, for the practical acquirement of the known ledge most important for servants of public offices. There the chief studies were history, commerce, mathematics, chemistry, and French, German, and Italian. Under this system, it is evident that very solid and valuable acquirements might be made; and those were solely the work of the Austrian sovereignty.

We give a slight abstract of the plan of education in the female schools, because it is on this point that England is still most deficient.

The female elementary schools had three classes.

In the youngest were taught spelling and writing, mental and written arithmetic, needlework, and the Catechism.

In the second were taught the elements of grammar, the four rules of arithmetic, and needlework, consisting of marking and embroidery, with religious instruction.

In the third were taught religion, sacred history, geography, Italian grammar, letter-writing, weights and measures, and the nature and history of coin.

All those acquirements were, of course, dictated by the necessities and habits of native life; but they compose a scale of practical knowledge which, while useful in their humblest capacity, would form an admirable ground-work for every attainment of the female mind. It is probably from some sense of hazard that we do not observe music among the objects of education: for doubtless singing must have been one of the habits of schools taught by a German system. We should also have desired to see some knowledge of domestic arrangements, of the culinary arts, and of making their own dress. However, it is probable that these obvious advantages, especially for the life of the peasantry, may have been added subsequently to the period from which our information is derived.

We should rejoice to see in England national institutions of this order established for the education of young females of every rank, thus withdrawing the daughters of the peasantry from those coarse drudgeries of the field which were never intended for them, relieving the female population of the manufacturing towns alike from the factory labour and the town habits, and training for the labouring population honest, useful, and moral partners of their lives. In the higher ranks, the activity, regularity, and practical use of all their occupations would be scarcely less essential; and we should see in the rising generation a race of accomplished women who had learned every thing that was of importance to make them the intellectual associates of the intelligent world, while they had acquired those domestic habits, and were entitled to avail themselves of those graceful and useful arts, which make home pleasing without feeble indulgence, hospitality cheerful without extravagance, and even time itself pass without leaving behind a regret for wasted hours.

The Lombard system had been subsequently applied to the Venetian provinces; where, twenty years ago, the number of schools had risen to between fourteen and fifteen hundred. The number of boys then attending the schools was upwards of sixty thousand. Higher still, there were eighty-six gymnasia or colleges, with three hundred professors, and attended by upwards of seven thousand students, with thirty-four colleges for females. Higher still were the twelve Lyceums, for philosophical studies; and, at the summit of all, the two universities of Padua and Pavia. The whole system being superintended by the general boards at Milan and Venice.

Whether all those regulations are applicable to our own country, may be a matter of question. But the grand difficulty experienced here, the power of making the parents avail themselves of those admirable opportunities, is easily solved by the German discipline. A register is kept in every commune, of all the children from six to twelve years old; and they are all compelled to attend the schools, except in case of illness, or some other sufficient cause. But the tuition is gratuitous, the expense and the schoolmaster being paid by the commune. Corporal punishment is wholly forbidden.

Such were the benefits lavished by Austria upon her Italian subjects; benefits which they never would have dreamed of if left to themselves; and which, in all probability, the pauperised exchequer of the revolt will never be able to sustain. Under this government, too, Lombardy had become the most fertile province of Italy, the most densely peopled, and the most opulent, of the south of Europe. Venice, too, which had been crushed almost into ruins by the French, rose again into a resemblance of that commercial power, and civil splendour, which once made her famous throughout the Mediterranean; and Milan, though characterised in the Italian annals as the most luckless of all the cities of earth, having been besieged forty times, taken twenty times, and almost levelled with the ground by the conqueror four times,—yet, when the late Emperor Francis visited her about twenty years ago, exhibited a pomp of private wealth, and a magnificence of public festivity, which astonished Europe, and was the most eloquent refutation of the declamatory ravings of the mob of patriotism.

That Austria should be unwilling to give up so fine a possession is perfectly natural; constituting, as it does, the noblest portion of the Italian peninsula; or, in the striking language of the historian Alison,—

"A plain, three hundred miles in length, by a hundred and twenty in breadth, and in the greatest portion of its length exhibiting an alluvial soil watered by the Ticino, the Adda, the Adige, the Tagliamento, and the Piave, falling from the Alps, with the Taro and other streams falling from the Apennines, and the whole plain traversed through its centre by the Po, affording the amplest means of irrigation, the only requisite in this favoured region for the production of the richest pastures and the most luxuriant harvests."

"On the west," says this master of picturesque description, "it is sheltered by a vast semicircle of mountains, which there unite the Alps and the Apennines, and are surmounted by glittering piles of ice and snow, forming the majestic barrier between France and Italy. In those inexhaustible reservoirs, which the heat of summer converts into perennial fountains of living water, the Po takes its rise; and that classic stream, rapidly fed by the confluence of the torrents which descend through every cleft and valley in the vast circumference, is already a great river when it sweeps under the ramparts of Turin."

The description of its agriculture is equally glowing with that of its mountain boundaries. "A system of agriculture, from which every nation in Europe might take a lesson, has been long established over its whole surface, and two, sometimes three, successive crops annually reward the labours of the husbandman. Indian corn is produced in abundance, and by its return, quadruple that of wheat, affords subsistence for a numerous and dense population. An incomparable system of irrigation, diffused over the whole, conveys the waters of the Alps into a series of little canals, like the veins and arteries in the human body, to every field, and in some places to every ridge, in the grass lands. The vine and the olive thrive on the sunny slopes which ascend from this plain to the ridges of the Alps, and a woody zone of never-failing beauty lies between the desolation of the mountain and the fertility of the plain. The produce of this region, which most intimately combines its interests with those of the great European marts, is silk. Italy now settles the market of silk over all Europe. Since the beginning of the present century, it has grown into an annual produce of the value of ten millions sterling! Within the last twenty years the export from the Lombardo-Venetian States has trebled." All those details give an impression of the security of property, which is the first effect of a paternal government. They fully answer all the absurd charges of impoverishment by Austria, of barbarism in its laws, or of severity in its institutions. Lombardy, independent, will soon have reason to lament the change from Austrian protection.

We come to other things. Italy is now in the condition of a man who thinks to get rid of all his troubles by committing suicide. Every kingdom, princedom, duchy, and village has successively rebelled, and proclaimed a constitution; and before that constitution was a month old, has forgotten what it was. A flying duke, a plundered palace, a barricade, and a national guard, are all that the philosopher can detect, or the historian has to record, in the Revolution of Italy. How could it be otherwise? Can the man who bows down to an image, and listens to the fictions of a priest, exercise a rational understanding upon any other subject? Can the slave of superstition be the champion of true freedom? or can the man, forced to doubt the virtue of his wife and the parentage of his children, which is the notorious condition of all the higher circles of Italian society, ever find fortitude enough to make the sacrifices essential to the purchase of true liberty? If all Italy were republicanised to-day, there would be nothing in its character to make liberty worth an effort,—nothing to prevent its putting its neck under the feet of the first despot who condescended to demand its vassalage.

The war of Piedmont and Austria is another chapter, written in another language than the feeble squabbles of the little sovereignties. There, steel and gunpowder will be the elements; here, the convulsion finishes in a harangue and the coffee-house. Charles Albert has passed the Mincio, but shall he ever repass it? Certainly not, if the Austrian general knows his trade. If ever king was in a military trap, if ever army was in a pitfall, the Piedmontese passage of the Mincio has done the deed. But, this must lie in the book of casualties. Austria is renowned for military blunders. In the Italian campaigns of Napoleon, her reinforcements came up only in time to see the ruin of the army in the field. Successive generals followed, only to relieve each other's reputation by sharing a common defeat; until Italy was torn by 50,000 Frenchmen from the hands of 100,000 Austrians. Yet the Germans have been always brave; their national calamity was tardiness. It clings to them still. They have now been gazing for a month at the army of Charles Albert; they ought to have driven it into the Mincio within twenty-four hours.

The Italian spirit of hatred to the German has exhibited itself in a thousand forms for a thousand years. It has murmured, conspired, and made vows of vengeance, since the days of Charlemagne. It has sentenced the "Teuton" in remorseless sonnets, has fought him in sinfonias, and slaughtered him in ballets and burlesques. But the German returned, chained the poets to the wall of a cell, and sent the writers to row in the galleys. For the last hundred years, Italy has implored all the furies in operas, and paid homage to Nemesis by the help of the orchestra—all in vain. At length, the French Revolution, by sweeping the Austrian armies out of Italy, gave the chance of realising the long dream. The "Cisalpine Republic" flourished on paper, and every Italian talked of Brutus, and the revival of the Consulate, and the Capitol. But the French price of liberty was too high for Italian purchase; the liberators robbed the liberated of every coin in their possession, and shot them when they refused to give it up. Even the "Teuton" was welcome, after this experience of the Gaul; and Italy found the advantage of a government which, though it exhibited neither triumphal chariots nor civic festivities, yet suffered the land to give its harvests to the right owners.

But even this feeling was to have a new temptation. About fifteen years ago, one of the chaplains of the King of Sardinia was struck off the court list, for uttering opinions which, touched with the old romance of Italian liberation, struck the whole court of Turin with horror. Charles Albert was then at the head of the Jesuits, and the Jesuits demanded the criminal Gioberti. Italy was no longer safe for him: he fled across the Alps, and took refuge in Belgium. There he wrote, through necessity. But he had something to revenge, and he wrote with the vigour of revenge. But he was an enthusiast, and he indulged in the reveries of enthusiasm. The double charm was irresistible to the dreamy spirit of a nation which loves to imagine impossible retribution, and achieve heroism in the clouds. His writings crossed the Alps. No obstacle could stop them; they wound their way through douanes; they insinuated themselves through the backstairs of palaces; they even penetrated into the cells of monks;—and his treatise "Del Primato Civile e Morale degl' Italiani," which appeared in 1843, was hailed with universal rapture. The literature of modern Italy seldom rises into that region of publicity which carries a work beyond seas and mountains. She has not yet attained the great art of common sense—the only art which furnishes the works of man with wings. Her poetry is local and trifling: her prose is loose, feeble, and rambling. Her best writers seem to the European eye what the wanderers through Soirees and Conversaziones are to the well-informed ear,—men of words living on borrowed notions, and, after the first half-dozen sentences, intolerably tiresome.

But the work of Gioberti was a panegyric on Italy, a universal laudation of the Italian genius, the Italian spirit, the Italian language, every thing that bore the name of Italian! Its very title, "The Pre-eminence, Civil and Moral, of the Italians," was irresistible.The monster-folly of all foreigners is a passion for praise; and the unpopularity of the Englishman on the Continent chiefly arises from his tardiness in gorging this rapacious appetite. Gioberti, with evident consciousness of the offence, labours to justify the assumption. "Individuals may be modest, but modesty degrades nations," is his preliminary maxim. "A nation to have claims must have merits; and who is to believe in her merits, unless she believes in them herself?" This curious logic, which would make vanity only the more ridiculous by the openness of its display, is the grand argument of the book. It has made Italy suddenly imagine herself a nation of heroes.

"When a nation," says Gioberti, "has fallen into social degradation, the attempt to revive its courage must be by praise; possibly dangerous at other times, but now a generous art." It is admitted, however, "that the facts ought to be true, and the arguments forcible; and that no good can come from adulation." And in consequence of this wise precaution, the patriotic monk proceeds to inaugurate his country with the precedency in the grand procession of all the kingdoms of the earth! But another striking feature of this work was, that all those changes must emanate from a centre, and that centre the Pope, that Pope being a professor of liberalism, and having for his pupils all the princes of Italy. Whether Gioberti saw futurity with the eye of prophet, or only in the conjecture of a charlatan, there can be no doubt that the coincidence between his theory and the facts is sufficiently curious. We are to remember that book was published in the reign of Gregory XVI.—a genuine monk, hardened in all the old habits of the cell, who thought that a railroad would be the overthrow of the tiara, and the expression of a political opinion would call up the shades of all the past Holinesses from their purgatorial thrones.

The book declared that the Deity being the source of all influence on the civilisation of man, the country which approached nearest to general influence over the world must be the leading nation. It contends that Italy fulfils this condition in three ways. First, that it has created the civilisation of all other nations; second, that it preserves in its bosom, for general use, all the principles of that civilisation; and third, that it has repeatedly shown the power of restoring that civilisation. He further contends that the true principle of Italian power is federation, and the true centre of that federation must be the Pope. He declares that the whole light of Italy, in the eyes of the world, has flashed from the papal throne—that the Roman States are to the rest of Italy what the site of the Temple was to the Jewish people—and seems to regard the whole Italian nation, in reference to Europe, as like the Chosen Land to the rest of the world. Even then, he marked the Piedmontese throne as the chief support of the federation, and Charles Albert as the champion of the great pontifical revolution which, expelling all strangers, and uniting all princes, was to place Italy in secure sovereignty over all the mental and moral influences of the world.

The work is obviously a romance; but it is a romance of genius; it is obviously unsuited to the realities of any nation under the moon, but it touches every weak point of the national character with a new colouring, and persuades the loose and lazy Italian that he has only to start on his feet to be a model for mankind. With him the church of Rome is no longer an antiquated building of the dark ages, full of obscure passages and airless chambers, with modern cobwebs covering its ancient gilding, and, with the very crevices which let in light, exhibiting only its irreparable decay. It is on the contrary a temple full of splendour, and spreading its light through the world, crowded with oracular shrines, and uttering voices of sanctity that are yet destined to give wisdom to the world.

It must be wholly unnecessary for Protestantism to expose the superficial glitter of those views, and the feeble foundations of this visionary empire. The true respondent is the actual condition of Europe. Every Protestant nation has left Italy behind. Even the Romish nations, which have borrowed their vigour from intercourse with Protestantism, have left her behind. Of what great invention for the benefit of man has Italy been the parent during the last three hundred years? What command has she given us over nature? what territory has she added to the civilised world in an age of perpetual discovery? what enlargement of the human mind has she exhibited in her philosophy? what advance in the amelioration of the popular condition signalises her intelligent benevolence? what manly inquiry into any one of the means by which governments or individuals distinguish themselves as benefactors to posterity, and live in the memory of mankind?

It is painful to answer queries like these with a direct negation; but that negation would be truth. Italy has nothing to show for her intellectual products during centuries, but the carnival and the opera; for her gallantry, but the sufferings of French and German invasions; for her political progress, but the indolent submission to generations of petty kings, themselves living in vassalage to France, Austria, and Spain; and for her religion, but the worship of saints, of whom no living man knows any thing—miracles so absurd as to make even the sacristans who narrate them laugh; new legends of every conceivable nonsense, and leases of purgatory shortened according to the pence dropped into the purse of the confessional.

Italy has two evils, either of which would be enough to break down the most vigorous nation—if a vigorous nation would not have broken down both, ages ago. These two are the nobles and the priesthood—both ruinously numberless, both contemptibly idle, and both interested in resisting every useful change, which might shake their supremacy. Every period of Italian convulsion has left a class of men calling themselves nobles, and perpetuating the title to their sons. The Gothic, the Norman, the papal, the "nouveaux riches," every man who buys an estate—in fact, nearly every man who desires a title—all swell the lists of the nobility to an intolerable size. Of course, a noble can never do any thing—his dignity stands in the way.

The ecclesiastics, though a busier race, are still more exhausting. The kingdom of Naples alone has eighty-five prelates, with nearly one hundred thousand priests and persons of religious orders, the monks forming about a fourth of the whole! In this number the priesthood of Sicily is not included, which has to its own share no less than three archbishops and eleven bishops. Even the barren isle of Sardinia has one hundred and seventeen convents! Can any rational mind wonder at the profligacy, the idleness, and the dependence of the Italian peninsula, with such examples before it? The Pope daily has between two and three thousand monks loitering through the streets of Rome. Besides these, he has on his ecclesiastical staff twenty cardinals, four archbishops, ninety-eight bishops, and a clergy amounting to nearly five per cent of his population. With those two millstones round her neck, Italy must remain at the bottom. She may be shaken and tossed by the political surges which roll above her head, but she never can be buoyant. She must cast both away before she can rise. Italy priest-ridden, and noble-ridden, and prince-ridden, must be content with her fate. Her only chance is in the shock, which will break away her encumbrances.

We now come to the Avatar, in which liberty is looked for by all the romancers in Italy. On the 1st of June 1846, Pope Gregory XVI. died, at the age of 81. He was a man of feeble mind, but of rigid habits, willing to live after the manner of his fathers, and, above all things, dreading Italian change. The occasional attempts at introducing European improvements into the Roman territory struck him with undisguised alarm; and even his old age did not prevent his leaving six thousand state prisoners in the Roman dungeons. On the 16th of the same month the Bishop of Imola was chosen Pope. He was of an Italian family, which had occasionally held considerable offices; was a man of intelligence, though tinged with liberalism; and was one of the youngest of the Popes since Innocent III., who took the tiara at the age of 37. The Bishop of Imola was 54.

Adopting the name of Pius IX., his first act was one of clemency. He published an amnesty for political offences, and threw open the prison doors. An act of this order is usual on the accession of a Pope. But the fears of the population had been so much heightened by the singular stubbornness of his predecessor, that the discovery of their having a merciful master produced a universal burst of rejoicing.

But the popular excitement was not to be satisfied with the trumpetings and parades of the returning exiles—it demanded a new tariff, which was granted, of course. Then followed fÊtes and illuminations, until the Pope himself grew tired of being blinded by fireworks and deafened by shouts. A succession of acts of civility passed between his Holiness and his people. He talked of railroads, canals, and commerce. He formed a council, which, so far as any practical effect has been produced by the measure, seems to have died in its birth. He cultivated popularity, walked through the streets, occasionally served the mass for a parish priest, and fully gained his object, of astonishing the populace by the condescension of a pontiff. To all this we make no imaginable objection. Pius IX. did but a duty that seldom enters into the contemplation of the prelacy, and which it would be well for their security, and not unwise in their calling, to practise in every province of Christendom.

But it is to be observed that, in all this pageantry of parliaments, and all those provinces of renovation, nothing has been done—that none of the real machinery of the popedom has been broken up—that the monk is still a living being, and the Jesuit, though a little plundered, is still in the world—that every spiritual law which made Rome a terror to the thinking part of mankind is in full vigour at this moment, and that whatever may be thought of the enlightenment of his Holiness, every weapon of spiritual severity remains still bright and burnished, and hung up in the old armoury of faith, ready for the first hand, and for the first occasion.

Lord Brougham, in his late memorable cosmopolite speech, has charged the popedom with being the origin of the European convulsions. There can be no doubt that the popedom, if it did not give birth to the movement, at least set the example. The first actual struggle with Austria was its quarrel about the possession of Ferrara, which was, after all, but a straw thrown up to show the direction of the wind. The call to the Italian states, though not loud, was deep; and an Italian army, for the purpose of forming an Italian confederation, made a part of every dream between the Alps and the sea.

Then came still more showy scenes of the great drama. France had looked on the Ferrarese struggle with the eager interest which inspires that busy nation on every opportunity of European disturbance. But the Parisian revolution suddenly threw the complimentary warfare of German and Italian heroism into burlesque. The extinction of the throne, the flight of a dynasty, the sovereignty of the mob, and the universal frenzy of a nation, were bold sports, of which Italian souls knew nothing. But their effect was soon perilously felt; the populace of Milan determined to rival the populace of Paris—had an emeute of their own, built barricades, fought the Austrian garrison, and made themselves masters of the capital of Lombardy.

But the Italian is essentially a dramatist without the power of tragedy; he turns by nature to farce, and in his boldest affairs does nothing without burlesque. Could it be conceived that a people, resolving on a revolution, should have begun it by a revolt of cigars! In England "sixty years ago," a noble duke exhibited his hostility to the government of Pitt, by ordering his footman to comb the powder out of his locks—this deficiency in the powder tax being regarded by the noble duke as a decisive instrument in the overthrowing the national policy. It must however be said, for the honour of England and the apology of the duke, that he was a Whig,—which accounts for any imbecility in this world.

The Milanese began by a desperate self-denying ordinance against tobacco. No patriot was thenceforward to smoke! What the Italian did with his hands, mouth, or thoughts, when the cigar no longer employed the whole three, is beyond our imagination. His next act of patriotic sacrifice was the theatre—the Austrian government receiving some rent as tax on the performances. The theatre was deserted, and even Fanny Ellsler's pirouettes could not win the rabble back. Even the public promenade, which happened to have some connexion with Austrian memories, was abandoned, and no Italian, man, woman, or child, would exhibit on the Austrian Corso. To our northern fancies, all this seems intolerably infantine; but it is not the less Italian—and it might have gone on in the style of children raising a nursery rebellion to this hour, but for the intervention of another character.

The history of the Sardinian states is as old as the Punic wars. But the glance which we shall give looks only to the events of the last century—excepting the slight mention, that from the period when Italy was separated from the fallen empire of Charlemagne in the ninth century, the command of the passes of Mont Cenis and Mont Genevre, with the countries at the foot of the Cottian and Graian Alps, was put in charge of some distinguished military noble, as the key of Italy, that noble bearing the title of Marquis or Lord of the Marches.

We come, leaving nine centuries of feud and ferocity behind, to the eighteenth century, when the house of Savoy became allied with the royal succession of England, by the marriage of Victor Amadeus with Anne Marie of Orleans, daughter of Philip, brother of Louis XIV., by Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. of England.

There are few historical facts more striking than the effect of position on the character of the princes of Savoy. The life of the Italian sovereigns has generally been proverbial for the feebleness of their capacities, or the waste of their powers; but Savoy exhibited an almost unbroken line of sovereigns remarkable for political sagacity, and for gallantry in the field. This was the result of their location. They were to Italy what the Lords Wardens of the Border were to England and Scotland; forced to be perpetually in the saddle—constantly preparing to repel invasion—their authority dependent from year to year on an outburst from France, or a grasp from the restless ambition and vast power of the German emperors. It is not less remarkable, that from the middle of the century, when the hazards of Savoy were diminished by the general amelioration of European policy, the vigour of the Savoyard princes decayed; and the court of Turin, instead of being a school of diplomacy and war, sank into the feebleness of Italian thrones, and retained its rivalry only in the opera.

But the French Revolution came, sent to try the infirmities of all thrones. It found Victor Amadeus the Third sitting calmly in the seat of his forefathers, and wholly unsuspicious of the barbarian storm which was to sweep through his valleys. The French burst on Nice in 1792, then on Oniglia, and stripped Savoy of all its outworks to the Alps.

But Napoleon came, another shape of evil. While the king was preparing to defend the passes of the mountains, the young French general turned the line of defence by the sea, and poured his army into Piedmont. A succession of rapid battles carried him to the walls of Turin; and the astonished king, in 1796, signed a treaty which left his dominions at the mercy of Republicanism.

On the death of the king in this year of troubles, his son, Charles Emanuel IV., succeeded him. But he was now a vassal of France; he saw his country dismembered, his armies ruined, and his people groaning under the cruel insults and intolerable exactions which have always characterised French conquest. Unable to endure this torture, he retired to Sardinia, and from Sardinia finally went to Rome, and there abdicated in favour of his brother, Victor Emanuel.

The new monarch, whose states were undergoing from year to year all the capricious and agonising vicissitudes of Italian revolution, at length shared in the general European triumph over Napoleon, and at the peace of 1814 returned to his dominions, augmented, by the treaty of Vienna, by the important addition of Genoa.

But his return was scarcely hailed with triumph by his subjects, when the example of Spain was followed in an insurrection demanding a new constitution. The king, wearied of political disturbance, and being without offspring, now determined to follow the example of his predecessor, and gave up the crown to his brother, Charles Felix, appointing, as provisional regent, Prince Charles Albert of Savoy Carignano, a descendant of Victor Amadeus I.

After a reign of ten years, undistinguished by either vices or virtues, but employed in the harmless occupations of making roads and building schools, the king died in 1831, and was succeeded by the Prince of Carignano.

Charles Albert has now been seventeen years upon the throne; yet, to this hour, his character, his policy, and his purposes, are the problems of Italy. His whole course strongly resembles those biographies of studied mystery and sleepless ambition—those serpent obliquities and serpent trails—which marked the career of the mediÆval princes of Italy; but which demanded not only a keen head, but a bold resolve,—Castruccio, with a Machiavel, for the twin image of the perfection of an Italian king.

The object of universal outcry for his original abandonment of "Young Italy,"—an abandonment which may find its natural excuse in the discovery that Young Italy was digging up the foundations of the throne, on whose first step his foot was already placed, and to which within a few years he actually ascended;—from that period he has fixed the eyes of all Italy upon his movements, as those of the only possible antagonist who can shake the power of Austria. He has at least the externals of a power to which Italy can show no rival: 50,000 of the best troops south of the Alps, which a blast of the trumpet from Turin can raise to 100,000; a country which is almost a continued fortress, and a position which, being in the command of the passes of Italy, can meet invasion with the singular probability of making his mountains the grave of the invader, or open Italy to the march of an auxiliary force, which would at once turn the scale. His government has exhibited that cool calculation of popular impulse and royal rights, by which, without a total prohibition of change, he has contrived to keep the whole power of government in his hands. Long watched by Austria, he had never given it an opportunity of direct offence; and if he has at length declared war, his whole past conduct justifies the belief, that he has either been driven to the conflict by some imperious necessity, or that he has assured himself, on deliberate grounds, of the triumph of his enterprise.

He has now taken the first step, and he has taken it with a daring which must either make him the master of Italy, or make him a beggar and an exile. By rushing into war with Austria, he has begun the game in which he must gain all or lose all. Yet we doubt that, for final success, far as he has gone, he has gone far enough. On the day when he unfurled the standard against Austria, he should have proclaimed Italian independence. We look upon the aggression on Austria as a violation of alliance which must bring evil. But that violation being once resolved on, the scabbard should have been thrown away, and the determination published to the world, that the foreign soldier should no longer tread the Italian soil. This declaration would have had the boldness which adds enthusiasm to interest. It would have had the clearness which suffers no equivocation; and it would have had the comprehensiveness which would include every man of Italian birth, and not a few in other countries, to whom unlicensed boldness is the first of virtues.

The private habits of this prince are said to be singularly adapted to the leader of a national war. His frame is hardy, his manner of living is abstemious, and his few recreations are manly and active. He has already seen war, and commanded a column of the French army in the campaign of 1823, which broke up the Spanish liberals, and reinstated the king upon the throne. But, with all those daring qualities, he never forgets that the Italian is by nature a superstitious being; that he is, at best, a compound of the mime and the monk—with the monk three-fourths predominating; and that no man can hope to be master of the national mind who does not take his share in the priestly slavery of the people. This accounts for the extraordinary reverence which from time to time he displays in the ceremonials of the church, for his sufferance of the monkish thousands which blacken the soil of his dominions, and for his tolerance of the Jesuits, whom he, as well as probably every other sovereign of Europe, dreads, and whom every other sovereign of Europe seems, by common consent, to be fixed on expelling from his dominions.

What the ulterior views of the King may be, of course, it would require a prophet to tell. Whether the crown of Lombardy is among the dreams of his ambition, whether the Italian hatred of Austria stimulates his councils, or whether the mere Italian passion for freedom urges him to stake his own diadem on the chances of the field for the liberation of the peninsula, are questions which can be answered only by the event; but he has at last advanced,—has menaced the Austrian possession of Italy; has pressed upon the Austrian army in its retreat; has reduced it to the defensive; and has brought the great question of Austrian dominion to the simple arbitration of the sword.

The history of the Sardinian campaign has been hitherto a history of skirmishes. The Piedmontese troops have advanced, and Radetski has retired. The Austrian position is memorable for its strength, and has been successively adopted by every defender of the Austro-Italian provinces. Peschiera, Verona, and Mantua form the three angles of an irregular triangle, of which the line of the Mincio forms the base. Charles Albert, by crossing the Mincio at Goito, is now within the triangle. The three fortresses are strong, and he has already made some attempts on Peschiera, which commands the head of the Lake of Garda. Those attempts have failed, and Verona is now his object; and there too he appears to have already undergone some failures. The true wonder is, that he has been suffered to remain a moment making these experiments, and that Austria, with 300,000 men under arms, should allow an Italian army, of 50,000 men at the most, to shut up her general, and lord it over half of her Italian territory. All this is an enigma. It is equally an enigma, that the Austrian commander-in-chief should have allowed himself to be driven out of the capital of Lombardy by the rabble of the streets, and have marched out with a garrison of 15,000 men, before a mob of half their number. He ought to have fought in Milan to his last battalion. If he had been embarrassed by orders from home, he ought to have resigned at once. A heavy blow at the insurrection in Milan would have extinguished Italian rebellion.

He has now a position in which he might fight with perfect security for his flanks and rear; with the strongest fortress in Italy, Mantua, for his place of refuge, if defeated; and, if successful, with the certainty of ruin to his adversary;—yet he stands still. It was by a brilliant movement in this position that the Austrian Kray gave the French that tremendous defeat which ultimately drove them over the Alps.

The surrounding country is of the most intricate kind—a perpetual intersection of large rivers, guarded at every passage by tÊtes de pont, and all the means known to military science. A war of this order may be carried on for years; and, unless the Italian population shall rise en masse, it must be a mere waste of blood and time.

The true tactique of an Italian invasion is a succession of rapid, daring, and hazardous attacks. This is the dictate of experience in every example of Italian conquest. A bold rush into the interior, leaving all fortresses behind, despising the obstacles of rivers, lakes, and mountains, and only hurrying on to meet the enemy in line, has been the principle of success from the first days of the French assaults on Italy to the last. Their war was an incursion, their marches were a headlong charge, their battles were outbursts of furious force; and, if their triumphs were transient, they failed merely from the national caprice which tires of every thing, and from the exhaustion of an ill-regulated finance. The French, even under the old Bourbons, never descended the Alps without sweeping all resistance before them. The campaigns of Napoleon in 1796, and the following year, were on the same principle. He plunged into Italy at the head of 50,000 troops, ragged, hungry, and in beggary, but the first robbers in Europe. He told them that, by beating the Italians, they should get clothes, food, and money. As a strategist, he probably committed a thousand faults, but he did not commit the grand fault of all, that of giving the enemy time to recover his senses. He fought every day,—he fought by night as well as by day. At Montenotte, he fought for twelve hours, and was beaten; he again mounted his horse at midnight, attacked the victor in his first sleep, and, before morning, was master of the mountains, with the Austrian army in full flight, and the gates of Turin open before him. The Russian campaign in Italy was on the same principle. "When you are not fighting, march; when you are not marching, fight." When the Austrian generals advised Suwarrow to manoeuvre, he laughed, and told them that tactics were only trifling. "Make reconnoissances," said the greybeard pupils of the Aulic Council. "My reconnoissances," said the great Russian, "are of 10,000 men. Form column, charge bayonet, plunge into the enemy's centre. These are my only reconnoissances." In three months he drove the French, under their two best officers, Macdonald and Moreau, across the Alps, and cleared Italy. A lingering Italian campaign is always a campaign thrown away, or a country lost. It is the work of a military gambler. Napoleon's invasion of Italy, in his consulate, was one of the most desperate hazards ever ventured in war. He might have been defeated, and, if defeated, he must have been utterly ruined. But he attacked the Austrians, was repulsed, renewed the attack in desperation, repulsed the enemy in turn, and next day saw all Italy capitulate to him.

What a month may bring forth is beyond our calculation; but while we were writing those pages, there had been a general movement of the Piedmontese troops on Verona, probably with the intention of aiding some insurrectionary movement in the city. The Piedmontese artillery speedily demolished the field-works in the approaches to the city. A general advance was ordered, and the Austrian troops continued to retreat, still turning on the advancing line, and fighting, through a country the greater part of which is a low shrubby forest. At length, however, a Piedmontese division was vigorously attacked, taken by surprise, and broken with a loss so heavy, as to determine the retreat of the army to its position of the morning. Still, this was but an affair of posts; and, in the mean time, General Nugent, with an army of 30,000 men, is putting down the insurgents in the Venetian provinces, and is marching towards the flank of the Piedmontese.

One fact is evident, that Italy has not risen in a body, and that, with all the harangues of her revolutionary orators, and all the promises of what those orators call "her heroic youth, burning to extinguish the abomination of the Teutons," very few of them have stirred from their coffee-houses. Italy, with her twenty millions of men, has probably not furnished to the field twenty thousand volunteers. Yet this is the time for which they have been all panting in all kinds of sonnets; when the "new spirit of political regeneration" has full range for its flight, when the Austrian police are a dead letter, and when Spielberg and its bastions are a bugbear no more.

But the movements of the Roman populace are matters of more rapid execution. What the Pope was a month since, every one knows;—Pius the powerful, Pius the popular, Pius the restorer of liberty to all the aggrieved nations of Italy, with a slight appendix, including the aggrieved nations of Europe. But the populace, which gave him his titles, have now changed them, and he is "Pius the Monk."

In a year whose every week produces a revolution, who can predict the events of a month? In the middle of this month of May, Pope Pius is virtually a prisoner in his palace; within a week he may be transferred to the castle of St Angelo; within a fortnight he may be an exile, an outlaw, or a refugee in England.

The intelligence from Rome at the commencement of the month was simply, that he was a cipher. The people, in their eagerness for Austrian overthrow, demanded a declaration of war. But the German bishops are said to have informed the Court of Cardinals, that a measure of that order would instantly produce a renouncement of their allegiance to the Roman See. A council of cardinals was now summoned, before whom the Pope laid a recapitulation of his policy, which may be considered in the light of a penitential speech. In the mean time, all his ministers tendered their resignations, probably hoping to lay the onus of things on the shoulders of Pius himself, and glad to escape from being massacred by the mob, or hanged by the Austrians.

But the Pope wisely determined, that whatever happened to one, should happen to all, and refused to let them resign. The general staff then held a "sitting," and the municipality marched in procession, to give their opinion at the Vatican on matters of government, and recommend "abdication!" Such are the benefits of telling the rabble that they are the true depositaries of the national wisdom. In other and better days, the Pope would have sent those volunteer privy-councillors to the galleys, as their impudence richly deserved. But he may now thank his own political visions.

The affair was not yet over. The civic guard, that darling creation of regenerate freedom, took up its muskets, planted themselves at the gates, and declared that no one, priest, bishop, or pope, should stir from Rome. A kind of rabble proclamation was next made, that "no ecclesiastic should hold any civil office." If this be persisted in, there is an end of "Our Sovereign Lord the Pope." He may possibly be allowed to say mass, hear confessions, and work miracles in the old monkish fashion. But his tiara must pass away, his sceptre will be a staff, and his toe will be kissed no more. The mob say that as they do not wish to take him by surprise, they have allowed him some days to settle the question of private life with himself. But the declaration of war is the sine qu non, and if he refuses, there is to be a "provisional government."

"By six o'clock, on the 1st instant, no answer had been received." Such is the new punctuality of popular dealings with princes and popes; and such was the announcement of the mob leaders to all those political reformers, the loungers of Rome. But at last the old expedient of startled sovereignty has been adopted. The ministry, by intelligence on the 5th, had been suffered to retire, and their successors, more liberal than ever, were received with popular acclamation.

The senate of Rome, probably to soften this measure to the Papal feelings, presented Pius with a long address, which, however, contains a repetition of the demand for war at any price. It says, "The people do not expect you, a messenger of peace, to declare war. But they only desire that you should not prevent those to whom you have confided the direction of temporal affairs to undertake and conduct it." Thus the division is complete. The Pope is to be two distinct personages—the messenger of peace, and the maker of war; unless, in the latter instance, he is to be responsible for acts which he does not guide, and to acknowledge his ministers to be "viceroys over him." Of all the acts of sovereignty, the most inalienable is the making of peace and war. But the sovereign of Rome is to have nothing of the kind. He is to be a puppet in the hands of a Board. We may well believe the accounts which represent him as "in deep dejection" at these manifestations of popular dealings with princes and popes. If his "Holiness" is not expeditious in his decision to obey his Sansculotte statesmen, the conclusion will be as rapid as the conception.

In all this chapter of change, whatever may be the coolness of our respect for the Papacy, we feel for the Pope, as we should feel for any man intolerably insulted by a conspiracy of wretches pampered into gross arrogance by sudden power. His personal character is unimpeachable; and if his vanity has met with a sudden and bitter reproof, it is only the vanity of an Italian.

Even of the people of Italy we speak only with regret. If these pages contain contemptuous expressions, wrung from us by the truth of things, we are not the less ready to acknowledge the original merits of a people spoiled only by their institutions. We admit every instance which their panegyrists adduce of their natural ability, of their kindliness of disposition, of their ancient intrepidity in the field, and of their brilliancy in the arts. We impute all their waste of those gifts to the fiction which they call their religion. We lament over the hopelessness of Italian restoration while the nation sees the melting of St Januarius's blood as a work of heaven; expects the remission of sins from looking at the napkin of St Veronica; bows down to an image of the Virgin as the worker of miracles, and as an object of divine worship. While this lasts, the mind of Italy must remain in the darkness of that of its fathers, it may have wars, but it will have no advance in liberty; it may have revolutions, but it will have no national vigour; it may have a thousand depositions of sovereigns, but it will only be a change of masters, and every change only leaving it the more a slave. Italy can have but one charter—the Bible.

But now the world is in confusion. War in the north—war in the south—war gathering in the east of Europe. Russia, with 120,000 men, marching on Poland, to be followed by 300,000 more. France, with half a million of men in arms, waiting but the blast of the revolutionary trumpet to pour down on Italy. Can these things be by accident? Universal convulsion after a tranquillity of thirty years! And are these but the beginning of sorrows?