Volume 70 — THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION.

The emeute of Paris, which cast out the Bourbons, is the key to all the subsequent emeutes of Europe. The nations of the Continent, however differing in features and language, are one family; they have the same policy, the same habits, and the same impulses. No member of that family can be moved without communicating that motion, more or less, to the whole body; like a vast lake, into which, stagnant as it may be, a stone flung spreads the movement in circle on circle, and spreads it the more for its stagnation. But, if the great moral expanse had any inherent motion; if, like the ocean, it were impelled by a tide, the external impulse would be overpowered and lost in the regular and general urgency of Nature.

This forms one of the distinctions which mark England as differing from the Continent; in this country there is a perpetual internal movement. Open as England is to all foreign impulses, they are overpowered by the vigour of change among ourselves. She has the moral tides; constantly renewing the motion of the national mind, guided by laws hitherto scarcely revealed to man; and tending, on the whole, to the general salubrity and permanence of the national system. This preserves England from revolutions; as manly exercise preserves the human frame from disease, and from those violent struggles with which nature, from time to time, throws off the excess of disease. Thus, it is scarcely possible to conceive a revolution in England!

In the life of a single generation we have seen three revolutions in France; and those three revolutions have been of the most decisive order;—the first comprehending an overthrow of the laws, the government, and the religion—a total overwhelming of the fabric of national society, an explosion of the State from its foundations;—no simple plunder of the palace, or disrobing of the priest—no passing violence of the mob, like a thunder cloud passing over the harvest-field, and though it prostrated the crop, yet leaving the soil in its native fertility;—but a tearing up of the soil itself; an extermination of monarchy, priesthood, and law; requiring a total renewal by the survivors of the storm. The two succeeding revolutions were overthrows, not merely of governments, but of dynasties—the exiles of kings and the imprisonment and flight of cabinets—great national convulsions, which would once have involved civil war, and which, but for the timid nature and sudden ruin of those dynasties, must have involved civil war, and probably spread havoc once more through Europe. Yet England was still unshaken. She had tumults, but too trifling for alarm, and apparently for the purpose of showing to the world her innate power of resistance to profitless innovation; or for discovering to herself the depth of her unostentatious loyalty to the constitutional throne.

The French emeute of 1830 propagated its impulse through every kingdom of Europe. The power of the rabble was proved to all by the triumph of the French mob; a new generation had risen, unacquainted with the terrible sufferings of war; the strictness of the European governments had been relaxed by the long disuse of arms; the increasing influence of commercial wealth had tended to turn ministers into flatterers of the multitude; and the increasing exigencies of kings had forced them to rely for their personal resources upon the merchant and the Jew. A less obvious, yet perhaps a more effective ingredient than all other materials of overthrow, was the universal irreligion of the Continent.

Divided between Popery and Infidelity, the European mind was prepared for political tumults. Superstition degrades the understanding, and makes it incapable of reason. Infidelity, while it makes the world the only object, gives loose to the passions of the world. The one, extinguishing all inquiry, merges all truth in a brutish belief; the other, disdaining all experience, meets all truth with a frantic incredulity. The first temptation to political disturbance finds both ready. The refusal to “give to God the things that are God’s,” is inevitably followed by the refusal to “give to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.”

Superstition took the lead in revolt. In 1830, the year after the expulsion of the Bourbons, some of the Papal provinces proclaimed the reign of Liberty at hand, and disowned the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. But the Austrian army was on the alert; the troops entered the Romagna; the Legations, wholly unprepared for resistance, (though storming the Vatican in their figures of speech,) at once discovered the fruitlessness of oratory against bayonets, and licked the dust before the Austrian grenadiers.

All tyranny is cruel in proportion to its weakness: such is the history of all despotic governments. The Romagna was inundated with spies; the prisons were crowded; (and what language can describe the horrors of an Italian prison!) and with an Austrian army as the defenders of the Papal throne against its subjects, the reign of the old despotism once more was the reign over all things but the minds of the people.

In the midst of this confusion, the old man on the Roman throne, who had exhibited nothing of supremacy but its violence, suddenly died. The death of Gregory XVI. was a crisis. The presence of the Austrians had begun to be an object of alarm to the government of the Cardinals, and the desire to get rid of this dangerous defence was the key to the new line of policy adopted by Rome. This suggested the choice of a man who might influence the popular mind by giving way to the feelings of the populace; and Maria Mastai Feretti was raised to the Papal sovereignty, by the name of Pius the Ninth.

The election of a Pope has generally been a matter of intrigue among the ambassadors of the foreign powers at Rome, and especially among the Cardinals—the former intriguing to elect a tool of their Government, and the others an instrument of their own. The Popes have been generally chosen in old age, and in the decay of their faculties—the former, as affording the speedier prospect of a successor—and the latter, as throwing him more completely into the hands of his court. But, the crisis demanded an instrument of another capacity. Mastai Feretti had been educated for a military career—had subsequently chosen the priesthood—and had, we understand, even been employed in the South American missions. Thus he had lived out of the conventual routine, and had the rare fortune, for a monk, of travelling beyond the borders of Italy. His family, too, were known by some public offices, and the hope of seeing the triple crown burnished on the brow of a vigorous leader, rendered the choice popular among the crowd.

The first act was to publish an Amnesty—an act of policy as well as of mercy; for, by it, he released a large number of the partisans of his new system. The exiles also were recalled; and some of the most prominent actors in the late movements were purchased by the hope of public offices. The Pope even performed occasionally the duties of the priesthood. He one day visited a church of which the vicar was absent; he put on the robe, and read the mass. Little dexterities of this kind, to which none could object, and which all were ready to applaud, raised popular acclamation to its height, and for a few months Pio Nono was, in all lips, the model of a priest, a patriot, and a pope.

All those things might have been done by a wise sovereign; but Pio Nono exhibited his ignorance of Italian nature by not knowing where to stop. Every day now produced some memorable innovation: the press was partially emancipated—a rational measure only among a rational people; the laity shared in the magistracies which had been hitherto confined to the priesthood; and a Cabinet Council was formed, all the members of which were laymen, except the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Minister of Public Instruction.

All those reforms, which would have been salutary among a manly people, were ruinous among a people utterly disqualified by their habits, their morals, and their religion, for liberty.

The news from Rome flew instantly to all parts of Italy. The populace everywhere demanded a constitution, and proceeded to attack the police, and sometimes to plunder the possessors of property. When the scattered soldiery resisted, the bloodshed was charged as a crime on the head of their governments. The peasantry thronged the roads, crying out for a reform, of which they could not comprehend the simplest principles. The King of Naples, in not unnatural alarm at those philosophers of the highway, attempted to exercise his authority. It was answered by rebellion. Sicily and Calabria at once armed their rioters. The mob seized upon Palermo and Messina; the politicians were on the alert; and they drew up a Jacobin constitution, which the King, helpless and hopeless, was persuaded to sign.

The Papacy was now in danger; the success of the Neapolitan rabble was a stimulus to the rabble of Rome. The Pope found the peril of toying with popular passions. He was forced to sign a constitution entitled—“a fundamental statute for the temporal government of the States of the Church.” He was virtually dethroned.

Thus the Popedom had begun the true revolutionary era. The Italian Revolution of 1846 was followed by the French Revolution of 1848. The echo of the thunder was thus louder than the thunder itself. It was reverberated from every throne of the Continent; Berlin was in the hands of a mob; Vienna was in open rebellion; Prague fought the Imperial troops; Hungary rose in arms, and fought the bloodiest campaigns since Waterloo,—till Russia entered the field with her one hundred and fifty thousand men, and extinguished the war by a truce, which will be broken at the first opportunity of bloodshed.

But, before the general spread of insurrection, Lombardy had risen in rebellion, tempted by the vauntings of Italian patriotism, by the lenity of the Austrian Government, and, above all, by the example of Rome.

The dominion of Austria in Italy consists of the provinces formerly known as the duchies of Milan and Mantua, and the territory of the late Venetian Republic. It is one of the most absurd blunders of modern republicanism, to represent those possessions as the spoil of war. On the contrary, if ancient right and regular inheritance can give a title, Austria possesses that title to the duchies of Milan and Mantua—Milan having been an Austrian fief from the year 1533, when it descended to Charles V., Emperor of Germany, by the death of its sovereign, Sforza; and Mantua having been also an Austrian fief, though governed by the Gonzagas till the reign of the last Duke Ferdinand; who, taking a hostile part in the war of the Spanish Succession, the Emperor, Joseph I., placed him under ban, and annexed his forfeited duchy to Milan.

From Charles, Milan descended to his son Philip II., and from him to the Spanish line of the House of Austria; when, by the War of the Succession, it passed to the German branch, and became a province of Austria; and so both remained, until Napoleon’s invasion of Italy in 1796.

The Austrian claim to the Venetian territory is later and more mixed with war, but is equally clear.

By the peace of Campoformio in 1797, Austria had been compelled to give up the duchies of Milan and Mantua, at the same time with Belgium, to the French Republic, receiving in return Venice and its territory, which were then French conquests. In the campaign of 1805, by the treaty following the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon again took possession of the Venetian territory and city, annexing them to Milan and Mantua, which, with the subsequent annexation of Modena, the Legations, and in 1808, the Papal Marches, he named the Kingdom of Italy, though not comprehending more than a third of Italy, and having only a population of six millions. It has been the curious fate of French aggression, to provide by its grasp for possession by others. In 1814, the Austrian Emperor, by the right of victory over France, claimed the duchies of Milan and Mantua, with the Venetian territory, which had been united to them, as we have seen, only by the short-sighted rapacity of Napoleon. The whole was then confirmed to the Austrian Emperor, by the treaty of Vienna, under the name of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, and annexed by Congress to the Imperial Crown of Austria. The other arrangements of Italy were also founded on their former state. Modena was restored to its Duke, the Legations and Marches were given again to the Pope; and, in general, the provinces south of the Po were placed under their former sovereigns.

Thus it is mere Italian coxcombry to talk of the Austrian possession of northern Italy as a usurpation. The Line of Charles V. have been its acknowledged masters for three hundred years—a possession as old as the reign of Elizabeth, and as thoroughly acknowledged as the possession of Ireland by the British sceptre. Irish folly may talk of the English as usurpers, and Saxons; but a right three centuries old is as indisputable as the reason of man can make it in either Ireland or Italy; and nothing but absurdity or treason in either case could call it in question.

But if it be said that those transfers of power were always resisted by the Italians, and that they merely succumbed to ill fortune in the field, nothing can be farther from the fact. From the earliest period of modern history, the Italians were the mere lookers-on in the wars which disposed of their country. The French fought the Germans, and the Germans fought the French; but Italy never fought for itself. Like Virgil’s heifer, it stood while the two bulls were lowering their horns, and tossing up the sand with their hoofs, the patient prize of the combat. When a French army entered Milan over the battalions of the German, the Italians welcomed them with an opera; when a German army entered Milan over the bodies of the French brigades, the Italians proclaimed the glories of Germany with a “Te Deum.” Then the affair was at an end; things took their regular course; the Italian returned to his macaroni, and acknowledged his master, consoling his submission by a vow of vengeance in the next generation.

Not that we would recommend a change of the national mind: the stiletto will never work a national redemption; and the bitter prejudices, womanish caprices, and narrow partialities of the Italian provincials, will never combine in one general and generous view of national independence. All the Italian’s sense of patriotism is party; all his love of liberty is love of licence; and all his religion is the denial of the right of judgment, and the practice of persecution.

The Italian republics of the Middle Ages were engaged in perpetual hostilities with each other. Milan detested Mantua, Florence flamed against Pisa. Genoa saw nothing in Venice but an enemy whose wealth would repay war. Venice saw in Genoa nothing but a rival, which she was pledged to level with the ground. Rome devoted them all to the fires of purgatory. The Peninsula was a vast hornet’s nest, in which all alike robbed the honey of others, and only employed the sting. To this hour the same spirit lives from the Alps to the Calabrias. No man on earth more despises the Neapolitan, than his fellow-subject the Sicilian. The Venetian’s contempt for the Tuscan is high and haughty: the Tuscan calls the tongue of the Venetian barbaresque, and says that his manners are suited to his tongue. How is it possible to form an Union among those scoffers? And without union, how is it possible to establish National independence?

But Austria has founded her claims to Italian supremacy on stronger grounds than even the superiority of her soldiership. There will be errors in all things human—there must be more than errors in the government of a despotism; the vices of despotism must be deepened where that government is military: yet, with all those drawbacks, the condition of Northern Italy under the Austrian government has been almost patriarchal compared to what it was before, and to what it must have continued, under the jealousies, antipathies, and ignorance of the native governments.

In the first place, it preserved those provinces from civil war. In the next, it expended immense wealth on the improvement of the country, in bridges, canals, roads, hospitals, &c. In the next, it provided schools to a remarkable extent, for the general training of the common people. In the next, it made some provision for civil liberty; and even for that most improbable of all things in Popish countries, some approach to liberty of religion.

As the great security of all, it established a firm, regular, and systematic administration of the kingdom. A governor generally residing at Milan, and frequently an archduke, ruled the whole. Under him were governors of its two grand divisions; the Lombard Provinces, and the Venetian Provinces. Those divisions were again subdivided into Delegazioni, or minor provinces, each with an officer at its head, entitled the Delegate. There are even further subdivisions, and each commune had its Podesta, or local magistrate. The Lombard provinces are nine; the Venetian provinces are eight; and the spirit of subordination, and, we believe, of justice, was thus made to penetrate to the lowest orders of the community.

The Italian governments of the middle ages had chiefly degenerated into Oligarchies; the worst form of government for the progress of nations that ever was invented by the artifice, or continued by the tyranny, of man. With exclusiveness for its principle, suspicion for its stimulus, and passion for its practice, it effectually renders the mind of a people at once crafty and cruel. In its nature feeble, it has no expedient for safety but arbitrary execution; and without any superior authority to restrain its jealousies, its perpetual policy is to crush all talent, honour, and character, which shows itself beyond the narrow circle of its conclave. It concentrates all the evils of both despotism and republicanism, and has all the remorseless sternness of the one, and all the rapid violence of the other. Universal espionage, secret trials, the consignment of the accused to dungeons for life or death in the dungeon, unacknowledged and unknown, constitute the whole compass of its theory of power.

For those wretched and desperate governments, of which, let history develop them as it will, it can never tell the ten thousand part of the misery, the fortunate accession of the Austrian government presented a system which, on the testimony of every man qualified to judge, rendered the Lombard provinces an example of agricultural prosperity, and the cities of splendour to the capitals of Europe. Since the war with France, and even in the short period between 1820 and 1834, the Austrian treasury had expended forty-two millions of livres for the Lombard provinces alone. The testimony of an intelligent French traveller (Valery, Voyages en Italie) is—“Nowhere, perhaps, on the Continent is the administration of the roads and bridges more actively and usefully carried on than in Lombardy. The whole of this part of Italy presents a solid and material prosperity; it presents the fine side of the Austrian dominion. The roads are like the walks of a garden, and they are kept in repair with the greatest care. The government, economical and parsimonious in other respects, is great and magnificent in this. The excellent state of the highroads of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom is maintained at the annual expense of 1,305,000 francs for 1518 Italian miles of road.”

But, though the habits of the empire predominate in the forms of its government, the Austrian influence, in Italy, makes considerable allowance for the natural love of freedom. The governors of the two grand divisions of Milan and Venice are each assisted by a species of parliament, consisting of landholders and deputies from the royal towns. Each minor province returns two landholders, one being noble, and the other not, as deputies, and the royal towns return one each. The Communal Councils, besides, each elect three persons, of whom the emperor selects one as deputy; those deputies are elected for six years.

Of course these provincial parliaments are not of the same rank with the British, but they have nearly the same financial duties. They settle the proportion of the taxes; they inspect the accounts of repairs of the roads and bridges, and have the superintendence of the revenues of the numerous charitable institutions. They have also a right of petition to the throne concerning the wants of the people. But, besides those parliaments, there is in every principal town of a province a council of eight, six, or four, landholders, one half of them being noble, and the other not of the nobility, whose office is to superintend the financial concerns of their respective districts. The Communes also have their own councils, and the system of commercial administration rounds the whole. Thus the inhabitants of the Lombard provinces have more influence over the collection and expenditure of the taxes, (the most important and most permanent interest of the people,) than in any other kingdom of the Continent.

We are not the panegyrists of Austria. We do not expect to see her giving liberty to the Italian dominions. We do not even believe that any Popish government ever will give liberty to its people, nor that any Popish people will ever be fit to receive liberty: the slaves of superstition must be the slaves of power. The man into whose house a priest can enter, at will, ransack his library, and tear the Bible from his hands, has no right to name the name of liberty. The man whom a priest can command to send his wife and children to the confessional, to do penance in his own person, and to abjure the right of inquiry into the most solemn of all human concerns, the truth of his religion, is already in the chain—has no claim to the sympathy of freemen—and is as incapable of civil freedom as he is of religious liberation.

But the next best government to a constitutional monarchy is a benevolent despotism. We have adverted to the conduct of Austria in its ancient Italian dominions. Let us next observe its conduct in its later provincial acquisitions. Long before the extinction of the Venetian Republic, every traveller in Italy predicted its ruin. It had been decaying for centuries. It finally fell less by the sword of France, than by its own inability to live. Already broken on the wheel, it waited only the coup-de-grace to hasten its dissolution. Its surrender to Napoleon was not conquest, but ruin; its surrender to Austria was not conquest, but restoration.

The Austrians, in 1814, found not less than 44,000 individuals, in Venice alone, dependent more or less on public charity—an enormous weight of pauperism. All the asylums, hospitals, and alms-houses, were in the deepest state of decay. Those were reinstated by the Austrian government—a poor government at all times—and then impoverished by a quarter of a century of war. Of this operation the expenses were upwards of nine millions of francs! There had also been many families of the old Venetian nobility decayed by time and casuality, and living on pensions from the Republic. The French invasion, of course, on the desperate maxim of “making war support war,” had plunged them into utter destitution. The Austrian government furnished them with the means of a decent existence. The old officials of the Republic who had retired on pensions, and who had lost everything in the war, were put again on the pension-list; and to make the public bounty at once permanent and effectual, “a committee of public benevolence” was founded under the care of the principal citizens, with the Patriarch and the Podesta at their head, to which the government contributed 100,000 livres a-year, and which now has an income of half a million. Besides those works of beneficence, the government devoted itself to the objects of decoration, the repairs of the palaces, the restoration of the state buildings, the care of the Venetian archives, and the collection of the national arts, at an expense of fifty-three millions of livres. The authorities for these statements are given in the Bolletino Statistico, and the Simplice Verita, published in 1834 and 1838.

The facts before the eyes of every man contradict the metaphorical misery. The commerce of the Republic, perishing for fifty years before the French invasion, and which by that invasion had almost disappeared, amounted in 1837 to 3000 vessels and 211,000 tons. The residence of government in Venice, with all its boards of administration and public instruments, annually distributed two millions of livres in its expenditure in the city. If it is impossible to make a Popish population industrious, or a lazy population rich—if the Italian would rather beg than work, and relieve his self-contempt by complaining of his masters, rather than gain a competence by honest toil—the remedy is as hopeless as the complaint is imaginary. The laws of nature cannot be subverted for the luxuries of a Lazzarone.

The secret of the Papal liberalism is still undeveloped; but it apparently lies in the Papal principle of universal power. Gregory VII. and Innocent III. aimed at this power by enlisting the vassal princes of Europe; but when the princes were vassals no more, the Popes bowed to the thrones, tried to obtain power by intrigue, and Jesuits and confessors took the place of legates and armies. A new era had begun, and a new source of power was to be employed. From the first French Revolution, the populace have been an element of overthrow. The two following French revolutions have made that element more conspicuous, more disciplined, and consequently more dangerous; but it is an evil acquiring strength alike with the laxity of government and the passions of the people. A mob had twice cast down the mightiest monarchy of continental Europe, and the Pope of Rome became a Liberal!

Insurrection immediately broke out in both the extremities of Italy. The Calabrias rose, and the Lombards rose. The centre, less bold but equally excited, threatened the seizure of its sovereigns, and the subversion of their government. The King of Sardinia, at the head of a well-disciplined army, and a flourishing exchequer, dazzled by the present promise of Lombard territory, and the glory of a future coronation in Rome, declared war, in the face of Austrian alliance, and rushed into the field.

In the public concerns of kingdoms, the faith of treaties is so essential to the existence of society, that probably it has never been violated without a condign and a conspicuous punishment. The French king’s breach of treaty with England in the American war cost France a revolution, and Louis his throne. The French breach of treaty with Turkey, by the invasion of Egypt, cost France a fleet, an army, and the loss of Italy in a single campaign. And within our immediate view, the Piedmontese breach of treaty with Austria, by the invasion of Lombardy, cost the king his army, his military reputation, his throne, and his death in a distant country, in a voluntary and melancholy exile.

The Papal court was now terrified, and the Papal guards were ordered to protect the Vatican from its new pupils of liberty in the streets; but the guards themselves were now Liberals. The Papal Council, next, modestly wrote to the Austrian Emperor to entreat his peaceable cession of the Austrian provinces, “and his acknowledgment of the Italian nation, each reducing its dominions within their natural limits with honourable compacts, and the blessing of heaven.”

But the Pope was still threatened by his people; and he took into his councils some of the popular favourites, chequering these councils, however, by men in his especial confidence. Thus Mamiani was placed side by side with Soglia—the tribune beside the cardinal. All was thenceforth confusion. A levy of twenty thousand men was ordered to march to the Po. But, at the next consistory, the Pope declared his reluctance to engage in hostilities with Austria. The populace clamoured, and the new Ministry resigned.

In June 1848, an “Assembly of Legislators” met in Rome. War, in the mean time, had broke out in the Milanese. An Austrian army threatened Rome. All was terror in the Court, and all fury in the streets. A new Ministry was chosen. They talked of a new code of laws, of reform, and rules of administration: they might as well have lectured on astrology. Such was the wisdom of choosing theorists to meet the perils of a state in the jaws of ruin. The Legislative Assembly met on the 15th of November; the populace crowded round the doors. The Minister, Rossi, was rash enough to pass through the hooting multitude. On some peculiarly stinging insult, he turned, with a smile of scorn; a ruffian rushed behind the unfortunate man, plunged a knife into his throat, and he expired!

That blow was struck against the Papal throne. The populace instantly took arms; the soldiery joined them; all cried out that they were betrayed. They formed in military array, and with cannon in their front, marched to the Quirinal, shouting for the downfall of the Pope, for the Roman republic, for war with Austria, and for a new Ministry!

Of the councils of that night of terror, of course, no exact detail can be given; but they were long, helpless, and distracted. The Pope is said to have appealed to the cardinals; the appeal was in vain; and the council terminated, with the vague but sufficient information to the populace, that “there should be a compliance with their demands.”

In the council, the Pope asked the commandant of the troops if they were to be relied on. His reply was, “Yes, if they are not ordered to act against the people.” The answer was decisive. The Pope, pale and confused, struck his hand against the table, exclaiming, “Then I have no resource left but to invoke the thunderbolts of God against the rebels”—and rushed out of the chamber.

Mamiani, recalled to Rome by the populace, now took the lead; the multitude were still the masters. On the night of the 24th of November, the Pope secretly fled from Rome in a carriage, with foreign arms, and, it is said, in the disguise of a valet. He took the road to Gaeta, and there remained.

Those events are worth recording, as they will yet form the essentials of history; and they are peculiarly important to England, as developing the principles of a domination, never more dangerous than when it is weak—never more haughty than when it is in the lowest depths of humiliation—and never more aggressive than when it has lost all strength, but in the folly of legislatures and the negligence of nations.

The Roman territory was now left without a government. Deputations were twice sent to supplicate the Pope’s return, but he refused. The Parliament appointed a commission or Giunta of government. This commission was the only form of power during the two months which followed. The resolution was then adopted to form a government. The people were called on to elect, by universal suffrage, in committees, a Constituent Assembly. Of the population of the Roman States, consisting of 2,000,000 souls, 343,000 voted.

On the 6th of February 1849, the representatives met in Rome; and on the 9th, after a sitting of fifteen hours, the fall of the Papal authority was decreed, and the Roman republic was declared from the Capitol!

Subsequently a triumvirate, consisting of Mazzini, Saffi, and Armellini, were chosen by the Assembly, and in them the executive power was embodied.

War was now inevitable, and the triumvirs prepared actively to meet it. They collected the dispersed soldiery; they appointed the exiled General Avezzana Minister of War. They provided arms, established a cannon foundry, organised an artillery, and soon were enabled to exhibit an army of forty thousand men. But the war, which was to dethrone the supremacy of Austria, was instantly converted into a war of defence, by the unexpected intelligence of a new assailant. The republic was to be crushed by a republic; liberalism was to receive its deathblow from liberals; and the fantasies of Roman freedom were to be scattered “into thin air” by the more substantial force of faction in France.

On the 24th of April, an expedition, under the command of General Oudinot, landed at Civita Vecchia. Its motives were an enigma. It was to take part with neither the people nor the Pope; it was neither to preserve the new constitution, nor to restore the old; it was simply to look on, while the people settled the form of government. But it was to prevent the possession of Rome by any other; the simple expedient being its possession by the French arms!

But the people did not comprehend this armed peace; they shouted defiance of France as they had done of Austria. The Assembly protested “in the name of God” against this aggression by an ally. They execrated the attempt to control the freedom of a people who had but followed the example of France, and they contemptuously compared the immediate act of the French government with its declaration, “that it made no war on the liberties of nations.” To this protest General Oudinot replied by advancing his camp to the walls of Rome; the people shut the gates, and the siege began.

But the shock of armies was to be in northern Italy. The pamphlets on the subject published by the contending parties are but imperfect sources of information; but a German volume—written by one who is neither Austrian nor Piedmontese, and so far free from the partialities of either, and which has the additional testimony to its truth of being translated by Lord Ellesmere—gives a remarkably intelligent view of the campaigns of 1848 and 1849. The work is anonymous, but the author is known to be a Swiss, and a soldier.

The first demand of revolutionists, and the first movement to revolution everywhere, is “a National Guard!” In 1847, the Pope established a National Guard in Rome! The example was followed by acclamation in all the towns of the Papal States. The acclamation and the example spread to Tuscany; they then spread to Lucca. All Italy was on fire for “National Guards.” The Pope spoke of disbanding the Swiss regiments in his service, amounting to 7000 men. He was thenceforth to know no protection but “his beloved citizens.” The unlucky sovereign had now mounted the first step of the ladder of revolution.

In Lombardy there were symptoms of conspiracy, but there was no National Guard. The presence of an Austrian force, and the vigour of a regular government, prevented both the acclamation and the example. The peasantry cared little for change of masters, since they had known the grinding of the French invasions; yet they hated the high rents of their nobles. The people of the towns, in Italy the idlest of the population, were the chief malcontents. The shopkeepers, with the little trade of an uncommercial country, envied the higher orders with nothing to do. The nobility, whose lives are spent between the opera and the Corso, longed for politics and parliaments, if it were only to divert the monotony of existence. In all Popish countries, the peasant believes in the church with the blindness of ignorance; the townspeople worship the image for the sake of the festival; and the nobility attend the altar through fashion or fear of the priest, and are pupils of Loyola in the spirit of Voltaire! In this mixture of ranks, of abject belief, of vulgar assent, and of indolent infidelity, there is always enough to involve national disturbance, and to consummate universal revolution; except where the government is military, and where the soldier is uncorrupted. It was soon found that even Lombardy was unsafe, and a reinforcement of sixteen battalions was ordered for the viceroyalty.

The conspiracy advanced; and as there is always something ridiculous in the seriousness of foreigners, the Liberals of Milan issued from their club, in the Café Cava, a prohibition of smoking cigars in the streets. By this formidable measure of finance, they proposed the bankruptcy of the Austrian empire!—though their patriotism did not extend to their firesides, for within doors the liberals themselves smoked as inveterately as ever. But the prohibition produced quarrels: the Austrian soldiers, not recognising the authority of the Café Cava, still smoked their cigars, and were insulted by the mob, until two proclamations were issued by the viceroy, the Archduke Raynier, to his “diletti Milanese,” for “the sake of peace,” forbidding the soldiers to smoke. Such concessions are always the reverse of conciliation, and the “diletti Milanese” became daily more and more insulting.

But stronger measures suddenly became necessary. Charles Albert of Savoy called out a conscription of 20,000 men, and fears were entertained for his adoption of the Lega Italiana, and an attack on Lombardy. On the 19th of January, an order appeared from the Field-Marshal Radetsky, declaring “the determination of his imperial master to defend his states against every assault, whether from within or without;” adding, “The sword which I have borne for fifty-six years with honour, in so many fields of battle, is still firm in my grasp.” This proclamation produced a temporary lull. But the storm was now gathering from every point of the horizon. The French revolution of the 24th of February was answered by the rising of Vienna. On the 18th of March Milan was in open insurrection. Within six days after, Charles Albert crossed the Tessin, and the war was begun!

It has been the misfortune of Austria to rely on concession, where force was essential. This policy has always been attended with the same results. It is mistaken for royal fear, and always engenders popular arrogance. On the 18th of March it was announced to the Milanese that the Emperor Ferdinand had yielded to their demand of a “Constitution;” and, on the same day, the citizens, with the town council at their head, marched to the palace of the Governor Count O’Donnell, demanding the formation of a National Guard for the city, the dissolution of the police, and the transfer of their arms to the guard. They overpowered the piquet at the palace, and finally took O’Donnell prisoner. Radetsky now delayed no longer; he ordered the alarm-gun to be fired, and moved to the attack of the Broletto, or hall of the town council, on which the tricolor flag had been hoisted.

The city was now in arms; barricades were erected in every quarter; the windows flanking them were filled with musketeers, who kept up a heavy fire on the advance of the troops. Missiles of every kind were flung from the windows and roofs; and boiling water, and even boiling oil, was used by men and women, screaming like lunatics, and swearing destruction to the Austrians. From want of preparation, and perhaps from compassion for the frantic city, the troops made tardy progress, and the fighting had lasted six hours, when the Field-Marshal gave orders that the Broletto should be gained at any risk. The building resisted all attacks for four hours more. It was taken, with two hundred and fifty of its defenders, the rest escaping over roofs.

The night was stormy, the lanterns in the streets were extinguished, and the troops were exhausted by the fatigues of the day, and by the inclemency of the night. But at morning the attack was renewed. The populace fought fiercely—defending the entrance of every street, and manning the barricades, but less defending them in front than by the fire from the windows. Thus the insurgents were to be fought only hand to hand, and every house was a fortress. Still the troops made progress, till the Field-Marshal, probably thinking that his troops ought to be preserved for nobler contests, abandoned the interior quarters of Milan, concentrated them at some distance, and threatened Milan with a bombardment.

This retreat was magnified into a victory; the Provisional Government ordered every man from twenty to sixty to be enrolled in the National Guard, attacked and mastered one of the city gates, and announced war against the empire. The intelligence from Piedmont, and even from Switzerland, now began to be formidable. It was said that thirty thousand Swiss were in march. The army of Charles Albert was already in the field; further delay might have compromised the fate of the Austrian army; it was evident that the fate of the Austrian provinces, while Vienna was in the hands of the rebels, must depend on the conduct of the Field-Marshal’s divisions; and in order to keep up the communication with the Austrian territories, and at the same time meet the shock of the Piedmontese forces, it was resolved to retreat to the line of the Adige or the Mincio.

The Austrian troops in Italy were seventy thousand; the Field-Marshal had demanded, even before the tumults, a hundred and fifty thousand as the least force with which he could be answerable for the defence of the provinces; he now declared it “to be a terrible necessity that Milan should be abandoned.” He withdrew the garrison from the citadel, called in the regiments, which had been widely posted on the frontier, and, after sustaining a succession of attacks from the insurgents, now flushed with apparent triumph, moved in the night of the 22d, encumbered by an immense baggage-train, containing the government effects, the wounded, and the public servants, in five columns, on the way to Lodi.

The career of the able soldier by whom such services were achieved at the age of eighty-three, is singularly interesting. Born in 1766, of a distinguished Bohemian line, he began his military life in the regiment of Francis’s Cuirassiers, serving against the Turks, and against the French in the Netherlands. In that regiment he attained the rank of captain. In the famous campaign of Suwarrow in Italy, 1799, he obtained the rank of lieutenant-colonel on the general staff, a preferment which vouched for his strategical talents. In 1805 he commanded, as major-general, a cavalry brigade in the army in Italy. He fought in the campaign of Aspern and Wagram. In 1813 he acted as chief of the general staff in the “Grand Army” of invasion under Prince Schwartzenburg, a position which required not merely the qualities of a soldier, but the intelligence of the diplomatist and minister.

Promoted to the rank of general of cavalry in 1829, and appointed to the command in Italy in 1833, he devoted himself to a study of the country, as the seat of a campaign, by holding his great annual reviews in the territory between the Adige and the Mincio—the very line of country in which the mastery of the Austrian provinces must always be sustained.

During the interval from the peace of 1815 to his commission in 1829, he had employed himself in military studies, and, as their result, published “a System of Instruction for Generals and the Staff in command of troops of all classes, over all varieties of ground.” Thus, accomplished by science, trained by long service, and feeling nothing of age, but its experience, his appointment to the baton of field-marshal in 1836 placed in the highest rank of the service an officer unsurpassed by the ablest of his continental competitors. He is covered with decorations of his own sovereign and of foreign princes—not the toys and trinkets of courts, but the tributes of men who have been his comrades in the field. They have been gallantly earned, and their honours will stand the test of time.

The retreat from Milan was blazoned as the conquest of Austria. “The enemy flies from Milan,” was the language of the Milanese proclamation to the rural clergy and authorities, calling on them for the “annihilation of the remnant of those savage hordes.” But the retreat was not too early. On the same day which saw the Austrian columns moving from the gates, a proclamation appeared from the King of Sardinia to the people of Lombardy and Venice, declaring for “Italian Unity,” and announcing the advance of his army into those governments. His force was about forty-five thousand men, in a state of preparation such as no army of an Italian sovereign had exhibited for a hundred years.

Savoy and its princes form one of the most striking examples of character resulting from condition. As the key of Italy, Savoy has been compelled to have its arms constantly in readiness for action. Thus the whole long line of its princes have been compelled to be perpetually in the saddle, and among them have been some of the first warriors and diplomatists of Europe.

Commencing with Amadeus the First, son of the Count of Maurienne and Susa, and thus possessing the great pass of Mont Cenis, then almost the only one into Italy, this brave mountaineer exhibited the independence of a man who knew his power. It is recorded, that on attending the Emperor, Henry the Third, at Verona, followed by a train of his officers, the Emperor refused to admit him “with his tail.” Amadeus spiritedly refused to be admitted on this condition. The Emperor eventually complied, and Amadeus was thenceforth called “Caudatus,” the man with the tail. The phrase, which has since become so familiar to us, thus finds its origin in the eleventh century, and among the Alps.

The long succession of the princes of Savoy were almost constantly belligerent, and in every war increasing their influence and their territories. Amadeus the Sixth, in the fourteenth century, was the arbiter of Italy. Amadeus the Eighth was even elected Pope at the council of Basle, by the title of Felix V. During the Italian wars of Louis XIV. the princes of Savoy figured constantly in battle and negotiation; and when, by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Philip V. of Spain was forced to surrender Sardinia to the Emperor of Germany, by him it was given to the Duke of Savoy, who then assumed the title of King of Sardinia.

In the War of the French Revolution, the king, Charles Emmanuel, being expelled from his throne by the French, abdicated in favour of his brother, Victor Emmanuel, who remained in Sardinia until the fall of Napoleon in 1814.

The Prince of Carignan, the late Charles Albert, during the life of his predecessor, Charles Felix, had the character of a liberal of the newest school. His accession to the throne inevitably changed his political sensibilities, and he became a monarch, in the sense of Duke Philibert, the founder of absolute monarchy in Savoy. With a revenue of sixty-nine millions of francs from his Continental States, and nearly three millions from Sardinia, with a regular army of between fifty and sixty thousand men, the best troops of Italy, and possessing one of the most defensible countries of Europe; with a considerable navy, and with a debt of but eighty-seven millions of francs, (scarcely more than a year’s revenue,) he might have seemed beyond the caprices of fortune, if not beyond the follies of ambition. The King himself was fond of soldiership. He had served in the Spanish Invasion as a volunteer, under the Duc d’Angouleme, and was present at the storming of the Trocadero. He was tall, robust, and bold in the field. Yet his political feelings were hostile to all change. He had completely thrown off the absurdities of liberalism; he was a rigid supporter of the ancient principles of the government, a champion of the privileged, and a protector of the peasant classes. In the midst of these rational principles, and the solid prosperity of the State, the temptation of territory was thrown out to him. To unite Lombardy with his hereditary dominions was the snare; and in an hour of calamity to his country, and of ruin to himself, breaking his treaties with Austria, and assuming the foolish, feeble, and frantic resolution of overthrowing the imperial sovereignty, he invaded the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom.

At this crisis the situation of the Austrian army was perilous in the extreme. One-third of its force was composed of Italian regiments. Of those some openly passed over to the insurgents; some remained faithful, but they were daily diminishing by desertion. The Austrians were enveloped in an excited population of eighteen millions; National Guards were already arming everywhere. In this moment a decisive movement by the gallant General d’Aspre probably alone saved Verona, the most important post in all Italy. A National Guard had been formed in the city; it demanded to share the garrison duty of the citadel. The governor refused the demand; but the population were sixty thousand, already tampered with. D’Aspre on receiving this intelligence determined at once to leave Padua, where he was stationed, to its fate; marched with his whole force for Verona; disarmed the National Guard, and saved the city. Mantua, the fortress next in importance, was entered by an Austrian brigade, and thus the defensive line of the campaign was established. Marshal Radetsky transferred his headquarters to Verona in April, and published an order of the day to the troops, containing the expressive words, “On military grounds, and in my capacity as commander, I, not you, have retired before the enemy; you have not been conquered!”

At this time, in every great town of Italy, with the exception of Verona and Mantua, the tricolor had been hoisted, a revolutionary government formed, and the population summoned to arms. Such was the result of the trumpet blown from Rome! The Papal troops, at the disposal of the League, were about seven thousand Italians, including a regiment of dragoons, besides a body of Swiss—capital soldiers—amounting to upwards of four thousand men. The whole amount of the forces of the League, including bands of volunteers, acting separately, probably amounted to one hundred thousand; which the first defeat of the Austrian army might have increased to ten times the number.

An inspection of the map will show the singularly difficult nature of the country through which the Austrian army had now to make its retreat. The Po, on the right hand, forms the natural boundary of Northern Italy, as the Alps form it on the left: the country between is intersected by the spurs of the mountains, and by the great rivers flowing from them—the Tessin, the Oglio, the Mincio, and the Adige. But a march along the right, or southern bank of the Po, may turn all those positions; and the position of Venice finally outflanks them all. On the parallelogram formed by Peschiera, Verona, Legnago, and Mantua, is the battle of Northern Italy to be fought; and that battle once won, either army must conclude the campaign.

It has been already observed, that the provident eye of the Austrian Field-Marshal had made this platform his especial study: he had instructed his staff to examine all its features with especial exactness, and had aided their practical knowledge of the ground by making it the scene of his Grand Reviews, from 1832. But new difficulties soon threatened him—the Tyrol was in danger. The portion verging on Italy was revolutionised, and thus his communications with Germany might be cut off. The Marshal instantly despatched a brigade to Trent; they took possession of the castle, and paraded the town with patrols of cavalry—arrested the conspirators, chiefly consisting of nobles—disarmed the citizens—prohibited party colours—and declared that, in case of disturbance, they would set the town in flames. The only successful mode of dealing with rebels is to punish them; and the knowledge that the Austrians would not now be chicaned into concession, put an end to their disloyalty.

The first collision of the armies was on the 7th of April. Colonel Benedek, an officer already distinguished in Gallicia, surprised a patrol of Genoa dragoons, and brought his prisoners into Mantua. Charles Albert moved on the Mincio, and a column of four thousand men attacked the Austrian post at Goito, on the right bank, two leagues above Mantua. The attack was gallantly resisted by the Tyrolese Jagers, and other troops; but after an action of four hours, the Piedmontese succeeded in crossing a bridge imperfectly blown up, and the Austrians retired, with the loss of their four guns, on the glacis of Mantua. In this action the two brothers Hofer, nephews of the famous Andreas Hofer—the one a cadet, and the other a lieutenant in the Tyrolese Jagers—were unfortunately killed. The Field-Marshal immediately advanced with eighteen thousand men to give battle; but the Piedmontese stopped, to leave the main body time to advance and enter upon the true field of the campaign.

The Field-Marshal now determined to leave the line of the Mincio. The Piedmontese were daily receiving reinforcements. On the 20th, General d’Arco Ferrari, the Tuscan commander, conducted a column of five thousand men into the royal camp. This number included fifteen hundred volunteers of the best families of Florence and Sienna, a corps of students from Pisa, officered by their professors, and a corps of two hundred and fifty Neapolitans, raised by a Neapolitan enthusiast. When this man took leave of the King of Naples, he asked him, “Your majesty, what shall I say to the Lombards on the part of my king?” The reply was, “Tell them that I will come to their assistance with all my forces, and will myself fight by the side of their humblest grenadier.” His majesty appears to have soon changed his mind.

The Austrians continued to retire, and Charles Albert commenced the siege of Peschiera, and the investment of Mantua. In the mean time the Austrian Council, though the whole empire was in confusion, made the most strenuous efforts to reinforce the army in Italy; and General Nugent, with some corps of Croats, joined the Field-Marshal.

Under the general name of Croat, in Austrian military language, are included all the Borderers of the Austrian dominions, who serve as light infantry. But of the eighteen regiments of Border light infantry, eight only are of the real Croat race. This race belongs to the great Sclave family, and passed from Bohemia to their present province at a remote period. The Hungarians, on the contrary, came from the far East. In Bohemia and Moravia the German and Sclave races are mingled; in Hungary, the Magyar, the Sclave, the Wallach, and the Saxon. From Hungary, at this period, nothing was to be hoped, for the Hungarian nobility had extorted from the emperor an independent administration. They had even gone so far as to demand the government of the military frontier towards the Turkish dominions. This innovation, which would have included the subordination of Croatia, was resisted by its gallant people, who now proved a firm and loyal defence of their country, and recovered a fame obscured since the wars of Maria Theresa.

Even in the briefest narrative of this anxious period, the governor of Croatia deserves a record.

Joseph, Baron Jellachich de Buzim, was the son of a military man of rank, who had served in the French war. Educated for the army, he did not neglect the studies which accomplish man in every condition; and he has been even distinguished as a poet. His family connection with Croatia, and his character for intelligence and intrepidity, rapidly attracted notice, and he was appointed to the Viceroyalty of the province. The march of the corps of Croats to Vienna gave the first favourable turn to the fortunes of the empire, and in the trying Hungarian campaigns, the Ban of Croatia was among the foremost officers of the service, as his troops were among the bravest. On the demand of the army in Italy for reinforcement, he did not hesitate a moment, but despatched from his force those battalions which had so large a share in the ultimate victories of the campaign.

Hostilities now rapidly advanced. On the 5th of May, Charles Albert attacked the celebrated position of Rivoli, but after a heavy cannonade, was repulsed. On the 7th, the Piedmontese army, amounting to forty-five thousand men, with sixty-six guns, attacked the Austrian front on the heights of Sena, near Verona. A defeat on this point would have left Verona open to a bombardment, and might have been the ruin of the Austrian cause in Italy. The battle began at nine in the morning. The Austrians were posted in a line of villages, partly fortified. The Piedmontese fought well, but they failed in all their attacks. The Austrian fire of artillery was heavy; and at four, a movement of Radetsky precipitated the retreat of the enemy. The king was in the field, as were the Archdukes Joseph (the present emperor) and Albert, the son of the famous Archduke Charles.

The action lasted till six in the evening. The returns of the loss, on both sides, are equally unintelligible. The Piedmontese loss was returned at only 87 killed! and 659 wounded; and this in a conflict which lasted nine hours, under a perpetual cannonade. The Austrians naturally lost less than their assailants; but foreign bulletins are always a trial to English credulity.

The prospect still darkened: the emperor fled from Vienna, and took refuge in the Tyrol. News of the insurrection in Naples, and fighting in the streets, arrived. Peschiera was besieged, without the hope of being relieved; it was already famishing; horse-flesh and maize were its only provision: it had withstood forty thousand cannon shots; and for every two guns remaining on its ramparts, there was but one artilleryman! On the 30th it capitulated. Intelligence next came that Vienna was in complete possession of the populace, and a provisional government installed! This put an end to all expectation of reinforcements. It now even became a question, whether the Austrian army should not abandon the field, and take shelter in Mantua. “What a misfortune,” said a German paper, “for an army to be so commanded. What has happened justifies the warning which we gave, months ago, that the conduct of such a struggle should not be committed to a man eighty-four years of age.”

On the night of the 5th of June, only two days after the disastrous news from Vienna, that old man commenced a movement which decided the war!

The whole army suddenly moved to the attack of Vicenza; swept the plain of the enemy’s detachments; assailed the fortified heights of Monte Berico, the key of Vicenza, defended by fifteen thousand Papal troops, with Swiss and volunteers; and forced the town to a capitulation next day. This daring exploit stopped Charles Albert at once; convinced him that he could advance no farther; and changed the whole face of the campaign.

The most interesting part in the history of nations at war is the sudden ebbs and flows of fortune. The Field-Marshal had hitherto been compelled to keep a watchful eye on the Alps; for if the French army, already collected at Grenoble, had joined the Italians, there was no resource for him but to have retired from the Peninsula. But the four days’ fighting in the streets of Paris, in June, satisfied him that the French would be fully occupied at home, and relieved him of anxiety in that quarter. The next news was, that the insurrection at Prague had been crushed, and that reinforcements were sure to be despatched; the next was, that Count Latour, the minister, had actually despatched twelve thousand men to the army. In a short period, his troops, which had been reduced to forty thousand men, of whom a large proportion were in hospital, were increased to a hundred and thirty-two thousand. The cavalry were raised to upwards of eight thousand, and the artillery to two hundred and fifty pieces.

On the 22d, in the evening, the troops moved to the attack of the entire Piedmontese position. It was on a range of hills rising in successive lines of heights. The troops were stopped by a heavy storm at midnight. They halted till dawn, and on the 23d attacked and carried the whole line of the Piedmontese. On the next day Charles Albert advanced against them, made a vigorous flank movement, broke an Austrian Brigade, and fought desperately till nightfall. On the 25th the battle was resumed, the heat was intense, and the ascent of the hills was fearfully exhausting. In one of the regiments a third of the men sank on the road, and sixteen died of coup-de-soleil. Such are the toils and the horrors of war. Charles Albert fought bravely, and manœuvred ably, but he was everywhere repulsed. Fortune had deserted him. The Austrians slept on the heights which they had won. Thus ended the great battle of Costazza.

General Radetsky now gave orders for a vigorous pursuit. In one of the towns occupied by the retreating enemy, the inhabitants took part in the skirmish. In this instance we find the first military use of gun-cotton, and it appears to have excited equal surprise and alarm in the pursuers. “It was terrible,” says one of of those describers, “to hear the whistling of the ball without the detonation. No despatch could be read, because the enemy fired from their concealment at every light that showed itself. Alarms were frequent, and occasioned momentary confusion among us; it was an awful night.”

After an unsuccessful attack on the Austrian outposts, the enemy retired. Soon afterwards, a flag of truce arrived, proposing an armistice, taking the Oglio for the line of demarcation. The Austrian general demanded the Adda, the cession of the captured fortresses, and the withdrawal of the king’s troops from Venice, Modena, and Parma. Those conditions were rejected, and the royal army renewed its retreat. The command of the troops was now relinquished by the king, and given up to General Bava.

All, thenceforth, was confusion; the army began to dissolve; there was neither rest for it, nor food. Many threw themselves down by the roadside and refused to go farther. An armistice was suggested by the British minister at Turin, but the answer was decisive: “No armistice till the imperial provinces are cleared.”

The retreat should have been by the right bank of the Po; but Charles Albert, in a chivalric spirit, resolved to defend Milan. The pursuit was still continued through the defensible and intricate country which surrounds Milan. On the evening of the 4th of August, the Austrian army was at the gates of the city. In the night a council was held, which determined on the evacuation of Milan. The populace, partly in terror, and partly in rage, denounced the king as a traitor to their cause, and even fired shots at his palace. In the night of the 6th the king was conveyed from Milan under escort; the report reached the populace in the morning, and they proceeded to plunder. A deputation of the magistracy were sent to the Field-Marshal. He entered the city at the head of a column of troops by the Porta Romana; and on the 7th, an order of the day appeared, thanking the troops, and containing these words: “The imperial flag is again waving from the walls of Milan; there is no longer an enemy on Lombard ground.” This fixed the fate of the imperial provinces.

The campaign which followed in 1849 may be described in a few words. The mortified pride of Charles Albert provoked him to make preparations for a renewal of the war. He raised his army by the conscription—that terrible tool in the hands of an ambitious or an absurd government, to a hundred and forty-eight thousand men—(of whom, however, eighteen thousand were in the hospitals.) But the army had known the disasters of war, and its romance had died away. None but the orators were advocates for a contest with the mighty force of the empire. General Bava, an able and brave officer, who had conducted the retreat, was displaced, and the command was given to Chrozanowski, a Pole, who had served on the Russian staff. The Austrian force, exclusive of sick and garrisons, was about eighty thousand men.

The armistice concluded on the 20th of March. The Polish general’s order of the day was in the theatrical style of Napoleon’s bulletins. “Soldiers! the greater your vigour in advance, the speedier will be your victory, and the earlier your return, crowned with laurels!” The manlier, because the more intelligible sentiment of the Field-Marshal’s order was, “Soldiers! forward, with Turin for your watchword!”

In twenty-four hours the Austrian army was in march for the Tessin, the boundary of Piedmont and Lombardy. The decisive battle was fought at Novara, a town on the left bank of the Agogna. In the rear of the town, the ground, consisting of water-courses and walled gardens, and with substantial villas, and a slope towards the town for artillery, is favourable for defence. The sons of Charles Albert, the Dukes of Savoy and Genoa, commanded brigades, the whole force amounting to fifty thousand men, with one hundred and eleven guns.

The battle began at eleven in the morning of the 23d of March, by an attack of the Archduke Albert on a fortified post. The combat continued in a succession of attacks on the Piedmontese positions, which were stoutly defended, till four o’clock; when, all the Austrian brigades having reached the field, the Field-Marshal gave orders for a general advance of the line. The enemy now fell into disorder, and retreated. The battle was won. The Austrian army bivouacked on the field. The king, who had remained under fire during the day, was in despair. He exclaimed to General Durando, who led him away, “General, this is my last day—let me die.” Later in the evening, he called his princes and chief officers about him, and declared his determination to resign the crown to the Duke of Savoy. He then dismissed them, wrote a letter of farewell to his wife, and made his appearance at the quarters of the Austrian officer, Count Thurn, at one in the morning, under the title of a Count; and being allowed to pass the Austrian lines, (of course his person being known,) went to Nice. From Nice he went to Portugal, and remained at Oporto until he died.

Thus ended the life of a king, and thus closed the first powerful effort of that consummation of violence and folly, misery, and popular ruin, which are all included in the name of Italian Independence.

Let it not be supposed, from the tone of our observations, that we are hostile to the freedom of nations. Hostility of that order would contradict the character of our country. We have exposed only the pretences to patriotism—the love of plunder under the plea of reform, the hatred of order under the pretext of right, and the convulsion of society under the affectation of independence.

We affirm, in the most unequivocal manner, that, to be free, nations must be Protestant. The Popish religion is utterly incompatible with freedom in any nation. The slave of the altar is essentially the slave of the throne. We prove this by the fact, that no Popish country in the world has been able to preserve, or even to have a conception of, the simplest principles of civil liberty. If we are told that France is free, the obvious reply is, that though France is the least Popish of Popish countries, it still has the Conscription; it is wholly under military government; it has no Habeas Corpus; and no journalist can discuss any subject without exposing himself to Government, by giving his name. Would this be called liberty in England?

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