Note 36 — Chapter XIV

At Milan, a short time ago, a gentleman had a Homer, in Greek and Latin, among his books. He was surlily asked to explain what it meant. Upon doing so, the Inspector shook his head doubtingly, and said, ‘it might pass this time,’ but advised him to beware of a second. ‘Here, now, is a work,’ he continued, pointing to ——’s Lives of the Popes, containing all the abominations (public and private) of their history, ‘You should bring such books as this with you!’ This is one specimen of that learned conspiracy for the suppression of light and letters, of which we are sleeping partners and honorary associates. The Allies complain at present of Mr. Canning’s ‘faithlessness.’ Oh! that he would indeed play them false and earn his title of ‘slippery George!’ Faithful to anything he cannot be—faithless to them would be something. The Austrians, it is said, have lately attempted to strike the name of Italy out of the maps, that that country may neither have a name, a body, or a soul left to it, and even to suppress the publication of its finest historians, that it may forget it ever had one. Go on, obliging creatures! Blot the light out of heaven, tarnish the blue sky with the blight and fog of despotism, deface and trample on the green earth; for while one trace of what is fair or lovely is left in the earth under our feet, or the sky over our heads, or in the mind of man that is within us, it will remain to mock your impotence and deformity, and to reflect back lasting hatred and contempt upon you. Why does not our Eton scholar, our classic Statesman, suggest to the Allies an intelligible hint of the propriety of inscribing the name of Italy once more on the map,

‘Like that ensanguined flower inscribed with woe’—

of taking off the prohibition on the Histories of Guicciardini and Davila? Or why do not the English people—the English House of Commons, suggest it to him? Is there such a thing as the English people—as an English House of Commons? Their influence is not felt at present in Europe, as erst it was, to its short-lived hope, bought with flat despair. The reason is, the cause of the people of Europe has no echo in the breasts of the British public. The cause of Kings had an echo in the breast of a British Monarch—that of Foreign Governments in the breasts of British Ministers! There are at present no fewer than fifteen hundred of the Italian nobility of the first families proscribed from their country, or pining in dungeons. For what? For trying to give to their country independence and a Constitutional Government, like England! What says the English House of Lords to that? What if the Russians were to come and apply to us and to them the benefits and the principles of the Holy Alliance—the bayonet and the thumbscrew? Lord Bathurst says, ‘Let them come;’—and they will come when we have a servile people, dead to liberty, and an arbitrary government, hating and ready to betray it!