of the French expedition only in so far as it limited the action and invaded the privileges of Austria, and took Oudinot to task because he did not at once declare his real purpose, the restoration of the Papal despotism.' The Times' had its correspondent within the French lines, whose thirst for blood could not be satisfied by Oudinot's tardy and comparatively humane operations. The sneers of the great newspaper at the 'degenerate remnant of the Roman people,' who 'will believe they are heroes,' revealed that remarkable form of pride in British institutions which used to consider it an insult to ourselves that any other race should aspire to progress and freedom.3

But the better England was well represented on the

And als right side of the walls. The artist of the leading illustrated

paper of the day was sending home the quaint sketches of the Garibaldini which I have been most kindly allowed to reproduce in this book. These pictures and the sympathetic comment in the text of the Illustrated London News' may be said to have laid the first foundations of the Garibaldian cult in our country,' a plant of slow but eventually of enormous growth. Arthur Clough was also in Rome, gathering the impressions which he dressed up in the 'Amours de Voyage.' His proverbial hesitation did not extend to the field of Italian politics, and he watched the martyrdom of Liberty with the eye, not of a sceptic, but of a poet. The Bostonian Margaret Fuller, as an old and dear friend of Mazzini in England, was even more whole-hearted in her devotion, and felt that the new Rome of the people was the visionary country of her heart.

Times leading articles, from January 18 onwards, e.g. April 17, April 19, May 11.

2 Times, June 6 and 12. He said the leaders in Rome, though not indeed Mazzini, desired to secure a well-filled purse': poor Garibaldi! The Quarterly stated that most of the Roman soldiers were not Italians! (lxxxv. 237); there were really about 400 non-Italians out of some 17,000 or more.

Times, May 11, June 30.

I know two Englishmen, afterwards great sympathisers with Italy, who severally recollect the lasting impression these pictures made on them as boys, when they knew nothing of Italian affairs.

• His letters (Prose Remains) show this even more strongly than the Amours de Voyage.

GARIBALDI'S ENTRY INTO ROME

III

Thus, with only the gods on their side, the Romans armed for the fight. Outside the city, friends and foes expected that they would surrender: 'Italians do not fight,' was the word passed round in the French camp, and even those who knew the North Italians had never heard of Roman valour in the history of the modern world. But a great moral change had taken place. When, on the afternoon of April 27, Garibaldi, the long-expected, entered Rome at the head of his bronzed Legionaries from the northern provinces of the Republic, there was little doubt of the spirit of the citizens through whom they pushed their way. 'He has come, he has come!' they cried all down the Corso. He had come, and the hour of Rome's resurrection had struck.1

'The sculptor Gibson, who was then in Rome, describes the spectacle offered by these wild-looking warriors, as they rode in, as one of the strangest ever witnessed in the Eternal City. The men, sunburnt, with long unkempt hair, wearing conicalshaped hats with black, waving plumes; their gaunt, dustsoiled faces framed with shaggy beards; their legs bare; crowding round their chief, who rode a white horse, perfectly statuesque in virile beauty; the whole group looking more like a company of brigands out of some picture of Salvator Rosa than a disciplined military force.'"

The combined effect of the presence of Mazzini and of Garibaldi in Rome was to exalt men's hearts and minds into a region where it seemed base to calculate nicely whether there was any hope of victory in the defensive war which they were undertaking. And in such magnificent carelessness lay true wisdom. There are times when it is wise to die for honour alone. If Rome had submitted again to Papal despotism without a blow she could never have become the capital of Italy, or only as the despised head of a noble family. Historians who blame the defence of Rome overlook this point, which surely is one of immense

1 Loev. i. 155, 156.

Costa, 43; Martinengo Cesaresco's Italy, 148. Their bare legs' are not mentioned by other authorities. They usually wore long trousers,

importance. The end of the present war might be scarcely doubtful, but the end for which they were about to fight lay in the distant future. If it is asked why the Romans were urged to undertake the struggle, let Mazzini answer for himself:

'With those who have said or written that the resistance of Rome to her French invaders was an error, it were useless to discuss.

'To the many other causes which decided us to resist, there was in my mind added one intimately bound up with the aim of my whole life-the foundation of our national unity. Rome was the natural centre of that unity, and it was important to attract the eyes and the reverence of my countrymen towards her. The Italian people had almost lost their Religion of Rome; they, too, had begun to look upon her as a sepulchre, and such she seemed.

'As the seat of a form of faith now extinct, and only outwardly sustained by hypocrisy and persecution, her middleclass living, in a great measure, upon the pomps of worship and the corruption of the higher clergy, and her people, although full of noble and manly pride, necessarily ignorant, and believed to be devoted to the Pope-Rome was regarded by some with aversion, by others with disdainful indifference. A few individual exceptions apart, the Romans had never shared that ferment, that desire for liberty which had constantly agitated Romagna and the Marches. It was therefore essential to redeem Rome; to place her once again at the summit, so that the Italians might again learn to regard her as the temple of their common country. It was necessary that all should learn how potent was the immortality stirring beneath those ruins of two epochs, two worlds. I did feel that power, did feel the pulsations of the immense eternal life of Rome through the artificial crust with which priests and courtiers had covered the great sleeper, as with a shroud. I had faith in her. I remember that when the question as to whether we should resist or not first arose, the chief officers of the National Guard, when I assembled and interrogated them, told me sadly that the main body of the guard would not in any case co-operate in the defence. It seemed to me that I understood the Roman people far better than they, and I therefore gave orders that all the battalions

MORITURI TE SALUTANT

113

should defile in front of the Palace of the Assembly on the following morning in order that the question might be put to the troops. The universal shout of Guerra that arose from the ranks drowned in an instant the timid doubts of their leaders.

'The defence of the city was therefore decided upon : by the assembly and people of Rome from a noble impulse and from reverence for the honour of Italy; by me as the logical consequence of a long-matured design. Strategically I was aware that the struggle ought to have been carried on out of Rome, by operating upon the flank of the enemy's line. But victory, unless we were to receive assistance from the other provinces of Italy, was equally impossible within and without the walls; and since we were destined to fall, it was our duty, in view of the future, to proffer our morituri te salutant to Italy from Rome.'1

1 Mazzini, v. 200-202. (Italian Ed. i. 175, 176, Note Autobiografiche.)

I

BUT Mazzini alone could not have inspired the heroic defence. If Garibaldi had not, at the eleventh hour, been brought into Rome by the agency of his admirer Avezzana, the new Minister of War, the resistance to Oudinot would have been very feeble. All Italian accounts of the siege make this abundantly clear, while French and Clerical writers regard his ill-omened arrival at the last moment as the reason why the Italians were 'terrorised' into dying for their country. The truth is, that his presence during the two days of preparation, before the battle of April 30, exalted the fighting spirit of the troops and of the populace by the exercise of that personal magic felt equally by all classes. The workman, the student, the employer and the landowner were all brothers-in-arms in the ranks of the volunteer regiments. To this people, singularly free from what in our island we know only too well as 'snobbery,' it was all one whether Garibaldi was the son of a nobleman or of a poor sailor: he was an Italian-no one asked more. 'In Italy (wrote one who saw the workings of this remarkable epoch in her history) the classes of society are far less distinct than elsewhere, so that, when once they are brought into 125 below.

For this Chapter see map p.

2 Garibaldi's own belief, right or wrong, was that Avezzana was the first real friend he had in high quarters at Rome. Mem. 224, and information given me by General Canzio.

1