approach of unity, by giving a new character to the local pride of the Romans, and marking out Rome to all the world as the capital of Italy and the only acceptable goal of the national aspirations.

Desperation was the mood of the hour. The Kings and the Moderates, said the Republicans, have betrayed the People let the People take their cause into their own hands-let us have no more half measures. 'Dare! and dare! and dare again!' So Danton had said when the Austrian armies threatened the life of the mother of modern Republics. And so now, in effect, said the Roman Democrats; but theirs was the daring of men who, at bottom, have little hope of immediate success. The ardour for the Mazzinian Republic was less forcible and effective than the French fury of 1793, but it was purer in its moral conception. It was less effective, because it was strong only in the towns; the peasant of the Apennines could not be roused to take arms, as Jacques Bonhomme had been roused, to form the battalions of national defence. But the Roman Republic was not cruel, and its advent was followed, not by the increase, but by the suppression of terrorism. In the first months of 1849 the new State fell under the influence of men much better than the Sterbinis and Carlo Bonapartes who had been prominent in Rome at the time of the murder of Rossi. The newly elected Constituent Assembly was a finer body, or, at any rate, had far better guidance, than the late Council of Deputies. Armellini, Muzzarelli, and Saffi, honourable and worthy politicians, led the Assembly in the early weeks of the Republic, and at the end of March ungrudgingly yielded the real power to Mazzini, when the triumvirate was formed. Until then he was only a member of the Assembly, but from the moment of his first entry into Rome he was its leading citizen and its real political chief.

It was the hope of Mazzini, with which he inspired the people of Rome, to unite the whole peninsula in one Republic. He dreamed that the work of liberation, starting from Rome, would spread from State to State, in an order of

ROMAN AND TUSCAN REPUBLICS

95

geographical expansion exactly the reverse of that by which Italian unity was in the end effected.

Tuscany and Naples were the nearest neighbours. The Tuscan Republic had been proclaimed ten days after that of Rome, and Mazzini, on his way south, had stopped to take a leading part in the revolution, effected at a meeting held under Orcagna's loggia in Florence (February 18), though he failed to persuade the Tuscans to incorporate their Republic with that of Rome. It was clear that they would be of little help in the coming death struggle against the armies of old Europe, for the forces of reaction within Tuscany itself were enough to render the overthrow of the Democrats probable even without foreign interference.

On the side of Naples, the foe was already in arms at the gate, for King Ferdinand, rejoicing in his new moral position as protector of the Pope, hoped to forestall Austria and France in the race to re-establish the Temporal Power. Had not his large, though not very efficient armies been already threatening the Roman border, the Republic would have sent Garibaldi to the assistance of King Charles Albert against the Austrians, in the fatal Novara campaign (March 14-23).'

Charles Albert, who, in fighting and suffering with Italy in the Lombard war, had learnt too late to sympathise with the people, was a Liberal, perhaps for the first time in his life, during the six months that followed the surrender of Milan to the Austrians and the armistice of August 1848. Though he himself was safe in Turin, he could not forget those scenes of the retreat through Milan, and the cries of a people thrust back into slavery. He was a haunted man, and his naturally diseased imagination turned from religious to political visions. He too ate Austria in his bread.' Radetzky's brutal punishment of those who had trusted him to save them stirred him like a personal insult, and at length he found that neither he nor his Piedmontese subjects could any longer endure to watch the agonies of Loev. i. 128, 129.

Lombardy. But when, on March 14, 1849, he denounced the armistice, and gathered his forces for a last rush on Milan, Radetzky was better prepared than he. Crossing into Piedmontese territory, the Austrians won the decisive victory of Novara (March 23), where, once more, brave fighting and bad generalship distinguished the Italian army.

Charles Albert had vainly sought death in the battle. To obtain better terms for his country, he abdicated the throne and rode away disguised through the Austrian lines. Before that summer was ended, he had died in a Portuguese cloister, his heart broken for Italy. Much is forgiven him, because he loved her much. He had long imagined, in his religious and mystical melancholy, that God had set him apart to procure her liberation, on condition that he himself became a sacrifice,' and that unselfish thought may well be repeated by history as her final judgment of his life.

Young Victor Emmanuel, left to cope with triumphant enemies and mutinous subjects, inherited the allegiance of a still formidable army and the attachment of a small band of servants of the House of Savoy, as Liberal as the Whigs of the Reform Bill, but as loyal as any Swiss guard. He saved Piedmont from conquest, partly through the assistance of very serious threats made by France against Austria, partly by consenting to abandon for the time the Democratic parties in the rest of Italy. Austria insisted, as a matter of course, that he should leave Venice to its fate by the withdrawal of his fleet from the Adriatic-an act of necessity which the Republicans throughout the Peninsula factiously charged against him as a crime. But there was one thing which he would not surrender, and that was the Constitution granted by his father to Piedmont. All the tempting offers made by Radetzky to induce him to 'modify' the great charter, which was destined to become the law of the kingdom of united Italy, were met by his staunch refusal, now celebrated in Italian popular art, which loves to depict the young and spirited king turning

Della Rocca, 28.