ally separated from the rest, and walked home | appeared to me on this occasion to treat the most together, arriving some five minutes later than piadosa Isabel with positive rudeness. the others; and on telling Henry the story, she expressed her very great astonishment at finding that the parents of the girl could see no harm in what she had done, and actually upheld her." It is to be hoped that there are few women in the Peninsula so much to be commiserated as her Majesty its Queen. If she has been belied by those who have held her up to the scorn of the world, she has been much wronged. If she has not been belied she is still, if all accounts are true, greatly to be pitied. The writer of these letters gives upon the whole a more generous view of her character and position than has usually been taken of it: "I do not know," she writes, " if I have told you anything of the Queen. She is exactly like her photographs, except that you must add to them a nose and lips that look as if newly stung by a wasp. The first time I saw her was in the opera, and then she wore a dress of cherry coloured and black satin, in stripes about six inches wide, you may imagine it was not very becoming to her. "Whatever the Queen may be, however, she never had a fair chance of being an honest woman, and she is at least as much sinned against as sinning. In her younger days, I believe, she was regularly encouraged and trained in all sorts of excesses by her mother, who was anxious to keep the power in her own hands by any means within reach. been very well whipped, and he is almost lost to "The king looks like a little boy who has sight behind his wife's portly figure. He is always spoken of with the greatest contempt, and is called Paquito,' the extreme diminutive of Francisco. He is a meagre, weak-looking little man, with a high treble voice, which makes him still more ridiculous. "They tell a story of him here, that at the time of the African war, O'Donnell was talking to the queen about it, and she, becoming very enthusiastic, cried out, Ay, si yo fuere hombre, yo iria!' Ah, if I only were a man, I would 'And so would I,' go too.'-'Y yo tambien.' squeaked the king.” Our author was in Madrid during Prim's abortive attempt to get at the head of affairs, and describes what came to her knowledge of it in a chapter which has an historical interest, and is also amusing. She gives O'Donnell credit for his moderation under the circumstances, and does not seem to have formed a high opinion of the conduct of the Progresistas, nor yet of the people, of whom she says that they " pear perfectly unconcerned to shrug their shoulders is the utmost sign of interest they give. They do not," she continues, 66 : ap care a straw which side wins, so long as they have plenty of paper cigars, and can take the sun in peace and quietness." Writing on January 19, 1866, she says: "She has, however, a frank, pleasing expression, which makes you fancy she must have been comely enough when she was young; and her manners are said to be singularly agreeable, and withal queenly. Every one says that after you have been a short time in her company you forget what she is in the charm of her manner. Among the lower classes and the country people she is popular, for she is extremely religious, I use the word advisedly, and is very generous and easy of access. This may account for the praise which Caballero, that most (Roman) Catholic of writers, lavishes on her; but in Madrid I never saw much evidence of popularity. When the last baby was born, I went to see the procession to the Atocha to present the little creature to the Virgin. The Pra- "We are still in the same pleasant state of do was filled with the carriages of the grandees, uncertainty here: still under martial law, and each with their six or eight horses, with col-I, at least, am unable to get out any distance oured plumes. Then came the foreign ministers and all the great people, in full gala dress; and the Queen's riding-horses, magnificently caparisoned, and led by grooms clothed in gold tissue. Lastly, after all the Infantes and Infantas had passed in state carriages, came the great gilt coach, containing the Queen and King, and the Asturian nurse holding the baby. A few listless, uninterested-looking people were lounging on the Prado, nothing approaching to a crowd; but they took no sort of notice of the royal party, not even raising a hat as the Queen bowed from side to side. One heard a few halfjeering, half-growling remarks on the position of the King, and whispered hints that the right man was not in the right place, and that was all. I believe the Spanish people were never in the habit of cheering their sovereigns, but they from home, for it is not safe for ladies to be in the street now on account of the 'runs' which are always taking place. Every day since Prim went out we have been told in the strictest confidence that the revolution was to begin that night. The porter of the house has been in a chronic state of terror, and is always closing the outer gates and rushing up with a white face to tell us there is firing going on in some of the streets. For the first ten days we were always going into the balcony to listen for this same firing, and two nights, when it had seemed unusually certain the great event was to come off, we sat up till two or three o'clock in the morning; but after so many false cries of wolf' we have become quite savage, and have posted up a notice over the mirror in the drawing-room, Il est défendu de parler de la révolution.' One night ་ runs. A day will come for Spain, but she must bide her time. Meanwhile we welcome such volumes as the one before us. It does not pretend to much, but it realizes rather more than it promises. It deals with superficialities, but deals sincerely with them, and, upon the whole, truly. From The Fortnightly Review. men. an alarm was given, and in a few minutes all tudes by which, only six months later, the the theatres and the opera-house were emptied, coping-stone was laid on that edifice of the people flying home as best they might of Italian nationality, at the foundation of course, it was nothing; and you have no notion which he had himself so powerfully laboured. how extremely absurd it is to see one of these D'Azeglio could not have foretold Sadowa; First come cabs and carriages rattling he had not preconceived Solferino. Inpast at full gallop, then a troop of men tearing deed, those two battles fought by foreigners along with their long cloaks flying behind them, to rid Italy of the presence of foreigners making them look like terrified bats; after every one is safely housed, and not a living soul is to were not merely out of his reckonings; they be seen in the streets but the inevitable civil were also out of his wishes. His motto guards, they begin to ask each other what they was that of Charles Albert, and of 1848, were running for-Because you ran,' is the "Italy shall manage for herself." Revoluonly answer; but who first begins to scamper no tion, in his conceit, should be the result of one seems to know." regeneration; the change should be moral ians should first have aspired to be men. and social no less than political. The ItalThat being accomplished, the whole world could not have prevented their being freewhole world could not have made them more That not being accomplished, the than freedmen. Therein, we believe, is the key to D'Azeglio's mind, and to the book which is its immediate emanation. Italy and fortune, in his estimation, had achieved wonders. They had conquered their king and dynasty; they had blotted out Parma, Modena, Tuscany, and Naples; they had beggared the Pope; they had-two-andtwenty millions of them-proclaimed Italy "one and indivisible; " they had accomplished what seemed to him impossible, what hardly appeared to him desirable. Only what victory had they achieved over themselves? What had they done towards what he deemed so easy, towards what he had so long urged and would have enforced, towards the rehabilitation of their moral character? That was the question he put to himself and to them; a question that remains to be answered. Had even D'Azeglio not died in sight of the land of promise, had he lived to see the last Austrian driven from the Quadrilateral, the burden of his song would still have been the same. The Italians might have Venice as they had had Milan. They could get Rome as they had. got Venice. But what had they done, what were they doing, to put themselves into such a position as to feel sure that what the foreigner had given, the foreigner could never take away? What proofs had they given, or were they giving, of their aptitude for self-defence or self-government? In the two volumes which his young countryman, Count Maffei, has just brought out in marvellously correct and idiomatic English, we have D'Azeglio's experiences, from the earliest reminiscences of his childhood up to the very period in which his political career may be said to have begun. With respect to his exploits as a patriotic warrior and statesman, we are dependent on such information as his editor and translator has supplied us, both in the notes and in an excellent introduction. That is the history of D'Azeglio's life, and it is casily to be made out of the pages of recent Italian annals; but, in these volumes, we have the romance of that life, the romance of the whole life; we have the inmost soul of the man, its aspirations no less than its regrets, the revelation of the motives which influenced action or which determined inaction, a full confession of what was done and what was left undone, the thought everywhere given as complement to the deed. The book of memoirs was undertaken when the writer was sixty-five years old; when he felt that he had done with existence, It was with a view to inculcate upon his and what was left to him was a period of countrymen the necessity of a moral revoblank retirement-a foretaste of the grave. lution that D'Azeglio laid before them the The compte rendu is final; it gives the last narrative of that change that had been results and conclusions beyond any chance wrought upon himself, for he also had been of revision- the writer's convictions, as it one of them; and no sermon, he conceived, were, stiffened in death. D'Azeglio died could be more efficacious than the example in January, 1866. He was far in his last of the reclaimed sinner. Could every Italdays from foreseeing the portentous vicissi-ian be made into a D'Azeglio, he reasoned - most unconsciously, for nothing was more | session of it, a native of that country may alien from his nature than the slightest be tolerated by foreigners, but as to being shadow of pharisaic pride-Italy might on terms of equality with them- -never." hope to secure by valour what had been be- Nothing could be more salutary than "this stowed upon her by fortune. sense of humiliation, which," as he soon Born with the very dawn of the present adds, "kept him sad company almost century, Massimo D'Azeglio constituted through life," and which strangely contrasta connecting link between Old and New ed with the conceit of Gioberti, who wrote Italy. Brought up in a society in which a book to vindicate for his countrymen the the word Frenchman was synonymous with first rank among nations, or that of Mazliberal, and that of Austrian with conserva-zini, who was sure that Italy has twice ruled tive, he belonged to a family distinguished the world, and that her turn could not fail for its heroic loyalty to the House of Savoy, to come for the third time. and was the son of a nobleman who had devoted himself to the service of his native princes, and had been involved in their ruin. But, although the young Massimo grew up among this reactionary party at a time in which their fidelity and sufferings entitled them to respect and sympathy, although he had before him the example of the exceptionally high character of his father, he was not slow in perceiving the hopeless rottenness of that decrepit society; and when, upon its recovering its ascend ency, nothing would have been easier for him than to share its honours and privileges, he gave himself no rest till he had broken with his caste at once and for ever; and, strongly attached as he was to his family, and not a stranger to the worst dissipations which constituted high life in the Piedmontese capital for a few years after the restoration, he found courage in his heart to begin life again, upon that ground of self-dependence which alone, as he fancied, could entitle him to self-respect; he turned his back upon home and country, and removed to Rome, almost penniless, with a settled determination to earn his bread as a landscape-painter. He Strong and active as this instinct of the necessity for his own regeneration and that of his country at all times was in the depth of D'Azeglio's heart, it did not prevent him from keeping up a genial, sympathetic appearance, which gained him easy admittance into every rank of society, and insured his popularity wherever he appeared. There was nothing in the least stern or forbidding in his austerity. With a handsome countenance, a commanding person, a consummate blandness and courtesy of address, he combined a readiness of humour, dry and caustic, which to a great extent enabled him not only to touch pitch without too much defiling himself, but even without altogether dissembling his disgust at the contact. was in the world, yet not of it. Nothing can be more repulsive, yet nothing more amusing, than the candour and simplicity with which he paints the interior of that shocking Roman society. There was nothing in it that he could believe in, revere, or love; nothing in its religious, political, or domestic relations in which his upright mind could seek a refuge against utter desolation; but he had another world of his own, a world of thought and work, into which As he voluntarily stepped down among he could withdraw at his pleasure; he had the lower ranks of society, with a heart his own sense of right, his hidden purpose, warming to the sons of toil whose fellowship he had courted, he soon perceived, however, that there was in that unfortunate Italy of his "in the lowest deep a lower deep," that the atmosphere of Rome was a It was only upon quitting Rome, howhundred times more corrupt than that of ever, after spending the ten best years of Turin, and that the lower strata of both his life between the toils of the apprenticewere by no means less mephitic than the ship of his art and the follies of his attachupper ones. His first feeling was "despairment to an unworthy object-it was only at being a noble;" his second, shame at upon returning to his northern latitudes of being an Italian." The sight of the Eng- Turin and Milan that he seemed to become lish in Rome was particularly galling to aware that he had a mission, and dedicated him, and for a good reason. "Their cold himself in all earnestness to its fulfilment. bearing, the quiet self-possessed pride writ- At Milan he made himself known as a ten on their faces," he says, "all seemed novel-writer no less than as a landscapeinvented on purpose to mortify me, to make painter; and both in his pictures and in his me feel my inferiority, to give me to under- books he gave people to understand that stand that when a country has for centu- he had a meaning. His intent was to ries belonged to whoever chose to take pos- revolutionise Italy; but it was a revolution 66 which not only bade him not to give in to evil, but even to turn his knowledge of evil into a means of eventually grappling with it. which every Italian should begin with himself. By deep thought and hard work he had himself effected his own redemption. Whoever would in the same manner labour at his own regeneration was sure, in his opinion, to contribute to the emancipation of the country. It was not true, he contended, that no scope was left for action in an enslaved community; not true that any government could degrade a people beyond the point to which the people themselves consented to their own degradation; not true that any tyranny had power to kill the soul. from the abhorred Jesuits. The conspiracy was henceforth to be nobody's secret. People should look the Austrians full in the face, and give them plainly to understand that Italy would be sure to give them notice to quit as soon as she could muster up strength commensurate with her goodwill. In order to gather up this needful strength, it was necessary to enlist the forces of the nation without too nice a discrimination of parties. The aim of all sects, as it is in their nature, had been selection, therefore division. D'Azeglio's impulse was towards reconciliation. Free to every D'Azeglio settled at Milan in the very Italian to lend a hand to Italy, even to seat of Austrian domination. He took the" that old traitor," Charles Albert, even to bull by the horns; he wrote patriotic novels; he painted patriotic pictures; he went with his manuscripts and canvases up to the police. He knocked at the censor's door; applied for permission to publish and exhibit. Books and paintings were "destined to rouse the Italians against the foreigner; "with Austria is with us." yet the imprimatur was given for the novels, and the halls of the Brera made room for the pictures. D'Azeglio himself never was fully aware of the momentous victory that had been achieved. Henceforth, it was understood, opinion, within legal limits, was emancipated in Italy. It became clear that the Italians' own pusillanimity had stood in the way of free utterance far more than all the rigour of Austrian censorship. "You are not allowed to speak out, you say?" D'Azeglio seemed to ask. "Are you sure that you have ever tried? Speak out, all of you, at once, as I do; surely Austria has not hangmen, she has not dungeons, enough to silence you all." "that arch-enemy," the Pope. The writ- the field single-handed and with one mind. D'Azeglio, staunch to his principles, stood up among the foremost ranks of the patriot combatants. One of the very first shots laid him low, and deprived him, in good time for him, of any share in those events by which a movement which had begun under such glorious auspices ended in the most glaring confusion and shame. Italy, it is well known, made sad work of The effect of the publication of "Ettore that crusade. But that was, nevertheless, Fieramosca" and of "Niccolò de' Lapi" the only instance in which that country took was tantamount to the gain of a great pitched battle over the Austrians. The Italians felt that an immense advantage had been secured; but they were also aware that it had been obtained on one conditionthat patriotism should henceforth only take the field with fair weapons and with an open countenance. D'Azeglio seemed to have taken the hint from that honest mountaineer, who, being sent to explore the nakedness of a neighbouring territory, entered the enemy's camp in full daylight, and with a great flourish of trumpets, announcing himself as "Der Spion von Uri." Agreeably to the principles of the new school which he founded in Milan, there was to be an end at once and for ever of the tenebrous work of subterranean Italy; a hearty detestation of that perverse doctrine that "the end justified the means," which the Carbonari and Young Italy sects had borrowed After the disaster of Novara, D'Azeglio found himself by the side of Victor Emanuel, his good angel no less than his prime minister. Italy was lost for the moment. D'Azeglio considered how he could save Piedmont- save her not from foreign outrage, but from her own madness. He forced a peace upon a country that could not make war; he gave that country freedom in return for peace. He won for the king that title of "honest man " which could not be denied to the minister; and when senseless opponents taunted him with inaction, and asked him "what he had been doing?" he answered that he had been living;" and with the Austrians at Milan, the French in Rome, the coup d'état in Paris, and reaction rampant all over the Continent, the mere fact that little constitutional Piedmont had managed for three years to keep soul and body together could indeed be boasted of as no inconsiderable achievement. However, stirring times were not in the long run suited to D'Azeglio's eminently artistic habits; and, after a three years' premiership, he made room for the more aspiring Cavour. 66 66 Count Maffei, in his introduction, has sketched the characters of those two statesmen with considerable skill, and pointed to the abyss" which parted one from the other. 'D'Azeglio," he says, "belonged to the past, Cavour to the new generation. The one had prepared the movement, the other carried it into execution." He adds that "poor D'Azeglio was tired, suffering from his badly healed wound, and that a sort of moral lassitude began to pervade him." D'Azeglio himself declared " qu'il n'était pas dévoré d'ambition, et qu'il n'en pouvait plus physiquement." His rival, on the contrary, if we accept Count Maffei's estimate, was ambition and energy incarnate." Even in a subordinate capacity, his activity was so strongly felt in the cabinet, that D'Azeglio used to say of him, "With this little man at my side, I am like Louis Philippe I reign, but do not govern." : Piedmont to play. In 1859 he had less faith in the results of the Plombières engagements than he who had just come back from that interview. In both instances, however, D'Azeglio found his rival's arguments unanswerable; he was won over to his policy, and lent it no inconsiderable support. "He hesitated no longer, and enlisted himself among the Cavourini." He gave Cavour full credit for that vastness of comprehension, for that soundness of judgment, above all things, for that promptness of action, of which he, the artist and novelist, found himself no longer capable. For all that, however, D'Azeglio could not persuade himself that "honesty should not at all times be the best policy." He saw Cavour putting no end to his official lies, when he deemed it expedient to reassure the Savoyards against the reports of their contemplated annexation to France. He saw him using Boncompagni, a diplomatic agent, in all the dirty work of a conspiracy against the government to which he was accredited. He saw him sending his fleet after Garibaldi with open instructions to thwart the adventurer's expedition, and secret orders "to be too late to oppose his landing.' D'Azeglio could not reconcile himself to a course which "he could not consider quite honourable," and which he did not, therefore, look upon as wise. D'Azeglio was no friend to the King of Naples, to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to any of the Italian princes; but even against them he did not think that double dealing and treachery could be justified. "God in his goodness," he tells us, “had planted in his heart a love of righteousness, and a hatred of injustice and deceit. He had always hated those evils, no matter who was to profit or to be injured by them. He hated them if they profited his enemies; he hated them if they profited his friends, if they profited himself. He would still loathe them if they were profitable to the persons most dear to him in the world, or even if they forwarded the fulfilment of his most ardent yearning to see Italy really reconstituted." The abyss which separated the two great men, however, was owing to something besides difference of age and temperament. D'Azeglio was a man of uncompromising uprightness, the soul of honour even amid the worst errors and follies of his youth. He would not aid a fair cause by foul means. He was a statesman as he had been a patriot, a diplomatist as he had been a conspirator-all fair and above-board." Cavour looked to the end, and troubled himself little about the means. To do nothing was to him the only wrong-doing; not to succeed was the only crime. Already, in 1852, the two friends split, upon Cavour "ratting And not only did he think that no evil from the Right, to which both belonged, and should be done that evil should come of it; going over to Rattazzi― that evil genius of he deemed it impossible that real good Italy, from Novara to Villafranca, from As- should come of evil. It might be very well promonte to Mentana. On the occurrence for Cavour to attempt to outwit Napoleon; of that coalition, or connubio, as it was but the fox should not forget that the lion's called, D'Azeglio resigned his office, with- last argument against craft is force. Caout, however, at any time going over to the vour managed the annexation of Romagna opposition. He was not only the most loyal and Tuscany; but, to say nothing of his of retired ministers, but the most amenable loss of Savoy and Nice, he forfeited, for to the views and purposes of his successor. himself and his countrymen, that self-reIn 1854 he thought a Crimean campaign spect upon which alone independence should rather too bold a card for half-bankrupt be based. And, after all, it was with the |