people who are, by the way, not uncommonly natives of the Emerald Isle -generally do a great deal in the talking way when they come down to breakfast in the public room of the hotel, and when they reveal to each other, quite naturally and artlessly, the contents of their letters just received. "Did you hear from dear Lady Jane this morning, Louisa?" asks

mamma.

"Yes. I had quite a long letter full of all sorts of small woes. You remember that darling little pug which she never would let out of her sight. Well, it has got the distemper, and is likely to die; and dear Jane's favourite mare has fallen down, and done something or other to her knees; and Lady Maria is staying at the Castle, and both the dear children have got the measles. In short, nothing but misfortunes."

"Dear Lady Jane is always so open-hearted and yearning for sympathy," remarks mamma.

"I never knew anyone so ready to bestow it upon others," puts in the friend.

"They are talking," continues the young lady who has had the happiness of receiving the letter, whose contents are being thus made public property, "they are talking of letting the castle for the season, and of going over to winter in Rome, which would certainly be most delightful, as we should meet them there. I shall certainly write and urge them to adhere to the plan."

"There will be a large gathering of the best English families in Rome this winter," says the small sycophantic gentleman at the foot of the table, speaking very solemnly. "It will be most delightful."

Of this sort is the conversation which is engaged in by persons who are in the habit of talking in public. It is not very profitable, nor, one would say, very entertaining, yet to some people-judging by their extraordinary readiness to engage in such talk-it appears to afford a considerable amount of gratification. You get at last to know one of these universal talkers at the first glance. As you take your seat in a railwaycarriage or on the deck of a steamer, you detect him at once. He brightens up with a horrid alacrity at your approach. It is in vain that you try to check his first advances. You may endeavour to hide behind your newspaper, or pretend to be absorbed in the book which you have just purchased, but it will not do. You pause to cut a few pages of your book, or to turn your newspaper over so as to get at the police-reports, and he is down upon you in a moment. He offers you, with a terrible cheerfulness, his own journal, pointing to an article on the state of the country which he thinks you would like to peruse, or he asks you to lend him one of your newspapers which you are not reading. In some way or other, and whether you like it or not, he beats down all the barricades which you have been so careful to set up, and compels you to enter with him upon the discussion of various vapid and uninteresting matters, as to which he is desirous of taking your opinion, or of expressing his own.

111

Garibaldi's Last Campaign.

Ir was 5 A.M. on the morning of the 9th September when I entered the splendid salon of the Swiss bank overlooking the Lake of Geneva, and found Garibaldi busily occupied in putting the last touch to the resolutions he intended to propose to the Peace Congress, whose first meeting was to be held at noon. He gave me a hearty welcome, asked after my inseparable friend and comrade A., who was sleeping off the weariness of the journey over Mont Cenis, and handed me his resolutions, saying"Who returns with me must be ready at 9 A.M. on Wednesday." Ready for what?" I asked.

66

86

The

Ready to go to Rome." "I thought we were summoned to Geneva to preach and listen to sermons on peace?" He pointed to the 7th resolution—“ Slaves alone have a right to make war on their tyrants." The Congress opened brilliantly. grand simplicity of the Electoral Hall, with its fresh playing fountains, the blended fragrance of flowers of every hue, the escutcheons of the Free Cantons encircling the motto, "Each for all, and all for each," the presence of some of the noblest thinkers and bravest doers of the nineteenth century, engendered a frame of mind in which the belief in a future when peace and good-will shall reign supreme, was possible, even easy. Nor did anything occur on Monday or Tuesday to dispel the illusion. On Wednesday, at the precise time fixed at the instant of his arrival, Garibaldi started by train from Geneva, and taking the Sempione route, alighted at the house of Signora Adelaide Cairoli, who in 1859 had sent her five brave sons to Turin from Pavia to fight under Garibaldi for Italian freedom. Carlo died at St. Fermo in 1859, and Benedetto was crippled for life at Varese; Luigi died in Naples, and Enrico received a bullet in his forehead at Palermo. While I write, they are bearing the body of Enrico, killed under the walls of Rome, back to his mother; while Giovanni, the youngest, lies wounded and a prisoner in the secret cell of S. Michele in Rome.

Arriving in Florence on the 15th, Garibaldi heard for the first time of the tempest in a teapot brewed by local ambition in Geneva; learned for the first time, from the English papers, of "his sudden disappearance, his flight before the indignation of the Genevese," and laughed heartily at the same; wrote a short and scornful denial of the unfounded calumnies, then turned his thoughts and set his face Romewards.

It was well known to him that the proposed expedition was disapproved of by all his best officers. Some, entangled in the web of ministerial complications, were vexed at this interruption of their schemes; others deemed the moment inopportune from a financial and military

point of view. The Republicans felt an invincible repugnance to unfurl any other flag in Rome save that under which their four thousand heroes fell in 1849. Moreover, they maintained that the House of Savoy would not dare to dethrone Papacy and proclaim "Italy-One, Free, and Independent," from the Capitol. Single-minded and tenacious, Garibaldi's line of reasoning was straightforward and intelligible. "It is too late now to discuss the programme accepted in 1859. We are twenty-five millions. People and Parliament have voted one Italy, with Rome for the capital, under the sceptre of Victor Emmanuel. Victor Emmanuel has accepted the plebesciti and the formula. In 1860 I was induced to stop short in my liberating career, believing that the unanimous manifestation of the national will would convince Europe of the necessity of allowing us to realize our legitimate aspirations. In 1862 I was shot down on the road to Rome, lest Italy should be plunged into a war with France. Now the French have evacuated Rome, the Romans are ripe for insurrection (even the September Convention does not pretend to fetter that), they claim our promised help. We went in a thousand to Sicily; as many at least will come with me to Rome."

This is neither the place nor the moment to trace the ambiguous conduct of the Government, persisted in throughout, so that all but the initiated believed that the old Cavourian policy of 1860 was dominant. Had there been a resolute determination to prevent a movement in Rome, and to hinder Garibaldi from arousing the provinces, nothing was easier in the undecided state of public opinion than to insure the tranquillity of both; but it was generally believed that if Rome should rise, the Ministry would offer no opposition then to "aid from the Italians to their Roman brethren;" nay, that the regular army would forestal the triumphs of the volunteers by entering the capital, and leaving them scattered through the provinces. Rattazzi's partisans maintain that this was his programme; that the order for the troops to cross only awaited the royal signature, which was indignantly refused, and that this refusal was the cause of the Premier's resignation. Be that as it may, it is clear that to play a Cavourian game, Cavourian skill is needed; and that in the present instance that skill was pitiably wanting.

With the pledge to his friends that he would not cross the frontier until the Romans should have commenced the insurrection, Garibaldi had, by the middle of September, won to his side most of his old officers, whose allegiance to the Duce was stronger than their parliamentary scruples ; stronger even than their fear of failure. Only the staunch Republicans remained still aloof; at which he laughed mischievously, saying, "The first shot will bring them to the field: a campaign without the Puritans would be indeed a novelty." The warning printed in the Official Gazette, on the 21st September, affected him not at all. He was used to "warnings" and "prohibitions" even from royal lips, and as used to their giving place to royal thanks when the forbidden fruit was really plucked.

So at 10 A.M. on the 22nd September we started, a small party, for Arezzo. The people crowded to welcome the "guest waited for since 1849;" and, with the exception of the prefect and his lady, I should say that every man, woman, and child of the populous town sunned themselves in his smile as he sat watching the races in the huge amphitheatre, and awarded the prize to "Constancy," who, after throwing her jockey, outdistanced her competitors, and halted riderless at the winningpost just under his balcony. On the morrow we went to breakfast at St. Maria, the olive-crowned mount on which, in 1849, he had encamped with his four thousand soldiers in his baffled march from Rome to Venice; and after listening with evident satisfaction to the new war hymn of his own composition, set to Donizetti's music, we set out in carriages for the Val di Chiana, to visit some friends at Sina Lunga, and to spend a day on Lake Thrasimene. More than once we objected to this journey, to halting in lonely, isolated villages, urging the facility of arrest, the impossibility of resistance; but Garibaldi replied, "We are fifty miles from the frontier; you hear how I answer the volunteers who clamour to be led to Rome,- Wait till the Romans call you, then hasten to the rescue, you will find me ready to lead:' we are violating no law, we are unarmed; du reste, if they mean to arrest me they can do so in one place as easily as in another."

This was a mistake. The prefect of Arezzo, as we afterwards learned, had the warrant in his hands; had gone to Florence to report the impossibility of effecting the arrest without producing a popular insurrection, and had been sent to concert with the prefect of Perugia for seizure of the General at any small place through which he might pass. On the morrow at 4 A.M., Garibaldi was arrested, in bed, at Sina Lunga, and conveyed by carabineers and a company of the 37th of the line, both commanded by ex-volunteer officers of 1860, towards Florence. At Seste counter-orders arrived, and he was taken to Alessandria. Just one telegram reached Florence, and one England: at half-past seven the Government took possession of the telegraph offices. Only on the morrow was Italy aware that the Member for Ozieri was in durance vile. Florence warned, rebelled; the people disarmed the National Guard; Rattazzi had a near escape; but for the admirable behaviour of the troops, whom no orders could induce, nor even insults provoke, to fire on the people, the massacres of Turin must have been re-enacted in the streets of the new capital.

I arrived at the fortress on the morrow. When conducted to the General's presence, I was surprised to find him in a filthy den, pale and haggard. I expressed my surprise at the sympathetic language of the soldiery who were his jailors; he said he was aware of the state of feeling in the army, or at least in a considerable portion, but "the time was not come to take note thereof; as a national force it must remain compact, must fight Italian foes unitedly." It was evident to me that he would never avail himself of that element either to effect his own

liberation, or even to hasten the accomplishment of his own immediate views: the last chance of uniting Italy under the existing system must be exhausted before Garibaldi would open his lips to absolve the soldier from his oath. The few words he let fall on that occasion explained to me his persistent reticence, when later, companies, nay, battalions, hung on his lips for a hint, a signal, to join the volunteers. The arrival of "Maurizio" with his bath and baggage put him in good humour, and he slept soundly for half-an-hour, wrapped in a railway-rug, while the commander of the fortress courteously led me to see the apartment just prepared, expressing his regret for the den in which I found the General, alleging as an excuse that they had not been warned who was the coming guest. "Well," said Garibaldi, "have you seen my new cage?" "Yes! and for a cage it is clean, airy, and odourless!" "Yes, but still a cage."

In the afternoon he bade me return to Florence via Genoa and Leghorn, to tell his followers to take no thought for him, but to prepare to respond to the faintest Roman call. On arriving at the capital I learned that the mutinous shouts of two regiments of soldiers, besides the Corpo Franco, "To Rome! to Rome with Garibaldi!" had induced the Government to offer him a free passage to Caprera and perfect freedom there: and that following the counsels of certain friends, who persuaded him that his imprisonment would prove fatal to the Roman insurrection, he had consented to embark for Caprera "free and without conditions" (I quote his printed words), "and with the promise of a steamer to reconduct him immediately to terra firma."

He started on Friday, 27th September, and I followed him on Sunday, to get several questions settled which could not be well dealt with on paper. In order not to make the eighteen hours' voyage to no purpose, I went to the Minister of the Interior to ascertain whether there would be any difficulty in obtaining access to the General. None! He was perfectly free, but I could only speak with him from boat to boat; he in one, I in another, with a sanitary officer in mine-as Leghorn, owing to the cholera, had a dirty bill of health, whereas Caprera had not been placed in quarantine. "How so?" I asked of the chief of the sanitary department, who had been summoned to give his verdict. "Genoa's bill is as foul as Leghorn's; the General started from Genoa with four companions, and great man as he is, I imagine that if infection can be carried he will carry as much as we pigmies? If the landing of five individuals on the island has not necessitated sanitary precautions, why should the arrival of a sixth compel you to use them?" The sanitary chief looked solemn, said there was salute pubblico and salute pubblico (moral and material, I suppose he meant); that during the insurrection in Sicily troops had been sent from stations infested by cholera; that Caprera, which could not exist without uninterrupted communications with the Maddalena, had not been placed in quarantine out of regard for the General, but that naturally the exception could not be extended to any one else.

So I consented to pass three days and three nights in open boat