as those which glow in our Italian sky. I will no longer delay the business of the Assembly."

The usual phrases, the wonted formula: the Rome of the People replaces the Rome of the Popes and the Rome of Cæsars, to give Italy unity and freedom, and to renovate mankind. It is a vague, almost a mystic formula, as all Mazzini's are. That he has no welldefined system, religious, social, or political, is untrue; for steady, nay dogged, he is in this one proposition, that Italy must become a single State, with Rome for her capital, through the medium of a revolution, a war, and a democracy. In theology he is a Deist, a Pantheist, and a Rationalist, by turns; or a compound of all. He might seem a Christian, but none can tell whether Catholic or Protestant, or of what denomination. At one time he appeared in every thing to copy La Mennais; another man without a system. He was not always a Republican, or did not show it, at any rate when in 1832 he invited King Charles Albert to act the Liberator. If Republican he were, it was a strange kind of Republic that he fancied, when in 1847 he exhorted Pius IX. "to have faith,' and thought him capable of every national, nay humanitarian, effort. At another time he wrote against the theories of what is called Socialism: then, when the wheel went round, he concocted a fresh Essay, and allied with the Socialists of all nations. I consider Mazzini to be altogether a man of mediocrity, but he is a real genius in point of tenacity, along with unbounded pride under a modest and lowly aspect;

There is also the concise

he is of good morals, liberal, kind, most considerate to his friends, with a great gift of wheedling, and with a headstrong temperament amidst the universal debility of this generation. Amidst the vices of many of his followers, he is virtuous: his language is easy, imaginative, insinuating; he has fantastic notions, which the vulgar take for sublimity; he has pity for the vices, nay too much also for the enormities, of his devotees, and he is always warm in the protection of an associate. His habits and ways are democratic; nay he is an idolater of the people, whom, in heaven and earth, he puts on a level with God. Such, if I mistake not, are the sources of his power. formula, which hoodwinks the simple, for they think everything concise is easy, which it is not; since the configuration of society is composed like that of the individual and of human nature; and in politics such maxims, as adapt themselves to the organic processes that modify human society under the action of time. and of civilisation, are good ones; not such as arrogate mastery over history and time, habit and nature. He talks much of an apostolate and a priesthood, and in fact he has the nature of a priest more than of a statesman: he, too, can see nothing in Italy but his own clique; he wants to tether the world to the round of his one, eternal, immutable idea. What should he care for the woes of mankind! All who suffer for, all who die in, Mazzini, are martyrs; they are not merely inscribed in the register of the free citizens of Italy, it is the martyrology of the Mazzinian Faith which claims them. What are years, what are genera

tions, in the reckoning of the eternal idea? He knows he is to triumph; nay, he seems to know it straight from God: it is a saint, it is one inspired, who speaks; he curses and prays, he blesses and hurls anathema, he is Pontiff, Prince, Apostle, Priest. Well, the clergy are off; and in Rome he is now at home.

While there, he applied himself with all his might to force Tuscany, from that quarter, into the "unification" for which she was not at all minded; and he spread it there, that all the Tuscans wished it, though he knew the contrary; he argued and strove for its enactment; the fiat pronounced at Rome, in the name of God and the people, being enough for him. The Prince of Canino had taken up Mazzini, because he was then the pet of the excited multitude, and because, for one who only wanted rattles, he was the noisiest to be had. This Prince of Canino, who will plume himself even upon ignorance when by such means he can tickle the palates of the ignorant, wants to destroy in a second, barriers, frontiers, custom-houses, and so to unify; and takes no heed, that he is only unifying misery: he means to make people stare, and laughs, perhaps, in his sleeve, while he is speaking with emphasis and pomp; those laugh at any rate who hear him, and know that it is all acting. The Assembly, however, simply decided on sending three Deputies to Tuscany as Commissioners for the unification; and selected Guiccioli, to console him for the ministerial portfolio he had lost; Camerata, who had descended from his seat in the Giunta of State to be the silent member for Ancona on the benches

of the centre; and Gabussi, an adept of the Clubs and the Sects, to whose savage ambition they had to give a sop, or at any rate a play-thing, that he might not vent himself upon Rome: they afterwards added Ciceruacchio and others of the commons, to get up a spectacle for the mob. But the Commissioners of the Assembly made no way at the Palazzo Vecchio, while Ciceruacchio caused mirth out of doors: Guiccioli went off to Venice, as Envoy of the Republic of Rome; the rest returned home; and Tuscany continued Tuscan, a gentle land, where the hurricane of revolution hardly raised the dust upon its face. The idea of an Italian Constituent, in the name of which, from Leghorn to Rome, so much had been subverted, never could be brought to effect, either by the energy of the inventors of that tool, or by the sagacity of the new rulers of Rome and Tuscany. It had been propounded to the Roman Assembly that, under a decree of the late provisional autocracy, they were to hold that the organising virtue and mind of Italy had been transfused by the Sovereign People into their own body; and accordingly a bill was introduced, under which this virtue and mind were again to migrate from the entire Assembly, and take flesh in the persons of sixty members only, the sixty who should obtain the largest numbers of votes. Always the philosophy of the multiplication-table, only a little more complex! With this came big words about the omnipotence of the said Sovereign People, and the universality of the organic virtue in the popular suffrage, superlative refinements and crotchets on the nature and compre

hensiveness of their powers, and other such sophistry, which I shall leave to be unravelled by those who understand it. It is, however, a fact, that Grillenzoni, a well-known physician of Ferrara, and an excellent citizen, whose business it was to scrutinise the plan, and, as it is called, to report upon the bill introduced, was of opinion that they must convene the electoral colleges afresh, in order to choose deputies for the Italian Constituent Assembly. The ministers Rusconi and Saffi, on the other hand, defended the bill on the table; while Audinot thought, and rightly, that at the moment when our arms were being burnished in Upper Italy for the national war, it was out of place to quibble about a Constituent: both right and left, the opinions were various and conflicting; at last the bill was rejected, and it was carried to convene the electoral bodies anew. But convened they

never were.

A keen and boisterous discussion occupied the Assembly, just as if it were dealing with a political argument, at a sitting with closed doors, about striking coin called coppery; that is to say, coin with a base alloy, to bear a nominal value. The warmer Republicans held, that there lay the real treasure-house of the Republic; so they suspected any one of treason against her, who might question the excellence of such measures; and they could not stomach the adverse opinion on the right, where sat the members most versed in economical subjects. Accordingly the Ministry received authority to coin 1,000,000 crowns of this base metal, of which the intrinsic value was to