It was the aim of D’Azeglio to bring to bear an enlightened public opinion on the evils which were generally admitted, without provoking revolutionary risings, in which he had no faith.  Like other Italian patriots, he desired to see his country freed from foreign domination, and was as much disliked by Metternich as by Mazzini.  The Austrian statesman ridiculed the idea of Italian unity, and called Italy a “geographical expression.”  What he considered an impossibility is now realized as a fact.  His judgment of the papacy however was wiser.  A “liberal Pope,” he declared, “is not a possible being.”  To all the reforms advocated by Italian statesmen the Pope, whatever his name, has remained consistently inflexible.  The words ascribed to the Jesuits would apply to all the Popes,—­“Let us remain as we are, or let us exist no longer.”  To every proposition for reform the cry has been, Non possumus.  The minutest concession has been obstinately refused,—­a fact so well known that even in Rome itself no other course has been possible among its discontented people than absolute rebellion.  Something was hoped from Pius IX.; but all hopes of reforms at his hand vanished soon after his elevation in 1846.  He did, indeed, soon after his accession, publish an amnesty for political offences; but this was a matter of grace, to show his kindness of heart, not to indicate any essential change in the papal policy.

Benevolence and charity are two different things from sympathy with reform and liberality of mind.  The first marked Metternich and Alexander I. of Russia, as well as Pius IX.  The most urbane and graceful of princes may be inflexible tyrants so far as government is concerned, like Augustus and Louis XIV.  You may be charmed with the manners and genial disposition and unaffected piety of a dignitary of the Church, but there can be no cordial agreement with him respecting the rights of the people any more than as to Church dogmas, even if you yield up ninety-nine points out of a hundred.  The intensest bigotry and narrowness are compatible with the most charming manners and the noblest acts of personal kindness.  This truth is illustrated by the characters drawn by Sir Walter Scott in his novels, and by Hume in his histories.  It explains the inconsistencies of hospitable English Tories, of old-fashioned Southern planters, of the haughty nobles of Austria who gathered around the table of the most accomplished gentleman in Europe,—­equally famous for his graceful urbanities and infamous for his uncompromising hostility to the leaders of liberal movements.  On the other hand, those who have given the greatest boons to humanity have often been rough in manners, intolerant of infirmities, bitter in their social prejudices, hard in their dealings, and acrid in their tempers; and if they were occasionally jocular, their jokes were too practical to be in high favor with what is called good society.

Now D’Azeglio was a high-born gentleman, aristocratic in all his ideas, and, what was unusual with Italian nobles, a man of enlarged and liberal views, who favored reforms if they could be carried out in a constitutional way,—­like Lord John Russell and the great English Whig noblemen who passed the Reform Bill, or like the French statesmen of the type of Thiers and Guizot.