Let us try to be just.  The unification of Italy has been the result of a noble conception.  The execution of the scheme has not been without faults, and some of these faults have brought about deplorable, even disastrous, consequences, such as to endanger the stability of the new order.  The worst of these attendant errors has been the sudden imposition of a most superficial and vicious culture, under the name of enlightenment and education.  The least of the new Government’s mistakes has been a squandering of the public money, which, when considered with reference to the country’s resources, has perhaps no parallel in the history of nations.

Yet the first idea was large, patriotic, even grand.  The men who first steered the ship of the state were honourable, disinterested, devoted—­men like Minghetti, who will not soon be forgotten—­loyal, conservative monarchists, whose thoughts were free from exaggeration, save that they believed almost too blindly in the power of a constitution to build up a kingdom, and credited their fellows almost too readily with a purpose as pure and blameless as their own.  Can more be said for these?  I think not.  They rest in honourable graves, their doings live in honoured remembrance—­would that there had been such another generation to succeed them.

And having said thus much, let us return to the individuals who have played a part in the history of the Saracinesca.  They have grown older, some gracefully, some under protest, some most unbecomingly.

In the end of the year 1887 old Leone Saracinesca is still alive, being eighty-two years of age.  His massive head has sunk a little between his slightly rounded shoulders, and his white beard is no longer cut short and square, but flows majestically down upon his broad breast.  His step is slow, but firm still, and when he looks up suddenly from under his wrinkled lids, the fire is not even yet all gone from his eyes.  He is still contradictory by nature, but he has mellowed like rare wine in the long years of prosperity and peace.  When the change came in Rome he was in the mountains at Saracinesca, with his daughter-in-law, Corona and her children.  His son Giovanni, generally known as Prince of Sant’ Ilario, was among the volunteers at the last and sat for half a day upon his horse in the Pincio, listening to the bullets that sang over his head while his men fired stray shots from the parapets of the public garden into the road below.  Giovanni is fifty-two years old, but though his hair is grey at the temples and his figure a trifle sturdier and broader than of old, he is little changed.  His son, Orsino, who will soon be of age, overtops him by a head and shoulders, a dark youth, slender still, but strong and active, the chief person in this portion of my chronicle.  Orsino has three brothers of ranging ages, of whom the youngest is scarcely twelve years old.  Not one girl child has been given to Giovanni and Corona and they almost wish that one of the sturdy little lads had been a daughter.  But old Saracinesca laughs and shakes his head and says he will not die till his four grandsons are strong enough to bear him to his grave upon their shoulders.