Some years of outward quiet doubtless confirmed him in the first opinion, while the second was not likely to be shaken by the next attempt that was made to take up arms for freedom.  On the 28th of June 1828, several villages in the province of Salerno rose in obedience to the harangues of two patriotic ecclesiastics, Canon de Luca and Carlo da Celle, superior of a capuchin convent.  This was meant to develop into a general insurrection, but it was nowhere followed up, and the sword of vengeance fell speedily on the wretched villagers.  Surrounded by the royal troops, they were forced into submission, many were shot on the spot, others were dragged in chains to Salerno, not even a drop of water being allowed them during the journey under the scorching sun.  The village of Bosco was rased to the ground.  The priest, the monk, and twenty-two insurgents were shot after the repression.  The heads of the victims were cut off and placed in iron cages where their wives or mothers were likely to see them.  A woman went to Naples to beg for the pardon of her two grandsons, by name Diego and Emilio.  The King, with barbarous clemency, told her to choose one.  In vain she entreated that if both could not be saved the choice should be left to chance, or decided by someone else.  But no; unless she chose they would both be shot.  At last she chose Diego.  Afterwards she went mad, and was constantly heard wailing:  ‘I have killed my grandson Emilio.’  This anecdote gives a fair notion of Francis I., whose short reign was, however, less signalised by acts of cruelty, though there were enough of these, than by a venality never surpassed.  The grooms-in-waiting and ladies-of-the-bedchamber sold the public offices in the daylight; and the King, who was aware of it, thought it a subject for vulgar jokes with his intimates.  Francis died in 1830 of bad humour at the Paris revolution, and was succeeded by Ferdinand II., to be known hereafter as Bomba—­then a clownish youth, one of whose first kingly cares was to create St Ignatius Loyola a Field-Marshal.

The revolution which upset the throne of Charles X., and ushered in the eighteen years’ reign of the Citizen King, seemed likely to have momentous consequences for Italy.  The principle of non-intervention proclaimed by French politicians would, if logically enforced, sound the death-knell of the Austrian power in Italy.  Dupin, the Minister of War, enlarged on the theme in a speech which appeared to remove all doubt as to the real intentions of the Government.  ‘One phrase,’ he remarked, ’has made a general impression; it expresses the true position of a loyal and generous Government.  Not only has the President of the Council laid down the principle that France should abstain from intervention; he has declared that she would not tolerate intervention on the part of others.  France might have shut herself up in a cold egotism, and simply said that she would not intervene; this would have been contemptible,