she liked with Italy.  There is a certain brutal straightforwardness in the line of argument.  Lord Castlereagh did not say that independence was not a good thing.  He had tried to obtain it for Poland and had failed; he had not tried to obtain it for Italy, because he was afraid of offending Austria.  At least he had the courage to tell the truth, and did not prate about the felicity of being subjects of the Austrian Emperor, as many English partisans of Austria prated in days to come.

The political map of Italy in the summer of 1814 showed the Pope (Pius VII.) reinstated in Rome, Victor Emmanuel I. at Turin, Ferdinand III. of Hapsburg-Lorraine in Tuscany, the Genoese Republic for the moment restored by the English, Parma and Piacenza assigned to the Empress Marie-Louise, and Modena to the Austrian Archduke Francis, who was heir through the female line to the last of the Estes.  Murat was still at Naples, Ferdinand IV. in Sicily, Austria acknowledged supreme in Lombardy and Venetia, and the island of Elba ironically handed over to Napoleon.  These were the chief features, so far as Italy was concerned, of the Treaty of Paris, signed on the 30th of May 1814.  Next year the Congress of Vienna modified the arrangement by providing that the Spanish Infanta Maria Louisa, on whom had been bestowed the ex-republic of Lucca, should have the reversion of Parma and Piacenza, while Lucca was to go in the end to Tuscany.  Murat having been destroyed, the Neapolitan Bourbons recovered all their old possessions.  San Marino and Monaco were graciously recognised as independent, which brought the number of Italian states up to ten.  The Sardinian monarchy received back the part of Savoy which by the Treaty of Paris had been reserved to France.  It was also offered a splendid and unexpected gift—­Genoa.

Lord William Bentinck entered Genoa by a convention concluded with the authorities on the 18th of April 1814.  A naval demonstration following an ably-conducted operation, by which Bentinck’s hybrid force of Greeks and Calabrese, with a handful of English, became master of the two principal forts, hastened this conclusion, but the Genoese had no reluctance to open their gates to the English commander, who inspired them with the fullest confidence.  He came invested with the halo of a constitution-maker-under-difficulties; it was known that he had stopped at nothing in carrying out his mission in Sicily; not even at getting rid of the Queen, who found in Bentinck the Nemesis for having led a greater Englishman to stain his fame in the roads of Naples.  Driven rather than persuaded to leave Sicily, Marie Antoinette’s sister encountered so frightful a sea voyage that she died soon after joining her relations at Vienna.  Lord William had acquired the art of writing the finest appeals to the love of freedom; a collection of his manifestoes would serve as handy-book to anyone instructed to stir up an oppressed nationality.  He immediately gave the Genoese some specimens of his skill as a writer, and by granting them at once a provisional constitution, he dispelled all doubts about the future recognition of their republic.  What was not, therefore, their dismay, when they were suddenly informed of the decision of the Holy Alliance to make a present of them to the people whom, of all others, they probably disliked the most.  Italians had not ceased yet from reserving their best aversion for their nearest neighbours.