banners, as a token that they would fight for, would animate, one another.  All was done in that beautiful poetic manner peculiar to this artist people; but it was the spirit, so great and tender, that melts my heart to think of.  It was the spirit of true religion,—­such, my Country! as, welling freshly from some great hearts in thy early hours, won for thee all of value that thou canst call thy own, whose groundwork is the assertion, still sublime though thou hast not been true to it, that all men have equal rights, and that these are birth-rights, derived from God alone.

I rejoice to say that the Americans took their share on this occasion, and that Greenough—­one of the few Americans who, living in Italy, takes the pains to know whether it is alive or dead, who penetrates beyond the cheats of tradesmen and the cunning of a mob corrupted by centuries of slavery, to know the real mind, the vital blood, of Italy—­took a leading part.  I am sorry to say that a large portion of my countrymen here take the same slothful and prejudiced view as the English, and, after many years’ sojourn, betray entire ignorance of Italian literature and Italian life, beyond what is attainable in a month’s passage through the thoroughfares.  However, they did show, this time, a becoming spirit, and erected the American eagle where its cry ought to be heard from afar,—­where a nation is striving for independent existence, and a government representing the people.  Crawford here in Rome has had the just feeling to join the Guard, and it is a real sacrifice for an artist to spend time on the exercises; but it well becomes the sculptor of Orpheus,—­of him who had such faith, such music of divine thought, that he made the stones move, turned the beasts from their accustomed haunts, and shamed hell itself into sympathy with the grief of love.  I do not deny that such a spirit is wanted here in Italy; it is everywhere, if anything great, anything permanent, is to be done.  In reference to what I have said of many Americans in Italy, I will only add, that they talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home.  They come ready trained to that mode of reasoning which affirms that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better.

As to the English, some of them are full of generous, intelligent sympathy;—­indeed what is more solidly, more wisely good than the right sort of Englishmen!—­but others are like a gentleman I travelled with the other day, a man of intelligence and refinement too as to the details of life and outside culture, who observed, that he did not see what the Italians wanted of a National Guard, unless to wear these little caps.  He was a man who had passed five years in Italy, but always covered with that non-conductor called by a witty French writer “the Britannic fluid.”