assailed only by legal means, when none such were available.  The end was in half-measures, always the worst possible.  He would not entirely yield, and the people would not at all.  The Order was ostensibly dissolved; but great part of the Jesuits really remain here in disguise, a constant source of irritation and mischief, which, if still greater difficulties had not arisen, would of itself have created enough.  Meanwhile, in the earnestness of the clergy about the pretended loss of the head of St. Andrew, in the ceremonies of the holy week, which at this juncture excited no real interest, was much matter for thought to the calm observer as to the restlessness of the new wine, the old bottles being heard to crack on every side, and hour by hour.

Thus affairs went on from day to day,—­the Pope kissing the foot of the brazen Jupiter and blessing palms of straw at St. Peter’s; the Circolo Romano erecting itself into a kind of Jacobin Club, dictating programmes for an Italian Diet-General, and choosing committees to provide for the expenses of the war; the Civic Guard arresting people who tried to make mobs as if famishing, and, being searched, were found well provided both with arms and money; the ministry at their wits’ end, with their trunks packed up ready to be off at a moment’s warning,—­when the report, it is not yet known whether true or false, that one of the Roman Civic Guard, a well-known artist engaged in the war of Lombardy, had been taken and hung by the Austrians as a brigand, roused the people to a sense of the position of their friends, and they went to the Pope to demand that he should take a decisive stand, and declare war against the Austrians.

The Pope summoned, a consistory; the people waited anxiously, for expressions of his were reported, as if the troops ought not to have thought of leaving the frontier, while every man, woman, and child in Rome knew, and every letter and bulletin declared, that all their thought was to render active aid to the cause of Italian independence.  This anxious doubt, however, had not prepared at all for the excess to which they were to be disappointed.

The speech of the Pope declared, that he had never any thought of the great results which had followed his actions; that he had only intended local reforms, such as had previously been suggested by the potentates of Europe; that he regretted the misuse which had been made of his name; and wound up by lamenting over the war,—­dear to every Italian heart as the best and holiest cause in which for ages they had been called to embark their hopes,—­as if it was something offensive to the spirit of religion, and which he would fain see hushed up, and its motives smoothed out and ironed over.