to be distracted by domestic difficulties.  The Austrian government seems as destitute of support from the nation as is possible for a government to be, and the army is no longer what it was, being made up so largely of new recruits.  The Croats are uncertain in their adhesion, the war in Hungary likely to give them much to do; and if the Russian is called in, the rest of Europe becomes hostile.  All these circumstances give Italy a chance she otherwise could not have; she is in great measure unfurnished with arms and money; her king in the South is a bloody, angry, well-armed foe; her king in the North, a proved traitor.  Charles Albert has now declared, war because he could not do otherwise; but his sympathies are in fact all against liberty; the splendid lure that he might become king of Italy glitters no more; the Republicans are in the ascendant, and he may well doubt, should the stranger be driven out, whether Piedmont could escape the contagion.  Now, his people insisting on war, he has the air of making it with a good grace; but should he be worsted, probably he will know some loophole by which to steal out.  The rat will get out and leave the lion in the trap.

The “illustrious Gioberti” has fallen,—­fallen for ever from his high scaffold of words.  His demerits were too unmistakable for rhetoric to hide.  That he sympathized with the Pope rather than the Roman people, and could not endure to see him stripped of his temporal power, no one could blame in the author of the Primato.  That he refused the Italian General Assembly, if it was to be based on the so-called Montanelli system instead of his own, might be conviction, or it might be littleness and vanity.  But that he privily planned, without even adherence of the council of ministers, an armed intervention of the Piedmontese troops in Tuscany, thus willing to cause civil war, and, at this great moment, to see Italian blood shed by Italian hands, was treachery.  I think, indeed, he has been probably made the scape-goat in that affair; that Charles Albert planned the measure, and, finding himself unable to carry it out, in consequence of the vigilance and indignant opposition of the Chamber of Deputies, was somewhat consoled by making it an occasion to victimize the “Illustrious,” whom four weeks before the people had forced him to accept as his minister.

Now the name of Gioberti is erased from the corners of the streets to which it was affixed a year ago; he is stripped of all his honorary degrees, and proclaimed an unworthy son of the country.  Mazzini is the idol of the people.  “Soon to be hunted out,” sneered the sceptical American.  Possibly yes; for no man is secure of his palm till the fight is over.  The civic wreath may be knocked from his head a hundred times in the ardor of the contest.  No matter, if he can always keep the forehead pure and lofty, as will Mazzini.

In thinking of Mazzini, I always remember Petrarch’s invocation to Rienzi.  Mazzini comes at a riper period in the world’s history, with the same energy of soul, but of purer temper and more enlarged views to answer them.