proof of the charge of treason.  Santurri was tried by a court martial, and sentenced at once to execution; as were also his colleagues, on further evidence of guilt being discovered.  Salvatori, therefore, pleaded, that his sole offence, if offence there was, consisted in having discharged his duty as an official of the Republican Government, and that this offence was condoned by the Papal amnesty.  This defence, as being somewhat difficult to answer, is purposely ignored; and a printed notice, published on the day of Santurri’s execution, and giving an account of his trial and conviction, is rejected as evidence, because it is not official!

Considering the tone of the sentence it will not be matter of surprise, that the court sums up with the conclusion, that “Not the slightest doubt can be entertained that the wilful calumnies and solicitations of the prisoner Salvatori were the sole and the too efficacious causes of the result he had deliberately purposed to himself” (namely, the murder of Santurri); and therefore unanimously condemns him to public execution at Anagni.  Vincenzo Fenili and Grassi, who had co-operated in the arrest of Santurri, are sentenced to 20 years’ labour on the hulks.  There not being sufficient evidence to convict Fanella, Federici, and Teresa Fenili, they are to be—­not acquitted, but kept in prison for six months more, while Gabrielli, whose only offence was, that he told Salvatori where the priest Santurri was to be found, though without any evil motive, is to be released provisionally, having been, by the way, imprisoned already for 18 months, while Garibaldi and De Pasqualis are to be proceeded against in default.

Salvatori was executed on the 10th of September, 1851; Fenili and Grassi are probably, being both men in the prime of life, still alive and labouring in the Bagnio of Civita Vecchia, where, at their leisure, they can appreciate the mercies of a Papal amnesty.  It seems to me that I should have called this chapter the Salvatori rather than the Santurri murder, and then the question asked at the end of the last would have required no answer.

CHAPTER VI.  THE PAPAL PRESS.

At Rome there is no public life.  There are no public events to narrate, no party politics to comment on.  Events indeed will occur, and politics will exist even in this best regulated of countries; but as all narration of the one, and all manifestation of the other, are equally interdicted for press purposes, neither events nor politics have any existence.  To one, who knows the wear and tear of the London press, to whom the very name of a newspaper recalls late hours and interminable reports, despatches and telegrams, proof-sheets, parliamentary debates and police intelligence, leading articles and correspondents’ letters; a very series of Sisyphean labours, without rest or end; to such an one the position of the Roman journalist seems a haven of rest, the most delightful