The squadron remained in Neapolitan waters until the festival of Pie di Grotta, on which occasion the King took me with him to a great review he held—­a very noisy and lively scene it was—­in the Toledo, the great artery of the town, with its picturesque vistas on to Vesuvius.  The National Guard was of modern growth, and lamentable at that.  Then came the regular army, and especially four Swiss regiments with their artillery, a magnificent division of troops.  As long as they are here, I said to myself, there need be no fear of revolutions.  But just because their valour and fidelity promised a reception little to the taste of the sedition-mongers, those prudent modern condottieri were waving their warlike pens, and loudly demanding the disembodiment of these very regiments.  It pained me to notice the icy reception given to the brave fellows as they marched past, and I could not help feeling a gloomy foreboding.

That sheet anchor of the Neapolitan Monarchy was destroyed before long by one of those compromises with rebellion so frequent in these days—­ disastrous proceedings, which inevitably lead the way by their evil and demoralising example, to other compromises, infinitely more lamentable, alas!—­I mean compromise with a foreign enemy.

At the time when I bore the King company at that review it was not his Swiss regiments alone who were the object of the agitators’ fury, but his government and his own person as well.  A sort of general conspiracy against them was brewing, fomented for the most part by foreign agents, some of them actually diplomats, who thus openly abused the immunity their functions gave them; and it was propagated by means of the secret societies which are an endemic plague in Italian countries.  King and Government alike fought as best they could against the current of revolution, and they did so rightly, in the general interest, for revolution brings nothing but ruin in its train.

But beside the adventurers who shrank from no crime, and who preached assassination and plunder, there stood many honourable and enlightened Neapolitans, who desired the reform of abuses (and God knows there were plenty of them!) and the progressive amelioration of the moral and material conditions of existence.  Unhappily it was on these men, whose sole offence lay in their opinions, that the brutality, and I might add the horrors, of the repressive measures adopted seemed by preference to fall.  The prisons of those days, in which they were confined, were perfect dens, and I greatly fear they are much the same all over Italy even now.  I doubt, for instance, that the convict prison at Pescara would yield in the matter of abominations to the convict prison at Nisida, some forty years ago.