resist the fascination of the Sicilian character, the South in general has remained to them, if not an absolutely sealed book, at any rate a volume to be glanced at, not read; not studied, but skimmed without interest, and hardly with curiosity. This want of interest is partly explained by the fact that, with occasional exceptions, the South was of less moment in the unitarian movement than the rest of Italy, and, although Neapolitan Liberals suffered far more and more cruelly than those of any other region, they did not produce any of the greatest figures of the Revolution. The insufficient interest leads to inadequate treatment, and to some degree of carelessness. The most conspicuous slips we have come across in Mr. King's book-which is on the whole a work of careful accuracy-all occur in connexion with the South. We laugh a good deal at foreigners' carelessness in spelling English names; we hardly should hold up Tivaroni, now the standard Italian historian of the Risorgimento,' as an example for imitation, when he writes of Sir Williams Gladstone.' Yet Mr. King throughout, even in the Index, writes Capitinata' for 'Capitanata,' and 'Delcarotto' for 'Delcarretto.' He also misspells Tanucci's name. On the three or four occasions when he has to mention the Cilento, the triangle between the Gulfs of Salerno and Policastro, he obviously supposes it to be a town, and not a district. Curiously enough, Mr. Probyn makes the same mistake in speaking of the rising at Bosco in the Cilento on June 28, 1828, which he describes as occurring at a place called Cilento.'

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Mr. King makes one glaring misstatement of fact through stumbling into a linguistic trap of the kind which occasionally will catch even the cleverest. In mentioning the insurrection of September 1, 1847, at Reggio, in Calabria-of which, by the way, Edward Lear, the artist, was an eyewitnesshe says: The insurgents were driven back on Aspromonte, 'where the Government easily crushed the immature move'ment, and shot forty-seven of the insurgents in cold blood.' Mr. Stillman, on the other hand, tells us that fourteen of 'the insurgents were condemned to death and four were 'executed. But even he has not given the figures correctly. Nine in all were executed. The facts are as follows:-Of 200 insurgents taken prisoners between Reggio and Gerace, five were condemned by the military commission which sat at Gerace, and shot on October 2. Another commission, sitting at Reggio, during the month of November sentenced fourteen more to death, but of these fourteen only four were

actually executed. Now the historian Nisco, in an account of these events, after mentioning by name the five Calabrians sentenced at Gerace, uses the following words: 'Il giorno 2 Ottobre quarantasette questi generosi furono fucilati,' i.e. On October 2 [eighteen hundred and] forty-seven 'these brave fellows were shot.'

There are few works so bulky and so full of detail as Mr. King's history that do not contain many slips as bad as this. We only wish he had given us four volumes instead of two. Then he might have found room-as does Mr. Probyn, despite his limited space-occasionally to quote the ipsissima verba of statutes, documents, and despatches. Then he need not have so ruthlessly excluded every one of those racy and characteristic stories of the time which would have helped to a fuller and more concrete presentation of many of the scenes and actors in the drama. They would encourage the reader of the idler sort, and, above all, they would dissipate the too common notion that Italian patriots were all tears and sentiment and 'high-falutin'.'

Mr. King's youth-he was a little boy at the time when his history closes in 1871-deprives him of the advantage enjoyed by his rivals in having lived much in Italy during those stirring times. It is remarkable how little his work suffers from this circumstance, though its effect is noticeable occasionally-for instance, in his treatment of Mazzini. Men of exactly the same cast and calibre of mind, of exactly the same political prejudices and associations, are apt to judge Mazzini from a very different point of view, according as they happen to be Englishmen or Italians. To the Englishman Mazzini is essentially the political philosopher. To the Italian he is, above all, an actor in his country's drama. Now Mr. King has two manners in writing of Mazzini. In his first manner we see the enthusiastic student of the great teacher's writings spell-bound by their literary and ethical fascination; in the second the sober historian scrutinising by the dry light of reason the good and evil actually accomplished in the history of the Peninsula by that inflexible but overweeningly egotistical doctrinaire.

The treatment of social and economic subjects, again, is that of an English philanthropic reformer, of the student of English industrial questions, and shows a certain lack of intimacy with the peculiar dress which the same problems put on in Italy.

On a future occasion we hope to deal with the later history; at present we are concerned only with the two earlier periods down to 1849, which roughly correspond with Mr. King's first volume.

The Liberals of the Carbonaro period, but for the interference of Austria, might have attained their object, notwithstanding Mazzini's disparaging criticism, which, of Piedmont at least, is utterly untrue. The Carbonaro revolutions failed,' said he, because their leaders were men of small capacity or originality. They had no programme beyond the overthrow of the absolutist governments, no social 'outlook beyond industrial freedom and a presentable system of law and education.'

The greatest vigour and stubbornness were shown in Sicily. But there traditional liberties and insular separatist feeling were the distinctive elements. For that reason Sicilian revolution was not in 1820 a step in the ladder of the Italian movement as it was in 1848. The Neapolitan revolution which preceded and led up to the Sicilian was purely military, and to some extent accidental. We might never have heard of it if Nugent had been a man of administrative ability. Of Irish birth, he had served long and brilliantly in the Austrian army, till, after the restoration of 1815, he was appointed Captain-General' of the Neapolitan forces. Had he been capable of maintaining military discipline and winning the support of the Murattist officers, who were the best element in the army, or even had Pepe's military district of Avellino happened instead to be under Church, who till a few weeks previously had commanded the lower Apulian district, the events of Nola, Mercogliano, and Avellino could scarcely have happened. But the very want of discipline and military loyalty that gave birth to the revolution also caused its destruction. The Neapolitan troops, which had proved their worth against Masséna and in Napoleon's campaigns, made no stand against Austrian invasion, and Ferdinand, the clown king, the 'Re Lazzarone,' returned to persecute the men whom he had ostentatiously thanked for the great service they 'had rendered to him and to the nation,' and to revoke the constitution for which he had thanked God, who has per'mitted me in my old age to do a great good to my kingdom,' and to which he had solemnly sworn, adding to the formal oath these words of his own accord as he fixed his eyes on the altar: Omnipotent God, who with infinite penetration lookest into the heart and into the future, if I

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lie, or if one day I should be faithless to my oath, do Thou at this instant annihilate me!'

The severities of Ferdinand's rule on his first restoration, after the brief republican interlude of 1799, had their explanation, their palliation, in his own nervous terror, and in the horror of all revolutionaries which not unnaturally had possessed the mind of his masterful queen, Mary Caroline, since the fate of her sister Marie Antoinette. And what were these severities beside the 12,000 executions in 200 days of the Revolutionary Tribunal of 1793? But Mary Caroline had now long passed from the scene, and the Carbonari were of far milder temper than the men of the mountain. Ferdinand's treachery was deliberate, of malice prepense, scarcely provoked. It rang the knell of his dynasty. Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.'

The Piedmontese revolution of 1821 was more normal. Its first overt sign was the appearance at the theatre of four students in red caps, and, although the army decided the crisis, it was actuated by patriotism, not by insubordination. Santarosa was the hero of the movement, the cry of War 'to Austria' its glory. It clearly marked out the house of Savoy for the future kingdom. One proclamation of the committee of Alessandria promulgates the constitution, in the name of the Italian Confederation, and of Italian inde'pendence.' Another says: "The national committee shall 'be considered legitimately formed, when the king shall have 'made his person sacred and inviolable, by the legitimisation of his authority as King of Italy.' How unfair to such aspirations as these is the passage already quoted from Mazzini !

The king, Victor Emmanuel I., would not grant the 'Spanish' Constitution of 1812, a doctrinaire house of cards that was in great favour with all the Carbonari. He did not believe in it; he knew that he could not defend it against Austria, backed by Russia and Prussia. Events had made it too late for the movement to quiet down peacefully, and he shrank from a resistance that meant civil war, for the feeling of the army was doubtful and divided. So he cut the knot by abdicating:-

O night of the 13th of March,' exclaims Santarosa, 'night fatal to my country, which disheartened us all, which broke so many swords raised for the cause of liberty, and dispersed like a dream so many cherished hopes! The country did not indeed fall with the king, but that country was for us personified in the king, in Victor Emmanuel, and the youthful promoters of that military revolution ex

claimed more than once, "Perhaps some day he will pardon us for making him king of six millions of Italians."

Contrast Victor Emmanuel's conduct with that of Ferdinand of Naples! Contrast the loyalty of the feeling which the very conspirators entertained for the king!

Much of the human interest of the story lies in Charles Albert of Carignan, who is now first introduced to us. His characteristic vacillation becomes apparent at once. Though heir presumptive to the throne, he had relations with the Carbonari. There are conflicting versions-well told by Mr. Stillman, and sifted in an appendix to Mr. King's book-of what passed at an interview between the prince and the leading conspirators; but it is pretty certain that, in some form or other, he promised his adhesion, when satisfied that no hostile action was to be taken against the king. But on the morrow, frightened and penitent, above all anxious to have no share in suborning the army, he betrayed the secret to the Government.' Charles Albert's weakness was of no great national moment on that occasion, nor even while he was regent after the abdication, and pending the arrival of the new king, Charles Felix, Victor Emmanuel's younger brother. But it was an indication of what was to come.

For the priest-ridden Charles Felix we must quote Mr. King:

'Not cruel by nature, he looked on the revolution as the accursed thing, and meant to stamp it out. Charles Felix was an absolutist of the straitest sect. But he had no qualifications for playing the grand monarch. Alone among the princes of Savoy he was no soldier. poor presence, superstitious, irritable, he had few friends, and his chroniclers have dealt hardly with him.'

Of

During his reign the popular heir to the throne swam with the tide. Metternich gives the following account of a meeting with Charles Albert at Genoa in 1825: "I was a ""tool," he said, taking leave of me," and I was so completely; ""to-day I do not wish to be so, and I will be so no more. "I have learned Liberalism and its directors, and I am ""disgusted with them." His entire conduct is, in fact, 'conformed to this declaration, and the Emperor thinks, as 'I do, that he is not likely to be recaptured easily. God grant it.' Yet he seems to have been trying to stand well with the Liberals at the same time. On his accession in 1831 they looked for large reforms. Mazzini published a letter appealing to him to lead the Nationalists.

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The