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showing people through the bogs and puddles of man's world; the former more powerful to raise men's hearts and thoughts to a higher tone.

I wish you could hear thoughtful men here speak of what the conception of such a character has even already done for the degraded Neapolitans. They are a people quick of apprehension and appreciation. Try to realise the disadvantages they have had. They were never taught about Christ; and to many of them the idea of right for right's sake, and of all that is true, noble, and devoted, has dawned upon them first through Garibaldi, and already worked a kind of regeneration in their feelings and opinions. Do not think me irreverent-I do not give this more than its true weight; I only mean that such an example and influence as his, acting upon the inner character of the units which make up the vast population of the country, appears to those who are here and observe it, not a substitute for the Christian faith, but a treasure of greater worth than shining statesman's qualities. We believe that it will make the people more worthy to profit by what statesmanship may secure to them now; so that each will do his work. This part of Garibaldi's work, however, is not so widely understood as his generalship. Even the fighting could not have been successful without him. If Victor Emmanuel had invaded, he would have probably found much more opposition here. It is Garibaldi who represents the moral feeling, and embodies the longings which have stirred all hearts; and this gave him the power to carry all before him.

EXTRACT 4.-VISIT TO ST. ELMO.

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Saturday, 27th.-We went to St. Elmo. You know from pictures that the fortress is built on a rock, three sides of which shelve steeply down; the fourth merges into the hill behind, still standing somewhat higher than the hill.

From the ramparts you see the whole of Naples like a map spread out. The huge walls of the fortress, growing straight out of the rock, look imposing

enough; but none of us had an idea, till we were there, that they form only the fourth étage as it were of a four-storied building. We were taken about the great square which they enclose, with its barrack buildings, its mounds of shells, its great guns and big mortars. When we had seen the top part, which covers an immense space, they asked us if we would like to see the covered batteries. They opened a large gate in the middle of the enclosed square, and with a lantern we began to descend a wide paved road, almost as steep as a staircase. When we reached the lower level we found ourselves among immense tunnels, very wide and lofty, which follow, at a varying distance of from ten to thirty feet from the outside, the shape of the great rock on which the upper building stands. Wherever the tunnel approached near enough to the outside, the intervening mass was pierced with a great round hole, at which stood a cannon (they now have all got their noses turned inwards); and from the heavy mysterious gloom of these huge caverns you caught sight of the most exquisite little vignette views framed in black rock, sometimes fringed with maiden-hair fern-little pictures perfectly painted. The effect was wonderful, from the concentration of light caused by looking through a tube, perhaps fifteen feet long, with black darkness on our side. one time it was the Red Palace with its arcades; at another a museum or church; then a bright bit of sea with men-ofwar riding at anchor. The maiden's-hair was not growing at all; for some had been newly chiselled out, to enable the guns to be better pointed down into the street. There were, perhaps, thirty in all. Then they showed us the big ovens quite at hand to red-heat the balls that they might set fire to any building they struck, and balls standing near, waiting to be heated. Some of the guns swept the drawbridge and causeway by which one ascends from the outer wall; and there are all the necessaries for a body of troops to live down there, even if the outworks were taken-mills for grinding corn, bread-ovens, sleeping huts,

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&c. This place is perfectly bomb proof. They talked of destroying St. Elmo; but none of us could understand how they could destroy this place, except by blasting away the entire hill.

Here and there were trap-doors which led down to a lower étage just like the upper one: that makes three floors; and now come the dungeons.

These have no communication with the batteries. To reach them we went a long way down the sloping covered road which leads to the Castle from the drawbridge. I think the door we went in by was on a level with the mouths of those wicked gun-holes. After entering it we went still further down steps and sloping passages cut roughly in the rock, until we came to a large circular dome-shaped cavern, the light of which was very dim. At one side of this cavehall, there was a funnel-shaped opening, beginning wide and growing narrower, until it reached the face of the rock and open air, where it was heavily barred. I think it looked towards the sea and islands of the west, but we could not see anything distinctly. All around this hall were little huts of mason-work, detached one from the other, that there might be less chance of communication. They had heavy doors faced with iron, if I remember rightly, and in each door a little window with a heavy shutter and bolts; and it was only through this window that the cell could borrow a little light from the large cave which was already so dim, and from which not a speck of green or of sky could be seen. I imagine, from the shape of the bars in the little window, that the door was never opened even to give food. The windows had an opening into which you could have slid a soup plate, which will give you an idea of their size; and the people there confidently assert that the shutters were closed by day. Inside each hut was a bed made of two boards, fixed in the corner, a little sloping, to save a pillow; in one the bed was of stone, with a pillow cut in

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They have been cleaned out and white-washed, but the stench is still overpowering; imagine what it was

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when inhabited by people who were never let out, who had no mattresses, and had to wear their clothes night and day! And, if so much cheating goes on about the food in the hospitals, which are open to every visitor, how may we imagine these people were fed!

There was one cell still worse than the others. A little winding staircase led up to it. Even with the door wide open you could not see the person at your elbow. Of course I had heard and read all about the prisons, as you will read this; but, standing there, it came upon me as it had never done before, as a new sense, what it would be to have that door shut upon one. Even when it was open, the darkness seemed to weigh like a year of midnight on my chest, and to crush the breath out. I don't think I should have courage to try to keep alive there; I should lie down on that plank bed and never move any more. A man was kept sixteen years in that hole! In that moment the last spark of pity I had felt for the Bourbons died out of me, and I could have clapped my hands for joy to think that it was over. other countries a single abuse may arise, like that on which Charles Reade has founded his novel Never too late to mend; but this was the system upheld by the Government, and known in all its details to Bomba at least, and made use of not against criminals, but against noble-minded men-against many even stupidly innocent, who had not an idea of being patriots, but in whose dusty book-shelves might have been found some book with a forbidden name or word in its pages, which had probably never been opened by its present owner. There is a good reason for never finding a library in the house of a Neapolitan.

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But these are not the worst prisons. They are dry: there are others by the sea which drip night and day; and a gentleman who was with us had been informed by one of the released prisoners of a torture invented by his jailorto dash on him, through an opening at the top, cold water at any time, night or day. He could not avoid it in any part of his cell, and never went to sleep

without expecting it. It became a haunting terror to him, and he had to remain shivering in his wet clothes until they dried upon him. It was a way of extorting money from the friends of a prisoner, to torture him unless bribed not to do so. There were names and dates inscribed on the rock-one of a Spanish nobleman 200 years ago. Some told of very long imprisonments: it seemed as if the very rocks were impregnated with sighs and tears, and groans, and as if they weighed and crushed one's heart with misery.

But there is more to tell, very horrible and mysterious. In the middle of this large cave there was a great round hole, with a low parapet wall enclosing it; and, looking down into it, we saw another hall cut in the rock, like that in which we stood-larger because of not being filled with the cells, and very deeplighted by a slanting shaft to the opening of the upper one. They told us that this was the place in which they used to put a number of prisoners, whom they wanted to get rid of, together, and shoot them from above. There was an iron gate in the side of the upper hall which led down by a staircase cut in the rock to the under one-a wide staircase, the ends of the steps sharp, but in the middle worn into one continuous slope. Even if the story of the shooting is an exaggeration, it must

have taken thousands of feet to wear the steps like this; and certainly those feet had not carried people there for their own pleasure. There is another

gate at the bottom, and more cells opening upon the stairs. It is true that all around the sides of this cave, about the height of a man's head and chest, the walls are marked with round holes, which Captain said he could not imagine having been made by anything but a bullet. Supposing that this was used not for political prisoners, but in cases of military revolt, yet what a system to put men into a wild beast's hole and shoot them down, instead of having an open execution after fair trial! The best colour one can put upon it is horrible.

I took the children: it will not be my fault if they do not grow up haters of tyranny and dark dealing. I did not allow them, however, to go into the cells, lest they should be poisoned; but sent them up into the blessed light of day. When we came up again upon the huge ramparts, and saw the celestial looking sunset over the peaks of Ischia, and the rosy clouds mirrored in the bay, it made my heart ache the more for those who had spent years without being able to tell the winter from the summer, scarcely the day from the night. I hope many of them have it made up to them now in glories which the eye of man hath not seen, nor his ear heard.

GARIBALDI'S RETIREMENT.

NOT that three armies thou didst overthrow,
Not that three cities oped their gates to thee,
I praise thee, Chief; not for this royalty,
Decked with new crowns, that utterly lay low;
For nothing of all thou didst forsake to go
And tend thy vines amid the Etrurian Sea;
Not even that thou didst this-though History
Retread two thousand selfish years to show
Another Cincinnatus! Rather for this-
The having lived such life that even this deed
Of stress heroic natural seems as is

Calm night, when glorious day it doth succeed,
And we, forewarned by surest auguries,
The amazing act with no amazement read.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

JANUARY, 1861.

RAVENSHOE.

BY HENRY KINGSLEY, AUTHOR OF GEOFFRY HAMLYN."

CHAPTER I.

AN ACCOUNT OF THE FAMILY OF RAVENSHOE.

I HAD intended to have gone into quite a family history of the Ravenshoes, from the time of Canute to that of her present Majesty, whom I here humbly congratulate of having wiser advisers than the monarch last mentioned, as she has never yet been so unfortunate as to wet her Royal feet through the bad advice of either party-I had meant, I say, to have been quite diffuse on the annals of one of our oldest commoner families; but, on going into the subject, I found I must either chronicle little affairs which ought to have been forgotten long ago, or do my work in a very patchy and inefficient way. When I say that the Ravenshoes have been engaged in every plot, rebellion, and civil war, from about a century or so before the Conquest to 1745, and that the history of the house is marked by cruelty and rapacity in old times, and in those more modern by political tergiversation of the blackest dye, the reader will understand why I hesitate to say too much in reference to a name which I especially honour. In order, however, that I may give some idea of what the hereditary character of the familiar is, I must just lead the reader's eye lightly over some of the principal events of their history.

The great Irish families have, as is well known, a banshee, or familiar spirit, who, previous to misfortune or death, flits moaning round the ancestral castle.

No. 15.-VOL. III.

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Now, although the Ravenshoes, like all respectable houses, have an hereditary lawsuit (a feud with the Humbys, of Hele), a ghost (which the present Ravenshoe claims to have repeatedly seen in early youth), and a buried treasure, yet I have never heard that they had a banshee. Had such been the case, that unfortunate spirit would have had no sinecure of it, but rather must have kept howling night and day for nine hundred years or so, in order to have got through her work at all. the Ravenshoes were almost always in trouble, and yet had a facility of getting out again, which, to one not aware of the cause, was sufficiently inexplicable. Like the Stuarts, they have always taken the losing side, and yet, unlike the Stuarts, have always kept their heads on their shoulders, and their house over their heads. Lady Ascot says that, if Ambrose Ravenshoe had been attainted in 1745, he'd have been hung as sure as fate there was evidence enough against him to hang a dozen men. myself, too, have heard Squire Densil declare, with great pride, that the Ravenshoe of King John's time was the only Baron who did not sign Magna Charta; and, if there were a Ravenshoe at Runnymede, I have not the slightest doubt that such was the case. Through the Rose wars, again, they were always on the wrong side, whichever that might have been, because your Ravenshoe, mind you, was not bound to either side in those times, but changed as he fancied fortune was going. As your Ravenshoe was the sort of man who generally joined

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a party just when their success was indubitable-that is to say, just when the reaction against them was about to set in -he generally found himself among the party which was going down hill, who despised him for not joining them before, and opposed to the rising party, who hated him because he had declared against them. Which little game is common enough in this present century among deep dogs, and men of the world, who seem, as a general rule, to make as little by it as ever did the Ravenshoes.

Well, whatever your trimmers make by their motion now-a-days, the Ravenshoes were not successful either at liberal conservatism, or conservative liberalism. At the end of the reign of Henry VII. they were as poor as Job, or poorer. But, before you have time to think of it, behold, in 1530, there comes you to court a Sir Alured Ravenshoe, who incontinently begins cutting in at the top of the tune, swaggering, swearing, dressing, fighting, dicing, and all that sort of thing, and, what is more, paying his way in a manner which suggests successful burglary as the only solution. Sir Alured, however, as I find, had done no worse than marry an old maid (Miss Hincksey, one of the Staffordshire Hinckseys) with a splendid fortune; which fortune set the family on its legs again for some generations. This Sir Alured seems to have been an audacious rogue. He made great interest with the King, who was so far pleased with his activity in athletic sports that he gave him a post in Ireland. There our Ravenshoe was so fascinated by the charming manners of the Earl of Kildare that he even accompanied that nobleman on a visit to Desmond; and, after a twelvemonth's unauthorized residence in the interior of Ireland, on his return to England, he was put into the Tower for six months to "consider himself."

This Alured seems to have been a deuce of a fellow, a very good type of the family. When British Harry had that difference we wot of with the Bishop of Rome, I find Alured to have been engaged in some five or six Romish plots, such as, had the King been in possession

of facts, would have consigned him to a rather speedy execution. However, the King seems to have looked on this gentleman with a suspicious eye, and to have been pretty well aware what sort of man he was, for I find him writing to his wife, on the occasion of his going to Court-"The King's Grace looked but "sourly upon me, and said it should go "hard, but that the pitcher which went so "oft to the well should be broke at last. "Thereto I making answer, that that "should depend on the pitcher, whether "it were iron or clomb,' he turned on his "heel, and presently departed from me."

He must have been possessed of his full share of family audacity to sharpen his wits on the terrible Harry, with such an unpardonable amount of treason hanging over him. I have dwelt thus long on him, as he seems to have possessed a fair share of the virtues and vices of his family-a family always generous and brave, yet always led astray by bad advisers. This Alured built Ravenshoe house, as it stands to this day, and in which much of the scene of this story is laid.

They seem to have got through the Gunpowder Plot pretty well, though I can show you the closet where one of the minor conspirators, one Watson, lay perdu for a week or more after that gallant attempt, more I suspect from the effect of a guilty conscience than any thing else, for I never heard of any distinct charge being brought against him. The Forty-five, however, did not pass quite so easily, and Ambrose Ravenshoe went as near to lose his head as any one of the family since the Conquest. When the news came from the north about the alarming advance of the Highlanders, it immediately struck Ambrose that this was the best opportunity for making a fool of himself that could possibly occur. He accordingly, without hesitation or consultation with any mortal soul, rang the bell for his butler, sent for his stud-groom, mounted every man about the place (twenty or so), armed them, grooms, gardeners, and all, with crossbows and partizans from the armoury, and rode

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