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XIX.-HOPE FOR ITALY.

L. MARIOTII.

THE French, wanting aid from every quarter, hailed the awakening of Italy. They gave her a standard; they girt her sons with the weapons of war; they seated them in senates and parliaments. They dusted the iron crown of the Lombards, and placed it on the brow of one of her islanders. The Italians started up; they believed, they followed, they fought. Deceived by the French, they turned to the Austrians-betrayed by the Austrians, they came back to the French. There ensued a series of deception and perfidy, of blind confidence and disappointment; and when the Italians, weary, dejected, and ravaged, lay down abandoned to their bitter reflections, an awful truth shone in its full evidencethe only price for torrents of blood-that beyond the Alps they had nothing but enemies! The reaction was long and severe. To those few years of raving intoxication, lethargy succeeded, and nothingness. The sword was taken from the side of the brave, the lips of the wise were closed; all was settled, and silenced, and fettered, but thought. Though remained anxious, sleepless, rebellious; with a grim, severe monitor behind—Memory; and a rosy syren before—Hope, always within its reach, always receding from its embrace; and it sat a tyrant of the soul, preyed upon the heart of the young, of the brave, of the lovely, choosing its victims with the cruel sagacity of the vampire, and it strewed their couches with thorns, and sprinkled their feasts with poison, and snatched from their hands the cup of pleasure.

"Italians," was the cry, "remember what you have been, what you are, what you must be. Is it thus, on the dust of heroes, is it in the fairest of lands, that you drag on the days of abjectness? Will you never afford a better spectacle to the nations than masquerades and processions of monks? Will you never go out among strangers, except as fiddlers and limners? England and France are subduing deserts and oceans; Germany flourishes in science and letters. The sons of the earth are snatching from your hands the sceptre of the arts. What is to become of Italy? Shall her name be buried under these ruins, to which you cling with the fondness of a fallen noble, prouder of the escutcheon and of the portraits of his ancestors, in proportion as he degenerates

from them? Shall it be said of her sons that they have made their own destiny, and they groan under a yoke they have merited ?"

But God has, at last, mercy on long-enduring Italy! Her princes may yet desert her. Her Pope, even if infallible, is not immortal. But God is eternal, and is with her. Happy, if she learns to trust in Him and herself alone! Her sorrow has been weighed her fate is mature. Kings and pontiffs may now work it out. It is not they, however, that prepared it. The Spirit that is alive within her, comes direct from the breath of her Maker. The phenix has been consumed upon her funeral pyre. Her last breath has vanished in the air with the smoke of her ashes; but the dawn breaks; the first rays of the sun are falling upon the desolate hearth; the ashes begin to heave, and from their bosom the new bird springs forth with luxuriant plumage, displaying her bold flight, with her eyes fixed on that sun from which she derived her origin.

XX.-PROVINCE OF THE HISTORIAN.

SCHLEGEL.

REMARKABLE actions, great events, and strange catastrophes, are not of themselves sufficient to preserve the admiration and determine the judgment of posterity. These are only to be attained by a nation who have given clear proofs that they were not insensible instruments in the hands of destiny, but were themselves conscious of the greatness of their deeds, and the singularity of their fortunes. This national consciousness, expressing itself in works of narrative and illustration, is History. A people whose days of glory and victory have been celebrated by the pen of a Livy, whose misfortunes and decline have been bequeathed to posterity in the pages of a Tacitus, acquires a strange pre-eminence by the genius of her historians, and is no longer in any dange of being classed with the vulgar multitude of nations, which, occupying no place in the history of human intellect, as soon as they have performed their part of conquest or defeat on the stage of the world, pass away from our view and sink forever into oblivion. The poet, the painter, or the

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sculptor, though endued with all the power and all the magic of his art,-though capable of reaching and embodying the boldest flights of imagination;-the philosopher, though he may be able to scrutinize the most hidden depth of human thought (rare as these attainments may be, and few equals as he may find in the society with which he is surrounded), can, during the period of his own life, be known and appreciated only by a few. But the sphere of his influences extends with the progress of ages, and his name shines brighter and broader as it grows old. Compared with his, the fame of the legislator, among distant nations, and the celebrity of new institutions, appears uncertain and obscure; while the glory of the conqueror, after a few centuries have sunk into the all-whelming, all-destroying abyss of time, is forever fading in its lustre, until at length it perhaps affords a subject of exultation to some plodding antiquarian, that he should be able to discover some glimmerings of a name which had once challenged the reverence of the world.

XXI-PROTEST AGAINST TURKISH PERFIDY.

KOSSUTH.

TO-DAY is the anniversary of our arrival at Kutahja! Kutahja! the tomb, where the Sublime Porte has buried us alive, whilst speaking to us of hospitality. Pursued by misfortune we stopped before the threshold of the Mussulman, and asked from him, in the name of God, in the name of humanity, in the name of his religion, a hospitable asylum, or a free passage. The Turkish government had entire liberty to receive us or not. It had the right of saying: I will give you shelter in a prison, or in some distant place where you will be detained and strictly guarded. This is the hospitality which Turkey offers you. If it does not please you, hasten your departure, rid us of your embarrassing presence. This was not said to us. The Sublime Porte deigned to open to as its sheltering tent; it entreated us to cross the threshold, and swore by its God and its faith that it would grant us hospitality and a safe asylum. We trusted ourselves to the honor of the Turks. We eat of their bread and of their salt; we reposed under their roof. We prayed to God

bless them, and we offered them our courage, our experience matured by vicissitudes, and our everlasting gratitude. And Hungarians keep their word.

Look at Bosnia, where Mussulmen, subjects of the Sublime Porte, are revolted against it. A handful of Hungarian soldiers are in the ranks of its army-it is but a handful, for the Porte would not accept more. Well! who are first upon the breach? who are first in the charge? who are they who never retreat, who advance in the midst of fire and grape-shot, bayonet in hand, to victory? They are this handful of exiles. They die for Turkey; the Hungarian keeps his word. They offered us hospitality, and they gave us a prison: they swore to us that we should meet with an asylum, and we have found banishment. God will judge; and God is just. We have suffered; but for the sake of not causing embarrassment, we have been silent. They begged us to have confidence. We have shown it. They begged us to wait. We have waited long. They said to us, it is only until Austria shall succeed in re-establishing that which the despots call order (the order of oppression), that which they call tranquillity (the tranquillity of the tomb).

Well, she has re-established this order, this tranquillity, by her executions. She has re-established it so far as to dare to provoke Prussia to war; so far as to dare, trusting to the support of her master, the Czar, to encroach upon the nations of Europe, to extend her forces from the Baltic to Rome; so far as to threaten Piedmont and Switzerland; so far as to bribe the border provinces of Turkey to revolt,-she has reestablished this tranquillity, she has even announced its re-establishment to the Sublime Porte; and we are still

prisoners.

I most solemnly protest against this act. I appeal from it to the eternal justice of God, and to the judgment of all humanity.

XXII.-LESSON TO AMBITION.

JEFFREY.

A GROUND of rejoicing in the downfall of Bonaparte is on account of the impressive lesson it has read to Ambition, and the striking illustration it has afforded, of the inevitable ten

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dency of that passion to bring to ruin the power and the greatness which it seeks so madly to increase. No human being, perhaps, ever stood on so proud a pinnacle of worldly grandeur, as this insatiable conqueror, at the beginning of his Russian campaign. He had done more—he had acquired more-and he possessed more, as to actual power, influence, and authority, than any individual that ever figured on the scene of European story. He had visited, with a victorious army, almost every capital of the Continent; and dictated the terms of peace to their astonished princes. He had consolidated under his immediate dominion, a territory and population apparently sufficient to meet the combination of all it did not include; and interwoven himself with the government of almost all that was left. He had cast down and erected thrones at his pleasure, and surrounded himself with tributary kings, and principalities of his own creation. He had connected himself by marriage with the proudest of the ancient sovereigns; and was at the head of the largest and the finest army that was ever assembled to desolate or dispose of the world. Had he known where to stop in his aggressions upon the peace and independence of mankind, it seems as if this terrific sovereignty might have been permanently established in his person. But the demon by which he was possessed urged him on to his fate. He could not bear that any power should exist which did not confess its dependence on him. Without a pretext for quarrel, he attacked Russia— insulted Austria-trod contemptuously on the fallen fortunes of Prussia-and by new aggressions, and the menace of more intolerable evils, drove them into that league which rolled back the tide of ruin upon himself, and ultimately hurled him into the insignificance from which he originally sprung.

Without this, the lesson to Ambition would have been imperfect, and the retribution of Eternal Justice apparently incomplete. It was fitting, that the world should see it again demonstrated, by this great example, that the appetite of conquest is in its own nature insatiable;-and that a being, once abandoned to that bloody career, is fated to pursue it to the end; and must persist in the work of desolation and murder, till the accumulated wrongs and resentments of the harassed world sweep him from its face.