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reverses they cursed the commissariat, accused each other of faults of commission and omission, and underwent the effects of the general despondency.

Still the king stood at the head of forty-five thousand men, and his field artillery was intact. He was advised to ask for an armistice, but the insulting terms Radetzky proposed aroused his pride, and he fell back on Milan, under whose walls he arrived on August 3, with only twenty-five thousand men left. It was at this time that the most inexplicable thing of all his career occurred, and which will ever cast a deep shadow over the king's memory. All the time he had been fighting, the Sardinian government had not taken possession of the authority at Milan and Venice; but on August 2, Lieutenant-General Olivieri arrived in the former city to depose the provisional government, and take possession in the king's name. On the 4th the last decisive action took place under the walls of Milan, and on the same night the king capitulated. Can we blame the republicans that they alleged he had only seized the authority at Milan in order to ransom his own kingdom by surrendering it to the Austrians, and that he preferred seeing Radetzky hold Lombardy than a French army come to the assistance of the junta?

There was a scene of frightful confusion in Milan when the news of the capitulation spread on the morning of August 5. Charles Albert explained his motives, his wish to spare the blood of the people; but his explanation was received with murmurs, which struck Charles Albert to the heart. "Well," he exclaimed, "if the conditions do not suit you, try to obtain others that are better; and if you will not surrender at any price, I will remain with you, and be buried beneath the walls of your city." But discouragement and anarchy had seized on the army; the soldiers, probably obeying previous orders, began leaving the city. The archbishop, the podestat, and two other citizens, considering defence impossible, went to Radetzky's camp and signed a new agreement, which was ratified by the chief of the staff, in the name of the king. When this became known the saddest scene of the whole sad history occurred:

Suddenly, as if seized with madness, the mob returned to the palace, and raised barricades around it. The night, slow in coming, covered with its darkness a fearful scene: cries of death against Charles Albert were heard; shots were fired at the windows, provoked by the shots of the servants, who wished to clear the palace; the mob attempted to enter the apartments, and were repulsed; it was proposed to fire the palace and the city, and thus leave Radetzky nought but ashes. If darkness permits every crime, it facilitates flight. The troops were far away; A de la Marmora got down from a window and returned at the head of a detachment of carabineers and bersaglieri, who effected the king's liberation. Charles Albert, crushed and tortured, went off through the Vercellina gate, with his two sons and the staff, hearing behind him the sound of fire-arms, the knell of the tocsin, and cries of fury and malediction. Charles Albert, four months previously, only dreamed of entering Milan to receive the honours of a triumph and the testimony of public gratitude. Instead of this, he arrived to endure an atrocious moral punishment, and offer to the world a fresh example of the versatility of peoples who adulate and crown success, and do not pardon mis

fortune.

On August 7, the Sardinian commissioners, by a strange mockery, took possession of Venice in the king's name, but the news of the capitulation of Milan put an end to their authority, and the republican flag again floated from the walls of the devoted city. At this moment the oppressed

nationalities turned their eyes to that generous nation which had offered its sword before: after all, the French were not more foreigners than were the Austrians. But it was too late: the sword of France had slipped from the nerveless grasp of the provisional government, and for want of a foreign war the nation had devoured its own children. When republican troops eventually marched into Italy, it was for a very different purpose than Lamartine had ever thought of. The troops of one republic went to suppress another republic, and produce that anomalous state of things from which Italy still suffers.

The events of these troublous times are, we allow, fully and fairly discussed by M. Garnier Pagès, and we are willing to consider with him that the provisional government meant fairly by Italy. At the same time, however, we cannot refrain, if we may judge from recent lessons in history, from thinking that Charles Albert acted wisely in declining French assistance. His son, who accepted it, has not much to boast about, after all; his troubles have yet to come, if, indeed, they have not already commenced. For a season the Italians will remain quiet, but already even Naples is growing a thorn in the side of the new King of Italy. When the taxation comes into operation we shall see whether Victor Emmanuel is equal to his post. At the same time, however, we cannot help repeating that Lord Palmerston incurred a deep responsibility when he declined accepting the mediation between Austria and Italy, for, humanly speaking, he might have in that way prevented the campaign of 1859, and the complications which may yet result from it. The best reparation he can offer is his hearty co-operation in the settlement of the Roman question, which is earnestly calling for a settlement, without which it is impossible for Italy to be pacified.

We offer our readers no apology for making M. Garnier Pagès's volume occasion for what may seem a twice-told tale. Not only have we been enabled to lay before them some new passages in that episode of Italian history, but we think it wise now and then to institute comparisons between past and present, as offering a tolerably trustworthy gauge of the future. In conclusion, it would be unjust did we not mention that this volume offers invaluable materials for the student, for it gives the story of all the insurrectionary Italian movements of 1848, fully and without prejudice. In his next volume, M. Pagès proposes to investigate other phases of that wonderful year, and we hope ere long to be enabled to lay the result of his researches before our readers.

Mingle-Mangle by Monkshood.

but made a mingle-mangle and a hotch-potch of it-I cannot tell what.— BP. LATIMER'S Sermons.

TOWN AND COUNTRY.

§ 3.

WILLIAM HABINGTON, whose life comprised just about the first half of the seventeenth century, and whose poetry has been said to have all the vices of the metaphysical school," excepting its occasional and sometimes studied licentiousness-balances with discretion and impartiality the comparative merits and drawbacks of Town and Country. His Epistle to a Friend, "his noblest friend, J. C., Esq.," contains lines of sense and strength hardly to be looked for in one who elsewhere talks, as Jeames of Berkeley-square might, of meadows wearing a "green plush," of the fire of love being available to cleanse the air of a plague-stricken city, and of a luxurious banquet being so rich that heaven must have opened its floodgates and rained down showers of sweetmeats, as if

Heaven were

Blackfriars, and each star a confectioner.

Not Mr. Alexander Smith, nor Mr. Stanyan Bigg, nor any other modern proficient in star imagery, can quite match that.-Surfeited by bonbon diet of this sort, the reader of Habington's poems the more gladly welcomes a plain statement like the following:

I hate the country's dirt and manners, yet

I love the silence; I embrace the wit

And courtship, flowing here in a full tide,
But loathe the expense, the vanity and pride.
No place each way is happy.*

This is terse and well-balanced. The poet could discriminate justly, and so shape his verses as to make pros and cons rhyme together, without offence to reason, or prejudice to themselves.

The poets generally (Herrick being a notable exception) are all one way, in this question. They feel bound over, ex officio, to write up the country, with all its imperfections on its head. And people who don't write poetry, but who wish to be, at any rate to be thought, poetically disposed-susceptible to the skyey influences, tasteful in the beauties of Nature, and unsophisticated if not altogether unspotted by the worldare apt to affect an unconditional enthusiasm for whatever is rustically out of town. Very few people, in fact, have the courage to acknowledge the indifference so many of them really feel, to hedgerow elms and hillocks green, and the whole cycle of country life. How comes it, asks Mr. Plumer Ward's "man of refinement," that all, even of the most illustrious rank, all that are eminent for powers and talents, as well as

Habington's "The Mistress and other Poems" (1634): Epistle to a Friend.

the most beautiful poets and the soundest philosophers, have alike concurred in the praises of retirement? The question is meant as a poser for Dr. Evelyn-who answers, however, "Praises, if you will; but who really practised what he recommended? Horace, with all his charming rhapsodies about Lucretilis and the Sabine farm, and his

O rus! quando ego te aspiciam?

was always sneaking to town, and then wrote to his steward that he was a very absurd fellow for not liking to stay in the country.'

Volney had from the Baron d'Holbach an anecdote which portrays two very different personages, Diderot and Delille, as regards their rural aspirations and sincerity of spirit. Some one had been praising up the happiness of country life, in Diderot's presence. Denis was caught by the picture thus painted. His enthusiasm was excited. He was all for groves and glens: he would go at once and spend a good while in the country the only question was, where should he go? About this time, the Governor of the Château de Meudon arrived on a visit; he was acquainted with Diderot, and learnt this new desire of his so the Governor courteously assigned him a room in the Château. Diderot hurries away to see the room and the neighbourhood: he is enchanted; he can never be happy anywhere else. He comes back to town, however, and somehow the summer slips away without his returning to Meudon. There is the one only spot on the face of the earth upon which, ipse dixit, Denis Diderot can live; and yet the summer is past, the autumn is ended, and he is not there. Another summer comes-and goes-but Denis Diderot revisits not the Château de Meudon. In September he happens to meet the poet Delille, who makes up to him, with earnest looks and careworn expression, and says: "I was looking for you, mon ami; I am quite taken up with my poem, and do so want to get a little solitude, that I may work at it as I would. Madame d'Houdetôt tells me you have a nice little room at Meudon which you never go there to make use of." "My dear Abbé," exclaims Diderot, "listen to me we all of us have some chimera that we place at a distance from us; if we lay our hand upon it, it makes off altogether, for other quarters. I do not go to Meudon, but I am every day saying to myself, To-morrow I'll go. If I no longer had it to go to, I should be unhappy." M. Sainte-Beuve shrewdly suspects that Delille would have been a little embarrassed, had Diderot taken him at his word, and that he would soon have found cette chambre solitaire a terrific bore. The country was always, if one may say it, the dada of the Abbé Delille, who talked about it, even when blind, as of a charm actually present." Berdardin de SaintPierre, in a letter to his wife, relates how Delille came and sat beside him at the Institut, and says: "I found him so amiable and so in love with the country, and he paid me compliments so extremely gratifying, that I made him an offer to come to Eragny." Delille would have rivalled Diderot, it is likely, in procrastination and excuses, had the offer been pressed. Even Voltaire, hardly come of age, and just arrived in

*Tremaine, ch. xxvii.

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Lettres inédites de Volney, dans Bodin, Recherches sur l'Anjou.
Sainte-Beuve, Portraits Littéraires, t. ii.: "Delille.”

Paris, pines for retirement, and swears he was born to be faune ou sylvain! He don't add, though we do, ou satyre.

One of Sydney Smith's letters, from Combe Florey, says: "I do all I can to love the country, and endeavour to believe those poetical lies which I read in Rogers and others, on the subject; which sad deviations from truth were, by Rogers, all written in St. James's-place." The London canon's favourite poet must have been that renowned tabletalker, the crumbs and droppings of whose table-talk were dearer to Sydney than any pretty warbling choir of bird-voices, Henry Luttrell. Sweet to those canonical ears must have been this urbane minstrel's urban apostrophe—

O London, comprehensive word!

Whose sound, though scarce in whisper heard,
Breathes independence!—if I share
That first of blessings, I can bear
Ev'n with thy fogs and smoky air.
Of leisure fond, of freedom fonder,
O grant me in thy streets to wander;
Grant me thy cheerful morning-walk,
Thy dinner and thy evening-talk.

What though I'm forced my doors to make fast?
What though no cream be mine for breakfast?
Though knaves around me cheat and plunder,
And fires can scarcely be kept under,

Though guilt in triumph stalks abroad,

By Bow and Marlborough-street unawed, .
What signify such paltry blots?

The glorious sun himself has spots.†

...

"When I go to Margate," says the stockbroker in one of Reynolds's effete comedies, "it's for the sake of the raffling, the dancing, and the card-playing; and what with being in the rooms all the morning and in the libraries all the evening, hang me if I think I ever saw the sea."‡ Bonus is so far honest, that he at least says what he goes into the "country" for and what he enjoys when he gets there. A passage in Professor Masson's Chatterton monograph, which he calls A Story of the Year 1770, shows us the Margate hoys of that year in full activity, conveying their annual freight of sea-sick London tradesmen, and their wives and children, and packets of superfluous sandwiches, to "that greedy coast-town of Kent," where the bathing-machines were out on the beach, and the shop-windows were resplendent with plates of prawns, and the dancing-saloons were in full play. "Even men who were never happy out of London streets, yielded to custom and forsook them now. ... The clubs were all broken up, and their scattered atoms were wandering melancholy among green fields, smelling the fresh hay, amusing the farmers by their ignorance of crops, and saying it was so pleasant to get away from town, but really longing for the time when they should again come together in their familiar rooms in the courts round about Temple Bar, and sit down, reconstituted for another year,

Sydney Smith to Lady Holland, Jan. 3, 1841. † Letters to Julia, III.

Laugh When You Can, Act III. Sc. 2.

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