of the Piedmontese Abbé Gioberti, who
supposed that a pope might rule as if he were
another Saint John the Apostle, or the true
Saint Peter, who bade men to lay aside all
malice and all guile and hypocrisies.

On behalf of the liberal party, two cardinals
were proposed for the vacant popedom. Although
one of them was known to be much trusted by
the people, the counsels of the liberals within
the Sacred College were divided, and the greatest
number of votes, though not the majority
necessary for election, thus fell to the lot of
Lambruschini. The two sections of the liberals
took alarm upon this; by mutual consent dropped
both their candidates; and joined their force for
the election, almost at haphazard, of Giovanni
Mastai, one of the obscurest members of the
College. He was the quiet bishop of the
distant little city of Imola, with so little
influence at Rome, that, when he received the
purple as Pius the Ninth, his eldest brother
was a political prisoner in the Castle of St.
Angelo. A month after his installation the new
pope issued, on the sixteenth of July, eighteen
forty-six, an edict declaring a general amnesty
of all political offences. It was the first public sign
of character he gave, and it was received with
immense joy, not only in the Papal States, but
throughout Italy. It was heightened when the
next act of the pope was to declare the favourite
cardinal, who had been desired as pope by the
people, his chief councillor and secretary of
state. Austria now regretted deeply that the
Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, whom she had
sent to assure the election of Lambruschini, had
arrived at Rome too late. Liberals in Italy
believed that half their will at least was
at once to be accomplished under the lead
of that new portent, a Reforming Pope. What
figs were they not to gather when the blossoms
of this thistle ripened into fruit!

There was at this time no state in Italy so
easy and prosperous as Tuscany. To pass into
Tuscany from the States of the Church was, and
is, to observe men, houses, cattle, tillage, towns,
villages, even the aspect of Nature herself,
changed for the better. When the good-natured
Tuscan giant saw Neighbour Dwarf—the poor,
commiserated popeland—rejoicing in amnesty
and constitutional advances, she said (as Mr.
Trollope suggests), with the Cornish giant, who
admired Jack's feats in the swallowing of
pudding, " Her can do that herself!"

Leopold the Second of Tuscany was an amiable
man, bodily cousin of the Emperor of Austria, but
spiritual son to the Pope. When his Holiness
passed for a social and political reformer,
Leopold reconciled much liberality of action with
his conscience, because it was recommended by
the keeper of his conscience. But he was not
prepared for action at all hazards. The head of
his house was at Vienna, and " my master,"
Metternich wrote, " will not permit the approach
towards representative government in any state
within the peninsula." Again, as a prince
devout in reverence for the authority of Rome,
which was regarded lightly by his people,
Leopold the Second was inclined to break down the
restraints on Church encroachment, which had
been set up in the laws of Leopold the First.
His desire was for a concordat with Rome, in
direct antagonism to the policy of his wise
grandfather and the spirit of his people. The
spirit of the Grand-Ducal government had
become less friendly to liberty for a year or two
before the accession of Pius the Ninth. Political
fugitives were not allowed the harbour they had
found there. After the change of pope, during
the whole year 'forty-six, the government and
people were still moving in opposite directions.
Mean efforts were made to propitiate the
offended government of Austria, Two
professors of the University of Pisa—Silvester
Centofanti, the most respected, and Guiseppe
Montanelli, the most influential, of the Tuscan
public teachers—received warnings from
the government. In the last month of the year
there occurred the centenary of the expulsion of
the Austrians from Genoa by the Genoese. All
Italy kept it. Austria strove in vain to quench
the bonfires that blazed out from top to top of
the Apennines. In spite of the police, on the
circle of hill-tops that surround Florence, the
fires leaped out boldly as soon as the early winter
night was dark.

In the year 'forty-seven, Pius the Ninth had
begun to understand that, being a pope, he
must, as a reformer, let I dare not wait
upon I would. The King of Naples, by
unstinted perjury, gilded despotic power with his
sacred promises. His promise was so little
trusted, that when, on the twenty-ninth of
January, eighteen forty-eight, King Ferdinand
swore to maintain the new constitution of his
monarchy, it was jealously guarded by the people
with an imprecation of unusual solemnity: "In
the awful name of the Most Holy and Omnipotent
God, who only can read the secrets of the heart,
on whom we loudly call to be the judge of the
purity and perfect loyalty of the intentions with
which we have determined to enter on this new
political course." The late detested and
infamous King of Naples took this oath, and
broke it under circumstances of atrocity
unequalled in all royal annals.

In Tuscany, irresolution of the government
was manifest to Austria, and, upon this, the wise
man of Vienna played. While law had her seat
in the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, the despicable
swarm of government spies and informers,
known there as the Good Government, the "Buon
Governo," had its own perfectly distinct ofiices
in the Palazzo Non Finito. There had been a
poor harvest; but Tuscans never starve, and
they are, as to ordinary details of life, an easy-
going people, not at all likely to set up bread-
riots while they have bread in their mouths.
But the agents of Austria seized on the
fact as a means of alarming the Grand-Duke
with riots of their own fomenting, and by the
diffusion of communistic pamphlets which they
had themselves imported. This is regarded as
a delicate and subtle part of Austrian policy.
On reliable authority it is asserted that Prince