the two men. Stern soldiers both of them—
severe, pitiless, and immovable. It is only the
scene of the brigandage that is changed, for
when Ferdinand the First conspired in Sicily
the war was in Calabria. Now that Francis
the Second inhabits Rome, it is in the Terra
de Lavoro and the Abruzzi that the scourge
is to be found. Of how little progress Italy
can boast in the road of civilisation and legality
since the commencement of the present century,
this very parallel is the proof; for here we have
the self-same pestilence and the self-same repression
that we witnessed more than fifty years ago.
The same baseness and the same crime, the same
insecurity, and the same severities. The frequent
changes of government in Southern Italy have
favoured this downward tendency; for, with the
fall of each, came an interregnum of disorder
and turbulence, when the jails gave up their
prisoners, and the robber bands got recruited
from the lowest classes of the people. In these
struggles the party of least power never scrupled
to avail itself of such aid as even brigandage
could offer, and this alone served to elevate the
brigand into a position of political importance,
and to dignify him with a station to which he
had no real pretension. Italy has many royalists
—many faithful and attached friends of the old
monarchy—many men of honourable fidelity to
the throne, around which their fathers and
grandfathers stood as defenders—but she has
no La Vendée; that is to say, there is no vast
region in which the sentiments of loyalty to
a sovereign are as an element of faith and a
religious belief. There is not in Italy, as there
once was in France, a great area in which the
exiled king was still recognised as the true
sovereign, and where all the power of his enemies
was deemed the accidental tyranny of usurpers.
With all his remoteness from the great centre
of political illumination, the Vendean peasant
knew what he was fighting for, and felt that
the blood of St. Louis demanded an expiation.
It is not to be supposed that the Calabrian
or Abruzzese does this. A few, and a
very few, of those in arms affect to be partisans
of the Bourbons; but the greater number
are as indifferent who rules the realm as to whom
may be the Tycoon of Japan.

A great impulse was unquestionably given to
the latter brigandage of Italy by the difficulty
in which the government succeeding to the
Garibaldian expedition found itself with regard
to the liberated prisoners. As Garibaldi advanced,
the jails were all broken open, and
the accused and the guilty were alike indiscriminately
set free. The State could scarcely
accept the services of such men, and yet what
were the men to do? If honest labour were
denied them, there was no other road but the
road of crime. When Cipriano della Gala presented
himself to the authorities—a well-known
highwayman, and of proved courage—he asked
to be employed against the brigands. The government
officials, instead of employing him, reconducted
him to jail. From that hour forth,
every escaped felon took to the high road.
Excluded from all hope of pardon, they accepted
lives of peril, as the last and only issue left them.

For the disbanded soldiers of the late royal
army no future was prepared; at least none that
could in any way be palatable to them. Accustomed
to lives of indolence and ease, either in
distant detachments or garrison duty,they frankly
owned that they had no fancy for service under a
king so fond of fighting, and who was actually capable
of "leading them against the Austrians;"
not to add that the discipline of the northern
army was more severe, and the pay smaller. To
men of this stamp, brigandage appealed very forcibly.
Of course it will always be a debatable
question to what extent fidelity to the late king
had a share in these motives, and one must expect
two very different answers from the opposed
partisans. The great probability, however, is, that
very few thought of anything but subsistence.

To listen to the descriptions given of these
wretched creatures by the officers of the royal
army, is to believe them in the lowest state of
destitution and want. Covered with rags, pale
with famine, scarcely able to crawl from debility,
it seems almost a barbarous cruelty to hunt
down to death, objects so contemptible and so
unequal to all resistance. This is not, however,
the picture which the press presents of them;
nor is it at all like the swaggering insolent-looking
fellow who parades the streets of Rome to-day,
and to-morrow is heard of in the Terra di
Lavoro. The truth probably lies between the
two statements, or rather it embraces both; brigandage
has its well-fed, well-clothed, and well-equipped
followers, as also its poor-looking,
squalid, and starving followers. It is no more
limited to a class than it is confined to one political
party. The syndic of one village, the
curate of another, the tax-collector of a third,
will have a son, a brother, or a brother-in-law,
a bandit, and will see the government proclamation
denouncing him on the wall before his
window. Familiarised to brigandage by long
habit—with ears that have listened to bandit adventures
from childhood—he has no very great
horror of the career, though he has a lively fear
of what it may lead to. When the ministerial
despatch reaches him to say that the "Seventy-fourth
Regiment of the Line will despatch Company
B of eighty-eight men, under command of
Captain Annibale Almaforte, for whose billet
and rations he will duly provide in his village,
giving them, besides, all such aid and assistance
as lie in his power to discover the haunts and
exterminate the persons who compose the band
of brigands under a chief called Crocco, or
Stoppa, or Ninco Nanco," the zeal and alacrity
he will lend to his task may be imagined if the
aforesaid leader be his own brother or his son—
ay, or even his cousin or his schoolfellow!

The unfortunate Piedmontese official sent
down south to administer the affairs of some
small town, to investigate its municipal accounts,
and to restore some show of order to its finances,
invariably writes back to Turin an entreaty that
he may be recalled, and a representation that he
is so thwarted, opposed, blinded, and deceived,