IV

  Ay! those were the days when beggared and bound,
  Italy lay in her blank despair;
  Ankles fettered—face to the ground—
  Ashes clotting her radiant hair—
  Bared to the kiss of the despot's lip—
  Bared to the lash of the Croat's whip!
"Where is thy God? Is he deaf or sleeping?"
Laughed the tormentors, close at her ear.
"Sing us gay songs! Art thou hoarse with weeping?
Smile us gay smiles! Art thou cold with fear?"
And the slave stood pale at her masters' revel;
  Spread the choice viands and poured the wine,
Poured her sons' blood, and her daughters' beauty,
—Shuddering sick at her nameless duty—
  Into the cups of the Moloch-devil,
  The huge blind idol of right Divine,
  Which sat and stared in its golden shrine,
  With hand on knee, and impotent feet,
  Stolidly glued to the judgment-seat;
     While evermore
     On the blood-stained floor,
Its Flamens, and Augurs, and men of might,
Wrought their fierce orgie to fever height,
'Mid clank of scourges, and shriek of slaves,
And hollow tramp over echoing graves;
     Round and round,
     Pounding the ground;
While high overhead in cadence slow,
The idol wagged its horrible poll
     To and fro! To and fro!
  Doggedly clanging the words of woe,
     "In statu quo! In statu quo!"
     O'er the monstrous Carmagnole.

                             V

  And so it was in the days I speak of
  That beards, and hats, and tricolored ties,
  Were thorns in Italian rulers' eyes;
     As signs and meanings
     Of radical leanings,
Which somehow their subjects had got a trick of.
And the Austrian eagle, motherly bird!
Teaching her eaglets to scratch and peck,
Made them shrewd gaugers of look and word,
And fed them on blood . . . from another's neck;
Showed them hard lying was wiser than fighting,
And proved that no good comes of reading and writing.
Nay, so far cherished their irritation
At the joke of a "so-called" Italian nation,
That even if the factious looked up in their pain
To a sky just swept by a shower of rain,
Your true-bred birro would glower askance
At the rainbow spanning the cloud-expanse,
And, setting his teeth, thus sulkily ponder:
"Those rascals have some understanding up yonder!
A tricolored signal! No sane man can doubt of it,
If the orange and blue were a little washed out of it!"

                              VI

  Montani held, I am sorry to say,
  A perilous faith, for that place and day,
About liberty, justice, political crimes,
The Council of Trent, and the "drift of the times;"
As if blessing, not banning, came best from the altar,
And "Ecclesia" translated, ought not to mean halter.
But, alas! with a nestful of mouths to feed,
Men do strain a point in the honestest creed.
Montani's poor oil-cruse ran lower and lower,
As his latest-born blessing was just to the fore.
So when somebody talked of appealing to Rome,
  Mistress Montani said, "Idling at home,
And grumbling because people wouldn't conspire,
Was like using that oil-cruse to put out the fire!
If he, like so many, would pocket his pride,
And beg back his judgeship . . . What? . . . Well! had he tried?"
  Thus, after ten days of storm or so,
   From morning to night, blow high, blow low,
   Montani made up his mind to go
Straight off to Rome; to repudiate thinking;
To barter his soul for mere eating and drinking;
To look upon freedom as out of men's reach,
And strive to keep cool if some priestly adviser,
Or laced humble servant of Pontiff or Kaiser,
Should chance to remark, as he twiddled his ring
(In a jocular tone, as a very smart thing),
Of beautiful Italy, grand in her shame,
That she was but "a mere geographical name,"
     Or a farcical figure of speech!

       Our hero takes his resolve, in fine,
And his place, for next Tuesday at half-after nine;
  Then writes to a tried friend at Rome, to explain
  The cause of his coming, the how and the when,
And to make the results of his journey more feasible,
Entreats him to grease every wheel that is greasable;
Sets forth to a nicety how the case stands with him,
And winds up, by hoping he soon shall shake hands with him.
  Then, jots down the dons to be called upon first,
  Packs up his trunk . . . and prepares for the worst.
But Mistress Montani had heard from a cousin,
That the case would be settled at once, by a dozen
Introductory words, if the Bishop wrote 'em,
To the Cardinal Sec., the Pope's factotum.
So, her ghostly director, a Jesuit brother,
Entreated the Bishop's chief almoner's mother
To prefer a request, as humble as fervent,
To Monsignorè's Brazilian servant.
And on Sunday, after high mass and "collation,"
     Montani (not guessing
     Their servile finessing),
With a potent feeling of disinclination,
—His frank grey eye a trifle sadder,
But that beard as mad as of old, or madder—
  Stood tête-à-tête with Monsignorè,
  Telling the rights and wrongs of his story,
In a pleasant room, with the windows wide,
And a Mexican parrot perched at its side,
Which, riled by Montani's beard, no doubt,
  Holloa'd " Afuera!" which means, " Get out!"

                              VII

The Bishop smiled and looked sleek the while
(Lord Burleigh's shake was a fool to his smile!);
And listening, smoothed with his fingers taper
The whity-brown sheet of a Roman paper,
Which told, in its "foreign intelligence" how
In fear of a Carbonaro row
The young King of Naples, called afterwards Bomba,
Had lately most luckily bagged a good number
Of dangerous characters, fifteen or twenty,
In the jail of Saint Mary, surnamed "Apparentè"
Or "Apparent" most likely because 'twas so plain,
Once in, that no soul would get out on't again.
     Quoth the Bishop: "Be seated!
     You're shamefully treated,
Dear sir! and your enemies must be defeated.