Chapter II (2)

However, on nearing them, the stranger discovered his mistake; and, throwing his rifle across the saddle once more, reined in his horse and waited their approach; for the spot where he then stood presented an excellent camping-ground, with abundance of dry wood and convenient water.

"Where from, stranger?"

"The divide, and to the bayou for meat; and you are from there, I see. Any buffalo come in yet?"

"Heap, and seal-fat at that. What's the sign out on the plains?"

"War-party of Rapahos passed Squirrel at sundown yesterday, and nearly raised my animals. Sign, too, of more on left fork of Boiling Spring. No buffalo between this and Bijou. Do you feel like camping?"

"_Well_, we do. But whar's your companyeros?"

"I'm alone."

"Alone! Wagh! how do you get your animals along?"

"I go ahead, and they follow the horse."

"Well, that beats all! That's a smart-looking hos now; and runs some, I'm thinking."

"Well, it does."

"Whar's them mules from? They look like Californy."

"Mexican country--away down south."

"H----! Whar's yourself from?"

"There away, too."

"What's beaver worth in Taos?"

"Dollar."

"In Saint Louiy?"

"Same."

"H----! Any call for buckskin?"

"A heap! The soldiers in Santa Fé are half froze for leather; and mocassins fetch two dollars, easy."

"Wagh! How's trade on Arkansa, and what's doin to the Fort?"

"Shians at Big Timber, and Bent's people trading smart. On North Fork, Jim Waters got a hundred pack right off, and Sioux making more."

"Whar's Bill Williams?"

"Gone under they say: the Diggers took his hair."

"How's powder goin?"

"Two dollars a pint."

"Bacca?"

"A plew a plug."

"Got any about you?"

"Have _so_."

"Give us a chaw; and now let's camp."

Whilst unpacking their own animals, the two trappers could not refrain from glancing, every now and then, with no little astonishment, at the solitary stranger they had so unexpectedly encountered. If truth be told, his appearance not a little perplexed them. His hunting frock of buckskin, shining with grease, and fringed pantaloons, over which the well-greased butcher-knife had evidently been often wiped after cutting his food, or butchering the carcass of deer and buffalo, were of genuine mountain make. His face, clean shaved, exhibited in its well-tanned and weather-beaten complexion, the effects of such natural cosmetics as sun and wind; and under the mountain hat of felt which covered his head, long uncut hair hung in Indian fashion on his shoulders. All this would have passed muster, had it not been for the most extraordinary equipment of a double-barrelled rifle; which, when it had attracted the eyes of the mountaineers, elicited no little astonishment, not to say derision. But, perhaps, nothing excited their admiration so much as the perfect docility of the stranger's animals; which, almost like dogs, obeyed his voice and call; and albeit that one, in a small sharp head and pointed ears, expanded nostrils, and eye twinkling and malicious, exhibited the personification of a "lurking devil," yet they could not but admire the perfect ease which this one even, in common with the rest, permitted herself to be handled.

Dismounting from his horse, and unhitching from the horn of his saddle the coil of skin rope, one end of which was secured round the neck of the horse, he proceeded to unsaddle; and whilst so engaged, the three mules, two of which were packed, one with the unbutchered carcass of a deer, the other with a pack of skins, &c., followed leisurely into the space chosen for the camp, and, cropping the grass at their ease, waited until a whistle called them to be unpacked.

The horse was a strong square-built bay; and, although the severities of a prolonged winter, with scanty pasture and long and trying travel, had robbed his bones of fat and flesh, tucked up his flank, and "ewed" his neck; still his clean and well-set legs, oblique shoulder, and withers fine as a deer's, in spite of his gaunt half-starved appearance, bore ample testimony as to what he _had_ been; while his clear cheerful eye, and the hearty appetite with which he fell to work on the coarse grass of the bottom, proved that he had something in him still, and was game as ever. His tail, ate by the mules in days of strait, attracted the observant mountaineers.

"Hard doins when it come to that," remarked La Bonté.

Between the horse and two of the mules a mutual and great affection appeared to subsist, which was no more than natural, when their master observed to his companions that they had travelled together upwards of two thousand miles.

One of these mules was a short, thick-set, stumpy animal, with an enormous head surmounted by proportionable ears, and a pair of unusually large eyes, beaming the most perfect good temper and docility (most uncommon qualities in a mule.) Her neck was thick, and rendered more so in appearance by reason of her mane not being roached, (or in English, hogged,) which privilege she alone enjoyed of the trio; and her short, strong legs, ending in small, round, cat-like hoofs, were feathered with profusion of dark brown hair.

As she stood stock-still, while the stranger removed the awkwardly packed deer from her back, she flapped backward and forward her huge ears, occasionally turning her head, and laying her cold nose against her master's cheek. When the pack was removed, he advanced to her head, and, resting it on his shoulder, rubbed her broad and grizzled cheeks with both his hands for several minutes, the old mule laying her ears, like a rabbit, back upon her neck, and with half-closed eyes enjoyed mightily the manipulation. Then, giving her a smack upon the haunch, and a "hep-a" well-known to mule kind, the old favourite threw up her heels and cantered off to the horse, who was busily cropping the buffalo grass on the bluff above the stream.

Great was the contrast between the one just described and the next which came up to be divested of her pack. She, a tall beautifully shaped Mexican mule, of a light mouse colour, with a head like a deer's, and long springy legs, trotted up obedient to the call, but with ears bent back and curled up nose, and tail compressed between her legs. As her pack was being removed, she groaned and whined like a dog, as a thong or loosened strap touched her ticklish body, lifting her hind-quarters in a succession of jumps or preparatory kicks, and looking wicked as a panther. When nothing but the fore pack-saddle remained, she had worked herself into the last stage; and as the stranger cast loose the girth of buffalo hide, and was about to lift the saddle and draw the crupper from the tail, she drew her hind legs under her, more tightly compressed her tail, and almost shrieked with rage.

"Stand clear," he roared, (knowing what was coming,) and raised the saddle, when out went her hind legs, up went the pack into the air, and, with it dangling at her heels, away she tore, kicking the offending saddle as she ran. Her master, however, took this as matter of course, followed her and brought back the saddle, which he piled on the others to windward of the fire one of the trappers was kindling. Fire-making is a simple process with the mountaineers. Their bullet-pouches always contain a flint and steel, and sundry pieces of "punk"[27] or tinder; and pulling a handful of dry grass, which they screw into a nest, they place the lighted punk in this, and, closing the grass over it, wave it in the air, when it soon ignites, and readily kindles the dry sticks forming the foundation of the fire.

[27] A pithy substance found in dead pine-trees.

The tit-bits of the deer the stranger had brought in were soon roasting over the fire; whilst, as soon as the burning logs had deposited a sufficiency of ashes, a hole was raked in them, and the head of the deer, skin, hair, and all, placed in this primitive oven, and carefully covered with the hot ashes.

A "heap" of "fat meat" in perspective, our mountaineers enjoyed their ante-prandial pipes, recounting the news of the respective regions whence they came; and so well did they like each other's company, so sweet the "honey-dew" tobacco of which the strange hunter had good store, so plentiful the game about the creek, and so abundant the pasture for their winter-starved animals, that before the carcass of the "two-year" buck had been more than four-fifths consumed; and, although rib after rib had been picked and chucked over their shoulders to the wolves, and one fore leg, and _the_ "bit" of all, the head, still cooked before them, the three had come to the resolution to join company and hunt in their present locality for a few days at least,--the owner of the "two-shoot" gun volunteering to fill their horns with powder, and find tobacco for their pipes.

Here, on plenty of meat, of venison, bear, and antelope, they merrily luxuriated; returning after their daily hunts to the brightly burning camp-fire, where one always remained to guard the animals, and unloading their packs of meat,--all choicest portions, ate late into the night, and, smoking, wiled away the time in narrating scenes in their hard-spent lives, and fighting their battles o'er again.

The younger of the trappers, he who has figured under the name of La Bonté, in scraps and patches from his history, had excited no little curiosity in the stranger's mind to learn the ups and downs of his career; and one night, when they assembled earlier than usual at the fire, he prevailed upon the modest trapper to "unpack" some passages in his wild adventurous life.

"Maybe," commenced the mountaineer, "you both remember when old Ashley went out with the biggest kind of band to trap the Columbia, and head-waters of Missoura and Yellow Stone. Well, that was the time this niggur first felt like taking to the mountains."

This brings us back to the year of our Lord 1825; and perhaps it will be as well, to render La Bonté's mountain language intelligible, to translate it at once to tolerable English, and tell in the third person, but from his lips, the scrapes which him befell in a sojourn of more than twenty years in the Far West, and the causes which impelled him to quit the comfort and civilisation of his home, and seek the perilous but engaging life of a trapper of the Rocky Mountains.

La Bonté was raised in the state of Mississippi, not far from Memphis, on the left bank of that huge and snag-filled river. His father was a Saint Louis Frenchman, his mother a native of Tennessee. When a boy, our trapper was "some," he said, with the rifle, and always had a hankering for the west; particularly when, on accompanying his father to Saint Louis every spring, he saw the different bands of traders and hunters start upon their annual expeditions to the mountains; and envied the independent, _insouciant_ trappers, as, in all the glory of beads and buckskin, they shouldered their rifles at Jake Hawkin's door, (the rifle-maker of St Louis,) and bade adieu to the cares and trammels of civilised life.

However, like a thoughtless beaver-kitten, he put his foot into a trap one fine day, set by Mary Brand, a neighbour's daughter, and esteemed "some punkins," or in other words toasted as the beauty of Memphis County, by the susceptible Mississippians. From that moment he was "gone beaver;" "he felt queer," he said, "all over, like a buffalo shot in the lights; he had no relish for mush and molasses; homminy and johnny cakes failed to excite his appetite. Deer and turkeys ran by him unscathed; he didn't know, he said, whether his rifle had hind-sights or not. He felt bad, that was a fact; but what ailed him he didn't know."

Mary Brand--Mary Brand--Mary Brand! the old Dutch clock ticked it. Mary Brand! his head throbbed it when he lay down to sleep. Mary Brand! his rifle-lock spoke it plainly when he cocked it, to raise a shaking sight at a deer. Mary Brand, Mary Brand! the whip-poor-will sung it, instead of her own well-known note; the bull-frogs croaked it in the swamp, and mosquitos droned it in his ear as he tossed about his bed at night, wakeful, and striving to think what ailed him.

Who could that strapping young fellow, who passed the door just now, be going to see? Mary Brand: Mary Brand. And who can Big Pete Herring be dressing that silver fox-skin so carefully for? For whom but Mary Brand? And who is it that jokes, and laughs, and dances with all the 'boys' but him; and why?

Who but Mary Brand: and because the love-sick booby carefully avoids her.

LOMBARDY AND THE ITALIAN WAR.

To what is the difference of national character due? Is it to climate? Is the Negro a barbarian by a law of nature? Do his fiery sunshine and his luxuriant soil, his magnificent forest shades, or his mighty rivers, hiding their heads in inaccessible solitudes, and winding for thousands of miles through fields of the plantain and the sugar-cane, condemn him to perpetual inferiority of intellect? Was the brilliancy of the ancient Greek only an emanation from the land of bright skies and balmy airs?--was it the spirit of the sounding cataracts, and the impulse of the vine-covered hills? Was the northern tempest the creator of the northern character? and the perpetual dash of the ocean on the Scandinavian shore, or the roar of the thunder and the sweep of the whirlwind over the Tartar steppe, the training of the tribes which burst in upon the iron frontier of the Great Empire, and left it clay?

The controversy has never yet been settled. Yet, on the whole, we are strongly inclined to think that the mightier impression is due to the operation of man on the mind of man. To our idea, "the globe, with all that it inherits," is but a vast school-room, with its scholars. The nations may enter with different propensities and capacities, but the purpose of the discipline is, to train all in the use of their original powers, to modify the rougher faculties, to invigorate the weaker; and perhaps, in some remoter period of the world and its completion, to educate a universal mind for the duties of a universal family.

What education is to the individual, institutions are to the nation. Why was it that the ancient Roman was the conqueror, the legislator, the man of stern determination, and the example of patriot virtue? Why was he the man of an ambition to be satisfied with nothing narrower than the supremacy of the globe--the defier of the desert, the master of the ocean, the ruler of all the diadems of all mankind?

Yet what is the contrast in the history of his successors,--millions living under the same sky, with the same landscape of hill and dale before them--even with the bold recollections of their ancestry to inspire them, and with frames as athletic, and intellects as vivid as those of the days when every nation brought tribute to the feet of the Cæsars? Why is it that the man of Thermopylæ and Platæa has now no representative but the "cunning Greek," and the land, once covered with trophies, is now only the soil of the trafficker and the tomb? Why has even our own island, so memorable and so admirable, exhibited a contrast to the early terrors and capricious bravery of the Briton in the time of the Roman? For the charioteers and spearmen who fought Cæsar on the shore were chiefly foreigners from Gaul and Germany, defending their own beeves and merchandise, while the natives fled into the forest, and submitted, wherever they were pursued. Why was Russia, for a thousand years, the constant prey of the "riders of the wilderness," who now offer so feeble a resistance to her firm sovereignty? Or, to come to the immediate instance, why have the fiercest tribe of Scandinavia, perhaps the most warlike of mankind in their day, sunk into the feeble flexibility of the Italian, in whom resistance is scarcely more than the work of exasperation, and the boldest hostilities probably deserve no more than the name of a paroxysm?

The name of the Lombards was famous as far back as the sixth century and the reign of Justinian. The camp of Attila had collected the chieftains of the barbarian tribes on the northern bank of the Danube, and his death had left them to divide the vast inheritance which had been won in the briefest period, and by the most remorseless slaughter, in the memory of the world. Hungary and Transylvania were seized by the roving warriors of the Gepidæ. The fears or the policy of Justinian contracted the boundaries of the empire; and whether despising the power, or relying on the indolence, of the barbarians, he stripped the southern bank of its garrisons, for the defence of Italy. The Gepidæ were instantly in arms, the river was crossed in contempt or defiance of the imperial revenge; and this daring act was not less daringly followed by a message to Constantinople, that "as the emperor possessed territories more than he knew how to govern, or could desire to retain, his faithful allies merely anticipated his bounty in taking their share." The emperor suffered the insult in silence, but resolved on revenge. With the artificial policy which always increases the evils of an unprepared government, he invited a new race of barbarians to act as the antagonists of the invader.

In the country between the Elbe and the Oder, about the time of Augustus, a tribe had settled, of a singularly savage aspect, and, by the exaggerations of national terror, described as having the "heads of dogs," as lapping the blood of the slain in battle, and exhibiting at once the ferocity of the animal and the daring of the man. On the summons of Justinian, they instantly plucked up their spears and standards from the graves of the Heruli, whom they had slaughtered in Poland, crossed the Danube with the whole force of their warriors, and finally, after a long and bloody war, extinguished the Gepidæ in a battle in which forty thousand of the enemy were slain round their king. The conqueror, with characteristic savageness, made a drinking-cup of the skull of the fallen monarch, and in it pledged his chieftains to their future fame.

This victory at last had taught the imperial court the hazards of its policy; but the deed was done, and Italy lay open to a race whose strange aspect, ferocity of habit, and invincible courage, had already wrought the Italians to the highest pitch of terror.

Among the effeminacies of Italy, the classic arrangement of the hair and beard seem to have held a foremost place. But, in their new invaders, the nation saw a host of athletic warriors, indifferent to every thing but arms, wearing their locks wild as nature had made them, and with visages and manners which almost justified the popular report, that they had the heads of dogs, and lapped up the blood of their enemies. From this length and looseness of hair they had their name. Savage as they were, they exhibited something of that spirit which from time to time tinges barbarism with romance. Alboin, the prince of the Longobards, young, handsome, and a hero, resolved to possess at once the two great objects of the passions, love and glory. To accomplish the first, he seized on Rosamunda, the beautiful daughter of the fallen monarch; and for the second he made a royal banquet, and, covering the tables with the fruits and wines of Italy, demanded of his chieftains whether the land which produced such things was not worth their swords? We may justly conceive that he was answered with acclamation. Their trumpets were heard through every tribe of the North, and the multitude were instantly in arms under a leader whose name was a pledge of possession. His vanguard scaled the Julian Alps. All the roving warriors of Gaul and Germany, with a column of twenty thousand Saxons, instantly joined the Lombard banner. Italy, exhausted by a long continuance of disease and famine, and now accustomed to yield, had lain at the mercy of the first invader, and Alboin, with his sword in the sheath, marched through a fugitive population, and finished his bloodless triumph within the impregnable ramparts and patrician palaces of Verona. From the Trentine hills to the gates of Ravenna and Rome, all was the easy prize of Lombard victory.

It is singular to hear, at the interval of more than a thousand years, the same names of the cities which then became the possession of the invaders, and to see the warlike movements of the present hour following the track of the warriors of the sixth century. Alboin conquered Milan by fear, and Pavia by famine; but the bold barbarian disdained to reside in a city, however splendid, which had yielded without a battle, and he fixed the Lombard throne in Pavia, which had earned his respect by a siege of three years.

It is a striking illustration of the superiority of institutions to climate, that the Lombard, even in Italy, continued the same bold, restless, and resistless man of iron, which he had been in the barren plains of Prussia, or on the stormy shores of the Baltic. With all the luxuries of Italy to soften him, and even with all the fervours of an Italian sun to subdue him into indolence, he was still the warrior, the hunter, and the falconer. Leaving tillage to the degraded caste of the Italian, he trained horses for war and the chase, in the famous pastures bordering the Adriatic. He sent to his native Scandinavia for the most powerful falcons; he trained the hound, that could tear down alike the stag and the wolf; and prepared himself hourly by the chase through the forests, which were now rapidly covering the depopulated plains of Italy, for the hardships and enterprises of actual war. The favourite distinctions of the Lombard noble were the hawk on the wrist and the falchion by the side.

We now give a rapid sketch of the subsequent periods.

From the tenth century, when Germany assumed the form of a settled state, its connexion with Italy was always exhibited in the shape of mastery. The modern Italian character is evidently not made for eminence in war. The hardships of German life, contrasted with the easy indolence of Italy, have always given the Northern ploughman the superiority over the vine-dresser of the South; and from the time when Charlemagne first moved his men of mail over the Alps, Italy has been a fair and feeble prize for German vigour and German intrepidity.

On the general dissolution of the empire of Charlemagne, Italy naturally followed the fate of all vassal kingdoms. At the close of the ninth century its provinces had been made a common field of battle to the multitude of dukes, counts, and captains of banditti, who suddenly started into a brief celebrity as spoilers of the great German empire. A terrible period of almost a century of intestine war followed, which covered the land with corpses, and made Northern Italy but one capacious scene of blood and desolation. At length, a German conqueror, Otho of Saxony, fortunately came, as of old, crushed all rivalry, drove the peasantry from the field, commanded the nobles to do him homage, and by the combined operation of the sceptre and the sword, partially compelled his fierce feudatories to learn the arts of peace. Still, perhaps, there was not upon the earth a more disturbed district than Lombardy. In the lapse of centuries, it had grown opulent, notwithstanding its spoilers. The native talent of the Italian, his commercial connexion with Egypt and the East, and his literary intercourse with the fugitives from Constantinople, and the eagerness of the Western nations, even at that early period, to obtain the produce of Italian looms and pencils, gave the nation wealth, and with it constitutional power. This power resulted in the formation of small commonwealths, which, though frequently at war with each other, often exhibited a lustre and spirit worthy of the vivid days of antique Italy.

The feudal system, the natural product of barbarian victory, by which the land had been divided among the conquerors, was strongly opposed by the commercial cities; and the most successful of all resistance, that of popular interests, rapidly broke down the system. The first struggle was by the class of the inferior nobles against the great proprietors. The close of the eleventh century found the principle of resistance advancing, and the populace now mingled in the contest.

The dissension was increased by the papal violences against the married clergy in the middle of the century. This dispute gave rise to one of the most important changes in the Romish discipline, and one of the longest contests between the Pope and the people. The Church of Milan, dating its liturgy from the times of the memorable Bishop Ambrose, had continued almost wholly independent of the discipline and the authority of Rome. By its especial rule, the priest who was married before his ordination retained his wife; but, if unmarried, he was not suffered to marry afterwards. This unfortunate compromise with superstition naturally produced the loss of the original right. The Jewish priesthood had been married under the direct sanction of a code confessedly divine. Peter, and apparently others of the apostles, were married; and there is no mention of any remonstrance on the part of our Lord against this most essential of all relationships. St Paul's wish "that the disciples should remain unmarried" in the time of a threatened persecution, was evidently limited to the persecution; and instead of denying the common right of the Christian clergy to marry, he expressly insists on his personal _right_ to marry if he should so please, as well as any other of the brethren. The recommendation _not_ to marry at the time was also addressed _not_ to the peculiar _teachers_ of Christianity, but to the whole body of the Christians--a generalisation which of itself shows that it was merely for the period; as it must be wholly irrational to suppose that the gospel desired the final extinction of marriage _among all mankind_.

The contest continued with great violence until the accession of the well-known Gregory VII., who, finding it impossible to overcome the resistance of the clergy, while they were sustained by their archbishop, dexterously dismantled the See, by annexing its suffragans gradually to Rome. The power of the archbishops of Milan thus sank, until they condescended to receive investiture from the Bishop of Rome. The See lost its independence; and the law of celibacy--one of the most corrupting to the morals of the priesthood, but one of the most effective to establish the domination of the papacy throughout Europe--became the law of Christendom.

The history of the Italian republics is an unhappy record for the advocates of republicanism. It was a history of perpetual feuds among the higher ranks, and perpetual misery among the people. The mediæval annals of Italy, with all their activity and lustre, might be wisely exchanged by any nation on earth for the quiet obscurity of a German marsh, or the remote safety of an island in the heart of the ocean. The only palliation was in the stimulus which all republics give to human energy, by relaxing all impediments to the exertion of the individual. But this good is strangely counteracted by the habitual uncertainty of republics. No man's fortune _can_ be safe while it remains under a popular government. A decree of the party in power may strip him of his property in a day. The general object of the rule of the rabble is the seizure of property, and the man of wealth to-day may be the beggar to-morrow. The most despotic monarchy seldom preys on the individual, and still seldomer takes him by surprise. For the long period of five hundred years, Lombardy was one of the most unfortunate countries in the world, from its republican propensities. Factions, of every degree of tyranny and vice, tore it asunder. The names of the Torriani, the Visconti, and the Sforze, are seen successively floating on the tide of blood and misery which covered this noblest of the Italian provinces; and each faction, at its sinking, left little more than a new evidence of the guilt of profligate governments, each exceeding the other in professions of public virtue. A single, vigorous sceptre--a settled constitution, however stern--a dynasty even of despots, which had the simple merit of stability, would have rescued Lombardy from a condition scarcely to be envied by a galley-slave. The historians of Italy recur to this period in words of horror. The romancers find in it an exhaustless fund of their darkest scenes. The poets revert to it for their deepest-coloured images of national destruction. What must be the condition of a country, when a military despotism, and that too the despotism of a foreign power, was a desirable change?

In the middle of the sixteenth century this change occurred, in the transfer of Lombardy to Charles V. After a century and a half of subjection to the Spanish dynasty, it again passed, by the failure of the line, into the hands of Austria. But at length, under the well-intentioned government of the Empress Maria Theresa, property became secure, the factions were suppressed by the strong hand of authority, commerce felt new confidence, and the natural advantages of climate, soil, and talent suddenly raised the country into a new and vigorous prosperity; within a quarter of a century, its population rose from less than a million to nearly a million and a quarter; and the produce of the soil not only fed its population, but was largely exported.

The French Revolution of 1789, which startled every kingdom of Europe, shook Italy to its centre. The religion of Rome, while it fills the eye with ceremonies, and the ear with dogmas, makes but little impression on the heart, and none on the understanding. The boundless profligacy of Italian manners had long corrupted public life. The opera and the billiard-table were the only resources of an overgrown nobility, pauperised by their numbers, and despised for their pauperism. The facility of dispensing with oaths, in a religion which gives absolution for every crime, and repeats it on every repetition of the crime, practically extinguishes all sense of allegiance; and, at the first offer of what the French pronounced liberty, every province was ready to rush into republicanism.

The campaigns of Napoleon, in 1796 and 1797, incomparably conducted by the genius of the French general, and wretchedly mismanaged by the inveterate somnolency of the councils of Austria, gave a new stimulus to the frenzy of revolution. Lombardy, already resolved on self-government, was constituted a republic by the treaty of Campo Formio in 1797--Austria receiving Venice as a compensation for Milan, Mantua, and Belgium. The Venetian outcry against this compact was bitter, but it was helpless. Napoleon had the sword which settled all diplomatic difficulties; and she had good reason to rejoice in her release from the perpetual robbery of her republican masters. The coronation of Napoleon in 1804, followed by the memorable Austrian campaign, which ended with the fatal fight of Austerlitz, again changed the destinies of the north of Italy. By the treaty of Vienna, Venice and Lombardy were united under France, and Napoleon assumed the crown of Charlemagne, as King of Italy!

On the exile of Napoleon to Elba, the Austrian Emperor again became master of Milan, Mantua, and Venice, combined under the name of the Lombardo-Veneto kingdom, which was annexed to the imperial crown--the whole being divided into nine Lombard provinces, and eight Venetian; and the population of the entire, by the census of 1833, being somewhat more than four millions and a half.

It cannot now be necessary to enter into the detail of the national government; but it was of a much more popular order than might be conceived from the formalities of Austria. Each of the great provinces--Lombardy and Venice--had a species of administrative council, consisting of deputies from the minor provinces, each returning two, the one a noble and the other a plebeian, with a deputy from each of the royal towns, the whole being elected for six years. Those bodies, though not entitled to make laws, had yet important functions. They settled the proportion of the taxes, superintended the disbursements for roads, and had the especial care of the charitable establishments. Nor were these all. In every chief town there was a local administration, especially superintending the finance of their respective districts; and the general taxation seemed to have been light, and but little felt, and scarcely complained of.

Burke, in one of his prophetic anticipations, pronounced that the first ruin of Europe would be in its finance, and that every kingdom was, even in his day, wading into a boundless ocean of debt. Austria, of course, had felt its share; and after the desperate wars of 1805 and 1809, nothing is more wonderful in the history of finance, or more honourable to the great statesman who for forty years presided over her fate, than that she should have escaped bankruptcy.

But her liberality to her Italian provinces never failed. Some of the details, which have already reached the public, give an extraordinary conception of the almost prodigality with which Austria has lavished her means upon the bridges, roads, and general public communications of Lombardy.

We give those items in francs.

Five millions spent in repairing and constructing dikes in the Mantuan province.

Four millions in completing the canal of the Naviglio.

A million and a half for roads in the mountains of the Bergamesque.

A million and a half for the great commercial road of the Splugen.

Two millions and a half for the road over the Hiffer Jock.

Three millions for continuing it along the shore of the lake Como.

Three millions and a quarter for completing the cathedral of Milan.

A million for improvements in the city.

Half a million for the fine bridge over the Ticino.

Twenty-four millions for cross-roads, between 1814 and 1831, besides miscellaneous expenditure;--the whole being not less than sixty-six millions in the fifteen years preceding 1834, in the mere matter of keeping up the means of intercourse in a country where, half a century ago, the cross-roads were little more than goat-tracks; besides the annual expense of about a million and a quarter on the repair of the roads since. And this munificent liberality was expended in Lombardy alone. The expenditure in Venice in the latter period of its possession has been nearly equal. The first French conquest had given it the name of a constitution, and nothing else. The famous republic was plundered to the last coin. On its second seizure its treasury was again emptied by its French emancipators; and when it was restored to Austria in 1814, its population presented a pauper list of fifty-four thousand individuals. Its commerce was in a state of ruin; its palaces and public buildings were in a state of decay; its charitable establishments were without funds; and a few years more must have filled its canals with the wrecks of its houses. Within the next twenty years the reparations cost the Austrian treasury not less than fifty-three millions of francs! Thus Venice rose from a condition which all our travellers, immediately after the peace of 1815, pronounced to be irreparable ruin, and is now one of the first commercial cities of Italy.

But the Austrian government had not been contented with a mere improvement of the soil or of the modes of communication--it had employed extraordinary efforts in giving education to the people. We are to remember the difficulties which impede all such efforts in Romish countries. Where the priest regulates the faith, he must always be jealous of the education. But the German habits of the government predominated over the superstition of Rome, and a species of military discipline was introduced, to compel the young Italians to learn the use of their indolent understandings. Within a few years after the peace of 1815 a national school system was put in action in Lombardy. Within a few more years it had spread over the whole country, with such effect, that there was scarcely a commune without its public place of education. The schools for boys amounted to upwards of two thousand three hundred, and for girls to upwards of twelve hundred. Nearly a hundred of the schools for boys taught a very extensive course of practical knowledge. The higher classes learned architecture, mechanics, geography, drawing, and natural history, in the vigorous, useful way for which German education is distinguished. Still higher schools, or portions of the former, were placed in the chief towns, for the practical acquirement of the known ledge most important for servants of public offices. There the chief studies were history, commerce, mathematics, chemistry, and French, German, and Italian. Under this system, it is evident that very solid and valuable acquirements might be made; and those were solely the work of the Austrian sovereignty.

We give a slight abstract of the plan of education in the female schools, because it is on this point that England is still most deficient.

The female elementary schools had three classes.

In the youngest were taught spelling and writing, mental and written arithmetic, needlework, and the Catechism.

In the second were taught the elements of grammar, the four rules of arithmetic, and needlework, consisting of marking and embroidery, with religious instruction.

In the third were taught religion, sacred history, geography, Italian grammar, letter-writing, weights and measures, and the nature and history of coin.

All those acquirements were, of course, dictated by the necessities and habits of native life; but they compose a scale of practical knowledge which, while useful in their humblest capacity, would form an admirable ground-work for every attainment of the female mind. It is probably from some sense of hazard that we do not observe music among the objects of education: for doubtless singing must have been one of the habits of schools taught by a German system. We should also have desired to see some knowledge of domestic arrangements, of the culinary arts, and of making their own dress. However, it is probable that these obvious advantages, especially for the life of the peasantry, may have been added subsequently to the period from which our information is derived.

We should rejoice to see in England national institutions of this order established for the education of young females of every rank, thus withdrawing the daughters of the peasantry from those coarse drudgeries of the field which were never intended for them, relieving the female population of the manufacturing towns alike from the factory labour and the town habits, and training for the labouring population honest, useful, and moral partners of their lives. In the higher ranks, the activity, regularity, and practical use of all their occupations would be scarcely less essential; and we should see in the rising generation a race of accomplished women who had learned every thing that was of importance to make them the intellectual associates of the intelligent world, while they had acquired those domestic habits, and were entitled to avail themselves of those graceful and useful arts, which make home pleasing without feeble indulgence, hospitality cheerful without extravagance, and even time itself pass without leaving behind a regret for wasted hours.

The Lombard system had been subsequently applied to the Venetian provinces; where, twenty years ago, the number of schools had risen to between fourteen and fifteen hundred. The number of boys then attending the schools was upwards of sixty thousand. Higher still, there were eighty-six gymnasia or colleges, with three hundred professors, and attended by upwards of seven thousand students, with thirty-four colleges for females. Higher still were the twelve Lyceums, for philosophical studies; and, at the summit of all, the two universities of Padua and Pavia. The whole system being superintended by the general boards at Milan and Venice.

Whether all those regulations are applicable to our own country, may be a matter of question. But the grand difficulty experienced here, the power of making the parents avail themselves of those admirable opportunities, is easily solved by the German discipline. A register is kept in every commune, of all the children from six to twelve years old; and they are all _compelled_ to attend the schools, except in case of illness, or some other sufficient cause. But the tuition is gratuitous, the expense and the schoolmaster being paid by the commune. Corporal punishment is wholly forbidden.

Such were the benefits lavished by Austria upon her Italian subjects; benefits which they never would have dreamed of if left to themselves; and which, in all probability, the pauperised exchequer of the revolt will never be able to sustain. Under this government, too, Lombardy had become the most fertile province of Italy, the most densely peopled, and the most opulent, of the south of Europe. Venice, too, which had been crushed almost into ruins by the French, rose again into a resemblance of that commercial power, and civil splendour, which once made her famous throughout the Mediterranean; and Milan, though characterised in the Italian annals as the most luckless of all the cities of earth, having been besieged forty times, taken twenty times, and almost levelled with the ground by the conqueror four times,--yet, when the late Emperor Francis visited her about twenty years ago, exhibited a pomp of private wealth, and a magnificence of public festivity, which astonished Europe, and was the most eloquent refutation of the declamatory ravings of the mob of patriotism.

That Austria should be unwilling to give up so fine a possession is perfectly natural; constituting, as it does, the noblest portion of the Italian peninsula; or, in the striking language of the historian Alison,--

"A plain, three hundred miles in length, by a hundred and twenty in breadth, and in the greatest portion of its length exhibiting an alluvial soil watered by the Ticino, the Adda, the Adige, the Tagliamento, and the Piave, falling from the Alps, with the Taro and other streams falling from the Apennines, and the whole plain traversed through its centre by the Po, affording the amplest means of irrigation, the only requisite in this favoured region for the production of the richest pastures and the most luxuriant harvests."

"On the west," says this master of picturesque description, "it is sheltered by a vast semicircle of mountains, which there unite the Alps and the Apennines, and are surmounted by glittering piles of ice and snow, forming the majestic barrier between France and Italy. In those inexhaustible reservoirs, which the heat of summer converts into perennial fountains of living water, the Po takes its rise; and that classic stream, rapidly fed by the confluence of the torrents which descend through every cleft and valley in the vast circumference, is already a great river when it sweeps under the ramparts of Turin."

The description of its agriculture is equally glowing with that of its mountain boundaries. "A system of agriculture, from which every nation in Europe might take a lesson, has been long established over its whole surface, and two, sometimes three, successive crops annually reward the labours of the husbandman. Indian corn is produced in abundance, and by its return, quadruple that of wheat, affords subsistence for a numerous and dense population. An incomparable system of irrigation, diffused over the whole, conveys the waters of the Alps into a series of little canals, like the veins and arteries in the human body, to every field, and in some places to every ridge, in the grass lands. The vine and the olive thrive on the sunny slopes which ascend from this plain to the ridges of the Alps, and a woody zone of never-failing beauty lies between the desolation of the mountain and the fertility of the plain. The produce of this region, which most intimately combines its interests with those of the great European marts, is silk. Italy now settles the market of silk over all Europe. Since the beginning of the present century, it has grown into an annual produce of the value of ten millions sterling! Within the last twenty years the export from the Lombardo-Venetian States has trebled." All those details give an impression of the security of property, which is the first effect of a paternal government. They fully answer all the absurd charges of impoverishment by Austria, of barbarism in its laws, or of severity in its institutions. Lombardy, independent, will soon have reason to lament the change from Austrian protection.

We come to other things. Italy is now in the condition of a man who thinks to get rid of all his troubles by committing suicide. Every kingdom, princedom, duchy, and village has successively rebelled, and proclaimed a constitution; and before that constitution was a month old, has forgotten what it was. A flying duke, a plundered palace, a barricade, and a national guard, are all that the philosopher can detect, or the historian has to record, in the Revolution of Italy. How could it be otherwise? Can the man who bows down to an image, and listens to the fictions of a priest, exercise a rational understanding upon any other subject? Can the slave of superstition be the champion of true freedom? or can the man, forced to doubt the virtue of his wife and the parentage of his children, which is the notorious condition of all the higher circles of Italian society, ever find fortitude enough to make the sacrifices essential to the purchase of true liberty? If all Italy were republicanised to-day, there would be nothing in its character to make liberty worth an effort,--nothing to prevent its putting its neck under the feet of the first despot who condescended to demand its vassalage.

The war of Piedmont and Austria is another chapter, written in another language than the feeble squabbles of the little sovereignties. There, steel and gunpowder will be the elements; here, the convulsion finishes in a harangue and the coffee-house. Charles Albert has passed the Mincio, but shall he ever repass it? Certainly not, if the Austrian general knows his trade. If ever king was in a military trap, if ever army was in a pitfall, the Piedmontese passage of the Mincio has done the deed. But, this must lie in the book of casualties. Austria is renowned for military blunders. In the Italian campaigns of Napoleon, her reinforcements came up only in time to see the ruin of the army in the field. Successive generals followed, only to relieve each other's reputation by sharing a common defeat; until Italy was torn by 50,000 Frenchmen from the hands of 100,000 Austrians. Yet the Germans have been always brave; their national calamity was tardiness. It clings to them still. They have now been gazing for a month at the army of Charles Albert; they ought to have driven it into the Mincio within twenty-four hours.

The Italian spirit of hatred to the German has exhibited itself in a thousand forms for a thousand years. It has murmured, conspired, and made vows of vengeance, since the days of Charlemagne. It has sentenced the "Teuton" in remorseless sonnets, has fought him in sinfonias, and slaughtered him in ballets and burlesques. But the German returned, chained the poets to the wall of a cell, and sent the writers to row in the galleys. For the last hundred years, Italy has implored all the furies in operas, and paid homage to Nemesis by the help of the orchestra--all in vain. At length, the French Revolution, by sweeping the Austrian armies out of Italy, gave the chance of realising the long dream. The "Cisalpine Republic" flourished on paper, and every Italian talked of Brutus, and the revival of the Consulate, and the Capitol. But the French price of liberty was too high for Italian purchase; the liberators robbed the liberated of every coin in their possession, and shot them when they refused to give it up. Even the "Teuton" was welcome, after this experience of the Gaul; and Italy found the advantage of a government which, though it exhibited neither triumphal chariots nor civic festivities, yet suffered the land to give its harvests to the right owners.

But even this feeling was to have a new temptation. About fifteen years ago, one of the chaplains of the King of Sardinia was struck off the court list, for uttering opinions which, touched with the old romance of Italian liberation, struck the whole court of Turin with horror. Charles Albert was then at the head of the Jesuits, and the Jesuits demanded the criminal Gioberti. Italy was no longer safe for him: he fled across the Alps, and took refuge in Belgium. There he wrote, through necessity. But he had something to revenge, and he wrote with the vigour of revenge. But he was an enthusiast, and he indulged in the reveries of enthusiasm. The double charm was irresistible to the dreamy spirit of a nation which loves to imagine impossible retribution, and achieve heroism in the clouds. His writings crossed the Alps. No obstacle could stop them; they wound their way through _douanes_; they insinuated themselves through the backstairs of palaces; they even penetrated into the cells of monks;--and his treatise "Del Primato Civile e Morale degl' Italiani," which appeared in 1843, was hailed with universal rapture. The literature of modern Italy seldom rises into that region of publicity which carries a work beyond seas and mountains. She has not yet attained the great art of common sense--the only art which furnishes the works of man with wings. Her poetry is local and trifling: her prose is loose, feeble, and rambling. Her best writers seem to the European eye what the wanderers through Soirees and Conversaziones are to the well-informed ear,--men of words living on borrowed notions, and, after the first half-dozen sentences, intolerably tiresome.

But the work of Gioberti was a panegyric on Italy, a universal laudation of the Italian genius, the Italian spirit, the Italian language, every thing that bore the name of Italian! Its very title, "The _Pre-eminence_, Civil and Moral, of the Italians," was irresistible.

The monster-folly of all foreigners is a passion for praise; and the unpopularity of the Englishman on the Continent chiefly arises from his tardiness in gorging this rapacious appetite. Gioberti, with evident consciousness of the offence, labours to justify the assumption. "Individuals may be modest, but modesty degrades nations," is his preliminary maxim. "A nation to have claims must have merits; and who is to believe in her merits, unless she believes in them herself?" This curious logic, which would make vanity only the more ridiculous by the openness of its display, is the grand argument of the book. It has made Italy suddenly imagine herself a nation of heroes.

"When a nation," says Gioberti, "has fallen into social degradation, the attempt to revive its courage must be by praise; possibly dangerous at other times, but now a generous art." It is admitted, however, "that the facts ought to be true, and the arguments forcible; and that no good can come from adulation." And in consequence of this wise precaution, the patriotic monk proceeds to inaugurate his country with the precedency in the grand procession of all the kingdoms of the earth! But another striking feature of this work was, that all those changes must emanate from a centre, and that centre the Pope, that Pope being a professor of liberalism, and having for his pupils all the princes of Italy. Whether Gioberti saw futurity with the eye of prophet, or only in the conjecture of a charlatan, there can be no doubt that the coincidence between his theory and the facts is sufficiently curious. We are to remember that book was published in the reign of Gregory XVI.--a genuine monk, hardened in all the old habits of the cell, who thought that a railroad would be the overthrow of the tiara, and the expression of a political opinion would call up the shades of all the past Holinesses from their purgatorial thrones.