francs for getting back his throne, thankfully agreed to support a German army to protect him against his subjects.  In the secret treaty concluded between himself and the Emperor of Austria, it was stipulated that the King of the Two Sicilies should not introduce into his government any principles irreconcilable with those adopted by His Imperial Majesty in the government of his Italian provinces.  As for the Roman States, Austria reckoned on her influence in always securing the election of a Pope who would give her no trouble.  Seeing herself without rivals and all-powerful, she deemed her position unassailable.  She forgot that, by giving Italy an unity of misery, she was preparing the way for another unity.  Common hatred engendered common love; common sufferings led on to a common effort.  If some prejudices passed away under the Napoleonic rule, many more still remained, and possibly, to eradicate so old an evil, no cure less drastic than universal servitude would have sufficed.  Italians felt for the first time what before only the greatest among them had felt—­that they were brothers in one household, children of one mother whom they were bound to redeem.  Jealousies and millennial feuds died out; the intense municipal spirit which, imperfect as it was, had yet in it precious political germs, widened into patriotism.  Italy was re-born.

Black, however, was the present outlook.  Total commercial stagnation and famine increased the sentiment of unmitigated hopelessness which spread through the land.  The poet Monti, who, alas! sang for bread the festival songs of the Austrians as he had sung those of Napoleon, said in private to an Englishman who asked him why he did not give his voice to the liberties of his country which he desired, though he did not expect to see them:  ’It would be vox clamantis in deserto; besides, how can the grievances of Italy be made known?  No one dares to write—­scarcely to think—­politics; if truth is to be told, it must be told by the English; England is the only tribunal yet open to the complaints of Europe.’  A greater poet and nobler man, Ugo Foscolo, had but lately uttered a wail still more despondent:  ’Italy will soon be nothing but a lifeless carcass, and her generous sons should only weep in silence without the impotent complaints and mutual recriminations of slaves.’  That as patriotic a heart as ever beat should have been afflicted to this point by the canker of despair tells of the quagmire—­not only political but spiritual—­into which Italy was sunk.  The first thing needful was to restore the people to consciousness, to animation of some sort, it did not matter what, so it were a sign of life.  Foscolo himself, who impressed on what he wrote his own proud and scornful temperament, almost savage in its independence, fired his countrymen to better things than the despairing inertia which he preached.  Few works have had more effect than his Letters of Jacobo Ortis.  As often happens