1821.]

CONSPIRACY AND COUNTER-STROKE.

157

Roscoe,1 to find a passage I have not found. Read the fourth vol. of W. Scott's second series of Tales of my Landlord. Dined. Read the Lugano Gazette. ReadI forget what. At eight went to conversazione. Found there the Countess Geltrude, Betti V. and her husband, and others. Pretty black-eyed woman that-only nineteen-same age as Teresa, who is prettier, though.

The Count Pietro G[amba] took me aside to say that the Patriots have had notice from Forli (twenty miles off) that to-night the government and its party mean to strike a stroke-that the Cardinal here has had orders to make several arrests immediately, and that, in consequence, the Liberals are arming, and have posted patroles in the streets, to sound the alarm and give notice to fight for it.

He asked me "what should be done?" I answered, "Fight for it, rather than be taken in detail;" and offered, if any of them are in immediate apprehension of arrest, to receive them in my house (which is defensible), and to defend them, with my servants and themselves (we have arms and ammunition), as long as we can,-or to try to get them away under cloud of night. On going home, I offered him the pistols which I had about me-but he refused, but said he would come off to me in case of accidents.

It wants half an hour of midnight, and rains ;-as Gibbet says, "a fine night for their enterprise-dark as "hell, and blows like the devil." 3 If the row don't happen now, it must soon. I thought that their system of shooting people would soon produce a re-action-and now it seems coming. I will do what I can in the way

1. William Roscoe (1753-1831) had already published his two historical works: The Life of Lorenzo de Medici, called the Magnificent (1796), and The Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth (1805). 2. Sic in Moore.

3. Beaux Stratagem, act iv. sc. 2.