cially, here spoken of under the name of Fantasio,-have since attained a European reputation. The narrative is strictly autobiographical; the writer briefly sketches his childhood, depicts the training at school and university to which the youth of the middle and upper classes in Piedmont were subjected twenty years ago, the proceedings and temper of the government which laid the foundation for the universal and well-founded discontent which then prevailed, the motives and commencements of the wild project for bringing about a better state of things, in which so many noble spirits were engaged and so many valuable lives were sacrificed, and the final discovery and ruin which involved them all. Their hopes, their wrongs, their failures, are all narrated in simple and unexaggerated language, with sadness, indeed, but without bitterness; and the delineation might teach some salutary lessons to the oppressive and retrogressive Italian governments of to-day,-if those perverse and demented governments could learn from any thing,-and can scarcely fail to suggest some interesting reflections to every reader.

Our author received his education at the public school, and afterwards at the University of Genoa. The first of these establishments seems to have an external resemblance to analogous seminaries in our own country, but it was, if possible, more completely in the hands of the clergy, the supervision exercised over the pupils was far more minute and vexatious, and the spirit prevalent among the boys was wholly different. Both in England and Sardinia the ancient classical writers form one of the leading subjects of study in a public school; but in England, the sympathy with freedom, and the hatred of despotism, which a boy imbibes from the great writers of Greece and Rome, harmonise with the political sentiments of the community into which he is about to enter. But the result was very different when the Sardinian government sought to mould their children into the docile, submissive, and uninterested subjects of a despotic rule, by feeding them on Plutarch, Livy, and the Philippics of Demosthenes, and making them drink in Republicanism with their mother's milk. Doomed as soon as they become men to take no interest and make no inquiries into affairs of State, they were taught while boys to look up with the most fervent admiration to those ancient warriors, senators, and statesmen, who deemed that the country held the first claim upon our services, that patriotism was the only absolutely essential virtue, that to be neutral in civil strife was a mortal crime, and that idem velle et idem nolle de republicâ was a closer bond of union than any family or private tie. Intended for unmurmuring slaves, and unquestioning believers in the right divine of kings to govern

'wrong,' they were fostered for this pre-ordered destiny by the biographies of the great king-killers and emancipators of old, by eulogistic lives of Leonidas and Epaminondas, Harmodius and Aristogiton.

6

Strange but true. Public education in Piedmont—the part of all Italy, perhaps, most despotically governed at that time—was entirely republican. The history of Greece and Rome, the only thing taught us with any care at school, was in truth, according to the light in which it was placed, little else than a constant libel upon monarchy, and a panegyric upon the democratic form of government. The decline of Athens and of Sparta, happy and flourishing as long as they remained republics, dated from the day which gave power into a single hand. Rome dated her greatness and power from the moment she expelled the Tarquins; and the great republic which had conquered the world faded under the hands of the Caesars, failed to defend its conquests, allowed inroads, and at last vanished. Our indignation against tyrants, and our enthusiasm even for their assassins, seemed to be purposely excited. The subjects given us for our themes in the classes were ever in this range of ideas. Sometimes we were to hurl the thunder of our Latin eloquence upon Cæsar, about to pass the Rubicon; and to prove, in an oration in three parts, with exordium and peroration, that it was the act of an unnatural son to smother the republic, his mother. At others, Brutus, both the elder and the younger, Mutius Scævola, Cato, &c, were to be deified in poetry. Thus, from our most tender years we were inspired with ideas and feelings quite opposed to those we ought to have brought into real life, and with a blind enthusiasm for actions and virtues, the imitation of which would be condemned and punished as a crime by the society in which we were to live. Now, was not this absurd? was it not wantonly sowing danger to be reaped in after life?' (P. 60.)

The sort of proceedings by which the Sardinian government of those days contrived to exasperate, while endeavouring to hush, the spirit of its subjects, is well shown in the University regulations, as described by Lorenzo Benoni in his sixteenth chapter. The students having been mainly concerned in the short-lived Revolution of 1821, the Academical Institutions both at Turin and Genoa were closed by order of the governBut an interdict of this sort which closed every liberal profession against the whole rising generation, could not of course be long entertained, and after a considerable interval, the Universities were re-opened, but under regulations designed 'first, to have few students, and secondly, to make those few as miserable as possible.'

ment.

To attain the former point, they created two classes of students; those whose parents could prove the possession of a certain amount of landed property, and those whose parents could not. Again, they

created two distinct modes of examination, one for students of the first class, the other for students of the second. The ordeal appointed for the latter was purposely fraught with such a complication of difficulties, with respect both to the extent of matter comprised in the examination, and to the number of votes required to pass, as to deter the most self-confident from facing it. This amounted to neither more nor less than an ingeniously disguised mode of excluding from the liberal professions an entire class of citizens.'

In addition to these impediments, a number of certificates were required for every student before he could be allowed to matriculate; to wit:

1. Certificate of birth and baptism.

. 2.

pox.

• 3.

Do. of my having been vaccinated or had the small

Do.

of my having followed two years' study in philosophy, and of having passed the examinations thereunto appertaining.

'4. Do. '5. Do.

of good conduct from my parish priest.

of having attended at my parish church on all church

and feast days for the last six months.

'6. Do.

period.

7. Do.

of having confessed each month during the same

of having confessed and taken the sacrament duly as required by the precept for Easter, at that solemnity last preceding.

'8. Do.

that my father and mother 'possessed landed property sufficient to afford each son a portion equal to the amount required by the rule to which I have already referred.

9. And last, a certificate from the police that I (then a boy of twelve years of age) had taken no part in the constitutional movement of 1821.'

Of course, certificates of this number and kind were not to be obtained without a considerable amount of necessary lying, which seems to have been pretty equally divided between the students themselves, and their more good-natured and sensible confessors. When, at length, they had all been furnished, and the requisite formalities gone through, it might have been hoped that all trouble was at an end. Not so, however; the student, it is true, was supplied with an Admittatur,' but this was valid for three months only: At the end of that time,' said the Secretary, you must bring me back this, signed by all the 'professors, along with a certificate from your confessor, and one from the rector of your parish, attesting that you have 'previously fulfilled your religious duties; and then we shall see whether we can give you another!' It may well be supposed that a system of this sort, rigidly carried out, regarding obedience, regularity, and submissiveness as everything, and

industry, talent, and merit as nothing, was admirably calculated to make slaves of the mean, hypocrites of the timid and crafty, and rebels and conspirators of every youth possessed of one spark of independent spirit, one noble and generous aspiration, or the slightest consciousness of high endowment. And in this wretched and degrading line of action, combined with the peculiar education we have already noticed as given at the public schools, we may find a sufficient explanation of the fact, that in nearly all Italian insurrections the students of the several Universities are among the most prominent actors, if not the prime movers and the chosen leaders.

The government of the State was precisely analogous to the government of the University. It was a compound of the two most odious and insolent forms of administration-the military and the ecclesiastical. It was at once stupid, provocative, and oppressive. Soldiers and priests swarmed everywhere. Priests made themselves the spies of the police, and the police carried into effect the orders of a tyrannical and bigoted priesthood. The civil authorities had comparatively little power; the regular legal tribunals could neither enforce their own decrees, nor ensure respect for their decisions, for the monarch interfered with them and revised them at his capricious pleasure. There was no liberty of action, and no liberty of speech. A public press scarcely existed. The only newspapers in all Piedmont were three official gazettes-the most dull, dreary, and meagre affairs imaginable. Informers flourished in every grade and in every circle of society. No good foreign books were allowed to pass the custom-house, and no decent ones of native manufacture could pass the censorship. An utter stagnation and suppression of all intellectual life was the thing aimed at and nearly attained. Those who acquiesced in such a state of things had all manliness crushed out of them. Those who rebelled against it became of necessity conspirators, insurgents, exiles, prisoners, and victims.

Of course a government like this could not exist without benumbing much besides literature and political excitement. Commerce cannot flourish without freedom; the legal profession cannot thrive where law is not respected, and where the highest courts of judicature are overridden by the arbitrary will of the monarch or the monarch's favourites; even medicine requires something like liberty and the power of progress to become either a dignified, a lucrative, or a scientific calling. Accordingly the saddest feature of Lorenzo Benoni' is the impression it gives of the stagnant, monotonous, spiritless, profitless existence to which every one above the condition of a

peasant or an artisan was at that time condemned. In no trade or profession was there an opening for men of energy a career for men of ambition. Scarcely anything was stirring, scarcely any thing was doing, in any line. Those who entered the army had a bare maintenance-but nothing more. They had nothing to do: so they frittered away their years at ballrooms, theatres, and cafés. Those who embraced the medical profession were nearly as ill off: that line was already overstocked, and few patients could be procured. Those who entered on a commercial life, like the uncle of our hero, found themselves engaged in a dull routine in which profits were small, and impediments and formalities were many. Those who became lawyers, like Lorenzo and his brother, could get no business: barristers were many; litigants were few - and, what was worse, were poor. So advocates and physicians, also, killed time as they could,-reading little, talking much,-in the streets, at the casino, in small knots and coteries of friends, and with the never-failing resource of a cigar. For literature there was no encouragement, and scanty reward; for if it soared above the meanest mediocrity it became suspected and dangerous, and was far more likely to lead to a loathsome. dungeon than to a laurel crown. A universal and compelled idleness seemed to be the law of the land; a life of usefulness and frivolity was enforced upon every one; and energy, talent, or spirit, was thus made a curse to its possessor, and a peril to the State.

This condition of society gives an ample explanation of three phenomena which, without a knowledge of it, we might not so readily have understood-namely, the perpetual plots of which all Italian governments, whether native or foreign, have been. the object; the extreme youth of the insurgents and conspirators; and the fact that they so often belong to the better and nobler spirits of the nation. Can we wonder that a Government insane enough thus laboriously, as it were, to dam up every legitimate channel in which the energies of its people. might have innocently and beneficially expended themselves, should find that it had driven them, by an irresistible necessity, into conspiracy and rebellion? Can we wonder at the fierce and implacable hatred it created in the minds of men who felt that they were born for better things,-that life under such conditions was scarcely worth having, and that a sway which thus killed, or crushed, or reduced to the inaction of despair whatever was good, and noble, and capable within their souls, was a public nuisance—an enemy of the human race, war against which partook of the holiness of a crusade? It is