MENTANA. A.D

Meantime things were going from bad to worse in Rome. The hatred between the goveming and the governed was becoming fiercer and more uncontrollable. The Inquisition was at work to discover treason as well as heresy, séditions acts and words were punished with extreme rigour, the sentences passed being in many cases unjust ; the soldiers of the foreign légion were insolent and overbearing, and the patience of the Romans was quite exhausted. The immense number of ecclesiastics congregated in the capital and filling every office of the State, and the close connection which many of them had with the old nobility, made the clérical party still formidable, supported as it was by a strong military force. .Nevertheless, the citizens resolved to appeal to arms once more, though many of their most daring spirits were in prison, in the galleys, or in exile.

The liberator, who had listened to the ‘ cry of anguish’ from the provinces, seemed deaf to ail their entreaties, and preached patience to them while the rest of Italy was congratulating herself on being ‘ made.’ So they turned their hopes to the rash but generous chief who

had made so many hopeless efforts to aid them in the past. During the five years that had elapsed since Aspromonte, Garibaldi had lived in retirement in Caprera, nursing his wound and brooding over the disjointed State of the world, which he was firmly convinced would never be set right till ail the priests were exterminated. This hostility to the clergy endeared him tothe Romans ; and almost ail the popular songs of this time had the Camicia Rossa for a hero. They asked him where did he hide himself when the voice of Italy called him : why did he not take his flight to the Capitol, where the bones of Brutus and Cassius summoned him ? Was he afflicted, suffering, depressed ? Then he was ail the more dear to them for those very reasons ; the scorn of the Modérâtes only made him the greater —

£d Aspromonte farti non possa

Meno magnanimo, Camicia Rossa !

He responded to the call, and took the field once more, with the old cry of ‘ Rome or death ! ’ — magic words, which drew hundreds of ardent young enthusiasts into the ranks of his vétéran band of volunteers, ready at the bidding of their chief to undertake any desperate enterprise.

The clérical party in Rome, knowing the disaffection that reigned in the city, and dreading the approach of the Garibaldians, made an outcry which was echoed by the Ultramontanes in France — ail declaring that the Italian Government was false to the convention of 1864. The cry of the papal party frightened the