Читать книгу Heart of Man - George Edward Woodberry - Страница 9

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Will you hear the legend of Taormina?—for in these days I dare not call it history. Noble and romantic it is, and age-long. I had not hoped to recover it; but my friend the librarian has brought me books in which patriotic Taorminians have written the story celebrating their dear city. I was touched by the simplicity with which he informed me that the town authorities had been unwilling to waste on a passing stranger these little paper-bound memorials of their city. "But," he said, "I told them I had given you my word." So I possess these books with a pleasant association of Sicilian honour, and I have read them with real interest. As I turned the pages I was reminded once more how impossible it is to know the past. The past survives in human institutions, in the temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the last is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race is pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the last with them. Least of all does the past survive in the living memories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air preserve on rock and column the lost speech of Nile; so the mind of man holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and fragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of books in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirring deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousand years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded, if you will have patience with such a tract of time, I will set down.

My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Giovanni, a Taorminian, who flourished in the last century. He was a man of vast erudition, and there is in his pages the Old-World learning which delights me. He was born before the days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. To allege an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers who repeat the original source is to render truth impregnable. Rarely does he show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. Scripta littera is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances to be at stake. He was really learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminish his authority. He was a patient investigator of manuscripts, and did important service to Sicilian history. The simplicity I have alluded to affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative. A few statements also in regard to the prehistoric period might disturb the modern mind, but I own to finding in them the charm of lost things. In my mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science; but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was brought up on quite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins with the flood. I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go back with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, when the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in her search for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched out under these bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough to say that Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War. Very dimly, it must be acknowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriving and driven, like all doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place the Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits from Italy and joins them. Here for three centuries these sparse communities lived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warred confusedly from their mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called because the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble a bull's horns; and they left no other memory of themselves.

Authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth century before our era. It is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock, the young Greek mariners leaped on the strand. This was their first land-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, doubtless, the alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers of the world's torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark island for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light, and were at last made friends with it—a chance that does not always befall. Then quickly rose the lowland city of Naxos, and by the river sprang up the temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine of the Sicilian Greeks, where they came ever afterward to pray for a prosperous voyage when they would go across the sea, homeward. They were from the first a fighting race; and decade by decade the cloud of war grew heavier on each horizon, southward from Syracuse and northward from Messina, and swords beat fiercer and stronger with the rivalries of growing states—battles dimly discerned now. A single glimpse flashes out on the page of Thucydides. He relates that when once the Messenians threatened Naxos with overthrow, the mountaineers rushed down from the heights in great numbers to the relief of their Greek neighbours, and routed the enemy and slew many. This is the first bloodstain, clear and bright, on our Taorminian land. Shall I add, from the few relics of that age, that Pythagoras, on the journey he undertook to establish the governments of the Sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, curing a mad lover of his frenzy by music, and being present on this hill and at Metaponto the same day—a thing not to be done without magic? But at last we see plainly Alcibiades coasting along below, and the ill-fated Athenians wintering in the port, and horsemen going out from Naxos toward Etna on the side of Athens in the death-struggle of her glory. And then, suddenly, after the second three hundred years, all is over, the Greek city betrayed, sacked, destroyed, Naxos trodden out under the foot of Dionysius the tyrant.

Other fortune awaited him a few years later when he came again, and our city (which, one knows not when, had been walled and fortified) stood its first historic siege. Dionysius arrived in the dead of winter. Snow and ice—I can hardly credit it—whitened and roughened these ravines, a new ally to the besieged; but the tyrant thought to betray them by a false security in such a season. On a bitter night, when clouds hooded the hilltop, and mists rolled low about its flanks, he climbed unobserved, with his forces, up these precipices, and gained two outer forts which gave footways to the walls; but the town roused at the sound of arms and the cries of the guards, and came down to the fray, and fought until six hundred of the foe fell dead, others with wounds surrendered, and the rest fled headlong, with Dionysius among them, hard pressed, and staining the snow with his blood as he went. This was the city's first triumph.

Not only with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, as a city should, with a great man. He was really great, this Andromachus. Do you not remember him out of Plutarch, and the noble words that have been his immortal memory among men? "This man was incomparably the best of all those that bore sway in Sicily at that time, governing his citizens according to law and justice, and openly professing an aversion and enmity to all tyrants." Was the defeat of Dionysius the first of his youthful exploits, as some say? I cannot determine; but it is certain that he gathered the surviving exiles of Naxos, and gave them this plateau to dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount Taurus, as had been the wont, but Tauromenium, or the Abiding-place of the Bull. A few years later Andromachus performed the signal action of his life by befriending Timoleon, as great a character, in my eyes, as Plutarch records the glory of. Timoleon had set out from Corinth, at the summons of his Greek countrymen, to restore the liberty of Syracuse, then tyrannized over by the second Dionysius; and because Andromachus, in his stronghold of Taormina, hated tyranny, Plutarch says, he "gave Timoleon leave to muster up his troops there and to make that city the seat of war, persuading the inhabitants to join their arms with the Corinthian forces and to assist them in the design of delivering Sicily." It was on our beach that Timoleon disembarked, and from our city he went forth to the conquest foretold, by the wreath that fell upon his head as he prayed at Delphi, and by the prophetic fire that piloted his ship over the sea. The Carthaginians came quickly after him from Reggio, where he had eluded them, for they were in alliance with the tyrant; and from their vessels they parleyed with Andromachus in the port. With an insolent gesture, the envoy, raising his hand, palm up, and turning it lightly over, said that even so, and with such ease, would he overturn the little city; and Andromachus, mocking his hand-play, answered that if he did not leave the harbour, even so would he upset his galley. The Carthaginians sailed away. The city remained firm-perched. Timoleon prospered, brought back liberty to Syracuse, ruled wisely and nobly, and gave to Sicily those twenty years of peace which were the flower of her Greek annals. Then, we must believe, rose the little temple on our headland, the Greek theatre where the tongue of Athens lived, the gymnasium where the youths grew fair and strong. Then Taormina struck her coins: Apollo with the laurel, with the lyre, with the grape; Dionysus with the ivy, and Zeus with the olive; for the gods and temples of the Naxians had become ours, and were religiously cherished; and with the rest was struck a coin with the Minotaur, our symbol. But of Andromachus, the founder of the well-built and fairly adorned Greek city that then rose, we hear no more—a hero, I think, one of the true breed of the founders of states. But alas for liberty! A new tyrant, Agathocles, was soon on the Syracusan throne, and he won this city by friendly professions, only to empty it by treachery and murder; and he drove into exile Timaeus, the son of Andromachus. Timaeus? He, evidently, of my Casa Timeo. I know him now, the once famed historian whom Cicero praises as the most erudite in history of all writers up to his time, most copious in facts and various in comment, not unpolished in style, eloquent, and distinguished by terse and charming expression. Ninety years he lived in the Greek world, devoted himself to history, and produced many works, now lost. The ancient writers read him, and from their criticism it is clear that he was marked by a talent for invective, was given to sharp censure, and loved the bitter part of truth. He introduced precision and detail into his art, and is credited with being the first to realize the importance of chronology and to seek exactness in it. He never saw again his lovely birthplace, and I easily forgive to the exile and the son of Andromachus the vigour with which he depicted the crimes of Agathocles and others of the tyrants. In our city, meanwhile, the Greek genius waning to its extinction, Tyndarion ruled; and in his time Pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever invading power of Carthage. But he was little more than a shedder of blood; he accomplished nothing, and I name him only as one of the figures of our beach.

The day of Greece was gone; but those two clouds of war still hung on the horizon, north and south, with ever darker tempest. Instead of Syracuse and Messina, Carthage and the new name of Rome now sent them forth, and over this island they encountered. Our city, true to its ancient tradition, became Rome's ever faithful ally, as you may read in the poem of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty with the title of a confederate city; and of this fact Cicero reminded the judges when in that famous trial he thundered against Verres, the spoiler of our Sicilian province, and with the other cities defended this of ours, whose people had signalized their hatred of the Roman praetor by overthrowing his statue in the market-place and sparing the pedestal, as they said, to be an eternal memorial of his infamy. From the Roman age, however, I take but two episodes, for I find that to write this town's history were to write the history of half the Mediterranean world. When the slaves rose in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves on this hill, and in their hands the city bore its siege by the Roman consul as hardily as was ever its custom. Cruel they were, no doubt, and vindictive. With horror Monsignore relates that they were so resolved not to yield that, starving, they ate their children, their wives, and one another; and he rejoices when they were at last betrayed and massacred, and this disgrace was wiped away. I hesitate. I cannot feel regret when those whom man has made brutal answer brutally to their oppressors. I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit to remember that the slaves, too, fought for liberty. I am sorry for those penned and dying men; their famine and slaughter in these walls were least horrible for their part in the catastrophe, if one looks through what they did to what they were, and remembers that the civilization they violated had stripped them of humanity. After the slave, I make room—for whom else than imperial Augustus? Off this shore he defeated Sextus Pompey, and he thought easily to subdue the town above when he summoned it. But Taormina was always a loyal little place, and it would not yield without a siege. Then Augustus, sitting down before it, prayed in our temple of Guiding Apollo that he might have the victory; and as he walked by the beach afterward a fish threw itself out of the water before him—an omen, said the diviners, that even so the Pompeians, who held the seas, after many turns of varied fortune, should be brought to his feet. Pompey returned with a fleet, and in these waters again the battle was fought and Augustus lost it, and the siege was raised. But when a third time the trial of naval strength was essayed, and the cause of the Pompeians ruined, Augustus remembered the city that had defied him, sent its inhabitants into exile, and planted a Roman colony in its place. Latin was now the language here. The massive grandeur of Roman architecture replaced the old Greek structures. The amphitheatre was enlarged and renewed in its present form, villas of luxury bordered the coasts as in Campania, and coins were struck in the Augustan name.

The Roman domination in its turn slowly moved to its fall; and where should the new age begin more fitly than in this city of beginnings? As of old the Greek torch first gleamed here, here first on Sicilian soil was the Cross planted. The gods of Olympus had many temples about the hill slopes, shrines of venerable antiquity even in those days; but if the monkish chronicles be credited, the new faith signalized its victory rather over three strange idolatries—the worship of Falcone, of Lissone, and of Scamandro, a goddess. I refuse to believe that the citizens were accustomed to sacrifice three youths annually to Falcone; and as for the other two deities, little is known of them except that their destruction marked the advent of the young religion. Pancrazio was the name of him who was destined to be our patron saint through the coming centuries. He was born in Antioch, and when a child of three years, going with his father into Judea, he had seen the living Christ; now, grown into manhood, he was sent by St. Peter to spread the gospel in the isles of the sea. He disembarked on our beach, and forthwith threw Lissone's image into the waves, and with it a holy dragon which was coiled about it like a garment and was fed with sacrifices; and he shattered with his cross the great idol Scamandro: and so Taormina became Christian, welcomed St. Peter on his way to Rome, and entered on the long new age. It was here, as elsewhere, the age of martyrs—Pancrazio first, and after him Geminiano, guided hither with his mother by an angel; and then San Nicone, who suffered with his one hundred and ninety-nine brother monks, and Sepero and Corneliano with their sixty; the age of monks—Luca, who fled from his bridal to live on Etna, with fasts, visions, and prophecies; and, later, simple-minded Daniele, the follower of St. Elia, of whom there is more to be recorded; the age of bishops, heard in Roman councils and the palace of Byzantium, of whom two only are of singular interest—Zaccaria, who was deprived, evidently the ablest in mind and policy of all the succession, once a great figure in the disputes of East and West; and Procopio, whom the Saracens slew, for the Crescent now followed the Cross.

The ancient war-cloud had again gathered out of Africa. The Saracens were in the land, and every city had fallen except Syracuse and Taormina. For sixty years the former held out, and our city for yet another thirty, the sole refuge of the Christians. Signs of the impending destruction were first seen by that St. Elia already mentioned, who wandered hither, and was displeased by the manners and morals of the citizens. I am sorry to record that Monsignore believed his report, for only here is there mention of such a matter. "The citizens," says my author, "lived in luxury and pleasure not becoming to a state of war. They saw on all sides the fields devastated, houses burnt, wealth plundered, cities given to the flames, friends and companions killed or reduced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin, that did not rule unpunished among them." Therefore the saint preached the woe to come, and, turning to the governor, Constantine Patrizio, in his place in the cathedral, he appealed to him to restrain his people. "Let the philosophy of the Gentiles," he exclaimed, "be your shame. Epaminondas, that illustrious condottiere, strictly restrained himself from intemperance, from every lust, every allurement of pleasure. So, also, Scipio, the Roman leader, was valorous through the same continence as Epaminondas; and therefore they brought back signal victory, one over the Spartans, the other over the Carthaginians, and both erected immortal trophies." He promised them mercy with repentance, but ended threateningly: "So far as in me lies I have clearly foretold to you all that has been divinely revealed to me. If you believe my words, like the penitents of Nineveh, you shall find mercy; if you despise my admonitions, bound and captive you shall be reduced to the worst slavery." He prophesied yet more in private. He went to the house of a noble citizen, Crisione, who esteemed him as a father, and, lying in bed, he said to him: "Do you see, Crisione, the bed in which I now lie? In this same bed shall Ibrahim sleep, hungry for human blood, and the walls of the rooms shall see many of the most distinguished persons of this city all together put to the edge of the sword." Then he left the house and went to the square in the centre of the city, and, standing there, he lifted his garments above the knee. Whereupon simple Daniele, who always followed him about, marvelling asked, "What does this thing mean, father?" The old man had his answer ready, "Now I see rivers of blood running, and these proud and magnificent buildings which you see exalted shall be destroyed even to the foundations by the Saracens." And the monk fled from the doomed city, like a true prophet, and went overseas.

The danger was near, but perhaps not more felt than it must always have been where the prayer for defence against the Saracens had gone up for a hundred years in the cathedral. The governor, however, had taken pains to add to the strength of the city by strong fortifications upon Mola. Ahulabras came under the walls, but gave over the ever unsuccessful attempt to take the place, and went on to ruin Reggio beyond the straits. When it was told to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, as the Saracens called it, had again been passed by, he cried out upon his son, "He is degenerate, degenerate! He took his nature from his mother and not from his father; for, had he been born from me, surely his sword would not have spared the Christians!" Therefore he recalled him to the home government, and came himself and sat down before the city. The garrison was small and insufficient, but, says my author, following old chronicles, "youths, old men, and children, without distinction of age, sex, or condition, fearing outrage and all that slavery would expose them to, all spontaneously offered themselves to fight in this holy war even to death: with such courage did love of country and religious zeal inspire the citizens." Ibrahim had other weapons than the sword. He first corrupted the captains of the Greek fleet, who were afterward condemned for the treason at Byzantium. Then, all being ready, he promised some Ethiopians of his army, who are described as of a ferocious nature and harsh aspect, that he would give them the city for booty, besides other gifts, if they would devote themselves to the bold undertaking. The catastrophe deserves to be told in Monsignore's own words:

"This people, accustomed to rapine, allured by the riches of the Taorminians and the promises of the king, with the aid of the traitors entered unexpectedly into the city, and with bloody swords and mighty cries and clamour assailed the citizens. Meanwhile King Ibrahim, having entered with all his army by a secret gate under the fortress of Mola, thence called the gate of the Saracens, raged against the citizens with such unexpected and cruel slaughter that not only neither the weakness of sex, nor tender years, nor reverence for hoary age, but not even the abundance of blood that like torrents flowed down the ways, touched to pity that ferocious heart. The soldiers, masters of the beautiful and wealthy city, divided among them the riches and goods of the citizens according as to each one the lot fell; they levelled to the ground the magnificent buildings, public or private, sacred or profane, all that were proudest for amplitude, construction, and ornament; and that not even the ruins of ancient splendour should remain, all that had survived they gave to the flames."

This city, which the Saracens destroyed, is the one the Taorminians cherish as the culmination of their past. In the Greek, the Roman, and the early Christian ages it had flourished, as both its ruins and its history attest, and much must have yet survived from those times; while its station as the only Christian stronghold in the island would naturally have attracted wealth hither for safety. In this first sack of the Saracens, the ancient city must have perished, but the destruction could hardly have been so thorough as is represented, since some of the churches themselves, in their present state, show Byzantine workmanship.

There remains one bloody and characteristic episode to Ibrahim's victory. The king, says the Arab chronicler, was pious and naturally compassionate, but on this occasion he forgot his usual mildness. In the midst of fire and blood he ordered the soldiers to search the caverns of the hills, and they dragged forth many prisoners, among whom was the Bishop Procopio. The king spoke to him gently and nobly, "Because you are wise and old, O Bishop, I exhort you with soft words to obey my advice, and to have foresight for your own safety and that of your companions; otherwise you shall suffer what your fellow-citizens have suffered from me. If you will embrace my laws, and deny the Christian religion, you shall have the second place after me, and shall be more dear to me than all the Agarenes." The prelate only smiled. Then, full of wrath, the king said: "Do you smile while you are my prisoner? Know you not in whose presence you are?" "I smile truly," came the answer, "because I see you are inspired by a demon who puts these words into your mouth." Furious, the king called to his attendants, "Quick, break open his breast, tear out his heart, that we may see and understand the secrets of his mind." While the command was being executed, Procopio reproved the king and comforted his companions. "The tyrant, swollen with rage, and grinding his teeth," says the narrative, "barbarously offered him the torn-out heart that he might eat it." Then he bade them strike off the bishop's head (who, we are told, was already half dead), and also the heads of his companions, and to burn the bodies all together. And as St. Pancrazio of old had thrown the holy dragon into the sea, so now were his own ashes scattered to the winds of heaven; and Ibrahim, having accomplished his work, departed.

Some of the citizens, however, had survived, and among them Crisione, the host of St. Elia. He went to bear the tidings to the saint; and being now assured of the gift of prophecy possessed by the holy man, asked him to foretell his future. He met the customary fate of the curious in such things. "I foresee," said the discomfortable saint, "that within a few days you will die." And to make an end of St. Elia with Crisione, let me record here the simple Daniele's last act of piety to his master. It is little that in such company he fought with devils, or that after he had written with much labour a beautiful Psalter, the old monk bade him fling it and worldly pride together over the cliff into a lake. Such episodes belonged to the times; and, after all, by making a circuit of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously unwet, and only his worldly pride remained at the lake's bottom. But it was a mind singularly inventive of penance that led the dying saint to charge poor Daniele to bear the corpse on his back a long way over the mountains, merely because, he said, it would be a difficult thing to do. Other survivors of the sack of Taormina, more fortunate than Crisione, watched their opportunity, and, at a moment when the garrison was weak, entered, seized the place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the Greek emperor once more. He could not maintain war with the Saracens, but by a treaty made with them he secured his faithful Taorminians in the possession of the city. After forty years of peace under this treaty it was again besieged for several months, and fell on Christmas night. Seventeen hundred and fifty of its citizens were sent by the victors into slavery in Africa. Greek troops, however, soon retook the city in a campaign that opened brilliantly in Sicily only to close in swift disaster; but for five years longer Taormina sustained continual siege, and when it fell at last, with the usual carnage of its citizens and the now thrice-repeated fire and ruin of Saracenic victory, we may well believe that, though it remained the seat of a governor, little of the city was left except its memory. Its name even was changed to Moezzia.

The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hundred years, until the landing of Count Roger, the Norman, the great hero of mediaeval Sicily, who recovered the island to the Christian faith. Taormina, true to its tradition, was long in falling; but after eighteen years of desultory warfare Count Roger sat down before it with determination. He surrounded it with a circumvallation of twenty-two fortresses connected by ramparts and bridges, and cut off all access by land or sea. Each day he inspected the lines; and the enemy, having noticed this habit, laid an ambush for him in some young myrtles where the path he followed had a very narrow passage over the precipices. They rushed out on him, and, as he was unarmed and alone, would have killed him, had not their cries attracted one Evandro, a Breton, who, coming, and seeing his chief's peril, threw himself between, and died in his place. Count Roger was not forgetful of this noble action. He recovered the body, held great funeral services, and gave gifts to the soldiers and the church. The story appealed so to the old chronicler Malaterra, that he told it in both prose and verse. After seven months the city surrendered, and the iron cross was again set up on the rocky eminence by the gate. It is a sign of the ruin which had befallen that the city now lost its bishopric and was ecclesiastically annexed to another see.

Taormina, compared with what it had been, was now a place of the desert; but not the less for that did the tide of war rage round it for five hundred years to come. It was like a rock of the sea over which conflicting billows break eternally. I will not narrate the feudal story of internecine violence, nor how amidst it all every religious order set up monasteries upon the beautiful hillsides, of whose life little is now left but the piles of books in old bindings over which my friend the librarian keeps guard, mourning the neglect in which they are left. Among both the nobles and the fathers were some examples of heroism, sacrifice, and learning, but their deeds and virtues may sleep unwaked by me. The kings and queens who took refuge here, and fled again, Messenian foray and Chiaramontane faction, shall go unrecorded. I must not, however, in the long roll of the famous figures of our beach forget that our English Richard the Lion-hearted was entertained here by Tancred in crusading days; and of notable sieges let me name at least that which the city suffered for its loyalty to the brave and generous Manfred when the Messenians surprised and wasted it, and that which with less destruction the enemies of the second Frederick inflicted on it, and that of the French under Charles II, who, contrary to his word, gave up the surrendered city to the soldiery for eight whole days—a terrible sack, of which Monsignore has heard old men tell. What part the citizens took in the Sicilian Vespers, and how the Parliament that vainly sought a king for all Sicily was held here, and in later times the marches of the Germans, Spaniards, and English—these were too long a tale. With one more signal memory I close this world-history, as it began, with a noble name. It was from our beach yonder that Garibaldi set out for Italy in the campaign of Aspromonte; hither he was brought back, wounded, to the friendly people, still faithful to that love of liberty which flowed in the old Taorminian blood.

I shut my books; but to my eyes the rock is scriptured now. What a leaf it is from the world-history of man upon the planet! Every race has splashed it with blood; every faith has cried from it to heaven. It is only a hill-station in the realm of empire; but in the records of such a city, lying somewhat aside and out of common vision, the course of human fate may be more simply impressive than in the story of world-cities. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, are great centres of history; but in them the mind is confused by the multiplicity and awed by the majesty of events. Here on this bare rock there is no thronging of illustrious names, and little of that glory that conceals imperial crime, the massacre of armies, and the people's woe. Again I use the figure: it is like a rock of the sea, set here in the midst of the Mediterranean world, washed by all the tides of history, beat on by every pitiless storm of the passion of man for blood. The torch of Greece, the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of the Crescent, have shone from it, each in its time; all governments, from Greek democracy to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn; Roman law and feudal custom had it in charge, each a long age: yet civilization in all its historic forms has never here done more, seemingly, than alleviate at moments the hard human lot. And what has been the end? Go down into the streets; go out into the villages; go into the country-side. The men will hardly look up from their burdens, the women will seldom stop to ask alms, but you will see a degradation of the human form that speaks not of the want of individuals, of one generation, or of an age, but of the destitution of centuries stamped physically into the race. There is, as always, a prosperous class, men well to do, the more fortunate and better-born; but the common people lead toilsome lives, and among them suffering is widespread. Three thousand years of human life, and this the result! Yet I see many indications of a brave patriotism in the community, an effort to improve general conditions, to arouse, to stimulate, to encourage—the spirit of free and united Italy awakening here, too, with faith in the new age of liberty and hope of its promised blessings. And for a sign there stands in the centre of the poor fishing-village yonder a statue of Garibaldi.