So many precautions could not be taken without its being discovered that avarice had been united to prodigality; for the plate, which had been offered by private individuals and by the churches, was melted into bars, and carried away. They embarked soon after midnight, in the ship of Nelson. The wind delayed their sailing, and the Neapolitans ran, the next day, to the shore, crying out, "That they must see the King-that they would have defended him, or perished with him." They besought him "not to trust to the English, who, for the sake of keeping Sicily, would have detained him prisoner." He did not shew himself; and caused it to be published in the form of an edict, that he would soon return with a powerful army. From that time, the people would never listen when the King was spoken of; but they continued to defend their own independence against the French, and to execrate all foreigners. They had already run in crowds to the distance of eight mile from Naples, to depose Mack, who had returned to collect the remnant of the army. He fled, and afterwards presented himself to Championet in an Austrian uniform; but he was declared prisoner for having fought in the dress of a Neapolitan, and travelled through France on his parole. It seems, however, that, since the Revolution, officers have thought themselves bound in duty to sacrifice their personal honour to the interests of the cause in which they serve; and Mack accordingly made his escape, which he justified by a pamphlet. His last achievement was the surrender of Ulm.

The French did not enter Naples until thirty-three days after the king's departure. There was so little of conspiracy, or of previous combination, for the accomplishment of any political change, that during all that time the kingdom had remained without a government. The viceroy appointed by the King being suspected by some to be a partisan of the revolutionists, and by others to be a traitor like all courtiers, was unable to act, because nobody would adhere to him. The municipal magistrates of the capital had long had nothing left them but the name. Every one agreed that some government must be acknowledged. The barons, the commons of the provinces, and the citizens, who, since the suppression of parliaments by the Spanish and Austrian viceroys, had been excluded from all share in the administration, without any other strength than what was derived to them from their obliterated rights, wished to found an oligarchy; while others insisted upon a constitutional monarchy. The enemies of the court were for a democracy; its friends maintained an unlimited despotism: the various parties attacked one another with declamation, recrimination, and calumny; while the great number of the prudent, and of those who possessed any influence, feared every body, and were averse

from all projects whatever: for, in founding a republic, they foresaw the consequences which attended the French revolution; and, on the other hand, at the approach of the French army, they dared no longer hope to maintain their monarchical institutions. Public opinion, in pointing out such individuals as appeared capable of seizing on the government, seemed to invite them to do so; but no one had prepared either plan or party, and no one dreamed of any thing but his own safety. The French therefore believed themselves secure of their conquest; and, as they advanced, the Lazzaroni, who had nothing to save, thought of seizing the supreme power, and defending the national independence.

The viceroy placed all his hope in delay, and signed an armistice, by which the French were excluded from Naples, while a part of the territory, with two millions and a half of francs, was granted to them. Championet, satisfied that he could not long retain possession of the conquered territory, despatched commissioners to receive the money; and the very sight of these officers rendered the populace of Naples furious. Meanwhile, Count Thurn, an Austrian, whom the Queen had caused to be appointed commodore in the Neapolitan navy, came up in a Portuguese vessel, and directed the setting fire to all ships of war and gun-boats, which they had not been able to carry off to Sicily. "We contemplated," says one of their writers," in gloomy tranquillity, the flames, which, in a few hours, consumed our treasures and our hopes. It seemed as if all Naples had at last become aware of the madness of her princes, and of all the miseries which she was now condemned to suffer."* Some relate, that the Queen had left agents with instructions to excite the Lazzaroni to burn the capital; others, with more reason, refusing to believe in useless crimes, ascribe the commotion which ensued to the fanaticism of the priests, the desire of pillage, and the unavoidable consequences of anarchy. It is certain that the burning of the vessels was interpreted by the populace as a signal for setting fire to the palaces of the nobles. They destroyed more than they plundered; they ran to provide themselves with arms from the castles and arsenals, and came back in order of battle, vociferating, that they were defending their nation and their religion; but hardly one among all the multitude was heard even to name the King. They arraigned and condemned the guilty, while the friars pronounced sentence, and assisted at the execution. The Duke Moliterni, then a young man, observing that they had no chiefs, sent several of his friends to mingle among them, and pretend to be of their party, and by these means he succeeded in making himself master

Saggio su la Rivoluzione di Napoli, Milano, First Edition, 1801.

of the forts. All the citizens, who had escaped the massacre, went to solicit the French to hasten to stop the torrent of civil bloodshed. Championet answered, that he would not expose himself in a city of four hundred thousand inhabitants, in a state of anarchy, without first having possession of the fort of St. Elmo. The multitude nevertheless fought the French for three nights and two days; nor did they suffer them to enter the city until they perceived that they were already possessed of the fort. Thus, after the councils and the army of an independent king had been misled by foreigners, he held none but his own subjects in suspicion and whilst his people were still exposing their fortune and life in his service, he inspired them all with his own terror; he suffered himself to be under the dominion of strangers, who, at once, burned his navy, delivered him up to contempt, and his kingdom to anarchy; and the invaders being intreated to dissolve a treaty by which they were kept at a distance from the capital, were regarded as liberators even while they overset the throne. In obedience to the conqueror, the forms of democracy replaced the ancient monarchy; yet in Naples, more than in all the rest of Italy, the great proprietors, and the men of science, engaged in the office of legislation, and in the administration of the new government, and kept the demagogues under control. But for the bishops, the friars would have continued to kindle in the populace the fury of bloodshed; and, but for the parish priests, the insurrection, which was about to degenerate into a civil war, would never have been subdued in the provinces. However, every body till then had suffered, and the republicans had been too liberal of their promises. In abolishing institutions, which, though of evil tendency, had been sanctioned by the prescription of time and custom, the new government substituted others, in themselves better, but which could not acquire the support of public opinion till after-experience should have demonstrated their utility. Meanwhile every one estimated them according to his previous notions and new expectations. To please the poor, the new administration abrogated a great number of vexatious impositions, which to that time had answered no other purpose than that of multiplying tax-gatherers, spies, and treasury-solicitors; these, finding themselves suddenly without employment, augmented the number of the disaffected, and indigent, and no longer excited any feeling but that of commiseration in the multitude. At the same time the landed-proprietors having to maintain the administration and a foreign army, the price of corn was raised, and the people regarded their governors in the light of impostors. Those, whose love of liberty had been enlightened more by books than experience, projected constitutions on the foundation of the equality of rights, even while they admitted that a nation can

not exist without proprietors; and the equality of rights was the more unattainable, from the enormous inequality of power, in Naples, where there are large landholders, and numberless paupers, without either the habits or the means of industry. The few who had experience warned the public of the dangers of a theoretical constitution, but could not avert it. Amongst these Vincenzo Cuoco, to whom the Essay (already quoted) on the Revolution of Naples is ascribed, joined to a deep and comprehensive mind, the fruits of long study in the history of governments. He was honest and wise, as it were, by nature; and he neither exasperated nor flattered men by his counsels. Whether Heaven had not endowed him with courage equal to his genius, or that foreseeing more clearly the calamities of Italy, he had been more forcibly struck by the dread of them, he afterwards became mad, and is now less unhappy. He was at that time, with others like him, silenced by the fury of the two parties, of which one would reform nothing, and the other sought to destroy every thing.

The Barons of Naples, after they had lost the privilege of controlling the crown, continued to exercise the rights of feudality more intirely than in other countries; and becoming more and more objects of hatred to the landholders in the provinces, were despised by the court with impunity. As soon as they had, by the revolution, recovered the powers of government; some among them demanded, "That the rights of feudality should be regarded as inseparable from their right of property, because both were contemporaneously derived from the right of conquest, and had been confirmed by the princes of every dynasty, which had successively reigned in Naples."-The Democrats, on the contrary, contended: "That every act of a tyrannical government is, in its origin, illegal."-Thus, the one party wished to keep in full vigour a system of jurisprudence incompatible with the opinions of the age, and the circumstances of the country; while the other, by a proposition, which seems, at first sight, self-evident, was for rendering all existing laws impracticable. The inconvenience of axioms in the conduct of public affairs consists in their applicability to the most opposite ends; and they are so much the more dangerous, as they have been generally introduced by distinguished men. The doctrine of the illegality of the acts of a tyrant, was proclaimed by Brutus and Cicero, in the name of the senate, against the populace, who had favoured Cæsar's perpetual dictatorship; and the populace of Paris availed themselves of it against the National Assembly. Such of the Neapolitans as had learned, during their emigration, the arts of revolutionary logic and eloquence, now returned as conquerors; the more favoured by the French, as

they alone had indissolubly bound themselves to their party. Four or five of their number had succeeded, by means of calumnious insinuations at popular meetings, in weakening the public confidence; for it was by playing upon human credulity and malignity, that the French demagogues persuaded the multitude to assist them in their projects of mutual destruction, until Robespierre, by dint of his greater skill in the art of calumny, had overcome all his opponents. Nevertheless, the jacobins of Naples gained more believers than followers; and they were too few in number to reign by force. Their insults, their threats, and their ostentation of atheism, answered no other purpose than to justify the accusations, and the approaching vengeance of the court; whilst the barons, by refusing to renounce those rights of their own free will, which were about to be torn from them by violence, lost the opportunity and the means of enlisting the population of the country, and of the provincial towns, on their side. The republic of Naples subsisted only five months.

The French, at first, in order that their troops at that place might not be cut off from all communication with the country beyond the Apennines, at a time, too, when the Roman territories. were in a state of insurrection against them, kept possession of a chain of four hundred miles in extent, from Naples to Tuscany, while the main body of their army was about to be defeated by the Allies in Lombardy. The Directory had till then endeavoured to sell its conquests in Italy to their former masters; and no sooner did this negotiation fail, than a French commissary repaired to Naples, intimating: "That all lands belonging to the crown, or to religious corporations, were to be speedily sold, and the money carried into France." General Championet declared: "That he had already disclaimed any pretension of conquest, and would never permit the selling of any portion of public lands, unless by a legislative act of the Neapolitans themselves, and for their own benefit only"-and ordered the commissary to quit the kingdom. The sudden loss of all Italy, which the French sustained, was the result of a new species of anarchy. The factions, which had ceased to agitate public places, and to disturb the municipalities, wearied with carnage, secretly domineered, notwithstanding, in the palaces of the rulers. Among the members of the Directory, there had not been one of a superior mind, excepting Carnot. It was he who had first organized the armies, and conceived the plans of the campaigns at the period of the national convention. He took no part in the interior administration; Robespierre spared him because he was necessary to him; and afterwards in the Directory he alone was in earnest in his persevering endeavours for the establishment of