1831.] Eiirope, and the English Parliamenl. J 



it every thing is attempted. There are now but two powers, the 

 Revolutionary power, still loose, and without a leader — divided, but 

 armed with an irresistible and fiery determination ; and the Monarchical 

 power — vigorous, compact, but insecure of its ground, and ominously 

 conscious of the strength of its enemy. Metternich is the leader of 

 the " Conservative System," and he at once lords it over Italy and 

 Germany; keeps the half-republican cabinet of France in awe, and 

 influences the councils of England. 



This is ambition. But we must own it to be a magnificent and lofty 

 ambition ; it dazzles and fills the mind. Whatever may be our dislike 

 of the principles of this pre-eminent statesman, we must allow that his 

 career has exhibited a singular display of the commanding qualities which 

 transmit a name proudly to posterity. Without holding up either his 

 personal virtues, or his political conduct, as a model to those who would 

 attain the noblest honours of national esteem, we yet cannot contemplate 

 the elevation to which such men have risen, and on which they have 

 sustained themselves in years pregnant with vicissitude, without feeling 

 a stronger consciousness of the vivid and vigorous faculties that may be 

 lodged in human nature. 



Italy is still disturbed. She has often been compared to her own 

 Mediterranean, alternately the most placid and the most turbulent of 

 seas. But the Italian insurrections have all died away. They were not 

 founded in the feelings of the people ; none of the great permanent po- 

 pular interests had been bruised ; the priesthood, the traders, the tillers 

 of the ground, had been untouched by Austria. Even the chief part of 

 the nobles, the most aggrieved class, had been either purchased by mili- 

 tary and civil office, or suffered to indulge in that indolent possession of 

 their opulence, which makes patriotism disappear from the mind. The 

 true depositories of manly thought, the scholars and writers of a nation, 

 are few in Italy, and the few are disunited by provincial prejudice, de- 

 pressed by want of public influence, or chained by pensions. In all 

 countries a pensioner is a slave. The last hope of Italian freedom lay in 

 the worst hands in which freedom ever took shelter ; the broken parti- 

 zans of French jacobinism, the remnant of the corrupt officials of the 

 Napoleon dynasty, the beggared courtiers of Murat, and the infidel dis- 

 ciples of Condorcet and Voltaire. Out of such elements no solid, peace- 

 ful constitution could ever grow. The original evil of its birth must have 

 envenomed and enfeebled every stage of its existence. A Jacobin Italian 

 Republic must have been attended by all the train of its terrible ancestor in 

 France ; it must have been followed by those horrid shapes of confiscation, 

 imprisonment, torture, and indiscriminate death ; that insolence to the 

 throne, and that spoliation of the temple, which to this hour throw their 

 shade over France, and make mankind distrust every movement of her 

 people, as if it were a coming subversion of her throne. 



But the divisions of Italy, the inveterate mutual scorn of men sepa- 

 rated from each other but lay a ridge of hills, or a river — by the differ- 

 ence of dialects, of name, of historical recollections — by the trivial injuries 

 of ages past, which, instead of fading away, have been only darkened by 

 time ; all the weak bitternesses of idle nations — exasperate Italian against 

 Italian, until the general enemy is received as a comparative friend, 

 fixes the fetter on the foolish combatants alike, and, while he indulges 

 in the full power of the tyrant, actually becomes the benefactor. 



