I entered into the subject heart and soul, and told her there were millions of people who thought slavery wrong; and I told her how England had freed her slaves, and how work was done better for fair pay than fear; and how the labourer, who was free, was respected, and the effect of this respect for work on all people-ladies and gentlemen and all. She became so intensely interested in this new idea that I was afraid she might speak out imprudently, so I cautioned her and told her of the experience of some of my abolitionist friends. Her face lighted up, and her beautiful eyes kindled as I told her how many women had suffered for saying that they thought slavery wrong. I went on to tell her of Miss M. G. and others who had been born slave-owners and rich, and who had freed all their slaves and lived a life of hard work and poverty rather than have any share in what they conceived to be a great iniquity.

"Supposing you are right that slavery is wrong, what will happen to us all here? Shall we be treated like Sodom and Gomorrah?"

I told her I thought that by God's laws, as we knew them, society could not be peaceful, constituted as this was in opposition to His evident intentions; that I did not think she need fear fire or brimstone, but that she must look for some change; what it would be I could not tell. It was getting late, and the damp mist was rising, so I was obliged to go. I walked with Cecilia to her door, kissed her, and promised to come the next day. Alas! the next day we received sad news from England, and we were obliged to start immediately for Mobile on our way home.

I had no regrets in leaving New Orleans except in causing some sorrow to some poor negro friends of ours, and the one deep regret of being unable to fulfil my engagement with poor Cecilia -poor, poor Cecilia! It was sad for her to lose her new friend, and it seemed as if her life was doomed to sadness and disappointment. I tormented myself with the imagination of this lonely

figure standing waiting in the marsh, and longing for the strange visitor to come and continue the conversation which had just begun to be so intimate, affectionate, and interesting. I thought of her going home to the dull house and the dull inmates. I was grieved to the heart to think of her daily bitter disappointments, and I was then pro-. voked and sorry I had not given her my name and address, for she really did not know my name; it was a tormenting pain to me the whole of my journey; and though I had written to her before leaving, and sent her a parcel of books, I had not faith enough in the post of Louisiana to believe she would ever receive the letter or the packet. In my letter I begged of her to write to me at New York and also to London. Alas! there was no letter at New York. I wrote again to her with no result. Weeks passed, we arrived in England, but never a letter has come to me from Cecilia. At the beginning of the war I wrote to her again, but I have never received any answer. Great changes have taken place in New Orleans since I was there, and I have this satisfaction in thinking of Cecilia, that whatever change has taken place in her fate, must be for the better. She is dead, perhaps; she has fallen in with some Federal officer who may love her; or she is again a hospital nurse. There is little doubt that she is happier now than when she sat beside me that first day I met her; probably, the ideas I gave her were thought over and over in her mind, and she was prepared for what has happened and ready for the time of change.

The life of this poor young lady in Louisiana was the dullest life I ever knew-dull, because her domestic life happened to be sad, lonely; dull, because she was poor; dull, because she was in a slave state; dull, because the country was dull and dreary; dull, because she was a young lady with nothing to do and very little education. Happily, such a dull life is not possible in many countries, and was rare no doubt in the country where I came across it.

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THE theory has been often started that history should be written in biographies. Whatever disadvantages there may be in this plan, it is at least clear that there is none which would dispel more popular fallacies about the past. With respect to the rise of constitutions, the progress of wars, the developments of arts and manufactures, we are rarely very far wrong; the facts of the present throw a light on them that cannot be wholly mistaken. But about the motives and characters of the men who were the principal agents in directing those developments we are often long in error. It is too much the fashion, with popular historians, to accept conventional traditions about such men, and to "chart them all in" their "coarse blacks and whites" as if to make cram-books for schoolboys. For this reason biographies, and especially autobiographies, are one of the most necessary parts of history, since they throw a light on the events in which the men whose lives they relate took part. Such a light could not come from any account of those events which made the actors entirely subordinate to the action.

And there are few men, perhaps, for whom this kind of light is more needed than the man who is at once the author and subject of these volumes. Interested as Englishmen have been in the Italian Revolution, and in the main well acquainted even with its details, they have been curiously ignorant of one of the earliest promoters of that revolution. Hackneyed traditions, wildly improbable stories, have gathered round his name, till every trace of the real man is lost in the conventional stageconspirator. Many of the errors to which we allude ought, we think, to be dispelled by the volumes before us.

The purely autobiographical element in them is, indeed, comparatively small; for Mazzini tells us in his preface that he has often declined writing his life, and that it is now only the public part of it that he gives to the world; as his purposes develop, too, he becomes so absorbed in his work that he almost ceases to have any private life; but, in the earlier part of his book, we have a clear view both of those circumstances which first turned his thoughts to that work, and of others that have given it that peculiar colouring which distinguishes it from similar efforts of other

men.

The scene with which the volume opens is a fit preparation for such a book. He is walking with his mother on the Strada Nuova at Genoa, just after the failure of the Piedmontese Insurrection in 1821. The leaders of that insurrection are embarking for Spain; "a tall, "black-bearded man, with a severe, "energetic countenance, and a glance "that I shall never forget," acccsts Mazzini's mother, and demands money for the refugees of Italy. "This day,' he continues, “ was the first in which a "confused idea presented itself to my "mind, I will not say of country or "liberty, but an idea that we Italians "could, and therefore ought to, struggle "for the liberty of our country.” "I began collecting names and facts, "and studied as best I might the "records of that heroic struggle, seeking "to fathom the causes of its failure.' He makes acquaintance with the Ruffinis and others who like him are grieving over the wrongs of their country. The influences of his parents, too, encourage this direction of his thoughts. But the path to political action appeared for the present to be closed to him, and

he began to turn his thoughts to literature, and even to have thoughts of devoting himself to it as a profession. Strange to say, however, this pursuit was the means of leading him back to the work which he had half thought of abandoning for it. A literary war was then raging between the "Romanticists" and "Classicists," the latter desiring to reduce all writings to the pattern of the old classical authors, the former trying to develop a more original and modern type of literature. Both parties seemed to Mazzini to have lost sight of their true mission. With the Classicists, of course, he had no sympathy; but even of the Romanticists he says that they, "founding their new literature on no "other basis than individual fancy, lost " themselves in fantastic mediæval "legends, unfelt hymns to the Virgin, "and unreal metrical despair, or any "other whim of the passing hour which

might present itself to their minds, "intolerant of every tyranny, but igno"rant also of the sacredness of the law "which governs art as well as every "other thing." Yet in this trifling he sees the possibility of higher things. The Romanticist school represents to him the struggle, however imperfectly understood, for national literary life against the fetters of a worn-out pedantry. Taken up in this spirit, it soon widens into a protest against all hindrances to national life. The Government suppresses the Indicatore Genoese, in which his articles appear. A new journal is started at Leghorn on the same principle; that too is suppressed, and for a time Mazzini's literary career is brought to an end. But by this time he has collected round him a number of friends who, like himself, have been only using this literary warfare as a preparation for political action; now they feel that their testimony has done its work. "We had proved to the young men of Italy that our Governments were deliberately adverse to all progress, and "that liberty was impossible till they 66 were overthrown."

The next step in his career was perhaps the only possible one to a man who

was earnestly bent on the object which he had in view. Association, which he afterwards preached as the duty of nations, he then, as now, held strongly to be the duty of individuals. But besides this, a special longing to obey and follow seems to have possessed him. "Reverence for righteous and true "authority, freely recognised and ac"cepted, is the best safeguard against "authority false or usurped. I therefore. "agreed to join the Carbonari.”

But, with all this eager reverence for authority, Mazzini was not disposed to be a mere puppet in the hands of men of whose purposes he knew nothing; he desired to be led, but he wished also to see the way on which he was to go. The utter aimlessness of Carbonarism disgusted him; its useless forms excited his contempt. He thus speaks of one of the ceremonies of initiation :-"My friend congratulated me on the fact "that circumstances had spared me the "tremendous ordeals usually under

gone; and, seeing me smile at this, "he asked me severely what I should "have done if I had been required, as "others had been, to fire off a pistol in

afford ground for an arrest; and he is shortly afterwards conveyed to the fortress of Savona. Here it was that he first conceived that great work to which he afterwards devoted himself. Not Carbonarism only, but every other organization for revolutionary purposes, had failed for want of an aim. They had never looked beyond the immediate object, the throwing off the tyranny which was at that time oppressing them. This seemed to Mazzini the great evil which he had to remedy. The society which he had to found must have a clear object, and must know what that object was. The rights of man had been the formula of the past; the salvation of the individual its object. Whatever worth that cry might have had in former days, it had failed of the object at which it aimed. The duties of man must be the gospel of Young Italy; "God and the People" its watchword.

This feeling was strengthened in Mazzini by his intercourse with Lamennais, which led him to.hope that even the priests of the established religion of his country might accept his programme. Thus he appeals to them in one passage:

"Priests of my country, would you 66 save the Christian Church from in

"evitable dissolution? Would you cause religion to endure strong in its own beauty and the veneration of "mankind? Place yourselves at the "head of the peoples, and lead them on "the path of progress, aid them to "regain their liberty and independence "from the foreigner; the Austrian that "enslaves both you and them. Have "not you, too, a country, and the hearts "of citizens? Do you not love your "fellow-men? Emancipate them and

alone, the first among you who shall "consecrate himself the apostle of "humanity and hearken to its voice; "who, strong in the purity of a stain"less conscience, shall go forth among "the hesitating and uncertain multi"tude and utter the word REFORM, "will save Christianity, reconstitute European unity, extinguish anarchy, "and put the seal to a lasting alliance "and concord between society and the "priesthood. But, if no such voice be "raised before the hour of common "resurrection has sounded, then God save you from the anger of the

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peoples, for terrible is the anger of "the peoples, and your sole path of "salvation is the one we have offered "you."

This then was to be the basis of the programme of the new society,-duty instead of right, the society instead of the individual. But it was not merely the absolute excellence of this programme that led Mazzini to adopt it, it was not merely his religious feelings that made him aim at the destruction of selfishness; he looked upon it as a step in the development of the history of his country-of all countries. The great element in the education of his countrymen which seemed to him to have been most neglected, and yet to be the one most requiring attention, was "history." Some had written from the aristocratic point of view, others from the Ghibelline, some without any definite aim at all, none with a clear sense of the mission of Italy. With Sismondi he

has more sympathy than with most of the others, but even of him he says, "Sismondi- the only foreign "writer upon Italy who deserves the name of an historian-notwithstand'ing his democratic sympathies, and "his long and patient study of his "subject, has only given us the history "of our factions, and the virtues, vices, "and ambitions of our illustrious fami"lies; without comprehending or sus"pecting the work of fusion (recog"nised, indeed, though but slightly "indicated by Romagna) that "silently but uninterruptedly going "on in the heart of the country."

was

This, then, was the second great historical error which must be amended by the new society. They were to preach their duties to Italians, not to teach them to clamour for their individual rights, and these duties were to be done by them as an united nation. How then was this union to be brought about? King-made revolutions had failed; the rivalry of the petty states would not allow an individual chosen from one of them to be put above the others; for an aristocracy united with the people there seemed to be no hope from the history of Italy. The new society, then, must proclaim a republic as its object. But a new question presented itself: If men have duties to each other as citizens of a nation, must not the nations which they form also have duties to each other? If they have duties to each other as children of God, can those duties be limited by geographical boundaries? "From "the first moment of its existence," he says, "God and Humanity' was adopted as the formula of the asso"ciation with regard to its external "relations, while 'God and the People'

"the conscience of the peoples." It does not, in his opinion, narrow the sympathies of mankind, but makes them more genuine and definite. With the vague cosmopolitanism of the leaders of the first French Revolution he has no sympathy: their form of propagandism is opposed to all his creed; for he would call out the voluntary union of the peoples, not set those who sympathised with his doctrines in opposition to the rest. For he sees that this part of the old revolutionary doctrine was essentially connected with their doctrine of the Rights of Man, against which he especially protests." For us," he says, "the starting-point is country: the

object or aim is collective humanity : "for those who call themselves cosmo"politans the aim may be humanity: "but the starting-point is individual man.'

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Starting, then, from this point of "country," he yet denounces vehemently the mere glorification of national peculiarities. In an article which he wrote whilst still a Carbonaro, " On Our European Literature," he protests most indignantly against this error in literary theories, and he is evidently thinking there of the political and moral question also. In this article he labours to refute the mere physical theory of literature, the theory, that is, which ascribes the formation of special literary tastes to differences of climate; a doctrine which he protests against as appealing to national exclusiveness. "Every attempt," he says, "to open up new

paths to literary intelligence, and every "exhortation to study the master works "of other nations, is opposed and met by dulcet phrases about ' our classic "soil' and 'the Italian sky;' phrases "too readily accepted as an answer by "those whose patriotism is satisfied with "words alone."

But the view which the new society was to take of this question of the relations of nations to each other must be summed up in his own words :"We believe, therefore, in the Holy "Alliance of the Peoples, as being "the vastest formula of association