was approaching, Piedmont was best fitted to wield its military forces, trained as it must be to keep watch and ward along the wall of the Alps. As soon, therefore, as the outbreak at Milan announced the beginning of the war for the liberation of Italy, he hastened to Rome in order to incite the Pope to sanction and aid it; and, for the moment, the latter did give way to the stormy enthusiasm of his people, and bestowed his blessing, chiefly because he could not do otherwise, upon the flags of the volunteers who were hastening northward. A mere timid Italian priest, without the slightest comprehension of the irresistible tendencies of the age, it came hard to Pius IX. thus to find himself driven to take part in an assault upon Austria, which for three centuries had been the bulwark of the temporal power of the popes; and even the general exultation with which the war was greeted at Rome had no effect in opening his eyes to the real condition of things. In vain did his nephews, the Marquis Patrizzi and the Prince Ruspoli, with their sons, prepare to take the field, while the cardinals gave their horses to draw the artillery, and the Princes Corsini and Borghese stood ready to receive the patriotic gifts which flowed in for the benefit of the sacred cause, gold ornaments and the savings of convents, the jewels of the matrons, and the pennies of the beggars; in vain once more did a spirit of brotherly love pervade all classes of the people, who, assembling by torchlight in the Forum and the Coliseum, gave open expression to their joy at the crusade which had for its object the liberation of their country and the regeneration of the Church; in vain did the Liberals remind him how Pope Alexander III. was once the ally of Milan in its struggles with Barbarossa; in vain did even the Pope himself attempt a feeble protest against his own timidity, when he published a proclamation reprehending those who saw in the workings of the storm the hand of man rather than that of God. Nothing could long stay the tide of that gloomy re-action which so soon swept him and his court away from every sympathy with the present back into those hopeless strongholds of medieval tradition, where the Papacy still lingers out its shrunken, ghastly life.

But meantime the war went on. Durando, with the Papal troops, was upon the right bank of the Po; and the Liberals pressed him to cross the river and cut off the Austrians entrenched in Verona, from one of their chief lines of communication. D'Azeglio, who had joined his army with a high position on his staff, was urgent for him to do so, but a strong Austrian corps advancing to cover Verona, the Italian commander retreated to Vicenza, which had already twice defended itself against the enemy. Two corps of the Austrians, with Radetzky at their head, were at once set in motion, and, crossing the Adige, advanced rapidly upon the Italians. Passing on their left the series of hills called Monti Berici, at the foot of which Vicenza lies, and which command it on the south side, they crossed the Bacchiglione, so that their right wing, under D' Aspre, threatened the eastern suburbs of Vicenza, while five thousand fresh troops with two battalions of artillery, which had already been sent forward from Verona, prepared to take possession of the northern side of the Monti Berici, where is the Church and Convent of Madonna del Monte.

Thus, on the 9th of June, 1848, the Austrians stood, with overwhelming force, in all forty-five thousand men, with one hundred and ten cannon in a semicircle around the devoted city. Durando had but ten thousand regular troops, with twenty-five field pieces, and six thousand badly armed, and worse trained, militia of the city. He sought, therefore, to strengthen his position by entrenchments, especially on the northern side of the Monti Berici, where stood two Papal battalions with seven pieces of artillery, a Roman legion, the civic battalion of Faenza, and a select band of volunteers from Vicenza, all under the command of D' Azeglio, with the rank of colonel, supported by the brave Cialdini of Modena, who had hastened from Spain to the aid of his old comrade, Durando, and had reached his army but two days before. D'Azeglio's post was the key to the whole line of defence which extended thence on the right to the Verona road, and on the left to the suburbs by the Padua gate, where the noble Rotunda of Palladio, so well remembered by every traveller,

was defended by the rifles of the Roman students against the artillery of Clam.

Radetzky had given orders that the battle should not begin till the morning of the tenth; but, before daybreak, Euloz's Jäger had begun to make themselves heard, and by eight o'clock the Austrian artillery had opened a terrific fire. Radetzky's plan was with one corps to take the heights of Monti Berici, and with the other to cut off the retreat of its defenders. "I have seen many a hot day," says the Austrian veteran, Schönhals, in describing the battle, "but never one when the attacking columns advanced with such regularity and precision. If the spectacle had not been so bloody, it might have passed for a parade." For several hours the battle raged uncertain, but, when the critical moment came, the superiority of the Austrian artillery made itself felt. Moreover, on the Austrian right, a thing almost without example in military history, -a concealed mortar battery had been erected not more than five hundred paces from the Italians. In ignorance of this fact, as well as of the strength of the enemy, and unconscious that the Tyrolese were already silently climbing the tortuous sides of the hills, under cover of the luxuriant growth which adorned them, D'Azeglio having received re-enforcements, resolved, about three o'clock, to undertake himself the offensive, and, leading his troops in columns down the slopes, charged straight in the direction of the Austrian battery; but he had advanced hardly fifty paces, when Euloz unmasked his pieces, and Kopal's Tyrolese leaped to their feet from the ground where they had been lying hid; both parties charged with the bayonet; the Swiss troops of the Pope gave way, and the day was lost, though not without terrible resistance on the part of D'Azeglio; for, mingled together as it were in one bloody embrace, the Swiss and Tyrolese and Italians and Croats rolled along the heights to the Church, where, so far from ceasing, the fight grew more frantic; even the priests, with an inspiration of patriotism, took part in it, and fell, several of them mortally wounded, on the pavement, while the grape-shot and shells tore to pieces the chefs-d'œuvre of Paul Veronese, and the flag-stones

ran with torrents of blood. But by degrees, as the fury of the combatants spent itself, the Swiss drew off; D'Azeglio was born away, severely wounded in the right knee; and the Austrians remained masters of the position, with friend and foe lying dead and wounded about them, as if they had fallen in the same ranks, fighting for the same cause.

"Passing through the church," says a French writer, an eye-witness of the scene, "I reached the terrace where General Euloz had ranged his batteries; and certainly I never beheld never shall behold a spectacle more beautiful or more terrible. At my feet lay the city, drowned as it were in the white vapor of the cannon, pierced here and there with jets of flame from the burning houses; while the last rays of the sun gilded the mountains of the Tyrol, and were reflected in gorgeous colors in the waters of the Brenta. Near me, I heard the music of a band playing the national airs of Austria; and all around me, in the bosquets of jasmines and of roses, glittered the wax tapers that had been plundered from the Church of the Madonna. The soldiers, drunk with victory and the smoke of powder, were dancing in the midst of the dead bodies of their comrades, while all the time the artillery still thundered at the city; and the cries of its terror-stricken inhabitants and the sound of trumpets mingled confusedly with our songs of triumph."

"We beheld at our feet," says Schönhals, the Austrian quartermaster-general and the historian of the campaign, "the beautiful city upon which Palladio had exhausted his genius; and we could not but ask ourselves, at sight of the fearful confusion which prevailed among the inhabitants, what would become of them when thirty thousand soldiers, intoxicated with victory, were let loose in its streets." That was a calamity which neither Durando nor D'Azeglio could endure to contemplate; and during the night they capitulated, at the risk of the hatred of all the fanatics and the abuse of all the demagogues of Italy. D'Azeglio, indeed, afterwards offered his aid to vindicate his general when overwhelmed with calumnies; but, with a generosity worthy of his patriotism, the latter declined it, saying, "It is better that I

should suffer than the cause of Italy:" for he knew that the justification of his conduct would involve the exposure of the irresolution of Charles Albert, to which the loss of the day was fairly to be ascribed.

Before leaving the battle-field, however, one cannot but cast a passing glance at that old soldier of eighty-three, the leader of the Austrian army in Italy and its idol, the Fieldmarshal Radetzky, the bold soldier of a dominion destined to perish, doing his duty there on the hot plains of Lombardy, as it came to him to do it, even while his emperor was flying for his life from Vienna,- with that iron will which, since the days when Marius defeated the Teutonic hordes on that field before Verona where Charles Albert gave way before the Austrian forces, has characterized the long struggle of the Germans for Italy. Yet well might the old man, familiar though he was with so many fields of death, write back to his master, after contemplating the heroism of the Italian youth that day, "The character of this people has become quite changed: fanaticism has seized every rank, and each sex, and all ages."-"I would give all my verses," exclaimed the poet Giusti, "to be in the shoes of the humblest volunteer in Lombardy."

For the cure of his wound and the restoration of his health, much shattered in the late campaign, D' Azeglio repaired to Florence, where, laying aside his sword, he resumed his political activity, in strenuous opposition to the republican theories of Guerrazzi; but, after the flight of the Grand Duke and the triumph of radicalism, he was driven from Tuscany by the republicans, as he had been before by the absolutists, calumniated by his enemies, and even misunderstood by his friends, who thought they perceived in the popular agitation the speediest means of securing the constitutional liberties of Italy. D'Azeglio, however, was not to be discouraged. In a pamphlet entitled "Timori e Spéranze," he opposed again to the philippics of the radicals the moderate doctrines of which he had been so long the representative; and as he had pleaded the cause of reform with Pius IX., he pleaded it now with Charles Albert. For