What a month may bring forth is beyond our calculation; but while we
were writing those pages, there had been a general movement of the
Piedmontese troops on Verona, probably with the intention of aiding
some insurrectionary movement in the city. The Piedmontese artillery
speedily demolished the field-works in the approaches to the city. A
general advance was ordered, and the Austrian troops continued to
retreat, still turning on the advancing line, and fighting, through a
country the greater part of which is a low shrubby forest. At length,
however, a Piedmontese division was vigorously attacked, taken by
surprise, and broken with a loss so heavy, as to determine the retreat
of the army to its position of the morning. Still, this was but an
affair of posts; and, in the mean time, General Nugent, with an army
of 30,000 men, is putting down the insurgents in the Venetian
provinces, and is marching towards the flank of the Piedmontese.
One fact is evident, that Italy has _not_ risen in a body, and that,
with all the harangues of her revolutionary orators, and all the
promises of what those orators call "her heroic youth, burning to
extinguish the abomination of the Teutons," very few of them have
stirred from their coffee-houses. Italy, with her twenty millions of
men, has probably not furnished to the field twenty thousand
volunteers. Yet this is the time for which they have been all panting
in all kinds of sonnets; when the "new spirit of political
regeneration" has full range for its flight, when the Austrian police
are a dead letter, and when Spielberg and its bastions are a bugbear
no more.
But the movements of the Roman populace are matters of more rapid
execution. What the Pope was a month since, every one knows;--Pius the
powerful, Pius the popular, Pius the restorer of liberty to all the
aggrieved nations of Italy, with a slight appendix, including the
aggrieved nations of Europe. But the populace, which gave him his
titles, have now changed them, and he is "Pius the Monk."
In a year whose every week produces a revolution, who can predict the
events of a month? In the middle of this month of May, Pope Pius is
virtually a prisoner in his palace; within a week he may be
transferred to the castle of St Angelo; within a fortnight he may be
an exile, an outlaw, or a refugee in England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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