I suppose, in fine, that I shall most interest my readers in Giusti, if I translate here the pieces that have most interested me. Of all, I like best the poem which he calls “St. Ambrose”, and I think the reader will agree with me about it. It seems not only very perfect as a bit of art, with its subtly intended and apparently capricious mingling of satirical and pathetic sentiment, but valuable for its vivid expression of Italian feeling toward the Austrians. These the Italians hated as part of a stupid and brutal oppression; they despised them somewhat as a torpid-witted folk, but individually liked them for their amiability and good nature, and in their better moments they pitied them as the victims of a common tyranny. I will not be so adventurous as to say how far the beautiful military music of the Austrians tended to lighten the burden of a German garrison in an Italian city; but certainly whoever has heard that music must have felt, for one base and shameful moment, that the noise of so much of a free press as opposed his own opinions might be advantageously exchanged for it. The poem of “St. Ambrose”, written in 1846, when the Germans seemed so firmly fixed in Milan, is impersonally addressed to some Italian, holding office under the Austrian government, and, therefore, in the German interest. ST. AMBROSE. Your Excellency is not pleased with me Because of certain jests I made of late, And, for my putting rogues in pillory, Accuse me of being anti-German. Wait, And hear a thing that happened recently: When wandering here and there one day as fate Led me, by some odd accident I ran On the old church St. Ambrose, at Milan. My comrade of the moment was, by chance, The young son of one Sandro{1}--one of those Troublesome heads--an author of romance-- _Promessi Sposi_--your Excellency knows The book, perhaps?--has given it a glance? Ah, no? I see! God give your brain repose; With graver interests occupied, your head To all such stuff as literature is dead. I enter, and the church is full of troops: Of northern soldiers, of Croatians, say, And of Bohemians, standing there in groups As stiff as dry poles stuck in vineyards,--nay, As stiff as if impaled, and no one stoops Out of the plumb of soldierly array; All stand, with whiskers and mustache of tow, Before their God like spindles in a row. I started back: I cannot well deny That being rained down, as it were, and thrust Into that herd of human cattle, I Could not suppress a feeling of disgust Unknown, I fancy, to your Excellency, By reason of your office. Pardon! I must Say the church stank of heated grease, and that The very altar-candles seemed of fat.