appointment as United States Consul at Genoa. There was a singular propriety in the request. Having passed and honored the ordeal of American citizenship, and being then a popular resident of the city which gave birth to the discoverer of this continent,--familiar with our institutions, and endeared to so many of the wise and brave in America and Italy,--illustrious through suffering, a veteran disciple and martyr of freedom,--he was eminently a representative man, whom freemen should delight to honor; and while it then gratified our sense of the appropriate that this distinction and resource should cheer his declining years, we are impelled, now that death has canonized misfortune and integrity, to avail ourselves of the occasion to rehearse the incidents and revive the lessons of his life.[1] [Footnote 1: It is to be lamented that Foresti had not anticipated our purpose with that consecutive detail possible only in an autobiography. "_Le Scene del Carcere Duro in Austria_," writes the Marquis Pallavicino, "non sono ancora la storia del Ventuno. Un uomo potrebbe scriverla e svelare molte infamie tuttavia occulte del governo Austriaco. Quest' uomo è Felice Foresti. Il quale abbandonò gli agi Americani per combattere un' altra volta, guerriero canuto, le gloriose battaglie dell' Italico risorgimento. Il martire scriva: e la sua penna, come quella d' un altro martire,--Silvio Pellico,--sarà una spada nel cuoro dell' Austria."--Notes to _Spielbergo e Gradisca_.] Underlying the external apathy and apparently frivolous life of the Italian peninsula, there has ever been a resolute, clear, earnest patriotism, fed in the scholar by memories of past glory, in the peasant by intense local attachment, and kindled from time to time in all by the reaction of gross wrongs and moral privations. Sometimes in conversation, oftener in secret musing, now in the eloquent outburst of the composer, and now in the adjuration of the poet or the vow of the revolutionist, this latent spirit has found expression. Again and again, spasmodic and abortive _émeutes_, the calm protest of a D'Azeglio and the fanaticism of an Orsini, sacrifices of property, freedom, and life,--all the more pathetic, because to human vision useless,--have made known to the oppressor the writhings of the oppressed, and to the world the arbitrary rule which conceals injustice by imposing silence. The indirect, but most emphatic utterance of this deep, latent self-respect of the nation we find in Alfieri, whose stern muse revived the terse energy of Dante; and in our own day, this identical inspiration fired the melancholy verse of Leopardi, the letters of Foscolo, the novels of Guerrazzi, and the tender melody of Bellini. Recent literature has exhibited the conditions under which Italian Liberals strive, and the method of expiating their self-devotion. The novels of Ruffini, the letters of the Countess d'Ossoli, the rhetoric of Gavazzi, and the parliamentary reports of