remembered that, as Mr. Trevelyan says, "the cult of Pio Nono was for some months the religion of Italy, and of Liberals and exiles all over the world. Even Garibaldi in Monte Video, and Mazzini in London, shared the enthusiasm of the hour." A year later, when the Roman Republic had been declared and the Pope had fled, and the French troops besieged Rome on his behalf, Miss Nightingale had only pity for Pio Nono; her anger she reserved for the French "cannibals," for the one Republic that was devouring another. "I must exhale my rage and indignation," she wrote in a diary (June 30, 1849), "before I have lost all notions of absolute right and wrong. It makes my heart bleed that the French nation, the nation above all others capable of an ideal, of aspiring after the abstract right, should have lent itself to such a brutal crime against its own brother--one may say its own offspring, for the Roman Republic sprang from the French; it is purest cannibalism; this breaks my heart. When I think of that afternoon at Villa Mellini (now occupied by a French general), of Rome, bathed in her crimson and purple shadows, lying at our feet, and St. Michael spreading his wings over all--the Angel of Regeneration as we thought him then--my eyes fill with tears. But he will be the Angel of Regeneration yet." The French, she said, might reduce the city and occupy it; but the heroic defence of the Republic "will have raised the Romans in the moral scale, and in their own esteem." They would never sink back to what they had been. Sooner or later, Rome would be free. She was especially indignant at the talk which she heard on all sides in cultivated society at home about the "vandalism" of the Romans in exposing their precious monuments of art to assault. She loved those monuments, as we have seen; but if the defence of Rome against the French required it, she would have been ready to see them all levelled to the ground. "They must carry out their defence to the last," she cried. "I should like to see them fight the streets, inch by inch, till the last man dies at his barricade, till St. Peter's is level with the ground, till the Vatican is blown into the air. Then would this be the last of such brutal, not house-breakings, but city-breakings; then, and not till then, would Europe do justice to France as a thief and a murderer, and a similar crime be rendered impossible for all ages. If I were in Rome, I should be the first to fire the Sistine, turning my head aside, and Michael Angelo would cry, 'Well done,' as he saw his work destroyed." It was not only in relation to the restraints of conventional domesticity that Florence Nightingale was a rebel. [38] G. M. Trevelyan, _Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic_, p. 65. III