So he lived his quiet, studious home-life, till an incident one day, when he was nearly sixteen, suddenly changed its tenor. The Carbonaro revolutions of 1820 and 1821 had ended in deserved collapse; and the Piedmontese Liberals, abandoned and defeated, crowded to Genoa and Sampierdarena, while yet there was time to escape to Spain. Some had fled penniless, and Mazzini, walking with his mother, noted their despairing faces, and watched while a collection was made for them in the streets. Their memory haunted him, and with a boy's enthusiasm for his heroes, he longed to follow them. He neglected his lessons, and sat moody and absorbed, interested only in gleaning news of the exiles and learning the history of their defeat. In his boyish impatience, which came near the truth, he felt "they might have won, if all had done their duty," and the thought puzzled and obsessed him. He insisted on dressing in black, and kept the habit to the end of life. He brooded over Foscolo's _Jacopo Ortis_, till the morbid pessimism of the book wrought on him, and his mother, apparently with good reason, feared suicide. In time he recovered his balance, and went back to his books with the old zest. He was now studying medicine, intending to follow his father's profession; but at his first attendance in the operation room he fainted, and it was clear that he could never be a surgeon.[1] To his father it must have been a sore disappointment, but he seems to have at once recognised the inevitable, and allowed the lad to read law. Mazzini had little heart in his new studies, for the arid, perfunctory teaching of law current at the time had small attraction for one who wanted to know the reason of things; but he persevered, and did well in his examinations, though it is probable that he always gave a big slice of his time to reading poetry and history. He was now at the University. Probably he went to school, though there is some doubt about it; at all events he seems to have escaped the brutality and bad pedagogy, which generally made school life then one long misery for a high-principled or sensitive lad. University life began at an early age in Italy, and Mazzini had matriculated at Genoa, when he was fourteen. So far as his fellow-students were concerned, he was in happy surroundings. But he was a troublesome scholar, always ready to rebel against the formalities that made a big part of University life. To the last he refused to attend the compulsory religious observances, not because he disliked them, but because they were compulsory; and the authorities, tolerant for once, shut their eyes to his insubordination. The University of Genoa did not possess a high name for scholarship; and at this time it had its special drawbacks, for the government was scared by the recent revolution, and fearful that a few hundred lads might shake the pillars of the state. No one could matriculate without a certificate that he had regularly attended church and confession.