The new leader soon showed his true character by hindering the expedition as long as possible; but in February, 1834, he yielded to the pressure of Mazzini and began the march. Unfortunately, Mazzini was seized with a fever on the route, and Ramorino, finding this obstacle to his treachery removed, ordered the columns to be dissolved and rode away. Plenty of scorn was heaped upon the failure of this first expedition of Young Italy. But Metternich, at any rate, judged more truly. In April, 1833, he had written to the chief of his spies in Lombardy to warn him against the growth of a new revolutionary party, and particularly against the advocate Mazzini, one of the most dangerous men of the faction; and he told him to procure copies of the journal called "La Giovine Italia," and two copies also of Mazzini's pamphlet about guerilla warfare. Menz, the spy in question, while believing that the journal of Young Italy was losing ground, yet considered that it was the most dangerous of the newspapers which circulated in Lombardy. This request of Metternich's was, indeed, made a few months before the actual invasion of Savoy, and Menz, no doubt, began to think that after that failure the power of Mazzini would decline; but it is tolerably clear that Metternich did not share that delusion, and kept his eye steadily on the new leader. Nor did even Menz believe that mere repression would now suffice to win the sympathies of the Lombards to Austria, and he proposed to divert the intellectual zeal of disaffected Lombards into a direction favourable to the State by offering prizes for the solution of questions in different branches of human knowledge. From the winners of these prizes, he thought, might be chosen professors, inspectors, and directors of studies, and encouragement might be given to compositions of poems and paintings, of which "the subject, and even the colour," was to be dictated by Government.[6] He further proposed that, with this object, an Academy of Poetry should be founded in Lombardy, under the absolute direction of the Austrian Government, who are to see that the nation should take part in an intellectual movement "with a correct view, and that these productions of the imagination, bearing the impress of a tendency profitable to the well-being of society, would, in their turn, act in a very favourable manner on the public spirit."