At Geneva we met Mazzini, a remarkable man, in his way, the very genius of intrigue, and wholly sold to the devil. We also met there the Abbate Gioberti, a Piedmontese, who had been exiled as a liberal by the government of Carlo Alberto, the _cidevant_ Carbonaro. He was a Catholic priest, and though under the censure of the government, and distrusted by the Jesuits, nay, violently opposed by them, he had not at that time, so far as I could learn, fallen under the censure of his church. He was one of the ablest men we met in our European travels, and a fine specimen of the higher order of Italian genius. Though comparatively young, not much over forty, he was deeply and solidly learned, and as a writer on political and philosophical subjects, had, saying nothing of his peculiar views, no superior, and hardly an equal in all Italy, if indeed in all Europe. Gioberti affected to be an Ultramontane, a rigid Catholic, a thoroughgoing Papist; yet his sympathies were with the liberal or revolutionary party. He was, first of all, an Italian, and held that the moral, civil, and political primacy of the world belonged to Italy, and it was because God had, from remote ages, given to her this primacy, that the Papal chair was established at Rome. The primacy belonged to the successors of St. Peter in their quality of _Roman_ pontiffs, who, as such, were heritors of the Italian _primato_. The Papal authority was founded in divine right, but mediately through the divine right of the Italians as heritors of the old Roman sacerdocy, and Italo-Greek civilization. According to him, the Papacy did not so much continue the synagogue, as the old Roman priesthood, or rather, the Jewish and Pagan priesthoods both meet and become one in the Papacy—the summit and representative of the Christian priesthood. His plan, therefore, was, first of all, Italian unity, not the republican or democratic unity of Mazzini and Young Italy, nor yet a monarchical unity, under a purely secular prince; but a federative union under the moderatorship of the Pope, made one in the Papacy. The Romans, he held, at least from the time of Numa, had been an armed priesthood, and should now resume, under the Pope, their old character and mission. Italy thus united, thus organized, under the moderatorship of the Pope, could reassert her primacy, and carry on the work of civilization. With her twenty-five millions of inhabitants, the natural superiority of her genius, the moral weight of the Papacy, her peculiar geographical position, and the productiveness of her soil, she would be impregnable to attack, and more than able to cope single-handed with any one of the great European powers. In other words, he sought for the Pope and the Italians what Nicholas is supposed to seek for the Czar and the Russians.