ined glass of the
cathedral, and then obligingly helps its dimness by lighting a score or
so of tapers. Did no monk ever think of putting a stained window in the
east, and compelling the sun to ogle the world through spectacles? "The
light is good," said He who created it, as He saw it darting its first
pure beam across creation. Not so, says the Puseyite; it is not good
unless it is coloured.

I looked with interest on the plains around Novara; for there, albeit no
trace of the bloody fray remains, the army of Charles Albert in 1848 met
the host of Radetzky; and there the fate of the campaign for Italian
independence was decided. The battle which was fought on these plains
led to the destruction of King Charles Albert, but not to the
destruction of his kingdom of Sardinia,--though why Radetzky did not
follow up his victory by a march on Turin, is to this hour a mystery.
Nay, though it sounds a little paradoxical, it is probable that this
battle, by destroying the king, saved the kingdom. Had Charles Albert
survived till the re-action set in 1849 and 1850, there is too much
reason to fear, from his antecedents, that he would have thrown himself
into the current with the rest of the Italian rulers; and so Sardinia
would have missed the path of constitutional liberty and material
development which it has since, under King Victor Emanuel, so happily
pursued. Had that happened, the horizon of Italy, dark as it is at this
hour, would have been still darker, and the peninsula, from the Alps to
Sicily, would not have contained a single spot where the hunted friends
of liberty could have found asylum.

We soon approached the Ticino, the boundary between Sardinia and
Austrian Lombardy. The Ticino is a majestic river, here spanned by one
of the finest bridges in Italy. It contains eleven arches; is of the
granite of Mount Torfano; and, like almost all the great modern works in
Italy, was commenced by Napoleon, though finished only after his fall.
Here, then, was the gate of Austria; and seated at that gate I saw three
Croats,--fit keepers of Austrian order.

I was not ignorant of the hand these men had had in the suppression of
the revolution of 1848, and of the ruthless tragedies they were said to
have enacted in Milan and other cities of Lombardy; and I rode up to
them in the eager desire of scrutinizing their features, and reading
there the signs of that ferocity which had given them such wide-spread
but evil renown. They s