ffairs at Naples became worse than they were before. In no country in
the world was there a more execrable despotism than that exercised by
the Bourbon Ferdinand. The prisons were filled with political prisoners;
and these prisons were filthy, without ventilation, so noisome and
pestilential that even physicians dared not enter them; while the
wretched prisoners, mostly men of culture, chained to the most
abandoned and desperate murderers and thieves, dragged out their weary
lives without trial and without hope. And this was what the king,
supported and endorsed by Metternich, considered good government to be.

The following year saw an insurrection in Piedmont, when the patriotic
party hoped to throw all Northern Italy upon the rear of the Austrians,
but which resulted, as will be treated elsewhere, in a sad collapse. The
victory of absolutism in Italy was complete, and all people seeking
their liberties became the object of attack from the three great Powers,
who obeyed the suggestions of the Austrian chancellor,--now
unquestionably the most prominent figure in European politics. He had
not only suppressed liberty in the country which he directly governed,
but he had united Austria, Prussia, and Russia in a war against the
liberties of Europe, and this under the guise of religion itself.

Metternich now thought he had earned a vacation, and in the fall of 1821
he made a visit to Hanover. He had previously visited Italy with the
usual experience of cultivated Germans,--unbounded admiration for its
works of art and sunny skies and historical monuments. He was as
enthusiastic as Madame de Stael over St. Peter's and the Pantheon. In
his private letters to his wife and children, so simple, so frank, so
childlike in his enjoyment, no one would suppose he was the arch and
cruel enemy of all progress, with monarchs for his lieutenants, and
governors for his slaves. His journey to Hanover was a triumphant
procession. The King George IV. embraced him with that tenderness which
is usual with monarchs when they meet one another, and in the
fulsomeness of his praises compared him to all the great men of
antiquity and of modern times,--Caesar, Cato, Gustavus Adolphus,
Marlborough, Pitt, Wellington, and the whole catalogue of heroes. On his
return journey to Vienna, Metternich stopped to rest himself a while at
Johannisberg, the magnificent estate on the Rhine which the emperor had
given him, near where he was born, and where he had