ut the unity of their own stock and
nation and were straining every nerve in that difficult enterprise,
could not excuse the desire of independence in the Italians, and
contended for the boasted rights of Austria and Germany over the lands
and the coasts of Italy, with the people that inhabited them. When it
became known in Germany that the pontifical troops were hastening to the
legitimate defence of Italy it affected the public feeling generally,
and the name of Pius IX was branded with censure, not by laymen only,
but by some bishops and high ecclesiastics. Monsignor Viale, nuncio at
Vienna, and Monsignor Sacconi, nuncio at Munich, were assiduous and
eager in detailing the sinister reports touching Rome and the Pope, and
colored them in such a way as to create an apprehension of schism, the
most serious one that could rise for a pope--and that pope, too, Pius
IX. He had before this been greatly troubled by the proclamation of
General Durando; still he had hoped that the Italian League would be
shortly concluded, and that, when he had furnished the quota of troops
that might be due from him as a temporal sovereign, he would then have
been able, in the capacity of pontiff, to use those good offices which
he considered requisite to assure the consciences of Catholics.

Even the news of some reverses to the Italian arms in Lombardy failed to
awaken a proper feeling among the inhabitants of Central and Southern
Italy, and Farini thus censures the slothfulness and vanity of his
countrymen: "Few gave credit or importance at the time to this and other
sinister intelligence; the greater part of those who beheld the first
marvellous smiles of fortune relied upon the star of Italy, and thought
the Empire was dismembered. We Italians are too susceptible to the
impulses of passion, and of heat in the imagination; with a small matter
we are drunken and think to leap over the moon. Deadly intoxication,
most deadly fault, that of undervaluing an enemy, which lets our
enthusiasm too easily evaporate, and gives him every facility for
showing that he is as gallant as we are, and more resolute; that he has
much of perseverance and of discipline--qualities more effectual and
valuable than simple courage. It comes to this; we must either send
about their business the dreams of poets, and educate ourselves in
severe and masculine virtues, or must yet remain long in a position to
chant many more elegies, to assuage our sorrow, than hymns of