dispelled by the mournful
spectacle which presented itself to our gaze, and which I believe has
very rarely been equalled. Men and women of every condition were being
barbarously dragged along the road, most of them streaming with blood,
many half dead, and stripped of every article of apparel, presenting
altogether the most deplorable sight the mind can conceive. The shrieks
and howlings of that ferocious mob were such, that it seemed composed,
not of human beings, but of a horde of wild beasts. They cast stones and
every species of filth at us, threatening to tear us to pieces." The
Iazzaroni, instigated by the priests,--at Naples, as every where, the
steadfast partisans of absolutism,--were the chief perpetrators of these
atrocious misdeeds. Scarcely a party of patriot prisoners passed through
the streets without some of its number being torn from the hands of the
escort and sacrificed to the blind fury of the benighted populace. And
it was a question if death were not preferable to the barbarous
treatment reserved for the survivors. Twenty thousand men, half-naked,
many of them wounded, were crowded into the halls of the public granary,
now converted into a temporary prison. Heat, filth, and vermin, were the
least of the evils endured by these unfortunates, amongst whom were
noblemen, priests, officers of high rank, many literary men, several
Celestin monks, and, to crown all, a number of lunatics. The Hospital of
Incurables had been held out by the medical students against the
royalists, and when the latter took it, they sent both sane and insane
to prison, where some of the madmen were detained on suspicion of
feigning lunacy. "One of these poor wretches was the cause of a most
disastrous scene, which we witnessed. Having struck one of the royal
officers on the face, the latter called out, 'to arms!' and as soon as
he was surrounded by his followers, he rushed furiously upon the
lunatic, whom he clove in two by a sabre stroke. During this time the
sentinels placed in the street to guard the royal granary, fired
musket-shots at the windows, and the bullets, rebounding from the
ceiling of the building, wounded and killed several amongst us." The
horrors of their situation, and the pangs of hunger and thirst were so
great, that some of the sane amongst the prisoners nearly went mad. It
was not till the third day that a scanty ration of bread and water was
distributed. This spare diet and the absence of covering had on