ergo sum_ could not have been predicated of the
Tuscans.

But the condition of things in the other states of the peninsula, in
Venice and Lombardy under the Austrians, in Naples under the Bourbon
kings, in Romagna under the Pope, and very specially in Modena under
its dukes of the House of Este, was much otherwise. In those regions
the Italians were "thinking" a great deal, and had been thinking for
some time past. And somewhere about 1849, those troublesome members
of the body social who are not contented with eating, drinking, and
singing--cantankerous reading and writing people living in towns, who
wanted most unreasonably to say, as the phrase goes, that "their souls
were their own" (as if such fee-simple rights ever fall to the lot
of any man!)--began in Tuscany to give signs that they also were
"thinking."

I remember well that Alberi, the highly accomplished and learned
editor of the _Reports of the Venetian Ambassadors_, and of the great
edition of Galileo's works, was the first man who opened my altogether
innocent eyes to the fact, that the revolutionary leaven was working
in Tuscany, and that there were social breakers ahead! This must
have been as early as 1845, or possibly 1844. Alberi himself was a
Throne-and-Altar man, who thought for his part, that the amount of
proprietorship over his own soul which the existing _regime_ allowed
him was enough for his purposes. But, as he confided to me, a very
strong current of opinion was beginning to run the other way in
Florence, in Leghorn, in Lucca, and many smaller cities--not in Siena,
which always was, and is still, a nest of conservative feeling.

Nevertheless there never was, at least in Florence, the strength and
bitterness of revolutionary feeling that existed almost everywhere
else throughout Italy. I remember a scene which furnished a very
remarkable proof of this, and which was at the same time very
curiously and significantly characteristic of the Florentine
character, at least as it then existed.

It was during the time of the Austrian occupation of Florence. On the
whole the Austrian troops behaved well; and their doings, and the
spirit in which the job they had in hand was carried out, were
very favourably contrasted with the tyranny, the insults, and the
aggressive arrogance, with which the French army of occupation
afflicted the Romans. The Austrians accordingly were never hated in
Florence with the bitter intensity of hate which the French ea