morose, and shut
himself up in the royal palace of Caserta. The constant lectures of
France and England annoyed him without persuading him to take the
means to put a stop to them. Not till 1859 did he open the doors of
the prisons in which Poerio, Settembrini and their companions were
confined. Many plans were made, meanwhile, for their liberation, and
English friends even provided a ship by which they were to escape; but
the ship foundered: perhaps fortunately, as Garibaldi, with
characteristic disinterestedness, had agreed to direct the enterprise,
which could not have been otherwise than perilous, and was not
unlikely to end in the loss of all concerned.

Disaster attended Baron Bentivegna's attempt at a rising at Taormina
in 1856, and Carlo Pisacane's landing at Sapri in the summer of the
following year had no better result. Pisacane, a son of the Duke
Gennaro di San Giovanni of Naples, had fought in the defence of Rome
and was a firm adherent of Mazzini, in conjunction with whom he
planned his unlucky venture. Pisacane watched the growing ascendency
of Piedmont with sorrow; he was one of the few, if not the only one of
his party to say that he would as soon have the dominion of Austria as
that of the House of Savoy. But if he was an extremist in politics,
none the less he was a patriot, who took his life in his hands and
offered it up to his country in the spirit of the noblest devotion. He
had the slenderest hope of success, but he believed that only by such
failures could the people be roused from their apathy. 'For me,' he
wrote, 'it will be victory even if I die on the scaffold. This is all
I can do, and this I do; the rest depends on the country, not on me. I
have only my affections and my life to give, and I give them without
hesitation.'

With the young Baron Nicotera and twenty-three others, Pisacane
embarked on the _Cagliari_, a steamer belonging to a Sardinian
mercantile line, which was bound for Tunis. When at sea, the captain
was frightened into obedience, and the ship's course was directed to
the isle of Ponza, where several hundred prisoners, mostly political,
were undergoing their sentences. The guards made little resistance,
and Pisacane opened the prisons, inviting who would to follow him. The
first plan had been to make a descent on San Stefano, the island where
Settembrini was imprisoned, but that good citizen had refused to admit
the liberation of the non-political prisoners, which was an
un