to keep its next ruler on the line which this one has marked out voluntarily; and thus gaining under good rulers, and holding its own, at least, under bad ones, it will arrive in due course at its years of discretion, its full strength, and its freedom. The most ardent lover of liberty, the most thorough-bred democrat and propagandist, will find in European history sufficient cause to believe that such is the best progress of society to political emancipation; and he may see examples in the world of such emancipation taking shape and permanency, and becoming a fruitful mother of blessings, while all the revolutions which have been effected by sudden outbreaks and overturnings, have, in the end, proved lamentable failures. We do not except France and its revolution of July; for Louis Philippe, now, is a harder and a stronger master than ever was Charles the Tenth. The history of Naples, for the last half century, is full of instruction on this head; and the historian now under consideration, who was a warm, and sincere, and consistent partisan of liberty, through all its vicissitudes, has not failed to let us see, in his narration, how much he has been disappointed in his hopes in the hour of success, and how clearly he sees now that that disappointment was inevitable.

Pietro Colletta was born of a good family in Naples, in the year 1775; he devoted his early years to study, cultivating chiefly the mathematics and Latin, especially Tacitus, for whom he seems to have had an enthusiastic admiration. He entered the army in 1796, and in 1798, he fought against the French invasion of Naples, with some distinction, as it appears he obtained a commission. The king being expelled, he took service under the republic, which cost him a severe imprisonment, and nearly his life, when the king returned in 1799; but he was again employed under Joseph, and Murat made him a colonel for his services in the taking of Capri; and afterwards, by his faithfulness and abilities in the direction of the engineer corps, he rose to the rank of general. He served Murat faithfully to the end, preserved his rank under the restored Ferdinand, and might have died in peace but for the so-called revolution of 1820. His experience of Neapolitan liberty had not made him worldly wise; he listened again to the syren, and when she delivered him up a second time to the tender mercies of the tyrant, he was too happy to escape with a three years' imprisonment in an Austrian dungeon, and exile from Naples

for life. He employed his latter years in writing the book which is before us.

The history, fate, and fame of this man are worth a moment's moralizing. He laid the foundation at school of his skill in engineering, to which he owed his highest promotion; and of his talent for writing, to which he owes his permanent reputation and having this foundation laid, he flung himself, unconscious of its value, into scenes and occupations the least likely to enable him to build on it. Full of activity and ambition, a man of a powerful frame, of persuasive address, of firm resolves, and a strong attachment to discipline, he was made to succeed in war, to gain laurels and rewards, and the smiles and favors of military kings. He did gain all these things, and we may say, he lost them all again; and probably after twenty years passed among such noisy and brilliant scenes, when he was left in his prison to reflect, or sent into his exile to write his history, he thought himself consigned to comparative obscurity, and deemed that the sun of his fortune had gone down. Yet it is to this exile, to this retirement, to his early love for Tacitus, and to his power over the peaceful pen, that we know all we know of Colletta. Valiant he was, no doubt; and so, when he fought at Capri, was every individual of the ten thousand men who fought there also. He had military fame, too, a little halo, which went about with him wherever he went, and seemed to him, perhaps, therefore to be everywhere, though for nearly every one else it was gone when he was out of sight; and he himself must have missed it before he died. What does the world care now for his military reputation? It was like one musket fired in a feu de joie, undistinguishable amid the echoes of a thousand more exactly like it, or quelled and dominated by kindred but superior noise. If there never had been but one battle in the world, Voltaire says, we should know all about it to the slightest particulars, the names, and even the genealogies of all the private soldiers; and so, he says, if there were but one book in the world, everybody would know it by heart, with all its divisions, chapters, words, and syllables. But fit copia fastidium, we have over many books and battles to charge our memories at this rate; but it is worth observing how much more the excellent in books excel their rivals than the excellent in battles do theirs. Amid the crowd of warriors, a superior man like Colletta was undistinguished, or only distinguished

like the crowd; but he took up the pen, and then his superiority was recognised.

The defects of this book are soon enumerated; but we have not much to do with them, inasmuch as they are not repulsive ones. He writes "with his sword arm," much more like a soldier, as he was, than a man of letters, which he was not. He would have made a history of anything he had not seen or known familiarly, at very great disadvantage, probably, from want of studious habits; and he makes this, of times in which he had a part to play, with some faults of grouping and perspective from the too great nearness of his points of view. We shall not enlarge upon all this, but proceed to give some account of the contents of the work, with such reflections as the progress of our sketches may suggest.

The kingdom of Naples has been a sort of football between France, Spain, and Rome, for the last four hundred years. It has always been claimed, but never possessed, by the pope; and yet nearly all its possessors have acknowledged themselves his vassals, and have regularly done him homage for it as a fief of the holy see. It was conquered and reconquered without leave of the pontiff, or in spite of him; but the potentate, who made himself his vassal against his will, never dared to refuse him the formal observances of subjection. Colletta gives an abstract of the papal doings in Naples, in a short paragraph, which is worth translating.

"Whoever should write out truly and fully the lives and actions of the popes, would write the civil history of Italy; so linked with the pontificate are the wars, treaties, revolutions, and political changes, the interruptions, and forced retrocessions of civilization. And to speak of our own kingdom only; the intrigues of the pope arrested first, and then extinguished whatever good was intended by the kings of the Swabian race; the popes redoubled the evils of the time of the house of Anjou; the popes nourished the civil wars under the kings of the family of Arragon. Nicholas the Third was an accomplice in the Sicilian vespers; Innocent the Eighth contrived the rebellion and baronial war against Ferdinand and Alphonso; Alexander the Sixth did not disdain to negotiate with Bajazet, emperor of the Turks, to furnish trouble for the Christian kings of the Sicilies; the popes, in the long course of the viceroyalty, stirred up to discord sometimes the rulers, and sometimes the subjects, accordingly as the unreasonable pretensions of the Church from time to time might best be furthered."

The vice-royalty finished in 1735. Naples since 1501 had been a province of Spain till the war of the succession; in the course of which, it was conquered for the Emperor of Germany. But when Philip the Fifth was firmly established on the throne of Spain, his second wife, Elizabeth of Farnese, who was a woman of a haughty spirit, and of great influence in the counsels of the king, obtained for her son, Charles of Bourbon, the ducal coronets, as a preliminary step, of Tuscany and Parma, and sent the boy, then sixteen years of age, to take the government of those countries upon himself. A year after, loftier projects developed themselves; a design was formed upon Naples and Sicily. A fleet and army were sent to execute it; and Charles, in person, took the apparent and nominal command. He made an easy conquest; and in the course of March, April, and May, 1734, he made himself master of the fairest part of the kingdom and of the capital, though another year was required before the Germans were fairly expelled from all their fortresses, and from the island of Sicily. The military inefficiency of Charles's generals seems to have triumphed only by the still greater ignorance and folly of their adversaries; and Colletta, who gives us some examples of the manner in which the lesser stupidity was converted into glory, remarks, contemptuously, that "the name of a great commander was more easily acquired in those times than now." It happened, however, that for many years after this, there was no demand for military abilities at Naples. Charles reigned peaceably from 1735 till the death of his elder brother, Ferdinand the Sixth of Spain, left that throne vacant for him in 1759, and enabled him to dispose of Naples for the aggrandizement of one of his. younger sons. His eldest, Philip, was an idiot; the second, therefore, was destined to inherit Spain; and the third became forthwith Ferdinand the Fourth of the two Sicilies, assuming the state of royalty immediately, at the early age of eight, and declared of age at sixteen. Charles embarked for Spain with the rest of his family, Ferdinand remained under the principal charge of Bernardo Tanucci, his father's old and faithful counsellor, and of a regency of noble and insignificant names, whom Tanucci governed completely by means of his continual correspondence and good understanding with Charles, till he was superseded, on the marriage of Ferdinand, by the influence of the queen.

Bernardo Tanucci was a professor of jurisprudence at Pisa.

He acquired a reputation for science which recommended him to Charles, and he seems to have been a man of general right views, but bounded by the political ignorance of his time, and enslaved by the commonplace dogmas on the subject which were then undisputed. He showed this narrowness most in his utter neglect of Ferdinand's education. The boy was left to run wild in hunting and fishing excursions— to choose his associates solely for their skill in contributing to his amusements, and to grow up, as he did, a vulgar-minded, ignorant, royal clown. He seems to have acquired no very bad active propensities. He did not fall upon his subjects and destroy their lives, or burn their villages for sport, but flattery and subservience, and the habit of seeing everything vield to his slightest wishes, did their unfailing work upon his temper. He imbibed the selfishness of royalty, and a thorough indifference to all consequences of pain and blood and tears, when the vindication of his prerogatives, and the preservation of his power were in question. As for good faith, he seems not to have known that there was such a thing. He heaped perjury on perjury, as if for amusement, and went to his long account, at last, with a catalogue of crime and baseness recorded against him, nearly the whole of which was as unnecessary and impolitic as it was atrocious.

It does not require much sagacity to trace the causes of the total extinction, in this branch of the Bourbon family, of all those virtues which depend on sympathy with men or with human nature; of all, in short, which are included in the observance of the golden rule, of doing as we would be done by. Henry the Fourth, the founder of their greatness, was a man tried and formed in adversity; he knew what suffering was, and could feel for it; he had a heart, without which a head can never long go right. But Louis the Thirteenth, Porphyrogenitus, born to royalty, like all his successors of this branch, ascended the throne at nine years old. His son, Louis the Fourteenth, was king at five, and Louis the Fifteenth, his great grandson, at four. But we have deviated from what concerns us. In the Neapolitan offshoot, Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis the Fourteenth, was king of Spain at seventeen; his son Charles, reigning duke at sixteen, and king of Naples at seventeen, and Ferdinand king of Naples at eight. In this long line of infant successions, where were knowledge and experience to break in ? Nations and sceptres, under this system, were made play