Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 10/Italy and England
ITALY AND ENGLAND.
The arrival of Garibaldi in England has been hailed with an enthusiasm which has astonished even those who were most inclined to welcome the peerless hero of Italy. The universality of the feeling is singular, unless we consider a little the slow and silent causes which have been preparing the national mind to sympathise so fully with the country of which he is the representative and the life, We think one of these has been the Italian Master. When we were a school-girl he was an essential aid in the completion of a first-rate education; and, though Italian has been slightly overborne by German as a fashionable study of late years, we believe few educated women are ignorant of the language of Dante and Petrarch.
We were at the Crystal Palace on Saturday, April 16, when that wonderful welcome was given to Garibaldi which those who witnessed never can forget; and one circumstance which particularly struck us was, that the ladies who surrounded us talked Italian, involuntarily as it were, under the excitement of the moment. And, as we heard, our thoughts flew back to the days when we were reading Silvio Pellico with one of Italy’s patient political martyrs, and hearing from him, during the needful time for conversation, the wrongs and aspirations of his countrymen.
The Italian master (of whom he was a good type) did not at all resemble the old French teacher who made French a popular tongue years before. The abbé and the ruined marquis of our grandmother’s days were simply aristocrats who had by some means to earn a living, and taught as they best might, with very little idea of conveying grammatical or literary information to the minds of their pupils. They spoke elegantly; would be shocked at the bad “turning” of a phrase; and bowed and took snuff with an infinite grace, which doubtless slightly influenced the generation of the Regency in manners.
The Italian master was generally of the middle classes. He was a well-educated man; frequently he had been a tutor in some noble family; sometimes he was a writer, who dared not publish in his native land. But he was always imbued with a strong love of his country—an ardent patriotism—which tinged all he taught and said.
We will return to our own teacher, who was, as we have observed, a fair type of the class, and fancy we sit again in the library that sultry July day when the leaves hung mutely on the trees of the square, and only the distant roar from busy Piccadilly told that we were in a great city. His voice came full and sonorous on the air as he read Icilio’s speech in Alfieri’s Virginia—the one beginning “Popolo Rè.” We can see now the look of power and determination in his fine dark countenance. The poet spoke his very thoughts; Alfieri was his delight; and we read it so often, and heard if so often discussed, that our knowledge of the Italian dramatist is only rivalled by that which we have of Shakespeare.
Our master had been the friend of Silvio Pellico; and often, when we read that most charming and touching of records, he would pause over the mournful story, to add some personal reminiscence to it. We remember how, that very summer day, he told us an incident, which would have been comic but for the disgraceful tyranny it revealed.
The Podestà of Brescia (at least such, if my memory serves me, was the dignitary of whom he spoke} was a creature of Austria, perhaps an Austrian himself. This man was so often in the habit of condemning persons suspected of disaffection to severe imprisonment (carcere duro) and all its attendant horrors, that he would occasionally go to sleep during the so-called examination and trial of the prisoner, and awake to pronounce his usual sentence. One sultry day, while the magistrate slumbered through his duties, a case respecting the disposal of certain sacks of wheat, which had been discussed some time previously, came before him. He was awakened by his clerk to give sentence, and, half rousing up, gravely condemned the sacks of wheat to "carcere duro for ten years.” We would not smile, then, at an act which so fully illustrated the condition Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/565 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/566