born giants." This angry speech, no doubt, added to the keen dissatisfaction of the Venetians in knowing that their general remained inactive on the bank while their ships were thus knocked to pieces. The truth probably lies between the two narratives, as so often happens; for Carmagnola might easily express his hot impatience with the authorities who had refused to be guided by his experience, arid with the admiral who took the first unexpected man in armour for a giant, when the messengers roused him with their note of alarm in the middle of the night, and yet have set himself in motion at once, though only to see the drifting of the grappled ships beyond his reach. He himself took the defeat so profoundly to heart, that the senators were compelled in the midst of their own trouble to send ambassadors to soothe him – "to mitigate his frenzy, that they might not fall into greater evil, and to keep him at his post." It is evident, we think, that the whole affair had been in direct opposition to his advice, and that instead of being in the wrong, he felt himself able to take a very high position with the ill-advised Signoria, and to resent the loss which must have been galling to him beyond measure, not only as a triumph of his immediate rivals, the Milanese captains, but as the cause of undoubted congratulation and satisfaction to Philip, his personal enemy. The Venetians avenged the disaster by sending a fleet at once to Genoa, where, coursing along the lovely line of the eastern Riviera, they caught in a somewhat similar way the Genoese fleet and annihilated it. But this is by the way.
Carmagnola all this time lay like Achilles sullen in his tent. Philip himself came in his joy and triumph to the neighbourhood, but could not tempt the disgusted general to more than a languid passage of arms. An attempt to take Cremona by surprise made by one of his officers, a certain Cavalcabó, seemed as if it might have been crowned with success had the general bestirred himself with sufficient energy – "if Carmagnola had sent more troops in aid." As it was, the expedition, being unsupported, had to retire. "The taking of the city being thus out of thought, he sent all his people into winter quarters: for the great rains which had fallen during the autumn made the year a bad one for military movements." He lay thus sullen and disheartened in his leaguer even when spring restored the means of warfare, and though his old enemy Piccinino was up and stirring, picking up here and there a castle in the disturbed precincts of the Cremonese. "The marvel grew," cries Sabellico, "that Carmagnola let these people approach him, and never moved."
The Signoria, in the meantime, had been separately and silently turning over many thoughts in their mind on the subject of this general who was not as the others, who would not be commanded nor yet dismissed, too great to be dispensed with, too troublesome to manage. Ever since the memorable incidents of the battle of Maclodio, doubts of his good faith had been in their minds. Why did he liberate Philip's soldiers if he really wished to overthrow Philip? It was Philip himself – so the commissioners had said in their indignation – whom he had set free; and who could tell that the treachery at Soncino was not of his own contriving, or that he had not stood aloof of set purpose while the ships
