- cessible to all who wished to approach him. By this
mild authority he maintained order in the city, and he might have succeeded in setting up good government in a permanent form, had it not been for the intervention of France. The attack on the Romans by Louis Napoleon has been described as one of the meanest political crimes, and indeed there was no excuse for it. The siege lasted nearly a month, and the city fell. The victors entered Rome. Garibaldi with three thousand followers refused to surrender and retreated. Mazzini fled the country. So ended his brief experience as a ruler.
He could not remain in Switzerland; he therefore returned to London. The death of his mother in 1852 came as a great blow to him. He had seen her in Milan and had always kept in close correspondence with her. "I have now no mother on earth except my country," he wrote, "and I shall be true to her as my mother has been true to me." She left him a small annuity, so that although he was poor, he was not in the desperate state of want he had been in formerly. He had to live very simply, however, his cigars being his only luxury. His most constant companions were his tame linnets and canaries, which perched about on his head and shoulders and hopped about among his papers in the thick, smoky atmosphere of his one room. He was very much appreciated and respected by many prominent men of the time,
