from their terror of retaliation. They enacted two edicts, in one of which the King declared: "That as he had never lost his kingdom, such of his subjects as had endeavoured to impose a capitulation upon his admission, were rebels." The other edict intimated: "That by virtue of the right he had acquired in RE CONQUERING his dominions, (as if it were possible to conquer that which has never been lost) the King suppressed certain immunities which the barons and their feudal estates had hitherto enjoyed." The Junta perceiving that revenge and confiscation were the only real objects of the persecution, and that it was necessary for them, either quietly to immolate their fellow citizens, or to give themselves up a useless sacrifice together with them, all its members, except one named Fiore, abdicated; and were supplied by others, who were sent on purpose from Sicily. The injustice, which seems to have been enforced by the blind necessity of a war at once foreign and domestic, and by the want of discipline of such a number and description of combatants, was subsequently justified by the cold-blooded calculations of lawyers. To ground their sentences, they derived from the two royal edicts the following legal acts:

"WHOEVER may have filled offices in the executive council, or in the legislature of the republic." "WHOEVER may have assisted at the demolition of the statue of Charles the IIId., or at the planting of the tree of liberty in the public squares."-"WHOEVER may have been present at the national feasts, where the people tore to pieces certain royal and British flags taken by the national guard in battle."—"WHOEVER may have opposed the Catholic army of the Cardinal Vice-Roy, or persisted in fighting when the vessel, carrying the King, was perceived off Naples."—" WHOEVER, during the republican government, may have written or preached against his Majesty or his Majesty's family."—" WHOEVER, by his professed adherence to the republic, may have shown his treasonable purposes against monarchy, and his impiety against religion.” "WHOEVER may have repelled by force, or fired from the windows on the loyal subjects who formerly, at the departure of his Majesty, and lately, at the approach of the Catholic army, attacked the houses of individuals obnoxious to their legitimate master."--Is to be committed for high treason, and punishable with death. Every man in the kingdom was, by this law, amenable to trial; and, by the last article, the pillage and fury on which the Lazzaroni at this time were so ferociously bent, were sanctioned, and brought forward to aggravate the legal bloodshed of the tribunal. The law continues" WHOEVER may have belonged to regular meetings or clubs, without having pledged himself by any oath, shall be punished with fifteen years' banishment and confiscation."-" WHOEVER may have subscribed to regular

meetings or clubs, and have taken any oath, although he thereby signed his capital sentence with his own hand, yet his Majesty out of clemency condemns him only to perpetual banishment and confiscation." On being banished, they delivered to the tribunal this declaration: "IN conformity with the royal enactment annexed in the acts of the grand criminal court, I hereby pledge myself by my signature, and bind myself by oath, on peril of being lawfully put to death as an outlaw and enemy of the crown, in case of my contravention, with impunity to every one who shall kill me, to transport myself forthwith, out of this city, and remove to a distance from the royal dominions." It happened that some after having delivered this bond, were tried again and condemned to death. The law concludes-" THE judges ought to recommend to royal mercy such individuals as had lent their services to the republic for the support of their families, provided they should be indicted of no one of the aforesaid acts." On the motion of Guidobaldi, one of its new members, the Junta determined that, instead of paying the executioner by the head according to custom, it would be more economical to give him a gross sum in advance, and engage his service for a twelvemonth.

No feeling so powerfully disposes men to resign themselves to death, as that of the loss of all hope of obtaining justice on earth. Some, in the belief that they shall elsewhere find a more equitable judge; others, in the certainty of an uninterrupted repose, oppose courage to oppression, indulging (perhaps reasonably) the expectation of preventing the present gratification, and exasperating the succeeding remorse of their enemies. For, the Neapolitans, endowed as they are by nature with a restless and ardent imagination, poor and rich, learned and illiterate, sceptics, and churchmen (both the conscientious and the profligate,) old men enfeebled by age, and females warm with youthful prospects of a life of enjoyment, almost all ascended the scaffold with equal serenity. Eleonora Fonseca, condemned for her writings, said to those who were to suffer with her, on their way to the place of execution, "that, calling to mind her relations, she regretted having received more of a literary education than was conducive to the welfare of families."—"Nevertheless," she added, “as the fruit of my studies, I have learned not to set too high a value on life;" and she ascended the scaffold, pronouncing with feminine pride:

"Audet viris concurrere virgo."

Cirillo, an eminent physician, who for many years had attended

* In the Italian "Sfrattare da questa città."

the Queen, and the English ambassador, on being in the name of Sir William Hamilton, and Lord Nelson, assured of mercy if he asked his Majesty's pardon, answered the King's attorney, "Tell them that I pity them all." Italy lost at that time several individuals who had grown grey in the diffusion of science; and almost all the promising youth: among others, Vincenzo Russo, the most eloquent, and most virtuous of his countrymen. He flattered himself with the idea of bringing to a state of perfection, beings perishable by nature, and inhabitants of a globe subject to periodical revolutions, where reproduction springs from destruction: and this very error of superior minds the more evidently displays our common imbecility.

The generous portion of the nobility then also perished, cut off in the flower of their hopes: for although the fathers had enslaved themselves by their indolence, the children were taught by the late calamities of their country that by the use of arms, and the participation in administering public affairs, the aristocracy of a nation can alone hope to oppose both domestic and foreign despotism. The lower classes throughout the rest of Italy still remember their liberties by traditions preserved even in their public buildings and churches; and the overthrow of their governments inspired them with the desire (which has been, and will be long the only cause of their animosities and consequent slavery) that all their cities should become again so many free states. The Lazzaroni alone had never heard of popular rights, except against the holy inquisition, which not even Philip the Second could establish at Naples. Their climate prevents them from feeling many wants, and gives them the means of satisfying them with little labour. Idleness maintains them in superstition and vice, inducing them to plunge desperately into commotions, and to withdraw from them as suddenly from love of inaction. They were most happy under an absolute government, which every where is more prone to punish the public virtues of the highest, than the crimes of its lowest subjects. Some of the writers of the time have registered the number, others, the names of the condemned; and though they do not always agree, it appears that there was scarcely a noble house which had not beheld the public sale of a part of its property, and the execution or banishment of at least one of its members. Of nine families there remained none but the children and women. In two more, only the old men survived, and their race is now extinct. Those bishops, who, in the old disputes between their sovereigns and the see of Rome, had supported the royal cause, and, after the King fled, exhorted the people to submit peaceably to the dispositions of Providence, were by the opposite principles of the church and the court, tried,

and condemned to different punishments, and two of them executed as guilty of treason, both against the pope's supremacy, and the legitimacy of the monarch. Two brothers, one fifteen, the other twelve years old, were also condemned to death; and upon the entreaties of their mother, the king's attorney told her that he could spare one of them, and bade her choose-she did not choose. He was a Sicilian, named Speziale, filling at once the offices of chief justice and public accuser, and was a man endowed with such a power of dissimulation, that whenever he could not elicit any evidence at the bar, he invited the prisoners into his private chambers, shed tears for their sufferings, protested before the Almighty that he accepted that place in order to save some of them-complained of the cruelty of the Queenoffered them means of escape; and if, trusting to human sympathy, they disclosed their opinions and feelings, he answered: "You have said too much, and unhappily for both of us, the law ought to be fully executed."-Some were strangled in the subterraneous dungeons, with friars about them, to learn under pretence of confession, the name and abode of their accomplices. Many suffered sentence to be pronounced without attempting a defence, lest they should commit their relations: others refused to answer the interrogatories of the judges; and Manthone, war minister of the republic, being provoked and insulted by them, uttered only these words-" Ho capitolato."

The first man executed, two months before the establishment of the grand criminal court, and even before the arrival of the King, was Prince Francesco Caracciolo, admiral of the Neapolitan navy, who, by seventy years of active life, had kept off the torpor under which Italian patricians are apt to languish; and to the experience of his profession, he added the acquirements of a man of science. He had, at first, followed the court to Sicily, and returned to Naples with the King's permission, who cautioned him not to mix in the affairs of the republic. Yet he conceived himself bound to resume the command of a flotilla of gun-boats, the only remains of the ships of war, lest the French should put into it officers of their own nation; and when the Allies attacked Naples, he attempted to drive out the British squadron from the island of Procida. A price was put upon his head, and he was carried before Nelson, who directed a court martial to proceed summarily, and "report to him what punishment the prisoner ought to suffer."* Count Thurn, who had formerly burned the Neapolitan navy, was one of those foreign adventurers intriguing for the favours of princes, and every where jealous of native merit; and although the prisoner alleged that

* Lord Nelson's first order to Commodore Count Thurn, June 29th, 1799.

Thurn was his known enemy, it was he who assembled the courtmartial of Neapolitan officers on board the flag-ship of Lord Nelson, and was appointed its president. The bearer of the sentence found the English admiral seated in his cabin, between Sir William and Lady Hamilton, and hearing that Caracciolo had been condemned to banishment and confiscation, he ordered the sentence to be revised: the punishment being then commuted to perpetual imprisonment, he desired them to revise it again. This is the statement of two naval officers, who, although then at Naples, were not ocular witnesses; the only historian by whom this transaction is related with impartiality, has made use of such cautious expressions in this place, that I can neither admit nor reject the circumstance of the revision of the two sentences. The trial began at ten o'clock in the morning, and Nelson soon after noon signed the sentence, and ordered the criminal to be hanged;† who, dreading rather the manner of his death, than the end of his life, demanded to be shot as an officer, or beheaded according to the privileges of his forefathers. The English admiral answered, "That he had no right to interfere in a judgment fairly pronounced by the officers of the country."

After these words he walked up and down, agitated and silent; and while he apparently tried to hush in his breast the presentiment of the stain inflicted on his reputation, Lady Hamilton was present at the execution. The Italian sailor who was ordered to pass the rope round the neck of the admiral, hesitated and bent forward as if desirous to kiss his hand. "Let me die alone," said Caracciolo, and, while he expired, Lady Hamilton wiped her eyes. Her endowments, both physical and intellectual, had urged her to struggle from her very infancy to rise by means of those expedients to which every individual must inevitably have recourse whose ambition is infinitely above his circumstances. She had been at first a menial servant in London; next a wandering girl, lost to virtue: at last, devoid of shame, she lent the admirable beauties of her person as a model to academies of painters, until she became the concubine of a young military man; and was no sooner raised from penury, than she gave a loose to that indiscretion which afterwards brought her, through anguish, luxury, and contempt, into the grave, in the same helpless indigence in which she was born. Her lover, distressed with debt, sold her to Sir William Hamilton, a man far advanced in years, and ambassador at Naples; he was an enthusiast in the fine arts, of

"Sir William and Lady Hamilton were in the ship; but Nelson, it is affirmed, saw no one, except his own officers." Southey's Life of Nelson, an. 1799— It is affirmed in Harrison's Memoirs of Nelson, “written under Lady Hamilton's eye at Merton."-Foote's Vindication, page 72.

+ Lord Nelson's second order to Commodore Count Thurn, June 29th, 1799.