of the city, is the Castellamare, an old Spanish fortress, partially dismantled by the popular rage in 1860. Beyond this to the north, a straggling 'long-shore suburb (the Borgo) leads first to the Vicaria or Great Gaol, a group of buildings on the radiating system, enclosed in a polygonal wall with parapets and bastions, and further on to the shipping port and Mole.

The points which it was essential to keep out of insurgent hands were thus numerous and scattered. The castle contained a considerable store of small-arms and ammunition; the Finanze held some 1,360,000l. sterling in bullion; the Palace was the head-quarters of authority, actual and symbolical, with considerable facilities for defence; the Town-hall and Quattro Cantoni were points to hold, not only on account of the importance of the former as the centre of urban authority and a depository of archives, but as constituting with the buildings about them a position of the greatest military weight in the command of the town. As long as this was properly held, the communication of the palace with the sea and the castle could scarcely be cut off. But the security of the gaol was perhaps the most important of all, containing as it did on the 16th September some 2500 criminals, accused or convicted, who on its fall would have been let loose like wild beasts upon the city. For the first two or three days of the insurrection, the fall of the gaol was the most serious ground of apprehension to reasonable people.

The whole number of troops in the province of Palermo was about 3000, of whom more than two-thirds were in and about the city. Of these the main body, amounting to some 1600,* was at or immediately after the outbreak concentrated at the Royal Palace and square; two companies were at the gaol, with as many more at a barrack beyond it, a like number at the castle, and some thirty-five men only at the Finanze. Besides these troops, which were nearly all, as we have said, raw levies, there were some 400 or 500 police of sorts, including a number of carabineers (i. e. gens-d'armes).

About an hour after midnight musketry had been heard in the direction of Monreale, four miles west of the city, and somewhat later towards Porazzi, a suburb lying south-west of the Palace; but the great majority of the citizens knew nothing of this. Towards dawn, however, shots echoed from various parts of the city itself, whilst guards arrived in haste at the Town-hall, reporting the entrance of armed bands, by whom their detachments had been overpowered or driven away. Prefect Torelli

* We take this number from the Casi di Palermo,' the best local account of the affair. All the official reports omit to state the strength of the palace garrison.

might have compared himself to the King of Babylon- One post did run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to show him that his city was taken at one end.'

These bands, by the most trustworthy accounts, did not muster more than 400 men in all; but they were at once joined by others who issued armed from buildings in the city, especially in the north-west quarter, between Via Maqueda and the Carini Gate. Here are several great monasteries, massive structures towering above the other buildings of the city, whilst the streets in that quarter form a vast network of narrow and crooked alleys, peculiarly adapted to defence. The possession of these monasteries was one of the first objects of the bands, if it were not indeed true, as the enemies of the monks and nuns assert, that some of them were already in armed occupation overnight. Four of them especially, the Madonna degli Stigmati, close to Porta Maqueda, San Vito, San Giuliano, and the Spirito Santo, formed a sort of rebel Quadrilateral, from which it would have been hard work to dislodge an insurrection better based than this.

The bands as they entered carried red flags, some of which bore Viva la Repubblica, and some in addition, it is said, a figure of Santa Rosalia, the local diva of Palermo. Some of the men wore red scarves and red nightcaps, and they scattered copies of a proclamation on red paper, containing vague and bombastical denunciations of the monarchy.

There were a few of the National Guard at the head-quarters, and a post of the corps at Sta. Anna, near the British consulate. The commandant now ordered the generale (for the assembly of the whole corps) to be beaten from those two points, but very few indeed answered the summons. Along with those few and a small body of miscellaneous armed police, a handful of spirited citizens had by daylight gathered round Marquis Rudini and Camozzi at the Town-hall.

The rebels had meanwhile mastered several detached stations of carabineers and police in different quarters of the city, appropriating the weapons and burning all the documents found in them, and had plundered a large store of second-hand arms in the Via Lattarini.* They speedily appeared at the Town-hall, and commenced a desultory attack upon it, overpowering the small guard at the Post-office, and taking possession of that building. A spirited return to their fire was made from the Town-hall, and for a time the attempt on it was given up.

The Prefect Torelli now joined the defenders, and after pro

This name is one of the Saracenic memorials of Palermo, being a corruption of Al-'Atári-the Druggists.

curing half a company of soldiers from the Royal Palace, it was decided to make a sally through the town, with the view of intimidating the insurgents, encouraging the alarmed citizens, and giving the National Guardsmen a new chance of joining their colours, which by this time in many parts of the town would have been scarcely practicable for single individuals in uniform. The Sindaco and Prefect led the party, and they patrolled a considerable part of the city, dispersing small parties of the rebels, and making some prisoners. On approaching the great convent of the Stigmati, however,—a building some ninety feet high, crowned, like many other Palermitan nunneries, by a projecting latticed balcony running round under the cornice,they were received with a heavy discharge of musketry from this kind of machicoulis, which, though it did no great damage, seems to have been too much for the young soldiers who formed the bulk of the patrol, and the party had to retire. As they did so, passing along a part of the Toledo, the Italian flag was exhibited at every house, and the balconies were crowded with applauding citizens and their families. Not a man, however, was added to the nucleus of the National Guard! Again the poor Prefect might have quoted the words of the prophet:- The mighty men of Babylon have forborne to fight; they have remained in their holds; their might hath failed; they are become as women !'

Though we think the circumstances here mentioned are fatal to the character of the National Guard of Palermo, there is a good deal to be said in defence of the body of the citizens who have been so heavily blamed. We will quote from the 'Anarchia di Palermo,' &c. :

'Let the facts at least be fairly considered. The Staff of the National Guard had again and again pressed on the Prefect and the Questor the urgent need for calling out the whole body to the defence of the city; but those authorities refused to permit the slumbers of peaceful citizens to be disturbed. And when the peaceful citizens looked out of their windows in the morning it was too late, the city was already in the hands of the invading bands. . . . .

It is really hard to say what could then have been done except what most did, i. e. nothing, except to provide as each best could for the wants of his family. Like all the military posts, private houses generally were destitute of provisions for those days of difficulty: had these days been a little prolonged, most would have starved..... These were not the circumstances under which measures of defence could be taken. Effective defence had become impossible; and a partial defence confined to the more resolute of the citizens would only have aggravated the resentment of the rebels, already excited by the manifest refusal of the citizens as a body to join in their miserable movement.

'No doubt it is a fact that some of the National Guard took part in the outbreak. The reform of that body had long been called for, but it had never been seriously taken in hand. Yet even the National Guard of Palermo, properly handled, had only some sixteen months before done good service in saving the city from a danger perhaps as great as that which we have just witnessed. In the summer of 1865 one Di Badia had put himself at the head of a number of malcontents, much as others did in September, 1866, and there was great alarm diffused. Gualterio, the Prefect of the day, took the matter up seriously, and caused a moveable column of the National Guard to be formed under a competent leader. The result was entirely satisfactory; the movement was extinguished, and Badia captured with other ringleaders.'

Still the momentary effect of the sortie was good, and if the military authorities had followed it up by the rapid movement of a column of 500 or 600 men, we believe they might then, or even a few hours later, have nipped the outbreak. They had probably no confidence in their men; but the detached and desultory attempts at action which alone were made were not calculated to give raw soldiers confidence in themselves.

The National Guard of Palermo had never, as a body, been in any tolerable state of organisation or discipline; and, except in the case of the officers and handful of men belonging to it, who accompanied the Sindaco and Prefect on their expedition through the streets, and aided afterwards in the defence of the Town-hall, the National Guard uniform never appeared again till the royal troops were in full possession on the following Saturday. The Commandant and those officers who had done their duty then showed their feeling of the conduct of their brethren, by resigning their commissions, a step which the King's Commissioner immediately followed up by disbanding the corps.

After the return of the sortie it was decided to transfer the municipal head-quarters to the Royal Palace, leaving the Townhall in charge of Camozzi with a company of the line and a small force of National Guards, civil troops of sorts, and a few resolute gentlemen of the city. The Generals in command at Palermo did not show any capacity to deal with such a crisis; and in nothing, we venture to think, was this more clear than in the indifference with which they seem to have regarded the tenure of the Town-hall and the Quattro Cantoni. The position presented considerable facilities for conversion into a strong post, and its importance was immense. Barricading, however, seemed to be regarded as a revolutionary characteristic, and was left, at least till it was too late, to the enemy. That the rebels throughout Sunday were not in any overpowering force, and had by no means thorough command of the town, is shown by the fact that about four in the afternoon a detachment from the Palace was able to relieve an officer of police, who with a small party had maintained his ground till then at the chief police-station, not far from the Quattro Cantoni. On being relieved the party not only took with them carts carrying several hundred muskets and a quantity of ammunition, but also conveyed to the Palace all the prisoners in charge, thirty-three in number. About noon on Sunday, a traveller visiting the Quattro Cantoni from the side of Porta Felice found it occupied by a small party of soldiers engaged in exchanging occasional shots with the rebels, who were posted in the Maqueda. The Toledo itself, usually almost as full of life as its namesake at Naples, was absolutely

bare

bare and deserted from end to end. In other parts of the town the insurgents were seen in frequent squads or straggling parties, moving this way and that in a desultory manner, but nowhere visible in great numbers. To the north a skirmish was witnessed outside the Porta Maqueda, the end of a sharp affair in which a party of soldiers and carabineers had attacked the rebels posted in a terraced garden, called the Villa Filippina, but had to retire with a loss of fifteen killed and wounded.

On Sunday night the tumult grew. Firing from various parts of the city was almost incessant, and from the rendezvous of the rebels at the extramural convent of S. Francesco di Paola, as well as from the churches within the adjoining walls, they kept up a hideous shouting, blowing of horns, and jangling of bells. This ringing of the tocsin, or stormo as they call it, the quick irregular bing-bing-bing-bang, on the bells of a dozen churches at once, and accompanied by constant and prolonged yells, was the most detestable of all the revolutionary noises in that noisy week. Nothing seemed so to realise hell broke loose; it always made the English hearer think of the Big Drum of Diabolus in John Bunyan.

On Monday morning (17th) a steamer arrived from Messina with a battalion of 400 men, but these also conscripts. Instead of reinforcing the gaol, which was now an object of persistent attack, they were marched to the Palace (strange to say without opposition), and so ceased to be of any moment in the suppression of the revolt.

In the suburb of St. Oliva, north of the Maqueda Gate, there is an establishment called the Istituto Militare Garibaldi, from its having been founded by that hero during his Dictatorship in Sicily, and since maintained by the Italian Government as a school for youths aspiring to the non-commissioned ranks. During the fight the day before, the staff of the Institution had sallied with some of the elder boys to cover the retreat of the soldiers. This had given dire offence to the insurgents, and on Monday forenoon they came in great numbers to attack the building. These assailants were generally ill-looking fellows in corduroy and velveteen, some of them mere boys, with a mixture of city loafers in shooting-jackets and wide-awakes, and one or two apparent leaders of better appearance. A great mass of those who now joined the movement were the same who had risen in 1860 in support of Garibaldi; but it would seem only on the principle that Government in general was a fair target, and Revolution in the abstract a lark that every good fellow was bound to take part in. There was no attempt now to associate Garibaldi's honoured name with the movement. From the enraged crowd

that