"CHILD] HAROLD" AND THE CARBON/MI.
CHARLES DICKENS, travelling in the North of Italy kJ twenty years after the poet's death, was amused at a Bolognese waiter's incessant references to " Lor Beeron " ; lett the Italians are very faithful to their friends, and the cult of "Childe Harold" has never ceased in the country of which he wrote in his journal :- "Supposing that Italy could be liberated. , It is a grand object—the very poetry of polities. Only think—a free Italy... Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of August :t: I reckon the times of Caesar (Julius) free; because the commeticeii left everybody a aide to take, and the parties were pretty equal the set out, but afterwards it was all praetorian and legit-may?. business."
On his fatal voyage to Greece, as they passed the island of Loma, converted into a dungeon by the Neapolitan Govern- ment, Trelawny urged him to write a poem on the subjeet. He replied : " Here kings and governors are only the hangunn and jailers of the detestable Austrian barbarians." And later "Give me time—I can't forget the theme : but for this Greek business I should have been at Naples writing a fifth canto of Childe Harold, expressly to give vent to my detestation of ti,; Austrian tyranny in Italy." But the sands of his life were running out fast then: time was not given him.
The biographers who dwell on the Venetian nights' enter- tainment do the poet less than justice. Ho was probably never as black as he liked to paint himself in his letters, for it was the fashion of the set to which he had belonged in England to boast of their superfluity of naughtiness, and Byron, besides, had a spirit of mischief that delighted in shocking the unco' guid. His connexion with the Countess Guiooioli involved him in politics, for her father—under whose roof she lived after leaving her husband—and her brother, Count Gamba, were both members of the famous secret society of the Carbonari, and Byron, who bad many light loves, but whose lifelong mistress was Liberty, was soon with them heart and soul.
During his stay in Ravenna in 1820 and 1821 his fellow- conspirators made a practice of storing their guns and ammunition in the lower rooms of his palace, and it is probable that at times both his life and his freedom were in greater jeopardy than he himself realized. Some of the men he knew—Italians—were arrested and condemned to death, or, worse still, to long periods of imprisonment in the dark and noisome cells of the Austrian fortresses. The authorities were afraid to lay hands on an Englishman with a world-wide reputation, but they would not have been sorry to get rid of him quietly, and it is quite possible that the crew of the felucca that ran down Shelley's boat off the Gulf of Spezia in the following year, in the belief that Byron was on board, had been bribed with Austrian gold.
Shelley and his friend Williams were drowned on July 8th, 1822. The Gambs, family had been exiled from the Romagna in the previous autumn. They had thought of going to Geneva, that Mecca of political refugees, but Byron, who accompanied them, had the casting vote, and he decided on Pisa. Hero they lived happily enough for some months, and apparently without giving much trouble to the Grand Ducal police. But the tragedy of his friend's death awoke the old unhappy restlessness in Byron. Writing to Thomas Moore, he said: "I had, and still have, thoughts of South America, but am fluctuating between it and Greece." There can be little doubt that his adventurous spirit had enjoyed the excite- ment of the past few years, the plots and counterplots, the business of the concealed weapons, even the anonymous letters threatening him with assassination on one of his long rides through the pine-woods about Ravenna ; but the leading Carbonari bad been imprisoned, and everything seemed quiet again. He began to despair of seeing Italy free, and the project of going to Greece attracted him more and more. In July, 1828, a year after the passing of the friend he had nicknamed the Snake, and of whom he had written in a mood of generous anger to Murray, his publisher : "You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison," be left the shores of Italy for ever. On April 19th in the following spring he died of fever at Missolonghi.
The Countess Guiccioli's young brother Gamba was with him to the end. He had gone to fight for freedom, and he died without striking a blow, but not ignobly. There were many, then and afterwards, who deplored the influence of the Countess Guiccioli and her connexions on the poet. They were mistaken. His interest in the Carbonari and their aims had served to rouse him from the state of sloth and sensuality into which he had lapsed during the first years of his stay in Italy. Nor did his work suffer, for during the two years he `spent at Ravenna be wrote the fifth canto of "Don Juan," "Cain," "Marino Fallen)," " Sardanapalus," " The Two Poscari," " Heaven and Earth," " The Vision of Judgment," and " The Blues." The Rome he mourned as " the Niobe of nations" has long since been made a joyful mother of children, the bronze horses of St. Mark are no longer bridled, but Italy has not yet paid off her old score in full. One can imagine the eagerness with which the man who wrote- " The Suabian sued, and now the Austrian reigns— An Emperor tramples where an Emperor knelt Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces, and chains
Clank over sceptred cities "-
would follow the fortunes of the Italian armies in the year
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