No. VII. Pesaro AND HIS COMPANIONS. Delicacies to be observed
in the subscrip- tion for thorn—Different climates and comforts of Naples and England—Pro- bable enjoyments of the exiles in England—Their steerings during imprison- ment.
From oldest times to latest, and in all quarters of the world, interest- ing stories, true as well as fabulous, have commenced with the unex- pected appearance of ships on a coast ; but few such incidents could have been more welcome to the general reader than the landing of the Nea- politan exiles at Cork. The esteemed character of the men and their cause, the ten years' ungrateful and brutal treatment they have expe- rienced at the hands of their tyrant, himself now a sufferer, perhaps mortally, their happy evasion of his last orders at sea, the enfeebled bodies of some of them, the poverty of their habiliments which they yet endeavoured to conceal, their intelligent Southern looks, the enthusiasm with which some of them kissed the ground on which they landed, the warm reception given them, and the glad and grateful acknowledgments of them all, might have furnished a good exordium for any story-toilet in prose or verse.
The purse-strings of this great, commercial, but not less free and hos- pitable kingdom, have been opened immediately for these noble and im- poverished gentlemen. Their holders are only considering in what man- ner the good object can beat be effected : all classes will claim the honour of joining in its furtherance ; and the only thing needed is to take care that in the haste of some of us to be foremost (a very good haste) we do nothing to jar against feelings, towards which we all feel tender. No generous men, such as these exiles must be, who have endured so much for the sake of public spirit, can object, in such extreme need as theirs, to the exercise of real generosity towards themselves; but it must be shown to be as real as it is, by the manner in which it is exercised, and their feelings thus be enabled to be as thoroughly grateful. It was well observed the other day, by a morning paper, that any portion
of the contributed money which may be raised by public amusements should not be stated as having been so raised, because it would lessen
the impression of public disinterestedness. And it may be added, that small sums should always be sent in lists with others ; or, at all events, not with any parade of giving, such as direct putting into the hands of the sufferers. The other day, a deputation of at least half a dozen persons waited upon Poerio himself, to present him a letter from a warm admirer, who appears to be a gentleman of landed property, and the warmth of whose admiration and whose purse was expressed by a donation, duly exhibited, of ten pounds. Ten pounds may be a princely or a paltry gift, in proportion to the means of the giver; and for the sake of the gentleman in question we shall think the best we can of it in the present instance ; for circumstances may have unduly represented him : otherwise it would look as if the mountain in the fable had come to the exiles to do them the honour of lying-in at their lodgings, and had made them a present of the mouse.
Our reception of the exiles may well be as warm in every respect as we can make it, considering the climate they have come to. No Sicily will they have found in Ireland, and no Naples in London; no cloudless skies ; no power to live out of doors night as well as day ; no absence of ice and snow, except as luxuries ; no flasks of wine for pennies ; no fruit and vegetables (so to speak) for nothing. A late Neapolitan envoy (Prince Castelcicala) is said to have observed, that he had "never met with any ripe fruit in England, except the roasted apples." If our visitors favour us with their company long enough, our hot-houses, and even common fruiterers' shops, will tell them a different story. But it must be allowed, that the purses must be warm to procure them. Very bad apples the Prince may have met with. We hope he did; and that his appointments from -his Bourbon employer did not allow him to pur- chase better. We ourselves have eaten very bad fruit in Italy, peaches in particular ; but excellent were to be had. All the fruits, however, in England, native or exotic, and all the other luxuries in it procurable from all parts of the world, will not give our visitors the climate of their p.m.e, or any other of its =exportable sweets. " Home is home, how- ver homely," says the good proverb ; and to a native Neapolitan, Naples must be Naples, however Bourbonized. Every spot in their recollection will become doubly dear to them in their inability to return to it. " Out of prison" there will be a very different thing from "out of prison" here. We must not cease to pity them as exiles, and to share their indignation as victims of tyranny, surround them with what comforts we may. To say that " every country is the country of an honest man " is a very fine saying, and good for the honest man to repeat. But the honest Neapoli- tan exile will still sigh for his Bay of Naples, and the honest Englishman for his St. James's or his Richmond; aye, or for his Tottenham Court Road.
On the other hand, moments, not only of comfort and of' joy, but of posi- tive transport, must not seldom be experienced for some time by these expatriated worthies. The kisses which they gave the Green Island, are not the only kisses which they will be inclined to give, or on grounds less proper. They probably felt inclined to kiss the prow of the vessel they came in, when they found it turned towards England, and the long, shaking voyage saved them. The beds they sleep in must give them transport, if only for being not in those vessels, and not shaking them at all. Their rooms, like the beds, must be transports, or rather the se- dated of pleasures, for not occasionally tumbling their dinners across the table, and themselves over one another. A thousandfold must the plea- sure be increased, when they reflect that no agent of a tyrant can come to take them away. Every morning our eloquent and free .spoken news- papers must astonish and enchant them. To see the Times with its every possible kind of advertisements, its tailings of ships to and from all quarters of the world, its importance in the eyes of Members of Parlia- ment, its attention to everything that takes place in the community, great and small, among rich and poor, its free remarks on statesmen of all parties, its own statesman-like views when it writes its best, and the influence which it unquestionably possesses in the affairs of Europe it- self, as the chief press-representative of British opinion, must seem to them like holding the world in their hands in that strange un-Italian shape, and enabling them to judge it as calmly as if they were sitting in some free region of space, looking down on it all. Then, at breakfast, or before it, as good coffee is to be had, as anywhere perhaps out of Tur- key; and if we have no fresh figs, we have excellent bread, ham, fowls, &a. If at dinner our macaroni is not perfect, not Neapolitan, it is next best, 4' neat as imported." Their own music and singers are to be had at operas. They can go there, or elsewhere, as they please ;—in and out of doors, as if there were no prisons in the world. If the thought of their
old, long, and detestable prison is sometimes painfully present to them, it will, at the next moment, and oftener, be beautifully felt to be absent ; and i4 when they go to bed, it is not to their own home-bed, the only beat bed in the world, yet an Englishman may be allowed 0 observe, that at all events there will be no chance of scorpions in it ; things that bed-makers at Naples sometimes find it convenient to cut in two. Also, no earth- quakes. Also, no eruptions of 'Vesuvius ;—" mue.h worse tonight, Sir, and a bigger portion of the mountain has fallen in." Item, no chance, therefore, of being suffocated with showers of black ashes, as the people were at Herculaneum and Pompeii :—a possibility which, during those sickly states of mind and body that will sometimes occur to the most heroical patriots, may be supposed to be not equal in imaginative comfort to the conciou.sness of being tucked up safely and snugly in a warm bed in. a cold level country.
In short, England was the place which these excellent persons wished to come to ; and here they are, welcomed and honoured. England was the country, which, through the accomplished pen of Mr. Gladstone, first made the world acquainted with their wrongs : the greatest and beet pub- lic men in England, men of world-famous names, will be their visitors : English sympathy will have asked, and obtained, their leave to prove the right which such a country possesses to recruit their resources ; and upon the whole, to all such of them as have not had their constitutions too much shaken to enjoy any pleasure to the full, England, we doubt not, in spite of its climate, and as long as they can stay, will be full of plea- surable consolation to men who have had so much life and spirit given them by nature, and who must know themselves to be so deserving. Greatly have they needed it, and for how many years ! We must not lose sight of that consideration ; for it is hardly possible, without having had some taste of it in our own persons, to do it justice. It has strangely been supposed, and this too by persons not otherwise =reflect- ing, that men of public spirit are not likely to be men of equally private spirit ; not domestic men ; not men given to considerations for their families, or likely to feel with severity any renouncement of private habits and domestic enjoyments. On the contrary men of public spirit, truly so called, that is to say men of spirit for the sake and in the in- terest of the public, and not merely noisy or ambitious men, who are but reflectors of themselves, would seem to be, of necessity, the most private and domestic of all men in their sympathies, because it is only out of the greatness of those sympathies they can learn truly to feel, and greatly to act, for what is needed by that vast collected body of private persons, who are called the public. We must not stop, however, to dilate on this point at present, and adduce examples of it. The more plentiful they are, the less in our present limits we can do them justice. To return, therefore, to the point preceding it, we say that it is very difficult without some experience, or a great deal of reflection, to do justice to the miseries which these gentlemen must have undergone during their long imprison- ment;—first, to the horrible shock of the imprisonment itself, when flint consigned to it,—when first taken away from the friends, the favourite habits, and the beloved kindred, to association with which enthusiastic men are most liable to be sensitive :—then to the nature of the imprisonment, its unhealthiness, its squalidness, its constant irritation of the will, its irons on limbs as well as tortures to the mind, and those monstrous linkings of gentlemen with no gentlemen, with galley slaves and ruffians, men on whose de secat ion of every delicacy as well as endurance horrible reckon- ing must have been made :—then to that long and indefinite prospect of the cottinuance of such horrors, which the prisoners must have looked to, knowing, as they did, what had been the fate of the Pellicos and Confalioneris before them, and what was the nature of the Bourbon who was acting under the influence of those Austrian precedents :—then to the weary, lowering, long days and nights which did actually continue; years and years coming round, and no change accruing in the fact of the imprisonment, though we cannot say at this present moment and till we receive further information, how long in particular the dreadful circum- stances we have alluded to were kept up : then, all this while, to the waning of hope, to the wasting of strength and spirits, to the distressing in- tellectual wonders at the nature of things and the dispensations of Provi- dence, to the pains and mortification of physical ailments added to those hypochondrical tendencies of the mind ; to the weak and perhaps hopeless endeavours for a long time to divert or ward them off by exercise or vain endeavours at exercise; the attainment at last, perhaps indeed never the entire loss, yet all but despairing submission, of the philosophy neces- sary to prevent the failure of reason ; and finally, when even the strange day of liberation arrived, the pang, incredible perhaps to the inex-
perienced, but no less certified by history and biography, of absolutely quitting the scenes and sorrows rendered endurable by that beautiful law of nature which will allow of no pain unmitignble or interminable, and endeared by the sympathies and sufferings of companions in ad- versity. Some of these sufferings, though not to be compared with them for a moment, either in regard to the worst of them, or to the duration of any, the writer of this article has known what it is to undergo. He underwent them in consequence of his denouncements of a foolish prince (who angered him with breaking his promises,); and in behalf of what still appears to him to have been a good cause, that of Catholic Emma* pation (though Popery has not behaved itself well after gaining it.) lie does not complain of what he suffered, especially as a very different sovereign, at the recommendation of a very different man, has been graciously pleased to save him from the worst of its consequences. Nor could he have lamented it, had the case been otherwise ; for he is sure that what he did has been of service to more good causes than one,—that of the free speaking of the press in particular. But having been in bad health when he went to prison, his confinement to it even but for two years, and amidst all sorts of the comforts of which an English prison is capable, did mischiefs to his constitution which it has never recovered. It is proper, at the same time to add, that these very mischiefs forced him upon such a life of temperance, as a natural tendency to pleasure would probably have obstructed; and that they have thus been a means of enabling the animal spirits which he inherited from one of his parents, to bring him to old age, notwithstanding the graver and sicklier portion of blood derived (God bless her) from the other. He begs pardon of his readers for speaking of himself at all after the incalculably greater claims on their sympathy, of which he has been writing ; but a comparatively small amount of suffering seemed to enable him to give some kind of measurement to a greater.
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