BEPPO, THE CONSCRIPT.
BY T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE.
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.
Once upon a time the narrow strip of territory shut in between the Apennine and the Adriatic to the south of Bologna and to the north of Ancona, was, as Byron has written of Venice,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.
That small district, so niggardly squeezed in between the encroaching mountains and the sea, was once one of the high places not only of Italian but of European civilisation. It was there that the brilliant dynasties of Rovere and Montefeltro held courts at Pesaro, at Urbino, or a little further inland among the hills, at Gubbio, who gathered around them all that was most distinguished in poesy, in scholarship, in art, and in chivalry. It was there that Tasso wandered among the green valleys and by streams made classical for the second time in their existence, by his genius—wandered now a brilliant courtier, and now an outcast mendicant, as the breeze of court favour, or more surely his own love-sick fancies and morbid imagination impelled him. There flows from its ice-cold cradle in the higher Apennine to its glowing death-bed in the genial Adriatic, that storied Metauro, whose second golden age, thanks to the imperishable names and memories attached to the halcyon days of the Ducal House of Urbino, has well-nigh eclipsed the glories of its first. There, mostly on the sea-board of the Adriatic, are a constellation of cities, once the chosen abode of the arts, of prosperity, and civilised culture in every kind; the rescued fragments of whose wealth have furnished forth the museums of every country in Europe, and the story of whose prime is one with that of the morning-tide vigour of every liberal art.
It is a different region now! And a very different spectacle, and other ideas and associations are impressed on the mind of a wanderer among those Adriatic cities! The Church stretched over them its leaden hand, and numbed them! Priestly power came, and literature ceased; education was no more; commerce pined and died; wealth made itself wings and flew away; all energy departed from them; the national character became deteriorated; the cities decayed; palaces fell to ruin; even churches were defaced and their beauty destroyed by the base greed and tasteless criticism of a clergy, whose scope was to use religion as a begging impostor’s swindle. Ever increasing poverty, and the spreading canker of mendicity invaded fields and cities. Lazy squalor, brutifying superstition, and the degrading and unmanly vices fostered by the morality of the confessional, marked the fallen region as their own!
It was not to be wondered at that a population which had stagnated and languished under priestly government, while the rest of the world had been more or less rapidly and umnistakeably progressing and improving itself, and which had long been hopelessly and fruitlessly beating its maimed and broken wings against the bars of its prison-house, should have seized with boundless enthusiasm the first really promising chance of escape! Nobody was, and only few pretended to be, surprised, when the all but entire population of Romagna rose to welcome their deliverers from the worse than Egyptian bondage under which they had been suffering, and to assist in the not very arduous effort needed for driving their oppressors from the country.
But neither should it have been surprising, though many more persons were surprised at it, that a population, which had grown up under such circumstances, moral and political, should have shown itself, as soon as the first enthusiastic impulse, by which it had achieved its deliverance, was spent, little fitted for the duties and discipline of well-policied political and social life, and above all indisposed for further regularised efforts and sacrifices, the necessity for which was not apparent to them, or at all events did not recommend itself to them as requisite for their own escape from present suffering. There was nothing, I say, in this that might not have been anticipated. As usual, the emancipated slaves thought that every kind of prosperity, happiness, and well-being was to be the immediate result of their emancipation;—that no further self-sacrifice was needed;—that a millennium of universal cakes and ale had arrived;—and all troubles, at all events all troubles connected with the governing of the country, had been got rid of for ever.
Of course the disappointment that awaited on the waking from this dream was great. Of course a certain measure of discontent with the new order of things supervened. Of course this was increased to the utmost, and in every way made the most of by those whose interests or prejudices placed them among the “laudatores temporis acti.” The class which might be so designated in the Romagna was a very small one. But it was one that wielded a special and peculiar power; for it embraced the very great majority of the clergy. The clerical government, and its myrmidons, whether lay or clerical, might be driven out. But it was impossible to drive out all the clergy in the country. It was impossible to deprive parishes of their parish priests. The deposed government thus left behind it a special and very effective army, vowed unalterably to its interests. And this army was composed of a class of men to whose consciences all means were lawful for the destruction, if possible—for the embarrassment, if more than that were not possible, of the new rulers. And it is difficult to exaggerate the power which