ere braving it out against their consciences. Very
likely they had no conscience about it; they had come there over the
dead body of the Roman Republic at the will of their rascal president,
and they were staying there by the will of their rascal emperor, to keep
on his throne the pope from whom the Italians had hoped for unity and
liberty. No one is very much to blame for anything, I suppose, and very
likely Pius IX. had not voluntarily disappointed his countrymen, who may
have expected too much. But then the French had been there fifteen
years, and were to be there another fifteen years yet. Now they are
gone, with the archbishop's red coach, and the complaisant grocer, and
the young man of twenty-seven in Via del Gambero, and the rest of the
things that the sun looked on and will look on the like of again, no
doubt, in our monotonous round of him.

To-day, instead of the red legs of the French soldiers, you see the blue
legs of the Italian soldiers, and instead of the fierce faces of their
officers, the serious, intelligent, mostly spectacled faces of the
Italian officers, in sweeping cloaks of tender blue verging on lavender.
They are soldierly men none the less for their gentler aspect, and
perhaps something the more; and a better thing yet is that there are
comparatively few of them. There are few of the privates also, far fewer
than the priests and the students of the ecclesiastical schools, who
dress like priests and go dashing through the streets in files and
troops.

I have an impression that one sees about the proportion of Italian
soldiers in Rome that one sees of American soldiers in Washington, or,
at least, not many more. The barracks are apparently outside the walls;
there you meet cavalry going and coming, and detachments of
_bersaglieri;_ or riflemen, pushing on at their quick trot, or plainer
infantry trudging wearily. Certainly, in a capital where the Church
holds itself prisoner, there is no show of force on the part of its
captors; and this is pleasant to the friend of man and the lover of
Italy for other reasons. In the absence of the military you can imagine
that not only does the state not wish to boast its political supremacy
in the ancient capital of the Church, but it does not desire to show the
potentiality of holding its own against the republic which is instinct
there. The monarchy is the consensus of all the differing wills in
Italy, which naturally would not for the most part have chose