e body that set
about applying this new strange rule sanctioned by the general Father;
they said to themselves, We do not by the law of veracity belong to
Naples and these Neapolitan Officials; we will, by favor of Heaven and
the Pope, be free of these. Fighting ensued; insurrection, fiercely
maintained in the Sicilian Cities; with much bloodshed, much tumult and
loud noise, vociferation extending through all newspapers and countries.
The effect of this, carried abroad by newspapers and rumor, was great
in all places; greatest perhaps in Paris, which for sixty years past has
been the City of Insurrections. The French People had plumed themselves
on being, whatever else they were not, at least the chosen "soldiers of
liberty," who took the lead of all creatures in that pursuit, at least;
and had become, as their orators, editors and litterateurs diligently
taught them, a People whose bayonets were sacred, a kind of Messiah
People, saving a blind world in its own despite, and earning for
themselves a terrestrial and even celestial glory very considerable
indeed. And here were the wretched down-trodden populations of Sicily
risen to rival them, and threatening to take the trade out of their
hand.

No doubt of it, this hearing continually of the very Pope's glory as
a Reformer, of the very Sicilians fighting divinely for liberty
behind barricades,--must have bitterly aggravated the feeling of every
Frenchman, as he looked around him, at home, on a Louis-Philippism
which had become the scorn of all the world. "_Ichabod_; is the glory
departing from us? Under the sun is nothing baser, by all accounts and
evidences, than the system of repression and corruption, of shameless
dishonesty and unbelief in anything but human baseness, that we now live
under. The Italians, the very Pope, have become apostles of liberty, and
France is--what is France!"--We know what France suddenly became in the
end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy, we can trace a
considerable share in that event to the good simple Pope with the New
Testament in his hand. An outbreak, or at least a radical change and
even inversion of affairs hardly to be achieved without an outbreak,
everybody felt was inevitable in France: but it had been universally
expected that France would as usual take the initiative in that matter;
and had there been no reforming Pope, no insurrectionary Sicily, France
had certainly not broken out then and so, but only afterwa