n and extraordinary
than their upward progress, have cast down the majority from their high
estate. The transitions have been rapid, from the palace to the prison,
from the sway of kingdoms to the sufferings of emigration, from the
command of mighty armies to the weariness and obscurity of a forced
inactivity. Fortunes built up in a year, have been knocked down in a
month; again reconstructed, they have been yet more rapidly destroyed.
Such changes have been as numerous, often as strikingly contrasted, as
the shifting visions of a magic lantern, or the fitful corruscations of
a firework. Within a short half century, how often has the regal purple
been bartered for the fugitive's disguise, the dictator's robe for a
prison garb, the fortunate soldier's baton of command for the pilgrim's
staff and the bitter bread of exile. Notable instances of such
disastrous fluctuations are to be found in the memoirs of the Neapolitan
general Guglielmo Pepe.

One of the youngest of a family of two-and-twenty children, born of
wealthy and highly descended parents, young Pepe was placed, before he
was seven years old, in the royal college of Catanzaro. There, his
father, anxious that his education should be complete and excellent,
intended him to remain until the age of eighteen. The peculiar
disposition of the boy proved a grave obstacle to the accomplishment of
the paternal wish. Nature had destined him for a military career, and
his tendency to a soldier's life was early manifest. To the studies that
would have qualified him for a learned profession, he showed an
insurmountable aversion; Latin he detested; on the other hand,
geography, history, and mathematics, were cultivated by him with a zeal
and eagerness that astonished his professors. He had just attained his
fourteenth year, when two of his brothers, but a little older than
himself, left the military college at Naples, and received commissions
in the army. This redoubled the military ardour of their junior, who had
already caught the warlike feeling with which the Neapolitan government
strove at that time to inspire the nation. He urged his father to
purchase him a commission; his father refused, and the wilful boy
absconded from college. Brought back again, he a second time escaped,
and enlisted in a regiment of riflemen. Again he was captured, and the
poor Sergeant who had accepted the juvenile recruit, was thrown into
prison for enticing away a pupil of the royal college. But