n Genoa, his native city.
His mother is still living, an excellent and dignified lady, as proud of
her Giuseppe, as Madame Letitia was of her Napoleon.

When young, Mazzini was remarkably handsome, and will be deemed so now in
his mature years, by all who, in the expression of his countenance, his
dark intelligent eye, and expansive intellectual forehead, can overlook
the deep, we may say premature furrows, traced in that forehead by the
never resting labors of a mind of indomitable activity, the constantly
renewing anxieties of a generous heart for the welfare of the human race;
and above all for that oppressed portion of it which claimed his earliest
sympathies, as his compatriots, his brothers, alike in the wrongs they
labored under, and their determined resolution to combat with them in
every shape, and to win in the contest, either a glorious victory, or an
honorable death. The youth of Mazzini was spent in witnessing the
struggles of his country for liberty. The fruitlessness of all these
struggles, the conviction they carried with them in their repeated
defeats, that there was something radically wrong in their organization,
or in the manner in which they were carried out, only excited ardent
desires in him to trace the evil to its root, and point out the remedy
accordingly: his genius naturally bent toward studies,

"High passions and high actions best describing,"

concentrated all its energies upon the situation of Italy, and on the
means of rescuing her from the despotism that preyed upon her very vitals,
and rendered even the choicest gifts of nature, with which she is so
abundantly endowed, not merely nugatory, but an absolute disadvantage and
a curse.

The revolution in France of July, 1830, communicated an electric flame
throughout Italy, which in the ensuing year kindled insurrections in
Modena, Parma, and other departments: the light of victory hovered over
them for a moment, but for a moment only. Aid had been hoped for from the
Citizen King, but in his very outset Louis Philippe evinced the political
caution which marked his reign. Austria, reassured by the conviction she
felt of his determination to remain neuter in the struggles of others for
the same freedom which had placed himself upon a throne, again advanced
upon the cities she had evacuated; the insurgents disappointed,
bewildered, paralyzed, offered no further resistance, and again all was
wrapped in the gloom of despotism. Then ca