exile, having no allies but
his brain and his pen, who set himself, certain of success, to
dissolve that mighty array of power and pomp. All his life Charles
Albert was a Faust for the possession of whose soul two irreconcilable
forces contended; the struggle was never more dramatically represented
than at this moment in the person of these two champions.

Mazzini's letter to Charles Albert, which was read by the King, and
widely, though secretly, circulated in Piedmont, began by telling him
that his fellow-countrymen were ready to believe his line of conduct
in 1821 to have been forced on him by circumstances, and that there
was not a heart in Italy that did not quicken at his accession, nor an
eye in Europe that was not turned to watch his first steps in the
career that now unfolded before him. Then he went on to show, with the
logical strength in developing an argument which, joined to a novel
and eloquent style, caused his writings to attract notice from the
first, that the King could take no middle course. He would be one of
the first of men, or the last of Italian tyrants; let him choose. Had
he never looked upon Italy, radiant with the smile of nature, crowned
with twenty centuries of sublime memories, the mother of genius,
possessing infinite means, to which only union was lacking, girt round
with such defences that a strong will and a few courageous breasts
would suffice to defend her? Had it never struck him that she was
created for a glorious destiny? Did he not contemplate her people,
splendid still, in spite of the shadow of servitude, the vigour of
whose intellect, the energy of whose passions, even when turned to
evil, showed that the making of a nation was there? Did not the
thought come to him: 'Draw a world out of these dispersed elements
like a god from chaos; unite into one whole the scattered members, and
pronounce the words, "It is mine, and it is happy"?'

Mazzini in 1831 was twenty-six years of age. His father was a Genoese
physician, his mother a native of Chiavari. She was a superior woman,
and devoted more than a mother's care to the excitable and delicate
child, who seemed to her (mothers have sometimes the gift of prophecy)
to be meant for an uncommon lot. One of the few personal reminiscences
that Mazzini left recorded, relates to the time and manner in which
the idea first came to him of the possibility of Italians doing
something for their country. He was walking with his mother in the