e vivid hatred of the Austrians among the
peasants.

After easily gaining possession of the left (Venetian) bank of the
Mincio, Charles Albert employed himself in losing time over chimerical
operations with a view to taking the fortresses of Peschiera and
Mantua, now strongly garrisoned, and impregnable while their
provisions lasted. This object governed the conduct of the campaign,
and caused the waste of precious months during every day of which
General Nugent, with his 30,000 men, was approaching one step nearer
from the mountains of Friuli, and General Welden, with his 10,000,
down the passes of Tyrol. If, instead of playing at sieges, Charles
Albert had cut off these reinforcements, Radetsky would have been
rendered powerless, and the campaign would have had another
termination. Never was there a war in which the adoption of Napoleon's
system of crushing his opponents one by one, when he could not
outnumber them if united, was more clearly indicated.

General Durando crossed the Po on the 21st of April with 17,000 men,
partly Pontifical troops and partly volunteers, to which weak corps
fell the task of opposing Nugent's advance in Venetia. The colours of
the Pontifical troops were solemnly blessed before they left Rome, but
as the order was only given to go to the frontier, and nothing was
said, though everything was understood, about crossing it, the Pope
was technically able to assert that the war was none of his making.
His ministry ventured to suggest to him that the situation was
peculiar. Now it was that Catholic Austria and Russia, herself
schismatic, flourished in the face of the Pope the portentous scare of
a new schism. It is said that the Pope's confessor, a firm Liberal,
died just at this time, not without suspicion of poison. Thoroughly
alarmed in his spiritual capacity, the Pope issued his Encyclical
Letter of the 29th of April--when his ministers and the whole country
still hoped from day to day that he would formally declare war--in
which he protested that his sacred office obliged him to embrace all
nations in an equal paternal love. If his subjects, he added, followed
the example of the other Italians, he could not help it: a
half-hearted admission which could not mitigate the indignation which
the document called forth. With regard to Durando's corps, the Pope
did what was the best thing under the altered circumstances; he sent
L.C. Farini as envoy to the King of Sardinia, with the request that