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Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber

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Title: Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber
        or, The influence of Romanism on trade, justice, and knowledge

Author: J. A. Wylie


        
Release date: March 9, 2009 [eBook #28294]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28294

Credits: E-text prepared by Frank van Drogen, Greg Bergquist, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PILGRIMAGE FROM THE ALPS TO THE TIBER ***


E-text prepared by Frank van Drogen, Greg Bergquist, and the Project
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Transcriber's note:

   The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been
   preserved faithfully. Only obvious typographical errors have
   been corrected.





PILGRIMAGE FROM THE ALPS TO THE TIBER.

Or

The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge.

by

REV. J.A. WYLIE, LL.D.

Author of "The Papacy," &c. &.c.







Edinburgh
Shepherd & Elliot, 15, Princes Street.
London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co.
MDCCCLV.




CONTENTS.


 CHAPTER I.
                                                           PAGE
 THE INTRODUCTION,                                            1

 CHAPTER II.
 THE PASSAGE OF THE ALPS,                                     8

 CHAPTER III.
 RISE AND PROGRESS OF CONSTITUTIONALISM IN PIEDMONT,         23

 CHAPTER IV.
 STRUCTURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE VAUDOIS VALLEYS,       43

 CHAPTER V.
 STATE AND PROSPECTS OF THE VAUDOIS CHURCH,                  62

 CHAPTER VI.
 FROM TURIN TO NOVARA--PLAIN OF LOMBARDY,                    83

 CHAPTER VII.
 FROM NOVARA TO MILAN--DOGANA--CHAIN OF THE ALPS,            94

 CHAPTER VIII.
 CITY AND PEOPLE OF MILAN,                                  105

 CHAPTER IX.
 ARCO DELLA PACE--ST AMBROSE,                               119

 CHAPTER X.
 THE DUOMO OF MILAN,                                        126

 CHAPTER XI.
 MILAN TO BRESCIA--THE REFORMERS,                           137

 CHAPTER XII.
 THE PRESENT THE IMAGE OF THE PAST,                         152

 CHAPTER XIII.
 SCENERY OF LAKE GARDA--PESCHIERA--VERONA,                  158

 CHAPTER XIV.
 FROM VERONA TO VENICE--THE TYROLESE ALPS,                  168

 CHAPTER XV.
 VENICE--DEATH OF NATIONS,                                  178

 CHAPTER XVI.
 PADUA--ST ANTONY--THE PO--ARREST,                          198

 CHAPTER XVII.
 FERRARA--RENEE AND OLYMPIA MORATA,                         209

 CHAPTER XVIII.
 BOLOGNA AND THE APENNINES,                                 216

 CHAPTER XIX.
 FLORENCE AND ITS YOUNG EVANGELISM,                         237

 CHAPTER XX.
 FROM LEGHORN TO ROME--CIVITA VECCHIA,                      262

 CHAPTER XXI.
 MODERN ROME,                                               276

 CHAPTER XXII.
 ANCIENT ROME--THE SEVEN HILLS,                             289

 CHAPTER XXIII.
 SIGHTS IN ROME--CATACOMBS--PILATE'S STAIRS--PIO NONO, &C., 302

 CHAPTER XXIV.
 INFLUENCE OF ROMANISM ON TRADE,                            333

 CHAPTER XXV.
 INFLUENCE OF ROMANISM ON TRADE--(CONTINUED),               352

 CHAPTER XXVI.
 JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE PAPAL STATES,                   366

 CHAPTER XXVII.
 EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE PAPAL STATES,               401

 CHAPTER XXVIII.
 MENTAL STATE OF THE PRIESTHOOD IN ITALY,                   415

 CHAPTER XXIX.
 SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC CUSTOMS OF THE ROMANS,                 430

 CHAPTER XXX.
 THE ARGUMENT FROM THE WHOLE, OR, ROME HER OWN WITNESS,     447




ROME,

AND

THE WORKINGS OF ROMANISM

IN ITALY.




CHAPTER I.

THE INTRODUCTION.


I did not go to Rome to seek for condemnatory matter against the Pope's
government. Had this been my only object, I should not have deemed it
necessary to undertake so long a journey. I could have found materials
on which to construct a charge in but too great abundance nearer home.
The cry of the Papal States had waxed great, and there was no need to go
down into those unhappy regions to satisfy one's self that the
oppression was "altogether according to the cry of it." I had other
objects to serve by my journey.

There is one other country which has still more deeply influenced the
condition of the race, and towards which one is even more powerfully
drawn, namely, Judea. But Italy is entitled to the next place, as
respects the desire which one must naturally feel to visit it, and the
instruction one may expect to reap from so doing. Some of the greatest
minds which the pagan world has produced have appeared in Italy. In that
land those events were accomplished which have given to modern history
its form and colour; and those ideas elaborated, the impress of which
may still be traced upon the opinions, the institutions, and the creeds
of Europe. In Italy, too, empire has left her ineffaceable traces, and
art her glorious footsteps. There is, all will admit, a peculiar and
exquisite pleasure in visiting such spots: nor is there pleasure only,
but profit also. One's taste may be corrected, and his judgment
strengthened, by seeing the masterpieces of ancient genius. New trains
of thought may be suggested, and new sources of information opened, by
the sight of men and of manners wholly new. But more than this,--I
believed that there were lessons to be learned there, which it was
emphatically worth one's while going there to learn, touching the
working of that politico-religious system of which Italy has so long
been the seat and centre. I had previously been at some little pains to
make myself acquainted with this system in its principles, and wished to
have an opportunity of studying it in its effects upon the government of
the country, and the condition of the people, as respects their trade,
industry, knowledge, liberty, religion, and general happiness. All I
shall say in the following pages will have a bearing, more or less
direct, upon this main point.

It is impossible to disjoin the present of these countries from the
past; nor can the solemn and painful enigma which they exhibit be
unriddled but by a reference to the past, and that not the immediate,
but the remote past. There is truth, no doubt, in the saying of the old
moralist, that nations lose in moments what they had acquired in years;
but the remark is applicable rather to the accelerated speed with which
the last stages of a nation's ruin are accomplished, than to the slow
and imperceptible progress which usually marks its commencement. Unless
when cut off by the sudden stroke of war, it requires five centuries at
least to consummate the fall of a great people. One must pass,
therefore, over those hideous abuses which are the immediate harbingers
of national disaster, and which exclusively engross the attention of
ordinary inquirers, and go back to those remote ages, and those minute
and apparently insignificant causes, amid which national declension,
unsuspected often by the nation itself, takes its rise. The destiny of
modern Europe was sealed so long ago as A.D. 606, when the Bishop of
Rome was made head of the universal Church by the edict of a man stained
with the double guilt of usurpation and murder. Religion is the parent
of liberty. The rise of tyrants can be prevented in no other way but by
maintaining the supremacy of God and conscience; and in the early
corruptions of the gospel, the seeds were sown of those frightful
despotisms which have since arisen, and of those tremendous convulsions
which are now rending society. The evil principle implanted in the
European commonwealth in the seventh century appeared to lie dormant for
ages; but all the while it was busily at work beneath those imposing
imperial structures which arose in the middle ages. It had not been cast
out of the body politic; it was still there, operating with noiseless
but resistless energy and terrible strength; and while monarchs were
busily engaged founding empires and consolidating their rule, it was
preparing to signalize, at a future day, the superiority of its own
power by the sudden and irretrievable overthrow of theirs. Thus society
had come to resemble the lofty mountain, whose crown of white snows and
robe of fresh verdure but conceal those hidden fires which are
smouldering within its bowels. Under the appearance of robust health, a
moral cancer was all the while preying upon the vitals of society,
eating out by slow degrees the faith, the virtue, the obedience of the
world. The ground at last gave way, and thrones and hierarchies came
tumbling down. Look at the Europe of our day. What is the Papacy, but an
enormous cancer, of most deadly virulency, which has now run its course,
and done its work upon the nations of the Continent. The European
community, from head to foot, is one festering sore. Soundness in it
there is none. The Papal world is a wriggling mass of corruption and
suffering. It is a compound of tyrannies and perjuries,--of lies and
blood-red murders,--of crimes abominable and unnatural,--of priestly
maledictions, socialist ravings, and atheistic blasphemies. The whine of
mendicants, the curses, groans, and shrieks of victims, and the demoniac
laughter of tyrants, commingle in one hoarse roar. Faugh! the spectacle
is too horrible to be looked at; its effluvia is too fetid to be
endured. What is to be done with the carcase? We cannot dwell in its
neighbourhood. It would be impossible long to inhabit the same globe
with it: its stench were enough to pollute and poison the atmosphere of
our planet. It must be buried or burned. It cannot be allowed to remain
on the surface of the earth: it would breed a plague, which would
infect, not a world only, but a universe. It is in this direction that
we are to seek for instruction; and here, if we are able to receive it,
thirty generations are willing to impart to us their dear-bought
experience. Lessons which have cost the world so much are surely worth
learning.

But I do not mean to treat my readers to lectures on history, instead of
chapters on travel. It is not an abstract disquisition on the influence
of religion and government, such as one might compose without stirring
from his own fire-side, which I intend to write. It is a real journey we
are about to undertake. You shall have facts as well as
reflections,--incidents as well as disquisitions. I shall be grave,--as
who would not at the sight of fallen nations?--but "when time shall
serve there shall be smiles." You shall climb the Alps; and when their
tops begin to burn at sunrise, you shall join heart and song with the
music of the shepherd's horn, and the thunder of a thousand torrents, as
they rush headlong down amid crags and pine-forests from the icy
summits. You shall enter, with pilgrim feet, the gates of proud
capitals, where puissant kings once reigned, but have passed away, and
have left no memorial on earth, save a handful of dust in a
stone-coffin, or a half-legible name on some mouldering arch. The solemn
and stirring voice of Monte Viso, speaking from the midst of the Cottian
Alps, will call you from afar to the martyr-land of Europe. You shall
worship with the Waldenses beneath their own Castelluzzo, which covers
with its mighty shadow the ashes of their martyred forefathers, and the
humble sanctuary of their living descendants. You shall count the towns
and campaniles on the broad Lombardy. You shall pass glorious days on
the top of renowned cathedrals, and sit and muse in the face of the
eternal Alps, as the clouds now veil, now reveal, their never-trodden
snows. You shall cross the Lagunes, and see the winged lion of St Mark
soaring serenely amid the bright domes and the ever calm seas of Venice,
where you may list

 "The song and oar of Adria's gondolier,
 Mellowed by distance, o'er the waters sweep."

You shall travel long sleepless nights in the _diligence_, and be
ferried at day-break over "ancient rivers." You shall tread the
grass-grown streets of Ferrara, and the deserted halls of Bologna, where
the wisdom-loving youth of Europe erst assembled, but whose solitude now
is undisturbed, save by the clank of the Croat's sabre, or the
wine-flagon of the friar. You shall visit cells dim and dank, around
which genius has thrown a halo which draws thither the pilgrim, who
would rather muse in the twilight of the naked vault, than wander amid
the marble glories of the palace that rises proudly in its
neighbourhood. You shall go with me, at the hour of vespers, to aisled
cathedrals, which were ages a-building, and the erection of which
swallowed up the revenues of provinces,--beneath whose roof, ample
enough to cover thousands and tens of thousands, you may see a solitary
priest, singing a solemn dirge over a "Religion" fallen as a dominant
belief, and existing only as a military organization; while statues,
mute and solemn, of mailed warriors, grim saints, angels and winged
cherubs, ranged along the walls, are the only companions of the
surpliced man, if we except a few beggars pressing with naked knees the
stony floor. You shall see Florence,--

 "The brightest star of star-bright Italy."

You shall be stirred by the craggy grandeur of the Apennines, and
soothed by the living green of the Tuscan vales, with their hoar
castles, their olives, their dark cypresses, and their forests,--

             "Where beside his leafy hold
 The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn,
 And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn."

You shall taste the vine of Italy, and drink the waters of the Arno. You
shall wander over ancient battle-fields, encounter the fierce Apennine
blast, and be rocked on the Mediterranean wave, which the sirocco heaps
up, huge and dark, and pours in a foaming cataract upon the strand of
Italy. Finally, we shall tread together the sackcloth plain on which
Rome sits, with the leaves of her torn laurel and the fragments of her
shivered sceptre strewn around her, waiting with discrowned and
downcast head the bolt of doom. Entering the gates of the "seven-hilled
city," we shall climb the Capitol, and survey a scene which has its
equal nowhere on the earth. Mouldering arches, fallen columns, buried
palaces, empty tombs, and slaves treading on the dust of the conquerors
of the world, are all that now remain of Imperial Rome. What a scene of
ruin and woe! When the twilight falls, and the moon begins to climb the
eastern arch, mark how the Coliseum projects, as if in pity, its mighty
shadow across the Forum, and covers with its kindly folds the mouldering
trophies of the past, and draws its mantle around the nakedness of the
Caesars' palace, as if to screen it from the too curious eye of the
visitor. Rome, what a history is thine! One other tragedy, terrible as
befits the drama it closes, and the curtain will drop in solemn, and, it
may be, eternal silence.




CHAPTER II.

THE PASSAGE OF THE ALPS.

     The Rhone--Plains of Dauphiny--Mont Blanc and the "Reds"--Landscape
     by Night--Democratic Club in the _Diligence_--Approach the
     Alps--Festooned Vines--Begin the Ascent--Chamberry--Uses of War--An
     Alpine Valley--Sudden Alternations of Beauty and
     Grandeur--Travellers--Evening--Grandeur of Sunset--Supper at
     Lanslebourg--Cross the Summit at Midnight--Morning--Sunrise among
     the Alps--Descent--Italy.


It was wearing late on an evening of early October 1851 when I crossed
the Rhone on my way to the Alps. It had rained heavily during the day,
and sombre clouds still rested on the towers of Lyons behind me. The
river was in flood, and the lamps on the bridge threw a troubled gleam
upon the impetuous current as it rolled underneath. It was impossible
not to recollect that this was the stream on the banks of which Irenaeus,
the disciple of Polycarp, himself the disciple of John, had, at almost
the identical spot where I crossed it, laboured and prayed, and into the
floods of which had been flung the ashes of the first martyrs of Gaul.
These murky skies formed no very auspicious commencement of my journey;
but I cherished the hope that to-morrow would bring fair weather, and
with fair weather would come the green valleys and gleaming tops of the
Alps, and, the day after, the sunny plains of Italy. This fair vision
beckoned me on through the deep road and the scudding shower.

We struck away into the plains of Dauphiny,--those great plains that
stretch from the Rhone to the Alps, and which offer to the eye, as seen
from the heights that overhang Lyons, a vast and varied expanse of wood
and meadow, corn-field and vineyard, city and hamlet, with the snowy
pile of Mont Blanc rising afar in the horizon. On the previous evening I
had climbed these heights, so stately and beautiful, with convents
hanging on their sides, and a chapel to Mary crowning their summit, to
renew my acquaintance, after an interval of some years' absence, with
the monarch of the Alps. I was greatly pleased to find, especially in
these times, that my old friend had not grown "red." Since I saw him
last, changes not a few had passed upon Europe, and more than one
monarch had fallen; but Mont Blanc sat firmly in his seat, and wore his
icy crown as proudly as ever.

Since my former visit to Lyons the "Reds" had made great progress in all
the countries at the foot of the Alps. Their party had been especially
progressive in Lyons; so much so as to affect the nomenclature of the
hills that overlook that city on the north. That hill, which is nearly
wholly covered with the houses and workshops of the silk-weavers, is now
known as the "red mountain," its inhabitants being mostly of that
faction; while the hill on the west of it, that, namely, which I had
ascended on the evening before, and which is chiefly devoted to
ecclesiastical persons and uses, is called the "white mountain." But
while men had been changing their faith, and hills their names, Mont
Blanc stood firmly by his old creed and his old colours. There he was,
dazzlingly, transcendently white, defying the fuller's art to whiten
him, and shading into dimness the snowy robe of the priest; looking
with royal majesty over his wide realm; standing unchanged in the midst
of a theatre of changes; abiding for ever, though kingdoms at his feet
were passing away; pre-eminent in grace and glory amidst his princely
peers; and looking the earthly type of that eternal and all-glorious
One, who stands supreme and unapproachable amid the powers, dominions,
and royalties of the universe.

The night wore on without any noticeable event, or any special
interruption, save what was occasioned necessarily by our arrival at the
several stages, and the changes consequent thereon of horses and
postilions. There was a rag of a moon overhead,--at least so one might
judge from the hazy light that struggled through the fog,--by the help
of which I kept watching the landscape till past midnight. Then a spirit
of drowsiness invaded me. It was not sleep, but sleep's image, or
sleep's counterfeit,--an uneasy trance, in which a confused vision of
tall trees, with their head in the clouds, and very long and very narrow
fields, marked off by straight rows of very upright poplars, and large
heavy-looking houses, with tall antique roofs, kept marching past,
without variety and without end. I would wake up at times and look out.
There was the same picture before me. I would fall back into my trance
again, and, an hour or so after, I would again wake up; still the
identical picture was there. I could not persuade myself that the
_diligence_ had moved from the spot, despite the rumbling of its wheels
and the jingling of the horses' bells. All night long the same
changeless picture kept moving on and on, ever passing, yet never past.

I may be said to have crossed the Alps amid a torrent of curses. My
place was in the _banquette_, the roomiest and loftiest part of the
lofty _diligence_, and which, perched in front, and looking down upon
the inferior compartments of the _diligence_, much as the attics of a
three-storey house look down upon the lower suits of apartments,
commands a fine view of the country, when it is daylight and clear
weather. There sat next me in the _banquette_ a young Savoyard, who
travelled with us as far as Chamberry, in the heart of the Alps; and on
the other side of the Savoyard sat the _conducteur_. This last was a
Piedmontese, a young, clever, obliging fellow, with a voluble tongue,
and a keen dark eye in his head. Scarce had we extricated ourselves from
the environs of Lyons, or had got beyond the reach of the guns that look
so angrily down upon it from the heights, till these two broke into a
conversation on politics. The conversation soon warmed into an energetic
and vehement discussion, or philippic I should rather say. Their
discourse was far too rapid, and I was too unfamiliar with the language
in which it was uttered to do more than gather its scope and drift. But
I could hear the names of France and Austria repeated every other
sentence; and these names were sure to be followed by a volley of
curses, fierce, scornful, and defiant. Austria was cursed,--France was
cursed: they were cursed individually,--they were cursed
conjunctly,--once, again, and a hundred times. What were the politics of
the passengers in the other compartments of the diligence I know not;
but little did they wot that they had a democratic club overhead, and
that more treason was spouted that night in their company than might
have got us all into trouble, had there been any evesdropper in any
corner of the vehicle. When I chanced to awake, they were still at it.
The harsh grating sound of the anathemas haunted me during my sleep
even. It was like a rattling hail-shower, or like the continuous
corruscations of lightning,--the lightning of the Alps. Had it been
possible for the authorities to know but a tithe of what was spoken
that night by my two neighbours, their journey would have been short:
they would have been shot at the next station, to a certainty.

With the night, the dream-like landscape, and the maledictory harangues
which had haunted me during the darkness, passed away, and the morning
found us nearing the mountains. The Alps open upon you by little. One
who has never climbed these hills imagines himself standing at their
feet, and looking up the long unbroken vista of fields, vineyards,
forests, and naked rocks, to the eternal snows of their summit. Not so.
They do not come marching thus upon you in all their grandeur to
overwhelm you. To see them thus, you must stand afar off,--at least
fifty miles away. There you can take in the whole at a glance, from the
beauteous fringe of stream, and hamlet, and woodland, that skirts their
base, to the white serrated line that cuts so sharply the blue of the
firmament. Nearer them,--unless, indeed, in the great central valleys,
where you can see the icy fields hanging in the firmament at an awful
distance above you,--their snow-clad summits are invisible, being hidden
by an intervening sea of ridges, that are strewn over with rocks, or
wave darkly with pines.

As we approached the mountains, they offered to the eye a beauteous
chain of verdant hills, with the morning mists hanging on their sides.
The torrents were in flood from the recent rains; the woods had the rich
tints of autumn upon them; but the charm of the scene lay in the
beautiful festoonings of the vine. The uplands before me were barred by
what I at first took to be long horizontal layers of fleecy cloud. On a
nearer approach, these turned out to be the long branchy arms of the
vine. The vine-stock is made to lean against the cut trunk of a chestnut
or poplar tree, and its branches are bent horizontally, and extended
till they meet those of the neighbouring vine-stock, which have been
similarly dealt with. In this way, continuous lines of luxuriant
foliage, with pendulous blood-red clusters in their season, may be made
to run for miles together along the hill-side. There might be from
thirty to forty parallel lines in those I now saw. Tinted with the
morning sun, and relieved against the deep verdure of the mountain, they
appeared like stripes of amber, or floating lines of cloud fringed with
gold.

It was the Mont Cenis route I was traversing,--the least rugged of all
the passes of the Alps, and the same by which Hannibal, as some suppose,
passed into Italy. The day cleared up into one of unusual brilliancy. We
began to ascend by a path cut in the rock of the mountain, having on our
left an escarpment of limestone several hundred feet high, and on our
right a deep gorge, with a white foaming torrent at its bottom. The
frontier chain passed, we descended into a rich valley, with a fine
stream flowing through it, and the poor town of Les Echelles hiding from
view in one of its angles. These noble valleys are sadly blotted by
filth and disease. The contrast offered betwixt the noble features of
nature and the degraded form of man is painful and humiliating. Bowed
down by toil, stolid with ignorance, disfigured with the goitre, struck
with cretinism, the miserable beings around you do more to sadden you
than all that the bright air and glorious hills can do to exhilarate
you.

The valley where we now were was a complete _cul de sac_. It was walled
in all round by limestone hills of great height, and the eye sought in
vain for visible outlet. At length one could see a white line running
half-way up the mountain's face, and ending in an opening no bigger than
a pigeon-hole. We slowly climbed this road,--for road it was; and when
we came to the diminutive opening we had seen from the valley below, it
expanded into a tunnel,--one of the great works of Napoleon,--which ran
right through the mountain, and brought us out on the other side. We now
traversed a narrow and rocky ravine, which at length expanded into a
magnificent valley, rich in vines and fruit-trees of all kinds, and
overhung by lofty mountains. On this plain, surrounded by the living
grandeur of nature, and the faded renown of its monastic and
archiepiscopal glory, and half-buried amid foliage and ruins, sits
Chamberry, the capital of Savoy.

At Chamberry our route underwent a change. Beauty now gave place to
grandeur; but still a grandeur blended with scenes of exquisite
loveliness. These I cannot stay to describe at length. The whole day was
passed in winding and climbing among the hills. We toiled slowly to rise
above the plains we had left, and to approach the region where winter
spreads out her boundless sea of ice and snow. We followed the
magnificent road which we owe to the genius of Napoleon. The fruits of
Marengo are gone. Austerlitz is but a name. But the passes of the Alps
remain. "When will it be ready for the transport of the cannon?"
enquired Napoleon respecting the Simplon road. War is a rough pioneer;
but without such a pioneer to clear the way the world would stand still.
Look back. What do you see throughout the successive ages? War, with his
red eye, his iron feet, and his gleaming brand, marching in the van; and
commerce, and arts, and Christianity, following in the wake of this
blood-besmeared Anakim. Such has ever been the order of procession.
Mankind in the mass are a sluggish race, and will march only when the
word of command is sounded from iron-throated, hoarse-voiced war. Look
at the Alps. What do you see? A gigantic form, busy amid the blinding
tempests and the eternal ice of their summits. With herculean might he
rends the rocks and levels the mountains. Who is he, and what does he
there? That is war, in the person of Napoleon, hewing a path through
rocks and glaciers, for the passage of the Bible and the missionary.
Under the reign of the Mediator the promise to Christianity is, All is
yours. War is yours, and Peace is yours.

As we passed on, innumerable nooks of beauty opened to the eye, and
romantic peaks ever and anon shot up before us. Now the path led along a
meadow, with its large bright flowers; and now along the brink of an
Alpine river, with its worn bed and tumultuous floods. Now it rounded
the shoulder of a hill; and now it lost itself in some frightful gorge,
where the overhanging mountain, with its drapery of pine forests, made
it dark as midnight almost. You emerge into daylight again, and begin
the same succession of green meadow, pine-clad hill, foaming torrent,
and black gorge. Thus you go onward and upward. At length white Alps
begin to look down upon you, and give you warning that you are nearing
those central regions where eternal winter holds his seat amid pinnacles
of ice and wastes of snow.

Let us take an individual picture. The road has made a sudden turn; and
a valley, hitherto concealed by the mountains, opens unexpectedly. It is
some three or four miles long; and the road traverses it straight as the
arrow's flight, till it loses itself amid the rocks and foliage at the
bottom of the mountain which you see lying across the valley. On this
hand is a stream of water, clear as crystal; on that is the ridgy, wavy,
lofty mass of a purple Alp. The bright air and light incorporate, as it
were, with the substance of the mountain, and spiritualize it, so that
it looks of mould intermediate betwixt the earth and the firmament. The
path is bordered with the most delicious verdure, fresh and soft as a
carpet, and freckled with the dancing shadows of the trees. On this
hand is a chalet, with a vine climbing its wall and mantling its
doorway; on that is a verdant knoll, planted a-top with chestnut trees;
and from amidst their rich, massy foliage, the little spire of the
church, with its glittering vane, looks forth. Near it is the cure's
house, buried amidst flower-blossoms, the foliage of vines, and the
shadows of the sycamore and chestnut. There is not a spot in the little
valley which beauty has not clothed and decked with the most painstaking
care; while grandeur has built up a wall all round, as if to keep out
the storms that sometimes rage here. It looks so quiet and tranquil, and
is so shut in from the great world outside, that one thinks of it as a
spot which happy beings from another sphere might come to visit, and
where he might list the melody of their voices, as they walk at
even-tide amid the bowers of this earthly Eden.

The road makes another turn, and the scene is changed in a moment,--in
the twinkling of an eye. The happy valley is gone,--it has vanished like
a dream; and a scene of stern, savage, overpowering sublimity rises
before you. Alp is piled upon Alp, chasms yawn, torrents growl, jutting
rocks threaten; and far over head is the dark pine forest, amid which
you can descry, perhaps, the frozen billows of the glacier, or have
glimpses of those still higher and drearier regions where winter sits on
her eternal throne, and holds undivided sway. Your farther progress is
completely barred. So it looks. A cyclopean wall rises from earth to
heaven. The gate of rock by which you entered seems to have closed its
ponderous jaws behind you, and shut you in,--there to remain till some
supernatural power rend the mountains and give you egress. The mood of
mind changes with the scene. The beauty soothed and softened you; now
you grow impulsive and stern. The awful forms around you blend with the
soul, as it were, and impart something of their own vastness to it. You
feel yourself carried into the very presence of that Power which sank
the foundations of the mountains in the depths of the earth, and built
up their giant masses above the clouds; which hung the avalanche on
their brow, clove their unfathomable abysses, poured the river at their
feet, and taught the forked lightning to play around their awful icy
steeps. You seem to hear the sound of the Almighty's footsteps still
echoing amid these hills. There passes before you the shadow of
Omnipotence; and a great voice seems to proclaim the Godhead of Him "who
hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven
with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and
weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance."

The road was comparatively solitary. We passed at times a waggoner, who
was conveying the produce of the plains to some village among the
mountains; and then a couple of pedestrians, with the air of tradesmen,
on their way perhaps to a Swiss town to seek employment; and next a
cowherd, driving home his herds from the glades of the forest; and now
an occasional gendarme would present himself, and force you to remember,
what you would willingly have forgotten amid such scenes, that there
were such things as armies in the world; and sometimes the long, dark
figure of the cure, reading his breviary to economize time, might be
seen gliding along before you, representative of the murky superstition
that still fills these valleys, and which, indeed, you can read in the
stolid face of the Savoyard, as he sits listlessly under the broad
easings of his cottage roof.

Anon the evening came, walking noiselessly upon the mountains, and
shedding on the spirit a not unpleasant melancholy. The Alps seemed to
grow taller. Deep masses of shade were projected from summit to summit.
Pine forest, and green vale, and dashing torrent, and quiet hamlet, all
retired from view, as if they wished to go to sleep beneath the friendly
shadows. A deep and reverent silence stole over the Alps, as if the
stillness of the firmament had descended upon them. Over all nature was
shed this spirit of quiet and profound tranquillity. Every tree was
motionless. The murmur of the brook, the wing of the bird, the creak of
our diligence, the voices of the postilion and _conducteur_, all felt
the softening influence of the hour.

But mark! what glory is this which begins to burn upon the crest of the
snowy Alps? First there comes a flood of rosy light, and then a deep
bright crimson, like the ruby's flash or the sapphire's blaze, and then
a circlet of flaming peaks studs the horizon. It looks as if a great
conflagration were about to begin. But suddenly the light fades, and
piles of cold, pale white rise above you. You can scarce believe them to
be the same mountains. But, quick as the lightning, the flash comes
again. A flood of glory rolls once more along their summits. It is a
last and mighty blaze. You feel as if it were a struggle for life,--as
if it were a war waged by the spirits of darkness against these
celestial forms. The struggle is over: the darkness has prevailed. These
mighty mountain torches are extinguished one after one; and cold,
ghastly piles, of sepulchral hue, which you shiver to look up at, and
which remind you of the dead, rise still and calm in the firmament above
you. You feel relieved when darkness interposes its veil betwixt you and
them. The night sets in deep, and calm, and beautiful, with troops of
stars overhead. The voice of streams, all night long, fills the silent
hills with melodious echoes.

We now threaded the black gorge of the Arc, passing, unperceived in the
darkness, Fort Lesseillon, which, erecting its tiers of batteries above
this tremendous natural fosse, looks like a mailed warrior guarding the
entrance to Italy. It was eleven o'clock, and we were toiling up the
mountain. We had left all human habitations far below, as we thought,
when suddenly we were startled by a peal of village bells. Never had
bells sounded sweeter in my fancy than those I now heard in these dreary
regions. These were the convent bells of the little village of
Lanslebourg, which lies at the foot of the summit of the Mont Cenis.
Here we were to sup. It was a sort of Arbour in the midst of the hill
Difficulty, where we Pilgrims might refresh ourselves before beginning
our last and steepest ascent. It was a most substantial repast, as all
suppers in that part of the world are; and we had the pleasure of
thinking that we were perhaps the highest supper party in Europe. It was
our last meal before crossing the mountain, and passing from the modern
to the ancient world; for the ridge of the Alps is the limit that
divides the two. On this side are modern times; on that are the dark
ages. You retrograde five full centuries when you step across the line.
We ate our supper, as did the Israelites their last meal in Egypt, with
our loins girded,--scarce even our greatcoats put off, and our staff in
our hand.

Now for the summit. We started at midnight. Above us was an ebon vault,
studded thick with large bright stars. Around us was the awful silence
of the mountains. The night was luminous; for in that elevated region
darkness is unknown, save when the storm-cloud shrouds it. Of our party,
some betook them to the diligence, and were carried over asleep; others
of us, leaving the vehicle to follow the road, which zig-zags up to the
summit, addressed ourselves to the old route, which winds steeply
upward, now through forests of stunted firs, now over a matting of
thick, short grass, and now over the bare debris-strewn scalp of the
mountain. The convent bells followed us with their sweet chimes up the
hill, and formed a link between us and the living world below. The
echoes of our voices were strangely loud. They rung out in the thin
elastic air, as if all we said had been caught up and repeated by some
invisible being,--some genius of the mountains. The hours wore away; and
so delighted were we with the novelty of our position,--climbing the
summits of the Alps at midnight,--that they seemed but so many minutes.

Ere we were aware, the night was past, and the dawn came upon us; and
with the dawn, new and stupendous glories burst forth. How fresh and
holy the young day, as it drew aside the curtains of the east, and
smiled upon the mountains! The valleys were buried under a fathomless
ocean of haze; but the pearly light, sown by the rosy hand of morn,
fringed the mountain ridges, and a multitudinous sea of silvery waves
spread out around us. The dawn stole on, waxing momentarily; and the
great white Alps, which had been standing all night around us so silent,
and cold, and sepulchral-like, in their snowy shrouds, now began to grow
palpable and less dream-like. The stars put out their fires as the pure
crystal light mounted into the sky. Each successive scene was
lovely,--inexpressibly lovely,--but momentary. We wished we could have
stereotyped it till we had had time to admire it; but while we were
gazing it had passed and was gone, like the other glories of the world.
But, lo! the sun is near. Mighty torch-bearers run before his chariot,
and cry to the rocks, the pine-forests, the torrents, the glaciers, the
vine-clad vales, the flower-enamelled glades, the rivers, the cities,
that their king is coming. Awake and worship! A mighty Alp, whose
loftier stature or more favourable position gives it the start of all
the others, has caught the first ray; and suddenly, as if an invisible
hand had kindled it, it rises into the firmament, a pyramid of flame,
soft, mild, yet gloriously bright, like a dome of living sapphire. While
you gaze, another flashes upon you, and another, and another, and at
length the whole horizon is filled with gigantic pyres. The stupendous
vision has risen so suddenly, that you almost look if you may see the
seraph which has flown round and kindled these mighty torches. The glory
is inexpressible, and on a scale so vast, that you have no words to
describe it. You can scarce believe it to be reflected light which gives
such glory to these mountains. They are so rosy, so vividly, intensely
radiant, that you feel as if that boundless effulgence emanated from
themselves,--were flowing forth from some hidden fountain of light
within. It is like no other scene of earthly glory you ever saw. You can
compare it only to some celestial city which has been let down from the
firmament upon the tops of the mountains, with its glittering turrets,
its domes of sapphire, and its wall of alabaster, needing no sun or
other source of earthly light to enlighten and glorify it. But while you
gaze, it is gone. The sun is up, and the mighty mountain-torches which
had carried the tidings of his coming to the countries beneath are
extinguished.

It was now full day, and we had reached the summit of the pass. Above us
were still the snow-clad peaks; but the road does not ascend higher. We
now crossed the frontier, and were in Italy. A little rocky plain
surrounded by weather-beaten peaks, a deep blue lake, and a sea of bare
ridges in front, were all that we saw of Italy. The road now began
sensibly to decline, and the diligence quickened its pace. We soon
reached the ridges before us, and began to descend over the brow of the
Alps, which are steep and perpendicular as a wall almost, on their
southern side. You first traverse a region covered with immense
lichen-clothed boulders; next come stretches of heath; then stunted
firs: by and by fruit and forest trees begin to make their appearance;
next comes the lovely acacia; and last of all the vine, tall and
luxuriant, veiling the peasant's cot with its shadow. The road is
literally a series of hanging stairs, which zig-zag down the face of the
mountain. At certain points the rock is perforated; at others it is hewn
into terraces; and at others the path rests on vast substructions of
masonry. Now an immense rock leans over the road, and now you find
yourself on the edge of some frightful precipice, with the gulph running
right down many thousands of feet, and a white torrent at the bottom,
boiling and struggling, but unable to make itself heard at that height
on the mountain. The turns are frequent and sharp; and the heavy,
overladen vehicle, in its furious downward career, gives a swing at
each, as if it would cut short the passage into Italy, and land the
passenger, sooner than he wishes, at the bottom. At length, after four
hours' riding, the descent is accomplished. The scene has changed in the
twinkling of an eye. The plain is as level as a floor. The warm
sun,--the brilliant sky,--the luxuriant vines,--the handsome
architecture,--the picturesque costumes,--the dark oval faces, and black
fiery eyes of the natives,--all tell you that it is a new world into
which you have entered,--that this is ITALY.




CHAPTER III.

RISK AND PROGRESS OF CONSTITUTIONALISM IN PIEDMONT.

     First Entrance into Italy--Never can be Repeated--The Cathedral of
     Turin--The Royal Palace--The Museum--Egyptian
     Mummies--Reflections--Landmark of the Vaudois Valleys--Piedmontese
     House of Commons--Piedmontese Constitution--Perils that surrounded
     it--Providentially shielded from these--Numbers and Wealth of the
     Priesthood--Want of Public Opinion--Rise of a Free Press--Its
     Power--The _Gazetta del Popolo_--The Bible quoted by the
     Journalists--The flourishing State of the Country--The Waldensian
     Temple and Congregation--Workmen's Clubs--The Capuchin Monastery--A
     Capuchin Friar--Sunset.


One can enter Italy for the first time only once. For, however often we
may climb the Alps, and tread the land that lies stretched out at their
base, it is with a cold pulse, compared with the fever of excitement
into which we are thrown by the first touch of that soil. The charm is
flown; the tree of knowledge has been plucked; and never more can we
taste the dreamy yet intense delight which attended the first unfolding
of the gates of the Alps, and the first rising of the fair vision of
Italy.

In truth, the Italy which one comes to see on his second visit is not
the Italy that first drew him across the Alps. That was the Italy of
history, or rather of his own imagination. The fair form his fancy was
wont to conjure up, draped in the glowing recollections of empire and of
arms, and encompassed with the halo of heroic deeds, he can see no more.
There meets him, on the other side of the Alps, a vision very unlike
this. The Italy of the Caesars is gone; and where she sat is now a poor,
naked, cowering thing, with a chain upon her arm,--the Italy of the
Popes. But the fascination attends the traveller some short way into
that land. Indeed, he is loath to lose it, and would rather see Italy
through the warm colourings of history, and the bright hues of his own
fancy, than look upon her as she is.

I shall never forget the intense excitement that thrilled me when I
found myself rolling along on the magnificent avenue of pollard-elms,
that runs all the way from Rivoli to Turin. The voluptuous air, which
seemed to fill the landscape with a dreamy gaiety; the intense sunlight,
which tinted every object with extraordinary brilliancy, from the bright
leaves overhead, to the burning domes of Turin in front; the dark eyes
of the natives, which flashed with a fervour like that of their own sun;
the Alps towering above me, and running off in a vast unbroken line of
glittering masses,--all contributed to form a picture of so novel and
brilliant a kind, that it absolutely produced an intoxication of
delight.

I passed a few days at Turin; and the pleasure of my stay was much
enhanced by the society of my friend the Rev. John Bonar, whom I had met
at Chamberry, _en route_, with his family, for Malta. We visited
together the chief objects of interest in the capital of Piedmont. The
churches we saw of course. And though we had been carried blindfolded
across the Alps, and set down in the cathedral of Turin, the statuary
alone would have told us that we were in Italy. The most unpractised eye
could see at once the difference betwixt these statues and those of the
Transalpine churches. The Italian sculptors seemed to possess some
secret by which they could make the marble live. Some half-dozen of
priests, with red copes (I presume it was a martyr's day, for on such
days the Church's dress is red), ranged in a pew near the altar, were
singing psalms. Whether the good men were thinking of their dinner, I
knew not; but they yawned portentously, wrung their hands with an air of
helplessness, and looked at us as if they half expected that we would
volunteer to do duty for an hour or so in their stead. A bishop chanting
his psalter under the groined roof of cathedral, and a covenanter
praying in his hill-side cave, would form an admirable picture of two
very different styles of devotion. There were some dozen of old women on
the floor, whom the mixed motive of saying their prayers and picking up
a chance alms seemed to have drawn thither. From the Duomo we went to
the King's palace. We walked through a suit of splendid apartments,
though not quite accordant in their style of ornament and comfort with
our English ideas. The floor and roof were of rich and beautiful
mosaics; the walls were adorned with the more memorable battles of the
Sardinian nation; and the furniture was minutely and elaborately inlaid
with mother-of-pearl. Three rooms more particularly attracted my
attention. The first contained the throne of the kings of Savoy,--a
gilded chair, under a crimson canopy, and surrounded by a gilt railing.
I thought, as I gazed upon it, how often the power of that throne had
lain heavily upon the poor Waldenses. The other room contained the bed
on which King Charles Albert died. It is yet in my readers'
recollection, that Charles Albert died at Oporto; but the whole
furniture of the room in which he breathed his last was transported,
together with his ashes, to Turin. It was an affecting sight. There it
stood, huddled into a corner,--a poor bed of boards, with a plain
coverlet, such as a Spanish peasant might sleep beneath; a chest of deal
drawers; and a few of the necessary utensils of a sick chamber. The
third room contained the Queen's bed of state. Its windows opened
sweetly upon the fine gardens of the palace, where the first ray, as it
slants downwards from the crest of the Alps into the valley of the Po,
falls on the massy foliage of the mulberry and the orange. On the table
were some six or eight books, among which was a copy of the Psalms of
David. "It is very fine," said my friend Mr Bonar, glancing up at the
gilded canopy and silken hangings of the bed, and poking his hand at the
same time into its soft woolly furnishings, "but nothing but blankets
can make it comfortable."

From the palace we passed to the Museum. There you see pictures,
statues, coins stamped with the effigies of kings that lived thousands
of years ago, and papyrus parchments inscribed with the hieroglyphics of
old Egypt, and other curiosities, which it has required ages to collect,
as it would volumes to describe. Not the least interesting sight there
is the gods of Egypt,--cats, ibises, fish, monkeys, heads of calves and
bulls, all lying in their original swathings. I looked narrowly at these
divinities, but could detect no difference betwixt the god-cat of Egypt
and the cats of our day. Were it possible to re-animate one of them, and
make it free of our streets, I fear the god would be mistaken for an
ordinary quadruped of its own kind, pelted and worried by mischievous
boys and dogs, as other cats are. I do not know that a modern priest of
Turin has any very good ground for taunting an old Egyptian priest with
his cat-worship. If it is impossible to tell the difference betwixt a
cat which is simply a cat, and a cat which is a god, it is just as
impossible to tell the difference betwixt a bread-wafer which is simply
bread, and a bread-wafer which is the flesh and blood, the soul and
divinity, of Christ.

Seeing in Egypt the gods died, it will not surprise the reader that in
Egypt men should die. And there they lay, the brown sons and daughters
of Mizraim, side by side with their gods, wrapt with them in the same
stoney, dreamless slumber. One mummy struck me much. It lay in a stone
sarcophagus, the same in which the hands of wife or child mayhap had
placed it; and there it had slept on undisturbed through all the changes
and hubbub of four thousand years. Over the face was drawn a thin cloth,
through which the features could be seen not indistinctly. Now, thought
I, I shall hear all about old Egypt. Perhaps this man has seen Joseph,
or talked with Jacob, or witnessed the wonders of the exodus. Come, tell
me your name or profession, or some of the strange events of your
history. Did you don the mail-coat of the warrior, or the white robe of
the priest? Did you till the ground, and live on garlic; or were you
owner of a princely estate, and wont to sit on your house-top of
evenings, enjoying the delicious twilight, and the soft flow of the
Nile? Come now, tell me all. The door of a departed world seemed about
to open. I felt as if standing on its threshold, and looking in upon the
shadowy forms that peopled it. But ah! these lips spoke not. With the
Rosetta stone as the key, I could compel the granite slabs and the brown
worn parchments around me to give up their secrets. But where was the
key that could open that breast, and read the secrets locked up in it?

And this form had still a living owner! This awoke a train of thought
yet more solemn. Who, what, and where is he? Anxious as I had been to
have the door of that mysterious past in which he had lived opened to
me, I was yet more anxious to look into that more mysterious and awful
future into which he had gone. What had he seen and felt these four
thousand years? Did the ages seem long to him, or was it but as a few
days since he left the earth? I went close up to the dark curtain, but
there was no opening,--no chink by which I could see into the world
beyond. Will no kind hand draw the veil aside but for a moment? There it
has hung unlifted age after age, concealing, with its impenetrable
folds, all that mortals would most like to know. Myriads and myriads
have passed within, but not one has ever given back voice, or look, or
sign, to those they left behind, and from whom never before did they
conceal thought or wish. Why is this? Do they not still think of us? Do
they not still love us? Would they softly speak to us if they could?
What gulf divides them? Ah! how silent are the dead!

Close by the great highway into Italy lie the "Valleys of the Vaudois."
One might pass them without being aware of their near presence, or that
he was treading upon holy ground;--so near to the world are they, and
yet so completely hidden from it. Ascend the little hill on the south of
Turin, and follow with your eye the great wall of the Alps which bounds
the plain on the north. There, in the west, about thirty miles from
where you stand, is a tall pyramidal-shaped mountain, towering high
above the other summits. That is Monte Viso, which rises like a
heaven-erected beacon, to signify from afar to the traveller the land of
the Waldenses, and to call him, with its solemn voice, to turn aside and
see the spot where "the bush burned and was not consumed." We shall make
a short, a very short visit to these valleys, than which Europe has no
more sacred soil. But first let us speak of some of the bulwarks which
an all-wise Providence has erected in our day around a Church and people
whose existence is one of the great living miracles of the world.

The revolutions which swept over Italy in 1848 were the knell of the
other Italian States, but to Piedmont they were the trumpet of liberty.
No man living can satisfactorily explain why the same event should have
operated so disasterously for the one, and so beneficially for the
other. No reason can be found in the condition of the country itself:
the thing is inexplicable on ordinary principles; and the more
intelligent Piedmontese at this day speak of it as a miracle. But so is
the fact. Piedmont is a constitutional kingdom; and I went with M.
Malan, himself a Waldensian, and a member of the Chamber of Deputies, to
see the hall where their Parliament sits. A spacious flight of steps
conducts to a noble hall, in form an ellipse, and surmounted by a dome.
At one end of the ellipse hangs a portrait of the President, and
underneath is his richly gilt chair, with a crimson-covered table before
it. Right in front of the Speaker's chair, on a lower level, is placed
the tribune, which much resembles the precentor's desk in a Scottish
church. The tribune is occupied only when a Minister makes a Ministerial
declaration, or a Convener of a Committee gives in his Report. An open
space divides the tribune from the seats of the members. These last run
all round the hall, in concentric rows of benches, also covered with
crimson. "There, on the right," said M. Malan, "sit the priest party. In
the front are the Ministerial members; on the left is my seat. There is
an extreme left to which I do not belong: I have not passed the
constitutional line. This lower tier of galleries is for the conductors
of the press and the diplomatic corps; this higher gallery is for ladies
and military men. We are 204 members in all. We have a member for every
twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Our population is four millions and a
half. Our House of Peers contains only ninety members. The King has the
privilege of nominating to it, but peers so created are only for life."

It was, in truth, a marvellous sight;--a free and independent Parliament
meeting in the ancient capital of the bigoted Piedmont, with a free
press and a public looking on, and one of the long proscribed Vaudois
race occupying a seat in it. The more I thought of it, the more I
wondered. The causes which had led to so extraordinary a result seemed
clearly providential. When King Charles Albert in 1848 gave his subjects
a Constitution, no one had asked it, and few there were who could value
it, or even knew what a Constitution meant. One or two public writers
there were who said that public opinion demanded it; but, in sooth,
there was then no public opinion in the country. Soon after this the
campaign in Lombardy was commenced, and the result of that campaign
threatened the Piedmontese Constitution with extinction. The Piedmontese
army was beaten by the Austrians, and had to make a hasty and inglorious
retreat into their own country. Every one then expected that Radetzky
would march upon Turin, put down the Constitution, and seize upon
Sardinia. Contrary to his usual habits, the old warrior halted on the
frontier, as if kept back by an invisible power, and the Constitution
was saved. Then came the death of Charles Albert, of a broken heart, in
Oporto, whither he had fled; and every one believed that the Piedmontese
charter would accompany its author to the tomb. The dispositions and
policy of the new king were unknown; but the probability was that he
would follow the example of his brother sovereigns of Italy, all of whom
had begun to revoke the Constitutions which they had so recently
inaugurated with solemn oaths. Happily these fears were not realized.
The new perils passed over, and left the Constitution unscathed. King
Victor Immanuel,--a constitutional monarch simply by accident,--turned
out a good-natured, easy-minded man, who loved the chase and his country
seat, and found it more agreeable to live on good terms with his
subjects, and enjoy a handsome civil list,--which his Parliament has
taken care to vote him,--than to be indebted for his safety and a
bankrupt exchequer to the bayonets of his guards. Thus marvellously,
hitherto, in the midst of dangers at home and re-action abroad, has the
Piedmontese charter been preserved. I dwell with the greater minuteness
on this point, because on the integrity of that charter are suspended
the civil liberties of the Church of the Vaudois. When I was in Turin
the Constitution was three years old; but even then its existence was
exceedingly precarious. The King could have revoked it at any moment;
and there was not then, I was assured by General Beckwith,--who knows
the state of the Piedmontese nation well,--moral power in the country to
offer any effectual resistance, had the royal will decreed the
suppression of constitutional government. "But," added he, "should the
Constitution live three years longer, the people by that time will have
become so habituated to the working of a free Constitution, and public
opinion will have acquired such strength, that it will be impossible for
the monarch to retrace his steps, even should he be so inclined." It is
exactly three years since that time, and the state of the Piedmontese
nation at this moment is such as to justify the words of the sagacious
old man.

The first grand difficulty in the way of the Constitution was, the
numbers and power of the priesthood. In no country in Europe,--not even
in France and Austria, when their size is compared,--were the benefices
so numerous, or their holders so luxuriously fed. Piedmont was the
paradise of priests. The ecclesiastical statistics of that kingdom,
furnished to the French journal _La Presse_, on occasion of the
introduction of the bill for suppressing the convents, on the 8th of
January 1855, reveals a state of things truly astonishing.
Notwithstanding that the population is only four and a half millions,
there are in Sardinia 7 archbishops; 34 bishops; 41 chapters, with 860
canons attached to the bishoprics; 73 simple chapters, with 470 canons;
1100 livings for the canons; and, lastly, 4267 parishes, with some
thousands of parish priests. The domain of the Church represents a
capital of 400 millions of francs, with a yearly revenue of 17 millions
and upwards. This enormous wealth is divided amongst the clergy in
proportions grossly unequal. The 41 prelates of Sardinia enjoy a revenue
of nearly a million and a half of francs, which is double what used to
maintain all the bishops of the French empire. The Archbishop of Turin
has an income of 120,000 francs, which is more than the whole bench of
Belgian bishops. The other prelates are paid in proportion. As a set-off
to this wealth, there are in Sardinia upwards of 2000 curates, not one
of whom has so much as 800 francs, or about L.35 sterling. These are
thus tempted to prey upon the people. Such is the terrible organization
which the King and Parliament have to encounter in carrying out their
reforms, and such is the fearful incubus which has pressed for ages upon
the social rights and industrial energies of the Piedmontese people.

But this is but a part of the great sacerdotal army encamped in
Piedmont. There are 71 religious orders besides, divided into 604
houses, containing in all 8563 monks and nuns. The expense of feeding
these six hundred houses, with their army of eight thousand strong,
forms an item of two millions and a-half of francs, and represents a
capital of forty-five millions. The greatest admirer of these
fraternities will scarce deny that this is a handsome remuneration for
their services; indeed, we never could make out what these services
really are. They do not teach the youth, or pray with the aged. For
reading they have no taste; and to write what will be read, or preach
what will be listened to, is far beyond their ability. Their pious hands
disdain all contact with the plough, and the loom, and the spade. They
share with their countrymen neither the labours of peace, nor the
dangers of war. They lounge all day in the streets, or about the wine
shops; and, when the dinner-hour arrives, they troop home-wards, to
retail the gossip of the town over a groaning board and a well-filled
flagon. Thus they fatten like pigs, being about as cleanly, but scarce
as useful. It is not surprising that a bill should at last have reached
the Chambers, proposing, _first_, the better distribution of the
revenues of the Church, equal to a fourth of the kingdom; and, _second_,
the suppression of those "houses," the rules of which bind over their
members to sheer, downright idleness, leaving only those who have some
show of public duty to perform. The priests denounce the bill as
"spoliation and robbery" of course, and prophesy all manner of things
against so wicked a kingdom. Doubtless it is daring impiety in the eyes
of Rome to forbid a man with a shaven crown and a brown cloak to play
the idler and vagabond. We are only surprised that the people of
Piedmont have so long suffered their labours to be eaten up by an order
of men useless, and worse than useless.

Another grand difficulty in Piedmont was the absence of a middle
class,--wealthy, intelligent, and independent. No one felt that he had
rights, and you never heard people saying there, as you may do in
Britain, "this is my right, and I will have it." A feeling of individual
right, and of responsibility,--for the two go together,--was then
just beginning to dawn upon the popular mind. This was accompanied
by a certain amount of disorganizing influence; not that of
Socialism,--which, happily, scarce existed in Piedmont,--but that of
self-action. Every one was feeling his own way. The priests, of course,
were exceedingly wroth, and loudly accused Protestantism as the cause of
all this commotion in men's minds. Alas! there was no Protestantism in
Piedmont, for it had been one of the most bigoted kingdoms in Italy. It
was their own handiwork; for a tyranny always produces a democracy. As
if by a miracle, a powerful and popular press started up in Turin. The
writers in the _Opinione_ and the _Gazetta del Popolo_, acting, I
suspect, on a hint given by some Vaudois that there was an old book, now
little known, that would help them in the war they were now waging, went
to the Bible, and, finding that it made against the priests, were
liberal in their quotations from it. Their most telling hits were the
extracts from Scripture; and finding it so, they quoted yet more
largely. The priests were much concerned to see Holy Scripture so far
profaned as to be quoted in newspapers, and exposed freely to the gaze
of the vulgar. But what could they do? Their own literary qualifications
did not warrant them to enter the lists with these writers: they had
forgot the way to preach, unless at Lent; they could work the
confessional, but even it began to be silenced by the powerful artillery
of the press. At an earlier stage they might have roused the peasantry,
and marched upon the Constitution, whose life they knew was the death of
their power; but it was too late in 1851. An attempt of this sort made a
year or two after, among the peasantry of the Val d'Aosta, turned out a
miserable failure. Thus, a movement which in other countries came
forward under the sanction of the priesthood, from the very outset in
Piedmont took a contrary direction, and set in full against the Church.
Since that day liberty has been working itself, bit by bit, into the
action of the Constitution, and the feelings of the people; and now, I
believe, neither King nor Parliament, were they so inclined, could put
it down.

The sum of the matter then is, that of all the kingdoms which the era of
1848 started in the path of free government, the brave little State of
Piedmont alone has persevered to this day. Amid the wide weltering sea
of Italian anarchy and despotism, here, and here alone, liberty finds a
spot on which to plant her foot. Again we ask, why is this? There is
nothing in the past history of the country,--nothing in the present
state of the nation,--which can account for it. We must look elsewhere
for a solution; and we do not hesitate to avow our firm conviction, that
a special Providence has shielded the Constitution of Piedmont, because
with that Constitution is bound up the liberties of the ancient martyr
Church of the Vaudois. It was the only one of the Italian Constitutions
that carried in it so sacred a guarantee of permanency. On the 17th of
February 1848 (the day is worth remembering), Charles Albert, by a royal
edict, admitted the Waldenses to the enjoyment of all civil and
political rights, in common with the rest of their fellow-subjects. Now,
for the first time in a thousand years, the trumpet of liberty sounded
amid the Vaudois valleys; and the shout of joy which the Alps sent back
seemed like the first response to the prayer which had so often ascended
from these hills, "How long, O Lord." Would not Sodom have been spared
had ten righteous men been found in it? and why not Piedmont, seeing the
Waldensian Church was there? Yes, Piedmont is the little Zoar of the
Italian plains! Little may its people reck to whom it is they owe their
escape. It is nevertheless a truth that, but for the poor Vaudois, whom,
instigated by the Pope, they long and ruthlessly laboured to
exterminate, their country would have been at this day in the same
gulph of social demoralization and political re-action with Tuscany, and
Naples, and Rome. These last were taken, and Piedmont escaped.

And the country is truly flourishing. It has thriven every day since
Charles Albert emancipated the Vaudois. No one can cross its frontier
without being struck with the contrast it presents to the other Italian
States. While they are decaying like a corpse, it is flourishing like
the chestnut-tree of its own mountains. The very faces of the people may
tell you that the country is free and prosperous. Its citizens walk
about with the cheerful, active air of men who have something to do and
to enjoy, and not with the listless, desponding, heart-sick look which
marks the inhabitants of the other States of Italy. Here, too, you miss
that universal beggary and vagabondism that disfigure and pollute all
the other countries of the Peninsula. What rich loam the ploughman turns
up! What magnificent vines shade its plains! Public works are in
progress, railways have been formed, and new houses are building. Not
fewer than a hundred houses were built in Turin last year, which is
more, I verily believe, than in all the other Italian towns out of
Piedmont taken together. Thus, while the other States of Italy are
foundering in the tempest, Piedmont lives because it carries the Vaudois
and their fortunes.

From the hall of the Chamber of Deputies I went with M. Malan to the
office of the _Gazetta del Popolo_, to be introduced to its editors. The
_Gazetta del Popolo_ is a daily paper, with a circulation of 15,000;
and, being sold at a penny, is universally read by the middle and lower
classes. It is the _Times_ of Piedmont. Its editors are men of great
talent, and write with the practical good sense and racy style of
Cobbett. They are not religious men, neither are they Romanists, though
nominally connected with the Church of the State; but they are warm
advocates of constitutional government, hearty haters of the Papacy, and
have done much to enlighten the public mind, and loosen it from
Romanism. They first of all made inquiries respecting the external
resemblance of Puseyistic and Popish worship, as I had seen the latter
in Italy. They made yet more eager inquiries respecting the progress and
prospects of Puseyism in England, and about a then recent declaration of
the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the effect that there were only two
Bishops in the Church of England that had gone over to Puseyism. They
seemed to feel that the fortunes of the Papacy would turn mainly upon
the fortunes of Puseyism in England. As regarded the Archbishop, I
replied, that I believed in the substantial accuracy of his statement,
that there were not more than two members of the episcopate who could be
held to be decided Puseyites; and as regarded the progress of Puseyism,
I said, that it had been making great and rapid progress, but that the
papal aggression, in my humble opinion, had dealt a somewhat heavy blow
to both Popery and Puseyism,--that so long as Romanism came begging for
toleration, it had found great favour in the eyes of the liberals; but
when it came claiming to govern, it had scared away many of its former
supporters, who had come to know it better,--and that the Protestant
feeling which the aggression had evoked on the part of the Court, the
Parliament, and the people, had tended to discourage Romanism, and all
kindred or identical creeds. They were delighted to hear this, and said
that they would baptize the fact in the _Gazetta del Popolo_, "the
assassination of the Papacy by Cardinal Wiseman." Their paper, M. Malan
afterwards told me, is published on Sabbaths as well (there are worse
things done on that day in Italy, even by bishops), on which day they
print their weekly sermon. "You won't preach," say they to the priests;
"therefore we will;" and it is in their Sabbath sheet that they make
their bitterest assaults upon the priesthood. They quote largely from
Scripture: not that they wish to establish evangelical truth, of which
they know little, but because they find such quotations to be the most
powerful weapons which they can employ against the Papacy. In truth,
they advertised in this way the Bible to their countrymen, many of whom
had never heard of such a book till then.

I was inexpressibly delighted to find such men in Turin wielding such
influence, and took the liberty of saying at parting, that we in England
had beheld with admiration the noble stand Piedmont had made in behalf
of constitutional government,--that we were watching with intense
interest the future career of their nation,--that we were cherishing the
hope that they would manfully maintain the ground they had taken
up,--and that in England, and especially in Scotland, we felt that the
root of all the despotism of the Continent was the Papacy,--that the way
to strike for liberty was to strike at Rome,--and that till the Papacy
was overthrown, never would the nations of the world be either free or
happy. They assured me that in these sentiments they heartily concurred,
and that they were the very ideas they were endeavouring to propagate.
They gave me, on taking leave, a copy of that morning's paper as a
_souvenir_; and on examining it afterwards, I found that the topic of
its leading article was quite in the vein of our conversation. The great
bulk of the liberal party in Piedmont shared even then the ideas of the
editors of the _Gazetta del Popolo_, and felt that to lay the
foundations of constitutional liberty, they needs must raze those of
Rome. This is a truth; and not only so,--it is the primal truth in the
science of European liberty. This truth only now begins to be
understood on the Continent. It is the main lesson which the re-action
of 1849 has been overruled to teach. All former insurrections have been
against kings and aristocrats: even in 1848 the Italians were willing to
accept the leadership of the Pope. The perfidies and atrocities of which
they have since been the victims have burned the essential tyranny of
the papal system into their minds; and the next insurrection that takes
place will be against the Papacy.

A constitution, a free press, and a public opinion, are but the outward
defences of a divine and immortal principle, which, rooted in the soil
of Piedmont, has outlived a long winter, and is now beginning to bud
afresh, and to send forth goodlier shoots than ever. To this I next
turned. Conducted by M. Malan, I went to the western quarter of Turin,
where, amid the gardens and elegant mansions of the suburbs, workmen
were digging the foundations of what was to be a spacious building. On
this spot the Dominicans in former ages had burned the bodies of the
martyrs; and now the Waldensian temple stands here,--a striking proof,
surely, of the immortality of truth,--to rise, and live, and speak
boldly, on the very spot where she had been bound to a stake, burned,
and extinguished, as the persecutor believed. This church, not the least
elegant in a city abounding with elegant structures, has since been
opened, and is filled every Sabbath with well-nigh a thousand
auditors,--the largest congregation, I will venture to say, in Turin.

In 1851 I could visit the cradle of this movement. It had its first rise
in the labours of Felix Neff, twenty-five years before; but it was not
till the revolution of 1848 that it appeared above ground. Even in 1851,
colportage among the Piedmontese was prohibited, though it was allowable
to print or import the Bible for the use of the Waldenses, and the
Government winked at its sale to their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects. I
was shown in M. Malan's banking office the Bible depot, and was
gratified to find that the sales which were made to applicants only had
during the past year amounted to a thousand copies. Evening meetings
were held every day of the week, in various parts of Turin, at which the
Bible was read, and points of controversy betwixt Christianity and
Romanism eagerly discussed. The Rev. M. Meille, the able editor of the
_Buona Novella_,--a paper then just starting,--informed me that not
fewer than ninety persons had been present at the meeting superintended
by him the night before. These week-day assemblages, as well as the
Sabbath audiences, were of a very miscellaneous character,--Vaudois, who
had come to Turin to be servants, for, prior to the revolution, they
could be nothing else; Piedmontese tradesmen; Swiss, Germans, and
Italian refugees, to whom three pastors ministered,--one in French, one
in German, and a third in the Italian tongue. There were then not fewer
than ten re-unions every week in Turin. The idea, too, had been started
of taking advantage of the workmen's clubs for the propagation of the
gospel. A network of such societies covered northern and central Italy.
The clubs in Turin corresponded with those in Genoa, Alessandria, and
all the principal towns of Piedmont; and these again with similar clubs
in central Italy; and any new theory or doctrine introduced into one
soon made the round of all. The plan adopted was to send evangelical
workmen into these clubs, who were listened to as they propounded the
new plan of justification by faith. The clubs in Turin were first
leavened with the gospel; thence it was extended to Genoa, and gradually
also to central Italy. While the _proletaires_ in France were discussing
the claims of labour, the workmen in Piedmont were canvassing the
doctrines of the New Testament; and hence the difference betwixt the
two countries.

It was now drawing towards sunset, and I purposed enjoying the
twilight,--delicious in all climates, but especially in Italy,--on the
terrace of the College or Monastery of the Capuchins. This monastery
stands on the Collina, a romantic height on the south of Turin, washed
by the Po, with villas and temples on its crest and summits. I took my
way through the noble street that leads southwards, halting at the
book-stalls, and picking out of their heaps of rubbish an Italian copy
of the Catechism of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. The Collina was all in a
blaze; the windows of the Palazzo Regina glittered in the setting beams;
and the dome of the Superga shone like gold. Crossing the Po, I ascended
by the winding avenue of shady acacias, which are planted there to
protect the cowled heads of the fathers from the noonday sun. One of the
monks was winding his way up hill, at a pace which gave me full
opportunity of observing him. A little black cap covered his scalp; his
round bullet-head, which bristled with short, thick-set hairs, joined
on, by a neck of considerably more than the average girth, to shoulders
of Atlantean dimensions. His body was enveloped in a coarse brown
mantle, which descended to his calves, and was gathered round his middle
with a slender white cord. His naked feet were thrust into sandals. The
features of the "religious" were coarse and swollen; and he strode up
hill before me with a gait which would have made a peaceful man, had he
met him on a roadside in Scotland, give him a wide offing. Parties of
soldiers wounded in the late campaign were sauntering in the square of
the monastery, or looking over the low wall at the city beneath. Their
pale and sickly looks formed a striking contrast to the athletic forms
of the full-fed monks. It was inexplicable to me, that the youth of
Sardinia, immature and raw, should be drafted into the army, while such
an amount of thews and sinews as this monastery, and hundreds more,
contained, should be allowed to run to waste, or worse. If but for their
health, the monks should be compelled to fight the next campaign.

The sun went down. Long horizontal shafts of golden light shot through
amidst the Alps; their snows glittered with a dazzling whiteness:
whiteness is a weak term;--it was a brilliant and lustrous glory, like
that of light itself. Anon a crimson blush ran along the chain. It
faded; it came again. A wall of burning peaks, from two to three hundred
miles in length, rose along the horizon. Eve, with her purple shadows,
drew on; and I left the mountains under a sky of vermilion, with Monte
Viso covering with its shadow the honoured dust that sleeps around it,
and pointing with its stony finger to that sky whither the spirits of
the martyred Vaudois have now ascended. It seemed to say, "Come and
see."




CHAPTER IV.

STRUCTURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE VAUDOIS VALLEYS.

     Journey to "Valleys"--Dinner at Pignerolo--Grandeur of
     Scenery--Associations--Bicherasio--Procession of
     _Santissimo_--Connection betwixt the History and the Country of the
     Vaudois--The Three Valleys of Martino, Angrona, and Lucerna--Their
     Arrangement--Strength--Fertility--La Tour--The Castelluzzo--Scenery
     of the Val Lucerna--The Manna of the Waldenses--Populousness of the
     Valleys--Variety of Productions--The Roman Flood and the Vaudois
     Ark.


The Valleys of the Vaudois lie about thirty miles to the south-west of
Turin. The road thither it is scarce possible to miss. Keeping the lofty
and pyramidal summit of Monte Viso in your eye, you go straight on, in a
line parallel with the Alps, along the valley of the Po, which is but a
prolongation of the great plain of Lombardy. On my way down to these
valleys, I observed on the roadside numerous little temples, which the
natives, in true Pagan fashion, had erected to their deities. The niches
of these temples were filled with Madonnas, crucifixes, and saints,
gaunt and grizzly, with unlighted candles stuck before them, or rude
paintings and tinsel baubles hung up as votive offerings. The
signboards--especially those of the wine venders--were exceedingly
religious. They displayed, for the most part, a bizarre painting of the
Virgin, and occasionally of the Pope; and not unfrequently underneath
these personages were a company of heretics, such as those I was going
to visit, sweltering in flames. Were a Protestant vintner to sell his
ale beneath a picture of Catholics burning in hell, I fear we should
never hear the last of it. But I must say, that these pictures seemed
the production of past times. They were one and all sorely faded, as if
their owners were beginning to be somewhat ashamed of them, or lacked
zeal to repair them. The _conducteur_ of the stage had an Italian
translation of Mr Gladstone's well-known pamphlet on Naples in his hand,
which then covered all the book-stalls in Turin, and was read by every
one. This led to a lively discussion on the subject of the Church,
between him and two fellow-travellers, to whom I had been introduced at
starting, as Waldenses. I observed that, although he appeared to come
off but second best in the controversy, he bore all with unruffled
humour, as if not unwilling to be beaten. At length, after a ride of
twenty miles over the plain, in which the husbandman, with plough as old
in its form as the Georgics, was turning up a soil rich, black, and
glossy as the raven's wing, we arrived at Pignerolo, a town on the
borders of the Vaudois land.

The two Vaudois and myself adjourned to the hotel to dine. Even in this
we had an instance of changed times. In this very town of Pignerolo a
law had been in existence, and was not long repealed, forbidding, under
severe penalties, any one to give meat or drink to a Vaudois. The
"Valleys" were only ten miles distant, and we agreed to walk thither on
foot. Indeed, all such spots must be so visited, if one would feel their
full influence. Leaving Pignerolo, the road began to draw into the bosom
of the mountains, and the scenery became grander at every step. On the
right rose the hills of the Vaudois, with knolls glittering with woods
and cottages scattered at their feet. On the left, long reaches of the
Po, meandering through pasturages and vineyards, gleamed out golden in
the western sun. The scenery reminded me much of the Highlands at
Comrie, only it was on a scale of richness and magnificence unknown to
Scotland.

After advancing a few miles, I chanced to turn and look back. The change
the mountains had undergone struck me much. A division of Alps, tall and
cloud-capped, appeared to have broken off from the main army, and to
have come marching into the plain; and while the mountains were closing
in upon us behind, they appeared to be falling back in front, and
arranging themselves into the segment of a vast circle. A magnificent
amphitheatre had risen noiselessly around us. On all sides save the
south, where a reach of the valley was still visible, the eye met only a
lofty wall of mountains, hung in a rich and gorgeous tapestry of bright
green pasturages and shady pine-forests, with the frequent sunlight
gleam of white chalets. The snows of their summits were veiled in masses
of cloud, which the southerly winds were bringing up upon them from the
Mediterranean. I seemed to have entered some stately temple,--a temple
not of mortal workmanship,--which needed no tall shaft, no groined roof,
no silver lamps, no chisel or pencil of artist to beautify it, and no
white-robed priest to make it holy. It had been built by Him whose power
laid the foundations of the earth, and hung the stars in heaven; and it
had been consecrated by sacrifices such as Rome's mitred priests never
offered in aisled cathedral. Nor had it been the scene only of lofty
endurance: it had been the scene also of sweet and holy joys. There the
Vaudois patriarchs, like Enoch, had "walked with God;" there they had
read his Word, and kept his Sabbaths. They had sung his praise by these
silvery brooks, and kneeled in prayer beneath these chestnut trees.
There, too, arose the shout of triumphant battle; and from those valleys
the Vaudois martyrs had gone up, higher than these white peaks, to take
their place in the white-robed and palm-bearing company. Can the spirit,
I asked myself, ever forget its earthly struggles, or the scene on which
they were endured? and may not the very same picture of beauty and
grandeur now before my eye be imprinted eternally on the memory of many
of the blessed in Heaven?

There was silence on plain and mountain,--a hush like that of a
sanctuary, reverent and deep, and broken only by the flow of the torrent
and the sound of voices among the vineyards. I could not fail to observe
that sounds here were more musical than on the plain. This is a
peculiarity belonging to mountainous regions; but I have nowhere seen it
so perceptible as here. Every accent had a fullness and melody of tone,
as if spoken in a whispering gallery. Right in the centre of the circle
formed by the mountains was the entrance of the Vaudois valleys. The
place was due north from where we now were, but we had to make a
considerable detour in order to reach it. A long low hill, rough with
boulders and feathery with woods, lay across the mouth of these valleys;
and we had to go round it on the west, and return along the fertile vale
which divides it from the high Alps, whose straths and gorges form the
dwellings of the Waldenses.

A dream it seemed to be, walking thus within the shadow of the Vaudois
hills. And then, too, what a strange chance was it which had thrown me
into the society of my two Waldensian fellow-travellers! They had met me
on the threshold of their country, as if sent to bid me welcome, and
conduct my steps into a land which the prayers and sufferings of their
forefathers had for ever hallowed. They could not speak a word of my
tongue; and to them my transalpine Italian was not more than
intelligible. Yet, such is the power of a common sympathy, the
conversation did not once flag all the way; and it had reference, of
course, to one subject. I told them that I was not unacquainted with
their glorious history;--that from a child I had known the noble deeds
of their fathers, who had received an equal place in my veneration with
the men of old, "who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought
righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouth of lions. And others
had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and
imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted,
were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and
goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; of whom the world was
not worthy;"--and that, next to the hills of my own land, hallowed, too,
with martyr-blood, I loved the mountains within whose shadow my
wandering steps had now brought me. The eyes of my Vaudois friends
kindled; they were not unconscious, I could see, of their noble lineage;
and they were visibly touched by the circumstance that a stranger from a
distant land--drawn thither by sympathy with the great struggles of
their nation--should come to visit their mountains. Every object in any
way connected with their history, and especially with their
persecutions, was carefully pointed out to me. "There," said they, "is
our frontier church, the first of the Vaudois candles," pointing to a
white edifice that gleamed out upon us amid woods and rocks, on the
summit of a hill, soon after leaving Pignerolo. They mentioned, too,
with peculiar emphasis, the year of the last great massacre of their
brethren. The memory of that transaction, I feel assured, will perish
only with the Vaudois race. Nor can I forget the evident pride with
which, on nearing the valley of Lucerne, they pointed to the giant form
of their Castelluzzo, now looming through the shades of night, and told
me that in the caves of that mighty rock their fathers found shelter,
when the valley beneath was covered with armed men.

Nowhere had I seen more luxuriant vines. They were festooned, too, after
the manner of those I had seen among the Alps; but here the effect was
more beautiful. They were literally stretched out over entire fields in
an unbroken web of boughs. Clothed with luxuriant foliage, they looked
like another azure canopy extended over the soil. There was ample room
beneath for the ploughman and his bullocks. The golden beams, struggling
through the massy foliage, fell in a mellow and finely tinted shower on
the newly ploughed soil. Wheat is said to ripen better beneath the
vine-shade than in the open sun. The season of grapes was shortly past;
but here and there large clusters were still pendent on the bough.

Hitherto, although we had been skirting the Vaudois territory, we had
not set foot upon it. The line which separates it from the rest of
Piedmont touches the small town of Bicherasio, on the western flank of
the low hill I have mentioned; and the roofs of the little town were
already in sight. Passing, on the left, a white-walled mass-house on a
small height, with the priest looking at us from amid the autumn-tinted
vine leaves that shaded the wall, we entered the town of Bicherasio. The
first sight we saw was a procession advancing up the street at
double-quick time. I was at first sorely puzzled what to make of it.
There was an air of mingled fun and gravity on the faces of the crowd;
but the former so greatly predominated, that I took the affair for a
frolic of the youths of Bicherasio. First came a squad of dirty boys,
some of whom carried prayer-books: these were followed by some dozen or
so of young women in their working attire, ranged in line, and carrying
flambeaux. In the centre of the procession was a tall raw-boned priest,
of about twenty-five years of age, with a little box in his hand. His
head was bare, and he wore a long brown dress, bound with a cord round
his middle. A canopy of crimson cloth, sorely soiled and tarnished, was
borne over him by four of the taller lads. He had a flurried and wild
look, as if he had slept out in the woods all night, and had had time
only to shake himself, and put his fingers through his hair, before
being called on to run with his little box. The procession closed, as it
had opened, with a cloud of noisy and dirty urchins hanging on the rear
of the priest and his flambeaux-bearing company. The whole swept past us
at such a rapid pace, that I could only, by way of divining its object,
open large wondering eyes upon it, which the large-boned lad in the
brown cloak noticed, and repaid with a scowl, which broke no bones,
however. "He is carrying the _santissimo_," said my fellow-travellers,
when the procession had passed, "to a dying man." We passed the line,
and set foot on the Vaudois territory. Being now on privileged soil, and
safe from any ebullition which the scant reverence we had paid the
procession of the _santissimo_ might have drawn upon us, we entered a
small albergo, and partook together of a bottle of wine. Our long walk,
and the warmth of the evening, made the refreshment exceedingly
agreeable. By way of commending the qualities of their soil, my
companions remarked, that "this was the vine of the land." I felt
disposed to deal with it as David did with the water of the well of
Bethlehem, for here--

 "The nurture of the peasant's vines
 Hath been the martyr's blood!"

It was dark before I reached La Tour; but one of my
fellow-travellers--the other having left us at San Giovanni--accompanied
me every footstep of the way, having passed his own dwelling two full
miles, to do me this kindness.

I must remind the reader, that this is simply a look in upon the
Vaudois, on my way to Rome. I purpose here no description in full of the
territory of the Vaudois, or of the people of the Vaudois. Their hills
were shrouded in cloud and rain all the while I lived amongst them; and
although my intention was to visit on foot every inch of their country,
and more especially the scenes of their great struggles, I was
compelled, after waiting well nigh a week, to take my departure without
having accomplished this part of my object. Leaving, then, the seeing
and describing these famous valleys to some possibly future day, all I
shall attempt here is to convey some idea of the structural
arrangement--the osteology, if I may call it so--of the Waldensian
territory, and the general condition of the Waldensian people. First, of
their country.

A country and its people can never well be separated. The former, with
silent but ceaseless influence, moulds the genius and habits of the
latter, and determines the character of their history. It marks them out
as fated for slavery or freedom,--degradation or glory. The country of
the Vaudois is the material basis of their history; and the sublime
points of their scenery join in, as it were, with the sublime passages
of their nation. Without such a country, we cannot conceive how the
Vaudois could have escaped extermination. The fertility and grandeur of
their valleys were no chance gifts, but special endowments, having
reference to the mighty moral struggle of which they were the destined
theatre. It is this sentiment that forms the living spirit in the
beautiful lines of Mrs Hemans, entitled, "The Hymn of the Vaudois
Mountaineers:"--

 For the strength of the hills we bless thee.
   Our God, our fathers' God.
 Thou hast made thy children mighty,
   By the touch of the mountain sod.
 Thou hast fixed our ark of refuge
   Where the spoiler's foot ne'er trod;
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee,
   Our God, our fathers' God!

 We are watchers of a beacon
   Whose light must never die;
 We are guardians of an altar
   'Midst the silence of the sky.
 The rocks yield founts of courage,
   Struck forth as by thy rod;
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee,
   Our God, our fathers' God!

 For the dark resounding caverns,
   Where thy still small voice is heard;
 For the strong pines of the forests
   That by thy breath are stirred;
 For the storms on whose free pinions
   Thy spirit walks abroad;
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee,
   Our God, our fathers' God!

 The banner of the chieftain
   Far, far below us waves;
 The war horse of the spearman
   Cannot reach our lofty caves.
 Thy dark clouds wrap the threshold
   Of freedom's last abode;
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee,
   Our God, our fathers' God!

 For the shadow of thy presence
   Round our camp of rock outspread;
 For the stern defiles of battle,
   Bearing record of our dead;
 For the snows and for the torrents,
   For the free heart's burial sod;
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee,
   Our God, our fathers' God!

We read in the Apocalypse, that "the woman fled into the wilderness,
where she had a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a
thousand two hundred and threescore days." "A place prepared"
undoubtedly implies a special arrangement and a special adaptation, in
the future dwelling of the Church, to the mission to be assigned her.
The "wilderness" of the Apocalypse, we are inclined to think, is the
great chain of the Alps; and the "place prepared" in that wilderness, we
are also inclined to think, are the Cottian Alps, and more especially
those valleys in the Cottian Alps which the confessors, known as the
Vaudois, inhabited. Long after Rome had subjugated the plains, she
possessed scarce a foot-breadth among the mountains. These, throughout
well-nigh their entire extent, from where the Simplon road now cuts the
chain, to the sea, were peopled by the professors of the gospel. They
were a Goshen of light in the midst of an Egypt of darkness; and in
these peaceful and sublime solitudes holy men fed their flocks amid the
green pastures and beside the clear waters of evangelical truth. But
persecution came: it waxed hot; and every succeeding century beheld
these confessors fewer in number, and their territory more restricted.
At last all that remained to the Vaudois were only three valleys at the
foot of Monte Viso; and if we examine their structure, we will find them
arranged with special reference to the war the Church was here called to
wage.

The three valleys are the Val Martino, the Val Angrona, and the Val
Lucerna. Nothing could be simpler than their arrangement; at the same
time, nothing could be stronger. The three valleys spread out like a
fan,--radiating, as it were, from the same point, and stretching away in
a winding vista of vineyards, meadows, chestnut groves, dark gorges, and
foaming torrents, to the very summits and glaciers of the Alps. Nearly
at the point of junction of the Val Angrona and the Val Lucerna stands
La Tour, the capital of the valleys. It consists of a single street (for
the few off-shoots are not worth mentioning) of two-storey houses,
whitewashed, and topped with broad eves, which project till they leave
only a narrow strip of sky visible overhead. The town winds up the hill
for a quarter of a mile or so, under the shadow of the famous
Castelluzzo,--a stupendous mountain of rock, which shoots up, erect as a
column on its pedestal, to a height of many thousands of feet, and, in
other days, sheltered, as I have said, in its stony arms, the persecuted
children of the valleys, when the armies of France and Savoy gathered
round its base. How often I watched it, during my stay there, as its
mighty form now became lost, and now flashed forth from the mountain
mists! Over what sad scenes has that rock looked! It has seen the
peaceful La Tour a heap of smoking ruins, and the clear waters of the
Pelice, which meander at its feet, red with the blood of the children of
the valleys. It has heard the wrathful execrations of armed men
ascending where the prayers and praises of the Vaudois were wont to
come, borne on the evening breeze,--scenes unspeakably affecting, but
which, nevertheless, from the principle which they embodied, and the
Christian heroism which they evoked, add dignity to humanity itself.
When we would rebut those universal libels which infidels have written
upon our race, we point to the Vaudois. However corrupt whole nations
and continents may have been, that nature which could produce the
Vaudois must have originally possessed, and be still capable of having
imparted to it, God-like qualities.

The strength of the Vaudois position, as I take it, lies in this, that
the three valleys have their entrance within a comparatively narrow
space. The country of the Vaudois was, in fact, an immense citadel, with
its foundation on the rock, and its top above the clouds, and with but
one gate of entrance. That gate could be easily defended; nay, it _was_
defended. He who built this mighty fortress had thrown up a rampart
before its gate, as if with a special eye to the protection of its
inmates. The long hill of which I have already spoken, which rises to a
height of from four to five hundred feet, lies across the opening of
these valleys, at about a mile's breadth, and serves as a wall of
defence. But even granting that this entrance should be forced, as it
sometimes was, there were ample means within the mountains themselves,
which were but a congeries of fortresses, for prolonging the contest.
The valleys abound with gorges and narrow passages, where one man might
maintain the way against fifty. There were, too, escarpments of rock,
with galleries and caves known only to the Vaudois. Even the mists of
their hills befriended them; veiling them, on some memorable instances,
from the keen pursuit of their foes. Thus, every foot-breadth of their
territory was capable of being contested, and _was_ contested against
the flower of the French and Sardinian armies, led against them in
overwhelming numbers, with a courage which Rome never excelled, and a
patriotism which Greece never equalled.

I found, too, that it was "a good land" which the Lord their God had
given to the Vaudois,--"a land of brooks of water, of fountains and
depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and
barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil, olive
and honey." The same architect who built the fortress had provisioned
it, so to speak, and that in no stinted measure. He who placed
magazines of bread in the clouds, and rained it upon the Israelites
when they journeyed through the desert, had laid up store of corn, and
oil, and wine, in the soil of these valleys; so that the Vaudois, when
their enemies pressed them on the plain, and cut off their supplies from
without, might still enjoy within their own mountain rampart abundance
of all things.

On the first morning after my arrival, I walked out along the Val
Lucerna southward. Flowers and fruit in rich profusion covered every
spot of ground under the eye, from the banks of the stream to the skirts
of the mist that veiled the mountains. The fields, which were covered
with the various cultivation of wheat, maize, orchards, and vineyards,
were fenced with neatly dressed hedge-rows. The vine-stocks were
magnificently large, and their leaves had already acquired the fine
golden yellow which autumn imparts. At a little distance, on a low hill,
deeply embosomed in foliage, was the church of San Giovanni, looking as
brilliantly white as if it had been a piece of marble fresh from the
chisel. Hard by, peeping out amidst fruit-bearing trees, was the village
of Lucerna. On the right rose the mighty wall of the Alps; on the left
the valley opened out into the plain of the Po, bounded by a range of
blue-tinted hills, which stretched away to the south-west, mingling in
the distant horizon with the mightier masses of the Alps. The sun now
broke through the haze; and his rays, falling on the luxuriant beauty of
the valley, and on the more varied but not less rich covering of the
hill-side,--the pasturages, the winding belts of planting, the white
chalets,--lighted up a picture which a painter might have exhibited as a
relic of an unfallen world, or a reminiscence of that garden from which
transgression drove man forth.

After breakfast, I sallied out to explore the valley of Lucerne, at the
entrance of which is placed, as I have said, La Tour, the capital of the
Waldenses. My intention was to trace its windings all the way, past the
village and church of Bobbio, and up the mountains, till it loses itself
amid the snows of their summits,--an expedition which was brought to an
abrupt termination by the black clouds which came rolling up the valley
at noon like the smoke of a furnace, followed by torrents of rain.
Threading my way through the narrow winding street of La Tour, and
skirting the base of the giant Castelluzzo, I emerged upon the open
valley. I was enchanted by its mingled loveliness and grandeur. Its
bottom, which might be from one to two miles in breadth, though looking
narrower, from the titanic character of its mountain-boundary, was, up
to a certain point, one continuous vineyard. The vine there attains a
noble stature, and stretches its arms from side to side of the valley in
rich and lovely festoons, veiling from the great heat of the sun the
golden grain which grows underneath. On either hand the mountains rise
to the sky, not bare and rocky, but glowing with the vine, or shady with
the chestnut, and pouring into the lap of the Vaudois, corn, and wine,
and fruit. Their sides were covered throughout with vineyards,
corn-fields, glades of green pasturages, clumps of forests and
fruit-trees, mansions and chalets, and silvery streamlets, which
meandered amid their terraces, or leaped in flashing light down the
mountain, to join the Pelice at its bottom. Not a foot-breadth was
barren. This teeming luxuriance attested at once the qualities of the
soil and sun, and the industry of the Vaudois.

As I proceeded up the Val Lucerna, the same scene of mingled richness
and magnificence continued. The golden vine still kept its place in the
bottom of the valley, and stretched out its arms in very wantonness, as
if the limits of the Val Lucerna were too small for its exuberant and
generous fruitfulness. The hills gained in height, without losing in
fertility and beauty. They offered to the eye the same picture of
vine-rows, pasturages, chestnut-groves, and chalets, from the torrent at
their bottom, up to the edge of the floating mist that covered their
tops. At times the sun would break in, and add to the variety of lights
which diversified the landscape. For already the hand of autumn had
scattered over the foliage her beautiful tints of all shades, from the
bright green of the pastures, down through the golden yellow of the
vine, to the deep crimson of those trees which are the first to fade.

A farther advance, and the aspect of the Val Lucerna changed slightly.
The vineyards ceased on the level grounds at the bottom of the valley,
and in their place came rich meadow lands, on which herds were grazing.
The hills on the left were still ribbed with the vine. On the right,
along which, at a high level on the hill-side, ran the road, the
chestnut groves became more frequent, and large boulders began
occasionally to be seen. It was here that the rolling mass of cloud, so
fearfully black, that it seemed of denser materials than vapour, which
had followed me up hill, overtook me, and by the deluge of rain which it
let fall, effectually forbade my farther progress.

The same shower which forbade my farther exploration of the Val Lucerna,
arresting me, with cruel interdict, as it seemed, on the very threshold
of a region teeming with grandeur, and encompassed with the halo of
imperishable deeds, threw me, by a sort of compensatory chance, upon the
discovery of another most interesting peculiarity of the Waldensian
territory. The heavy rain compelled me to seek shelter beneath the
boughs of a wide-spread chestnut-tree; and there, for the space of an
hour, I remained perfectly dry, though the big drops were falling all
around. Soon a continuous beating, as if of the fall of substances from
a considerable height on the ground, attracted my attention,--tap, tap,
tap. The sound told me that something was falling bigger and heavier
than the rain-drops; but the long grass prevented me at first seeing
what it was. A slight search, however, showed me that the tree beneath
which I stood was actually letting fall a shower of nuts. These nuts
were large and fully ripened. The breeze became slightly stronger, and
the fruit shower from the trees increased so much, that a soft muffled
sound rang through the whole wood. It was literally raining food. Some
millions of nuts must have fallen that day in the Val Lucerna. I saw the
young peasant girls coming from the chalets and farm-houses, to glean
beneath the boughs; and a short time sufficed to fill their sacks, and
send them back laden with the produce of the chestnut-tree. These nuts
are roasted and eaten as food; and very nutritious food they are. In all
the towns of northern Italy you see persons in the streets roasting them
in braziers over charcoal fires, and selling them to the people, to whom
they form no very inconsiderable part of their food. I have oftener than
once, on a long ride, breakfasted on them, with the help of a cluster of
grapes, or a few apples. This was the manna of the Waldenses. And how
often have the persecuted Vaudois, when driven from their homes, and
compelled to seek refuge in those high altitudes where the vine does not
grow, subsisted for days and weeks upon the produce of the
chestnut-tree! I could not but admire in this the wise arrangement of
Him who had prepared these valleys as the future abode of his Church.
Not only had He taught the earth to yield her corn, and the hills wine,
but even the skies bread. Bread was rained around their caves and
hiding-places, plenteous as the manna of old; and the Vaudois, like the
Israelites, had but to gather and eat.

I came also to the conclusion, that the land which the Lord had given to
the Waldenses was a "large" as well as a "good" land. It is only of late
that the Vaudois have been restricted to the three valleys I have named;
but even taking their country as at present defined, its superficial
area is by no means so inconsiderable as it is apt to be accounted by
one who hears of it as confined to but three valleys. Spread out these
valleys into level plains, and you find that they form a large country.
It is not only the broad bottom of the valley that is cultivated;--the
sides of the hills are clothed up to the very clouds with vineyards and
corn-lands, and are planted with all manner of trees, yielding fruit
after their kind. Where the husbandman is compelled to stop, nature
takes up the task of the cultivator; and then come the chestnut-groves,
with their loads of fruit, and the short sweet grass on which cattle
depasture in summer, and the wild flowers from which the bees elaborate
their honey. Overtopping all are the fields of snow, the great
reservoirs of the springs and rivers which fertilize the country. This
arrangement admitted, moreover, of far greater variety, both of climate
and of produce, than could possibly obtain on the plain. There is an
eternal winter at the summit of these mountains, and an almost perpetual
summer at their feet.

In accordance with this great productiveness, I found the hills of the
Vaudois exceedingly populous. They are alive with men, at least as
compared with the solitude which our Scottish Highlands present. I had
brought thither my notions of a valley taken from the narrow winding and
infertile straths of Scotland, capable of feeding only a few scores of
inhabitants. Here I found that a valley might be a country, and contain
almost a nation in its bosom.

But, not to dwell on other peculiarities, I would remark, that such a
dwelling as this--continually presenting the grandest objects--must have
exerted a marked influence upon the character of the inhabitants. It was
fitted to engender intrepidity of mind, a love of freedom, and an
elevation of thought. It has been remarked that the inhabitants of
mountainous regions are less prone than others to the worship of images.
On the plain all is monotony. Summer and winter, the same landmarks, the
same sky, the same sounds, surround the man. But around the dweller in
the mountains,--and especially such mountains as these,--all is variety
and grandeur. Now the Alps are seen with their sunlight summits and
their shadowless sides; anon they veil their mighty forms in clouds and
tempests. The living machinery of the mist, too, is continually varying
the landscape, now engulphing valleys, now blotting out crags and
mountain peaks, and suspending before the eye a cold and cheerless
curtain of vapour; anon the curtain rises, the mist rolls away, and
green valley and tall mountain flash back again upon you, thrilling and
delighting you anew. What variety and melody of sounds, too, exist among
the hills! The music of the streams, the voices of the peasants, the
herdsman's song, the lowing of the cattle, the hum of the villages. The
winds, with mighty organ-swell, now sweep through their mountain gorges;
and now the thunder utters his awful voice, making the Alps to tremble
and their pines to bow.

Such was the land of the Vaudois; the predestined abode of God's Church
during the long and gloomy period of Anti-christ's reign. It was the ark
in which the one elect family of Christendom was to be preserved during
the flood of error that was to come upon the earth. And I have been the
more minute in the description of its general structure and
arrangements, because all had reference to the high moral end it was
appointed to serve in the economy of Providence.

When of old a flood of waters was to be sent on the world, Noah was
commanded to build an ark of gopher wood for the saving of his house.
God gave him special instructions regarding its length, its breadth, its
height: he was told where to place its door and window, how to arrange
its storeys and rooms, and specially to gather "of all food that is
eaten," that it might be for food for him and those with him. When all
had been done according to the Divine instructions, God shut in Noah,
and the flood came.

So was it once more. A flood was to come upon the earth; but now God
himself prepared the ark in which the chosen family were to be saved. He
laid its foundations in the depths, and built up its wall of rock to the
sky. A door also made He for the ark, with lower, second, and third
storeys. It was beautiful as strong. Corn, wine, and oil were laid up in
store within it. All being ready, God said to his persecuted ones in the
early Church, "Come, thou and all thy house, into the ark." He gave them
the Bible to be a light to them during the darkness, and shut them in.
The flood came. Century after century the waters of Papal superstition
continued to prevail upon the earth. At length all the high hills that
were under the whole heaven were covered, and all flesh died, save the
little company in the Vaudois ark.




CHAPTER V.

STATE AND PROSPECTS OF THE VAUDOIS CHURCH.

     Dawn of the Reformation--Waldensian Territory a Portion of
     Italy--Two-fold Mission of Italy--Origin of the Vaudois--Evidence
     of Romanist Historians--Evidence of their own Historians--Evidence
     arising from the Noble Leycon from their Geographical
     Position--Grandeur of the Vaudois Annals--Their Martyr Age--Their
     Missionary Efforts--Present
     Condition--Population--Churches--Schools--Stipends--Students--Social
     and Moral Superiority--Political and Social Disabilities--The Year
     1848 their Exodus--Their Mission--A Sabbath in the Vaudois
     Sanctuary--Anecdote--Lesson Taught by their History.


How often during the long night must the Vaudois have looked from their
mountain asylum upon a world engulphed in error, with the mingled wonder
and dismay with which we may imagine the antediluvian fathers gazing
from the window of their ark upon the bosom of the shoreless flood! What
an appalling and mysterious dispensation! The fountains of the great
deep had a second time been broken up, and each successive century saw
the waters rising. Would Christianity ever re-appear? Or had the Church
completed her triumphs, and finished her course? And was time to close
upon a world shrouded in darkness, with nought but this feeble beacon
burning amid the Alps? Such were the questions which must often have
pressed upon the minds of the Vaudois.

Like Noah, too, they sent forth, from time to time, messengers from
their ark, to go hither and thither, and see if yet there remained
anywhere, in any part of the earth, any worshippers of the true God.
They returned to their mountain hold, with the sorrowful tidings that
nowhere had they found any remnant of the true Church, and that the
whole world wondered after the beast. The Vaudois, however, had power
given them to maintain their testimony. In the midst of universal
apostacy, and in the face of the most terrible persecutions, they bore
witness against Rome. And ever as that Church added another error to her
creed, the Vaudois added another article to their testimony; and in this
way Romish idolatry and gospel truth were developed by equal stages, and
an adequate testimony was maintained all through that gloomy period. The
stars of the ecclesiastical firmament fell unto the earth, like the
untimely figs of the fig-tree; but the lamp of the Alps went not out.
The Vaudois, not unconscious of their sacred office, watched their
heaven-kindled beacon with the vigilance of men inspired by the hope
that it would yet attract the eyes of the world. At length--thrice
welcome sight!--the watch-fires of the German reformers, kindled at
their own, began to streak the horizon. They knew that the hour of
darkness had passed, and that the time was near when the Church would
leave her asylum, and go forth to sow the fields of the world with the
immortal seed of truth.

We must be permitted to remark here, that the fact that the Waldensian
territory is really a part of Italy, and that the Vaudois, or Valdesi,
or People of the Valleys (for all three signify the same thing), are
strictly an Italian people, invests ITALY with a new and interesting
light. In all ages, Pagan as well as Christian, Italy has been the seat
of a twofold influence,--the one destructive, the other regenerative. In
classic times, Italy sent forth armies to subjugate the world, and
letters to enlighten it. Since the Christian era, her mission has been
of the same mixed character. She has been at once the seat of idolatry
and the asylum of Christianity. Her idolatry is of a grosser and more
perfected type than was the worship of Baal of old; and her Christianity
possesses a more spiritual character, and a more powerfully operative
genius, than did the institute of Moses. We ought, then, to think of
Italy as the land of the martyr as well as of the persecutor,--as not
only the land whence our Popery has come, which has cost us so many
martyrs of whom we are proud, and has caused the loss of so many souls
which we mourn,--but also as the fountain of that blessed light which
broke mildly on the world in the preaching of John Huss, and more
powerfully, a century afterwards, in the reformation of the sixteenth
century. Though there was no audible voice, and no visible miracle, the
Waldenses were as really chosen to be the witnesses of God during the
long night of papal idolatry, as were the Jews to be his witnesses
during the night of pagan idolatry. They are sprung, according to the
more credible historical accounts, from the unfallen Church of Rome;
they are the direct lineal descendants of the primitive Christians of
Italy; they never bowed the knee to the modern Baal; their mountain
sanctuary has remained unpolluted by idolatrous rites; and if they were
called to affix to their testimony the seal of a cruel martyrdom, they
did not fall till they had scattered over the various countries of
Europe the seed of a future harvest. Their death was a martyrdom endured
in behalf of Christendom; and scarcely was it accomplished till they
were raised to life again, in the appearance of numerous churches both
north and south of the Alps. Why is it that all persons and systems in
this world of ours must die in order to enter into life? We enter into
spiritual life by the death of our old nature; we enter into eternal
life by the death of the body; and Christianity, too, that she might
enter into the immortality promised her on earth, had to die. The words
of our Lord, spoken in reference to his own death, are true also in
reference to the martyrdom of the Waldensian Church:--"Verily verily, I
say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it
abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

The first question touching this extraordinary people respects their
origin. When did they come into being, and of what stock are they
sprung? This question forces itself with singular power upon the mind of
the traveller, who, after traversing cities and countries covered with
darkness palpable as that of Egypt of old, and seeing nought around him
but image-worship, lights unexpectedly, in the midst of these mountains,
upon a little community, enjoying the knowledge of the true God, and
worshipping Him after the scriptural and spiritual manner of prophets
and apostles of old. He naturally seeks for an explanation of a fact so
extraordinary. Who kindled that solitary lamp? Their enemies have
striven to represent them as dissenters from Rome of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries; and it is a common error even among ourselves to
speak of them as the followers of Peter Waldo, the pious merchant of
Lyons, and to date their rise from the year 1160. We cannot here go into
the controversy; suffice it to say, that historical documents exist
which show that both the Albigenses and the Waldenses were known long
before Peter Waldo was heard of. Their own traditions and ancient
manuscripts speak of them as having maintained the same doctrine "from
time immemorial, in continued descent from father to son, even from the
times of the apostles." The Nobla Leycon,--the Confession of Faith of
the Vaudois Church, of the date of 1100,--claims on their behalf the
same ancient origin; Ecbert, a writer who flourished in 1160--the year
of Peter Waldo--speaks of them as "perverters," who had existed during
many ages; and Reinerus, the inquisitor, who lived a century afterwards,
calls them the most dangerous of all sects, because the most ancient;
"for some say," adds he, "that it has continued to flourish since the
time of Sylvester; others, from the time of the apostles." This last is
a singular corroboration of the authenticity of the Nobla Leycon, which
refers to the corruptions which began under Sylvester as the cause of
their separation from the communion of the Church of Rome. Rorenco, the
grand prior of St Roch, who was commissioned to make enquiries
concerning them, after hinting that possibly they were detached from the
Church by Claude, the good Bishop of Turin, in the eighth century, says
"that they were not a new sect in the ninth and tenth centuries."
Campian the Jesuit says of them, that they were reputed to be "more
ancient than the Roman Church." Nor is it without great weight, as the
historian Leger observes, that not one of the Dukes of Savoy or their
ministers ever offered the slightest contradiction to the oft-reiterated
assertions of the Vaudois, when petitioning for liberty of conscience,
"We are descendants," said they, "of those who, from father to son, have
preserved entire the apostolical faith in the valleys which we now
occupy."[1] We have no doubt that, were the ecclesiastical archives of
Lombardy, especially those of Turin and Milan, carefully searched,
documents would be found which would place beyond all doubt what the
scattered proofs we have referred to render all but a certainty.

The historical evidence for the antiquity of the Vaudois Church is
greatly strengthened by a consideration of the geographical position of
"the Valleys." They lie on what anciently was the great high-road
between Italy and France. There existed a frequent intercourse betwixt
the Churches of the two countries; pastors and private members were
continually going and returning; and what so likely to follow this
intercourse as the evangelization of these valleys? There is a tradition
extant, that the Apostle Paul visited them, in his journey from Rome to
Spain. Be this as it may, one can scarce doubt that the feet of Irenaeus,
and of other early fathers, trod the territory of the Vaudois, and
preached the gospel by the waters of the Pelice, and under the rocks and
chestnut trees of Bobbio. Indeed, we can scarce err in fixing the first
rise of the Vaudois Churches at even an earlier period,--that of
apostolic times. So soon as the Church began to be wasted by
persecution, the remote corners of Italy were sought as an asylum; and
from the days of Nero the primitive Christians may have begun to gather
round those mountains to which the ark of God was ultimately removed,
and amid which it so long dwelt.

   "I go up to the ancient hills,
     Where chains may never be;
   Where leap in joy the torrent rills;
 Where man may worship God alone, and free.

   There shall an altar and a camp
     Impregnably arise;
   There shall be lit a quenchless lamp,
 To shine unwavering through the open skies.

   And song shall 'midst the rocks be heard,
     And fearless prayer ascend;
   While, thrilling to God's holy Word,
 The mountain-pines in adoration bend.

   And there the burning heart no more
     Its deep thought shall suppress;
   But the long-buried truth shall pour
 Free currents thence, amidst the wilderness."

How could a small body of peasants among the mountains have discovered
the errors of Rome, and have thrown off her yoke, at a time when the
whole of Europe received the one and bowed to the other? This could not
have happened in the natural order of things. Above all, if they did not
arise till the twelfth or thirteenth century, how came they to frame so
elaborate and full a testimony as the _Noble Lesson_ against Rome? A
Church that has a creed must have a history. Nor was it in a year, or
even in a single age, that they could have compiled such a creed. It
could acquire form and substance only in the course of centuries,--the
Vaudois adding article to article, as Rome added error to error. We can
have no reasonable doubt, then, that in the Vaudois community we have a
relic of the primitive Church. Compared with them, the house of Savoy,
which ruled so long and rigorously over them, is but of yesterday. They
are more ancient than the Roman Church itself. They have come down to us
from the world before the papal flood, bearing in their heaven-built and
heaven-guarded ark the sacred oracles; and now they stand before us as a
witness to the historic truth of Christianity, and a living copy, in
doctrine, in government, and in manners, of the Church of the Apostles.

Fain would we tell at length the heroic story of the Vaudois. We use no
exaggerated speech,--no rhetorical flourish,--but speak advisedly, when
we say, that their history, take it all in all, is the brightest, the
purest, the most heroic, in the annals of the world. Their martyr-age
lasted five centuries; and we know of nothing, whether we regard the
sacredness of the cause, or the undaunted valour, the pure patriotism,
and the lofty faith, in which the Vaudois maintained it, that can be
compared with their glorious struggle. This is an age of hero-worship.
Let us go to the mountains of the Waldenses: there we will find heroes
"unsung by poet, by senators unpraised," yet of such gigantic stature,
that the proudest champions of ancient Rome are dwarfed in their
presence. It was no transient flash of patriotism and valour that broke
forth on the soil of the Vaudois: that country saw sixteen generations
of heroes, and five centuries of heroic deeds. Men came from pruning
their vines or tending their flocks, to do feats of arms which Greece
never equalled, and which throw into the shade the proudest exploits of
Rome. The Jews maintained the worship of the true God in their country
for many ages, and often gained glorious victories; but the Jews were a
nation; they possessed an ample territory, rich in resources; they were
trained to war, moreover, and marshalled and led on by skilful and
courageous chiefs. But the Waldenses were a primitive and simple people;
they had neither king nor leader; their only sovereign was Jehovah;
their only guides were their _Barbes_. The struggle under the Maccabees
was a noble one; but it attained not the grandeur of that of the
Vaudois. It was short in comparison; nor do its single exploits, brave
as they were, rise to the same surpassing pitch of heroism. When read
after the story of the Vaudois, the annals of Greece and Rome even,
fruitful though they be in deeds of heroism, appear cold and tame. In
short, we know of no other instance in the world in which a great and
sacred object has been prosecuted from father to son for such a length
of time, with a patriotism so pure, a courage so unshrinking, a
devotion so entire, and amidst such a multitude of sacrifices,
sufferings, and woes, as in the case of the Vaudois. The incentives to
courage which have stimulated others to brave death were wanting in
their case. If they triumphed, they had no admiring circus to welcome
them with shouts, and crown them with laurel; and if they fell, they
knew that there awaited their ashes no marble tomb, and that no lay of
poet would ever embalm their memory. They looked to a greater Judge for
their reward. This was the source of that patriotism, the purest the
world has ever seen, and of that valour, the noblest of which the annals
of mankind make mention.

Innocent III., who hid under a sanctimonious guise the boundless
ambition and quenchless malignity of Lucifer, was the first to blow the
trumpet of extermination against the poor Vaudois. And from the middle
of the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century they suffered
not fewer than thirty persecutions. During that long period they could
not calculate upon a single year's immunity from invasion and slaughter.
From the days of Innocent their history becomes one long harrowing tale
of papal plots, interdicts, excommunications, of royal proscriptions and
perfidies, of attack, of plunder, of rapine, of massacre, and of death
in every conceivable and horrible way,--by the sword, by fire, and by
unutterable tortures and torments. The Waldenses had no alternative but
to submit to these, or deny their Saviour. Yet, driven to arms,--ever
their last resource,--they waxed valiant in fight, and put to flight the
armies of the aliens. They taught their enemies that the battle was not
to the strong. When the cloud gathered round their hills, they removed
their wives and little ones to some rock-girt valley, to the caverns of
which they had taken the precaution of removing their corn and oil, and
even their baking ovens; and there, though perhaps they did not muster
more than a thousand fighting men in all, they waited, with calm
confidence in God, the onset of their foes. In these encounters,
sustained by Heaven, they performed prodigies of valour. The combined
armies of France and Piedmont recoiled from their shock. Their invaders
were almost invariably overthrown, sometimes even annihilated; and their
sovereigns, the Dukes of Savoy, on whose memory there rests the
indelible blot of having pursued this loyal, industrious, and virtuous
people with ceaseless and incredible injustice, cruelty, treachery, and
perfidy, finding that they could not subdue them, were glad to offer
them terms of peace, and grant them new guarantees of the quiet
possession of their ancient territory. Thus an invisible omnipotent arm
was ever extended over the Vaudois and their land, delivering them
miraculously in times of danger, and preserving them as a peculiar
people, that by their instrumentality Jehovah might accomplish his
designs of mercy towards the world.

Nor were the Waldenses content simply to maintain their faith. Even when
fighting for existence, they recognised their obligations as a
missionary Church, and strove to diffuse over the surrounding countries
the light that burned amid their own mountains. Who has not heard of the
Pra de la Torre, in the valley of Angrona? This is a beautiful little
meadow, encircled with a barrier of tremendous mountains, and watered by
a torrent, which, flowing from an Alpine summit, _La Sella Vecchia_,
descends with echoing noise through the dark gorges and shining dells of
the deep and romantic valley. This was the inner sanctuary of the
Vaudois. Here their _Barbes_ sat; here was their school of the prophets;
and from this spot were sent forth their pastors and missionaries into
France, Germany, and Britain, as well as into their own valleys. It was
a native and missionary of these valleys, Gualtero Lollard, which gave
his name, in the fourteenth century, to the Lollards of England, whose
doctrines were the day-spring of the Reformation in our own country. The
zeal of the Vaudois was seen in the devices they fell upon to distribute
the Bible, and along with that a knowledge of the gospel. Colporteurs
travelled as pedlars; and, after displaying their laces and jewels, they
drew forth, and offered for sale, or as a gift, a gem of yet greater
value. In this way the Word of God found entrance alike into cottage and
baronial castle. It is a supposed scene of this kind which the following
lines depict:--

 Oh! lady fair, these silks of mine
   Are beautiful and rare,--
 The richest web of the Indian loom
   Which beauty's self might wear;
 And these pearls are pure and mild to behold,
   And with radiant light they vie:
 I have brought them with me a weary way;--
   Will my gentle lady buy?

       *       *       *       *       *

 Oh! lady fair, I have got a gem,
   Which a purer lustre flings
 Than the diamond flash of the jewell'd crown
   On the lofty brow of kings:
 A wonderful pearl of exceeding price,
   Whose virtue shall not decay,--
 Whose light shall be as a spell to thee,
   And a blessing on the way!

       *       *       *       *       *

 The cloud went off from the pilgrim's brow,
   As a small and meagre book,
 Unchased by gold or diamond gem,
   From his folding robe he took.
 Here, lady fair, is the pearl of price;--
   May it prove as such to thee!
 Nay, keep thy gold--I ask it not;
   _For the Word of God is free!_

       *       *       *       *       *

 And she hath left the old gray halls,
   Where an evil faith hath power,
 And the courtly knights of her father's train,
   And the maidens of her bower;
 And she hath gone to the Vaudois vale,
   By lordly feet untrod,
 Where the poor and needy of earth are rich
   In the perfect love of God!

But, turning from this inviting theme, to which volumes only could do
justice, let us lift the curtain, and look at this simple, heroic
people, as they appear now, after the "great tribulation" of five
centuries. The Protestant population of "the Valleys" is 22,000 and
upwards. They have fifteen churches and parishes, and twenty-five
persons in all engaged in the work of the ministry. This was their state
in 1851. Since then, two other parishes, Pignerolo and Turin, have been
added. To each church a school is attached, with numerous sub-schools.
It is to the honour of the Vaudois that they led the way in that system
of general education which is extending itself, more or less, in every
State in Europe. Repeated edicts of the Waldensian Table rendered it
imperative upon the community to provide means of religious and
elementary education for all the children capable of receiving it. They
have a college at La Tour, fifteen primary schools, and upwards of one
hundred secondary schools. The whole Waldensian youth is at school
during winter. In their congregations, the sacrament of the Supper is
dispensed four times in the year; and it is rare that a young person
fails to become a communicant after arriving at the proper age. There
are two preaching days at every dispensation of the ordinance; and the
collections made on these occasions are devoted to the poor. There was
at that time no plate at the church-door on ordinary Sabbaths; and no
contributions were made by the people for the support of the gospel. I
presume this error is rectified now, however; for it was then in
contemplation to adopt the plan in use in Scotland, and elsewhere, of a
penny-a-week subscription. The stipends of the Waldensian pastors are
paid from funds contributed by England and Holland. Each receives
fifteen hundred francs yearly,--about sixty-two pounds sterling. Their
incomes are supplemented by a small glebe, which is attached to each
_living_. The contribution for the schools and the hospitals is
compulsory. In their college, in 1851, there were seventy-five students.
Some were studying for the medical profession, some for commercial
pursuits; others were qualifying as teachers, and some few as pastors.

The Waldenses inhabit their hills, much as the Jews did their Palestine.
Each man lives on his ancestral acres; and his farm or vineyard is not
too large to be cultivated by himself and his family. There are amongst
them no titles of honour, and scarce any distinctions of rank and
circumstances. They are a nation of vine-dressers, husbandmen, and
shepherds. In their habits they are frugal and simple. Their peaceful
deportment and industrial virtues have won the admiration, and extorted
the acknowledgments, even of their enemies. In the cultivation of their
fields, in the breed and management of their cattle and their flocks, in
the arrangements of their dairies, and in the cleanliness of their
cabins, they far excel the rest of the Piedmontese. To enlarge their
territory, they have had recourse to the same device with the Jews of
old; and the Vaudois mountains, like the Judaean hills, exhibit in many
places terraces, rising in a continuous series up the hill-side, sown
with grain or planted with the vine. Every span of earth is cultivated.

The Vaudois excel the rest of the Piedmontese in point of morals, just
as much as they excel them in point of intelligence and industry. All
who have visited their abodes, and studied their character, admit, that
they are incomparably the most moral community on the Continent of
Europe. When a Vaudois commits a crime,--a rare occurrence,--the whole
valleys mourn, and every family feels as if a cloud rested on its own
reputation. No one can pass a day among them without remarking the
greater decorum of their deportment, and the greater kindliness and
civility of their address. I do not mean to say that, either in respect
of intelligence or piety, they are equal to the natives of our own
highly favoured Scotland. They are surrounded on all sides by
degradation and darkness; they have just escaped from ages of
proscription; books are few among their mountains; and they have
suffered, too, from the inroads of French infidelity; an age of
Moderatism has passed over them, as over ourselves; and from these evils
they have not yet completely recovered. Still, with all these drawbacks,
they are immensely superior to any other community abroad; and, in
simplicity of heart, and purity of life, present us with no feeble
transcript of the primitive Church, of which they are the
representatives.

The lotus-flower is said to lift its head above the muddy current of the
Nile at the precise moment of sunrise. It was indicative, perhaps, of
the dawning of a new day upon the Vaudois and Italy, that that Church
experienced lately a revival. That revival was almost immediately
followed by the boon of political and social emancipation, and by a new
and enlarged sphere of spiritual action. The year 1848 opened the doors
of their ancient prison, and called them to go forth and evangelize.
Formerly, all attempts to extend themselves beyond their mountain abode,
and to mingle with the nations around them, were uniformly followed by
disaster. The time was not come; and the integrity of their faith, and
the accomplishment of their high mission, would have been perilled by
their leaving their asylum. But when the revolutions of 1848 threw the
north of Italy open to their action, then came forth the decree of
Charles Albert, declaring the Vaudois free subjects of Piedmont, and the
Church of "the Valleys" a free Church. The disabilities under which the
Waldenses groaned up till this very recent period may well astonish us,
now that we look back to them. Up till 1848 the Waldensian was
proscribed, in both his civil and religious rights, beyond the limits of
his own valleys. Out of his special territory he dared not possess a
foot-breadth of land; and, if obliged to sell his paternal fields to a
stranger, he could not buy them back again. He was shut out from the
colleges of his country; he could not practise as a member of any of the
learned professions; every avenue to distinction and wealth was closed
against him,--his only crime being his religion. He could not marry but
with one of his own people; he could not build a sanctuary,--he could
not even bury his dead,--beyond the limits of "the Valleys." The
children were often taken away and trained in the idolatrous rites of
Romanism, and the unhappy parents had no remedy. They were slandered,
too, to their sovereigns, as men marked by hideous deformities; and
great was the surprise of Charles Albert to find, on a visit he paid to
the Valleys but a little before granting their emancipation, that the
Vaudois were not the monsters he had been taught to believe. I have been
told, that to this very day they carry their dead to the grave in open
coffins, to give ocular demonstration of the falsehood of the calumnies
propagated by their enemies, that the corpses of these heretics are
sometimes consumed by invisible flames, or carried off by evil spirits
before burial. But now all these disabilities are at an end. The year
1848 swept them all away; and a bulwark of constitutional feeling and
action has since grown up around the Vaudois, cutting off the prospect
of these disabilities ever being re-imposed, unless, indeed, Austria and
France should combine to put down the Piedmontese constitution. But
hitherto that nation which gave religious liberty to the people of God
has had its own political liberties wonderfully protected.

The year 1848, then, was the "exodus" of the Vaudois. And why were they
brought out of their house of bondage? Surely they have yet a work to
do. Their great mission, which was to bear witness for the truth during
the domination of Antichrist, they nobly fulfilled; but are they to have
no part in diffusing over the plains of Italy that light which they so
long and so carefully preserved? This undoubtedly is their mission. All
the leadings of Providence declare it to be so. They were visited with
revival, brought from their Alpine asylum, had full liberty of action
given them, all at the moment that Italy had begun to be open to the
gospel. They are the native evangelists of their own country: let them
remember their own and their fathers' sufferings, and avenge themselves
on Rome, not with the sword, but the Bible. And let British Christians
aid them in this great work, assured that the door to Rome and Italy
lies through the valleys of the Vaudois.

The last day of my sojourn in the Waldensian territory was Sabbath the
19th of October, and I worshipped with that people,--rare enjoyment!--in
their sanctuary. The day broke amid high winds and torrents of rain. The
clouds now veiled, now revealed, the hill-side, with its variously
tinted foliage, and its white torrents dashing headlong to the vale. The
mighty form of the Castelluzzo was seen struggling through mists; and
high above the winds rose the roar of the swollen waters. At a quarter
before ten, the church-bell, heard through the pauses of the storm, came
pealing from the heights. The old church of La Tour,--the new and more
elegant fabric which stands in the village was not then opened,--is
sweetly placed at the base of the Castelluzzo, embowered amid vines and
fragrant foliage, and commanding a noble view of the plains of Piedmont.
Even amidst the driving mists and showers its beauty could not fail to
be felt. The scenery was--

 "A blending of all beauties, streams and dells,
 Fruits, foliage, crag, wood, corn-field, mountain, vine."

General Beckwith did me the honour to call at my hotel, and I walked
with him to the church. Outside the building--for worship had not
commenced--were numerous little conversational parties; and around it
lay the Vaudois dead, sleeping beneath the shadow of their giant rock,
and free, at last and for ever, from the oppressor. They had found
another "exodus" from their house of bondage than that which King
Charles Albert had granted their living descendants. We entered, and
found the schoolmaster reading the liturgy. This service consists of two
chapters of the Bible, with at times the reflections of Ostervald
annexed; during it the congregation came dropping in,--the husbandmen
and herdsmen of the Val Lucerna,--and took their seats. In a little the
elders entered in a body, and seated themselves round a table in front
of the pulpit. Next came the pastor, habited, like our Scotch ministers,
in gown and bands, when the regent instantly ceased. The pastor began
the public worship by giving out a psalm. He next offered a prayer,
read the ten commandments, and then preached. The sermon was an
half-hour's length precisely, and was recited, not read; for I was told
the Waldenses have a strong dislike to read discourses. The minister of
La Tour is an old man, and was trained under an order of things
unfavourable to that higher standard of pulpit qualification, and that
fuller manifestation of evangelical and spiritual feeling, which, I am
glad to say, characterize all the younger Waldensian pastors. The people
listened with great attention to his scriptural discourse; but I was
sorry to observe that there were few Bibles among them,--a circumstance
that may be explained perhaps with reference to the state of the
weather, and the long distance which many of them have to travel. The
storm had the effect at least of thinning the audience, and bringing it
down from about 800, its usual number, to 500 or so. The church was an
oblong building, with the pulpit on one of the side walls, and a deep
gallery, resting on thick, heavy pillars, on the other. The men and
women occupied separate places. With this exception, I saw nothing to
remind me that I was out of Scotland. One may find exactly such another
congregation in almost any part of our Scottish Highlands, with this
difference, that the complexions of the Vaudois are darker than that of
our Highlanders. They have the same hardy, weather-beaten features, and
the same robust frames. I saw many venerable and some noble heads among
them,--men who would face the storms of the Alps for the lost wanderer
of the flock, and the edicts and soldiers of Rome for their home-steads
and altars. There they sat, worshipping their fathers' God, amid their
fathers' mountains,--victorious over twelve centuries of proscription
and persecution, and holding their sanctuaries and their hills in
defiance of Europe. In the evening Professor Malan preached in the
schoolhouse of Margarita, a small village on the ascent from La Tour to
Castelluzzo. He discoursed with great unction, and the crowded audience
hung upon his lips.

On my way back to my hotel, Professor Malan narrated to me a touching
anecdote, which I must here put down. Monsignor Mazzarella was a judge
in one of the High Courts of Sicily; but when the atrocities of the
re-action began, he refused to be a tool of the Government, and resigned
his office. He came to Turin, like numerous other political refugees;
and in one of the re-unions of the workmen, he learned the doctrine of
"justification by faith." Soon thereafter, that is, in the summer of
1851, he and a few companions paid a visit to the Vaudois Church. A
public meeting, over which Professor Malan presided, was held at La
Tour, to welcome M. Mazzarella and his friends. Professor Malan
expressed his delight at seeing them in "the Valleys;" welcomed them as
the first fruits of Italy; and, in the name of the Vaudois Church, gave
them the right hand of fellowship. The reply of the converted exiles was
truly affecting, and moved the assembly to tears. Rising up, Mazzarella
said, "We are the children of your persecutors; but the sons have other
hearts than the fathers. We have renounced the religion of the
oppressor, and embraced that of the Vaudois, whom our ancestors so long
persecuted. You have been the people of God, the confessors of the
truth; and here before you this night I confess the sin of my fathers in
putting your fathers to death." Mazzarella at this day is an evangelist
in Genoa. In his speech we hear the first utterance of repentant
Christendom. "The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come
bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves
down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee the city of the
Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel."

I had now been well nigh a week in "the Valleys." A dream long and
fondly cherished had become a reality; and next morning I started for
Turin.

The eventful history of the Vaudois teaches one lesson at least, which
we Protestants would do well to ponder at this hour. The measures of the
Church of Rome are quick, summary, and on a scale commensurate with the
danger. Her motto is instant, unpitying, unsparing, utter extermination
of all that oppose her. Twice over has the human mind revolted against
her authority, and twice over has she met that revolt, not with
argument, but with the sword. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the
Waldensian movement had grown to such a head, that the dominion of Rome
was in imminent jeopardy. Had she delayed, the Reformation would have
been anticipated by some centuries. She did not delay. She cried for
help to the warriors of France and Savoy; and, by the help of some
hundred thousand soldiers, she put down the Waldensian movement as an
aggressive power. The next revolt against her authority was the
Reformation. Here again she boldly confronted the danger. She grasped
her old weapon; and, by the help of the sword and the Jesuits, she put
down that movement in one half the countries of Europe, and greatly
weakened it in the other half.

We are now witnessing a third revolt against her authority; and it
remains to be seen how the Church of Rome will deal with it. Will she
now adopt half measures? Will she now falter and draw back,--she that
never before feared enemy or spared foe? Will that Church that quenched
in blood the Protestantism of the Waldenses,--that put down the
Reformation in France by one terrible blow,--that by the help of
dungeons and racks banished the light from Italy and Spain,--will that
Church, we ask, spare the Protestantism of Britain? What folly and
infatuation to think that she will! What matters it that, in rooting out
British Protestantism, she should shed oceans of blood, and sound the
death-knell of a whole nation? These are but dust in the balance to her:
her dominion must be maintained at all costs. Her motto still is,--let
Rome triumph though the heavens should fall. But she tells us that she
repents. Repents, does she? She has grown pitiful, and tender hearted,
has she? She fears blood now, and starts at the cry of murdered nations!
Ah! she repents; but it is her clemency, not her crimes, of which she
repents. She repents that she did not make one wide St Bartholomew of
Europe; that when she planted the stake for Huss, and Cranmer, and
Wishart, she did not plant a million of stakes. Then the Reformation
would not have been. Yes, she repents, deeply, bitterly repents, her
fatal blunder. But it will not be her fault, the _Univers_ assures us,
if she have to repent such a blunder a second time. Let us hear the
priests speaking through one of the country papers in France:--"The wars
of religion were not deplorable catastrophes; these great butcheries
renewed the life of France. The incense cast away the smell of the
corpses, and psalms covered the noise of angry shouts. Holy water washed
away all the bloody stains. With the Inquisition, the most beautiful
weather succeeded to storms, and the fires that burned the heretics
shone like supernatural torches." The hand that wrote these lines would
more gladly light the faggot. Let only the present regime in France last
a few years, and the priests will again rejoice in seeing the colour of
heretic blood. There cannot and will not be peace in the world, they
say, till for every Protestant a gibbet or stake has been erected, and
not one man left to carry tidings to posterity that ever there was such
a thing as Protestantism on the earth.




CHAPTER VI.

FROM TURIN TO NOVARA.

     At Turin begins Pilgrimage to Rome--Description of
     _Diligence_--Dora Susina--Plain of Lombardy--Its Boundaries--Nursed
     by the Alps--Lessons taught thereby--The Colina--Inauspicious
     Sunset--The Road to Milan--The Po--Its Source--Tributaries and
     Function--Evening--Home remembered in a Foreign Land--Inference
     thence regarding Futurity--Thunderstorm among the
     Alps--Thunderstorm on the Plain of Lombardy--Grandeur of the
     Lightning--Enter Novara at Day-break.


I had two objects in view in crossing the Alps. The first was to visit
the land of the Vaudois; the second was to see Rome. The first of these
objects I had accomplished in part; the second remained to be
undertaken.

This plain of Piedmont was the richest my foot had ever trodden; but
often did I turn my eyes wistfully towards the Apennines, which, like a
veil, shut out the Italy of the Romans and the City of the Seven Hills.
At Turin, which the Po so sweetly waters, and over which the snow-clad
hills of the Swiss fling their noble shadows, properly begins my journey
to Rome.

I started in the _diligence_ for Milan about four of the afternoon of
the 21st October. Did you ever, reader, set foot in a _diligence_? It is
a castle mounted on wheels, rising storey upon storey to a fearful
height. It is roomy withal, and has apartments enough within its
leathern walls for well-nigh the population of a village. There is the
glass _coupe_ in front, the drawing-room of the house. There is the
_interieur_, which you may compare, if you please, to the dining-room,
only there you do not dine; and there is the _rotundo_, a sort of cabin
attached, the limbo of the establishment, in which you may find
half-a-dozen unhappy wights for days and nights doing penance. Then, in
the very fore-front of this moving castle--hung in mid air, as it
were--there is the _banquette_. It is the roomiest of all, and has,
moreover, spacious untenanted spaces behind, where you may stow away
your luggage; and, being the loftiest compartment, it commands the
country you may happen to traverse. On this account the _banquette_ was
the place I almost always selected, unless when so unfortunate as to
find it already bespoke. Half-hours are of no value in the south of the
Alps, and a very liberal allowance of this commodity was made us before
starting. At last, however, the formidable process of loading was
completed, and away we went, rumbling heavily over the streets of Turin
to the crack of the postilion's whip and the music of the horses' bells.

On emerging from the buildings of the city, we crossed the fine bridge
over the Dora Susina, an Alpine stream, which attains almost the dignity
of a river, and which, swollen by recent rains, was hurrying on to join
the Po. Our course now lay almost due east, over the great plain of
Lombardy; and there are few rides in any part of the world which can
bring the traveller such a succession of varied, rich, and sublime
sights. The plain itself, level as the floor of one's library, and
wearing a rich carpeting, green at all seasons, of fruits and verdure,
ran out till it touched the horizon. On the north rose the Alps, a
magnificent wall, of stature so stupendous, that they seemed to prop
the heavens. On the south were the gentler Apennines. Between these two
magnificent barriers, this goodly plain--of which I know not if the
earth contains its equal--stretches away till it terminates in the blue
line of the Adriatic. On its ample bosom is many a celebrated spot, many
an interesting object. It has several princely cities, in which art is
cultivated, and trade flourishes to all the extent which Austrian
fetters permit. Its old historic towns are numerous. The hoar of eld is
upon them. It has rags of castles and fortresses which literally have
braved for a thousand years the battle and the breeze. It has spots
where empires have been lost and won, and where the dead of the tented
field sleep their dreamless sleep. It has fine old cathedrals, with
their antique carvings, their recumbent statues of old-world bishops,
and their Scripture pieces by various masters, sorely faded; and here
and there, above the rich foliage of its various woods, like the tall
mast of a ship at sea, is seen the handsome and lofty campanile, so
peculiar to the architecture of Lombardy.

The great Alps look down with most benignant aspect upon this plain.
They seem quite proud of it, and nurse it with the care and tenderness
of a parent. Noble rivers not a few--the Ticino, the Adige, and streams
and torrents without number--do they send down, to keep its beauty ever
fresh. These streams cross and re-cross its green bosom in all
directions, forming by their interlacings a curious network of silvery
lines, like the bright threads in the mine, or the white veins in the
porphyritic slab. Observe this little flower, with its bright petals,
growing by the wayside. That humble flower owes its beauty to yonder
chain. From the frozen summits of the Alps come the waters at which it
daily drinks. And when the dog-days come, and a fiery sun looks down
upon the plain from a sky that is cloudless for months together, and
when every leaf droops, and even the tall poplar seems to bow itself
beneath the intolerable heat, the mountains, pitying the panting plain,
send down their cool breezes to revive it. Would that from the lofty
pinnacles of rank and talent there descended upon the lower levels of
society an influence equally wholesome and beneficent! Were there more
streams from the mountain, there would be more fruits upon the plain.
The world would not be the scorched desert which it is, in which the
vipers of envy and discontent hiss and sting; but a fragrant garden,
full of the fruits of social order and of moral principle. Truly, man
might learn many a useful lesson from the earth on which he treads: the
great, to dispense freely out of their abundance,--for by dispensing
they but multiply their blessings, as Mont Blanc, by sending down its
streams to enrich the plain, feeds those snows which are its glory and
crown,--and the humble, the lesson of a thankful reciprocation. This
plain does not drink in the waters of the Alps, and sullenly refuse to
own its obligations. Like a duteous child, it brings its yearly offering
to the foot of Mont Blanc,--fields of golden wheat, countless vines with
their blood-red clusters, fruits of every name, and flowers of every
hue;--such is the noble tribute which this plain, year by year, lays at
the feet of its august parent. There is but one drawback to its
prosperity. Two sombre shadows fall gloomily athwart its surface. These
are Austria and Rome.

The plain of Lombardy is so broad, and the road to Milan by Novara is so
much on a level with its general surface, that the eye catches the
distant Apennines only at the more elevated points. The screen which
here, and for miles after leaving Turin, shuts out the view of the
Apennines, is the Colina. The Colina is a range of lovely hills, which
rise to a height of rather more than 1200 feet, and run eastward along
the plain a few miles south of the Milan road. Soft and rich in their
covering, picturesque in their forms, and indented with numerous dells,
they look like miniature Alps set down on the plain, nearly equidistant
from the great white hills on the north and the purple peaks on the
south. The sun was near his setting; and his level rays, passing through
fields of vapour,--presages of storm,--and shorn of the fiery brilliancy
which is wont at eve to set these hills on a blaze, fell softly upon the
dome of the Superga, and lighted up the white villas which stud the
mountain by hundreds and hundreds throughout its whole extent. Vividly
relieved by the deep azure of the vineyards, and looking, from their
distance, no bigger than single blocks, these villas reminded one of a
shower of marble, freshly fallen, and glittering in pearly whiteness in
the setting rays.

The road, which to me had an almost sacred character, being the
beginning of my journey to Rome, was a straight line,--straight as the
arrow's flight,--between fields of rich meadow land, and rows of elms
and poplars, which ran on and on, till, in the far distance, they
appeared to converge to a point. It was a broad, macadamized,
substantial highway, of about thirty feet in width, having a white line
of curb-stones placed eight or ten paces apart; outside of which was an
excellent pathway for foot passengers. On the left rose the Alps, calm
and majestic, clothed in the purple shadows of evening.

I have mentioned the Po as flowing past Turin. This stream is doubtless
the relic of that mighty flood which covered, at some former period, the
vast space between the Alps and the Apennines, from the Graian and
Cottian chains on the west, to the shores of the Adriatic on the east.
As the waters drained off, this central channel alone was left, to
receive and convey to the sea the innumerable torrents which are formed
by the springs and snows of the mountains. The noble river thus formed
is called the Po,--the pride of Italy, and the king of its streams. The
Greeks, who clothed it with fable, and drowned Phaeton in its stream,
called it Eridanus. Its Roman appellation was Padus, which in course of
time resolved itself into its present name, the Po. Unlike the Nile,
which rolls in solemn and solitary majesty through Egypt without
permitting one solitary rill to mingle with its flood, the Po welcomes
every tributary, and accepts its help in discharging its great function
of giving drink to every flower, and tree, and field, and city, in broad
Lombardy. It receives, in its course through Piedmont alone, not fewer
than fifty-three torrents and rivers; and in depth and grandeur of
stream it is not unworthy of the praises which the Greek and Roman poets
lavished upon it. The cradle of this noble stream is placed in the
centre of the ancient territory of the Vaudois, whose most beautiful
mountain, Monte Viso, is its nursing parent. A fountain of crystal
clearness, placed half-way up this hill, is its source. Thence it goes
forth to water Piedmont and Venetian-Lombardy, and to mingle at last
with the clear wave of the Adriatic,--emblem of those living waters
which were to go forth from this same land into all quarters of Europe.

The sun had now set; and I marked that this evening no golden beams
among the mountains, no burning peaks, attended his departure. He went
in silent sadness, like a friend quitting a circle which he fears may
before his return be visited with calamity. With him departed the glory
of the scene. The vine-clad Colina, erst sparkling with villas, put out
its lights, and resolved itself into a dark bank, which leaned,
cloud-like, against the sky. The stupendous white piles on the left drew
a thin night vapour around them, and retired from the scene, like some
mighty spirit gathering his robe about him, and leaving the earth,
which his presence had enlightened, dark and solitary. The plain lay
before us a sombre expanse, in which all objects--towns, spires, and
forests--were fast blending into one darkly-shaded and undefined
picture. Dwellers in _diligences_, as well as dwellers in hotels, must
sleep if they can; but the hour for "turning in" had scarce arrived, and
meanwhile, I remember, my thoughts took strongly a homeward direction.

With these, of course, I shall not trouble the reader; only I must be
permitted to mention a misconception into which I had fallen, in
connection with my journey, and into which it is possible others may
fall in similar circumstances. One is apt to imagine, before starting,
that should he reach such a country as Italy, he will there feel as if
home was very distant, and the events of his former life far removed in
point of time. He thinks that a journey across the Alps has somehow a
talismanic power to change him. He crosses the Alps, but finds that he
is the same man still. Home has come with him: the friendships, the
joys, the sorrows, of his past existence are as near as ever; nay, far
nearer, for now he is alone with them; and though he goes southward, and
kingdoms and mountain-chains are between him and his native country, he
cannot feel that he is a foot-breadth more distant than ever. He moves
about through strange lands in a shroud of home feelings and
recollections.

How wretched, thought I, the man whom guilt chases from his country! He
flies to distant lands in the hope of shaking off the remembrance of his
crime. He finds that, go where he will, the spectre dogs his steps. In
Paris, in Milan, in Rome, the grizzly form starts up before him. He must
change, not his country, but his heart--himself--before he can shake off
his companion.

May not the same principle be applicable, in some extent, to our
passage from earth into the world beyond? When at home in Scotland, I
had thought of Italy as a distant country; but now that I was in Italy,
Scotland seemed very near--much nearer than Italy had done when in
Scotland. We who are dwellers on earth think of the state beyond as very
remote; but once there, may we not feel as if earth was in close
proximity to us,--as if, in fact, the two states were divided by but a
narrow gulph? Certain it is that the passage across it will work in us
no change; and, like the stranger in a foreign country, we shall enter
with an eternal shroud of joys and sorrows, springing out of the deeds
and events of our present existence.

I found that if in this region the day had its beauty, the night had its
sublimity and terrors. I had years before become familiar with the
phenomena of thunder-storms among the Alps; and one who has seen
lightning only in the sombre sky of Britain can scarce imagine its
intense brilliancy in these more southern latitudes. With us it breaks
with a red fiery flicker; there it bursts upon you like the sun, and
pours a flood of noonday light over earth and sky. One evening, in
particular, I shall never forget, on which I saw this phenomenon in
circumstances highly favourable to its finest effect. I had walked out
from Geneva to pass a few hours with the Tronchin family, whose mansion
stands on the southern shores of the lake. It was evening; and the deep
rolling of the thunder gave us warning that a storm had come on. We
stepped out upon the lawn to enjoy the spectacle; for in the vicinity of
the Alps, whose summits attract the fluid, the lightning is seldom
dangerous to life. All was dark as midnight; not even the front of the
mansion could we see. In a moment the flash came; and then it was
day,--boundless, glorious day. All nature was set before us as if under
the light of a cloudless sun. The lawn, the blue lake, the distant
Alpine summits, the landscape around, with its pines, villas, and
vineyards, all leaped out of the womb of night, stood in vivid intense
splendour before the eye, and in a twinkling was again gone. This
amazing transition from midnight to noonday, and from noonday to
midnight, was repeated again and again. I was now to witness the
sublimities of a thunder-storm on the plain of Lombardy.

Right before us, on the far-off horizon, gleams of light began to shoot
along the sky. The play of the electric fluid was so rapid and
incessant, as to resemble rather the continuous flow of light from its
fountain, than the fitful flashes of lightning. At times these gleams
would mantle the sky with all the soft beauty of moonlight, and at
others they would dart angrily and luridly athwart the horizon. Soon the
storm assumed a grander form. A ball of fire would suddenly blaze forth,
in livid, fiery brilliancy; and, remaining motionless, as it were, for
an instant, would then shoot out lateral streams or rays, coloured
sometimes like the rainbow, and quivering and fluttering like the
outspread wings of eagles. One's imagination could almost conceive of it
as being a real bird, the ball answering to the body, while the flashes
flung out from it resembled the wings, which were of so vast a spread,
that they touched the Apennines on the one hand, and the Alps on the
other.

The storm took yet another form, and one that increased the sublimity of
the scene, by adding a slight feeling of uneasiness to the admiration
with which we had contemplated it so far. A cloud of pitchy darkness
rose in the south, and crossed the plain, shedding deepest night in its
track, and shooting its fires downward on the earth as it came onwards.
It passed right over our heads, enveloping us for the while (like some
mighty archer, with quiver full of arrows) in a shower of flaming
missiles. The interval between the flashes was brief,--so very brief,
that we were scarcely sensible of any interval at all. There was not
more than four seconds between them. The light was full and strong, as
if myriads and myriads of bude lights had been kindled on the summits of
the Apennines. In short, it was day while it lasted, and every object
was visible, as if made so by the light of the sun. The horses which
dragged our vehicle along the road,--the postilion with the red facings
on his dress,--the meadows and mulberry woods which bordered our
path,--the road itself, stretching away and away for miles, with its
rows of tall poplars, and its white curb-stones, dotted with waggons and
couriers, and a few foot-passengers,--and the red autumnal leaves, as
they fell in swirling showers in the gust,--all were visible. Indeed, we
may be said to have performed several miles of our journey under broad
daylight, excepting that these sudden revelations of the face of nature
alternated with moments of profoundest night. At length the big
rain-drops came rattling to the earth; and, to protect ourselves, we
drew the thick leathern curtain of the _banquette_, buttoning it tight
down all around. It kept out the rain, but not the lightning. The seams
and openings of the covering seemed glowing lines of fire, as if the
_diligence_ had been literally engulphed in an ocean of living flame.
The whole heavens were in a roar. The Apennines called to the Alps; the
Alps shouted to the Apennines; and the plain between quaked and trembled
at the awful voice. At length the storm passed away to the north, and
found its final goal amid the mountains, where for hours afterwards the
thunder continued to growl, and the lightnings to sport.

Order being now restored among the elements, we endeavoured to snatch
an hour's sleep. It was but a dreamy sort of slumber, which failed to
bestow entire unconsciousness to external objects. Faded towns and tall
campaniles seemed to pass by in a ghost-like procession, which was
interrupted only by the arrival of the _diligence_ at the various
stages, where we had to endure long, weary halts. So passed the night.
At the first dawn we entered Novara. It lay, spread out on the dusky
plain, an irregular patch of black, with the clear, silvery crescent of
a moon hanging above it.




CHAPTER VII.

THE INTRODUCTION.

     Novara--Examination of Passports--Dawn--Monks prefer Dim Light to
     Clear--Battle of Novara, and its Results--The
     Ticino--Croats--Austrian Frontier and Dogana--Examination of Books
     and Baggage--Grandeur of the Alps from this Point--Contrast betwixt
     the Rivers and the Governments of Italy--Proof from thence of the
     Fall--Providence "from seeming Evil educing Good"--Rich but
     Monotonous Scenery of the Plain--Youth of the Alps, and Decay of
     the Lombard nations--The only Remedy--An Expelled Democrat--First
     View of Milan.


Novara, of course, like all decent towns in Lombardy and elsewhere, at
four in the morning was a-bed, and our heavy vehicle, as its harsh
echoes broke roughly on the silent streets, sounded strangely loud. We
were driven right into a courtyard, to have our passports examined. We
had left Turin the evening before, with a clean bill of political
health, duly certified by three legations,--the Sardinian, the English,
and the Austrian; and in so short a journey--not to speak of the flood
and fire we had passed through--it was scarce possible that we could
have contracted fresh pollution. We were examined anew, however, lest
the plague-spot should have broken out upon us. All was found right, and
we were let go to a neighbouring restaurant, where we swallowed a cup of
coffee,--our only meal betwixt Turin and Milan. After a full hour's
halt, we re-mounted the _diligence_, and set forth.

On emerging from the streets of the city, I found the east in the glow
of dawn. Still, and pure, and calm broke the light; and under its ray
the rich plain awoke into beauty, forgetful of the fiery bolts which had
smitten it, and the darkness and destruction which had so lately passed
across it. "Hail, holy light!" exclaims the bard of "Paradise." Yes,
light is holy. It is undefiled and pure, as when "God saw the light that
it was good." Man has ravaged the earth and reddened the seas; but light
has escaped his contaminating touch, and is still as God made it,
unless, indeed, when man imprisons it within the stained glass of the
cathedral, and then obligingly helps its dimness by lighting a score or
so of tapers. Did no monk ever think of putting a stained window in the
east, and compelling the sun to ogle the world through spectacles? "The
light is good," said He who created it, as He saw it darting its first
pure beam across creation. Not so, says the Puseyite; it is not good
unless it is coloured.

I looked with interest on the plains around Novara; for there, albeit no
trace of the bloody fray remains, the army of Charles Albert in 1848 met
the host of Radetzky; and there the fate of the campaign for Italian
independence was decided. The battle which was fought on these plains
led to the destruction of King Charles Albert, but not to the
destruction of his kingdom of Sardinia,--though why Radetzky did not
follow up his victory by a march on Turin, is to this hour a mystery.
Nay, though it sounds a little paradoxical, it is probable that this
battle, by destroying the king, saved the kingdom. Had Charles Albert
survived till the re-action set in 1849 and 1850, there is too much
reason to fear, from his antecedents, that he would have thrown himself
into the current with the rest of the Italian rulers; and so Sardinia
would have missed the path of constitutional liberty and material
development which it has since, under King Victor Emanuel, so happily
pursued. Had that happened, the horizon of Italy, dark as it is at this
hour, would have been still darker, and the peninsula, from the Alps to
Sicily, would not have contained a single spot where the hunted friends
of liberty could have found asylum.

We soon approached the Ticino, the boundary between Sardinia and
Austrian Lombardy. The Ticino is a majestic river, here spanned by one
of the finest bridges in Italy. It contains eleven arches; is of the
granite of Mount Torfano; and, like almost all the great modern works in
Italy, was commenced by Napoleon, though finished only after his fall.
Here, then, was the gate of Austria; and seated at that gate I saw three
Croats,--fit keepers of Austrian order.

I was not ignorant of the hand these men had had in the suppression of
the revolution of 1848, and of the ruthless tragedies they were said to
have enacted in Milan and other cities of Lombardy; and I rode up to
them in the eager desire of scrutinizing their features, and reading
there the signs of that ferocity which had given them such wide-spread
but evil renown. They sat basking themselves on a bench in front of the
Dogana, with their muskets and bayonets glittering in the sun. They were
lads of about eighteen, of decidedly low stature, of square build, and
strongly muscular. They looked in capital condition, and gave every sign
that the air of Lombardy agreed with them, and that they had had their
own share at least of its corn and wine. They wore blue caps, gray
duffle greatcoats like those used by our Highlanders, light blue
pantaloons fitting closely their thick short leg, and boots which rose
above the ankle, and laced in front. The prevailing expression on their
broad swarthy faces was not ferocity, but stolidity. Their eyes were
dull, and contrasted strikingly with the dark fiery glances of the
children of the land. They seemed men of appetites rather than passions;
and, if guilty of cruel deeds, were likely to be so from the dull, cold,
unreflecting ferocity of the bull-dog, rather than from the warm
impulsive instincts of the nobler animals. In stature and feature they
were very much the barbarian, and were admirably fitted for being what
they were,--the tools of the despot. No wonder that the _ideal_ Italian
abominates the _Croat_.

The Dogana! So soon! 'Twas but a few miles on the other side of the
Ticino that we passed through this ordeal. But perhaps the river,
glorious as it looks, flowing from the democratic hills of the Swiss,
may have infected us with political pravity; so here again we must
undergo the search, and that not a mere _pro forma_ one. The _diligence_
vomits forth, at all its mouths, trunks, carpet-bags, and packages,
encased, some in velvet, some in fir-deals, and some in brown paper. The
multifarious heap was carried into the Dogana, and its various articles
unroped, unlocked, and their contents scattered about. One might have
thought that a great fair was about to begin, or that a great Industrial
Exhibition was to be opened on the banks of the Ticino. The hunt was
especially for books,--bad books, which England will perversely print,
and Englishmen perversely read. My little stock was collected, bound
together with a cord, and sent in to the chief douanier, who sat,
Radamanthus-like, in an inner apartment, to judge books, papers, and
persons. There is nothing there, thought I, to which even an Austrian
official can take exception. Soon I was summoned to follow my little
library. The man examined the collection volume by volume. At last he
lighted on a number of the _Gazetta del Popolo_,--the same which I have
already mentioned as given me by the editors in Turin. This, thought I,
will prove the dead fly in my box of ointment. The sheet was opened and
examined. "Have you," said the official, "any more?" I could reply with
a clear conscience that I had not. To my surprise, the paper was
returned to me. He next took up my note-book. Now, said I to myself,
this is a worse scrape than the other. What a blockhead I am not to have
put the book into my pocket; for, except in extreme cases, the
traveller's person is never searched. The man opened the thin volume,
and found it inscribed with mysterious and strange characters. It was
written in short-hand. He turned over the leaves; on every page the same
unreadable signs met the eye. He held it by the top, and next by the
bottom: it was equally inscrutable either way. He shut it, and examined
its exterior, but there was nothing on the outside to afford a key to
the mystic characters within. He then turned to me for an explanation of
the suspicious little book. Affecting all the unconcern I could, I told
him that it contained only a few commonplace jottings of my journey. He
opened the book; took one other leisurely survey of it; then looked at
me, and back again at the book; and, after a considerable pause, big
with the fate of my book, he made me a bland bow, and handed me the
volume. I was equally polite on my part, inly resolving, that
henceforward Austrian douanier should not lay finger on my note-book.

The halt here was one of from two to three hours, which were spent in
unlading the _diligence_, opening and locking trunks,--for in Austria
nothing is done in a hurry, save the trial and execution of Mazzinists.
But the long halt was nothing to me: I could not possibly lose time, and
I could scarce be stopped at the wrong place; and certainly the bridge
of the Ticino is the very spot one would select for such a halt, were
the matter left in one's own choice. It commands the finest assemblage
of grand objects, in a ride abounding in magnificent objects throughout.
Having been pronounced, in passport phrase, "good to enter
Austria,"--for my carpet-bag was clean, though doubtless my mind was
foul with all sorts of notions which, in the latitude of Austria, are
rankly heretical,--(and, by the way, of what use is it to search trunks,
and leave breasts unexplored? Here is an imperfection in the system,
which I wonder the Jesuits don't correct)--having, I say, had the
Croat-guarded gates of Austria opened to me till I should find it
convenient to enter, I retraced the few paces which divided the Dogana
from the bridge, and stood above the rolling floods of the Ticino.

Refreshing it verily was to turn from the petty tyrannies of an Austrian
custom-house, to the free, joyous, and glorious face of nature. Before
me were the Alps, just shaking the cold night mists from their shaggy
pine-clad sides, as might a lion the dew-drops from his mane. Here rose
Monte Rosa in a robe of never-fading glory and beauty; and there stood
Mont Blanc, with his diadem of dazzling snows. The giant had planted his
feet deep amid rolling hills, covered with villages, and pine-forests,
and rich pastures. Anywhere else these would have been mountains; but,
dwarfed by the majestic form in whose presence they stood, they looked
like small eminences, scattered gracefully at his base, as pebbles at
the foot of some lofty pile. On his breast floated the fleecy clouds of
morn, while his summit rose high above these clouds, and stood, in the
calm of the firmament, a stupendous pile of ice and snow. Never had I
seen the Alps to such advantage. The level plain ran quite up to them,
and allowed the eye to take their full height from their flower-girt
base to their icy summit. Hundreds and hundreds of peaks ran along the
sky, conical, serrated, needle-shaped, jagged, some flaming like the
ruby in the morning ray, others dazzlingly white as the alabaster.

As I bent over the parapet, gazing on the flood that rolled beneath, I
could not help contrasting the bounty of nature with the oppression of
man. Here had this river been flowing through the long centuries,
dispensing its blessings without stop or grudge. Day and night, summer
and winter, it had rolled gladsomely onwards, bringing verdure to the
field, fruitage to the bough, and plenty to the peasant's cot. Now it
laved the flower on its brink,--now it fed the umbrageous sycamore and
the tall poplar on the plain,--and now it sent off a crystal streamlet
to meander through corn-field and meadow-land. It exacted nothing of man
for the blessings it so unweariedly dispensed. It gave all freely.
Whether, said I to myself, does Italy owe most to its rivers or to its
Governments? Its rivers give it corn and wine: its Governments give it
chains and prisons. They load the patient Lombard with burdens that
press him down into toil and poverty; or they lead him away to shed his
blood and lay his bones in a foreign soil. Why is it that all the
functions of nature are beneficent? Even the storms that rage around
Mont Blanc, the ice of its eternal winter, yield only good. Here they
come, a river of crystal water, decking with living green this
far-spreading plain. But the institutions of man are not so. From their
frozen summits have too oft, alas! descended, not the peaceful river,
but the thundering avalanche, burying in irretrievable ruin, man, with
his labours and hopes. I suspect, however, that this is a narrow as well
as a sombre philosophy. Doubtless the great fact of the Fall is written
on the face of life. Nevertheless, we have a strong belief that the
mighty schemes of Providence, like the arrangements of external nature,
will all in the end become dispensers of good; that those evil systems
which have burdened the earth, like those mountains of ice and snow
which rise on its surface, have their uses, though as yet we stand too
near them, and too much within the sphere of their tempests and their
avalanches, fully to comprehend these uses. We must descend into the
low-lying plains of the future, and contemplate them afar off; and then
the glaciers and tempests of these moral Mont Blancs may dissolve into
tender showers and crystal rivers, which will fructify and gladden the
world.

In a few minutes I must leave the bridge of the Ticino. Could I, when
far away,--in the seclusion of my own library, for instance,--bid the
Alps rise before me, in stupendous magnificence, as now? I turned round,
and fixed my gaze on the tamer objects of the plain; then back again to
the mountains; but every time I did so, I felt the scene as new. Its
glory burst on me as if seen for the first time. Alas! thought I, if
this majestic image has so faded in the interval of a few moments, what
will it be years after? A scene like this, it is true, can never be
forgotten; but it is but a dwarfed picture that lives in the memory; and
it is well, perhaps, it should be so; for were one to see always the
Alps, with what eyes would one look upon the tamer though still romantic
hills of his own country! And we may extend the principle. There are
times when great truths--eternal verities--flash upon the soul in Alpine
magnitude. It is a new world that discloses itself, and we are thrilled
by its glory; but for the effective discharge of ordinary duties, it is
better, perhaps, that these stupendous objects should be seen "as
through a glass darkly," though still seen.

All too soon was the _diligence_ ready to start. From the bridge of the
Ticino the scenery was decidedly tamer. The Alps fell more into the
background, and with their white peaks disappeared the chief glory of
the scene. The plain was so level, and its woods of mulberry and walnut
so luxuriant, that little could be seen save the broad road, with its
white lines of curb-stones running on and on, and losing itself in the
deep foliage of the plain. Its windings and turnings, though coming only
at an interval of many miles, were a pleasant relief from the sameness
of the journey. Occasionally side views of great fertility opened upon
us. There were the small farms of the Lombard; and there was the tall
Lombard himself, striding across his fields. If the farms were small,
amends was made by the largeness of the farm-house. There was no great
air of comfort about it, however. It wanted its little garden, and its
over-arching vine-bough, which one sees in the happier cantons of
Switzerland; and the furrowed and care-shaded face of the owner bespoke
greater acquaintance with hard labour than with the dainties which the
bounteous earth so freely yields. The Lombard plants, but another eats.
We could see, too, how extensively and thoroughly irrigated was the
plain. Numerous canals, brim-full of water, the gift of the Alps,
traversed it in all directions; and by means of a system of sluices and
aqueducts the surrounding fields could be flooded at pleasure. The plain
enjoys thus the elements of a boundless fertility, and is the seat of an
almost eternal summer.

 Hic Ver perpetuum, atque alienis mensibus Aestas.

But the little towns we passed looked so very old and tottering, and the
inhabitants, too, appeared as much oppressed with years or cares as the
heavy dilapidated architecture amid which they dwelt, and out of which
they crept as we passed by, that one's heart grew sad. How evident was
it that the immortal spirit was withered, and that the land, despite its
images of grandeur and sublimity, nourished a stricken race! The Alps
were still young, but the men that lived within their shadow had grown
very old. Their ears had too long been familiar with the clank of
chains, and their hearts were too sad to catch up the utterances of
freedom which came from their mountains. The human soul was dying, and
will die, unless new fire from a celestial source descend to rekindle
it. Architecture, music, new constitutions, the ever glorious face of
nature itself, will not prevent the approaching death of the continental
nations. There is but one book in the world that can do it,--the Book of
Life. Unfold its pages, and a more blessed and glorious effulgence than
that which lights up the Alps at sunrise will break upon the nations;
but, alas! this cannot be so long as the Jesuit and the Croat are there.
We saw, too, on our journey, other things that did not tend to put us
into better spirits. As we approached Milan, we met a couple of
gensdarmes leading away a poor foot-sore revolutionist to the frontier.
Ah! said I inly, could the Jesuits look into my breast, they would find
there ideas more dangerous to their power, in all probability, than
those that this man entertains; and yet, while he is expelled, I am
admitted. No thanks to them, however. I rode onwards. League followed
league of the richest but the most unvaried scenery. Campanile and
hamlet came and went: still Milan came not. I strained my eyes in the
direction in which I expected its roofs and towers to appear, but all to
no purpose. At length there rose over the green woods that covered the
plain, as if evoked by enchantment, a vision of surpassing beauty. I
gazed entranced. The lovely creation before me was white as the Alpine
snows, and shot up in a glorious cluster of towers, spires, and
pinnacles, which flashed back the splendours of the mid-day sun. It
looked as if it had sprung from under the chisel but yesterday. Indeed,
one could hardly believe that human hands had fashioned so fair a
structure. It was so delicate, and graceful, and aerial, and unsullied,
that I thought of the city which burst upon the pilgrims when they had
got over the river, or that which a prophet saw descending out of
heaven. Milan, hid in rich woods, was before me, and this was its
renowned Cathedral.




CHAPTER VIII.

CITY AND PEOPLE OF MILAN.

     The Barrier--Beautiful Aspect of the City--Hotel Royale--History of
     Milan--Dreariness of its Streets--Decay of Art--Decay of Trade--The
     Cathedral--Beauty, not Sublimity, its Characteristic--Its Exterior
     described--The Piazza of the Cathedral--Austrian Cannon--Pamphlets
     on Purgatory--Punch--Punch _versus_ the Priest--Church and State in
     Italy--Austrian Oppression--Confiscation of Estates in
     Lombardy--Forced Loans--Niebuhr's Idea that the Dark Ages are
     returning.


It was an hour past noon when the _diligence_, with its polyglot
freight, drove up to the harrier. There gathered round the vehicle a
white cloud of Austrian uniforms, and straightway every compartment of
the carriage bristled with a forest of hands holding passports. These
the men-at-arms received; and, making them hastily up into a bundle, and
tying them with a piece of cord, they despatched them by a special
messenger to the Prefect; so that hardly had we entered the Porta
Vercellina, till our arrival was known at head-quarters. There was
handed at the same time to each passenger a printed paper, in which the
same notification was four times repeated,--first in Italian, next in
French, then in German, and lastly in English,--enjoining the holder,
under certain penalties, to present himself within a given number of
hours at the Police Office.

It was under these conditions,--a pilgrim from a far land,--that I
appeared at the gates of Milan. The passport detention seemed less an
annoyance here than I had ever felt it before. The beauteous city,
sitting so tranquilly amidst the sublimest scenery, seemed to have
something of a celestial character about it. It looked so resplendent,
partly by reason of the materials of which it is built, and partly by
reason of the sun that shone upon it as an Italian sun only can shine,
that none but pure men, I felt, might dwell here, and none but pure men
might enter at its gates. There were white sentinels at its portals;
rows of white houses formed its exterior; and in the middle of the city,
floating above it,--for it seemed to float rather than to rest on
foundations,--was its snow-white temple,--a place too holy almost, as it
seemed, for human worship and human worshippers; and then the city had
for battlements a glorious wall, white as alabaster, which rose to the
clouds. Everything conspired to cheat the visitor into the belief that
he had come at last to an abode where every hurtful passion was hushed,
and where Peace had fixed her chosen seat.

"All right," shouted the passport official: the gensdarmes, who guarded
the path with naked bayonet, stepped aside; and the quick, sharp crack
of the postilion's whip set the horses a-moving. We skirted the spacious
esplanade, and saw in the distance the beauteous form of the Arco della
Pace. We had not gone far till the drum's roll struck upon the ear, and
a long glittering line of Austrian bayonets was seen moving across the
esplanade. It was evident that the time had not yet come to Milan, all
glorious as she seemed, when men "shall learn war no more." We plunged
into a series of narrow streets, which open on the Mercato Vecchio. We
crossed the Corso, and came out upon the broad promenade that traverses
Milan from the square of the Duomo to the Porta Orientale. We soon found
ourselves at the _diligence_ office; and there, our little colony of
various nations breaking up, I bade adieu to the good vehicle which had
carried me from Turin, and took my way to the Hotel Royale, in the
Contrada dei tre Re.

At the first summons of the porter's bell the gate opened. On entering,
I found myself in what had been one of the palaces of Milan when the
city was in its best days. But the Austrian eagle had scared the native
princes and nobles of the Queen of Lombardy, who were gone, and had left
their streets to be trodden by the Croat, and their palaces to be
tenanted by the wayfarer. The buildings of the hotel formed a spacious
quadrangle, three storeys high, with a finely paved court in the centre.
I was conducted up stairs to my bed-room, which, though by no means
large, and plainly furnished, presented the luxury of extreme
cleanliness, with its beautifully polished wooden floor, and its
delicately white napery and curtains. The saloon on the ground-floor
opened sweetly into a little garden, with its fountain, its bit of
rock-work, and its gods and nymphs of stone. The apartment had a
peculiarly comfortable air at breakfast-time. The hissing urn, flanked
by the tea-caddy; the rich brown coffee, the delicious butter, and the
not less delicious bread, the produce of the plains around, not
unnaturally white, as with us, but golden, like the wheat when it waves
in the autumnal sun; and the guests, mostly English, which assembled
morning after morning,--made the return of this hour very pleasant.
Establishing myself at the Albergo Reale for this and the two following
days, I sallied out, to wander everywhere and see everything.

Milan is of ancient days; and few cities have seen greater changes of
fortune. In the reign of Diocletian and Maximilian it became the capital
of the western empire, and was filled with the temples, baths, theatres,
and other monuments which usually adorn royal cities. The tempest which
Attila, in the middle of the fifth century, conducted across the Alps,
fell upon it, and swept it away. Scarce a vestige of the Roman Milan has
come down to our day. A second Milan was founded, but only to fall, in
its turn, before the arms of Frederick Barbarossa. There was a strong
vitality in its site, however; and a third Milan,--the Milan of the
present day,--arose. This city is a huge collection of churches and
barracks, cafes and convents, theatres and palaces, traversed by narrow
streets, ranged mostly in concentric circles round its grand central
building, the Duomo. The streets, however, that lead to its various
ports, are spacious thoroughfares, adorned with noble and elegant
mansions. Such is the arrangement of the town in which I now found
myself.

I sought everywhere for the gay Milan,--the white-robed city I had seen
an hour ago,--but it was gone; and in its room sat a silent and sullen
town, with an air of most depressing loneliness about it. There were few
persons on the streets; and these walked as if they dragged a chain at
their heels. I passed through whole streets of a secondary character,
without meeting a single individual, or hearing the sound of man or of
living thing. It seemed as if Milan had proclaimed a fast and gone to
church; but when I looked into the churches, I saw no one there save a
solitary figure in white, in the distance, bowing and gesticulating with
extraordinary fervour, in the presence of dumb pictures and dim tapers.
How can a worship in which no one ever joins edify any one? I could
discover no signs of a flourishing art. There were not a few pretty and
some beautiful things in the shop-windows; but the latter were all
copies generally of the more striking natural objects in the
neighbourhood, or of the works of art in the city, the productions of
other times,--things which a dying genius might produce, but not such as
a living genius, free to give scope to her invention, would delight to
create. Such was the art of Milan,--the feeble and reflected gleam of a
glory now set. As regards the trade of Milan,--a yet more important
matter,--I could see almost no signs of it either. There were walking
sticks, and such things, in considerable variety in the shops; but
little of more importance. The fabrics of the loom, and the productions
of the plane, the forge, and the printing press, which crowd our cities
and dwellings, and give honest bread to our artizans, were all wanting
in Milan. How its people contrived to get through the twenty-four hours,
and where they got their bread, unless it fell from the clouds, I could
not discover.

What an air of languor and weariness on the faces of the people! Amid
these heavy-hearted and dull-eyed loiterers, what a relief it would have
been to have met the soiled jacket, the brawny arm, and the manly brow,
of one of our own artizans! I felt there were worse things in the world
than hard work. Better it were to roll the stone of Sisyphus all
life-long, than spend it in such idleness as weighs upon the cities of
Italy. Better the clang of the forge than the rattle of the sabre. The
Milanese seemed looking into the future; and a dismal future it is, if
one may judge from their looks,--a future full of revolutions, to
conduct, mayhap, to freedom; more probably to the scaffold.

I turned sharply round the corner of a street, and there, as if it had
risen from the earth, was the Cathedral. As the sun breaking through a
fog, or an Alpine peak flashing through mists, so burst this
magnificent pile upon me; and its sudden revelation dispelled on the
instant all my gloomy musings. I could only stand and gaze. Beauty, not
sublimity, is the attribute of this pile. Beauty it rains around it in a
never-ending, overflowing shower, as the sun does light, or Mont Blanc
glory. I sought for some one presiding idea, simple and grand, which
might take its place in the mind, and dwell there as an image of glory,
never more to fade; but I could find no such idea. The pile is the slow
creation of centuries, and the united conception of innumerable minds,
which have clubbed their ideas, so to speak, to produce this Cathedral.
Quarries of marble and millions of money have been expended upon it; and
there is scarce an architect or sculptor of eminence who has flourished
since the fourteenth century, who has not contributed to it some
separate grace or glory; and now the Cathedral of Milan is perhaps the
most numerous assemblage of beauties in stone which the world contains.
Impossible it were to enumerate the elegances that cover it from top to
bottom,--its carved portals, its flying buttresses, its arabesque
pilasters, its richly mullioned windows, its basso-reliefs, its
beautiful tracery, and its forest of snow-white pinnacles soaring in the
sunlight, so calm and moveless, and yet so airy and light, that you fear
the nest breeze will scatter them. You can compare it only to some
Alpine group, whose flashing peaks shoot up by hundreds around some
snow-white central summit.

The building, too, is populous as a city. There are upwards of three
thousand statues upon it, and places for a thousand more. Here stands a
monk, busy with his beads,--there a mailed warrior,--there a mitred
bishop,--there a pilgrim, staff in hand,--there a nun, gracefully
veiled,--and yonder hundreds of seraphs perched upon the loftier
pinnacles, and looking as if a white cloud of winged creatures from the
sky had just lighted upon it.

I purposed to-morrow to climb to the roof,

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