gradually down till it sank beneath the horizon. Not that he suffered himself to be unmanned by sorrow; quite otherwise. But the physical frame felt the shock, and yielded to it perceptibly.

"Sir Howard enjoyed excellent health up to Miss Douglas's death. All his teeth were sound; he walked three or four miles a day, and obtained eight hours' sleep at night. But that event gave his system a shock, and the controversy about armour ships wore it more, showing his friends a marked change. His sleep was less regular and composed, and he frequently recited the lines of our great poet

That with the hurly death itself awakes.'

"But he hid his sorrows, appearing calm and cheerful, though his manner was subdued and his conversation less animated. His vivacity revived at times, particularly when he spoke of Scotland, the theme he liked best; or when he recalled his early life in America, and described the pathless forests, the villages of wigwams, or the falls of Niagara, reciting Thomson's lines

'Smooth to the shelving brink a copious flood

Rolls fair and placid,' &c.

"He derived little benefit from the

Folkstone breezes on his last visit, though enjoying his walks on the promenade, which he pronounced the noblest platform in Europe. Its attrac tions were just to his taste, for he could here see the coast of France, against which he had raised such bulwarks, watch the yachts and shipping in harbour and Channel, and glance around at the military strollers. Shorncliff Camp was within reach, as well as the Military School at Hythe, in which he took great interest, highly appreciating General Hay. He supported the Volunteer movement, and aided in its organisation, addressing a letter of advice to the Na

tional Rifle Association through his friend General Hay, and receiving an honorary member. So well did he keep acknowledgment in his election as an abreast with the age. He showed the

same interest in the movements at the Camp, and attended any display, though not always to commend. He particularly censured a sham fight, representing an attack on an enemy who had landed in a bay near Hythe. The troops were marched down, and skirmishers thrown out on the beach, when the whole body fell back on the heights, holding them to cover their retreat. What an absurd proceeding!' remarked Sir Howard to Mr Bateman, who was by his side; 'the movement ought to be exactly reversed. They should have brought down every man and gun as quickly as possible if the enemy had landed, and attacked him, and driven him into the sea. There would be some sense in that.'

"Sir Howard looked a soldier to the last, retaining his erect bearing, and walking with a firm step, though cautiously, and with looks bent on the ground. His sight had begun to fail, and cataracts were forming on both his eyes, but he did not submit them to medical treatment. They will last my time,' he remarked to the author. He contrived to write by never raising his pen, forming the letters by habit, and all were plain to one acquainted with his hand. A career of threescore years and ten left his character much what it

first appeared, with all its elements of dash, vigour, enterprise, aptitude, and perception, its habits of industry, its generous instincts, and its warm sympathies. Neither heart nor mind showed the wear of life, and he is the same at eightyfive as at seventeen; inspiring the Volunteers at Hythe as he inspired them at Tynemouth, and exercising the inven tive genius which scared the rats in improving the screw propeller. The hand that caught up the child in the shipwreck, obeyed the same impulse still; and Mr Bateman saw him walking up the street at Folkstone with a loaded basket which he had taken from a poor little girl. My dear, give that to me,' he said, as he saw her bending under the weight; I am better able to carry it than you. The words were reported by a lady who heard them in passing, as child of five walked away together." the General of eighty-five and the poor

We are not going to draw an elaborate character of one whose life may be said to have formed his epitaph. Sir Howard Douglas

needs no panegyrist to tell the world what he was. Chivalrous, truthful, high-minded, brave, he secured the esteem, not less than he commanded the respect, of all who approached him. Had circumstances so ordered it that he had ever directed the movement of troops in the field, we take it upon us to say, that among English generals few would have attained to higher eminence than he. As it was, he did more for the British army, and navy too, in his books

and by his teaching, than either army or navy, or the heads of both branches of the service, have ever had the grace to acknowledge. To these more shining qualities of head and temperament he added the faith and humility of a Christian man a humility which was far too real to be obtruded on careless observers; a faith which had not one shade of hypocrisy or fanaticism about it. Rest to his noble spirit! it will be long before we look upon his like again.

TERRORISM, in one shape or other, is the bane of Italy. By a system of organised terrorism the princes of Italy have governed their states, and by means of terror the peoples have replied to their rulers. From the wide diffusion of this sentiment throughout the nation, secret societies took their root in the land, and men became banded together for attack, protection, resistance, or revenge. There was none so high in character or so elevated by station that he might not be denounced; there was not one so degraded that he might not be associated with the secret acts of the Government. The only idea of rule was through the instrumentality of a secret police. All were suspected-all were watched. The report of the secretary was entertained as to the character and the acts of the minister, and the secretary was himself under the close inspection of some underling in his office. The work of the State went on under the assumption that no man was honest; and it was really curious to see how all the complicated questions of a Government could be dealt with by a system whose first principle was that there was no truth anywhere. It impaired nothing of a man's position or influence that he was known to take bribes. Corruption was the rule, from the star-covered courtier beside the throne, down to the half

naked lazzarone on the Mole. "Take care of your pockets, gentlemen, there's a minister coming," was the decorous pleasantry of King Ferdinand at one of his last receptions, and the speech had a significance which all could appreciate. It was especially in Southern Italy that this corruption prevailed the most. Amongst a race long enervated and demoralised, the work of Government went easily on by means of such agency. The great efforts of the rulers were directed, not to repress crimes against property and offences against society, but to meet political disaffection and discontent. The noted thief would be leniently dealt with, while the Liberal journalist would be sentenced to the ergastolo. Assassination and robbery went on increasing, and none seemed to feel terrified; while the imprisonment of one man for some expression of Liberal opinions, or some half-implied censure of the Government, was sure to strike terror into many a heart.

The Government" was, in fact, very little else than an organised conspiracy against the spread of all civilisation. Its efforts were directed to keeping the people in a degraded ignorance-the slaves of priestly superstition, thinking little of the present and utterly regardless about the future. The Neapolitan temperament was well suited

for such a system. Caring wonderfully little how life was sustained, so that no labour was exacted for its maintenance, light-hearted, even to recklessness-indifferent to almost all privations,-such a people were neither subject to the same fears nor stirred by the same hopes as the Northern Italian. They asked, in fact, for little beyond the permission to exist. Discontent, in its political significance, had no place among them; they had never heard of any better liberty than idleness, and if they had, they could not have prized it. With natural acuteness, however, they saw the corruption that surrounded them-how the minister took bribes from the contractor, and how the contractor cheated the State how the customs officer was bribed by the smuggler, and how the first merchants of the capital filled their warehouses with contraband goods. They saw that no man's integrity ever interfered to his disadvantage, but that self-interest was the mainspring of every action; and could a people so acute to learn be slow to profit by the lesson they acquired? Out of this system of terror, for it was and is a system, grew two institutions in Southern Italy-Brigandage and the Camorra. The former of these asserted its influence over the country at large; the latter, which was an "organised blackmail," limited its operations to towns and cities. Brigandage is no new pestilence in Italy; it has existed for centuries. From the character of the country, so difficult to travel and so interlaced with cross paths only known to the inhabitants, all pursuit of these robbers has been rendered difficult; but besides this, another and far greater obstacle has presented itself in the sympathy of the peasantry, who, partly from affection and partly from fear, have always taken part with the brigands to protect or to conceal them. The same disposition of the country people to side with those who break the law that we see every day in Ireland, is recog

nisable here. Like the Irish, the lower Italians have never regarded the law but as a harsh and cruel tyranny. They only know it in its severity and in its penalties— they have never had recourse to it for protection or defence; it has never been to them a barrier against the exactions of the great man, or the unjust pressure of the powerful man; they have felt it in its moods of vengeance, and never in its moments of commiseration. Elevated above their fellows by a certain wild and savage chivalry. the brigands have long exercised a terror over the people of the South. Their lives were full of marvellous adventures, of terrible incidents and hairbreadth escapes, sure to excite interest in the minds of an uneducated and imaginative race, who grew to regard the relators in the light of heroes. Nor did the Church itself scruple to accept the ill-gotten gains of the highwayman: and the costly robe of the Virgin, and the rich gems that decked her shrine, have often and often displayed the spoils that have been torn from the luckless traveller.

In this mixture of religious superstition with a defiance of all human law, we see again a resemblance between the Italian and the Irishman, whose traits have indeed an almost unerring similarity in everything. That "wild justice" of which the great Irish rhetorician once spoke, is the rule of each. Assuming that society has formed a pact against them, they have taken up arms in their own defence; and whether it be the landlord or the traveller, it matters little who shall pay the penalty. It is next to impossible to deal with crime where the general sentiment favours the criminal. The boasted immunity of the policeman in England is but another name for the ascendancy of the law. How comes it otherwise that one man armed with a mere truncheon dares to arrest a thief in the midst of his accomplices and associates, while

mora.

we see in Italy ninety thousand soldiers unable to repress Brigandage in two provinces of the South, where the number of the brigands is set down as four hundred? Such in substance is the report lately furnished to the Chamber of Deputies at Turin by the order of General LamarThe forces for the repression of Brigandage amount to ninety thousand well-armed and well-disciplined soldiers, and the enemy are stated as four hundred half-naked and scarcely armed wretches, as destitute of courage as of food. Such is the picture given of them; and we are left in utter astonishment to guess why, with such a disparity of numbers, the curse of Brigandage should yet be known in the land.

Why cannot ninety thousand deal with four hundred, even were the cause at issue less one of equity and justice? If, as has often been asserted, the Brigandage has been fed from Rome-if the gold of Francis II. and the blessing of the Pope go with those who cross the frontier to maintain the disturbance in Southern Italy-what should be easier, with such a superiority of numbers, than to cut off the communication? With sixty thousand men a cordon could be drawn from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic in which each sentinel could hail his neighbour. Were the difficulty to lie here, could it not be met at once ? It was declared a few weeks back by Mr Odo Russell, that a whole regiment, armed and clothed in some resemblance to French soldiers, passed over to the south; and we are lost in amazement why such resources should be available in the face of an army greater than Wellington ever led in Spain or conquered with at Waterloo. To understand a problem so difficult, it is first of all necessary to bear in mind that this same Brigandage is neither what the friends of the Bourbons nor what the advocates of united Italy have pronounced it. If the Basilicata and the Capitanata are very far from being La Vendée, they are also unlike what the friends of Pied

montism would declare-countries well affected to the House of Savoy under the temporary dominion of a lawless and bloody tyranny from which they are utterly powerless to free themselves. If Brigandage is not in its essence a movement of the reactionists, it has nevertheless been seized upon by them to prosecute their plans and favour their designs. To render the Neapolitan States ungovernable-to exhibit to the eyes of Europe a vast country in a state of disorganisation, where the most frightful cruelties are daily practised-where horrors that even war is free from are hourly perpetrated-was a stroke of policy of which the friends of the late dynasty were not slow to avail themselves. By this they could contrast the rule of the present Government with that of the former ones; and while the press of Europe still rang with the cruelties of the Bourbons, they could ask, Where is the happy change that you speak of? Is it in the proclamations of General Pinelli-the burning of villages, and the indiscriminate slaughter of their inhabitants? Do the edicts which forbid a peasant to carry more than one meal to his daily labour, tell of a more enlightened rule? Do the proclamations against being found a mile distant from home, savour of liberty? Are the paragraphs we daily read in the Government papers, where the band of this or that brigand chief has been captured or shot, the only evidences to be shown of a spirit which moves Italians to desire a united nation? You tell us of your superior enlightenment and cultivation, say the Bourbonists, and the world at large listens favourably to your claims. But why, if it be true, have the last two years_counted more massacres than the forty which have preceded them? Why are thousands wandering homeless and shelterless through the mountains, while the ruins of their dwellings are yet smoking from the ruthless depredations of your sol

diery? If Brigandage numbers but four hundred followers, why are such wholesale cruelties resorted to? The simple fact is this: the Brigandage of Southern Italy is not a question of four hundred, or four thousand, or four hundred thousand followers, but of a whole people utterly brutalised and demoralised, who, whatever peril they attach to crime, attach no shame or disgrace to it. The labourers on one of the Southern Italian lines almost to a man disappeared from work, and on their return to it, some days after, frankly confessed they had spent the interval with the brigands. They were not robbers by profession nor from habit; but they saw no ignominy in lending themselves to an incidental massacre and bloodshed. The National Guards of the different villages, and the Syndics themselves, are frequently charged with a want of energy and determination; but the truth is, these very people are the very support and mainspring of Brigandage. The brigands are the brothers, the sons, or the cousins of those who affect to move against them. So far from feeling the Piedmontese horror of the brigand, these men are rather irritated by the discipline that bands them against him. They have none of that military ardour which makes the Northern Italian proud of being a soldier. Their blood has not been stirred by seeing the foreigner the master of their capital cities; their pride has not been outraged by the presence of the hated Croat or the rude Bohemian at their gates. To them the call to arms has been anything but a matter of vain glory. Besides this, there seems in the unrelenting pursuit of the Brigandage a something that savours of the hate of the North for the South. Under the Bourbons the brigand met a very different measure, as he did under the French rule, and in the time of Murat. Men of the most atrocious lives, stained with many and cruel murders, were admitted

to treat with the Government, and the negotiations were carried on as formally as between equals. When a Capo Briganti desired to abandon his lawless and perilous life, he had but to intimate his wish to some one in authority. His full conditions might not at first or all be acceded to, but he was sure to be met with every facility for his wish; and in more than one case was such a man employed in a situation of trust by the State; and there yet lives one, Geosaphat Talarico, who has for years enjoyed a Government pension as the reward of his submission and reformation.

Under the old Bourbon rule, all might be pardoned, except an offence against the throne. To the political criminal alone no grace could be extended. The people

saw this, and were not slow to apply the lesson. Let it also be borne in mind, that the brigand himself often met a very different appreciation from those who knew him personally to that he received at the hands of the State. The assassin denounced in wordy proclamations, and for whose head a price was offered, was in his native village a "gran' Galantuomo," who had done scores of fine and generous actions.

To revolutionise feeling in such a matter is not an easy task. Let any one, for instance, fashion to his mind how he would proceed to turn the sympathies of the Irish peasant against the Rockite and in favour of the landlord, to hunt down the criminal and to favour his victim. It would be a similar task to endeavour to dispose the peasant of the Abruzzi to look unfavourably on Brigandage. Brig. andage was, in fact, but another exercise of that terrorism which they saw universally around them. Was the Capo Briganti more cruel than the tax-gatherer? was he not often more merciful? and did he ever press upon the poor? Were not his exactions solely from the rich? Was he not generous, too, when he was full-handed? How many a bene