tried. The word republic possessed then, as now, a delicious attraction
for people who had grievances; and although, after the conquest of
Naples, Garibaldi had made a sort of public abjuration of republican
principles, so far as Italy was concerned, the plotters of all classes
persisted in coupling his name with the idea of a commonwealth erected on
the plan of "sois mon frère ou je te tue." Profound silence on the part
of Governments, and a still more guarded secrecy on the part of
conspiring bodies, were practised as the very first principle of all
political operations. No copyist, at half-a-crown an hour, had yet
betrayed the English Foreign Office; and it had not dawned upon the
clouded intellects of European statesmen that deliberate national
perjury, accompanied by public meetings of sovereigns, and much blare of
many trumpets, could be practised with such triumphant success as events
have since shown. In the beginning of the year 1865 people crossed the
Alps in carriages; the Suez Canal had not been opened; the first Atlantic
cable was not laid; German unity had not been invented; Pius IX. reigned
in the Pontifical States; Louis Napoleon was the idol of the French;
President Lincoln had not been murdered,--is anything needed to widen the
gulf which separates those times from these? The difference between the
States of the world in 1865 and in 1885 is nearly as great as that which
divided the Europe of 1789 from the Europe of 1814.

But my business is with Rome, and not with Europe at large. I intend to
tell the story of certain persons, of their good and bad fortune, their
adventures, and the complications in which they found themselves placed
during a period of about twenty years. The people of whom I tell this
story are chiefly patricians; and in the first part of their history they
have very little to do with any but their own class--a class peculiar and
almost unique in the world.