ments so accurately that the forces of Cremona, under Buoso and Oberto, and those of Ferrara and Mantua, under the Marquis of Este, bore upon him simultaneously, and fairly brought him to a stand. Though hemmed in upon all sides, he did not lose his wonted ardor; but in the very moment of danger, the Brescians gave rein to their horses, and saved themselves by flight. In vain did he attempt to keep his men together, and effect a retreat in good order towards Bergamo. The allies attacked his disbanded troops, making a great number of prisoners.

Ezzelino, belabored on all sides, fought with the fury of a tiger, covered with blood, and in the midst of a circle of dead bodies; and at length, finding himself nearly alone, he furiously put spurs to his horse, and made a desperate effort to escape. He was, however, pursued and overtaken by a large number of horsemen, who made him prisoner. The same instant, a soldier, whose brother had been mutilated by order of Ezzelino, struck him on the head and wounded him thrice in revenge. Others say that he was thus wounded before his capture, in an encounter with Mazzoldo dei Lavelonghi, a Guelph nobleman of Brescia.

The day on which this memorable victory, which gladdened the heart of all Italy, took place, was the feast of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, September 27th, in the year of grace 1259. The people crowded upon the road by which he was conveyed to Soncino, all being desirous of seeing the man whom the stoutest soldier had never approached hitherto without trembling. To one of the many who, covering him with reproaches and insults, threatened moreover to finish him, he turned with eyes of fire, and a frown of his dark brow: "And wouldst thou have courage (he said) to lay thy hands upon Ezzelino?" The growl of the caged lion was sufficient to strike terror into the heart of the man, and of all the bystanders.

He soon reached Soncino, where he was protected from further injury by the noble Marquis of Este, who provided him with surgeons, and commanded that every attention and respect should be paid to him. His wounds, however, were so deep as to baffle the skill of his attendants. He refused to partake of any food, and

without giving any sign of repentance, he died some days after, in the seventie: year of his age, rejecting even the conse Ïations of religion.

His brother Alberico was put to death the year after, together with all his sons, in force of a barbarous sentence suggested by the fear, that if even a scion remained of so evil a race, it would one day grow up to be the curse of the country.

His shrewdness was

So, to the unspeakable relief of all Italy. perished Ezzelino, il Crudele, or the Cruei. who, endowed with great military genius, might have been a hero, and chose to be the scourge of his country, and the detestation of posterity. equal to his cruelty; for at a glance he read the deepest secrets of the heart, and was known to scrutinize and study every face upon which he turned his gaze. He was of athletic mould, and gifted with nerves like whip-thongs and sinews of iron His hair and eye-brows were dark and bushy, his features pale but marked with extraordinary expression, and his eyes like those of the viper. There is a portrait of him in the Pitti Gallery at Florence, worthy the study of the traveller.

He was so wantonly cruel, that sometimes, on the capture of a town, he would order all the inhabitants to be deprived of their legs, or arms, or noses, or otherwise shamefully mutilated. Having heard tha: a quantity of blind and disabled persons, who went around begging through the Italian cities, asserted that they had been reduced to that state by Ezzelino, he issued a proclamation inviting those unhappy poor to present themselves to him, with the assurance that they would be nourished and provided for. Three thousand miserable wretches came to him, whom he inclosed in a large building, ordering it to be set on fire, so that the whole number perished in the flames.

He had great faith in magic and judi cial astrology, an imposition very prevalent in those days, although its practices were forbidden under severe penalties. While he was moving against the city Feltre, it is said that a magpie hovering around his banner, finally rested upon it. Whether that he considered the fact s good omen, or felt a kindred sympathy for that bird of prey, Ezzelino was delighted with the animal, which was so tame as to

allow itself to be caught, and ordered the friendly pie to be conveyed to Padua, and delicately nourished.

But it is time to close this sketch of the life of this famous chieftain-the most inhuman of those numerous Italian warriors of the middle ages, whose science and

valor might have made them a blessing to their beautiful country, but who plunged it deeper and deeper into those feuds which finally, by destroying the resources of its vitality, rendered it an easy prey to the grasping stranger.

THE idea and sentiment of liberty must be very deep in human nature, or man would not still cling to it-seek it, as he does, after all that has transpired to make him abandon it. The mightiest empires have exerted and exhausted their mightiest efforts to stifle its breathings. Monarchs of every name have made it the one long scheme and purpose of their lives to cause it to perish in their dominions, and to root it out from the memories of their subjects; and, at death, they have left their partial successes therein as choice jewels for the inheritance of their houses, and have imposed the continuance of the tradition as one of the most solemn of duties. The talents of all the wily counsellors that bounties and patronage could win, have been concentrated in plotting its ruin. The ministers of religions, false and true, have been wheedled to betray it, or forced to become its executioners. Men, in the attempt to defend it, have poured out their blood like water; have desolated their best-loved hearths; have made their own wives widows, and their children orphans; have watered with their tears the capive's bread, and have felt through dreary years the dungeon mildew devouring their nembers and gnawing at their vitals. And as each old generation passes away, t perceives that the price of liberty is coninual sacrifice and heroic suffering, and hat, even thus, its rescue is but partial nd soon declines; and yet the eye of the eteran kindles with that of the youth, nd their voices unite in invoking that for hich the one has suffered, and the other

VOL. II. NO. I. NEW SERIES.

is ready to suffer, and thus the struggle is continued and perpetuated. Liberty must be very dear to the human heart.

But the name of liberty has been assumed, and its privileges abused by monstrous broods, so numerous and odious, that memory refuses to rehearse their catalogue. When worthlessness would seek for distinction, or misrule for power, or cupidity for fortune, or hatred for vengeance, or voluptuousness for unbridled license, how often has each called itself the advocate of liberty! How often have they joined their forces to assault authority and good order! How often, especially in the days nearest our own, have they made the name of liberty the rallying cry of crime, and a sound portending calamity and woe to the citizens of quiet and peace! Thus have the powers of evil availed to bury the graceful form of liberty beneath hideous ruins, or to shroud it in lurid colorings, till the poet has described it, and the painter figured it, and a sentiment too common stamped it, even on a nation's currency, but as a zoneless bacchanal. Still men, and the lovers of man, have not ceased, from amid the cloudy terrors of evil fashionings, to invoke it with their voices, and to evoke it by their good deservings. Again, then, liberty must be something very dear to man, and, moreover, very noble in itself, that it is thus sought after and thus loved.

The sentiment of liberty is indeed something very noble, for by it God has distinguished man from the lower parts of creation, which are governed by necessary

5

the throne of the mind. And, though itself be not reason, it yet, with equal step, accompanies all the operations of reason, and without it reason becomes unreason. And yet reason is not the seat of the liberty that so encompasses it, but that other faculty, which, in the triune spirit, is ordained the scholar and yet the mistress of reason the scholar to be enlightened by it as to what is truth, and the mistress to force it, despite its lessons, into perverse windings, or to compel it to the just application of its teachings.

This faculty, need we say it, is the will, in naming which we have said free will, since these two are so knit that without freedom there is no will, and without will there is no freedom. Ubi voluntas, ibi libertas.

But in our first parents' fall, the human will was perverted, and two kinds of liberty were lost liberty from sin, and liberty from misery. Liberty from necessity was preserved to man, as a ground of merit or demerit. This is what we understand by natural liberty; and from all that we have said, we may gather why man so clings to seeking it, and has so abused it.

We have been meditating on the recent tragedies of Swiss revolution; and whoever is acquainted with the long history of that romantic confederacy, and understands the guilty violence that has just now dishonored virginal freedom on the mountains of Uri and of Schwytz, will agree, with a burning heart, that all we have said of liberty, and more than we are sufficient to say, has been illustrated, has been embodied in their annals.

of an

Pens of an authority, and tongues eloquence, far other than ours, have been pleading, in Europe, the cause of prostrate, outraged Switzerland. They cried in the ears of the great powers of Europe, while the great nations of Europe were yet powers, that the conspiracy of revolutionists in the city of Berne was not a local affair; that the ruin of the Swiss constitution was not the end, but only the means of the conspirators; that the flames of civil war, kindled in the homesteads of the

most cherished institutions. Oppressors disregarded and have fallen; and if any movement has indeed been made towards securing the true and reasonable rights of the people in parts of Europe, we may be sure that their late masters look with regret not more poignant on what they have lost, than do the jacobins centred in Switzerland on what they have thereby failed to gain. Switzerland, indeed, is a little country, but the questions that have shaken her concern all Europe. Wisdom must prevent their consequences, or time will show them yet further; for the secret lodges of Berne have purposes not yet fulfilled.

But if Swiss affairs interest the adjoining nations of Europe by their actual tendencies, they may interest others in the way of solemn lessons. For us republicans, for us constitutional republicans, oh! how many lessons might be drawn from the history, and at length from the calamities of an elder republic; and how many arguments might be found in the causes of those calamities, for principles whose application our national interests are at this moment loudly demanding. we cannot pretend to discuss at length, nor as their importance would warrant, in the present essay; but we shall nevertheless have natural occasion to indicate some of them less or more pointedly, and shall thus leave them to the reflection or to the minuter examination of our readers.

These

The race which has rendered Switzerland famous in modern Europe, were emigrants from the remote North. Passing by their earliest struggles and sufferings amid the rugged Alps, the records of which are more or less uncertain, we find them, early in the ninth century, possessed of liberty and a formal constitution; for Louis le Debonnaire, in extending to them the paternal protection of the Carlovingian empire, expressly guarantied to them the preservation of these. The fundamental provisions of this constitution bear a most striking resemblance to the laws of the ancient Scandinavians, as they may be found detailed in the poetical legends that have come down to us from Olaus and Johannes

*

Magnus, or as they have at a later date been collected and critically examined by the learned Messenius, in his "Scondia Illustrata." This constitutional correspondence in their social fabric between Switzerland and the extreme North, of itself proves the origin of the race, and is at the same time an illustration of the truth, that constitutions which show the vigor of permanence and vitality, which successfully resist encroachments from without, and bind firmly to one another their constituents from within, are not the handiwork of political forecast, nor are hewn out as a creation de novo by the statesmen of an incipient people; but that their foundation, on the contrary, is in the public synderesis of the primitive community, and their shapings are the gradual results of the practical needs and peculiar position of each nation as it grows towards maturity. Switzerland, which, since the Congress of European powers at Vienna in 1815, has consisted of twenty-two cantons, takes its name from the canton of Schwytz, which was the first nucleus of the confederation, and has ever been the soul of its glory, and the noblest guardian of its liberties. Uri and Unterwalden, co-ordinate in race and origin with Schwytz, were always knit to it in feeling, and, from early in the twelfth century, formed with it a regular defensive league. These three cantons formed the Waldstaaten, or Woodland States.

The customs and manners, and the complete sovereignty of each canton, by stipulation, remained inviolable; but the entire support of the three was pledged to resist any foreign interference. About the middle of the thirteenth century, they chose the celebrated Rodolph of Hapsburg to be the head and arbiter of their league. This was in evident obedience to the prevailing sentiment of Europe at that time, whose aspirations were for an emperor of all Christendom, to be elected, not less for his high personal worth, than for the extent of his material resources; and to whom, therefore, all disputes between nations might be referred for a rightful adjustment a magnificent conception, but why has it proved so unsatisfactory in practice?

The same century had not passed away

*Historia Gentium Septentrionalium, Basilea, 1567.

till the people of the Waldstaaten found that this chieftainship of a stranger was likely to be abused to purposes of foreign aggression; and with the manly energy that they have ever displayed in coping with perils, they compelled the Count of Hapsburg, elevated though he now was to the position of emperor, to retrench himself within the faculties that had been conIceded to him. A solemn renewal of the alliance between the three Waldstaaten was consequently made in the year 1291, and on the same occasion they re-enacted an ancient law, that no man who was of foreign birth, be his qualifications or his character what they might be, should ever exercise the office of a judge among them. They applied the same rule to their clergy with a few exceptions, and this identity of sympathy between the people and their pastors has been a powerful promoter of the union that has always existed in these countries, between their patriotism and their religion.

When Rodolph of Hapsburg died, his house began the base, degenerate course that has ended by rendering it, first the enemy, and now, at length, the laughingstock of Christendom. At the very beginning of the fourteenth century, Albert, son of Rodolph, set about the task of wantonly injuring the Waldstaaten, that he might thence find occasion to reduce them beneath his iron yoke. What kind of success he had has become matter of story and of song wherever patriotism or political liberty is prized. He sent the notorious Gesler to administer justice in Schwytz and Uri, and Beringer in like capacity to Unterwalden. But these emissaries of oppression had scarcely had time for more than to commence their task, when Werner Von Stauffach, Arnold Anderhalden, and Walter Furst, meeting together by night at the great rock which marks the boundary between Uri and Unterwalden, on the Lake of Waldstaaten, plighted there their troth to one another that, God helping, they would set their country free. This was on the 17th of November, 1307. The day was fixed, upon which each of them, with a chosen band of patriots, was, in their respective cantons, to raise the cry of liberty, to which they well knew that every Swiss heart was ready to answer at the cost of its blood. But in the interval of the oath