In those regions
the Italians were "thinking" a great deal, and had been thinking for
some time past. And somewhere about 1849, those troublesome members
of the body social who are not contented with eating, drinking, and
singing--cantankerous reading and writing people living in towns, who
wanted most unreasonably to say, as the phrase goes, that "their souls
were their own" (as if such fee-simple rights ever fall to the lot
of any man!)--began in Tuscany to give signs that they also were
"thinking."
I remember well that Alberi, the highly accomplished and learned
editor of the _Reports of the Venetian Ambassadors_, and of the great
edition of Galileo's works, was the first man who opened my altogether
innocent eyes to the fact, that the revolutionary leaven was working
in Tuscany, and that there were social breakers ahead! This must
have been as early as 1845, or possibly 1844. Alberi himself was a
Throne-and-Altar man, who thought for his part, that the amount of
proprietorship over his own soul which the existing _regime_ allowed
him was enough for his purposes. But, as he confided to me, a very
strong current of opinion was beginning to run the other way in
Florence, in Leghorn, in Lucca, and many smaller cities--not in Siena,
which always was, and is still, a nest of conservative feeling.
Nevertheless there never was, at least in Florence, the strength and
bitterness of revolutionary feeling that existed almost everywhere
else throughout Italy.
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