A SKETCH OF VERONA
Personality of Italian Towns—Verona—Its History—Early
Years—Ezzelino da Romano, Unique in Cruelty—Wholesale Execution
and Imprisonment—Pope Alexander IV Assails the Monster—Ezzelino
Wounded and Captured—Suicide—New Line of Despots—Cangrande della
Scala—Dante and Petrarch—Further Lords of Verona—Later History—The
Drei Kaiser Bund.
Almost every ancient Italian town possesses some distinctive attribute
of its own, whether of pure beauty or grandeur or sanctity; or, else,
of mere gentle charm, gladsome or melancholy, such as Sorrento or
Ravenna; but of them all perhaps the most richly endowed—Rome itself
alone excepted—with stirring memories of the men and their deeds, good
and bad, of bygone ages, is the city of Verona.
One of the earliest—and very possibly, too, one of the
best—representations of Verona is to my mind that visible in the
background of the painting of the deposition of our Saviour from the
cross, by Paolo Morando, better known as Cavazzola. In that picture the
artist gives us a wonderfully vivid impression of his native town, as
a pile of old masonry incasing a hill that rises up from the bank of
a river—the Adige—against the cold clear sky of an evening of spring.
This picture was painted about 1520, a few years after the restoration
of Verona to the Venetian Government by Francis I of France, after
wresting it from the Emperor of Germany, Maximilian of Hapsburg.
Thenceforth its history was comparatively uneventful, that of an
appanage of Venice, until the Napoleonic era, when the French took the
town, afterwards sharing it for a space with the Austrians, 1798-1800.
From then on the allegiance of Verona was claimed—and enacted—in turn
by France and Austria until it became part of the King of Sardinia’s
territories after the peace of Nikolsburg in 1866.
But it is in the history of Verona’s earlier days that we find her
greatest glories side by side with her greatest suffering, from the
nightmare of the attempt upon her sovereignty by Ezzelino da Romano to
the “Golden Age” of the Scaligeri.
Ezzelino, hereditary lord of Bassano, was one of the leaders of the
party of the Ghibellines against the Guelphs, and a supporter of the
Hohenstaufens in their unavailing contest for the supremacy in Italy.
Never has any human being earned so dark a character for cruelty as
Ezzelino; never, until our own day, in which (1906) the “Viedomosti”
of Moscow suggested the massacre of a million people as the means
of quieting the Russian revolution, has any one aspired to rival
Ezzelino’s record as a slayer of unarmed people. Beside this man,
such small fry as Cromwell, Gilles de Retz, and their kind sink into
insignificance. The Florentine historian, Villani, describes Ezzelino
as “the cruelest and most terrific tyrant that ever existed among
Christians. By his might and tyranny he lorded it for a long time
over the March of Treviso and the town of Padua and a great part of
Lombardy. He made away with a fearful part of the citizens of Padua,
and blinded a great number, even of the best and noblest among them,
taking away their possessions and sending them adrift to beg through
the world. And many others by divers torments and martyrdoms he put to
death, and in one hour caused eleven thousand Paduans to be burnt.”
Ezzelino’s principal opponent in the city of Verona and the surrounding
country was the family of San Bonifacio, who headed the party of the
Guelphs. In truth, Ezzelino himself would appear to have been simply
a madman, hæmatomaniac; although, at the same time, he showed energy,
resolution, and shrewdness altogether beyond the ordinary, so that the
Emperor Frederick made him his Vicar in the north of Italy. One city
after another found itself compelled to submit to Ezzelino; Verona,
Vicenza, Padua, Feltre, and Belluno, together with many other small
towns and strong places, succumbed to him. A small, wiry man and pale,
with hair, as we are told by a contemporary, “between the white and
the red,” Ezzelino’s very look is said to have struck terror into the
majority of those who beheld him. The only good deed recorded of him
was his interfering to put a stop to the sack of Vicenza in 1236, when,
in company with his master, the Emperor, he wrested the city from the
Guelphs. Ezzelino’s object in doing this seems to have been less one,
however, of humanity than that of acquiring for himself the gratitude
of the citizens whom he intended to make ultimately his own subjects.
As an instance of the discipline maintained by him, it is told that, on
this occasion, on finding his orders disobeyed by a captain of German
“Landsknechts,” he cut the man down on the spot, so that the rest of
the soldiery were awed into good behaviour. No sooner, however, had
they departed from it than Ezzelino, as the Imperial Commissary of the
town, proceeded to set up a special tribunal on his own account, by
means of which he speedily put to death some two thousand citizens of
Padua that he found there, in revenge for the action of their native
city in having declared against him a short while previously. Here,
too, as also at Verona, many nobles were burned in the public square,
after having been dragged for miles at a horse’s tail.
It was not until the following year—1237—that Ezzelino succeeded in
reducing Padua itself to submission. The Paduans he hated even more
venomously than he hated the rest of mankind, because of their long
resistance to him; for Padua, the City of Saint Anthony, had all along
been a stronghold of the Guelph party; that is to say, of the Church,
in her struggle for civilisation and humanity, against the Emperor and
his barons who were opposed to any lessening of their power by the
erection of popular institutions. The wars between the Guelphs and
their opponents, the Ghibellines, began in the Eleventh Century and
lasted for some four hundred years; during which period innumerable
despots ruled over various cities and districts in Italy, putting
to death countless thousands of their fellow-creatures and, very
frequently, meeting their own end at the hand of murderers either by
dagger or poison. And, of them all, Ezzelino was the most universally
execrated by reason of his monstrous cruelty.
On this occasion of his capturing Padua, therefore, Ezzelino
indulged his love of bloodshed without stint. It was on this occasion
that nearly eleven thousand—ten thousand and eight hundred, to be
exact—Paduan soldiers were burned by his orders. The chronicler says
that they were burned “in an hour”; but that is obviously impossible. I
doubt whether Ezzelino, in those earlier stages of his career, ever had
more than from twenty to twenty-eight thousand men under his command at
once; and so it is probable that the executions were continued during
a number of days or, even, of weeks. At the same time he built no less
than eight prisons in Padua, two of which held each three hundred
prisoners; and albeit the executioners were never idle, yet those
prisons were always kept full.
It is said that thousands perished in these and similar dungeons of
Ezzelino at Verona, Vicenza, and Cittadella. The prisoners included
young boys and girls, and also little children, with whom were huddled
grown men and women of all ages and conditions; many died from want
of air, and many went mad and attacked their miserable companions. And
whenever any one died in prison, his or her body was left there to rot
among the living until the next cleaning of the prison—which only took
place at regular intervals of three months.
One of Ezzelino’s most detestable exploits was achieved on his capture
of Friola, when he caused the entire population to have their eyes put
out, and their noses and legs cut off, and then to be thrown out beyond
the town in still living heaps of bodies.
And once he came nearly to a premature end, when one of the House of
Monticoli, whom he had insulted, sprang upon him and so tore his face
and neck with teeth and nails that Ezzelino bore the marks of them for
the rest of his days; so frightful, too, were the tortures inflicted by
Ezzelino upon his victims that one of them once—a certain man—fearing
lest his sufferings might make him betray his friends, bit out his
tongue and spat it into the face of Ezzelino, who was watching him
being fastened to the rack. His own father-in-law, the father of his
third wife, Beatrice Maltraversi—of the same house, I take it, as the
English family of Maltravers—he had thrown into prison and starved to
death.
In the year 1255, however, Pope Alexander IV issued Letters of Crusade
against the monster—Ezzelino had already long before been laid under
the ban of Major Excommunication—and gave the Papal Benediction to
all who joined themselves to the forces preparing to deal with that
enemy of the human race. The Archbishop of Ravenna was appointed to
the chief command and he was soon joined by the troops of Venice and
of Este. But the victory was not to be an easy one; for three whole
years the contending forces wrestled with each other in Lombardy and
Venetia, until Ezzelino was at last defeated and captured, on September
16, 1259, in a battle on the banks of the Adda. Thence he was taken,
desperately wounded, to the castle of Soncino for safekeeping, with
the intention of bringing him to trial for his enormities; a design
frustrated by Ezzelino himself, a few days later, when, in a fit of
rage and despair, he tore the bandages from his wounds and so bled to
death.
The downfall of Ezzelino it was that ushered in the advent of a nobler
race of despots—the Scaligeri—in the person of Mastino della Scala,
who was elected Chief Magistrate of Verona by the people on learning
the glad news of Ezzelino’s death; and, in 1262, they chose him to
be “Chief of the People.” Mastino was a Ghibelline, however, and his
popularity could not endure for ever among a populace that had already
suffered so much from its subjection to that party. On October 26,
1277, Mastino was stabbed, together with his friend Antonio Nogarola,
near his own house; and to him succeeded his brother Alberto, who was
the first of the Scaligeri to place the family on a semi-royal footing
by means of his conquests and the matrimonial alliances arranged by him
for his two eldest sons, Bartolomeo and Alboino. It was the youngest,
however, of the nephews of the murdered Mastino, Cangrande della Scala,
who was to prove himself the greatest of them all. On the death of
Bartolomeo, the eldest of the brothers, Alboino assumed the reins of
government in Verona, and called in Cangrande to assist him.
Cangrande—“The Great Dog”—was the very “beau-ideal” of a despot;
as splendid in his person and mind as in his disposition and his
victories, his is one of the most striking figures of the Middle Ages.
As Boccaccio says of him, he was “one of the most noted and magnificent
lords known in Italy since the time of Frederick II,” and the Guelph
historian Villani styles him “the greatest tyrant and the richest
and most powerful prince that has been in Lombardy since Ezzelino
da Romano”; whilst Petrarch styles Cangrande “the consoler of the
houseless and the afflicted,” in commemoration of Cangrande’s kindness
to Dante when the latter was exiled from Florence, as well as of the
hospitable treatment accorded to other unfortunates by the generosity
of “The Dog.” Among these guests of Cangrande were included many of
his prisoners of war, such as Giacomo da Carraraam and Albertino da
Mussato, whom he treated with all the courtesy and consideration shown
by him to his voluntary guests, such as Dante himself and Spinetta
Malaspina.
In spite, however, of Dante’s very real gratitude to Cangrande, there
grew up a coldness between them which seems to have been mainly brought
about by Dante’s unsociable and critical temperament. It was no less
experienced a judge of men and of the society of his time than Petrarch
who writes of Dante and his relations with Cangrande:
“When banished from his country he (Dante) resided at the court
of Cangrande, where the afflicted universally found consolation
and an asylum. He was at first held in much honour by the Dog
(dal Cane), but afterwards he by degrees fell out of favour, and
day by day pleased less that lord. Actors and parasites of every
description used to be collected together at the same banquet;
one of these, most impudent in his words and in his obscene
gestures, obtained much importance and favour with many. The Dog,
suspecting that Dante disliked this, called the man before him,
and, having greatly praised him to our poet, said: ‘I wonder how
it is that this silly fellow should know how to please all, and
that thou canst not, who art said to be so wise.’ Dante answered:
‘Thou wouldst not wonder if thou knewest that friendship is
founded on similarity of habits and disposition.’ It is also
related that at his table, which was indiscriminately hospitable,
where buffoons sat down with Dante, and where jests passed which
must have been repulsive to every person of refinement, but
disgraceful when uttered by the superior in rank to his inferior,
a boy was once concealed under the table, who, collecting the
bones that were thrown there by the guests, according to the
custom of those times, heaped them up at Dante’s feet. When the
tables were removed, the great heap appearing, the Dog pretended
to show great astonishment and said, ‘Certainly Dante is a great
devourer of meat.’ To which Dante readily replied, ‘My Lord, if
I were the Dog, you would not see so many bones’—‘Se fosse io
il Can non si vedrebbe tante osse,’—meaning that, if he had been
Cangrande, he would have had fewer and choicer companions at his
table.
“From the strength and glory of his position in Lombardy,
Cangrande would appear to have been designated by Dante as the
one man fitted to unite the entire peninsula of Italy under
his own rule. This belief of Dante’s, according to many of
his commentators, is expressed in what has become known as
the ‘Veltro prophecy’ in the first Canto of the ‘Inferno,’
the passage where the poet, finding his way barred by the
leopard—‘quella fera alla gaietta pelle,’—is saved from it by the
shade of Virgil, who explains to him the pure character of the
heart which, as he says, ‘is but the hungrier after banqueting.’
“And then the shade continues:
“‘Many are the animals with which this beast doth mate, and
there shall yet be others still, until the greyhound comes that
is to make the beast die painfully. He (the greyhound) shall not
feed on land or gold, but on wisdom and virtue and love. And his
country shall lie between Feltro and Feltro; and he shall be the
saviour of this lowly Italy.’
“And again, at perhaps the most disputed passage of the entire
‘Divina Commedia’ (Purgatorio, Canto XXXIII, line 46), Dante
speaks of a mysterious personage who is to do great things and
of whom he speaks as ‘A five hundred and ten and five sent
by God’—‘Un cinquecento diece e cinque, messo di Dio’—which
numerals, as is held by many, have reference to no other than
Cangrande himself, and that the DXV of these numerals and the
‘Veltro’ of the former prophecy are only meant to signify one and
the same person—the lord of Verona.
“And, in fact, Cangrande became in 1313, on the death of Emperor
Henry of Luxembourg, the natural leader of the Ghibellines and
the mainstay of their hopes in Italy—for his was an united and
a single authority in his dominions, whereas the rule of the
Visconti in Milan—the other great Ghibelline centre—was as yet
but feeble by comparison and very uncertain. From then until his
death Cangrande devoted himself to furthering his pet project
of a federation of Italian States under his own leadership—but
without success. He came to his end at the untimely age of
thirty-eight, July 22, 1329, as the effect, according to Mr.
Ruskin, of ‘eating apples when he was too hot.’ By then Cangrande
had compelled nine other cities besides Verona to pay yearly
tribute to him as their sovereign lord—Padua, Vicenza, Treviso,
Brescia, Feltre, Belluno, Parma, Modena, and Lucca—their
collected addition to his revenues being, as Villani said,
‘more than 70,000 florins of gold, which no other Christian King
possesses, unless it be the King of France.’”
After Cangrande’s demise, however, the lordship of his dominions fell
into very different hands. He was succeeded by his two nephews, Mastino
and Alberto, of whom the elder was devoured by an insatiable ambition
to extend his lordship still further and to make of it an independent
kingdom and the arbiter of Italian destinies; whilst the younger,
Alberto, was merely a man of pleasure. Thus it came about that before
long Mastino had engaged his people in disputes with the republics
of Florence and Venice and the clans of Este, Visconti, and Gonzaga;
Alberto, as his subscription to the general ill-will, having at the
same time inflicted an outrageous wrong upon the great Paduan house of
Carrara in the person of one of its women. So that the Scaligeri had
to contend with external foes and with rebellion as well. By the end
of 1339, ten years after Cangrande’s death, their dominions had been
reduced to the two cities of Verona and Vicenza; moreover, Mastino had
been excommunicated for killing his uncle’s kinsman, Bishop Bartolomeo
della Scala, in anger at some remonstrance on the prelate’s part. His
repentance, though, was sincere and lasting; for it is said of him
that, after the crime, he never again suffered any living being to
look upon his face, not even allowing his wife, Taddea de Carrara, a
relative of the lady injured by Alberto, to behold it. Mrs. Wiel, in
her brilliant history of Verona, to which famous work I would fain
express my immense obligation, is of the opinion that this tradition
may well owe its origin to the fact that the armoured equestrian
statue of Mastino, over his tomb in Verona, is represented with the
vizor down, as indicating Mastino’s desire to conceal his features
permanently from sight.
But from now on, for more than forty years, murder plays almost the
chief part in the chronicle of the Scaligeri. After Mastino came
his son, Cangrande II, who was murdered by his younger brother,
Cansignorio, aged twenty, with his own hand on December 14, 1359.
Soon after, Cansignorio was proclaimed, together with his own younger
brother Alboino, lord of Verona, but soon Cansignorio exiled Alboino
to Peschiera, because he was afraid of the youth’s popularity with
the citizens. Years went by whilst Alboino lay in exile at Peschiera;
during which years two natural sons, Bartolomeo and Antonio, were
born to Cansignorio in Verona. Cansignorio, however, was not fated to
live long, for death came to seek him out in his thirty-sixth year,
but he knew of its certain coming some time beforehand, and faced it
resignedly. But, even while he was dying, the news was circulated in
the streets of Verona that his brother Alboino had suddenly died at
Peschiera—of poison, as the people declared, in order that he might
not succeed to the lordship that Cansignorio had destined for his own
illegitimate sons. But then every death of which the cause was not
quite plain was ascribed to poison in those days, so that it seems only
charitable to believe that public opinion may have been at fault in its
verdict upon the death of Alboino della Scala.
Cansignorio himself died on October 19, 1375, and his sons, Bartolomeo
and Antonio, reigned for a while together in his stead. But Antonio was
infected with ambition to be the sole ruler of Verona; moreover, he was
jealous of the love which all who knew him bore toward Bartolomeo.
Now it chanced that the latter, in the month of July, 1381, was
courting a beautiful daughter of the family of Nogarola, whose dwelling
stands in the street of “the two Moors,” not far from the palace of the
Scaligeri. Bartolomeo, though, was not her only suitor, for he had a
rival in the person of a cadet of the house of Malaspina. And Antonio,
seeing how the thing was, resolved to make use of this situation to rid
himself of Bartolomeo and to reign alone in Verona. Accordingly, on the
evening of July 12, 1381, he hired a number of “bravi,” or professional
assassins, and concealed them in Bartolomeo’s apartments in the Palazzo
Scaligeri. Later on, Bartolomeo, who had been hunting, came home
attended by a friend called Galvani, and they supped together, after
which the two lay down and fell asleep; thereupon the murderers came
out from their hiding-place and killed the sleepers with many blows
of their knives, Bartolomeo receiving as many as twenty-six stabs, all
in front. Then the “bravi,” having draped the bodies in black mantles
with hoods that they pulled over the faces of them, carried them
noiselessly down out of the palace and through the deserted streets to
the “piazzetta” of Santa Cecilia, where they left them at the door of
Palazzo Nogarola—so that all might believe the murder to have been the
work of that family. And there the dead Bartolomeo and his friend were
found in the morning by the indignant citizens of Verona, who had loved
Bartolomeo more than they loved his younger brother.
But when they came to Antonio with the dreadful news, he feigned
great sorrow and anger, and declared it to be his belief that the Lord
Nogarola, together with young Malaspina, had committed the crime in
order to be revenged upon Bartolomeo della Scala for having dishonoured
the girl to whom, as was well known, he had been paying court.
And then, that all men might accept his story for the truth, Antonio
had Nogarola arrested, with Malaspina and the girl herself, and
condemned them to be tortured in order to make them admit the truth
of his villainous accusation. But without success; for not one of the
three would consent to confirm the lie in spite of their torments,
and it is recorded that the girl even expired on the rack sooner
than satisfy the demands of her torturers. The fortitude of the
victims now began to have its influence upon public opinion, which
came round ultimately to the conviction that Antonio himself had
caused his brother to be assassinated for his own private ends, a
conviction that was soon voiced aloud wherever men met together in
Verona; so that Nogarola and Malaspina had to be released and declared
innocent, greatly to Antonio’s rage and confusion and to the joy
of all good men. Shortly afterwards, Antonio found an opportunity
of turning away the thoughts of his subjects from these events, so
unfavourable to himself and his popularity, by ordering a series of
feastings and entertainments on the occasion of his marriage to one
of the most beautiful and the most foolish women of that or any other
age—Samaritana de Polenta, the daughter of the neighbouring despot of
Ravenna. Of Samaritana it is recorded, as an instance of her folly,
that she would not put on even a pair of stockings unless they were
decorated with jewels.
The festivities were held in the great Arena and were a complete
success, so far as Antonio’s design of averting the popular reprobation
from himself was concerned. Nevertheless, they were destined—together
with the coming of Samaritana—to usher in a period altogether
disastrous to Antonio’s fortunes, by reason of the fatal extravagance
that now seized upon the administration and court of Verona, and the
consequent increase in the taxation of the people. Soon, Antonio found
himself compelled to engage in war with his neighbours of Padua, much
as did Napoleon III in 1870 and with almost exactly the same result.
For the Veronese troops, softened by disuse and led by incompetent
generals, suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of their opponents
under such experts as “Aucúa” (Sir John Hawkwood) and Giovanni d’Azzo;
until at length Antonio, deserted by all who had once fawned upon him,
fled from his capital under cover of a night of November, 1387. On the
next day the town declared for the Visconti, the lords of Milan. In
the meanwhile Antonio della Scala was making his way to Venice with
Samaritana and their one small son; and there he died in August of
the following year, leaving his wife and son to be cared for by the
Venetian Republic, which settled a small annual pension upon them, and
so ended the reign of the Scaligeri over Verona.
The Arena of Verona, above mentioned, is a very ancient and very
perfectly preserved amphitheatre in the centre of the town; so old
is it, indeed, that no man may say with certainty when it was first
erected, although there seems little doubt but that the Romans were
the builders of it. The Arena has been the theatre of every imaginable
kind of spectacle, savage and solemn and pathetic, from the martyrdoms
of early Christians and the gladiatorial combats of Trajan’s day, down
through the ages to the bull-fights of Napoleonic times and the last
scene of the Austrian domination in Venetia, when the Italian soldiers
captured during the battle of Custozza were brought into Verona in the
course of the afternoon of June 24, 1866, to be confined in the old
amphitheatre.
In the month of July, 1805, Napoleon, who was then returning to Paris
after his coronation as King of Italy at Milan, arrived at Verona
and expressed his wish to witness a bull-fight. Such a spectacle was
accordingly organised for his pleasure, and the great man came to
preside over the entertainment in the Arena on the afternoon of the
16th of the month—at the very moment when he was straining every nerve,
politically speaking, to prepare for an universal European war, and
while his fertile brain was completing the details of his projected
attack upon the English coast from Boulogne.
The account of this bull-fight says that a fine, courageous bull was
loosened, and overcame, one after another, the dogs that were set
on to it, until Napoleon, carried away by excitement, ordered that
two, and then three, dogs should be set on to the bull at once; this
number proving insufficient, moreover, the Emperor commanded that all
the dogs kept there for purposes of bull-baiting should be let in to
attack the bull simultaneously. Needless to add that the unlucky bull
was eventually overpowered by its numerous adversaries and that it
succumbed beneath their combined attack. It was at this point that one
of Napoleon’s general aides-de-camp turned to him, with the laughing
suggestion of a warning to be gathered from what had just passed
beneath their eyes: namely, the danger of a general hostile alliance of
the European Powers, the which it might well be possible for Napoleon
to defeat one by one, or even by two or three at a time, but which
must as certainly succeed in overcoming him when united by the bond of
their common danger. We are not told what answer Napoleon returned to
this; but it certainly did not influence him, seeing that he at once
set himself to defeating the most formidable of his opponents, Austria,
England, and Russia—an undertaking in which the disaster of Trafalgar
was well balanced for him by the triumphs of Ulm and Austerlitz.
It is recorded, too, that he returned to Verona for a repetition of the
detestable entertainment in the Arena in the month of November, 1807;
but that on this occasion the bull-fight was spoiled for him by the
early on-drawing of the night—which is not surprising when we read that
the spectacle did not begin until half-past four in the afternoon! The
last of these loathsome affairs took place, it is grievous to think,
under good Archduke John of Austria, in the autumn after Waterloo, on
the occasion of his assuming the functions of Governor of Venetia—the
solitary instance of his sanctioning anything approaching cruelty. It
was in the Arena of Verona that my dear old Adelaide Ristori made her
first bow to the public of Northern Italy, although she was already
well known to that of Rome. I cannot say at this moment precisely
when she first acted in Verona; but I fancy it was at some time in the
forties of the last century, the “roaring forties,” when Venetia was
making ready for the eruption of ’48. Verona was the special darling of
“Father” Radetzky, of whose beloved Quadrilateral it formed the chief
fortress, and it was he who fortified it so well and lovingly as to
make it well-nigh impregnable. It was to Verona, moreover, that he fell
back with his small but well-disciplined army during those dark days of
May, 1848, when, as the poet Grillparzer wrote in a poem addressed to
the fearless old hero:
“We others are but scattered ruins,
And in thy camp alone is Austria.”
From Verona, too, it was that the Austrian troops took train in
the July of 1866, under Archduke Albrecht, to go up into Moravia to
the assistance of Benedek’s army; and from Verona it was that the
Archduke’s historic telegram was despatched, on receipt of the news of
Sadowa, to the Emperor at Vienna, bidding him take heart and have no
fear for the outcome of the struggle: “Nothing is lost yet so if only
both Army and People will spurn discouragement from them. After the
defeat at Regensburg came the glorious day of Aspern....”
But it was in vain that the lion-hearted Archduke tried to obtain the
prolongation of the struggle; the country was willing to do its best,
but the Emperor, by force of his responsibilities, was forced to view
the matter from a different standpoint. It went against his conscience
to lay a further burden of sacrifice and suffering upon his people, and
so he did not hesitate to take upon himself the heartbreaking decision
to suspend hostilities. The decision, too, however painful, was a wise
one; and from that hour Austria has never ceased to grow in health and
strength until to-day, when her position in the councils of Europe is
once more what it was under Maria Theresa. Let us hope soon to see the
time when, as her best friends have never ceased from urging her to
do, Austria will put aside all the petty difficulties that have come
between her and her mighty eastern sister, and so will join herself
to Russia, together with Germany, in a firm and lasting renewal of her
only natural policy—that of the Dreikaiserbund, the good old alliance
of the three Emperors. In regard to this question, I wonder if I may
be allowed to quote the dying injunction of the Emperor Nicholas to
his son, the Tsarevitch Alexander, in 1855—“And tell Fritz” (Frederick
William III of Prussia) “not to forget Papa’s words”—by which he
referred to the advice given by Frederick William II to his son, to the
effect that he ought never to let anything interfere with the natural
alliance of Prussia with Russia.