O Senator of Rome! if true and well
You are reckoned honest, in the Vatican,
Let it be yours His Holiness to tell,
There are many Cardinals, and not one man.
They are made like lobsters, and, when they are dead,
Like lobsters change their colors and turn red;
And while they are living, with their backward gait
Displace and tangle good Saint Peter's net.
An impulse of the time is strong again in the following Stornello,--a
cry of reproach that seems to follow some recreant from a beleaguered
camp of true comrades, and to utter the feeling of men who marched to
battle through defection, and were strong chiefly in their just cause.
It bears the date of that fatal hour when the king of Naples, after a
brief show of liberality, recalled his troops from Bologna, where they
had been acting against Austria with the confederated forces of the
other Italian states, and when every man lost to Italy was as an
ebbing drop of her life's blood.