4789. Walter Savage Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 237–240.
[Florence]
December 4. [1860] [1]
Dear Browning,
Miss Blagdon paid me a visit in the evening and gave me your address. She had previously told me of Mrs Browning[’]s grief at her sister’s increasing illness, and now of its end. During the distressing continuance the affectionate warmhearted Mrs Browning must have suffered more continually than now when it is over– Let me pass to other matters, tho I pass in heaviness[.]
Politics vex me. I told you that Capua could not hold out long. [2] Yet it is strange that the sixtyfour thousand, in and about it, offered so little and so short a resistance. It is only today that I learn, from the Nazionale, [3] of such a vast number. It appears that the French allies protected and devised the escape of 25000, and as many yet remain in Gaieta. [4] Killed, wounded, and deserters to the King of Italy are about 10,000.
I hope you will have strength and health enough to visit that interesting scene toward the end of spring, before which time I can hardly hope the city will surrender, protected as it is by a french fleet, and provisioned under it. Cicero’s Formian villa, the site of which is now occupied by another, is inviting not only as the favourite residence of that great man, but also for its beautiful views. [5]
Æneia nutrix
Æternam moriens famam,
Caieta dedisti. [6]
Austria has rendered Mantua as strong, the beautiful Verona too, and Peschiera nearly so, [7] perhaps she has rendered Pola [8] as difficult to attack. Even Garibaldi will be put to his wits end, with all his valour, and generalship and circumspection. The poor devil of a pope lies under the tyger’s claw. He is crying out to Austria, but Austria is hard at work in unravelling a skein which her clumsy fingers tied in a knot. I wish I could see Kossuth: I dare not write to him again: more, if I did, it would be on matters about which he is too prudent to reply. I think of Kossuth as Grote [9] and all other wise and honest men think of Demosthenes.
I tremble for Garibaldi in his little island. [10] He will not be permitted to rest there. The naval defender of Gaeta may peradventure be the invader of Caprera, and prove that the planter of vines and olives disturbs the peace of Europe.
O Orsini! Orsini! how glorious, how beneficial to the world, would thy atchievement [sic] have been, if the guilty had fallen and the innocent had not. My friend Arthur Walker, who knew him intimately, told me that he grieved bitterly at this. It was his intention to have slain the usurper of Rome, and betrayer of Italy, at his own house, on the night when his soldiers fired on the people of Paris. A card of admittance to the Carpi [11] converzione was promised him by the Brazilian minister, but with[h]eld by his suspecting some mischief. I publisht my opinion long ago, that nothing is so glorious as tyrranicide, nothing so base as assassination. [12] Harmodios and Aristogeiton [13] acted from personal motives, Brutus from sheer envy. His letter to Cicero, entreating him to spare the traitor Lepidus, [14] shows how little he cared for the Republic. Yet how clam[or]ously have these three men been cried up! Schools and colleges echo with their names. Grave dons pat youngsters on the head for repeating them. We must bring men near together for weighing them accurately and justly. The antients stand on pedestals, our contemporaries are on foot, and, seen across the street, they appear no higher than ourselves. Fame is not worth a straw. We tire ourselves in running after a butterfly, and are often tript up in the chase.
While I am dipping my pen in the ink, it occurs to me that very probably I am tiring you, and this thought and my paper tell me alike that it is high time for me to say how truly I remain your affectionate
W.S. Landor
Address: Robert Browning Esq / 126 Via Felice / Roma.
Publication: BBIS-5, pp. 33–34.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Year provided by Landor’s reference to Henrietta’s death.
2. Following the battle of the Volturno (1–2 October 1860), the defeated Neapolitan forces withdrew to the fortress at Capua, which Garibaldi could not attack because he lacked the necessary artillery. When the Piedmontese army arrived in late October, under the command of General Della Rocca, siege batteries were brought up and commenced firing on 1 November. The next morning, the Neapolitans surrendered and its “garrison of 10,000 men became prisoners of war” (George Macaulay Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, New York and London, 1911, p. 275).
3. Probably sic, for La Nazione, a Florence newspaper that sometimes reprinted articles from Il Nazionale, a Naples newspaper founded in 1860 by Ruggiero Bonghi (1826–95), politician and scholar.
4. Sic, for Gaeta. Francis II, King of Naples, had fled there on 6 September and “was able to assemble an army of about 50,000 men” (Edgar Holt, Risorgimento: The Making of Italy, 1815–1870, 1970, p. 245). “The siege of Gaeta,” which began in early November, “was protracted all the winter, because Napoleon III kept the French fleet in those waters with orders to prevent the Italian fleet from bombarding the fortress. The siege operations had therefore to be conducted entirely from the land side, and were not brought to a successful issue until February 1861,” after the French ships withdrew on 9 January (Trevelyan, p. 276).
5. The site of Cicero’s villa near present-day Formia, on the Gulf of Gaeta, “is now occupied by the villa Caposele, once a summer residence of the kings of Naples” (EB).
6. “Caieta, nurse of Aeneas, have by your death given eternal fame [to our shores]” (Æneid, 7, 1–2, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough).
7. Three fortresses of the Quadrilateral (see letter 4536, note 10).
8. Now Pula, Croatian seaport at the southern tip of the Istrian Peninsula. It was part of the Austrian Empire until 1918.
9. George Grote (1794–1871), author of History of Greece (8 vols., 1846–56).
10. Following Victor Emmanuel’s arrival in Naples on 7 November, Garibaldi asked to be appointed “civil and military governor of the Two Sicilies for a year with full powers; but the king turned down his request, and Garibaldi refused the king’s offer of various financial and material rewards for his services. Two days later the ex-dictator left by boat for Caprera. All that he took with him was a bag of seed-corn for his farm and some borrowed money for immediate expenses. He made nothing for himself out of his months of power” (Holt, p. 256).
11. Leone Carpi (1810–98), Italian political economist and writer.
12. Landor refers to his “Tyrannicide” (1851), which appeared in a “four-page leaflet to be sold ‘for the benefit of the Hungarians in America’” (R.H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography, New York, 1954, p. 392).
13. Athenians Harmodius and Aristogiton “planned to kill the tyrant Hippias and his younger brother Hipparchus, in consequence of a private quarrel (514 B.C.). The plot miscarried: only Hipparchus was killed. Harmodius was at once cut down by Hippias’ guards, Aristogiton arrested and executed … As the tyranny was overthrown three years later, the two were popularly supposed to have made this possible, and were ever after called the Liberators” (The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford, 1957, p. 91).
14. Presumably, Landor has in mind a letter dated 1 July [43 B.C.], in which Brutus asks Cicero to spare Lepidus's children, Lepidus being Brutus's brother-in-law: “The fears of the rest of the world make me apprehensive about M. Lepidus. If he tears himself away from us … I beg and implore you, Cicero, in the name of our friendship and your good will towards me, to forget that my sister’s children are Lepidus’ sons and to regard me as having replaced him as their father” (Cicero, Letters to Quintus and Brutus, 20 (I, 13), trans. D.R. Shackleton Bailey). It was Roman practice to execute the children of traitors.
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