CHAPTER XVII. MAZZINI IN ENGLAND-INCIDENTS IN HIS CAREER
Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Englishmen know as Joseph Mazzini, was born in Genoa, June 22, 1805, and died in Pisa, March 10, 1872. He spent the greater part of forty years of his marvellous life in London. * Some incidents of his English career, known to me, may increase or confirm the public impression of him.
* First in Devonshire Street, Queen Square; in Chelsea; in
Brompton; in earlier years in penury. Where he had command
of a sitting-room, birds were flying about. Uncaged freedom
was to Mazzini the emblem of Liberty.
Never strong from youth, abstemious, oft from privation, and always from principle, he was as thin as Dumas describes Richelieu. Arbitrary imprisonment, which twice befel him, and many years of voluntary confinement, imposed upon himself by necessity of concealment—living and working in a small room, whence it was dangerous for him to emerge by day or by night—were inevitably enervating. When he first came to London in 1837, he brought with him three exiles, who depended upon his earnings for subsistence. The slender income supplied him by his mother might have sufficed for his few wants,* but aid for others and the ceaseless cost of the propaganda of Italian independence, to which he devoted himself, had to be provided by writing for reviews. At times cherished souvenirs had to be pledged, and visits to money-lenders had to be made.
* Of Mazzini's great abstemiousness it was written later in
life:
"A cheaper world no one can know,
Where he who laughs grows fat;
Man wants but little here below—
Mazzini less than that."
It was the knowledge all his countrymen had that he sought nothing for himself, never spared himself in toil or peril, that was the source of his influence. He wrote: "We follow a path strewn with sacrifices and with sorrows." But all the tragedies of his experience we never knew until years after his death, when his incomparable "Love Letters" were published in the Nineteenth Century, No. 219, May, 1895.
He appeared to others to have "the complexion of a student," the air of one who waited and listened. As Meredith said, it was not "until you meet his large, penetrating, dark eyes, that you were drawn suddenly among a thousand whirring wheels of a capacious, keen, and vigorous intellect."
Mr. Bolton King has published a notable book on the great Italian, containing more incidents in his career than any other English writer has collected. I confine myself mainly to those within my knowledge.