“10.—If the steamer does not appear, it is because difficulties have prevented it.
“Now if Madame Settembrini has a short memory, it will be best to commit these points to writing, and enclose them in a wax pill covered with gutta-percha (a piece of which is enclosed), and which she will put in her mouth and swallow, if examined closely at the Convent. But better still if there be nothing in writing.”
The plan set forth met with the fullest approbation from Mr. Fagan; he, however, wrote to Panizzi “to be most cautious, for although Mazza had left the Police, they, the English, were watched night and day, and were hated by the King’s partisans.”
The great difficulty in the undertaking turned out to be the obtaining of a vessel. Owing to the exigencies of the Crimean War, Panizzi, up to the 31st of August, had been unable either to charter or buy a craft suitable for his purpose. At length the desired object was attained in the shape of the screw steamer “Isle of Thanet.” But now comes the melancholy part of the story; failure of skilfully and anxiously concerted plans, waste of money collected with so much pain, arduous and continuous labour miserably thrown away; bitter disappointment to Panizzi, and prolonged incarceration of the wretched inmates of S. Stefano. The ill-fated vessel charged with the restoration to freedom of Settembrini and his companions was but laden, after all, with the destruction of the hopes of all concerned in the attempted liberation. Scarcely had she started from Hull, when she met with a disabling accident which forced her to put back for repairs. These being completed, she set forth a second time, and had proceeded no further than Yarmouth when she was caught in a storm on the 25th of October and totally lost. So ended by no default of skill, but by the merest caprice of fortune, an enterprise which, if we consider the persons engaged, the means within their reach, and the purity of its purpose, must ever be reckoned as a most brilliant attempt; and so did not end, at least with all true lovers of freedom and humanity, the glory of those that had embarked upon it.
Amongst others who felt the disappointment of the failure almost as keenly as Panizzi himself was Mr. Gladstone, who lost no time in writing a letter of condolence on the ill-success of the expedition:—
“Hawarden, Chester, November 6th, 1855.
“My dear Panizzi,
I cannot help writing you a line, however barren of condolence. I had hoped it might please God that your benevolent plan should succeed. It seems usually so hopeless to do good in this world, on a large scale, that one desires to become intensely concentrated on what lies within a small compass. For myself, too, I feel that with respect to the Italians I have had a great deal more credit than I have fairly earned; and I wished to have a hand in doing something by way of a step towards rectifying the account. I am so little informed of the reasons and particulars of your mode of proceeding, that I will at present go no further; but whenever the opportunity offers, I shall be most desirous to converse with you. I hope to hear more in the interval if you have more that can be usefully said.
I have resumed, during this recess, some old studies on Homer, and have also gone back for collateral illustration to that field of which I am very fond—the Italian romance. So for the first time I have been reading you on Ariosto and Bojardo, and on the romance in general; let me add, with great interest and pleasure, and with profit too, unless it be my own fault. But I am curious to know whether you still hold all the opinions that you had when you gave these books to the world. Are you still willing to have it thought to be probably your opinion that Berni is better than Bojardo? I am inclined to like Domenichi better than Berni, because he is so much nearer Bojardo. Mr. Hallam speaks of him with contempt. I doubt if he had paid much attention to either.
I have also been reading the ‘Orlandino’ and the ‘Ricciardetto.’ All these poems have an interest attaching to them as parts of a great chapter of literature. The last of them, at least the first half of it, though far from unexceptionable, seems to me better and not worse than Ariosto, in the one point for which he is justly censured.