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After all, Varhely might, at this moment, be close to death; but, whatever might be the fate which awaited him at the end of his journey, he found the road very long and the engine very slow. At Venice he took a train which carried him through Lombardy into Tuscany; and at Florence he found Angelo Valla.
Good Master Lovel the wharfinger neither knew his daughter nor his father's name in this long-drawn compound of liquids; he was troubled, very doubtful, anxious for Gregory Drax; but all Lombardy and the Emilian March came to know it in time. Amilcare rode down opposition. Eloquence!
At the camp of Molnitz the plan was matured of giving Bohemia and Upper Austria to the Duke of Bavaria. Frederic of Prussia was to receive Upper Silesia and Glatz. Augustus of Poland was to annex to his kingdom Moravia and Upper Silesia. Lombardy was assigned to Spain. Sardinia was to receive some compensation not yet fully decided upon.
Zurich verified this assertion in many ways; for, owing to its free government, its proximity to the republics of Lombardy, and to the settlements of the Waldenses in the Alps, the place swarmed with that motley tribe of political and religious dreamers which Liberty is ever doomed to tolerate in her train. Of course, Arnold had his clique among the rest.
The Croats, the Tyrolese, all the Illyrians were rising, and so far from giving aid in the defence of the French soil it was manifest that the Viceroy could hardly hope to maintain himself much longer in Lombardy.
And spring with foliage and blossom would be with us by and by, in a month or two; even now in midwinter there was a foretaste of it, and it came to us first as a delicious fragrance in the air at one spot beside a row of old Lombardy poplars an odour that to the child is like wine that maketh the heart glad to the adult.
The heavy exactions of the French, and even more perhaps the wanton contempt with which they treated the churches and the clergy, had produced or fostered the indignation of a large part of the population throughout Lombardy. Reports of new Austrian levies being poured down the passes of the Tyrol were spread and believed.
I was wicked for serving the king, and therefore the country, as a spy; but I was to persevere, and cancel my iniquities by betraying those whom I served to you. That was your instructive precept. Have I done it or not? Answer, too have I done it for any payment beyond your approbation? I persuaded you to hope for Lombardy, and without any vaunting of my own patriotism.
A later journey in May of the same year took Chaucer once more to Italy, whither he had been sent with Sir Edward Berkeley to treat with Bernardo Visconti, joint lord of Milan, and "scourge of Lombardy," and Sir John Hawkwood the former of whom finds a place in that brief mirror of magistrates, the "Monk's Tale."
As ruler of Lombardy and Venetia she practically controlled Italy, and as presiding member of the German Confederation she had been able to keep even Prussia in line.
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