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Among them was observed Padre Gavazzi, a Barnabite monk, whose puerile vanity made him aspire to distinction, and whose career was already marked by pretentious eloquence, a bombastic style, confused ideas, and a mind still undecided as to the limits of orthodoxy, which, a little later, he stepped beyond. He was the preacher of the crusade.
With perfect self-command, gift of mimicry and dramatic gestures, the lecturer swayed his audience; now bubbling over with witty anecdotes, again exercising his power of graphic portraiture. Whatever he was, "poet, orator and dramatist, an English Gavazzi," or, "mountebank," "humbug," or "backslider," Mr. Gough was, even at that early period, an antagonist not to be despised.
It is like passing by a single leap from the dark ages to modern times. Then only do you feel what you owe to Watt. His priests in France have attended at the opening of railways, and blessed the engines. What! bless the steam-engine! Sprinkle holy water on the heads of Mazzini and Gavazzi. For what are these engines, but so many cast-iron Mazzinis and Gavazzis.
No writer, though he write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Lamartine, or Dudevant, can hope for such an audience as Verdi or Meyerbeer. No orator speaks to such crowds as Rossini; no Everett or Kossuth, or Gavazzi or Spurgeon, has so many listeners as Donizetti.
I was speaking the other day to a lady who had known Signor Alessandro Gavazzi. 'When he was in England, she told me, 'he used to come and stay at my father's home, and, to us girls, he seemed like a visitor from another world. The life of Gavazzi is one of the stirring romances of the nineteenth century. Born at Bologna in 1809, he became, at the age of fifteen, a Barnabite monk.
Now and then, as the political campaigns drew on, we had speeches from eminent statesmen; and I give in the chapters on "My Religion" reminiscences of speeches on religious subjects made by Archbishop Hughes and Father Gavazzi. Jumel. One afternoon at that period she appeared in the streets of Saratoga in an open coach-and-four, her horses ridden by gaily dressed postilions.
The Neapolitan government deemed all further resistance on the island of Sicily useless, and recalled its troops for the defence of Naples. At Messina, Garibaldi was joined by Father Gavazzi, the finest orator of Italy, who had seceded from the Romish Church, and who threw his whole soul into the cause of Italian independence.
Many persons in Rome reported the event; but instead of copying what is already before the public, I translate a letter addressed to me by P. Alessandro Gavazzi, late chaplain-general of the Roman army, in reply to a few questions which I had put to him. All who have heard his statements may judge whether his account of facts be not marked with every note of accuracy.
The matters which the Italian youth are taught they are taught by rote. "Ignorance is the mother of devotion," a maxim sometimes quoted with a sneer, but one which embodies a profound truth as regards that kind of devotion which is prevalent at Rome. I have seen estimates by Gavazzi and other Italians, of the proportion who can read in the Roman States. It is somewhere about one in a hundred.
These persons were enjoying the fun with a relish which was noways abated by the spectacle over the way. The whole thing was acted exactly as I had seen it before; but to me it was a novelty to hear Punch, and all the other interlocutors in the piece, discourse in the language in which Dante had sung, and in which I had heard, just before leaving Scotland, Gavazzi declaim.
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