The Sun.
London, England, 1862-12-19 00:00:00

Restoration. As things are at present,it is always
by necessity a heartburning to the pride of the
Neapolitans that their lovely capital has dwindled
into a very subordinate position compared with
that yet held haughtily far away in the north-west
of the Peninsula by furin : a metropolis intrinsi-
cally with not 'a tithe of her pretensions (that is of
the pretensions of Naples) to precedence. Florence
likewise intermediately finds all this while her in-
clination baulked—Florence being held, by some
among the politicians of Christendom to be
a city, by reason of its geographical posi-
tion, of its topographical advantages, and of its
political and social antecedents to be a very fair
substitute, in its way, for the Eternal City, suppos-
ing that latter still to remain unattainable as the
metropolis. Milan, too, once the glory and central
point of the Austrian rule in Lombardy—Milan in
her time, from having been the arena, at the dis-
tance of a thousand years from each other of the
Coronation now in 800 of the Emperor CHARLE-
MAGNE, now in 1800 of the Emperor NAPOLEON the
Great, each Emperor (as at Milan) the anointed
King of Italy, crowned with the iron diadem, cry-
ing out before the world in defiance, Dieu me la
donne gar a qui la touche ! Milan, the royal and
the white cathedralled,
,has subsided from a promi-
nent, not simply to a secondary, but to a third
rate or fourth rate position among the
cities of Italy. It constitutes, in fact, to '
our thinking one of the most signal tokens of the
vitality of the Italian movement in favour of Unifi-
cation, the restraining thus so long, and so steadily,
and so calmly, by this province and that, by Lom-
bardy, and Tuscany, and Naples especially, of every
imaginable jealousy. Naples, Milan, Florence—
yielding (doubtless with a secret sense of mortified
pride),recedence, and priority, and supremacy to
the more fortunate city of Turin—once no more
than the capital of Piedmont, now the metro-
polis—for the time being at least—of all Italy,
of the whole Italian kingdom !
Nay, the situation, ther, in the Roman peninsula
is so difficult of its kind, is so precarious,
is so wholly undetermined that Turin itself, hitherto
and still among the cities of Italy the "cynosure
of neighbouring eyes," and of distant eyes as well,
yet itself is not without its poignant qualms of
jealousy and of heartburnings. For—ever since
Italy asserted her independence—laas not the ques-
tion of Turin's precedence among all the principal
cities upon the Italian soil been trembling perpe-
tually in the balance ? Has Turin not held its own
simply, as it were, on sufferance P Yet, in spite of
all these incitements to disunion and jealousy of one
another—Turin, and Milan, and Florence, andNa plea
—nay, far more than those cities themselves, the
very provinces of which each is the respective capi-
tal, Piedmont, and Lombardy, and Tuscany, and
the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, have still held
resolutely together ! In spite of the rashness of
GARIBALDI—in spite of the trickery of RATTAZZI
—in spite of the deadweight antagonistically
of the policy of the French EMPEROR, in spite of
the armed presence along the whole of the
north-eastern frostier of the New Kingdom of the
Austrian soldiers garrisoning the grim and all but
impregnable fortresses of the Quadrilateral. In
defiance and despite of each and all of these obstacles
to the Unification, Italy has persistently remained
as long as she could, she still remains as firmly
and completely as is in any way practicable
—unified ! That is her hope—the groundwork and
guarantee of her hope—the fact, that provinces ap-
parently so alien to each other have still survived
throughout the whole of this great national move-
ment, not simply in cordial alliance, but in com-
plete amity and union. It is this bond of sympathy
that binds together so tenaciously and securely
those otherwise distinct and separate rods of em-
pire making up the lictor's fasces that might be
symbolled ae borne before his Italian Majesty King
VICTOR EMMANUEL.