The Sun.
London, England, 1849-11-16 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

E I?NE S7'o DI RIPALTA : a Tale of the
Italian Revolution. 3 Vols. By Hamilton Geale.
Encouraged by the success of his previous work,
the first of his literary productions, entitled " Notes
of a Two Years' Residence in Italy," Mr. Hamilton
Geale has adventured upon a new path as an author
in aspiring to the rank of a novelist. To this end he
has written "Ernesto di Ripalta"—selecting as the
fittest theme for his maiden fiction the social and
political fortunes (alas ! that we should have to say
now the social and political misfortunes) of the
Italian multitude. Seeing that the volumes before
were penned at the period when the Roman penin-
sula was most sanguine of its liberation and of its
ulterior consolidation into an independent nationality,
it cannot be surprising that the author should evince
in every page an enthusiasm commensurate with that
of the then hopeful Italians. While inditing the
effusion the atmosphere of Italy resounded with
the battle-song of Carlo Alberto, and with the
immortal hymn of Pio Nono. It was, therefore, with
an earnest belief in the nature of the Italians that Mr.
Geale delineated the scenes, the incidents, and the
imaginary characters introduced into the narrative. In
regard to time the story goes no further down than
he fatal morning when the star of the heroic but
unfortunate monarch of Sardinia, Charles Albert the
Magnanimous, began to set in the gloom of his
memorable retreat before the soldiers of Radetzky.
The narrator hints, in very comprehensible language,
at the calamities which betel the three noblest princes
of Italy, the three most earnest aspirants for her
emancipation. It is impossible while reading the last
two chapters not to coincide with the novelist in his
opinion, that the misfortunes which have befallen the
Roman peninsula are directly, if not exclusively,
attributable to the treasonously inert attitude
assumed by the Lombards when the Piedmontese
were lavishing blood, money, and lives for the expul-
-lion of the Austrians beyond the Carpathians. This
miserable indolence on the part of the people of
Lombardy led at once to the downfal of the Italian
cause, and the sanguinary triumph of the German
invader. Hence the miseries and disappointments of
those who had been the first to raise the standard of
Italian liberation :—the death by a broken heart, in
-xile, of the magnanimous Charles ; the sorrows of
the eloquent Gioberti; the dejection of the ardent
Ventura ; the expulsion of the liberal-minded and
large-hearted Ferdinand from Tuscany ; and—last
and most melancholy spectacle of all—the bombard-
ment of Pio Nono in his Palace of the Quirinal.
Strange indeed it is to remember, that of all the sove-
reigns of Italy, the only one who has been enabled to
keep his throne unshaken is the one wbo butchered
his subjects in the streets of his capital—the ruthless
and abhorred King of Naples. All the others,
identified with the cause of the national rising,
,orne of them its immediate originators, were
rejected by the people who, when they should have
been fighting under the Sardinian banner, were
:pebbling about precedents. The plot of the fiction
before us is a mere skeleton on which the author has
heaped together the events of a strange and stirring
time. There is a young Italian (Ernesto di Ripalta)
who marries a beautiful English girl (called alter-
nately by fits and starts by the author now Emma
and now Emily Montague, as if the names were
identical) ; there is the Italian's bosom friend, a
young democrat of Switzerland (Gustave de Mont-
inaure), who loves the sister of his companion (An-
gelica); there is the good Bishop of Albano ; a
conspiring nobleman (Prince Negroni); a religious
devotee (the Marchese di Ripalta); a wily young
nephew of Cardinal Lambruschini (Casanova):;
end that most hackneyed and intolerable
of all romance horrors, a crafty and subtle
Jesuit, the Padre Verrone. Out of the
career of these most uninteresting personages the
writer contrives to fabricate a most absurd and unin-
eresting narrative—one of the most absurd and
uninteresting it has ever been our misfortune to wade
through. The following is about the only fragmentary
paragraph in the whole of the three volumes of suffi-
cient merit to admit of quotation ; it will doubtless
be read with some emotion, as affording a faint
-ketch of the personal appearance of the gallant and
ill doomed