The text states the King of Italy was "repaying that magnificent dotation [of the Two Sicilies] with a shameful imprisonment." Explain the historical implications of this statement and discuss how such an act of political ingratitude might shape the perception of both the author and the work itself for a contemporary reader.

From the book

and personal traits which really make a book, as lines and light shadows make a countenance. Moreover, the Italian MS. itself, written in the autograph of the General, was compiled as the solace of heavy hours at Varignano, where the King of Italy, who owed to Garibaldi's sword the splendid present of the Two Sicilies, was repaying that magnificent dotation with a shameful imprisonment.

s sword the splendid present of the Two Sicilies, was repaying that magnificent dotation with a shameful imprisonment. The time will come when these pages--in their original, at least--will be numbered among the proofs of the poet's statement that-- "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage: Minds innocent and quiet take These for a hermitage." If there be many passages in the narrative where the signs are strong that "the iron has entered into the soul," there are also a hundred where the spirit of the good and brave chieftain goes forth from…

of their birth is but a cold virtue compared with the burning devotion which fills the spirit of our warrior-novelist. It is as though the individuality of one of her antique Catos or Fabii was resuscitated, to protest, with deed and word, against the false and cunning tribe which have suborned the imperial city to their purposes, and turned the monuments of Rome, as it were, into one Cloaca Maxima. The end of these things is probably approaching, although His Holiness is parodying the great Councils of past history, and pretending to give laws _urbi et orbi_, while the kingdoms…

national dignity, or the contemptuous smile of all other European nations at the open buying and selling of provinces! They were thinking first of gain and remunerative employment, and were consequently deaf to all generous propositions likely to set in risk their Eldorado of profits, though they would, if successful, procure national unity and prosperity by energetic action. This middle-class cowardice is the cause of Italy's degradation at the present day, and were it not for that, the kissing of the slipper would be an infamy of the past. It is the reason, too, why Italy's soil…

ampaigns at least, since those glorious but mournful days, he has waged battle for the ancient city in the open field. Here, then, is his description of "Rome in the Nineteenth Century"--not seen as tourists or dilettanti see her, clothed with the imaginary robes of her historic and classic empire, but seen naked to the stained and scourged skin--affronted, degraded, defamed, bleeding from the hundred wounds where the leech-like priests hang and suck, and, by their vile organization, converted from the Rome which was mistress of the world, to a Rome which is the emporium of solemn…