130
LIFE OF COLONEL MACERONI.
Queen, Acton, and Count Thurn, already thirty thousandpersons were entombed alive in the city of Naples alone.Above three hundred were already put to death. Amongstthe latter were Caraffa, Riario Colonna, Caracciolo; fivePignatelli’s, and twenty-seven other nobles. Of men ofletters and high literary or scientific reputation, were Cirillo,Pagano, Conforti, Russo, Ciaja, Fiorentino, Baffi, Fal-conieri, Logoteta, de Filippis, Albanese, Bagni, Neri, andforty others. Moreover, generals, field officers, and men inauthority, Federiei, Massa, Mantlioni, the Bishops ofSarno, Natale , and Troise; the ladies Pimentel and Sanfelice,and many others of all classes, were murdered in violationof the capitulation of Naples of 1799.
In the midst of all these horrors, which cast so deep andsanguinary a stain upon the character of man, one greatsaving and consoling feature stood prominent, and, as itwere, at once to mitigate the miseries of the time and place,and vindicate one moiety of our species from the infamy sowell merited by the other. I allude to the glorious conductof the women. In times when even the best of men wereparalysed with fear and deep despair, the women assumedthe office of assisting the afflicted, and pleading the causeof innocence. Spurned from the anti-chambers of theministers ; thrust from the thresholds of the prisons;outraged, insulted, and indecently assaulted even by the vilerabble of scriveners, ushers, judges,—they endured allwith meek and modest resolution, equally removed fromboldness or submission. Repulsed one day in their appli-cations, the next, they patiently renewed them ; and to theinsults they endured responded with modest remonstrance,and with tears ! If any man escaped the death he had beendoomed to, or if any others found a mitigation of their sen-tences,— to the indomitable perseverance and piety of womenwere they indebted for the benefit. In one of the subter-