384

LIFE OF COLONEL MACERONI.

The Pope shut himself up in his palace of the Quirinal ,(Monte Cavallo) issued a Bull of Excommunication againstNapoleon,Murat, and all his abettors, in the silly expectationthat the people of Italy retained enough of their by-gonereverence for his Pontifical petticoats, to bestir themselvesin his behalf. The trumpet of the Vatican was now nomore than the penny trumpet of a fair, and Europe , espe-cially Italy , would have been freed from the Ecclesiasticalincubus for ever, had not the Protestant ( Pope and Poperyhating) Lord Castlereagh set him up again in 1815!

To the cry of “no Popery!”'—Answer, “who set up thePope 1 ”

About the middle of 1809, every thing seemed favourableto Murat and to the power of Napoleon, when on the 11thof June, the telegraphs of Calabria announced the Anglo-Sicilian expedition, consisting of several hundred ships ofwar and transports. The next signals announced sixtyvessels of war, and two hundred and six transports;all under the ostensible command of Prince Leopold,of Sicily , but really of General Sir John Stuart, who hadso well beaten Regnier at Maida two years previously.This fleet contained on board, fourteen thousand troops,British and Sicilian ; besides which numerous civil andmilitary authorities, and a tribunal ready “cut and dried,”composed of the celebrated worthies who had so greatlydistinguished themselves, as I have recited in 1799.

Two days after the sailing of the main expedition, twominor ones issued from the port of Messina, one of whichlanded four hundred brigands and two hundred troops inthe gulf of Gioja, in Calabria ; the other landed three thou-sand soldiers and two hundred brigands on the coastbetween Reggio and Palma. These two latter corps formeda junction on the mountains of Melia, and then undertookthe siege of Scilla with the regular troops, while the bri-