We Italians are too susceptible to the
impulses of passion, and of heat in the imagination; with a small matter
we are drunken and think to leap over the moon. Deadly intoxication,
most deadly fault, that of undervaluing an enemy, which lets our
enthusiasm too easily evaporate, and gives him every facility for
showing that he is as gallant as we are, and more resolute; that he has
much of perseverance and of discipline--qualities more effectual and
valuable than simple courage. It comes to this; we must either send
about their business the dreams of poets, and educate ourselves in
severe and masculine virtues, or must yet remain long in a position to
chant many more elegies, to assuage our sorrow, than hymns of triumph;
we must either rest assured that with the tenacious, the disciplined,
and the resolute only the tenacious, disciplined, and resolute can cope,
and must therefore leave off despising the Austrians, and imitate them
in their steadiness and their attention to the military spirit; or else
we must be doomed to the disgrace of seeing them masters of our country.
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