Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches Part 3

I have before me just now a little silver coin picked up in Savoy very soon after Italy had become a kingdom, and Savoy had ceased to be part of it. That was in truth the only thing that made the coin in any way specially interesting--the fact that it happened to be in chance circulation through Savoy when Savoy had no longer any claim to it. So, for that little sc.r.a.p of melancholy interest I have since kept the coin in my purse, and it has made many journeys with me in Europe and America; and I suppose I can never be utterly dest.i.tute while it remains in my possession. Now, the head which is displayed upon that coin is not of kingly mould. The mint has flattered its royal master much less than is usual with such portrait painters. An English silver or gold coin of this year's mintage will still represent Her Majesty Queen Victoria as a beautiful young woman of twenty, with features worthy of a Greek statue and a bust shapely enough for Dryden's Iphigenia. But the coin of King Victor Emanuel has little flattery in it. There is the coa.r.s.e, bulldog cast of face; there are the heavy eye-brows, the unshapely nose, the hideous moustache, the receding forehead, and all the other beauties and graces of the "bloat King's" countenance. Certainly the face on the coin is not bloated enough, and there is too little animalism displayed in the back of the head, to do justice to the first King of Italy.

Moreover, the coin gives somehow the idea of a small man, and the King of Italy finds it not easy to get a horse strong enough to bear the load of Antony. But for a coin it is a wonderfully honest and truthful piece of work, quite a model to other mints, and it gave when it was issued as fair an idea as a little piece of silver could well give of the head and face of Europe's most ill-favored sovereign.

What a chance Victor Emanuel had of being a hero of romance! No king perhaps ever had such a chance before, and missed it so persistently.

Europe seemed at one time determined, whether he would or no, to make a hero, a knight, a _preux chevalier_, out of the son of Charles Albert.

Not Charles Edward, the brilliant, unfortunate Stuart himself, not Gustavus Adolphus even seemed to have been surrounded by such a romantic rainbow of romance and of hope. When, after the crowning disaster of Novara, Victor Emanuel's weak, vacillating, unlucky, and not very trustworthy father abdicated the crown of Sardinia in favor of his son, the latter seemed in the eyes of liberal Europe to represent not merely the hopes of all true Italians, but the best hopes of liberty and progress all over the world. There was even then a vague idea afloat through Europe--although Europe did not know how Cavour had already accepted the idea as a principle of action--that with her tremendous defeats Piedmont had won the right to hoist the standard of one Italy.

This then was the cause which the young King was taken to represent. He had been baptized in blood to that cause. He represented Italy united and free--free from Austrian and Pope, from political and religious despotism. He was at all events no carpet knight. He had fought bravely on more than one fearful field of battle; he had looked on death closely and undismayed; he had been wounded in fighting for Italy against the Austrian. It was said of the young sovereign--who was only Duke of Savoy then--that on the night of Novara, when all was over save retreat and humiliation, he shook his dripping sword at the ranks of the conquering Austrians and exclaimed, "Italy shall make herself for all that!"

Probably the story is substantially true, although Victor Emanuel may perhaps have used stronger expressions if he spoke at all; for no one ever doubted his courage and coolness in the hour of danger. But true or not, the anecdote exactly ill.u.s.trated the light in which the world was prepared to regard the young sovereign of Sardinia--as the hope of Italy and of freedom, the representative of a defeat which he was determined and destined to convert into a victory.

Not many years after this, and while the l.u.s.tre of his misfortunes and the brilliancy of his hopes still surrounded him, King Victor Emanuel visited England. He was welcomed everywhere with a cordiality of personal interest and admiration not often accorded by any people to a foreign king. Decidedly it was a hard thing to look at him and yet retain the thought of a hero of romance. He was not then nearly so bloated and burly as he is now; and he was at least some dozen or fourteen years younger. But even then how marvellously ill-favored he was; how rough and coa.r.s.e-looking; how unattractive in manner; how brusque and uncouth in gesture and bearing; how liable to fits of an apparently stolid silence; how utterly devoid of grace and dignity! His huge straw-colored moustache, projecting about half a foot on each side of his face, was as unsightly a piece of manly decoration as ever royal countenance displayed. Yet the public tried to forget all those external defects and still regard him as a hero of romance somehow, anyhow. So fully was he believed to be a representative of civil and religious freedom in Italy, that one English religious society of some kind--I forget which it was--actually went the length of presenting an address to him, in which they flourished about the errors of Popery as freely as if they were appealing to an Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great.

Cavour gave them very neatly and tersely the snub that their ignorance and presumption so well deserved; and their address did not obtain an honored place among Victor Emanuel's memorials of his visit to England.

He was very hospitably entertained by Queen Victoria, who is said to have suffered agonies of martyrdom from her guest's everlasting cigar--the good soul detests tobacco as much as King James himself did--and even more from his occasional outbursts of roystering compliment and canteen love-making toward the ladies of her staid and modest court. One of the household edicts, I think, of Queen Elizabeth's court was that no gallant must "toy with the maids, under pain of fourpence." Poor Victor Emanuel's slender purse would have had to bear a good many deductions of fourpence, people used to hint, if this penal decree had prevailed in his time at Windsor or Osborne. But Queen Victoria was very patient and friendly. Cavour has left some pleasant descriptions of her easy, unaffected friendliness toward himself.

Guizot, it will be remembered, has described her as the stiffest of the stiff, freezing into petrifaction a whole silent circle by her invincible coldness and formality. I cannot pretend to reconcile the conflicting accounts of these two eminent visitors, but certainly Cavour has drawn some animated and very attractive pictures of Queen Victoria's almost girlish good-humor and winning familiarity. However that may be, the whole heart of free England warmed to Victor Emanuel, and was ready to dub him in advance the chosen knight of liberty, the St. George of Italy, before whose resistless sword every dragon of despotism and superst.i.tion was to grovel in the dust.

So the King went his way, and the next thing the world heard of him was that he was in league with Louis Napoleon against the Austrian, and that the child his daughter was to be married to the obese and elderly Prince Napoleon, whose eccentric genius, varied accomplishments, and thrilling eloquence were then unrecognized and unknown. Then came the triumphs of Magenta and Solferino, and it was made plain once more to the world that Victor Emanuel had the courage of a true soldier. He actually took a personal share of the fighting when the Italians were in action. He did not sit on his horse, far away from the bullets, like his imperial ally, and direct the movements of the army by muttering "_C'est bien_,"

when an aide-de-camp galloped up to announce to him as a piece of solemn farce that this or that general had already accomplished this or that operation. No; Victor Emanuel took his share of the fighting like a king. In the affair of San Martino he led an attack himself, and encouraged his soldiers by bellowing in stentorian voice quite a clever joke for a king, just as he was about to charge. A crack regiment of French Zouaves (the French Zouaves were soldiers in those days) was so delighted with the Sardinian King that it elected him a corporal of the regiment on the field of battle--a quite wonderful piece of compliment from a Zouave regiment to a foreign sovereign. Not so long before had Lamoriciere declared that "Italians don't fight," and here was a crack Zouave regiment enthusiastic about the fighting capacity of an Italian King. The irony of fate, it will be remembered, decreed soon after that Lamoriciere should himself lay down his arms before an Italian general and Italian soldiers.

Out of that war, then, Victor Emanuel emerged still a hero. But the world soon began to think that he was only a hero in the field. The sale of Savoy and Nice much shocked the public sentiment of Europe. The house of Savoy, as an English orator observed, had sprung from the womb of the mountains which the unworthy heir of Savoy sold to a stranger. As the world had given to Victor Emanuel the credit of virtues which he never possessed, it was now ready to lay on him all the burden of deeds which were not his. Whether the cession of Savoy was right or wrong, Victor Emanuel was not to blame, under the hard circ.u.mstances, for withdrawing, according to the first Napoleon's phrase, "_sous les draps d'un roi const.i.tutionnel_," and allowing his ministers to do the best they could.

In fact, the thing was a necessity of the situation. Napoleon the Third had to make the demand to satisfy his own people, who never quite "seemed to see" the war for Italy. The Sardinian ministers had to yield to the demand to satisfy Napoleon the Third. Had Prussia been a raw, weak power in September, 1866, she must have ceded some territory to France. Sardinia or Italy was raw and weak in 1860, and had no choice but to submit. There were two things to be said for the bargain. First, Italy got good value for it. Next, the Savoyards and Nizzards never were good Italians. They rather piqued themselves on not being Italians. The Savoy delegates would not speak Italian in the old Turin Parliament. The ministers had to answer their French "interpellations" in French.

Still all this business did an immense harm to the reputation of King Victor Emanuel. He had acted like a quiet, sensible man--not in any way like a hero of romance, and Europe desired to see in him a hero of romance. Then he did not show himself, people said, very grateful to Garibaldi when the latter opened the way for the expulsion of the Bourbons from Naples, and did so much to crown Victor Emanuel King of Italy. Now I am a warm admirer of Garibaldi. I think his very weaknesses are n.o.ble and heroic. There is carefully preserved among the best household treasures of my family a vine leaf which Garibaldi once plucked and gave me as a _souvenir_ for my wife. But I confess I should not like to be king of a new monarchy partly made by Garibaldi and with Garibaldi for a subject. The whole policy of Garibaldi proceeded on the gallant and generous a.s.sumption that Italy alone ought to be able to conquer all her enemies. We have since seen how little Italy availed against a mere fragment of the military power of Austria--that power which Prussia crushed like a nutsh.e.l.l. Events, I think, have vindicated the slower and less a.s.suming policy of Victor Emanuel, or, I should say, the policy which Victor Emanuel consented to adopt at the bidding of Cavour.

But all the same the _prestige_ of Victor Emanuel was gone. Then Europe began to look at the man coolly, and estimate him without glamour and without romance. Then it began to listen to the very many stories against him which his enemies could tell. Alas! these stories were not all untrue. Of course there were grotesque and hideous exaggerations.

There are in Europe some three or four personages of the highest rank whom scandal delights to a.s.sail, and of whom it tells stories which common sense and common feeling alike compel us to reject. It would be wholly impossible even to hint at some of the charges which scandal in Europe persistently heaped on Victor Emanuel, the Emperor Napoleon III., Prince Napoleon, and the reigning King of the Netherlands. If one-half the stories told of these four men were true, then Europe would hold at present four personages of the highest rank who might have tutored Caligula in the arts of recondite debauchery, and have looked down on Alexander the Sixth as a prudish milksop. But I think no reasonable person will have much difficulty in sifting the probable truth out of the monstrous exaggerations. No one can doubt that Victor Emanuel is a man of gross habits and tastes, and is, or was, addicted to coa.r.s.e and ign.o.ble immoralities. "The manners of a mosstrooper and the morality of a he goat," was the description which my friend John Francis Maguire, the distinguished Roman Catholic member of the House of Commons, gave, in one of his Parliamentary speeches, of King Victor Emanuel. This was strong language, and it was the language of a prejudiced though honest political and religious partisan; but it was not, all things considered, a very bad description. Moreover, it was mildness, it was compliment--nay, it was base flattery--when compared with the hideous accusations publicly and distinctly made against Victor Emanuel by one of Garibaldi's sons, not to speak of other accusers, and privately whispered by slanderous gossip all over Europe. One peculiarity about Victor Emanuel worthy of notice is that he has no luxury in his tastes.

He is, I believe, abstemious in eating and drinking, caring only for the homeliest fare. He has sat many times at the head of a grand state banquet, where the rarest viands, the most superb wines were abundant, and never removed the napkin from his plate, never tasted a morsel or emptied a gla.s.s. He had had his plain fare at an earlier hour, and cared nothing for the triumphs of cookery or the choicest products of the vine. He has thus sat, in good-humored silence, his hand leaning on the hilt of his sword, through a long, long banquet of seemingly endless courses, which to him was a pageant, a ceremonial duty, and nothing more. He delights in chamois-hunting--in hunting of almost any kind--in horses, in dogs, and in women of a certain coa.r.s.e and gross description.

There is nothing of the Richelieu or Lauzun, or even the Francis the First, about the dull, I had almost said harmless, immoralities of the King of Italy. Men in private and public station have done far greater harm, caused far more misery than ever he did, and yet escaped almost unwhipt of justice. The man has (or had, for people say he is reformed now) the coa.r.s.e, easily-gratified tastes of a sailor turned ash.o.r.e after a long cruise--and such tastes are not kingly; and that is about all that one feels fairly warranted in saying either to condemn or to palliate the vices of Victor Emanuel. He absolutely wants all element of greatness. He is not even a great soldier. He has boisterous animal courage, and finds the same excitement in leading a charge as in hunting the chamois. But he has nothing even of the very moderate degree of military capacity possessed by a dashing _sabreur_ like Murat. It seems beyond doubt that it was the infatuation he displayed in attempting the personal direction of affairs which led to the breakdown at Custozza. The man is, in fact, like one of the rough jagers described in Schiller's "Wallenstein's Camp"--just this, and nothing more. When Garibaldi was in the zenith of his fortunes and fame in 1860, Victor Emanuel declared privately to a friend that the height of his ambition would be to follow the gallant guerilla leader as a mere soldier in the field. Certainly, when the two men entered Naples together, every one must have felt that their places ought to have been reversed. How like a king, an ideal king--a king of poetry and painting and romance--looked Garibaldi in the superb serenity of his untaught grace and sweetness and majesty. How rude, uncouth, clownish, even vulgar, looked the big, brawny, ungainly trooper whom people had to salute as King. When Garibaldi went to visit the hospitals where the wounded of the short struggle were lying, how womanlike he was in his sympathetic tenderness; how light and noiseless was his step; how gentle his every gesture; what a sweet word of genial compa.s.sion or encouragement he had for every sufferer. The burly King strode and clattered along like a dragoon swaggering through the crowd at a country fair. Not that Victor Emanuel wanted good nature, but that his rude _physique_ had so little in it of the sympathetic or the tender.

Was there ever known such a whimsical, harmless, odd saturnalia as Naples presented during those extraordinary days? I am thinking now chiefly of the men who, mostly uncalled-for, "rallied round" the Revolution, and came from all manner of holes and corners to offer their services to Garibaldi, and to exhibit themselves in the capacity of freedom's friends, soldiers, and scholars. Hardly a hero, or crackbrain, or rantipole in Europe, one would think, but must have been then on exhibition somewhere in Naples. Father Gavazzi harangued from one position; Alexandre Dumas, accompanied by his faithful "Admiral Emile,"

directed affairs from another. Edwin James, then a British criminal lawyer and popular member of Parliament, was to be seen tearing round in a sort of semi-military costume, with pistols stuck in his belt. The worn, thoughtful, melancholy face of Mazzini was, for a short time at least, to be seen in juxtaposition with the c.o.c.kney visage of an ambitious and restless common councilman from the city of London, who has lived all his life since on the glorious memories and honors of that good time. The House of Lords, the House of Commons, and the Guildhall of London were lavishly represented there. Men like Turr, the dashing Hungarian and Mieroslawski, the "Red" leader of Polish revolution--men to whom battle and danger were as the breath of their nostrils--were b.u.t.tonholed and advised by heavy British vestrymen and pert Parisian journalists. Hardly any man or woman entered Naples from a foreign country at that astonishing time who did not believe that he or she had some special counsel to give, which Victor Emanuel or Garibaldi or some one of their immediate staff was bound to listen to and accept. Woman's Rights were pretty well represented in that pellmell. There was a Countess something or other--French, they said--who wore short petticoats and trousers, had silver-mounted pistols in her belt and silver spurs on her heels, and was generally believed to have done wonders in "the field"--what field no one would stop to ask. There was Jessie Mario White, modest, pleasant, fair-haired woman, wife of a gallant gentleman and soldier--Jessie White, who made no exhibition of herself, but did then and since faithful and valuable work for Italian wounded, such as Italy ought not soon to forget. There was Mrs.

Chambers--Mrs. Colonel Chambers--the Mrs. "Putney Giles" of Disraeli's "Lothair"--very prominent everywhere, sounding the special eulogies of Garibaldi with tireless tongue, and utterly overshadowing her quiet husband, who (the husband I mean) afterwards stood by Garibaldi's side at Aspromonte. Exeter Hall had sent out powerful delegations, in the firm faith apparently that Garibaldi would at their request order Naples forthwith to break up its shrines and images of saints and become Protestant; and that Naples would at once obey. Never was such a time of dreams and madness and fussiness, of splendid aspirations and silly self-seeking vanity, of chivalry and daring, and true wisdom and nonsense. It was a time naturally of many disappointments; and one disappointment to almost everybody was His Majesty King Victor Emanuel.

His Majesty seemed at least not much to care about the whole affair from the beginning. He went through it as if he didn't quite understand what it was all about, and didn't think it worth the trouble of trying.

People who saw him at that splendid moment when, the forces of Garibaldi joining with the regular Sardinian troops after all had been won, Garibaldi and the King met for the first time in that crisis, and the soldier hailed the sovereign as "King of Italy!"--people who saw and studied that picturesque historic meeting have told me that there was no more emotion of any kind on Victor Emanuel's face than if he were receiving a formal address from the mayor of a country town. "I thank you," were his only words of reply; and I am a.s.sured that it was not "I thank _you_," with emphasis on the last word to indicate that the King acknowledged how much he owed to his great soldier; but simply "I thank you," as he might have thanked a groom who opened a stable door for him.

Perhaps the very depth and grandeur of the King's emotions rendered him incapable of finding any expression for them. Let us hope so. But I have had the positive a.s.surances of some who saw the scene, that if any such emotions were felt the royal countenance concealed them as completely as though they never had been.

In truth, I presume that the whole thing really was a terrible bore to the royal Rawdon Crawley, who found himself compelled by cursed spite to play the part of a patriot king. The Pope, the ultramontane bishops, and the ultramontane press have always been ringing fierce changes on the inordinate and wicked ambition of Victor Emanuel. I am convinced the poor man has no more ambition than his horse. If he could have chalked out his own career for himself, he would probably have asked nothing better than to be allowed to devote his life to chamois-hunting, with a hunter's homely fare, and the companionship of a few friends (some fat ladies among the number) with whom he could talk and make jokes in the _patois_ of Piedmont. This, and perhaps a battle-field and a dashing charge every now and then, would probably have realized his dreams of the _summum bonum_. But some implacable destiny, embodied in the form of a Cavour or a Garibaldi, was always driving on the stout King and bidding him get up and attempt great things--be a patriot and a hero.

Fancy Rawdon Crawley impelled, or rather compelled by the inexorable command of Becky his wife, to go forth in quest of the Holy Grail, and one may perhaps be able to guess what Victor Emanuel's perplexity and reluctance were when he was bidden to set out for the accomplishment of the regeneration of Italy. "Honor to those to whom honor is due; honor to old Mother Baubo," says some one in "Faust." Honor on that principle, then, to King Victor Emanuel. He did get up and go forth and undertake to bear his part in the adventure. And here seriously let me speak of the one high merit of Victor Emanuel's career. He is not a hero; he is not a statesman or even a politician; he is not a patriot in any grand, exalted sense. He would like to be idle, and perhaps to be despotic. But he has proved that he understands the true responsibilities and duties of a const.i.tutional King better than many sovereigns of higher intellect and better character. He always did go, or at least endeavor to go, where the promptings of his ministers, the commands of his one imperious minister, or the voice of the country directed. There must be a great struggle in the mind of Victor Emanuel between his duty as a king and his duty as a Roman Catholic, when he enters into antagonism with the Pope. Beyond doubt Victor Emanuel is a superst.i.tious Catholic. Of late years his const.i.tution has once or twice threatened to give way, and he is probably all the more anxious to be reconciled with the Church.

Perhaps he would be glad enough to lay down the load of royalty altogether and become again an accepted and devoted Catholic, and hunt his chamois with a quieted conscience. But still, impelled by what must be some sort of patriotism and sense of duty, he accepts his uncongenial part of const.i.tutional King, and strives to do all that the voice of his people demands. It is probable that at no time was the King personally much attached to his ill.u.s.trious minister Cavour. The genius and soul of Cavour were too oppressively imperial, high-reaching, and energetic for the homely, plodding King. With all his external levity Count Cavour was terribly in earnest, and he must often have seemed a dreadful bore to his sovereign. Cavour knew himself the master, and did not always take pains to conceal his knowledge. He would sometimes adopt the most direct and vigorous language in remonstrating with the King if the latter did not act on valuable advice at the right moment. Sometimes, when things went decidedly against Cavour's wishes, the minister would take the monarch to task more roundly than even the most good-natured monarchs are likely to approve. When Napoleon the Third disappointed Cavour and all Italy by the sudden peace of Villafranca, I have heard that Cavour literally denounced Victor Emanuel for consenting to the arrangement.

Count Arrivabene, an able writer, has given a very vivid and interesting description of Cavour's demeanor when he reached the Sardinian headquarters on his way to an interview with the King and learned what had been done. He was literally in a "tearing rage." He tore off his hat and dashed it down, he clenched his hands, he stamped wildly, gesticulated furiously, became red and purple, foamed at the mouth, and grew inarticulate for very pa.s.sion. He believed that he and Italy were sold--as indeed they were; and it was while this temper was yet on him that he went to see the King, and denounced him, as I have said. Now this sort of thing certainly could not have been agreeable to Victor Emanuel; and yet he patiently accepted Cavour as a kind of glorious necessity. He never sought, as many another king in such _duresse_ would have done, to weaken his minister's influence and authority by showing open sullenness and dissatisfaction. Ratazzi, with his pliable ways and his entire freedom from any wearisome earnestness or devotion to any particular cause, was naturally a far more companionable and agreeable minister for the King than the untiring and imperious Cavour.

Accordingly, it was well known that Ratazzi was more of a personal favorite; but the King never seems to have acted otherwise than loyally and honestly toward Cavour. Ricasoli was all but intolerable to the King. Ricasoli was proud and stern; and he was, moreover, a somewhat rigid moralist, which Cavour hardly professed to be. The King writhed under the government of Ricasoli, and yet, despite all that was at the time whispered, he cannot, I think, be fairly accused of having done anything personally to rid himself of an obnoxious minister. Indeed, the single merit of Victor Emanuel's character, if we put aside the element of personal courage, is its rough integrity. He is a _galantuomo_, an honest man--in that sense, a man of his word. He gave his word to const.i.tutional government and to Italy, and he appears to have kept the word in each case according to his lights.

But his popularity among his subjects, the interest felt in him by the world, have long been steadily on the wane. Years and years ago he ceased to retain the faintest gleam of the halo of romance that once was, despite of himself, thrown around him. His people care little or nothing for him. Why, indeed, should they care anything? The military _prestige_ which he had won, such as it was, vanished at Custozza, and it was his evil destiny, hardly his fault, to be almost always placed in a position of antagonism to the one only Italian who since Cavour's death had an enthusiastic following in Italy. Aspromonte was a calamity for Victor Emanuel. One can hardly blame him; one can hardly see how he could have done otherwise. The greatest citizen or soldier in America or England, if he attempted to levy an army of his own, and make war from American or English territory upon a neighboring State, would surely have seen his bands dispersed and found himself arrested by order of his government; and it would never have occurred to any one to think that the government was doing a harsh, ungrateful, or improper thing. It would be the necessary, rightful execution of a disagreeable duty, and that is all. But the conditions of Garibaldi's case, like the one splendid service he had rendered, were so entirely abnormal and without precedent, the whole thing was from first to last so much more a matter of national sentiment than of political law, that national sentiment insisted on judging Garibaldi and the King in this case too, and at least a powerful, pa.s.sionate minority declared Victor Emanuel an ingrate and a traitor. Mentana was almost as bad for the King as Custozza. The voice of the country, so far as one could understand its import, seemed to declare that when the King had once ordered the Italian troops to cross the frontier, he should have ordered them to go on; that if they had actually occupied Rome, France would have recognized accomplished facts; that as it was, Italy offended France and the Pope by stepping over the barrier of the convention of September, only to humiliate herself by stepping back again without having accomplished anything.

Certainly the policy of the Italian Government at such a crisis was weak, miserable, even contemptible. Then indeed Italy might well have exclaimed, "Oh for one hour of Cavour!" One hour of the man of genius and courage, who, if he had moved forward, would not have darted back again! Perhaps it was unfair to hold the King responsible for the mistakes of his ministers. But when a once popular King has to be pleaded for on that sole ground, it is pretty clear that there is an end to his popularity. So with Victor Emanuel. The world began to forget him; his subjects began to despise him. Even the thrilling events that have lately taken place in Italy, the sudden crowning of the national edifice--the realization of that hope which so long appeared but a dream--which Cavour himself declared would be the most slow and difficult to realize of all Italy's hopes--even the possession of Rome hardly seems to have brought back one ray of the old popularity on the heavy head of King Victor Emanuel. Again the wonderful combination of good luck and bad--the good fortune which brought to the very door of the house of Savoy the sudden realization of its highest dreams--the misfortune which allowed that house no share in the true credit of having accomplished its destiny. What had Victor Emanuel to do with the sudden juncture of events which enabled Italy to take possession of her capital? Nothing whatever. His people have no more reason to thank him for Rome than they have to thank him for the rain or the sunshine, the olive and the vine. The King seems to have felt all this. His short visit to Rome, and the formal act of taking possession, may perhaps have been made so short because Victor Emanuel knew that he had little right to claim any honors or expect any popular enthusiasm. He entered Rome one day and went away the next. I confess, however, that I should not wonder if the visit was made so short merely because the whole thing was a bore to the honest King, and he could only make up his mind to endure a very few hours of it.

Victor Emanuel, King of United Italy, and welcomed by popular acclamation in Rome--his second son almost at the same moment proclaimed King of the Spaniards--his second daughter Queen of Portugal. How fortune seems to have delighted in honoring this house of Savoy. I only say "seems to have." I do not venture yet to regard the accession of King Amadeus to the crown of Spain as necessarily an honorable or a fortunate thing. Every one must wish the poor young prince well in such a situation; perhaps we should rather wish him well out of it. Never king a.s.sumed a crown with such ghastly omens to welcome him. Here is the King putting on his diadem; and yonder, lying dead by the hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin, is the man who gave him the diadem and made him King! But for Juan Prim there would be no Amadeus, King of the Spaniards; and for that reason Juan Prim lies dead. The young King must have needed all his hereditary courage to enable him to face calmly and bravely, as he seems to have done, so terrible a situation. Macaulay justly says that no danger is so trying to the nerves of a brave man as the danger of a.s.sa.s.sination. Men utterly reckless in battle--like "bonny Dundee" for example--have owned that the knowledge of the a.s.sa.s.sin's purpose and haunting presence was more than they could endure. The young Italian prince seems to have shown no sign of flinching. So far as anything indeed is known of him, he is favorably known to the world. He bore himself like a brave soldier at Custozza, and obtained the special commendation of the Austrian victor, the gallant old Archduke Albrecht.

He married for love a lady of station decidedly inferior to that of a royal prince; the lady had the honor of being sneered at even in her honeymoon for the modest, inexpensive simplicity of her toilet, as she appeared with her young husband at one of the watering-places; he had not made himself before marriage the subject of as much scandal as used to follow and float around the bachelor reputation of his elder brother Humbert. He is believed to be honestly and manfully liberal in his views. He ought to make a good King as kings go--if the murderers of General Prim only give him the chance.

As I have mentioned the name of the man whose varied, brilliant, daring, and turbulent career has been so suddenly cut short, I may perhaps be excused for wandering a little out of the path of my subject to say that I think many of the American newspapers have hardly done justice to Prim. Some of them have written of him, even in announcing his death, as if it were not possible for a man to be honest and yet not to be a republican. In more than one instance the murder of Prim was treated as a sort of thing which, however painful to read of, was yet quite natural and even excusable in the case of a man who endeavored to give his country a King. There was a good deal too much of the "Sic semper tyrannis" tone and temper about some of the journals. Now, I do not believe that Prim was a patriot of that unselfish and lofty group to which William the Silent, and George Washington, and Daniel Manin belong. His was a very mixed character, and ambition had a large place in it. But I believe that he sincerely loved and tried to serve Spain; and I believe that in giving her a King he honestly thought he was doing for her the thing most suited to her tendencies and her interests. If Prim could have made Spain a republic, he could have made himself her President, even perhaps for life; while he could not venture, she being a kingdom, to const.i.tute himself her King. Many times did Prim himself say to me, before the outbreak of his successful revolt, that he believed the republican to be the ultimate form of government everywhere, and that he would gladly see it in Spain; but that he did not believe Spain was yet suited for it, or numbered republicans enough.

"To have a republic you must first have republicans," was a common saying of his. New England is a very different sort of place from Old Castile. At all events, Prim is not to be condemned as a traitor to his country and to liberty, even if it were true that he could have created a Spanish republic. We have to show first that he knew the thing was possible and refused to do it, for selfish or ign.o.ble motives. This I am satisfied is not true. I think Prim believed a republic impossible in the Spain of to-day, and simply acted in accordance with his convictions. He came very near to being a great man; he wanted not much of being a great patriot. He was, I think, better than his fame. As Spain has decreed, he "deserved well of his country." It seems hardly reasonable or just to decry him or condemn him because he did not deserve better. Such as he was, he proved himself original. "He walked,"

as Carlyle says, "his own wild road, whither that led him." In an age very prolific of great political men, he made a distinct name and place for himself. "Name thou the best of German singers," exclaims Heine with pardonable pride, "and my name must be spoken among them." Name the half-dozen really great, originating characters in European politics during our time, and the name of Prim must come in among them.

But I was speaking of Victor Emanuel and his children. All I have heard then of the Duke of Aosta leads me to believe that he is qualified to make a respectable and loyal const.i.tutional sovereign. High intellectual capacity no one expects from the house of Savoy, but there will probably be good sense, manly feeling, and no small share of political discretion. In the Duke of Aosta, too, Spain will have a King who can have no possible sympathy with slave systems and their products of whatever kind, and who can hardly have much inclination for the coercing and dragooning of reluctant populations. If Spain in his day and through his influence can get decently and honorably rid of Cuba, she will have entered upon a new chapter of her national existence, as important for her as that grand new volume which opens upon France when defeat has purged her of her thrice-accursed "militaryism." The dependencies have been a miserable misfortune to Spain. They have entangled her in all manner of complications; they have filled her with false principles; they have created whole corrupt cla.s.ses among her soldiers and politicians. General Prim himself once a.s.sured me that the real revenues of Spain were in no wise the richer for her colonial possessions.

Proconsuls made fortunes and spread corruption round them, and that was all. If her new King could only contrive to relieve Spain of this source of corruption and danger, he would be worth all the cost and labor of the revolution which gives him now a Spanish throne.

Why did fate decree that the very best of all the children of Victor Emanuel should have apparently the worst fortune? The Princess Clotilde is an exile from the country and the palace of her husband; and if the sweetness and virtue of one woman might have saved a court, the court of the Tuileries might have been saved by Victor Emanuel's eldest daughter.

I have heard the Princess Clotilde talked of by Ultramontanes, Legitimists, Orleanists, Republicans, Red Republicans (by some among the latter who firmly believed that the poor Empress Eugenie was wickeder than Messalina), and I never heard a word spoken of her that was not in her praise. Every one admitted that she was a pure and n.o.ble woman, a patient wife, a devoted mother; full of that unpretending simplicity which, let us own it frankly, is one of the graces which very high birth and old blood do sometimes bring. The Princess must in her secret soul have looked down on some of the odd _coteries_ who were brought around her at the court of the Tuileries. She comes of a house in whose genealogy, to quote Disraeli's humorous words, "Chaos was a novel," and she found herself forced into companionship with ladies and gentlemen whose fathers and mothers, good lack! sometimes seemed to have omitted any baptismal registration whatever. I presume she was not ignorant of the parentage of De Morny, or Walewski, or Walewski's son, or the Jerome David cla.s.s of people. I presume she heard what every one said of the Countess this and the Marchioness that, and so on. Of course the Princess Clotilde did not like these people--how could any decent woman like them?--but she accepted the necessities of her position with a self-possession and dignity which, offending no one, marked the line distinctly and honorably between her and them. Her joy was in her children. She loved to show them to friends, and to visitors even whom she felt that she could treat as friends. Perhaps she is not less happy now that the ill-omened, fateful splendors of the Palais Royal no longer help to make a gilded cage for the darlings of her nursery. Of the whole family, hers may be called the only career which has been doomed to what the world describes and pities as failure. It may well be that she is now happiest of all the children of the house of Savoy.

Meanwhile, Victor Emanuel has been welcomed at the Quirinal, and is indeed, at last, King of Italy. We may well say to him, as Banquo says of Macbeth, "Thou hast it all!" Lombardy, Tuscany, Parma, Modena, the Two Sicilies, Venetia, and Rome--what gathering within less than a fifth of an ordinary lifetime! And on the Quirinal Victor Emanuel may be said to have stood alone. Of all the men who mainly wrought to bring about that grand consummation, not one stood by his side. Daniel Manin, the pure, patient, fearless, patriot hero; Cavour, the consummate statesman; Ma.s.simo d'Azeglio, the Bayard or Lafayette of Italy's later days, the soldier, scholar, and lover of his country--these are dead, and rest with Dante. Mazzini is still a sort of exile--homeless, unshaken, seeing his prophecies fulfil themselves and his ideas come to light, while he abides in the gloom and shadow, and the world calls him a dreamer.

Garibaldi is lending the aid of his restless sword to a cause which he cannot serve, and a people who never understood him; and he is getting sadly mixed up somehow in ordinary minds with General Cluseret and George Francis Train. Louis Napoleon, who, whatever his crimes, did something for the unity of Italy, is a broken man in captivity. Only Victor Emanuel, least gifted of all, utterly unworthy almost to be named in the same breath with any of them (save Louis Napoleon alone)--only he comes forward to receive the glories and stand up as the representative of one Italy! Let us do him the justice to acknowledge that he never sought the position or the glory. He accepted both as a necessity of his birth and his place, a formal duty and a bore. His was not the character which goes in quest of greatness. As Falstaff says of rebellion and the revolted English lord, greatness "lay in his way, and he found it."

LOUIS ADOLPHE THIERS.

Guizot quietly at work in the preparation of a history of France for the instruction of children--Thiers taking his place in a balloon to fly from one seat of government in France to another! Such were the occupations, at a given time in last November, of the two distinguished men whose rivalries and contentions disturbed the politics of France for so many years.

An ill-natured person might feel inclined to say that the adventures in the balloon were a proper crowning of the edifice of M. Thiers's fitful career. Was not his whole political life (_non meus hic sermo_, please to understand--it is the ill-natured person who says this) an enterprise in a balloon, high out of all the regions where common sense, consistency, and statesmanship are ruling elements? Did he not overleap with aeronautic flight when it so suited him, from liberalism to conservatism, from advocating freedom of thought to enforcing the harshest repression? Was not his literary reputation floated into high air by that most inflated and gaseous of all balloons, the "History of the Consulate and the Empire"? Thiers in a balloon is just where he ought to be, and where he ever has been. Condense into one meagre little person all the egotism, all the self-conceit, all the vainglory, all the incapacity for looking at anything whatever from the right point of view, which belong to the typical Frenchman of fiction and satire, and you have a pretty portrait of M. Thiers.

Doubtless, the ill-natured person who should say all this would be able to urge a good many plausible reasons in justification of his a.s.sertions. Still, one may be allowed to admire--one cannot help admiring--the astonishing energy and buoyancy which made M. Thiers, despite his seventy-three years, the most active emissary of the French Republic during the past autumn, the aeronautic rival of the vigorous young Corsican Gambetta, who was probably hardly grown enough for a merry-go-round in the Champs Elysees when Thiers was beginning to be regarded as an old fogy by the ardent revolutionists of 1848. About the middle of last September, a few days after the sudden creation of the French Republic, M. Thiers precipitated himself on London. An account in the newspapers described him as "accompanied by five ladies." Thus gracefully escorted, he marched on the English capital. He had interviews with Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, the French Amba.s.sador, and divers other great personages. He was always rushing from diplomatic office to office. He "interviewed" everybody in London who could by any possibility be supposed capable of influencing in the slightest degree the fortunes of France. He never for a moment stopped talking. Great men excel each other in various qualities; but there never was a great man who could talk against M. Thiers. He could have shut up the late Lord Macaulay in no time; and I doubt whether Mr. Seward could have contrived to edge in a word while Thiers was in the same room. M. Thiers stayed in London little more than two days. He arrived, I think, on a Wednesday night, and left on the following Sat.u.r.day. During that time he managed to do all the interviewing, and was likewise able to take his family to see the paintings in the National Gallery, where he was to be observed keenly eyeing the pictures, and eloquently laying down critical law and gospel on their merits, as if he had come over on a little autumnal holiday from a settled and peaceful country, which no longer needed looking after. Then he started from London in a steam-yacht, cruised about the North Sea and the Baltic, dropped in upon the King of Denmark, sounded the views of Sweden, collected the general opinion of Finland, visited the Emperor of Russia and talked him into semi-bewilderment, and then travelled down by land to Vienna, where he used all his powers of persuasion on the Emperor Francis Joseph, and to Florence, where by the sheer force of argument and fluency he drove Victor Emanuel nearly out of his senses. Since that time, he all but concluded an armistice with Bismarck, and when last I heard of him (previous to this writing) he was, as I have said, going on a mission somewhere in a balloon.

During his recent diplomatic flights, M. Thiers constantly offered to encounter much greater fatigues and responsibilities if needful. He was ready to go anywhere and talk to anybody. He would have hunted up the Emperor of China or the Mikado of j.a.pan, if either sovereign seemed in the remotest degree likely to intervene on the side of France. I believe I can say with confidence, that at the outset of his expedition he had no official authority or mission whatever from the Provisional Government. He told Jules Favre and the rest that he was about to start on a tour of inspection round the European cabinets, and that they had better let him try what he could do; and they did not refuse to let him try, and it would not have mattered in the least whether they refused or not. He came, in the first instance, altogether "on his own hook."

Perhaps, at first, the Republican Government was not very anxious to accept the services of M. Thiers as a messenger of peace. No living Frenchman had done half so much to bring about the state of national feeling which enabled Louis Napoleon to precipitate the nation into a war against Prussia. Perhaps they thought the man whose bitterest complaint against the Emperor was that he failed to take advantage of the chance of crushing Prussia in 1866, was not the most likely emissary to conciliate victorious Prussia in 1870. But Thiers was determined to make himself useful, and the Republican Government had to give in at last, and concede some sort of official authority to him. Like the young lady who said she married the importunate suitor to get rid of him, Jules Favre and his colleagues probably accepted M. Thiers for their spokesman as the only way of escaping from his eloquence. His mission was heroic and patriotic, or egotistical and fussy, just as you are pleased to regard it. In certain lights Cardinal Richelieu looks wonderfully like Bottom the weaver. But it is impossible not to admire the energy and courage of the irrepressible, inexhaustible, fragile-looking, shabby old Orleanist. Thiers does not seem a personage capable of enduring fatigue. He appears a sapless, withered, wasted old creature. But the restless, fiery, exuberant, egotistical energy which carried him along so far and so fast in life, has apparently gained rather than lost in strength and resource during the forty years which have elapsed since the subject of this sketch, then editor of the "National," drew up in Paris the famous protest against the five infamous _ordonnances_ of Charles the Tenth, and thus sounded the prelude to the Revolution of July.

It must have been no common stock of self-possession and self-complacency which enabled M. Thiers to present himself before the great Prussian Chancellor as a messenger of peace. Bismarck, who has a happy knack of apt Shakespearian quotation, might have accosted him in the words of Beatrice and said, "This is a man's office, but not yours."

For M. Thiers, throughout his whole career, devoted his brilliant gifts to the promotion of that spirit of narrow national vainglory which of late years has made France dreaded and detested in Germany. M. Thiers is like aesop's trumpeter--guilty not of making war himself, but of blowing the blasts which set other men fighting. The very speech in which he protested last summer against the war initiated by the Imperial Government, was inspired by a principle more immoral, and more calculated to inflame Germany with resentment, than the very declaration of war itself. For Thiers only condemned the war on the ground that France was not properly prepared to crush Germany; that she had lost her opportunity by not falling on Prussia while the latter was in the death-grapple with Austria in 1866; and that as France had not done the thing at the right time, she had better not run the risk of doing it incompletely, by making the effort at an inopportune moment.

These considerations, however, did not trouble M. Thiers. He advanced to meet Count von Bismarck with the easy confidence of one who feels that he has a right to be treated as the best of friends and most appropriate of envoys. If, immediately after the conclusion of the American war, John Bright had been sent to Washington by England to endeavor to settle the Alabama dispute, he probably would not have approached the President with anything like the confident a.s.surance of a genial welcome which inspired M. Thiers when he offered himself as a messenger to the Prussian statesman. This very sublimity of egotism is, and always was, one of the sources of the success of M. Thiers. No man could with more perfect composure and self-satisfaction dare to be inconsistent. His was the very audacity and Quixotism of inconsistency. In office to-day, he could advocate and enforce the very measures of repression which yesterday, out of office, he was the foremost to denounce--nay, which he obtained office by opposing and denouncing. He whose energetic action in protesting against the celebrated five _ordonnances_ of Charles the Tenth did so much to bring about the Revolution of July, was himself the chief official author of the equally celebrated "laws of September,"

introduced in Louis Philippe's reign, which might have suited the administration of a Peter the Great, or any other uncompromising despot.

In practical politics, of course, almost every minister is occasionally compelled by the force of circ.u.mstances to do things which bear a considerable resemblance to acts warmly condemned by him while he sat in opposition. But M. Thiers invariably, when in power, exhibited himself as the author and champion of principles and policy which he had denounced with all the force of his eloquent tongue when he was the opponent of the Government. He seemed in fact to be two men rather than one, so entirely did Thiers in office contrast with Thiers in opposition. But Thiers himself never appeared conscious of inconsistency. Indeed, he was always consistent with his one grand essential principle and creed--faith in the inspiration and the destiny of M. Thiers.

To one other principle too let it be said in justice that this brilliant politician has always been faithful--the principle which maintains the right of France to throw her sword into the scale where every or any foreign question is to be weighed. When, after a long absence from the parliamentary arena, he entered the Imperial Corps Legislatif as one of the deputies for Paris, he soon proved himself to be "old Ca.s.sius still." Age, study, experience, retirement, reflection, had in no wise dimmed the fire of his ardent nationalism. Eagerly as ever he contended for the sacred right of France to dragoon all Europe into obedience, to chop up the Continent into such symmetrical sections as might seem suitable to the taste and the convenience of French statesmen.

Undoubtedly he was a sharp, tormenting thorn in the side of the Imperial Government when he returned to active political life. Louis Napoleon had no minister who could pretend to compare with Thiers in debate. He was an aggravating and exasperating enemy, against whom fluent and shallow men like Billault and Baroche, or even speakers of heavier calibre like Rouher, had no chance whatever. But there were times when to any impartial mind the invectives of Thiers made the Imperial policy look n.o.ble and enlightened in comparison with the canons of detestable egotism which he propounded as the true principles of government. I remember thinking more than once that if Louis Napoleon's Ministers could only have risen to the real height of the situation and appealed to whatever there was of lofty unselfish feeling in France, they might have overwhelmed their remorseless and envenomed critic. In 1866 and 1867, for example, Thiers made it a cardinal point of complaint and invective against the French Government that it had not prevented by force of arms the progress of Germany's unity. Nothing could be more pungent, brilliant, bitter, than the eloquence with which he proclaimed and advocated his doctrines of ign.o.ble and unscrupulous selfishness. Why did not the Imperial spokesmen a.s.sume a virtue if they had it not, and boldly declare that the Government of France scorned the shallow and envious policy which sees calamity and danger in the union and growing strength of a neighboring people? Such a chord bravely struck would have awakened an echo in every true and generous heart. But the Imperial Ministers feebly tried to fight M. Thiers upon his own ground, to accept his principles as the conditions of contest. They endeavored in a paltering and limping way to show that the French Government had been selfish and only selfish, and had taken every care to keep Germany properly weak and divided. It was during one of these debates, thus provoked by M. Thiers, that occasion was given to Count von Bismarck for one of his most striking _coups de theatre_. The French Minister (if I remember rightly, it was M. Rouher), tortured and baited by M. Thiers, stood at bay at last, and boldly declared that the Government of France had taken measures to render impossible any political cohesion of North and South Germany. A day or two after, Count von Bismarck effectively and contemptuously replied to this declaration by unfolding in the Prussian Chamber the treaties of alliance already concluded between his Government and the South German States.

It has always been a matter of surprise to me that Thiers did not prove a success at the bar, to which at first he applied his abilities. He seems to have the very gifts which would naturally have made a great pleader. All through his political career he displayed a wonderful capacity for making the worse appear the better cause. The adroitness which contends skilfully that black is white to-day, having argued with equal force and fluency that white was green yesterday, would have been highly appropriate and respectable in a legal advocate. But M. Thiers did not somehow get on at the bar, and having no influential friends (he was, I think, the son of a locksmith), but plenty of ambition, courage, and confidence, he strove to enter political life by the avenue of journalism. Much of Thiers's subsequent success as a debater was probably due to that skill which a practised journalist naturally acquires--the dexterity of arraying facts and arguments so as not to bear too long on any one part of the subject, and not to offer to the mind of the reader more than his patience and interest are willing to accept. Most of the events of his political career, up to his reappearance in public life in 1863, belong wholly to history and the past. His long rivalry with Guizot, his intrigues out of office, and his conduct as a Minister of Louis Philippe, have hardly a more direct and vital connection with the affairs of to-day than the statecraft of Mazarin or the political vicissitudes of Bolingbroke. One indeed of the projects of M. Thiers has now come rather unexpectedly into active operation. The fortifications of Paris were the offspring of the apprehension M. Thiers entertained, thirty years ago, that the Eastern question of that day might provoke another great European war. Since that time many critics sneered and laughed a good deal at M. Thiers's system of fortifications; but the whirligig of time has brought the statesman his revenge. No one could mistake the meaning of the smile of self-satisfaction which used last autumn to light up the unattractive features of the veteran Orleanist, as he made tour after tour of inspection around the defences of Paris. This chain of fortifications alone, one might almost say, connects the Thiers of the present generation with the Thiers of the past. There were malignant persons who did not scruple to say that the author of the scheme of defences was not altogether sorry for the national calamity which had brought them into use, and apparently justified their construction. It is very hard to be altogether sorry for even a domestic misfortune which gives one who is especially proud of his foresight and sagacity an opportunity of pointing out that the precautions which he recommended, and other members of the family scorned, are now eagerly adopted by unanimous concurrence. There certainly was something of the pardonable pride of the author of a long misprized invention visible in the face of M.

Thiers as he used to gaze upon his beloved system of fortifications any time in last September. Little did even he himself think when, after Sadowa, he accused the Emperor's Government of having left itself no blunder more to commit, that it had yet to perpetrate one crowning and gigantic mistake, and that one effect at least of this stupendous error would be to compel Paris to treat _au serieux_, and as a supreme necessity, that system of defences so long regarded as good for little else than to remind the present generation that Louis Adolphe Thiers was once Prime Minister of France.

Thiers was not far short of seventy years old when, in 1863, he entered upon a new chapter of his public life as one of the deputies for Paris in the Imperial Corps Legislatif. A new generation had meantime arisen.

Men were growing into fame as orators and politicians who were boys when Thiers was last heard as a parliamentary debater. He returned to political life at an eventful time and accompanied by some notable compeers. The elections which sent Thiers to represent the department of the Seine made the venerable and ill.u.s.trious Berryer one of the delegates from Ma.r.s.eilles. I doubt whether the political life of any country has ever produced a purer, grander figure than that of Berryer; I am sure that an obsolete and hopeless cause never had a n.o.bler advocate. The genius and the virtues of Berryer are indeed the loftiest claims modern French legitimacy can offer to the respect of posterity. I look back with a feeling of something like veneration to that grand and kingly form, to the sweet, serene, unaffected dignity of that august nature. Berryer belonged to a totally different political order from that of Thiers. As John Bright is to Disraeli, as John Henry Newman is to Monsignore Capel, as Montalembert was to Louis Veuillot, as Charles Sumner is to Seward, so was Berryer to Thiers. Of the oratorical merits of the two men I shall speak hereafter; now I refer to the relative value of their political characters. With Thiers and Berryer there came back to political life some men of mark and worth. Garnier-Pages was one, the impulsive, true-hearted, not very strong-headed Republican; a man who might be a great leader if fine phrases and good intentions could rule the world. Carnot was another, not much perhaps in himself, but great as the son of the ill.u.s.trious organizer of victory (oh, if France had lately had one hour of Carnot!), and personally very popular just then because of his scornful rejection of Louis Napoleon's offer to bring back the ashes of his father from Magdeburg in Prussia to France.

Eugene Pelletan, who had been suffering savage persecution because of his fierce attack on the Empire in his book, "The New Babylon"; Jules Simon, a superior sort of French Tom Hughes--Tom Hughes with republican convictions and strong backbone--and several other men of name and fibre, were now companions in the Corps Legislatif. All these, differing widely in personal opinions, and indeed representing every kind of political view, from the chivalrous and romantic legitimacy of Berryer to the republican religion or fetichism of Garnier-Pages, combined to make up an opposition to the Imperial Government. Up to that time the opposition had consisted simply of five men. For years those five had fought a persevering and apparently hopeless fight against the strength of Imperial arms, Imperial gold, and the lungs of Imperial hirelings. Of the five the leader was Jules Favre. The second in command was Emile Ollivier, whose treason to liberty, truth, and peace has since been so sternly avenged by destiny. The other three were Picard, a member of the Republican Government of September, and MM. Darimon and Henon.

Numerically the opposition, now strengthened by the new accessions, became quite respectable; morally and politically it wholly changed the situation. It was no longer a Leonidas or Horatius Cocles desperately holding a pa.s.s; it was an army encountering an army. The Imperialists of course still far outnumbered their opponents; but there were no men among the devotees of Imperialism who could even pretend to compare as orators with Berryer, Thiers, or Favre. Of these three men, it seems to me that Berryer was by far the greatest orator, but Thiers left him nowhere as a partisan leader. Thiers undoubtedly pushed Jules Favre aside and made him quite a secondary figure. Thiers delighted in worrying a ministry. He never needed, as Berryer did, the impulse of a great principle and a great purpose. He felt all the joy of the strife which distinguishes the born gladiator. He soon proved that his years had in no degree impaired his oratorical capacity. It became one of the grand events of Paris when Thiers was to speak. Owing to the peculiar regulations of the French Chamber, which required that those who meant to take part in a debate should inscribe their names beforehand in the book, and speak according to their turn--an odious usage, fatal to all genuine debate--it was always known in advance through Paris that to-morrow or the day after Thiers was to speak. Then came a struggle for places in what an Englishman would call the strangers' gallery. The Palais Bourbon, where the Corps Legislatif held its sittings, opposite the Place de la Concorde, has the n.o.ble distinction of providing the least and worst accommodation for the public of any House of a.s.sembly in the civilized world. The English House of Commons is miserably defective and n.i.g.g.ardly in this respect, but it is liberal and lavish when compared with the French Corps Legislatif. Therefore, when M. Thiers was about to speak, there was as much intriguing, clamoring, beseeching, wrangling, storming for seats in the public _tribunes_ as would have sufficed to carry an English county election. The trouble had its reward. n.o.body could be disappointed in M. T