V

On February 19 he quitted the scene of so many anxieties and such
strenuous effort as we have seen. The _Terrible_ fell into a strong
north-easter in the Adriatic, and took thirty-six hours to Pola. There
they sought shelter and got across with a smooth sea to Venice on the
23rd. He saw the Austrian archduke whom he found kind, intelligent,
earnest, pleasing. At Turin a few days later (March 23), he had an
interview with Cavour, for whom at that moment the crowning scenes of
his great career were just opening. 'At Vicenza,' the diary records
(Feb. 28), 'we had cavalry and artillery at the station about to march;
more cavalry on the road with a van and pickets, some with drawn swords;
at Verona regiments in review; at Milan pickets in the streets; as I
write I hear the tread of horse patrolling the streets. Dark omens!' The
war with Austria was close at hand.

I may as well in a few sentences finally close the Ionian chapter,
though the consummation was not immediate. Mr. Gladstone, while he was
for the moment bitten by the notion of ceding the southern islands to
Greece, was no more touched by the nationalist aspirations of the
Ionians than he had been by nationalism and unification in Italy in
1851. Just as in Italy he clung to constitutional reforms in the
particular provinces and states as the key to regeneration, so here he
leaned upon the moderates who, while professing strong nationalist
feeling, did not believe that the time for its realisation had arrived.
A debate was raised in the House of Commons in the spring of 1861, by an
Irish member. The Irish catholics twitted Mr. Gladstone with flying the
flag of nationality in Italy, and trampling on it in the Ionian islands.
He in reply twitted them with crying up nationality for the Greeks, and
running it down when it told against the pope. In the Italian case Lord
John Russell had (1860) set up the broad doctrine that a people are the
only true judges who should be their rulers--a proposition that was at
once seized and much used by the Dandolos, Lombardos, Cavalieratos and
the rest at Corfu. Scarcely anybody pretended that England had any
separate or selfish interest of her own. 'It is in my view,' said Mr.
Gladstone, 'entirely a matter of that kind of interest only, which, is
in one sense the highest interest of all--namely the interest which is
inherent in her character and duty, and her exact and regular fulfilment
of obligations which she has cont