nsummate
suppleness he confronted the necessities of a situation that he had not
sought, and assuredly had neither invented nor hurried. The politician, he
used to tell his friends, must above all things have the tact of the
Possible. Well did Manzoni say of him, "Cavour has all the prudence and
all the imprudence of the true statesman." Stained and turbid are the
whirlpools of revolution. Yet the case of Italy was overwhelming. Sir
James Hudson wrote to Mr. Gladstone from Turin (April 3, 1859)--"Piedmont
cannot separate the question of national independence from the accidental
existence of constitutional liberty (in Piedmont) if she would.
Misgovernment in central Italy, heavy taxation and dearth in Lombardy,
misgovernment in Modena, vacillation in Tuscany, cruelty in Naples,
constitute the famous _grido di dolore_. The congress of Paris wedded
Piedmont to the redress of grievances."

(M4) In August (1860) Garibaldi crossed from Sicily to the mainland and
speedily made his triumphant entry into Naples. The young king Francis
withdrew before him at the head of a small force of faithful adherents to
Capua, afterwards to Gaeta. At the Volturno the Garibaldians, meeting a
vigorous resistance, drove back a force of the royal troops enormously
superior in numbers. On the height of this agitated tide, and just in time
to forestall a fatal movement of Garibaldi upon Rome, the Sardinian army
had entered the territories of the pope (September 11).

II

In the series of transactions that I have sketched, the sympathies of Mr.
Gladstone never wavered. From the appearance of his Neapolitan letters in
1851, he lost no opportunity of calling attention to Italian affairs. In
1854 he brought before Lord Clarendon the miserable condition of Poerio,
Settembrini, and the rest. He took great personal trouble in helping to
raise and invest a fund for the Settembrini family, and elaborate accounts
in his own handwriting remain. In 1855 he wrote to Lord John Russell, then
starting for Vienna, as to a rumour of the adhesion of Naples to the
alliance of the western powers: "In any case I can conceive it possible
that the Vienna conferences may touch upon Italian questions; and I
sincerely rely upon your humanity as well as your love of freedom, indeed
the latter is but little in question, to plead for the prisoners in the
kingdom of the two Sicilies detained for political offences, real or
pretended. I do not ask you to leave any greate