r ascendency in greater force than ever; and the
last ten years of that ascendency will always be remembered as the
period when its tyrannical character was most fully developed. The hoary
proconsul of the Lorraines, Radetzky, if not personally cruel, was
determined to do for his masters what Castilian lieutenants had done
for the Austro-Burgundian monarchs of Spain and her dependencies,
the fairest portions of Italy being among those dependencies, in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,--to destroy the public spirit of
Italy. Could he have completed a century of life, or had there been no
European nation ready to prevent the success of the Germanic policy
under which Italy was to wither to provincial worthlessness, he might
have been successful. But Austria lost her best man, the only one of
her soldiers who had shown himself capable of upholding her Italian
position, when he had reached to more than ninety years; and it pleased
Providence to raise up a friend to Italy in a quarter to which most men
had ceased to look for anything good.

Well has it been said, that "it is not the best tools that shape out
the best ends; if so, Martin Luther would not have been selected as the
master-spirit of the Reformation." Napoleon III. may deserve all that is
said against him by men of the extreme right and by men of the extreme
left,--by Catholics and infidels,--by _Whites_, and _Reds_, and
_Blues_,--but it cannot be denied that he gave to the Italians that
assistance without which they never could have obtained even partial
deliverance from the Austrian yoke, and which they could have procured
from no other potentate or power. Bankrupt though she was, Austria's
force was so superior to anything that Italy could present in the shape
of an army, that Sardinia must have been conquered, if she had contended
alone with her enemy; and a war between Austria and Sardinia was
inevitable, and would probably have broken out long before 1859, had the
former country been assured of the neutrality of France.

There has been a great inkshed, and a large expenditure of oratory, on
the question of the origin of the Italian war of 1859; and, as usual,
much nonsense has been written and said of and concerning the ambition
of France and the encroachments of Sardinia. But that war was brought
about neither by French ambition nor by Sardinian desire for territorial
aggrandizement. That it occurred in 1859 was undoubtedly owing to the
action of F