which he relied were
not in good defensible condition, his commissaries having placed the
funds in their pockets that should have been devoted to the purchase
of stores,--a story that wears a very probable air, in view of the
discovery subsequently made of the malversations of some of the highest
persons at Vienna, and which had much to do with the suicide of the
Minister of Finance. It is known, too, that the force which Napoleon
III. had assembled in the Adriatic was very strong, and could have been
so used as to have promoted an Hungarian insurrection in a sense not at
all pleasant to the Austrians, to have attacked Dalmatia and Istria, and
to have aided in the deliverance of Venice. That force was largely naval
in its character, and the French navy was burning to distinguish itself
in a war that had been so productive of glory to the sister-service: it
would have had a Magenta and a Palestro of its own, won where the Dorias
and the Pisani had struggled for fame and their countries' ascendency.
Instead of the Quadrilateral being a bar to the French, it would have
been a trap to the Austrians, who would have been taken there after the
manner in which Napoleon I. took their predecessors at Ulm. After the
war was over, it came out that Verona was not even half armed.

If Napoleon III. was bent upon carrying that imitation of his uncle, of
which he is so fond, to the extent of granting a magnanimous peace to a
crushed foe, he may be said to have caricatured that which he sought
to imitate. The first Napoleon's magnanimity after Austerlitz has been
attributed to the craft of the beaten party,--he allowing the Russians
to escape when they had extricated themselves from the false position in
which their master's folly had caused them to be placed. But the third
Napoleon did allow the Austrians to avoid the consequences of their
defeat, and so disappointed Italy and the world. He _was_ magnanimous,
and most astonishing to the minds of men was his magnanimity. Most
people called it stupidity, and strange stories were told of his
nervous system having been shattered by the sights and sounds of those
slaughter-fields which he had planned and fought and won!

We live rapidly in this age, when nations are breaking up all around us,
when unions are dissolving, when dynasties disappear before the light
like ghosts at cock-crowing, and when emperors and kings rely upon
universal suffrage, once so terrible a bugbear in their eyes, fo