of history has lately said, in 1859, as in 1849,
there was a Hamlet in the case; but Paris, not Turin, was his abode.
Napoleon needed and perhaps desired to be precipitated. Look at it how
we may, it must be allowed that he was doing a very grave thing: he
was embarking on a war of no palpable necessity against the sentiment,
as the Empress wrote to Count Arese, of his own country. A stronger
man than he might have hesitated.

The natural discernment of the Italian masses enlightened them as to
the magnitude of Cavour's part in the play, even in the hour when the
interest seemed transferred to the battlefield, and when an emperor
and a king moved among them as liberators. At Milan, after the victory
of Magenta had opened its gates, the most permanent enthusiasm
gathered round the short, stout, undistinguished figure in plain
clothes and spectacles--the one decidedly prosaic appearance in the
pomp of war and the glitter of royal state. Victor Emmanuel said
good-humouredly that when driving with his great subject, he felt just
like the tenor who leads the prima donna forward to receive applause.

Success followed success, and this to the popular imagination is the
all-and-all of war. Milan was freed, though the battle of Magenta was
not unlike a drawn one; Lombardy was won, though the fight for the
heights of Solferino could hardly have resulted as it did if the
Austrians had not blundered into keeping a large part of their forces
inactive. Would the same fortune be with the allies to the end?
Cavour does not appear to have asked the question. He watched the war
with no misgivings. It was to him a supreme satisfaction that the
Sardinian army, which he had worked so hard to prepare, did Italy
credit. He took a personal pride in the romantic exploits of the
volunteers, though for political reasons he carefully concealed that
he had been the first to think of placing them in the field. He made
an indefatigable minister of war (having taken the office when La
Marmora went to the front). The work was heavy; the problem of finding
even bread enough for the allied armies was not a simple one. On one
occasion the French Commissariat asked for a hundred thousand rations
to make sure of receiving fifty thousand; the officer in charge was
surprised to see one hundred and twenty thousand punctually arrive
on the day named. Cavour's thoughts were not, however, only with the
troops in Lombardy. The whole country was in a ferment, and