er cupidity or the desire of
luxury. It is immoral continually to proclaim, as the act of a
whole party, the death of a statesman killed by an unknown
hand, under the influence of the irritation produced by his own
acts and by the attacks of another political party, many months
before the Republican party recommenced its activity.

Mr. Mazzini charges no direct treachery against Carlo Alberto. He
declares him to have been himself the victim of the weakness which
caused others as well as himself so much loss and misery. For the
impossible political project of a Kingdom of the North he was content to
surrender the grand reality of a United People which fate had placed
within his hands.

CHARLES ALBERT.

Genius, love, and faith were wanting in Charles Albert. Of the first,
which reveals itself by a life entirely, logically, and resolutely
devoted to a great idea, the career of Charles Albert does not offer the
least trace; the second was stifled in him by the continual mistrust of
men and things, which was awakened by the remembrance of an unhappy
past; the last was denied him by his uncertain character, wavering
always between good and evil, between _to do_ and _not to do_, between
daring and not daring. In his youth, a thought, not of virtue, but of
Italian ambition--the ambition however which may be profitable to
nations--had passed through his soul like lightning; but he recoiled in
affright, and the remembrance of this one brilliant moment of his youth
presented itself hourly to him, and tortured him like the incessant
throbbing of an old wound, instead of acting upon him as an excitement
to a new life. Between the risk of losing, if he failed, the crown of
his little kingdom, and the fear of the liberty which the people, after
having fought for him, would claim for themselves, he went hesitating
on, with this spectre before his eyes, stumbling at every step, without
energy to confront these dangers, without the will or power to
comprehend that to become King of Italy he must first of all forget that
he was King of Piedmont. Despotic from rooted instinct, liberal from
self-love, and from a presentiment of the future, he submitted
alternately to the government of Jesuits, and to that of men of
progress. A fatal disunion between thought and action, between the
conception and the faculty of execution, showed itself in every act.
Most of those who endeavored to place him at the head of the en