throne. Two
officers of the royal household had caused him annoyance while he was
Duke of Savoy by telling tales of his unconventionality to his
easily-scandalised father. To them, perhaps, he owed the condign
punishment he had undergone for the famous promenade under the
Porticoes. At anyrate, they had procured for the Duke many bad
quarters-of-an-hour, but the King, when he became King, chose to be
completely oblivious of their conduct, and they remained undisturbed
at their posts. To those who pointed to King Leopold of the Belgians,
or to any other foreign example of a loyal sovereign who understood
the needs of his people as a model for Victor Emmanuel to imitate, he
was in the habit of replying: 'I remember the history of my fathers,
and it is enough.'

'The Persians,' says the Greek historian, 'taught their children to
ride and to speak the truth.' In a land that had seen as much of
enthroned effeminacy and mendacity as Italy had seen, a prince fond of
manly exercise and observant of his word was more valuable than a
heaven-sent genius, and more welcome than a calendar saint. Piedmont
only could give such a prince to Italy. Its kings were not Spaniards
who, by way of improvement, became lazzaroni, nor were they Austrians
condemned by a fatal law to revert to their original type; they were
children of the ice and snow, the fellow-countrymen of their subjects.
All their traditions told of obstinacy and hardihood. They brought
their useful if scarcely amiable moral qualities from Maurienne in the
eleventh century. The second Count of Savoy, known as Amadeus with the
Tail, son of Humbert of the White Hands, founder of the House, went to
the Holy Roman Emperor with such a body of retainers that the guards
refused them entrance to the Council Chamber. 'Either I shall go in
with my Tail or not at all,' said Humbert, and with his Tail he went
in. This was the metal of the race. Even at the time when they were
vassals of the Empire, they expected to dictate rather than to obey.
They studiously married into all the great royal houses of Europe.
Though they persecuted their Vaudois subjects, who were only in 1848
rewarded by emancipation for centuries of unmerited sufferings and
splendid fidelity, yet the Princes of Savoy had from the first, from
the White-Handed Humbert himself, held their heads high in all
transactions with the Holy See, between which and them there was an
ever-returning antagonism. Not to the early part