the beau monde could have wished. He was more frequently to be seen in the libraries of our parliamentary notabilities, with many of whom he contracted lasting and valuable friendships, than at Almack's and the opera. The roues of the fashionable world plied him with their blandishments in vain; he had too much to do to waste his time in dissipation, even supposing he had any inclination that way, which happily he had not. Were there not the rattling looms of Manchester, Macclesfield, and Derby to be seen, the Staffordshire coal-fields and iron-foundries, and the Liverpool docks? He has come to these shores to pick up hints for the silk-throwsters and cotton-spinners of Genoa, and to learn the mysteries of guano for the benefit of the old-fashioned farmers of the Lomellina. We take it for certain he was one of the first to go and see Mr. Huxtable's pigs, and to listen to the marvelous revelations of that modern Triptolemus, as to how stones may be turned into bread, by simply calling in the aid of chemistry, to fatten our fields with the manure of the mastodons. He was thankful to protectionist squires for many an agricultural hint, whilst he imbibed sound Free-Trade doctrine at the feet of Cobden and Bright. For we were then in the midst of the great Corn-Law struggle; nor could he have pitched on a more favorable time for seeing in full play all the thousand springs of England's complicated industrial and political life. Was Count Cavour in the Speaker's gallery during the great tariff debate on the eleventh of March, 1842, when Sir Robert Peel expatiated so suspiciously, and so much to the disgust of the country gentlemen, on the soundness of the commercial maxim "to buy in the cheapest, and sell in the dearest market ?" Most likely he was, although we can not positively affirm the fact. If he had not already set sail for Genoa-for it was in that year that he took his departure we may be pretty sure that he was there. For he followed every phase of the stirring controversy with the liveliest interest, and to what excellent purpose he studied it is triumphantly recorded in the liberal commercial code of his country. We think we have a right to be proud that England was the university in which this eminent statesman graduated, "the greatest of the present age," as he is styled by a recent Reviewer, "and wor thy to be ranked with the greatest of any age." "I taught the boy," Britannia can say, appropriating the honest boast with which Pitt's schoolmaster is said to have greeted the close of his illustrious pupil's maiden speech in Parliament. If there be any who judge that recent events do not confirm the high estimate previously entertained of Count Cavour's sagacity, we own we are not amongst the number. He was no party to the sinister Peace of Villafranca. So far from it, he indignantly resigned office on the morrow of its conclusion, and his retirement caused an immediate fall in the English and Continental funds. The present dead-lock at Zurich proves that he was right. Meanwhile, the calm and resolved attitude of Italy, which, by enlisting in its cause the public opinion of Europe, bids fair to baffle all the calculations of the despots, is entirely the result of his wise and temperate policy. The game is not played out as yet; and even as the pieces stand, there are many excellent judges who think that when he quitted the board, he had still a very fair chance of checkmating the astute Frenchman, as he had already done his Austrian antagonist. Never were the pawns handled in so masterly a style. Fortunately, those who have suc-1 ceeded him are all men of his school, although in all likelihood he must soon be recalled to power to disentangle by some stroke of his genius, the seemingly hopeless imbroglio. Doubtless should the liberation of the Peninsula-the one aim of all his profound combinations-be again defeated for this time, he will feel bitterly disappointed. For not even in Mazzini's fiery breast does the Italian idea glow more fiercely than in that of the cool and calculating Cavour. In the great things he has done for Sardinia, he has all along kept eagerly in sight the elevation of his greater fatherland. Yet, even should this hope be deferred, it is at least something glorious to have taught the Italians the true secret of their strength, and to have pointed out the means by which they must ultimately triumph. He has translated their inarticulate yearnings out of the raving jargon of revolution into the measured and intelligible language of reason, and has taught them how to render the poetry of childhood into the manly realities of cotemporary history. If Italy is ever again to become independen: because united-she was never united but once, and then she was mistress of the world-she will owe it less to the two Napoleons, although both of them have blindly helped on her birth-throes, than to Count Cavour. The Bonaparte of our fathers' days, by massing together her petty states and municipalities into great provinces and kingdoms, and by subjecting all to his code, gave the death-blow to that narrow church-steeple or parish patriotism, as it is called, which has always been her deadliest bane, and against which Dante and Macchiavelli had hitherto uselessly warned their countrymen. Molten thus into one in the fiery furnace of French conquest, the consciousness of a common country was unwittingly conjured up by the great Corsican magician. Strangely enough, it was Austria which for the first time appealed to this new spirit of Italian nationality, in her summons to the peninsula to cast off his yoke in 1814. And now we see the Imperial pamphleteer of our own times turning the tables upon the Hapsburgs, and endeavoring to chain this powerful Jin to his own tottering throne. That the attempt should succeed in the long run is simply impossible. For meanwhile the Italian idea has found native expositors, and already the mission of the prophet of despair belongs to the realm of the past; whilst that of the practical statesman, with a hopeful example to point to, of the bright future in store for the whole nation, if it will only be true to itself, has stirred every patriot's heart from the Alps to Sicily. England, then, if only by the lessons she gave Count Cavour during his apprenticeship to his craft in this tight little is land, has done some small matter for poor Italy as well as boastful France. When he came to this country he was still smarting from the disappointment occasioned by the abortive movements of 1831-in which, by the by, the present Emperor of the French figured as a sworn Carbonaro. As for the young Piedmontese, although he had already abandoned the politics of his family and therefore naturally was no uninterested spectator of these revolutionary risings, he himself took no part in them. He was then just of age, having been born at Turin in 1810, during the French occupation of the country. Some will think it an ominous circumstance, that a sister of Napoleon I., the Princess Marie Pauline Borghese, was one of the sponsors when he was christened. However, we can not afford more than a few sentences for the Count's antecedents previous to his visit to England, which was really the turning-point in his whole development. His first tutor up to his fourteenth year was the Abbé Frézet, who is known as the writer of a French history of the House of Savoy, from which province the Cavours are thought to have originally sprung. As the second son of a noble line, his father, according to the Italian custom in such cases, destined him for the army, and he was accordingly sent to the Royal Military Academy at Turin, where he so distinguished himself by his diligence and his fine aristocratic bearing, that he was recommended by his superiors to the Court of Charles Felix, as a page to wait upon the king. But he was soon found to be far too high-spirited a lad to be made a lackey of, even to a monarch, and to the infinite chagrin of his friends, who thought his career was now forever at an end, he was dismissed in disgrace. His own words when he rejoined his friends at the Academy were: "Thank God! I have flung off that mule's burden!" It was in vain that he now strove, by redoubled diligence in his studies, to regain the good opinion of his family. History, geography, ethnology, general literature, and mathematics, he read with avidity; and so proficient did he become in this last department of science in particular, that the famous astronomer Plana, who was his instructor, said he never had so gifted a pupil. But it is quite characteristic of the debasement to which a despotic and priest-ridden court dooms the high-born idlers that flutter around it, that his relatives only despised him the more, as an incorrigible book-worm, utterly insensible to the claims of his exalted station, as the destined heir of a fortune of nearly a million sterling, and of an unsullied name. It was far worse, of course, when he fell under suspicion of being a Liberal. At length, with the events of '31, and the raz zia that followed against every thing like f.ee opinion, his position in the army-in which he had risen to the rank of a lieutenant, but for whose brilliant gayeties he had never felt any liking-became so intolerable, that his father felt constrained to yield a reluctant consent to his quitting the service. He had now an opportunity of showing that he was any thing but a dreamer, by entering upon that career as a practical ising there. A slight breeze was rippling the surface of the Dead Sea. Long had Sardinia been the very paradise of the Jesuits, who held the nobles in willing, and Carlo Alberto, as was often suspected even then, in unwilling tutelage. The ministers were the creatures of these living corpses, and scarcely in Rome itself was clerical domination more absolute. The Subalpine kingdom, in short, had become a Paraguay in the heart of Europe. But the hour of liberation was drawing on, and free England had meanwhile been schooling the man for the task. Taking advantage of the new life which had already begun to show itself in almost all the great cities of the peninsula, especially in the establishment of schools for the poor, and institutions for the encouragement of science, art, and literature, Count Cavour, soon after his return, founded, with the help of other eminent Piedmontese patriots, the Royal Agricultural Society of Sardinia, which soon numbered more than 2000 members. In this and other philanthropic and scientific associations, the Liberals, in spite of Della Margherita's jealous police system, found centers of union; by means of which they consolidated their strength, and were enabled to exert a certain degree of moral influence, which favorable circumstances could not fail to convert-for the want of other organs of public opinion-into real political power. Pio Nono's reforms and the Tuscan movement furnished this oc agriculturist, which even amidst the hea-mont, things were looking far more promviest cares of State he has never since relinquished, and which, especially after his return from England, after picking up all sorts of farming lore, has alone rendered him such an unspeakable blessing to his country. As already hinted, he was the first landed proprietor in the Subalpine kingdom to use guano on his fields, and although the rustic wiseacres laughed at him a good deal at first, they now import that manure to the tune of a million tons per annum. The cork plantations, too, of the Sardinian island, are his work, and many another happy innovation, which has made that formerly barren wilderness begin to blossom like a garden. For there is a good deal of the thrift of the Hollander-a little, too, of Dutch phlegm about this sharp-witted Italian. Look at any tolerable portrait of him, and see if there be any mistaking the air of business that plays around those restless though good-humored features. From behind the spectacles those keen eyes can see a thing or two, no doubt. An aristocrat every inch of him certainly, but not above work. A man diligent in his business, whether in the stubble-land, the workshop, or the Cabinet; whichever comes handiest for the moment, and will do most good to his country. Such a man, Solomon says, shall stand before kings. A man well worth studying, but seen best in action. "What has he done?" Napoleon used to ask of any one who was praised to him as a genius. There need be no shrinking from this test, in the in-casion, and rendered the Provincial Constance before us. It was in 1842, as already observed, that Count Cavour, enriched with valuable information of all kinds most useful to a statesman, returned to Turin. He was then thirty-two, in the full vigor of life; and since he sleeps but four hours a day, enjoys robust health, and regards labor as a luxury, he had managed during his voluntary exile, to keep up his studies in every department of national economy, and the administrative sciences, with especial reference to the commercial, industrial, and international relations of Piedmont. But his first and foremost study was the English constitutional system, which, in spite of present appearances, he was not without hopes of seeing one day acclimatized, and bearing its precious fruits, on his native soil. It so happened, too, that at the time of his return to Pied gress of the Societa Agraria at Alessandria an ever memorable event in the history of Sardinian freedom. Soon Carlo AIberto, by relaxing the restrictions on the press, gave it to be understood that he was not disinclined to still more important political concessions. But between the king and the people lay entrenched the black legions of the clerical party, strong in its alliance with the feudal aristocracy, many of whose members were affiliated to the Jesuits. It was necessary to put to the rout this formidable phalanx, if Carlo Alberto and the nation were to be brought together in a common effort for the regeneration of the State. Cavour's keen discernment saw at once the seriousness of the crisis, when the events of the autumn of 1847, threatened absolutism with shipwreck. A foe alike to the clerico-aristocratic régime on the Europe. one hand, and to all revolutionary violence | his colleagues, upon the helpless and be. on the other, he felt the vast importance wildered Cabinet the fearful perils of de of warding off too stormy a collision, by lay, the Count himself wrote to the King getting a hearing for the opinions of tem- through the post, inclosing the minutes perate though earnest reformers. Wise of the meeting which the Censorship had and enlightened journalism he instinctively burked, and solemnly assuring Carlo Alsaw to be the best means to this end. He berto that he and those who acted with therefore established, in conjunction with him were loyally bent on nothing save a his friend, the illustrious historian of Italy, happy alliance between the majesty and Count Cesare Balbo, and other eminent security of the Crown and the true interpatriots-such as Count Santa-Rosa and ests of the country. It was mainly owing the Cavaliere Boncompagnia daily to him also that these vigorous steps were paper, Il Risorgimento, which, in spite followed up on the fifth of February by of its aristocratic staff, soon became the an address to the same effect, which was organ of the middle classes. It speedily carried in the strongly aristocratic Munibecame the Times of Turin, only, happily, cipal Chamber of Turin, by a majority of an honest Times; sternly closed to all three fourths. Two days afterwards the democratic flummery and Mazzinian theo- King announced in a manifesto to his overries. In its influential columns the Eng-joyed subjects Sardinia's accession to the lish constitutional system first became ex- ranks of the Constitutional States of tensively known and popular in Piedmont and Italy at large, through the powerful The new electoral law was Cavour's pen of Cavour. At the same time the work, which he undertook at the request Count's saloons became the head-quarters of the ministry; and when, in the May of the élite of the Liberal party, just as his following, the Turin Parliament met for father's had heretofore been the favorite the first time, he sat in the Lower Chamrendezvous of the Reäctionaries; and his ber, as deputy for the first electoral college honorable ambition was gratified at seeing of the capital. But meanwhile came the himself recognized as the leader of an im- five bloody days of Milan, the cry which portant political section. Animated, bril- rang throughout Italy for the War of Inliant chat, rather than discussion, amidst dependence, Carlo Alberto's prompt rethe rushing current of events, was the sponse in the defiance hurled at Austria order of the day in these reunions; and on the twenty-third of March, and his first the quiet, cool insight with which the intoxicating victories and subsequent master of the house unraveled the tangles ominous checks. And now at the very of the situation, and his imperturbable outset we discover, what subsequently humor, even in the gravest moments, were becomes verified throughout his whole the theme of general admiration. Already career, in how strikingly original a manin the January and February days of 1848, ner our illustrious Italian pupil has apprehe saw the storm that was hurrying on, hended the constitutional system. As and resolved to be beforehand with it, by he has listened admiringly to the debates boldly taking the place which he felt be in our own House of Commons, his agile longed to him as the mouthpiece of the southern intellect, overleaping John Bull's moderate patriots. It was he who, amidst honest but perhaps rather "slow" and the popular rage at the ministry's refusal humdrum prejudices about party consistof an audience to the Reform deputations ency, has conceived an idea of a someto the King from Genoa and the other what novel and fruitful kind. He does not great towns, and even from the priest-see why the same man may not be a Tory ridden island of Sardinia, guided the swelling stream into a safe channel. His was the decisive voice at the meeting of the Turin press convened on the occasion, at which, when reforms were spoken of, he, amidst general acclamations, insisted that the one reform needed was a constitution, whereupon he was selected, together with Santa Rosa and Durando, to lay this demand at the foot of the throne. Accordingly, after urging, in conjunction with at one time, and a Radical at another, so that he be consistently patriotic in both phases. He is for rolling Russell and Peel into one, a sort of embodied Coalition, who is to be the former on the eve of a Reform Bill and the latter on its morrow. The situation, not a mere party shibboleth, is to decide a politician's course, and he sees no intrinsic reason for a change of captains, because the vessel of the state at one time requires more bal |