The share taken by Napoleon III. in the affairs of Italy has already been treated of, yet a look from that point of view may find place here. The interference of Austria with the Italian States--not only her own subjects there, but the independent States as well--has been called "a standing menace to Europe." It was finally brought to a crisis of conflict by the King of Sardinia, who had already provided himself with a friend and ally in the French emperor; and when, on the 29th of April, 1859, Austria crossed the river Ticino in hostile array, the combined French and Sardinian troops were ready to do battle. The campaign was short, and everywhere disastrous to the Austrians; so that on July 6 an armistice was concluded, and on July 12 the peace of Villa Franca ended the war, with Lombardy ceded to Sardinia, while Nice and Savoy were the reward of the French,--justifying by this addition to the territory and glory of France the emperor's second war of prestige. Louis Napoleon reached the culmination of his fame and of real or supposed greatness--I mean his external power and grandeur, for I see no evidence of real greatness except such as may be won by astuteness, tact, cunning, and dissimulation--when he returned to Paris as the conqueror of the Austrian armies. He was then generally supposed to be great both as a general and as an administrator, when he was neither a general nor an administrator, as subsequent events proved. But his court was splendid; distinguished foreigners came to do him homage; even monarchs sought his friendship, and a nod of his head was ominous. He had delivered Italy as he had humiliated Russia; he had made France a great political power; he had made Paris the most magnificent city of the world (though at boundless expense), and everybody extolled the genius of Hausmann, his engineer, who had created such material glories; his fêtes were beyond all precedent; his wife gave the law to fashions and dresses, and was universally extolled for her beauty and graces; the great industrial exhibition in 1855, which surpassed in attractiveness that of London in 1851, drew strangers to his capital, and gave a stimulus to art and industry. Certainly he seemed to be a most fortunate man,--for the murmurs and intrigues of that constellation of statesmen which grew up with the restoration of the Bourbons, and the antipathies of editors and literary men, were not generally known. The army especially gloried in the deeds of a man whose successes reminded them of his immortal uncle; while the lavish expenditures of government in every direction concealed from the eyes of the people the boundless corruption by which the services of his officials were secured.