There are few historical facts more striking than the effect of position on the character of the princes of Savoy. The life of the Italian sovereigns has generally been proverbial for the feebleness of their capacities, or the waste of their powers; but Savoy exhibited an almost unbroken line of sovereigns remarkable for political sagacity, and for gallantry in the field. This was the result of their location. They were to Italy what the Lords Wardens of the Border were to England and Scotland; forced to be perpetually in the saddle--constantly preparing to repel invasion--their authority dependent from year to year on an outburst from France, or a grasp from the restless ambition and vast power of the German emperors. It is not less remarkable, that from the middle of the century, when the hazards of Savoy were diminished by the general amelioration of European policy, the vigour of the Savoyard princes decayed; and the court of Turin, instead of being a school of diplomacy and war, sank into the feebleness of Italian thrones, and retained its rivalry only in the opera. But the French Revolution came, sent to try the infirmities of all thrones. It found Victor Amadeus the Third sitting calmly in the seat of his forefathers, and wholly unsuspicious of the barbarian storm which was to sweep through his valleys. The French burst on Nice in 1792, then on Oniglia, and stripped Savoy of all its outworks to the Alps. But Napoleon came, another shape of evil. While the king was preparing to defend the passes of the mountains, the young French general turned the line of defence by the sea, and poured his army into Piedmont. A succession of rapid battles carried him to the walls of Turin; and the astonished king, in 1796, signed a treaty which left his dominions at the mercy of Republicanism. On the death of the king in this year of troubles, his son, Charles Emanuel IV., succeeded him. But he was now a vassal of France; he saw his country dismembered, his armies ruined, and his people groaning under the cruel insults and intolerable exactions which have always characterised French conquest. Unable to endure this torture, he retired to Sardinia, and from Sardinia finally went to Rome, and there abdicated in favour of his brother, Victor Emanuel. The new monarch, whose states were undergoing from year to year all the capricious and agonising vicissitudes of Italian revolution, at length shared in the general European triumph over Napoleon, and at the peace of 1814 returned to his dominions, augmented, by the treaty of Vienna, by the important addition of Genoa.