The cares of a large family were particularly pressing on the Queen and Prince during this year. Prince Leopold, who was delicate from his birth, had a sharp attack of measles, which caused great anxiety. It was necessary to send him (aged only seven) to Cannes for the winter; and the choice of suitable people to take charge of the delicate little lad was necessarily an anxious one. Among the other engagements of this autumn was included a visit to Ireland, with a hurried excursion to the Curragh to see the Prince of Wales, who was going through a course of military training there. With regard to public affairs, foreign politics were more than ordinarily absorbing. It was the year of the triumphal entry of Garibaldi into Naples, and of Victor Emmanuel into the Papal States. The Queen and Prince followed these events with more anxiety and less sympathy than the Ministry or the nation. The Prince dubbed Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, “the two old Italian masters.” The Court seems to have failed to appreciate the constructive greatness of Garibaldi, and could see in him little more than a kind of picturesque bandit. The fruit of his labors towards the unification of Italy was now, however, nearly ripe, and before the death of the Prince Consort the English Government had acknowledged the title of Victor Emmanuel as King of Italy. On the Eastern Question the Queen and Prince were troubled and perplexed by the tendency of Turkey to relapse into all her old vices of oppression and bad government, and by the evident hesitation of the French Emperor upon the question whether it would not be to his interest to throw over the English and form a Russian alliance.