according to M. de Mazade, that no republic can give as much liberty, and as real liberty, as a constitutional monarchy that operates regularly. It is noticeable that, keeping in view his hero's conservative side, M. de Mazade relates in considerable detail the story of the liberation of Italy, with no allusion to Mazzini beyond speaking of him two or three times as a vulgar and truculent conspirator, and with a regrettable tendency to stint the mixture of praise to the erratic but certainly, during a most important period, efficient Garibaldi. But Cavour's nature was a wonderfully rich and powerful one; and there is something very striking in such religious devotion to an idea when it is unaccompanied with fanaticism or narrowness of view, and tempered with good sense and wit and the art of taking things easily. Cavour had had his idea from the first: he cherished it for a long time very quietly: he was awaiting his opportunity. "We will do something," he said one day in 1850, rubbing his hands--his legendary gesture--as he looked across Lago Maggiore to the Austrian shore. It was not till 1855 that the first serious opportunity came, but he attached himself to this with the quiet zeal and obstinacy of a man who feels that he is driving in the narrow end of the wedge. There were all sorts of telling objections to be made to the co-operation of Piedmont in the Crimean war, and Cavour was at the disadvantage, for a man who was rigidly and supremely practical, of having to defend his course on ideal and far-fetched grounds. But his idealism proved to be plain good sense: it brought little Piedmont to the notice of Europe, and gave her the right to call attention to her affairs. The young Italian officer spoke the truth who said to a poor soldier struggling with the mud in the Crimean trenches, "Never mind--make the best of it: with this mud we are making Italy!" As Piedmont had had a hand in the war, so she had a seat at the Congress of Paris which followed it; and here Cavour, finding his auditory ready made to his hand, introduced--a little perhaps by the shoulders--the then comparatively novel "Italian question." This was his second opportunity. The emperor Napoleon had asked him, from an impulse of imperial civility, "If there was any thing he could do for Italy?" and Cavour, taking him at his word, and more than his word, had instantly drawn up a list of _desiderata_. M. de Mazade gives a detailed and very interesting account of the gradual adoption by the emperor of his Italian policy--of the various phases through which it passed, of its complications and interruptions, and of Napoleon's curiously fitful, illusive and at times evasive attitudes. Cavour's relations with Napoleon III. may serve as the best example of his disposition to use the best instruments and opportunities that offered themselves, and not quarrel with them because they were not ideally perfect. This was what the Italian