Not many years after this, and while the lustre of his misfortunes and the brilliancy of his hopes still surrounded him, King Victor Emanuel visited England. He was welcomed everywhere with a cordiality of personal interest and admiration not often accorded by any people to a foreign king. Decidedly it was a hard thing to look at him and yet retain the thought of a hero of romance. He was not then nearly so bloated and burly as he is now; and he was at least some dozen or fourteen years younger. But even then how marvellously ill-favored he was; how rough and coarse-looking; how unattractive in manner; how brusque and uncouth in gesture and bearing; how liable to fits of an apparently stolid silence; how utterly devoid of grace and dignity! His huge straw-colored moustache, projecting about half a foot on each side of his face, was as unsightly a piece of manly decoration as ever royal countenance displayed. Yet the public tried to forget all those external defects and still regard him as a hero of romance somehow, anyhow. So fully was he believed to be a representative of civil and religious freedom in Italy, that one English religious society of some kind--I forget which it was--actually went the length of presenting an address to him, in which they flourished about the errors of Popery as freely as if they were appealing to an Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great. Cavour gave them very neatly and tersely the snub that their ignorance and presumption so well deserved; and their address did not obtain an honored place among Victor Emanuel's memorials of his visit to England.