But his popularity among his subjects, the interest felt in him by the world, have long been steadily on the wane. Years and years ago he ceased to retain the faintest gleam of the halo of romance that once was, despite of himself, thrown around him. His people care little or nothing for him. Why, indeed, should they care anything? The military _prestige_ which he had won, such as it was, vanished at Custozza, and it was his evil destiny, hardly his fault, to be almost always placed in a position of antagonism to the one only Italian who since Cavour's death had an enthusiastic following in Italy. Aspromonte was a calamity for Victor Emanuel. One can hardly blame him; one can hardly see how he could have done otherwise. The greatest citizen or soldier in America or England, if he attempted to levy an army of his own, and make war from American or English territory upon a neighboring State, would surely have seen his bands dispersed and found himself arrested by order of his government; and it would never have occurred to any one to think that the government was doing a harsh, ungrateful, or improper thing. It would be the necessary, rightful execution of a disagreeable duty, and that is all. But the conditions of Garibaldi's case, like the one splendid service he had rendered, were so entirely abnormal and without precedent, the whole thing was from first to last so much more a matter of national sentiment than of political law, that national sentiment insisted on judging Garibaldi and the King in this case too, and at least a powerful, passionate minority declared Victor Emanuel an ingrate and a traitor. Mentana was almost as bad for the King as Custozza. The voice of the country, so far as one could understand its import, seemed to declare that when the King had once ordered the Italian troops to cross the frontier, he should have ordered them to go on; that if they had actually occupied Rome, France would have recognized accomplished facts; that as it was, Italy offended France and the Pope by stepping over the barrier of the convention of September, only to humiliate herself by stepping back again without having accomplished anything. Certainly the policy of the Italian Government at such a crisis was weak, miserable, even contemptible. Then indeed Italy might well have exclaimed, "Oh for one hour of Cavour!" One hour of the man of genius and courage, who, if he had moved forward, would not have darted back again! Perhaps it was unfair to hold the King responsible for the mistakes of his ministers. But when a once popular King has to be pleaded for on that sole ground, it is pretty clear that there is an end to his popularity. So with Victor Emanuel. The world began to forget him; his subjects began to despise him. Even the thrilling events that have lately taken place in Italy, the sudden crowning of the national edifice--the realization of that hope which so long appeared but a