If Napoleon III. was bent upon carrying that imitation of his uncle, of which he is so fond, to the extent of granting a magnanimous peace to a crushed foe, he may be said to have caricatured that which he sought to imitate. The first Napoleon's magnanimity after Austerlitz has been attributed to the craft of the beaten party,--he allowing the Russians to escape when they had extricated themselves from the false position in which their master's folly had caused them to be placed. But the third Napoleon did allow the Austrians to avoid the consequences of their defeat, and so disappointed Italy and the world. He _was_ magnanimous, and most astonishing to the minds of men was his magnanimity. Most people called it stupidity, and strange stories were told of his nervous system having been shattered by the sights and sounds of those slaughter-fields which he had planned and fought and won! We live rapidly in this age, when nations are breaking up all around us, when unions are dissolving, when dynasties disappear before the light like ghosts at cock-crowing, and when emperors and kings rely upon universal suffrage, once so terrible a bugbear in their eyes, for the titles to their crowns. Opinion is rapidly formed, and is as rapidly dismissed. We may be as much astonished now at the peace of Villafranca as we were on the day when first it was announced, and while looking upon it only as a piece of diplomacy intended to put an end to a contest costly in blood and gold; but we cannot say, as it was common then to say, that the war which it closed has decided nothing. That war established the freedom and nationality of Italy, and the peace so much condemned was the means of demonstrating to the world the existence of an _Italian People_. How far the French Emperor was self-deceived, and to what extent he believed in the practicability of the arrangements made at Villafranca and Zurich, are inscrutable mysteries. _Que sais-je_? might be the form of his own answer, were any one entitled to question him concerning his own opinion on his own acts of 1859. But of the effects of his attack on Austria there can be no doubt. That Lorraines and Bourbons have ceased to reign in Italy,--that the Kingdom of Victor Emanuel has increased from six millions of people to twenty-four millions,--that the same constitutional monarch who ruled at Turin is now acknowledged in Milan, in Ancona, in Florence, in Naples, and in Palermo, being King of Lombards, and Tuscans, and Romans, and Neapolitans, and Sicilians,--and that the Austrians are no longer the rulers of the Peninsula,--these things are all due to the conduct of the French Emperor. Had the peace of Europe not been broken by France, the Austrian power in Italy would have been unbroken at this moment, and Naples have been still under the dominion of that mad tyrant whose supreme delight it was to offend the moral sense of the world, and who found even in the remonstrances of his brother-despots occasion for