is omitted, and surely enough is told to vindicate for Cavour the highest rank which the enthusiastic admiration and gratitude of his countrymen have accorded to him.  Where can we find a nobler life?  And, take him all in all, whom shall we pronounce to have been a greater statesman?  What variety of power he showed, and what wealth of resources he had at command!  Without the pride and coldness of Pitt, the private vices of Fox, the tempestuous and ill-regulated sensibility of Burke, he had the useful and commanding intellectual qualities of all the three, except the splendid and imaginative eloquence of the last.

This life of Cavour, and the incidental sketches of his associates which it includes, will have a tendency to correct some of the erroneous impressions current among us as to the intellectual qualities and temperament of the Italian people.  The common, or, at least, a very prevalent, notion concerning them is that they are an impassioned, imaginative, excitable, visionary race, capable of brilliant individual efforts, but deficient in the power of organization and combination, and in patience and practical sagacity.  Some of us go, or have gone, farther, and have supposed that the Austrian domination in Italy was the necessary consequence of want of manliness and persistency in the people of Italy, and was perhaps as much for their good as the dangerous boon of independence would have been.  All such prejudices will be removed by a candid perusal of this memoir.  Cavour himself, as a statesman and a man, was of exactly that stamp which we flatter ourselves to be the exclusive growth of America and England.  He was nothing of a visionary, nothing of a political pedant, nothing of a doctrinaire.  Franklin himself had not a more practical understanding, or more of large, plain, roundabout sense.  He had, too, Franklin’s shrewdness, his love of humor, and his relish for the natural pleasures of life.  He had a large amount of patience, the least showy, but perhaps the most important, of the qualifications of a great statesman.  And in his glorious career he was warmly and generously sustained, not merely by the king, and by the favored classes, but by the people, whose efforts and sacrifices have shown how worthy they were of the freedom they have won.  We speak here more particularly of the people of the kingdom of Sardinia; but what we say in praise of them may be extended to the people of Italy generally.  The history of Italy for the last fifteen years is a glorious chapter in the history of the world.  Whatever of active courage and passive endurance has in times past made the name of Roman illustrious, the events of these years have proved to belong equally to the name of Italian.

But we are wandering from Count Cavour and Professor Botta.  We have to thank the latter for enriching the literature of his adopted country with a memoir which in the lucid beauty and transparent flow of its style reminds the Italian scholar of the charm of Boccaccio’s limpid narrative, and is besides animated with a patriot’s enthusiasm and elevated by a statesman’s comprehension.  A more cordial, heart-warming book we have not for a long time read.