On September 11 the Sardinian army, more than double as strong as Lamoriciere’s, crossed the papal frontier.  With the exception of England and Sweden, all the Powers recalled their representatives from Turin.  The French Ministry telegraphed to Napoleon, who was at Marseilles, to ask what they were to do.  They got no answer, and, left to their own inspiration, they informed the Duke de Grammont, the French Ambassador at Rome, that the Emperor’s Government “would not tolerate” the culpable aggression of Sardinia, and that orders were given to embark troops for Ancona.  These misleading assurances encouraged Lamoriciere, but in any case he would probably have thought it incumbent on him to make what stand he could.  He was defeated by Cialdini on the heights of Castelfidardo—­“yesterday unknown, to-day immortal,” as Mgr.  Dupanloup eloquently exclaimed.  Ancona fell to a combined attack from land and sea.  Meanwhile Fanti advanced on Perugia, and was on the point of entering Viterbo when a detachment from the French garrison in Rome suddenly occupied the town:  one of Napoleon’s facing-both-ways evolutions by which he thought to save the goat and cabbages of the Italian riddle, but the final result was to lose both one and the other.  Lamoriciere went home, declaring that he took his defeat less to heart than the cruel disillusions he had undergone in Rome.  Some one proposed that he should go to the rescue of King Francis, but he answered that his wish had been to serve the Pope, not the Neapolitan Bourbons.

On the 20th the King of Sardinia, at the head of his army, marched into the kingdom of Naples.  For the Continental Powers it was a new act of aggression; for Lord Palmerston, a measure of the highest expediency, to which he had been urging Cavour with an impatience hardly exceeded by that of the most ardent Italian patriot.  The goal of Italian unity was now more than in sight—­it was touched.  The Rubicon was crossed in more senses than one.  But at this last stage there arose a danger which Cavour had not seriously apprehended.  He thought that Austria would not attack, unless directly provoked by some imprudence of the extreme party.  She had allowed the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the King of Naples to fall; why should she be more concerned for the Pope?  Austria’s concern for the Pope was, in fact, not very deep, but there were Austrian politicians who argued that, if Venetia was to be saved for the empire, the right of Austria to hold it must rest on something more solid than a treaty, every other clause of which had been torn to shreds.  Never could a time return so favourable as the present for striking a blow at the nascent Italian kingdom.  With the king and the best part of the army in the south, who was there to oppose them?  It is true that there was a feeling, growing and expanding silently, which tended all the other way:  a feeling that enough of German and Hungarian and Bohemian and Polish blood had been poured out upon Italian plains; that