spoken by him in his last hours.  But he was continually delirious; all that could be understood was that his wandering mind was running on what had been the life of his life, Italy.  In the early dawn of the 6th, he imagined that he was making a ministerial statement from his place in the Chamber of Deputies; his voice sounded clear and distinct, but ideas, names, words, were incoherently mixed together.  At four o’clock he became silent, and very soon life was pronounced to be extinct.

One Sunday in June, a year before, Cavour spent some hours in the ancestral castle at Santena, which he so rarely visited.  On that occasion he said to the village syndic:  “Here I wish my bones to rest.”  The wish was respected, the king yielding to it his own desire to give his great minister a royal burial at the Superga.  Cavour had the old sentiment that it was well for a man to be buried where his fathers were buried, and to die in their faith.  At all times it would have been repugnant to him to pose as a sceptic, most of all on his deathbed.  Once, when he was reminded in the Campo Santo at Pisa that he was standing on holy earth brought from Palestine, he said, smiling, “Perhaps they will make a saint of me some day.”  He died a Catholic, and, instead of launching its censures against Fra Giacomo, the Church might have written “ancor questo” among its triumphs.  For the rest, with minds such as Cavour’s, religion is not the mystical elevation of the soul towards God, but the intellectual assent to the ruling of a superior will, and religious forms are, in substance, symbols of that assent.  The essence of Cavour’s theology and morality is expressed in two sayings of Epictetus.  One is, that as to piety to the gods, the chief thing is to have right opinions about them; to think that they exist, and that they administer the all well and justly.  The other is:  For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you.

“Cavour,” said Lord Palmerston in the classic home of constitutional liberty, the British House of Commons, “left a name ’to point a moral and adorn a tale.’” The moral was, that a man of transcendent talent, indomitable industry, inextinguishable patriotism, could overcome difficulties which seemed insurmountable, and confer the greatest, the most inestimable benefits on his country.  The tale with which his memory would be associated was the most extraordinary, the most romantic, in the annals of the world.  A people which seemed dead had arisen to new and vigorous life, breaking the spell which bound it, and showing itself worthy of a new and splendid destiny.  The man whose name would go down to posterity linked with such events might have died too soon for the hopes of his fellow-citizens, not for his fame and his glory.

After thirty-seven years nothing need be taken away from this high eulogy, and something can be added.  The completion of the national edifice within a decade of Cavour’s death was still, in a sense, his work, as the consolidation of the United States after the death of Lincoln was still moulded by his vanished hand.