turning to account the superior gifts with which he was undoubtedly endowed.  But the kindliness of the reproof did not lessen his own sense of shame and mortification.  The lesson was useful; he forsook the Bourse, and at cards he conquered the passion without giving up the game.  Rightly or wrongly it was said that many years after he played high stakes at whist with political men to gain an insight into their characters.  In any case there is nothing to show that his fondness for play ever again led him into excesses which his judgment condemned.  He had recovered his freedom.

Cavour invariably ended his visits to Paris by crossing the Channel, and, if in the French capital he gained greater knowledge of men, it was in England that he first grew familiar with the public life which he considered a pattern for the world.  He did not find the delightful social intercourse to be enjoyed in Paris; in fact, not one of the persons to whom he brought letters of introduction took the least notice of him.  English society is quicker to run after celebrities than to discern them in embryo.  But the two or three Englishmen whom he already knew were active in his behalf.  William Brokedon, his old friend the painter, conducted him to the dinner of the Royal Geographical Society, where a curious thing happened.  Cavour’s first essay in public speaking was before an English assembly.  After several toasts had been duly honoured, the Secretary of the Society, to his unbounded astonishment, proposed his health.  Taken unawares, he expressed his thanks in a few words, which were well received, and on sitting down he said to his neighbour, the Earl of Ripon, “C’est mon maiden speech!” Lord Ripon remarked, “with a significant smile,” that he hoped it would be the opening of a long career.  He dined with John Murray, and went to see Faraday, who in his working clothes made him think of a philosopher of the sixteenth century.  At a party given by Babbage, the mathematician, he met Hallam, Tocqueville, Ada Byron, and the three beautiful daughters of Sheridan.  With Nassau Senior he began a long friendship, and Edward Romilly, the librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, whom he had met at Geneva, introduced him to a rich landed proprietor of the name of Davenport, who was to prove the most useful of all his English acquaintances, as he liberally placed his house in Cheshire at Cavour’s disposal to give him an opportunity of studying English agriculture.  The chance was not thrown away.  Cavour learnt everything about the management of a well-ordered English estate down to the minutest particulars.  He admired much, especially the system of subsoil drainage, then a novelty to foreigners, but he was not carried away by the beautiful appearance of the English country so far as to think that the English farmer was in all respects ahead of the North Italian.  He compared the up-and-down English meadow left to itself with the highly-manured pasture lands of Piedmont,