The brightest gleam of success which shone on the king of Sardinia’s arms was at Goito, in the battle of May 30.  It was on that occasion that Cavour’s nephew, Augusto di Cavour, was killed.  The enfant terrible grew up to be a young man of singular promise, on whom Cavour had fixed all his hopes for the future of his name and house.  His uncle’s last letter of encouragement to do his duty was found on Augusto’s body.  The blow unnerved Cavour; he was found lying prostrate in an agony of speechless grief.  Through his life he kept the blood-stained uniform in which the young officer received his death-wound in a glass case in his bedroom, a piece of enduring sentiment which shows how unlike Cavour was the coldly calculating egotist whose portrait has passed for his.

The story of the years of revolution in Italy is a story of great things and small, like most human records; but, when all is said, the great predominate, for no blunders could efface the readiness for self-sacrifice displayed by the whole people.  The experience of these years was bitter, but possibly necessary.  It destroyed illusions.  It showed, for instance, that in the nineteenth century a free and independent Italy under the hegemony of the Pope belonged to political mythology.  Here was a Pope who was, at heart, patriotic, but who drew back at the crucial moment, precisely as Mazzini (almost alone) had predicted.  The first threat of a schism was enough to make him wear dust and ashes for his patriotism.  The Bourbons of Naples were ascertained to have learnt nothing and unlearnt nothing; perfidy alone could be expected from them.  It was proved that the princes of the other states, Piedmont excepted, must gravitate towards Austria even if they did not wish it.  All this was useful, if dearly bought, knowledge.

At the first general elections in Piedmont, Cavour failed to obtain a seat.  He told the electors in his address that he had always desired Italia unita e libera, and if “united” did not yet imply “under one king,” the phrase was still significant.  Two months later he was elected in four divisions; probably the death of his nephew in the interim on the field of battle modified, for the time, his unpopularity.  He took his seat for the first college of Turin.  He did not make an immediate impression; his short stature, and still more the imperfect accent with which he spoke Italian, were not in his favour.  French was allowed in the Sardinian Chamber, but Cavour never opened his lips in it in Parliament.  By degrees his speeches became marvels of close reasoning, and they even soared, sometimes, when he was deeply moved, into a kind of eloquence superior to that of rhetoric, but the accent was never such as would satisfy a fastidious ear.  The day came, however, when people hung with too much anxiety on the least of his utterances for any one to notice this defect.  Cavour sat on the Right, and from the first he horrified his colleagues on the same benches by the enunciation of views which to them were rank heresies.  They existed in a state of perpetual uneasiness as to what he might say or do next.