giving them the worst horses, and that he ought to be dismissed.  “But,” said M. de la Rive, “I cannot dismiss him; that depends on the syndic.”  “Very well,” said the child, “I wish for an audience with the syndic.”  “You shall have one to-morrow,” replied M. de la Rive, who wrote to the syndic, a friend of his, that he was going to send him a highly entertaining little man.  Camille was therefore received next day with all possible ceremony, which by no means abashed him.  After making three bows, he quietly and lucidly explained his grievance, and apparently got a promise of satisfaction, as when he went back he exclaimed in triumph to M. de la Rive, “He will be dismissed!”

The Swiss relations were most enlightened people.  Cavour’s uncle, the Count de Sellon, was a sort of Swiss Wilberforce, an ardent philanthropist whose faith in human perfectibility used sometimes to make his nephew smile, but early intercourse with a man of such large and generous views could not have been without effect.  De Sellon was one of the first persons to dream of arbitration, and though a Protestant he sent a memorial on this subject to the Pope.  M. de la Rive was a man of great scientific acquirements, and his son William became Cavour’s congenial and life-long friend.  This cosmopolitan society was entirely unlike the narrow coteries of the ancient Piedmontese aristocracy which are so graphically described by Massimo d’Azeglio, and the absence of constraint in which Cavour grew up makes a striking contrast to the iron paternal rule under which the young d’Azeglios trembled.  It should be observed, however, that in spite of his mixed blood and scattered ties, Cavour was in feeling from the first the member of one race and the citizen of one state.  The stronger influence, that of the father’s strain, predominated to the exclusion of all others.  Though all classes in Piedmont till within the last fifty years spoke French when they did not speak dialect, the intellectual sway of France was probably nowhere in Italy felt so little as in Piedmont.  The proximity of the two countries tended not for it, but against it.  They had been often at war; all the memories of the Piedmontese people, the heroic exploit of Pietro Micca, the royal legend of the Superga, turned on resistance to the powerful neighbour.  A long line of territorial nobles like the Bensos transmits, if nothing else, at least a strong sentiment for the birthland.  In Cavour this sentiment was, indeed, to widen even in boyhood, but it widened into Italian patriotism, not into sterile cosmopolitanism.

In one respect Cavour was brought up according to the strictest of old Piedmontese conventions.  No one forgot that he was a younger son.  Gustave, the elder brother, received a classical education, and acquired a strong taste for metaphysics.  He became a thinker rather than a man of action, and was one of the first and staunchest friends of the philosopher-theologian Rosmini, whose attempts to reconcile