was a folly which can hardly be otherwise described than as a crime; it happened, however, that in Piedmont there was a King who had not the slightest intention of turning it into an excuse for a royal hark-back.  Austria and France offered Victor Emmanuel their arms to put down the revolution, but, declining the not exactly disinterested attention, he made a wise choice in La Marmora, who accomplished the ungrateful task with expedition and humanity.  An amnesty was granted to all but a very few participators in the revolt.  On the brief black list when it was submitted to the King was the name of the Marquis Lorenzo Pareto, who at one time had held the Foreign Office under Charles Albert.  As Colonel of the Genoese National Guard, his responsibility in joining the insurrection was judged to be particularly heavy; but the King refused to confirm his exclusion from the amnesty.  ’I would not have it said,’ he objected, ’that I was harsh to one of my father’s old ministers.’

The conception of Victor Emmanuel as a bluff, easy-going monarch is mistaken.  Very few princes have had a keener sense of the royal dignity, or a more deeply-rooted family pride, or, when he thought fit to resort to it, a more decisive method of preventing people from taking liberties with him.  But he knew that, in nearly all cases, pardon is the best of a king’s prerogatives.

An instance to the point happened when he came to the throne.  Two officers of the royal household had caused him annoyance while he was Duke of Savoy by telling tales of his unconventionality to his easily-scandalised father.  To them, perhaps, he owed the condign punishment he had undergone for the famous promenade under the Porticoes.  At anyrate, they had procured for the Duke many bad quarters-of-an-hour, but the King, when he became King, chose to be completely oblivious of their conduct, and they remained undisturbed at their posts.  To those who pointed to King Leopold of the Belgians, or to any other foreign example of a loyal sovereign who understood the needs of his people as a model for Victor Emmanuel to imitate, he was in the habit of replying:  ’I remember the history of my fathers, and it is enough.’

‘The Persians,’ says the Greek historian, ’taught their children to ride and to speak the truth.’  In a land that had seen as much of enthroned effeminacy and mendacity as Italy had seen, a prince fond of manly exercise and observant of his word was more valuable than a heaven-sent genius, and more welcome than a calendar saint.  Piedmont only could give such a prince to Italy.  Its kings were not Spaniards who, by way of improvement, became lazzaroni, nor were they Austrians condemned by a fatal law to revert to their original type; they were children of the ice and snow, the fellow-countrymen of their subjects.  All their traditions told of obstinacy and hardihood.  They brought their useful if scarcely amiable moral qualities from Maurienne in the eleventh century.  The second Count of