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Victor Emmanuel could say what few men have been able to say of so large a promise:  ‘I have kept my word.’  He gathered up the Italian flag from the dust of Novara, and carried it to the Capitol.  In spite of the grandeur of republican tradition in Italy, and the lofty character of the men who represented it during the struggle for unity, a study of these events leaves on the mind the conviction that, at least in our time, the country could neither have been freed from the stranger nor welded into a single body-politic without a symbol which appealed to the imagination, and a centre of gravity which kept the diverse elements together by giving the whole its proper balance.  The Liberating Prince whom Machiavelli sought was found in the Savoyard King.  ’Quali porte se gli serrerebbono?  Quali popoli gli negherebbono la obbedienza?  Quale invidia se gli opporrebbe?  Quale Italiano gli negherebbe l’ossequio?’ To fill the appointed part Victor Emmanuel possessed the supreme qualification, which was patriotism.  Though he came of an ambitious race, not even his enemies could with any seriousness bring to his charge personal ambition, since every step which took him further from the Alps, his fathers’ cradle, involved a sacrifice of tastes and habits, and of most that made life congenial.  When his work was finished, though he was not old, he had the presentiment that he should not long survive its completion.  And so it proved.

In the first days of January 1878, the King was seized with one of those attacks on the lungs which his vigorous constitution had hitherto enabled him to throw off.  But in Rome this kind of illness is more fatal than elsewhere, and the doctors were soon obliged to tell him that there was no hope.  ‘Are we come to that?’ he asked; and then directed that the chaplain should be summoned.  There was no repetition of the scene at San Rossore; the highest authority had already sanctioned the administration of the Sacraments to the dying King, nay, it is said that the Pope’s first impulse was to be himself the bearer of them.  At that hour the man got the better of the priest; Francis drove out Dominic.  The heart that had been made to pity and the lips that had been formed to bless returned to their natural functions.  When the aged Pius heard that all was over, exclaimed:  ’He died like a Christian, a Sovereign and an honest man (galantuomo).’  Very soon the Pope followed the King to the grave, and so, almost together, these two historical figures disappear.

Six years before, solitary and unsatisfied, Mazzini died at Pisa, his heart gnawed with the desire of the extreme, as the hearts have been of all those who aspired less to change what men do, or even what they believe, than what they are.  More deep than political regrets was the pain with which he watched the absorption of human energies, in the race for wealth, for ease, for material happiness; he discerned