Ar the end of May, I passed through Turin on my way homewards from Southern Italy. It was in the January of 1859 that I had last seen the Alpsurrounded city, then the capital of Piedmont, and now the capital of Italy. In these words lay the gist of some two and a half years, which had gone by between my two visits. The worldfamed interview of Plombières, the full secret of which is hidden now in the grave of Count Cavour, and in the heart of one than whom the grave is not more taciturn; the passage of the Mincio, when the white-coated Austrians came marching on Turin, till their progress was stayed by the coming of the French armies whom Cavour had summoned to the rescue; the retreat from Milan; the battles of Magenta, San Martino and Solferino; the treaty of Villa Franca, to which Victor Emmanuel, by Cavour's guidance, affixed his signature under protest; the expulsion of the Austrian Grand-dukes; the revolt of the Romagna; the annexation of central Italy; the triumphal entry of the "Ré Eletto," as they called him then, into Parma, and Modena, and Florence, and Bologna, when Cavour stood by his side; the landing of Gari

baldi at Marsala; the bombardment of Palermo; the march through Calabria; the flight of the Bourbon King; the Garibaldian dictatorship; the invasion of the Papal States; the rout of Lamoricière's army at at Castlefidardo; the capture of Ancona; the retirement of Garibaldi to Caprera; the siege of Gaeta and the surrender of Messina; the proclamation of the Italian kingdom, of which Cavour declared that Rome should be the future metropolis-all these and a hundred other incidents had led to and were contained in this one great fact that the capital of Piedmont had become the capital of Italy.

It had been my fortune to reside in Italy, with but short intervals of absence, throughout the whole of that eventful period. I had been present at many of the scenes in that great world-drama. I had seen the French regiments marching through Paris on their way to Solferino. I had seen their thinned ranks marching out of Milan, when the work was ended and the victory won. I had been at Florence in the last days of the grand-ducal dynasty, and had been there again when Victor Emmanuel came to take possession of the Tuscan land. I had mingled with

the crowd which followed Garibaldi as he entered into Naples, passing beneath the pointed guns of the "Castel del Carmine," heeding nothing but the people's cheering. I had met the Exdictator on his last day in Naples when he paid his farewell visits, unheeded and alone. I had been present when the parting decrees were placarded over Naples bearing for the last time the signature of Francis II., king of the Two Sicilies-and had been present also when the Royal Exiles knelt for the first time before "Pio Nono at the shrine of Saint Peter, boy-king and girlqueen together. I had passed through the Sardinian camp before Gaeta, when the shells from the fortress came flying over the land-locked bay. I had wandered about the captured fortress, while the dead were being carried out for burial from beneath the shattered walls. I had seen Turin, the capital of a petty state, on the eve of invasion by Austrian armies-I was coming now to see it in the hour of triumph, as the capital of a great country.

I have said thus much to show why to me it was an object of especial interest to listen to a debate in the Italian parliament. The drama of the Italian revolution was one that I had not only read but seen acted. The varying events and episodes, the men by whom the plot was worked out, and the spots wherein the scenes were fixed, were to my mind connected with living memories. The "Italia una e libera" was for me no mere abstraction. In the meeting of that first of Italian parliaments, I was to see the idea, whose growth I had watched, realized and made manifest. And so, before I left Italy-left it, as it then seemed, in the full tide of success-with the great dream that Mazzini conceived, and Garibaldi fought for, and Cavour wrought into being, almost an "accomplished fact," accomplished fact," -I had resolved to take away with me as the last in a bundle of many memories, the record of a sitting in the National parliament of the Italian kingdom. I carried out my purpose; and, in so doing, I saw and heard more than I had reckoned on-I saw

the last appearance before the world, I heard the last speech, of Count Cavour.

I was present, then, at two debates of the Italian Parliament, on the 28th and 29th of May,-debates which will long live in the memory of all those who heard them, not from what occurred there, but from what came afterwards. There is no difficulty about getting admission into the Turin Chambers; the only trouble is to find your way to the Assembly-house in the "Piazza Carignano." There is so little of pomp, or show, or bustle, about the place to attract a stranger's notice. In fact, you might well pass without heeding it: a low town-hall-looking building, with three doors opening on the street. Two national guards-Florentines by the way -stood on duty there when I entered; a weather-stained tricolor, with the cross of Savoy in the centre, hung over the main entrance, out of which every now and then you saw men in morning attire passing to and fro. A printed placard told you that to-day was an open sitting, commencing "al tocco," or at the time of bell-ringing, as one o'clock is called in the North of Italy. Another notice over each side-door informed you that this was the way to the public tribune; and, entering by one of these doors, asking no questions and being asked none, you passed out of the open street, up a narrow dark dirty staircase, pushed open a green-baize door and found yourself in the Commons House of the Italian kingdom. Your first feeling was that you had entered by mistake into a public lecture-room. A horse-shoe shaped hall, with tier upon tier of high red velvet-covered benches, rising one above the other, half-way up the building; behind the last bench a number of wide open boxes, where reporters and diplomats and illustrious visitors had the right of entrance; then, overhanging these, a high gallery supported on light and airy pillars, and in the gallery three or four tribunes, Anglice, "pens," reserved for ladies and national guards, and the common public, of whom you were one; over head a lofty skylightbroken roof-these were the broad fea

tures of the building in which you stood. Details of any kind there were few to notice. In the centre of the dead wall, which stood where the curtain would have stood, had the house been a theatre, was a portrait of "Victor Emmanuel," in the dress of a Sardinian officer, with the upturned moustaches, and the marked Calmuck-looking features, whose expression never varies. On either side were two tablets, much like those on which the Ten Commandments are inscribed in English chapels; and on them were written: "March 1848," and "February 1861"-the dates when Charles Albert proclaimed the Sardinian constitution, and when Victor Emmanuel proclaimed the Italian kingdom. Underneath the king's picture is a raised platform, on which stands the chair of the President; and in front of this again is a low table, where the ministers are seated with their faces turned towards the audience. Little more, I think, need be said about the stage on which Cavour achieved the glory of his life-speaking to the first Italian parliament as Prime Minister of the First King of Italy-and from which I saw him, but yesterday, speak for the last time, to go home thence, and die.

The house, when I entered, was very fairly full, three-fifths probably of the seats being occupied. The benches to the left of the president's chair, where the opposition sits, were almost crowded, for the day's question had brought together a great rallying of the Garibaldian members. The thing which struck you most, as your eye wandered from the building to its occupants, was the extremely English look of the members as a body. There was less eccentricity in dress or gesture than you would see any day in the English House of Commons. As all the upper Italians do now-a-days, the members very much affected English fashions in the colour and cut of their clothes; and, if it had not been that the features were somewhat more marked, and the complexions somewhat darker than would have been the case with us, you could hardly have told that you were not in an assemblage of English gentlemen. Disturbance, or noise, or confusion of any kind, there

was none. All the proceedings were carried on with a degree of quiet order, or orderly quiet, for which, even with some knowledge of the self-restraint that Italians possess, I was not prepared. Indeed, the absence of any apparent excitement was almost oppressive, except on the rare occasions when my neighbours round me in the public tribune, many of whom were disbanded Garibaldians, applauded the expression of any sentiment more patriotic, perhaps, than discreet. And then, having noticed all this, your eyes turned inevitably to the ministerial bench, and passed by Ratazzi, Minghetti, Fanti, and Scialoja, to fix themselves upon Cavour.

He was sitting on the first day of that debate at the right end of the ministers' table. I had seen him last at Bologna, hustled by a dense crowd, cheering madly, as Victor Emmanuel entered, as king, the northern capital of the Papal States. Still, even if I had not known him by sight before, there could have been no difficulty in recognising the Italian premier. The form, and figure, and features were such that portrait-painters and caricaturists could and did seize them easily and truly. The squat and I know no truer word-pot-bellied form; the small stumpy legs; the short, round arms, with the hands stuck constantly in the trousers' pockets; the thick neck, in which you could see the veins swelling; the scant, thin hair; the slurred, blotched face; and the sharp, grey eyes, covered with the goggle spectaclesthese things must be known to all who have cared enough about Italy to examine the likeness of her greatest statesThe dress itself seemed a part and property of the man. The snuffcoloured tail-coat; the grey, creased, and crumpled trousers; the black silk double tie, seeming, loose as it was, a world too tight for the swollen neck it was bound around; the crumpled shirt; the brown. satin, single-breasted waistcoat, half unbuttoned, as though the wearer wanted breath, with the short, massive gold chain dangling down its front-seemed all to be in fitness with that quaint, world-known figure. What, however,

man.

no portrait that I have seen has ever given, was the great kindliness of look and manner. It is Balzac, I believe, who says that dogs and women have an unfailing instinct which teaches them whom they can make up to safely; and I think that a dog who wanted his head patted, or a woman who sought for a kind word in trouble, would have come to Count Cavour without doubt or fear. Whether, when the pat was given and the kind word spoken, there was room for a deeper and more personal affection, may perhaps be doubtful. The great men of this world have few friends and many lovers; and of such Cavour was

one.

The matter in discussion before the House on those two last days of Cavour's public life was one which, strangely enough, called into question the whole of the Premier's policy. A law had been proposed by the ministry to regulate the pensions of the different civil and military "employés" who had been deprived of their salaries, from political motives, by the late governments of the various annexed States. The principle of the law received the unanimous approval of all parties in the country. The only question at issue was how far the compensation should be carried. It seems that, after the reconquest of Venice by the Austrians, in 1849, a number of Venetians, who had situations under the Provisional Government, took refuge in Piedmont, and were, as a matter of favour, granted pensions from the civil list of the Sardinian Government. demand of the liberal opposition was that this, which had formerly been granted as a favour, should now be granted as a right. The question was one of principle, not of practical importance. Of the eighty-one officers who had originally received these pensions, forty-seven had taken service in the Italian army; eighteen more had obtained civil appointments; and therefore only sixteen were left qualified to claim compensation. The real point at issue between the opposition and ministry was, whether the fact of these sixteen officers having held rank under Manin's Provisional Government, at Venice, entitled

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them to claim, as a right, pensions from the war budget of the Italian kingdoma point which involved the whole question of how far the National Italian Government was disposed to recognise the acts and authority of the former revolutionary governments. When I had ceased looking around me, Tecchio was urging, temperately enough, the claims of the Venetian officers. Himself an exile from Venice, with his tall, portly, military figure, and his worn handsome face-worn rather by sorrow and suffering than by age—and his grave stately utterance, his words obviously carried weight. Scarcely had he sat down before Bixio had sprung upon his legs, and was speaking-as his wont is rapidly. All who knew Naples during the Garibaldian days must well remember Bixio, with all the wild stories that used to be told about him-of how, with his own hand, he had shot a soldier dead on the march through Calabria, whom he found stealing a roadside bunch of grapes beneath that burning summer sun, and how his very aides-de-camp were afraid to speak to him without revolvers in their hands. There he was, looking almost wilder in his plain clothes than in the red shirt of a Garibaldian general-a little wiry nervous man, rather French than Italian in look, reminding one of the fierce young Marseillaise Girondins, such as Carlyle has painted them, marching to Paris and the guillotine, cutting right and left with a sharp ready tongue, sparing neither friend nor foe, and yet, with all his fierceness, not unequal to the occasion in the time of danger, whether in war or peace, as he had shewn ofttimes in Rome and Sicily, and showed again not long ago, when he healed the great feud between Cavour and Garibaldi, by declaring, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, that, to see those two men at peace together, he would gladly sacrifice his own life, and that of all who were near and dear to him. He is speaking now with short epigrammatic sentences, tossing his arms about him wildly, and uttering, so fast that one can scarce follow him, sayings such as these that night is not day;