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  Hapsburg, a thorough reactionary, and in part they were not deceived. No man had more of the feeling of kingship or the pride of birth than Victor Emanuel, and no man more confidence in his own right to rule. He compelled his Parliament to sign the peace which saved Piedmont; he quarrelled in the very crisis of his fate with Cavour, because the great minister made a remark which the king considered derogatory to his house; he refused the throne of the Peninsula, if he were to be called "King of the Italians;" and he would often aver to the last that it was "hard work to guide his political team." He was, in fact, by temperament a king of the old type, but he had acquired, either from some teaching of his father or the circumstances of his own history, an absolute conviction that to carry his father's policy to success, and rear the throne his father had designed, he must be a constitutional king, and from that resolve he never swerved. His Austrian relatives, implored and threatened him to give up the Statuto, the priests, whom he, as a dissolute and superstitious man, greatly feared, menaced him with every spiritual suffering; his closest female kinsfolk declared the incessant deaths in his house a judgment from heaven; but the proud, hot-tempered, bull-headed soldier never swerved from the word he had given. He would keep the Constitution as his father had sworn, and maintain his father's cause, and all Italy in one twelvemonth recognized that he was faithful, and fell at the feet of the only Italian prince who could be trusted. Before he had won a province, every Italian city used periodically to be placarded with "Viva Verdi," the name of the composer containing the initials of "Vittorio Emanuele, Rè d'ltalia," and in every advance his troops had behind them the army of the people.

The popular confidence in Victor Emanuel never wavered, and it was well deserved. Dissolute in private life, a trooper in bearing, a rude sportsman in taste and habits; with no knowledge of literature, and little taste for art; speaking by preference a dialect as rough as the broadest Yorkshire, and never thoroughly mastering Italian; a second-rate general in all but daring; at once reckless and ignorant of finance — so reckless that his debts were a permanent trouble to the treasury, and so ignorant that he never could understand how his vast nominal income went — the king had three of those great qualities which build up in a favoring cycle of circumstance durable thrones. He never feared, or disliked, or tricked the people. He could take a great risk, as he did when he invaded the Romagna; or exercise a grand self-control, as he did when, almost apoplectic with rage, he agreed to the peace of Villafranca, or when he signed away, on the demand of Napoleon, the cradle of his house. And he could recognize and accept and use great servants. His was probably not the insight which has made of the Hohenzollern the most powerful monarch in the world, the insight which picked out Moltke from among soldiers of fortune and Bismarck from among petty squires; but still, among the statesmen around him the king chose right. He alone after Novara insisted, in the teeth of enormous opposition, on choosing Massimo d'Azeglio. There is reason to believe that he hated Cavour personally, though at a time when he was absolute he had selected him; but he never but once, and then for a moment, deserted his great servant. He chafed under Ricasoli's stern rein, but he never overthrew him. He must have writhed often under recent ministers, especially in ecclesiastical affairs, but he never deserted them, even under pressure which to him, at heart a superstitious Catholic, must have been tremendous. It was not that he simply suffered them. To the last his power over every ministry was considerable, and was exercised freely, especially as regards the army and foreign affairs; but he never violated the Constitution, and never acted without his ministers' knowledge. As he told Gambetta, the last foreign statesman who saw him alive, had he been king of France Gambetta would have been his premier, and would have been supported. The origin of his loyalty was, in part at least, his utter fearlessness, which rescued him from that suspiciousness alike of the people and of personages which besets kings, and in part the result of a feeling that he should be personally happier if all went wrong at last, and he was again the chamois-hunting prince of Piedmont; but he was loyal to the bone, and his loyalty built Italy. No man less trusted, however superior in personal character or in intellectual powers, could have excited the same devotion, or received such adhesion from the determined, suspicious republicans whom Italy, in her long years of suffering, had bred. Mazzini never accepted him, but the Mazzinians ceased to plot. In the land of the dagger he was safer from attempts on his life than Queen Victoria in England, and the grief of his whole people at his death shows at once the confidence he had attracted and their keen political sense, which saw that