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.

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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. The 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

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;

that the Assembly are not lawyers, still less diplomats; and that, come what may, speaking the truth can do no harm.

Then Cavour rose. His attitude was careless-almost slovenly. With the left hand buried deep down in his pocket, his right played nervously with a paper-knife, which he kept swinging to and fro. (Ah, me! what a treasured relic that paper-knife must be to some one now!) His sentences at first came slowly and hesitatingly; and, as they ended, he seemed to falter constantly, as though he was doubting what next to say. A8

he went on, however, you perceived that the order and sequence of those halting sentences was perfect; that the man was speaking, not because he had a speech to make, still less because it was a pleasure to him to speak, but because he had something that needed saying. Even if the speech itself had not an interest of its own, the last words of so great a man are worth recording. The reports of the Italian papers are, to our notion, very curt and meagre; but, comparing them with my own recollections, I think I can state confidently that Cavour spoke much as follows:

"Because one has the honour of re"presenting the government of one's

country before foreign powers, one is "no less a patriot for that. I am bound "to explain to you the motives which "direct my policy. I admit freely that "all who took part in the noble defence "of Venice have deserved well of their

country. The only question is, whe"ther we ought to recognise the grades "conferred by the provisional govern"ment of that city. If we admit the "principle for Venice, we must admit it "for all the other provisional govern"ments, including that of Rome. We "cannot act on one principle for Venice, "and on another for Rome.

I ask

everywhere; but, at present, I declare "explicitly that there is no need to "trouble ourselves about the diplo"matic side of the question.

"I call, therefore, on the Chambers "to vote my order of the day; which "requests the ministry to study the "question, but not to recognise the "grades indiscrimately."

When the Premier sat down there

was a loud murmur of assent rather than of applause. I suspect that, save under exceptional circumstances, Cavour's oratory was never likely to create much enthusiasm. There was too obvious an expression of the feeling that he spoke not to influence the decision of his audience, but because he thought it due to them and to himself to explain the reasons on which he called on them to follow his decision.

In strange contrast to Cavour's hesitating accents, the deep, sonorous, somewhat funereal, voice of Brofferio now resounded through the house. A tall, thin, sallow, bilious man, with that fatal flow of words, and that disinclination to the show of white linen which seem to me characteristic, all the world over, of the disappointed democrat! He spoke well, and, though pompously, with force. The occupants of the public tribune cheered from time to time the terminations of those well poised sentences; and the pointed, laboured sarcasms told with success. "If he was a "lawyer," so I remember a fragment of his speech ran, "he loved to defend a "just cause. Count Cavour had misre"presented the whole matter in dispute. "It was not a question of compensation, "but whether blood shed for the cause "of Italy should be refused a refuge on "Italian soil. It was all very well to "talk about Rome and Venice; but the "time was come not to talk but to act. "He was sent to represent the Italian "nation, and he would fulfil his duty."

In spite of Brofferio's sarcasms, he could obtain no notice from Cavour. The gallery might cheer; but the Minister sat silent, playing with his paperknife, and smiling with a smile that was almost contemptuous, as if long ago he had taken his assailant's measure and found him not worth combating. It was curious to see how Cavour's manner changed when Brofferio gave place to Bixio. The slight scornful smile was laid aside, and the Minister listened carefully to an adversary whom he seemed to think required listening to and answering. Bixio, in truth, spoke freely. He told him he himself had fought at Rome and been wounded

there; and, when he added that at Rome and Venice the Italians had been fighting in their own houses and for their own homes, it was not the gallery or the left alone that cheered his words. The speech of General Fanti, the war minister, in reply, was one of those which injure the cause they advocate. Strictly speaking, no doubt he was in the right; but, when he expatiated drily on the technical inconveniences of granting military pensions to men who had not served regularly, the feeling of the House was clearly not with him. Cavour was obviously aware of this; and, when Tecchio rose again and proposed, as a compromise, that pensions should only be given to those Venetian officers who had applied unsuccessfully for service in the Sardinian army during the great war of independence in 1859, the Premier accepted the proposal readily. And so, for the day the matter rested. The sittings are not long in the Italian Parliament; and by half-past five the debate was

over.

The next day, the last of Count Cavour's appearance, I was present at the opening of the sitting. This time I took my place in a private tribune, for which I had been given a ticket; but I do not know that I was better off than in the public gallery. No question of much interest was thought likely to come under discussion, and the House was not so full as the day before. I have fancied since, while thinking the matter over, that there was a slight change visible in Cavour's look and manner. He seems to me now, though I own the reflection is one I made afterwards, to have been somewhat nervous and restless. This I know, that he changed his seat several times from one part of the ministerial bench to another, and that more than once during the debate he left the house, as though, in that hot, sultry, storm-laden atmosphere, he needed fresher air.

The orders of the day comprised a good deal of dry matter; but, as happens sometimes in other Parliaments, almost all the sitting was occupied in a discussion about which nothing could be found in

the orders of the day.

When the president, Ratazzi, proceeded, as a matter of form, to propose Tecchio's amendment-agreed upon the night beforeto the house, Brofferio got up suddenly, and moved, as an amendment, that the words," and Roman" should be inserted after Venetian. He was too acute an orator not to make the most of Cavour's admission on the previous day, that the same principle must be adopted about Rome as about Venice. He dwelt bitterly upon the logical inconsistency of rewarding the defenders of the one and neglecting those of the other, compared the dictatorship of Mazzini at Rome to that of Manin at Venice, and wound up with a declamatory paragraph loaded with antithesis and alliteration, somewhat of this kind:-"If, then, "gentlemen, the circumstances of Rome "and Venice are alike; if the men "who fought on the shores of the "Adriatic and those who died on the "banks of the Tiber are great alike; if "the consequences are alike; if a like "justice urges us, and a like right com"mands us- -then why should we not "do an act of like justice?"

Tecchio's motion was put from the chair and carried unanimously; and then, when Brofferio's amendment was placed before the House, Cavour opposed it in these words :

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our standard, I do not think that we "ought to put ourselves forward to "meet those who fought beneath "another flag and have not even recog"nised our own. Many of them indeed "came to the monarchy, and said, 'We recognise you, we offer you our "services;' and all who so came were "accepted readily. An honourable "Gentleman calls out that all so came, "but I am not of his opinion-I "wonder indeed how such an opinion can be expressed, when but a few

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months ago a person with whom the "deputy I allude to is avowedly in "relations published a book in which "he declared that his flag was not our "flag. When, an expedition of volun"teers was raised in Tuscany, under the "command of an individual (Nicotera), "who, after he had accepted the stan"dard of Savoy, declared that he would "follow it no longer, we may respect

men who hold such opinions as these, "but for us they are opponents and "enemies.

"We accepted the motion of Signor 'Tecchio, because he declared that it "referred only to these officers who "offered their services to the govern"ment during the campaign of '59. "But did all the officers of the Roman Republic do this? This very Cernuschi, on whom Signor Brofferio passed "such an eulogium, never came near us, and preferred keeping a lucrative "appointment he has got at Paris. "Amongst the defenders of Rome there

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try, out of a sense of justice, resolved "to accept the amended motion. "the other hand, the proposal of Signor "Brofferio is not of the same character, "because it extends to all the officers "of the Roman Republic, and does not “ assume as a 'sine qua non' that they "must have offered their services to us

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are indeed many who gave in their “adhesion to the national cause; and, "if they took no part in the war, it was "from no want of good will on their part. On this account we are bound "to pay regard to them.

"It is difficult to lay down any exact