forms; and he had likewise the eloquence of character; that is, he had the singular power, which not half a dozen men in a generation possess, of imparting to a large audience the exact copy of the feelings, the exact impress of the determination, with which they are themselves possessed. On a matter of figures, "Pitt said so," was enough; on a question of legislative improvement, an apathetic Parliament caught some interest from his example; in the deepest moments of national despair, an anxious nation could show some remains of their characteristic courage, from his bold audacity, and unwearied, inflexible, and augmenting determination.

No man could have achieved this without a sanguine temperament, and accordingly good observers pronounced Mr. Pitt the most sanguine man they had ever known. In no stage of national despondency, in no epoch of national despair, was his capacity of hope, one of the important capacities for great men in anxious affairs, ever shaken. At the crisis of his early life, Lord Temple's resignation, which seemed the last possible addition to the coalition of difficulties under which he was labouring, is said to have deprived him of sleep; but nothing else ever did so after his power attained its maturity, and while his body retained its strength.

Over the House of Commons, too, his anxious love of detail had an influence which will not surprise those who know how sensitive that critical assembly is to every sort of genuineness, and how keenly watchful it is for every kind of falsity. The labour bestowed on his reform of the Customs Acts, on his Indian measures, on his financial proposals from year to year, is matter of history; no one can look with an instructed eye at these measures without instantly being conscious of it. In addition to his other great powers, Mr. Pitt added the rare one of an intense power of work, in an age when that power was rarer than it is now, and in a Parliament where the element of dandies and idlers was far more dominant than it has since become.

Nor would this enumeration of Pitt's great parliamentary qualities be complete; it would want, perhaps, the most striking and obvious characteristic if we omitted to mention Pitt's well-managed shyness and his surpassing pride.

In all descriptions of Pitt's appearance in the House of Commons, a certain aloofness fills an odd space. He is a "thing apart," different somehow from other members. Fox was the exact opposite. He was a good fellow; he rolled into the House fat, good-humoured, and popular. Pitt was spare, dignified, and reserved. When he entered the House, he walked to the place of the Premier, without looking to the right or to

the left, and he sat at the same place. He was ready to discuss important business with all proper persons, upon all necessary occasions; but he was not ready to discuss business unnecessarily with any one, nor did he discuss any thing but business with any, save a very few intimate friends, with whom his reserve at once vanished, and his wit and humour at once expanded, and his genuine interest in all really great subjects was at once displayed. In a popular assembly this sort of reserve rightly manipulated is a power. It is analogous to the manner which the accomplished author of Eothen recommends in dealing with Orientals: "it excites terror and inspires respect." A recent book of memoirs illustrates it. During Addington's administration, a certain rather obscure "Mr. G." was made a privy-councillor, and the question was raised in Pitt's presence as to the mode in which he could have obtained that honour. Some one said, "I suppose he was always talking to the Premier, and bothering him." Mr. Pitt quietly observed, "In my time I would much rather have made him a privy-councillor than have spoken to him.” It is easy to conceive the mental exhaustion which this well-managed reserve spared him, the number of trivial conversations which it economised, the number of imperfect ambitions which it quelled before they were uttered. An ordinary man could not of course make use of it. But Pitt at the earliest period imparted to the House of Commons the two most important convictions for a member in his position: he convinced them that he would not be the King's creature, and that he desired no pecuniary profit for himself. As he despised royal favour and despised real money, the House of Commons thought he might well despise them.

We have left ourselves no room to speak of Mr. Pitt's policy at the time of the French Revolution. It would require an essay of considerable length to do it substantial justice; and when Lord Stanhope has completed these volumes, we hope to have a more fitting opportunity. But we may observe that the crisis which that revolution presented to an English statesman was one rather for a great dictator than for a great administrator. The English people were at first in general pleased with the commencement of the French Revolution. "Anglomanie," it seemed, had been prevalent on the Continent; the English constitution it was hoped would be transplanted; the fundamental principles of the English Revolution it was, at any rate, hoped would be imitated. The essay of Burke by its arguments, the progress of events by an evident experience, proved that such would not be the history. What was to come was uncertain. There was no precedent on the English file;

the English people did not know what they ought to think; they were ready to submit to any one who would think for them. The only point upon which their opinion was decided was, that the French Revolution was very dangerous; that it had produced awful results in France; that it was no model for imitation for sober men in a sober country. They were ready to concede any thing to a statesman who allowed this, who acted on this, who embodied this in appropriate action.

Mr. Pitt saw little further than the rest of the nation; what the French Revolution was he did not understand; what forces it would develop he did not foresee; what sort of opposition it would require he did not apprehend. He was, indeed, on one point much in advance of his contemporaries. The instinct of uncultivated persons is always towards an intemperate interference with any thing of which they do not approve. A most worthy police-magistrate in our own time said that "he intended to put down suicide." The English people, in the very same spirit of uncultured benevolence, wished to "put down the French Revolution." They were irritated at its excesses; they were alarmed at its example; they conceived that such impiety should be punished for the past and prohibited for the future. Mr. Pitt's natural instinct, however, was certainly in an entirely opposite direction. He was by inclination and by temperament opposed to all war; he was very humane, and all war is inhuman; he was a great financier, and all war is opposed to well-regulated finance. He postponed a French war as long as he could; he consented to it with reluctance, and continued it from necessity.

Of the great powers which the sudden excitement of democratic revolutions would stimulate in a nation which seemed exhausted, Mr. Pitt knew no more than those who were around him. Burke said that, as a military power, France was "blotted from the map of Europe;" and though Pitt, with characteristic discretion, did not advance any sentiment which would be so extreme, or any phrase which would adhere so fixedly to every one's memory, it is undeniable that he did not anticipate the martial power which the new France, as by magic, displayed; that he fancied she would be an effete country; that he fancied he was making war with certain scanty vestiges of the ancien régime, instead of contending against the renewed, excited, and intensified energies of a united people. He did not know that, for temporary purposes, a revolutionary government was the most powerful of all governments; for it does not care for the future, and has the entire legacy of the past. He forgot that it was possible, that from a brief period of tumultuous disorder, there might issue

a military despotism more compact, more disciplined, and more overpowering than any which had preceded it or any which has followed it.

But, as we have said, the conclusion of a prolonged article is no place for discussing the precise nature of Mr. Pitt's antirevolutionary policy. As has been observed, he did not comprehend the Revolution in France; as Lord Macaulay has explained, with his habitual power, he over-rated the danger of a revolution in this country; he entirely over-estimated the power of the democratic assailants, and he entirely underestimated the force of the conservative, maintaining, restraining, and, if need were, reactionary, influence. He saw his enemy, but he did not see his allies. But it is not given to many men to conquer such difficulties; it is not given to the greatest of administrators to apprehend entirely new phenomena. A highly imaginative statesman, a man of great moments and great visions, a greater Lord Chatham, might have done so, but the educated sense and equable dexterity of Mr. Pitt failed. All which he could do he did. He burnt the memory of his own name into the Continental mind. After sixty years, the French people still half believe that it was the gold of Pitt which caused half their misfortunes; after half a century it is still certain that it was Pitt's indomitable spirit and Pitt's hopeful temper which was the soul of every Continental coalition, and the animating life of every antirevolutionary movement. He showed most distinctly how potent is the influence of a commanding character just when he most exhibited the characteristic contraction of even the best administrative intellect.

ART. X.-THE LATE COUNT CAVOUR.

The Times of Friday, June 7th, 1861.

SINCE our last issue the greatest of European statesmen has passed from the scene; and though the chronicle of current history is no part of our province, we should be wanting to our convictions did we fail to record our sense of the irreparable loss which freedom has sustained. Count Camillo Cavour, "maker" of Italy as he was so often styled, rendered to Europe a service, the effects of which may be felt long after his country has lost the memory of the sufferings he was the first successfully to relieve. Civilisation owes to him the first proof of the ines timable truth that it is as possible to "make" a constitutional monarchy as a republic or a despotism. The illusion which

for half a century has cramped all political thought and misdirected all political energy, the notion that a true constitution can only grow," only be developed like a coral rock by internal and spontaneous accretion, is finally disproved. Arising out of the failures of the National Assembly, that theory has done more to retard the progress of European freedom than the House of Romanoff or the République Rouge. It roused every king for a struggle to the death with movements which, as philosophers taught, could end only in republicanism. It sowed the seeds of a fatal distrust between the middle class anxious for order, and the people anxious only for ideas; and it urged the revolutionists of Europe to waste strength which might have secured freedom, in a vain endeavour to force on an irreparable conflict with the past. Human beings want to see the result of their efforts; and as constitutions could only "grow," the peoples sprang at the form of existence which seemed immediately attainable. The property-holders of Europe, at the same time, were decided against republicanism, and the very class who ought to have led the vanguard of the battle of freedom rallied round the most pitiless of its foes. The movements of 1831 and 1848 alike ended in an increased power bestowed by the middle classes on the thrones to save themselves and their property from, what they imagined to be, the road to anarchy. Count Cavour was the first to show practically that the ideologues were wrong, that it was not necessary either to wait for ages, or break with the past, in order to build on a basis absolutely new. No land could seem less "fitted" for a mixed government than Italy. For generations her people had had no experience of government save republicanism or tyranny, while the mutual dislike of her provinces appeared to render "strong government" the first necessity for national cohesion. On this unpromising soil, in ten years, Count Cavour built a great constitutional monarchy, strong for battle, and unswerving in the maintenance of order, yet free in its organisation, and rich in that boundless capacity for ultimate development which only a strong freedom has been as yet successful to obtain.

Count Camillo Cavour was born in 1810, the second son of a family who, though not rich, traced back their pedigree to men who had followed the Dukes of Maurienne, when the favour of Charlemagne first raised them from the mass. belonged strictly to that grade of the Italian nobles, the ancient proprietors of the soil, which from age to age has supplied Italy with some of the highest names on her endless roll of greatness. He was trained in the ordinary way, at the Military Academy of Turin, and took service temporarily with the Court; but some fortunate inheritances left him free to follow the bent of his own fancy. This directed him to study, and study of the