produced that wonderful, wandering, and almost omnipresent personality whose red shirt was to be a walking flag:  Garibaldi.  And many English Liberals sympathised with him and his extremists as against the peace.  Palmerston called it “the peace that passeth all understanding”:  but the profanity of that hilarious old heathen was nearer the mark than he knew:  there were really present some of those deep things which he did not understand.  To quarrel with the Pope, but to compromise with him, was an instinct with the Bonapartes; an instinct no Anglo-Saxon could be expected to understand.  They knew the truth; that Anti-Clericalism is not a Protestant movement, but a Catholic mood.  And after all the English Liberals could not get their own Government to risk what the French Government had risked; and Napoleon III. might well have retorted on Palmerston, his rival in international Liberalism, that half a war was better than no fighting.  Swinburne called Villafranca “The Halt before Rome,” and expressed a rhythmic impatience for the time when the world

  “Shall ring to the roar of the lion
  Proclaiming Republican Rome.”

But he might have remembered, after all, that it was not the British lion, that a British poet should have the right to say so imperiously, “Let him roar again.  Let him roar again.”

It is true that there was no clear call to England from Italy, as there certainly was from Denmark.  The great powers were not bound to help Italy to become a nation, as they were bound to support the unquestioned fact that Denmark was one.  Indeed the great Italian patriot was to experience both extremes of the English paradox, and, curiously enough, in connection with both the two national and anti-German causes.  For Italy he gained the support of the English, but not the support of England.  Not a few of our countrymen followed the red shirt; but not in the red coat.  And when he came to England, not to plead the cause of Italy but the cause of Denmark, the Italian found he was more popular with the English than any Englishman.  He made his way through a forest of salutations, which would willingly have turned itself into a forest of swords.  But those who kept the sword kept it sheathed.  For the ruling class the valour of the Italian hero, like the beauty of the Danish Princess, was a thing to be admired, that is enjoyed, like a novel—­or a newspaper.  Palmerston was the very type of Pacifism, because he was the very type of Jingoism.  In spirit as restless as Garibaldi, he was in practice as cautious as Cobden.  England had the most prudent aristocracy, but the most reckless democracy in the world.  It was, and is, the English contradiction, which has so much misrepresented us, especially to the Irish.  Our national captains were carpet knights; our knights errant were among the dismounted rabble.  When an Austrian general who had flogged women in the conquered provinces appeared in the London streets, some common