Lord Malmesbury was so favourably impressed by Sardinia’s docility and so furious with the Austrian coup de tete that he became in those days quite ardently Italian, which he assured Massimo d’Azeglio was his natural state of mind; and such it may have been, since cabinet ministers are constantly employed in upholding, especially in foreign affairs, what they most dislike.  He hoped to stop the runaway Austrian steed by proposing mediation in lieu of a Congress; but the result was only to delay the outbreak of the war for a week, much to the disadvantage of the Austrians, as it gave the French time to arrive and the Piedmontese to flood the country by means of the canals of irrigation, thus preventing a dash at Turin, probably the best chance for Austria.  Baron von Kellersberg and his companion, during their brief visit, had done nothing but pity “this fine town so soon to be given over to the horrors of war.”  Their solicitude proved superfluous.

For the present the statesman’s task was ended.  He had procured for his country a favourable opportunity for entering upon an inevitable struggle.  When Napoleon said to Cavour on landing at Genoa, “Your plans are being realised,” he was unconsciously forestalling the verdict of posterity.  The reason that he was standing there was because Cavour had so willed it.  In spite of the Emperor’s fits of Italian sympathy and the various circumstances which impelled him towards helping Italy, he would not have taken the final resolution had not some one saved him the trouble by taking it for him.  As a French student of history has lately said, in 1859, as in 1849, there was a Hamlet in the case; but Paris, not Turin, was his abode.  Napoleon needed and perhaps desired to be precipitated.  Look at it how we may, it must be allowed that he was doing a very grave thing:  he was embarking on a war of no palpable necessity against the sentiment, as the Empress wrote to Count Arese, of his own country.  A stronger man than he might have hesitated.

The natural discernment of the Italian masses enlightened them as to the magnitude of Cavour’s part in the play, even in the hour when the interest seemed transferred to the battlefield, and when an emperor and a king moved among them as liberators.  At Milan, after the victory of Magenta had opened its gates, the most permanent enthusiasm gathered round the short, stout, undistinguished figure in plain clothes and spectacles—­the one decidedly prosaic appearance in the pomp of war and the glitter of royal state.  Victor Emmanuel said good-humouredly that when driving with his great subject, he felt just like the tenor who leads the prima donna forward to receive applause.