Rome; and lastly, he had to satisfy and yet calm the impatience of Italy for the emancipation of Venetia. It would be hard to find a more instructive study for a lover of parliamentary oratory than the portions of his speech in which Count Cavour dealt with these four points. Good language and studied periods are but the shell of good speakers. The kernel consists in the choice which the orator makes when he says what he selects to say out of all he might say, and in the relation which he establishes between himself and his hearers with regard to the great topics of common interest. Count Cavour spoke so as to make his speech the key of Italian difficulties and the programme of Italian policy.

It required very delicate tact to adopt exactly the right tone towards Garibaldi. Count Cavour had to end his differences with the great general and overbear his opposition by a decisive parliamentary majority. At the same time, Garibaldi is the hero of Italy, and due homage had to be paid to his virtues and talents. The orator first took care to make his own position sure. He appealed to a very willing audience when he assumed it as indisputable that the King could only accept the annexation of Southern Italy if it was made unconditionally. Bertani had explained that what the opponents of Cavour in the councils of Garibaldi had aimed at was not the creation of Southern Italy into a Republican State, but annexation to Northern Italy on special terms. So large a portion of Count Cavour's hearers came from provinces which had annexed themselves unconditionally, that he was saved from the necessity of arguing an irritating question; and he could be sure that a general assent would follow the proposition that what had been just for Tuscany and Romagna was just for Naples and Sicily. Thus the whole question of the terms which Southern Italy should ask was got rid of at once; for the vote of the Parliament must be treated as final, unless Italy was to present the spectacle of a house

divided against itself; and if discussion was avoided, the Parliament would naturally vote for unconditional annexation. Thus there seemed to be no point of real importance at issue between the speaker and Garibaldi, and it was easy for the former to throw the blame on the evil advisers of the latter, and appeal to the well-known loyalty of Garibaldi not to prolong a difficulty which would weaken the position of his Sovereign. It is not improbable that Garibaldi was rather distracted and wearied by the contest of rival factions at Naples, than seriously influenced by Mazzini and his adherents. But at any rate, either a study of Cavour's speech or his own good sense has carried him in the right road lately, and he has submitted himself entirely to the will of Victor Emmanuel, with whose arrival at Naples his own tenure of power naturally terminates.

No part of this great speech deserves so much admiration as that in which the speaker touches on the possibility of further concessions of territory being demanded by France. Unhappily, Cavour had protested, as solemnly as a man can protest, before the cession of Savoy and Nice, that the cession should not be made. He felt, therefore, that the most fervent assurances of resistance to future demands would be received with silent but significant marks of derisive scepticism. There was only one method of comforting and persuading his hearers. It was to defy France. It was to appeal to the vanity of his hearers, and make them think that if they did as he bid, no concessions could be asked of them. There was something stirring and reassuring in the novel thought that the Italy for the creation of which they were asked to vote would be too strong to be spoiled. It is true that the more a nation is made to believe in itself, the stronger it is; and therefore this bold speaking was not mere empty declamation. But it is obvious that its great value lay in its temporary oratorical effect. A nation of twenty millions may not be easy to rob,

1860.]

but in this case it is the supposed robber who determines whether Italy shall be a nation of twenty millions.

The transition to the topic of Rome enabled Count Cavour to apply a little salve to French vanity, in case it should have been wounded by this defiance. It is really so obvious that the Italians must wait for Rome until the French give it them, that it was unnecessary to explain why the strictest amity with France must be preserved by the nation which is dependent on France for the possession of its future capital. The declaration that Rome is to be the capital of the Italian kingdom answered two purposes. It served to fix in the minds of all men the belief that the sovereignty of the Pope, even within its narrowest limits, is a thing virtually of the past. Rome no longer belongs to its bishop; but to its king. And then the announcement that Rome was to be the seat of government tended to heal the jealousies which the transformation of their once royal and ducal capitals into the large towns of a great kingdom must naturally create in the breasts of the Neapolitans, the Florentines, and the Milanese. The difficulty of really governing free Italy from Rome would be immense until the purely ecclesiastical character imposed on the city of the popes by centuries of uniform customs and traditions had passed away, and that is a work that time alone can effect. It is better that Italian freedom should be a little older and stronger before it is exposed to the danger of having the overpowering ecclesiastical influences of Rome brought to bear on its central administration. But the belief that Rome is hereafter to be the capital of Italy does unmixed good at present. It makes all the other towns of Italy equal among themselves, and this removes a great cause of division, and it keeps up a lively feeling of opposition to the ecclesiastics who must be thoroughly beaten before this belief can be realized.

The language used by Count

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Cavour regarding Venetia was so exceedingly explicit, that Austria might easily have made it a cause of war, if aggressive warfare had been her present object. The only reason why the Austrians were not to be attacked in Venetia, was because it was unwise. Of course Count Cavour could not say that it was unwise because the Italians would probably get well beaten if they ventured on such an unequal struggle, but he drew the attention of his hearers to the attitude of the Great Powers of Europe, and showed that the public opinion of Europe would not sanction Italy in renewing the war at present. He thus rested his case on an argument the force and truth of which no one could deny, and at the same time he instilled the conviction that the times and seasons of great European questions must be left to statesmen like himself, and not to mere warriors like Garibaldi. Some hopes must however be held out, and he showed on what ground hopes for the emancipation of Venetia could reasonably be based. The Emperor of Austria, in spite of the good intentions for which Count Cavour gave him credit, is daily obliged to govern Venetia with augmented severity, and the pressure will necessarily increase as the attraction of a larger Italy in possession of freedom acts on the Venetians. This will stir the sympathy of France, of England, and of all that is free in Germany, and thus public opinion will force Austria to hand over Venetia to Italy.

The King of Naples had been made the subject of all kinds of wild stories, and it was doubted whether he was at Trieste, Madrid, or Gaeta, when suddenly, on the Ist of October, his troops made a great move on the positions of Garibaldi, which very nearly restored him once more to a brief tenure of power in his capital. He may perhaps live to rejoice that he did not succeed, and that he will now depart from his kingdom without having given up Naples to pillage, and without having eclipsed the useless crime of shell

ing his subjects at Palermo. The battle of the Volturno was well and fiercely fought on both sides, and it had the happy effect at once of rendering the Royalists powerless, and of obliging Garibaldi to wait until Victor Emmanuel arrived to complete the liberation of the Two Sicilies. Victor Emmanuel has been exposed to some unfavourable criticism in England, because he delayed his entry into Naples until the voting of the people had given him a title to consider himself sovereign and owner, and the exking at Gaeta a pretender and intruder. It is true that universal suffrage is a farce, but as Victor Emmanuel was obliged, in deference to his French patron, to have recourse to it, decency required that he should not treat it as wholly nugatory. He now takes the field as elected king, and that is in its way a fair ground for chasing his rival out of the field. The excellent sense and spirit of the proclamation which he addressed to the people of Southern Italy give an ample assurance that he is in the hands of good advisers. It must be acknowledged, even by their bitterest enemies, that the Italians know how to draw up a State document, and this cannot be said of many nations. Nothing, for instance, could be worse than Lord John Russell's recent despatch to Sir James Hudson, on the relations of England and Italy. It was conceived in that vein of supercilious dogmatism, affected superiority, and constant wavering between English interests and English love of freedom, which mark the worst effusions of our worst diplomatists. Lord John Russell is a very good foreign minister, and has steered the country well through a critical time, but when he has to take paper and pen and express his feelings towards one of the minor allies of England, he is simply insufferable.

Nowhere is the Romish Church

behaving with dignity or composure in the hour of its trial. Dr. Cullen has made the Irish brigade ridiculous by getting up a mock ceremony of mourning over its victims, and he has issued another of those pungent manifestoes in which he freely damns all the world except a few of his most fanatical friends. At Rome itself, the poor old Pope has invested the last days of the Papal sovereignty with a tinge of the ludicrous that cannot fail to efface much of the pity which would otherwise accompany the falling fortune of a wellmeaning man. He is supposed to be a Sovereign, and is also supposed to have the special duty of directing the conduct and the consciences of Catholic Princes. Now that the crisis of his fate is come, now that he has to save his kingdom, to influence the policy of France, and to combine the remaining forces of ultramontanism, all that he can think of as a last resource is to go and shut himself in the Catacombs and invite the approach of a consolatory martyrdom. He is not, however, allowed to do this, and is made the subject of a fierce contest between his two chief advisers, one of whom wants to carry him off to Belgium or Spain, and the other wishes him to remain in quiet enjoyment of the security and comfort assured to him as long as he is the passive tool of France. Antonelli, who advocates the latter policy, has triumphed for the moment, but it is probable that if the issue of the Warsaw conference disappoints the Pope, the struggle will be renewed. That this conference can really alter the position of the Pope is hard to believe. Unless his friends will fight for him, they are no use to him, and as France has just declared that Austrian intervention in Italy means a new war with France, it is probable that the conference will end in resolutions of a purely defensive nature.

A

LMOST every man is what, if he were a horse, would be called a screw. Almost every man is unsound. Indeed, my reader, I might well say even more than this. It would be no more than truth, to say that there does not breathe any human being who could satisfactorily pass a thorough examination of his physical and moral nature by a competent inspector.

I do not here enter on the etymological question, why an unsound horse is called a screw. Let that be discussed by abler hands. Possibly the phrase set out at length originally ran, that an unsound horse was an animal in whose constitution there was a screw loose. And the jarring effect produced upon any machine by looseness on the part of a screw which ought to be tight, is well known to thoughtful and experienced minds. By a process of gradual abbreviation, the phrase indicated passed into the simpler statement, that the unsound steed was himself a screw. By a bold transition, by a subtle intellectual process, the thing supposed to be wrong in the animal's physical system was taken to mean the animal in whose physical system the thing was wrong. Or, it is conceivable that the use of the word screw implied that the animal, possibly in early youth, had got some unlucky twist or wrench, which permanently damaged its bodily nature, or warped its moral development. A tendon perhaps received a tug

VOL. LXII. NO. CCCLXXII.

which it never quite got over. A joint was suddenly turned in a direction in which Nature had not contemplated its ever turning and the joint never played quite smoothly and sweetly again. In this sense, we should discern in the use of the word screw, something analogous to the expressive Scotticism, which says of a perverse and impracticable man, that he is a thrawn person; that is, a person who has got a thraw or twist; or rather, a person the machinery of whose mind works as machinery might be conceived to work which had got a thraw or twist. The reflective reader will easily discern that a complex piece of machinery, by receiving an unlucky twist, even a slight twist, would be put into a state in which it would not go sweetly, or would not go at all.

After this excursus, which I regard as not unworthy the attention of the eminent Dean of Westminster, who has for long been, through his admirable works, my guide and philosopher in all matters relating to the study of words, I recur to the grand principle laid down at the beginning of the present dissertation, and say deliberately, that ALMOST EVERY MAN THAT LIVES, IS WHAT, IF HE WERE A HORSE, WOULD BE CALLED A SCREW. Almost every man is unsound. Every man (to use the language of a veterinary surgeon) has in him the seeds of unsoundness. You could not honestly give a warranty with almost any mortal. 3 A

Alas! my brother; in the highest and most solemn of all respects, if soundness ascribed to a creature implies that it is what it ought to be, who shall venture to warrant any man sound!

In

I do not mean to make my readers uncomfortable, by suggesting that every man is physically unsound: I speak of intellectual and moral unsoundness. You know, the most important thing about a horse is his body; and accordingly when we speak of a horse's soundness or unsoundness, we speak physically; we speak of his body. But the most important thing about a man is his mind; and so, when we say a man is sound or unsound, we are thinking of mental soundness or unsoundness. short, the man is mainly a soul; the horse is mainly and essentially a body. And though the moral qualities even of a horse are of great importance, such qualities as vice (which in a horse means malignity of temper), obstinacy, nervous shyness (which carried out into its practical result becomes shying); still the name of screw is chiefly suggestive of physical defects. Its main reference is to wind and limb. The soundness of a horse is to the philosophic and stable mind suggestive of good legs, shoulders, and hoofs; of uncongested lungs and free air-passages; of efficient eyes and entire freedom from staggers. It is the existence of something wrong in these matters which constitutes the unsound horse, or screw.

But though the great thing about rational and immortal man is the soul and though accordingly the most important soundness or unsoundness about him is that which has its seat THERE; still, let it be said that even as regards physical soundness there are few men whom a veterinary surgeon would pass, if they were horses. Most educated men are physically in very poor condition. And particularly the cleverest of our race, in whom intellect is most developed and cultivated, are for the most part in a very unsatisfactory state as regards bodily soundness. They rub

on they manage somehow to get through their work in life; but they never feel brisk or buoyant. They never know high health, with its attendant cheerfulness. It is a rare case to find such a combination of muscle and intellect as existed in Christopher North: the commoner type is the shambling Wordsworth, whom even his partial sister thought so mean-looking when she saw him walking with a handsome man. Let it be repeated, most civilized men are physically unsound. For one thing, most educated men are broken-winded. They could not trot a quarter of a mile without great distress. I have been amused, when in church I have heard a man beyond middle age singing very loud, and plainly proud of his volume of voice, to see how the last note of the line was cut short for want of wind. I say nothing of such grave signs of physical unsoundness as little pangs shooting about the heart, and little dizzinesses of the brain; these matters are too serious for this page. But it is certain that educated men, for the most part, have great portions of their muscular system hardly at all developed, through want of exercise. The legs of even hard brain-workers are generally exercised a good deal; for the constitutional exercise of such is usually walking. But in large towns such men give fair play to no other thews and sinews. More especially the arms of such men are very flabby. The muscle is soft, and slender. If the fore legs of a horse were like that, you could not ride him but at the risk of your neck.

Still, the great thing about man is the mind; and when I set out by declaring that almost every man is unsound, I was thinking of mental unsoundness. Most minds are unsound. No horse is accepted as sound in which the practised eye of the veterinarian can find some physical defect, something away from normal development and action. And if the same rule be applied to us, my readers; if every man is mentally a screw, in whose intellectual and moral development