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