valueless. I have had access to a collection of these older writings,
formed with much care between the years 1850-1870, and some
authorities that were wanting, I found in the library of Sir James
Hudson, given by him to Count Giuseppe Martinengo Cesaresco after he
left the British legation at Turin.

There are, of course, many books in which the affairs of Italy figure
only incidentally, which ought to be consulted by anyone who wishes to
study the inner working of the Italian movement. Of such are Lord
Castlereagh's _Despatches and Correspondence_, and the autobiographies
of Prince Metternich and Count Beust.

Perhaps I have been helped in describing the events clearly, by the
fact that I am familiar with almost all the places where they
occurred, from the heights of Calatafimi to the unhappy rock of Lissa.
Wherever the language of the _Si_ sounds, we tread upon the history of
the Revolution that achieved what a great English orator once called,
'the noblest work ever undertaken by man.'

The supreme interest of the re-casting of Italy arises from the new
spectacle of a nation made one not by conquest but by consent. Above
and beyond the other causes that contributed to the conclusion must
always be reckoned the gathering of an emotional wave, only comparable
to the phenomena displayed by the mediæval religious revivals.
Sentiment, it is said, is what makes the real historical miracles. A
writer on Italian Liberation would be indeed misleading who failed to
take account of the passionate longing which stirred and swayed even
the most outwardly cold of those who took part in it, and nerved an
entire people to heroic effort.