A great king--
what better? But it is ill that a throne be sat on by one whose legs
dangle uncertainly towards the dai"s, and ill that a crown settle down
over the tip of the nose. And the very fact that for quite inadequate
kings men's hands do leap to the salute, instinctively, does but make
us, on reflection, the more conscious of the whole absurdity. Even
than a great man on a throne we can, when we reflect, imagine
something--ah, not something better perhaps, but something more remote
from absurdity. Let us say that Umberto's father was great, as well as
extraordinary. He was accounted great enough to be the incarnation of
a great idea. `United Italy'--oh yes, a great idea, a charming idea:
in the 'sixties I should have been all for it. But how shall I or any
other impartial person write odes to the reality? What people in all
this exquisite peninsula are to-day the happier for the things done by
and through Vittorio Emmanuele Liberator?
The question is not merely rhetorical. There is the large class of
politicians, who would have had no scope in the old days. And there
are the many men who in other days would have been fishing or
ploughing, but now strut in this and that official uniform. There
passes between me and the sea, as I write--how opportunely people do
pass here!--a little man with a peaked cap and light blue breeches and
a sword.
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