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.