Progress is the great characteristic of the Sardinian state.

Leave it for five years; visit it again, and you behold improvement.

When you enter the kingdom and find, by the very skirts of its admirable roads, a raised footpath for the passengers and travellers from town to town, you become suddenly aware that you are in a land where close attention to the humbler classes is within the duties of a government.

As you pass on from the more purely Italian part of the population,--from the Genoese country into that of Piedmont,--the difference between a new people and an old, on which I have dwelt, becomes visible in the improved cultivation of the soil, the better habitations of the labourer, the neater aspect of the towns, the greater activity in the thoroughfares.

To the extraordinary virtues of the King, as King, justice is scarcely done, whether in England or abroad.
Certainly, despite his recent concessions, Charles Albert is not and cannot be at heart, much of a constitutional reformer; and his strong religious tendencies, which, perhaps unjustly, have procured him in philosophical quarters the character of a bigot, may link him more than his political, with the cause of the Father of his Church.