THE GRAVE OF SONNINO.
AMONG the rocky headlands of the Tuscan shore to the south of Leghorn stood an old watchtower to which the legend had become attached that in the Middle Ages a knight disappointed in love had taken refuge there, and the place was known as the Hermitage. In recent years another hermit acquired the tower, extended its crenelated walls, and added a big pavilion opening to the sea, in which was stored a great library of the works of all the masters of the mind. Here Sidney Sonnino, the thinker and dreamer, the silent man among a people with whom expression is instinctive and unrestrained, lived his own life, for the most part alone, whenever he could escape from the political arena in which half of his time was spent, with only a little less isolation. Very few, only one or two intimate friends —poets, philosophers and men of letters—penetrated into his Thebaid.
Those in England who only knew of Sidney Sonnino as the Foreign Minister of Italy during the Great War, as the restorer of Italian finance in the years 1893 to 1896, or as twice Prime Minister for a hundred days, who learned the reputation which he acquired at the recent Peace Congress of being uncompromising, tenacious, angular and at moments irritable, will not have under- stood how remarkable a character and how lovable a man to those who had the privilege of knowing him has just passed away.
In the volcanic rocks which bounded his hermitage a natural cavern opens towards the blue waters which he loved to contemplate. There it was his wish to be buried, and there, simply and without ceremony, his body was laid in the sarcophagus which he had prepared to receive it. It is said that when a friend once observed to him that the authorization which he had obtained to be buried in his own grounds was very exceptional he had replied, " It is the only privilege which the State has granted me in my life." The answer was characteristic of the man who walked alone and never sought for or accepted any of the privileges to which his position and great public services would have entitled him. There was a grandeur of simplicity, almost of austerity, in his life, and a certain Puritan rigidity, due no doubt to the training of a Welsh mother, which was in marked contrast with the exuberance of his countrymen. He held, for instance, that a statesman should hold no investments other than State securities, and, faithful to his opinion, sacrificed much of his private fortune. His energies he devoted to the service of his country, his intellect to study, and his affection to poetry and philosophy. In a land where all men are students of the national poet he was pre-eminent in all the lore of Dante, and the realization of the Italian ideal was the dream of his life. If his fellow negotiators at the Peace Congress at times grew impatient at the tenacity with which he clung to certain Adriatic aspirations, formulated when the struggle was only directed against the artificial Empire of the Hapsburgs, it was because they could not appreciate how vivid to him was the inspiration of an ideal which changed conditions could not affect. At any rate, he saw the vindication of his country's most essential claims, and he must have had the supreme satisfaction of being conscious how great a part he had played in 1915 in preparing the way for the final unity of Italy. He remains the chief outstanding figure in her last war of redemption, and if it was not without some bitterness of soul that, assailed by criticism both at home and abroad. he retired in 1919 from public life to the solitude of his hermitage, he has now been followed on his last journey through the solitary maremma to his resting-place in the cavern opening on the Tuscan sea by the silent homage of a nation which has realized that in him its most illustrious citizen
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