EMMANUEL OF ITALY

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 143, 18 June 1923, Page 5

EMMANUEL OF ITALY

TRIUMPH OVER GREAT DIFFI-

CULTIES.

King.Victor Emmanuel 111. of Italy, who entertained the King and Queen of England at Rome the other day, is a wise, plain, _ unassuming, democratic monarch, who lives and conducts affairs more like the president of a republic than tho sovereign of a nation. He has had a hard fight to make his throne secure. Loyalty to their king was no tradition of the people of United Italy, states a writer in tho Sydney "Sun." and Victor Emmanuel was about as unlike the kingly figure that commands respect as one could possibly conceive. Studious, plain, lacking in charm, hunched and small to dwarflshness, so weak as a child that he had to be carried upetairs, he was not expected to attain to manhood But his brilliant and dashing father, disappointed in his son's physical deficiencies, set about by giving him health and ■ strength by kill-or-cure moans. He put Emmanuel under an English military tutor, who instituted a regime. of hard study, cold baths, an open-air life, and exercise. And the heir to the throne, instead of dying, became as enduring as a campaigning trooper.

His marriage, while still Prince of Naples, to the handsome Princess' Heleno of • Montenegro, sturdj' daughter of a

sturdy hill race, was carried through in face of the opposition of his family, and has turned out one of the ideal royal unions of the time.

King Emmanuel prefers the companionship of servants and men of affairs to that of pretty women and flattering courtiers. ■ The society of Rome—a pleasureloving society—consequently does not centre, round the Kalian court, which is the reverse of brilliant; and tho King entertains very little. But he is no recluse. He ie continually out and about, and his people see plenty of him.