Alexandria Gazette

THE GAZETTE.

WEDNESDAY MORNING, MAY 18, 1859.

THE MEN OF THE TIME

We condense the following sketches of some of the leading men in the impending struggle, from various sources:

Victor Emanuel II, King of Sardinia, which country bears almost the same relation to the pending European war that Turkey did to the Crimean, is one of the prominent actors in the great drama now being enacted on the Eastern hemisphere. The House of Savoy, of which he is the head, descends from the old Counts of Sardinia.

The latest news places General Mamora in command of the Sardinian army, ready to co-operate with Louis Napoleon against Austria at a moment's notice. General Mamora is an old and tried soldier. When the Crimean war broke out, and Sardinia joined the Western Powers against Russia, and the Sardinian contingent was raised, he was placed in command, went to the Crimea, and behaved in the noblest manner, making himself famous as one of the generals of Europe.

The Marquis D'Azeglio has figured in the quarrel very prominently. He is the Sardinian ambassador, and of one of the oldest families in Piedmont, and one of considerable distinction at the present time.

The firm stand taken by Count Cavour, the Sardinian prime minister, to compel the admission of the Sardinian Government to a representation in the proposed European Peace Congress, and to enforce a recognition of the importance of that Power among the great nations of Europe, has marked him as a prominent man in view of the impending war, and of the part in it which is necessarily assigned to him. He was born in Turin, August 10, 1810, and belongs to an ancient and wealthy family of Piedmont.

The name of Joseph Mary Garibaldi—he who now commands the ten thousand Italian volunteers in defence of Sardinia against Austria—is suggestive of liberty, and by many of his countrymen he is revered, almost as a Washington.

On Louis Napoleon—alternately the Prince the outcast, the fugitive, the prisoner, the pamphleteer, and the Emperor—the eyes of the world are now fixed, as upon an arbiter of the destinies of Europe.

Francois Certain Canrobert, Marshal of France, Senator, was born in the year 1809 and belongs to an honorable family of Bretagne.

Baraguay d'Hilliers, it is announced by the Niagara will command one of the divisions of the French army to co-operate with Sardinia, and is therefore of note in the present crisis. He was in 1849 military governor of Rome and commander-in-chief of the French army in Italy, though formerly he had been a French prisoner of war in Porchester castle, and at a time when no parole was granted to any prisoner, whatever might be his rank.

Count Jacques Louis Caesar Alexander Randon, Marshal of France, formerly Minister and Senator—now named as Major General on the Piedmontese frontier—was born at Grenoble on the 25th of March, 1795.

Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria, who has been so energetically preparing for war, in spite of his youth and inexperience, and of the Napoleon with whom he has to deal, in connection with the infuriated liberals of Italy, has undoubtedly been actuated by a determined ambition. He was born in August, 1830 and is consequently but nearly twenty-nine years of age. He is a son of the Archduke Francis Joseph. His titles, besides that of Emperor of Austria, are King of Hungary and Bohemia, King of Lombardy and Venice, Archduke of Austria, and other minor titles.