stories to nurses, and to babies, of whatever age they may be, whether in or out of the nursery. The Italian is neither vindictive nor cruel; he is hasty and passionate. His temper, like his climate, habitually gay and serene, is sometimes agitated by black and tremendous storms, and these storms, though transient, often produce most lamentable catastrophes. An unexpected insult, a hasty word, occasions a quarrel; both parties lose their temper; daggers are drawn, and a mortal blow is given: the whole transaction is over so soon, that the by-standers have scarce time to notice, much less to prevent it*. The deed is considered, not as the effect of deliberate malice, but of an involuntary and irresistible impulse; and the perpetrator, generally repentant and horror-struck at his own madness, is pitied and allowed to fly to some forest or fastness. Such is the cruelty of the Italians, and such the assassination too common in some great towns, yet not near so common as has often been repre

* The author, with one of his young companions, happened to be present at a quarrel, which had nearly terminated in a very tragic manner. Walking early in the morning in the streets of Antium, he saw a man and a boy disputing; the man was middle aged and of a mild benevolent countenance, the boy stout and impudent: after some words, the man seized the boy by the collar, the boy struggled, and finding that to no purpose, had recourse to blows: the old man bore several strokes with tolerable patience, when, all on a sudden, his colour changed to a livid pale, his eyes sparkled, and every feature of his face became absolutely demoniac. He held the boy's throat with his left hand, took his knife out of his pocket with his right, and applied it to his teeth to open it; the boy seemed sensible of his fate, lost all power of resistance, and was sinking to the ground with fear. We immediately stepped in and seized the man's arm, we took the knife out of his hand, and rescued the boy: the man made no resistance, and seemed for some minutes totally insensible of what was passing.

ment.

sented. It is the effect, not of a sanguinary but of a fiery temper, was prevalent at all times in southern countries, and might be checked by the severity and activity of a good governBut of the two governments under which this atrocity is the most destructive, the one is too indulgent and the other too indolent; and while the papal magistrate forgives, and the Neapolitan neglects the criminal, they both eventually encourage and propagate the crime. Yet the remedy is easy and obvious. A prohibition, under the severest penalty, to carry arms of any description. This remedy has been applied with full success by the French, while masters of the south; and by the Austrians while in possession of the north of Italy.

But, in justice to the Italians, every impartial traveller must acknowledge, that actual murder or deliberate assassination is very uncommon among them; that they are very seldom prompted to it by jealousy, of which they are by no means so susceptible as some writers would persuade us, and scarcely ever tempted to it by that vile, hellish love of money, which in France and in England impels so many miscreants, after a cool calculation of possible profit, to imbrue their hands in the blood of their fellow creatures. Even robbers are rarely met with at present; like the ghosts that swim in the air during the darkness of the night, they are often talked of but never scen; and a traveller, excepting in times of invasion, war, or civic dissensions, may pass the Alps and the Apennines, and traverse the dreary Campagna, and the uninhabited Paludi, by day or by night, without alarm or molestation. I do not expect to hear the bloody scenes that stain the annals of Florence, Genoa, or Venice, quoted as proofs of national cruelty. Such scenes disgraced ancient Greece and

Rome, and stain the pages of Dutch and English, of Spanish and Portuguese history, and they have been renewed in the French Revolution, with a profusion of blood, a refinement in cruelty, and an enormity of guilt unparalleled in the records of the Universe. But these crimes belong, not to the nation, but to the species. The earth, under all its climates, has too often drunk the blood of man shed by his brother, and while it cries to heaven for vengeance, proves, in spite of philosophism, that man when left to the workings of his own corrupted heart, becomes the most cruel of savages, the foulest of monsters. We may conclude, that neither the history nor the manners of Italy present more frequent or more aggravated features of cruelty than those of any other nation; and that all accusations against them on this head, are the effusions of hasty prejudice and of superficial observation.

Thus, I have now reviewed, and, I conceive, refuted the principal charges against this celebrated people. The lesser imputations, though sung by poets, repeated by novellists, and copied again and again by ephemeral tourists, may be passed over in silent contempt, as unworthy the notice of the reader and the traveller. He who, from the knavery of the innkeepers, reasons against the honesty of a nation, or judges of its character from the accomplishments of a few wandering artists, may indeed imagine that Italy is peopled with rogues and swindlers, and produces nothing but dancers and buffoons, singers and fiddlers. But, upon the same ground he must conclude, that the French nation is entirely composed of cooks and hair-dressers, and that England herself, even England, the mother of heroes, of patriots, of statesmen, has fur

nished Europe with nothing more than grooms and jockies, cotton and woollen manufacturers.

What then, it will be asked, is the real character of the modern Italians? It will not, methinks, be difficult to ascertain it, when we consider the part which the modern Italians have acted in story, and compare it with the part which their ancestors performed. The latter were a bold and free people. Their love of liberty shewed itself in the various commonwealths that rose up in every part of Ausonia, and at length it settled and blazed for ages in the Roman Republic. The former have given the same proofs of the same spirit. They have covered the face of the same country with free States, and at length beheld, with a mixture of joy and jealousy, the grand Republic of Venice, the daughter and almost the rival of Rome, stand forward the bulwark and the glory of Italy. The ancient Romans, by their arms, founded the most extensive, the most flourishing, and the most splendid empire, that ages ever witnessed in their flight. The modern Italians, by their wisdom, have acquired a more permanent, and perhaps a more glorious dominion over the opinions of mankind, and still govern the world by their religion and their taste, by their arts and their sciences. To the ancient Italians, we owe the plainest, the noblest, the most majestic language ever spoken: to the modern, we are indebted for the softest and sweetest dialect, which human lips ever uttered. The ancient Romans raised the Pantheon; the modern erected the Vatican. The former boast of the age of Augustus, the latter glory in that of Leo. The former have given us Virgil, the latter Tasso. In which of these respects are the modern Italians unworthy of their ancestors?

Through the whole of their history we observe and applaud the same love of liberty, the same unbroken spirit, the same patriotism, the same perseverance, the same attachment to letters, the same detestation of barbarism and of barbarians; and in short, the same active, towering, and magnificent spirit, that so gloriously distinguished the Romans. How then can we presume to tax them with the feeble vices of a degraded and subjugated tribe? with ignorance, cowardice, and general degeneracy? The Italians, it is true, have never been able to unite the states of their own country, in order to give it all its force, and to enable it to exert all its energies, as the Romans did; still have they, like the Romans, succeeded in extending their conquests far and wide, and imposing a new yoke on half the nations of the world. But let it be remembered, that in the first as well as in the last of these projects, the Italians have been opposed not by their own countrymen only, but by the Germans, by the French, and by the Spaniards, no longer tribes of wandering, divided, undisciplined savages, but mighty monarchies, united each under one chief, and employing for the attainment of its object, the numbers of ancient times directed by the skill and by the experience of modern days. With such difficulties in opposition to their vast designs, we may be allowed to doubt whether the Romans themselves would have succeeded in the conquest even of Cisalpine Gaul, and still more, whether they could ever have extended their dominion one foot beyond the precincts of Italy.

From these observations I think, I may fairly be allowed to conclude, that a nation which has thus, during so many ages, continued to act so great and so glorious a part in the history of