elf in the midst of a strange
medley of thieves, sharpers, guitar-players, artists' models, beggars,
_ciceroni_, and _ruffiani_. If you speak to them, you may be sure they
will kiss your Excellency's hand, and pick your Excellency's pocket. I
do not think a worse breed is to be found in any city in Europe, not
even in London. All these people _practise_ religion, without the
least believing in God. The police does not meddle much with them. To
be sure they are sent to prison now and then, but thanks to a
favourable word in the right quarter, or to the want of prison
accommodation, they are soon set at liberty. Even the honest workmen
their neighbours occasionally get into scrapes. They have made plenty
of money in the winter, and spent it all in the Carnival--as is the
common custom. Summer comes, the foreign visitors depart; no more work
and no more money. Moral training, which might sustain them, is wholly
wanting. The love of show, that peculiar disease of Rome, is their
bane. The wife, if she be pretty, sells herself, or the husband does
what he had better leave undone.

Judge them not too harshly. Remember, they have read nothing, they
have never been out of Rome; the example of ostentation is set them by
the Cardinals, of misconduct by the prelates, of venality by the
different functionaries, of squandering by the Finance Minister. And
above all, remember that care has been taken to root out from their
hearts, as if it were a destructive weed, that noble sentiment of
human dignity which is the principle of every virtue.

The blood which flows in Italian veins must be very generous, or so
notable a portion of the plebeians of Rome as the people of the
_Trastevere_, could never have preserved their manly virtues, as is
notoriously the case with them. I have met with men in this quarter of
the city, coarse, violent, sometimes ferocious, but really _men_; nice
as to their honour, to the extent of poniarding any one who is wanting
in respect to them. They are fully as ignorant as the people of the
Monti; they have learnt the same lessons, and witnessed the same
examples; they have the same improvidence, the same love of pleasure,
the same brutality in their passions; but they are incapable of
stooping, even to pick anything up.

A government worthy of the name would make something of this ignorant
force, first taming, and then directing it. The man who stabs his
fellow in a wineshop might prove a good soldier on a b