ivating a small patch of land. The farms, like those in Ireland, are
mere crofts. The proprietor, who lives in the city, provides not only
the land, but the implements and cattle also, and in return receives a
stipulated portion of the fruits. His share is often as high as a half,
never lower than a fourth. The farmer is a tenant-at-will most commonly,
but removals are rare; and sometimes, as in Ireland, the same lands
remain in the occupation of the same families for generations. Their
conical little hills, with their peasant villages a-top, are curiously
ribbed with a particoloured vegetation, each family cultivating their
couple of acres after their own fashion; while the plain is not
unfrequently abandoned to marshes, or ruins, or wild herbage. To dig
drains, to clear out the substructions, to re-open the ancient
water-courses, or to follow any improved system of cropping, is far
beyond the enterprise of the poor farmer. He has neither skill, nor
capital, nor savings. If nature takes the matter into her own hand,
well; if not, one bad harvest irretrievably lands him in famine. Thus,
with a soil and climate not excelled perhaps in the world, the
husbandman drags out his life in poverty, and is often on the very brink
of starvation. Whatever beauty and fertility that land still retains, it
owes to nature, not to man. Indeed, it is now only the skeleton of Italy
that exists, with here and there patches of its former covering,--nooks
of exquisite beauty, which strike one the more from the desolation that
surrounds them. But its cultivated portions are every year diminishing.
Its woods and olives are fast disappearing; and by and by the very
beasts of the field will be compelled to leave it, and the King of the
Seven Hills, could we conceive of his remaining behind, will be left to
reign in undisputed and unenvied supremacy over the storks and frogs,
and other animals, that breed and swarm in its marshes.

The commerce of Italy, too, is extinct. How can it be otherwise? Under
their terrible stagnation and death of mind, the Italians produce
nothing for export. In that country there are no factories, no mining
operations, no ship-building, no public works, no printing presses, no
tools of trade. In short, they create nothing but a few articles of
vertu; and even in those arts in which alone their genius is allowed to
exert itself, foreigners excel them. The best sculptors and painters at
Rome are Englishmen. And as regards