most
humdrum intentions in phraseology as flat and wearisome.

Now you will ask, perhaps, Is this a fair type of the present-day
habits--are the Italians of our time like those of Goldoni's? My reply
would be, that it would be difficult to imagine a people who have
changed less within a century. The same small topics, the same petty
interests engage them. They display the same ardent enthusiasm about
trifles, and the same thorough indifference to great things, as their
grandfathers; and they are marvellously like the dreary puppets that the
immortal dramatist has given us as their representatives.

It has been reproached to Sheridan, that no people in real life ever
displayed such brilliancy in conversation as the characters in the
'School for Scandal;' and tame as Goldoni reads, I verily believe his
dialogue is rather above the level of an Italian salon.

The great interests of Life, the game of politics, the contests and
reverses of party, literature in its various forms, and the sports of
the field, form topics which make the staple of our dinner-talk. Instead
of these the Italians have their one solitary theme--the lapses of their
neighbours, the scandals of the small world around them. Not that they
are uncharitable or malevolent; far from it. They discuss a frailty as a
board of physicians might a malady, and without the slightest thought of
imputing blame to "the patient." They have now and then a hard word for
an unfortunate husband, but even him they treat rather as one ignorant
of conventional usages and the ways of the polite world, than as a man
radically bad or cruel.

They have in their blood the old Greek sensitiveness to suffering,
and they dislike painful scenes and disastrous catastrophes; and
this sentiment they carry to extremes. Although they have the finest
representative of Othello--Salvini--at this moment in Europe, the
terrible scene of the murder of Desdemona is a shock that many would
shrink from witnessing. They will bear any strain on the imagination,
but their fine-strung nerves revolt against the terrible in action.
To this natural refinement is owing much of that peculiar softness of
manner and reluctance to disoblige which foreigners frequently mistake
for some especial desire to win their favour.

The idleness which would make an Englishman awkward sits gracefully on
the Italian. He knows how to "do nothing" with dignity. Be assured, if
Hercules had been of Anglo-Saxon blood, Ompha