o be a failure. You may change the venue, if you will, from
London to Paris, to Vienna, or St. Petersburg, but the issue is always
the same; the very same interests are at work, and the same passions
exercised, by the self-same kind of people. If such be the rule among
the first-rate capitals of Europe, it is very far from being the case
in those smaller cities which belong to inferior States, and which, from
reasons of health, pleasure, or economy, are the resort of strangers
from different parts of the world. In these society is less disciplined,
social rank less defined; conflicting claims and rival nationalities
disturb the scene, and there is, so to say, a kind of struggle for
pre-eminence, which in better regulated communities is never witnessed.
If, as is unquestionably true, such places rarely present the
attractions of good society, they offer to the mere observer infinitely
more varied and amusing views of life than he would ever expect to see
elsewhere. As in the few days of a revolution, when the "barricades are
up," and all hurrying to the conflict, more of national character will
be exhibited than in half a century of tame obedience to the law; so
here are displayed, to the sun and the noonday, all those passions and
pretensions which rarely see the light in other places.

The great besetting sin of this social state is the taste for NOTORIETY.
Everything must contribute to this. Not alone wealth, splendor, rank,
and genius, but vice, in all its shapes and forms, must be notorious.
"Better be calumniated in all the moods and tenses than untalked of," is
the grand axiom. Do something that can be reported of you, good, if you
will, bad, if you must; but do it. If you be not rich enough to astonish
by the caprices of your wealth, do something by your wits, or even your
whiskers. The color of a man's gloves has sufficed to make his fortune.

Upon this strange ocean, which, if rarely storm-shaken, was never
perfectly tranquil, the Onslows were now launched, as well pleased as
people usually are who, from being of third or fourth-rate importance
in their own country, suddenly awake to the fact that they are
celebrities abroad.

The Mazzarini Palace had long been untenanted; its last occupant had
been one of the Borghese family, whose princely fortune was still unable
to maintain the splendor of a residence fitted only for royalty. To
learn, therefore, that a rich "milordo" had arrived there with the
intention