all the better, where they are not restricted by a court with its sentinels, or interrupted by the chiacchera of the boxes. Justice must be done to Beyle, M. de Stendhal, as he calls himself, the writer of the "Life of Rossini," who lived at this time in Italy, and who witnessed the first representations of all the operas, whose birth he relates, and whose story he tells. The book is redolent of Italy, and drags the reader, as it were, completely behind the scenes. It is singular that two French writers, Madame Sand and M. Beyle, should have given more vivid pictures of Italy than any Italian writer. I left Rome in a tremendous hurry. The courier brought word of an eruption of Vesuvius, and that was a representation which one might wait years to witness. But even the post could not do the one hundred and fifty iniles' journey in less than thirty hours, and when I arrived the mountain throes were over, and little more than the thick and sulphurous mist remained, that reeked from the sunk conflagration. The Bay of Naples, or rather its shores, was a foot thick of fine ashes; the lava torrents were still hot and not yet solid, and there was a remue-ménage of English hurrying to the mountain and from the mountain, which evinced the passion of the Saxon for an explosion. There were two British vessels in the anchorage beyond Portici; the very tars had taken up a position to behold the conflict of the ele ments. The symptoms on Naples of the moral eruption, which had signalized 1821 and 1822, were as vivid and painful as those which Vesuvius had left. The Austrians were everywhere. They garrisoned Capua, and were very particular about visitors and passports. They had their cannon in the squares of Naples, loaded with grape. The poor Neapolitan had offered no resistance whatever; but the Austrians remained not the less armed to the teeth, and fierce as their own Pandours. The Neapolitans were to be seen nowhere. Society was in holes and corners, and carried on by whispers. The English embassy was the only place where people congregrated to breathe and to talk freely. Old Ferdinand on his return from Verona had rentré dans ses droits. And the solemn silence with which he was received when he occupied the box at the San Carlo, was something that might chill a colder heart than his. There was great difference in 1822 between the liberal movements in Milan and those in Naples. In Lombardy and Piedmont the rising, or the conspiracy to rise, was the work of the noblesse. It was thus confined to the upper classes, who almost exclusively paid the penalty with their properties and freedom. In Naples it was the professional classes, the lawyers, officers, and even civil employés. All the well-todo-people beneath the noblesse had proclaimed the constitution, and Ferdinand had the best of all opportunities of founding a monarchy of the middle classes in his dominion, had he so minded it, or if the three gentlemen of Verona would have allowed it. In order to accomplish this, there must, however, be sincerity on one side and good sense on the other; and both were wanting on this occasion; as, indeed, on all occasions of trying so interesting an experiment. The fugitives from Milan were all of the nobler and wealthy classes, easily supported in exile by their friends at home; but the young Neapolitans implicated in the constitutional government were of the middle ranks, not wealthy enough to bear exile. They abided the storm, therefore, and the police crammed thousands into prison, still more remaining in semi-concealment, hiding with this friend and that. The Neapolitans have almost as great a horror as the French of quitting their dear metropolis. A prison within its walls seems preferable to a palace without. So that Poerio and the other constitutional chiefs coolly annulled the sbirri of Ferdinand in 1823, as they did of his son in 1848. Naples and Venice are the cities of Italy most prized and frequented by the English tourist. I have shed my anathemas against Venice, and I would shed no less severe a condemnation upon Naples. It is the least Italian of all cities, with the exception of two elements of Italianism, its climate and its lazzaroni. These certainly are unique; but the rest has neither characteristic nor worth. The French régime of Murat destroyed the noblesse, at least all that was left to destroy of it. What remains is a worthy appendage of the meanest, most ignorant, most mean, and debauched court in Europe. The French régime in destroying the noblesse, however, created a larger town middle class, and country middle class of small proprietors, who have the disadvantage of being little Italian, but who have, on the other hand, the best qualities of the French, a determination to be ruled or dominated by neither court, priesthood, nor aristocracy. They shook the three off in 1848, and all three have now got once more astride the backs of the Neapolitans. But they are most awkward and most ignorant riders, that it is utterly impossible they should be able to keep their seats; the first secousse or shake in Europe will send the authorities of Naples into the depths of its bay, and, we may add, that none will pity them. But no Englishman can be much interested in Neapolitan literature, or indeed in Neapolitan anything, save and except the clime. Their political ideas and discontent are French. So is the little cultivation they have got, and the education they glean independent of the priesthood. But Naples has no literature, no art, no educators, no school, no society, no nationality. That so large a population should be collected in the loveliest of the earth's cities, and with all the elements of property and ease, and make no intellectual or possible use of them :— this is truly a wonder. The government is bad, bad as government can well be. But other cities under a bad government have still produced men of intellect, and have cultivated even works of art and literature with success. The Milanese are more oppressed than the Neapolitans, whose tyranny is at least a Neapolitan one. But the Neapolitans are as inferior to their northern countrymen, as Athenian to Boeotian. There is, however, one quality which Northern and Southern Italians both possess, and rival each other in, whilst the central Italians are totally without it, and that is, culinary taste. The Romans have nothing to eat; the Tuscans are too stingy to eat what they have got. But the Milanese and the Neapolitans are fond of the table, cultivate cookery as an art, and set off their good things to the best advantage. Milan and Naples have the largest opera-houses of the Peninsula, both have an audience capable of appreciating the best works. Both, however, have the same fault, of delighting in the rare, and the odd, and the conceited, rather than the simply beautiful. Both affected to be far above admiring Rossini, neither could tolerate Mozart. The operatic favourites consisted of names never heard of since. Neapolitan women are not pretty. The peasant women are the ugliest in Italy, principally because they labour in the fields, which always deprives the female sex of any pretensions to beauty, especially in a southern clime. And thus the lower orders are universally ugly; beauty is rare at the same time amongst the upper ones, whether it is that the sight of beauty engenders beauty, and vice versa, or from some other cause. A brilliant exception to the ugliness of Naples, and the empty expression of the Neapolitan Bourbons, was the young Princess Maria Christina. It was impossible to behold a more lovely young woman. She was then the eldest princess, the Duchess of Berry having gone to France. The present King of Prussia, then Crown-Prince, was so struck with her, that his good father found it a difficult matter to tear the prince from Naples. And when a violent storm carried away the bridge of boats over the Garigliano, and compelled the royal cortège of Prussia to return to Naples, it was attributed by the prince to his great good luck, and by the public to an artifice of his passion, worthy of romance. Scandalous tongues were already busy with her. I did not believe one word of their infamy. It is enough to destroy chastity and honour, that indiscriminate negation of it, upon the slightest of grounds, for the most puerile of purposes. I could write a very long disquisition on the lower orders of Italian cities, so remarkable by their strong characteristics and extreme diversity. This, however, is not the place for more than a few remarks on a subject which would repay attention. Take Naples and Genoa, two Italian seaports, in pretty much the same clime, the lower orders of the population having almost identical means of earning a livelihood, that is, by conveying persons and goods from vessels to shore, acting as porters and so on. The Neapolitan lazzaroni is proverbially the laziest of men; the Genoese porter the most active. The one is all truth, the other all lies; the one all honesty and frugality, the other all roguishnesss and prodigality; for the lazzaroni spends what he gets forthwith. You might trust one with a weight of gold, the other not within reach of your pocket-handkerchief. The one marries, rears a family and cares for them; the other lives like a beast, and does not rise even to the level of domesticity. But Genoa and Venice have republican traditions, which have communicated to the lower orders many of the high qualities of the gentle. Naples has no tradition but that of tyranny, and its working class are as base as the hereditary slave. The worst political states that can befall a country, are those of a large republic or a small despotism. If the liberty and activity of a republic be not distributed through every limb, and their local life secured by minute and complete subdivisions, it is like the republics tried in France, a multitudinous and vulgar tyranny, degrading as it is galling. Absolute power, to be tolerable and profitable, should extend over large spaces and multitudes, at least whilst it legislates and reorganizes. I should have desired no better fate for Italy at the commencement of this century, than that which the greatest of its sons, Napoleon Buonaparte, might have given it, despotic unity of government, with the deletion of its local and foreign tyrannies, its priestly rule, and its corrupt courts. But, unfortunately, he treated his noble country as a mere cabbage-garden, to be cut into slices for the amusement of his puerile relatives, Murat and Beauharnois. Had he sent the Pope an order to endow Rome with a civil government, and cashiered the states of Venice and Genoa, to make them ports of an Italian kingdom, Italians might have pardoned him. Had Bonaparte done this for Italy, Italy would have loved him, would have given him soldiers and support, and in his day of misfortune would have formed him a fastness and a retreat, from which Europe could not have driven him, and which they would gladly have left him. Italy may be defended by small armies, France can only be defended by large bodies, as Napoleon himself too fully proved in 1814. At the moment in which I write the dissolvent elements are stronger in Italy than they have been for centuries. The Pope is flourishing, and more zealously patronized by France and Austria, than the See of Rome has, perhaps, ever been. Each petty tyrant, too, has now unlimited power. Education and expression of thought are more stifled than ever. And the only counteractive good promised for Italy, comes from the railroads, which must, in despite of all obstruction, and were it but for military objects, be opened soon from one end of the peninsula to the other. These new links are doing their work in Germany, and will, no doubt, level Apennines and Alps. But Italy, in 1852, would require a very different portraiture, philoso phy, spirit, and prognostication, from those offered and suggested by Italy in 1822. I returned by Genoa to Turin. Genoa was prosperous, especially its trading and middle classes, who were fast buying up the palaces of the nobility, and demanding but a liberal commercial policy, in order to become once more a great trading community. This, however, is impossible, if Austria and Tuscany unite to exclude. Piedmontese trade. This, in 1852, is now the case, and Genoa, of course, is relapsing into insignificance. How your petty Italian potentates delight in ruining each other, and with each other their common country. Turin I found in a false and affected frenzy of loyalty. The Duke of Carignan, since Charles Albert, had commenced his political career by betraying his associates, and turning penitent. All the courtly, professional, and other people at Turin were engaged in the same task. Turin did not present the scenes of anguish and misery which afflicted Milan and Naples, but its immunity from punishment rendered its pusillanimity more degrading. It was difficult to conceive, what has since turned out to be the case, that the Piedmontese would be the only staunch and sensible constitutional people in the peninsula. But their connection with France, its princes, politics, and literature, now became so intimate, that its very royalists learned constitutionalism; and Charles Albert was emboldened by the example of the Duke of Orleans, to resume, as king those liberal, views which he had been compelled to repudiate as prince. IN MEMORIA. EMBALM the venerated clay; Rear high the monumental stone; Give dust to dust with martial pomp; Victorious trophies laid. Assemble all your proudest host ; Stand, Prince and People, round the tomb, That gilds its solemn gloom. The sepulchre no shadow throws When the Illustrious pass from sight, Glory with living lustre glows The star is quenched in light. JULIA DAY. Cowes, Oct. 20, 1852. |