selves, who had invoked their protection, | had hitherto nominally acknowledged the were forced to acknowledge their sway. sway, first of the eastern, afterwards of the Thus, in less than half a century, and French and German empire, had, in fact, about half a century before the peace of either been ruled by papal theocracy, or, Constance assured for the north of Italy the breaking into endless rebellions and feuds, free enjoyment of democratic institutions, had been plunged for whole ages into a the monarchical and feudal system was state of absolute anarchy. The papal powfounded in the south by the Normans-a er seemed to be more systematically settled basis of that edifice which has lasted until in Rome by Innocent III. in the days of our days-the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Frederic II.; but it was for more than three The efforts of the Lombard league, centuries warmly disputed, and more than crowned by the peace of Constance, se- once entirely shaken off; so difficult a task cured for all Italy the uninterrupted enjoy- it was then to teach the Italians the arts ment of her independence. The contest of servitude. was not essentially renewed till early in the From the epoch of the crowning of Alboin following century by Frederic II., grand- we have dated the first setting in of the midson of Barbarossa, and heir to the most dle ages in Italy. From the peace of Coneminent qualities of his predecessor. This stance we enter into the age of Italian liberyoung monarch, who united to the imperial ties. All the events that took place during dignity the crown of the Two Sicilies, de- that long night of six centuries seem to lead volving upon the house of Swabia after the to this happy result-Italy recalled into exextinction of the Norman line, was early istence. By this time the northern hive of the engaged in envenomed feuds against the holy see and the free states of northern Italy, which papal intrigues had enlisted in its cause. Divided as they were by their ancient factions of Guelphs and Ghibelines, the last of whom stood by the emperor, the Lombard league still proved too formidable an adversary for the imperial might. Harassed by the inveterate hatred of the popes, deserted by his barons and allies, disheartened by the rebellions of his children, not withstanding some signal victories, Frederic, routed by the Guelphs at Parma, and his son being taken prisoner at Bologna, was forced to give up the contest, and died overcome by his disasters. (A. D. 1250.) His sons, Conrad and Manfred, heirs to the throne of Naples and of Sicily, but not to the imperial crown, were successively overthrown by the popes, and with them the Ghibeline faction and the imperial influence lost for a long while their ascend ency. nations was exhausted; the Normans had been the last tribe wandering in search of a home; Europe was then divided nearly into the same states as it is in our days; and though armies and fleets were still busy in their works of destruction, each nation belonged to its country, and could no more be removed than the forests and mountains among which they had chosen their abode. The original marks of their different primitive descent can still be perceived, even after such a long lapse of years, and after so many vicissitudes, in the features and characters of the inhabitants of the several districts of the country, offering an infinite variety to the observer, seldom to be found in other countries. It has been generally remarked, as a subject of reproach, that the Italians are a degenerate race, unworthy of treading a soil that bred once the conquerors of the world. But the inhabitants of Italy have no need, if they have no right, to claim their descent During the wars against the second from the Romans of old. The name of Italy Frederic, the cities of Tuscany, and those and Italians, even in modern times, is too of the duchy of Spoleto and the Marches of beautiful for that people to envy any nobler Ancona, either joined the common league appellation. The annals of Milan, Florence, of the Lombards, or formed new alliances and Venice, give them arguments enough for between themselves; but, through the art-national pride. The names of Dante, of ful insinuations of the popes, the last were Columbus, of Galileo, which they possess in induced to place themselves under the im- common, have little to dread from a compamediate patronage of the holy see, and the rison with the fairest names of antiquity. first declared themselves, and were for a Unfortunately, even this modern appellation long time the best champions of the Guelph conveys a vague, indeterminate meaning. party, and of the rights of the church. Still, There exists no Italy except on the maps, whilst nations trembled, and monarchs and in the heart of a few believers; there cowered before the thunders of the Vati- is no people entitled to the appellation of can; notwithstanding the real or supposed Italians; and the subjects of the kings of donations of Constantine, Pepin, and Char- Sardinia or Sicily, or of any other of those lemagne, and the more substantial bequest petty states, are called so by foreigners only of the Countess Matilda,-notwithstanding by way of courtesy, as the title of lord is the talents and boundless ambition of Gre-given to the eldest sons of English peers, as gory VII. and the popularity of Alexander a designation, not of what they are, but of III., it was only by gradual usurpations that what they will be one day. The confines of the the popes dared to extend their influence ten or twelve divisions into which the country over the neighbouring states, and their is now dismembered, were laid only accordpower was still far from being thoroughly ing to the arbitrary rule of fortune, founded established even in Rome. This city, which on the right of marriages, alliances, and suc cessions, by which Italian lands were always cast into the scales of European diplomacy to balance accounts. But nature had drawn other lines of demarcation between the sons of Italy, in consequence of their different origin, and of the different career they have run, which might have perhaps been an obstacle to future union and concord, had not the arbitrary dealing of her conquerors so far violated those natural limits, that it is now no easy task to discover their traces. The population of the Vale of the Po, of all that vast tract that lies between the Alps and the Apennines down to the Adriatic Sea, the fairest as well as the richest part of the country, preserves eminent marks of its northern origin. This beautiful plain, fenced, as it were, by its two snowy ridges, smiling like a garden, spreading like an ocean, with a thousand rivers rushing from the hills, a thousand towns glittering on the plain, crowded with ten millions of human beings, blessed with a severer but a healthier climate, dividing the vaunt of being the best cultivated land in Europe, only with England and Holland, exhibits all the vigour and energy of an eternal youth. Since immemorial time, the field where all christian combats are fought, since three centuries the prey of all foreigners, it seems to derive from the inexhaustibleness of its soil the sources of exuberant vitality. The Lombards (by which appellation ought to be understood, not only the actual subjects of Austria, but all the people distinguished by kindred dialects, such as the Piedmontese, the inhabitants of Parma, Modena, Bologna, and Romagna, down to Ravenna and Rimini,) are to be distinguished among the sons of Italy by their fair hair and complexion, large serene eyes, tall and portly but seldom elegant forms, and by their sanguine temper, which is often turned into apathy in mature age. Living in a rich country, they are early addicted to epicurean tastes, and their comparative tardiness of mind, joined to their fondness for animal enjoyments, have won them from their southern brothers the appellation of Lombard wolves, or Baotians of Italy. But from the earliest ages they displayed the greatest talents in agriculture, commerce, and industry; and though they came late into such business, they perhaps still excel, in our days, in the useful as well as the fine arts, and in every branch of science and letters. The Lombards are a true, generous, and hospitable race; though perhaps slow and phlegmatic, plain and credulous, they participate in some degree in the best and worst qualities of their neighbours the Germans. But on their firmness and constancy lie the best hopes of the country; they are the stoutest hearts in days of battle; and the veterans are not all dead of those Lombard legions who less than thirty years ago used to drive Austrians and Hungarians before them, all over the continent. mixture. The Venetian aristocracy, the noblest of all aristocracies, hardened by the constant exertions demanded by their situation, inflamed by a sincere though perhaps selfish patriotism, displayed for a long time a valour worthy of a better fate. The dark and bloody policy which stained the last period of that ill-fated republic, has been, we think, too long exposed and execrated even to exaggeration, and it is full time that peace should be granted, at least, to the memory of Venice, since little more than her memory remains. Her native element, the sea, is now receding from her lagoons, like a faithless friend in the hour of adversity; and she lies down lifeless and mute, a spectre city, insensible of her rapid decay, dead almost to the fondest hopes and to the revengeful wrath universally cherished in the Italian bosoms, as if the sentence that laid her low were irrevocable, and the hour of Italian redemption, however soon it may strike, would always be too late for the revival of Venice. The Genoese, secure in the barrenness of their rocks, the descendants of the fierce Ligurians, escaped foreign mixture to a great extent, and preserved their hardy and thrifty habits through the Roman and all the following phases. Genoa, the queen of the Mediterranean, sitting on her hills like a wide amphitheatre of marble, crowned with her row of towering palaces, stretching her arms on her sea,-that bluest of seas,—in the attitude of sovereignty,-Genoa, like Venice, arising from liberty, survives her liberty; struck by the same blow by which Venice was undone, she preserves all the nerve of her cohesive activity. The Genoese, still acknowledged as the best sailors in the Mediterranean, the most uncontaminated race in Italy, sober, enduring, indefatigable, as if to scorn the assertion that activity and hardihood are incompatible with a soft, luxurious climate,are to be known, not only amidst the Italians, but among any other nation they mix with— even after several generations-for their sharp but keen features, their small black eyes, their short and agile stature, and their harsh and truly barbarous dialect. Joining a spirit of pomp and show to their sparing habits, and to their proverbial avarice, they have raised temples and palaces with more magnificence than taste, but they have warred against all difficulties of nature, and raised their gardens and villas on the crags of the Apennines, and on the sands of the sea. A race of rovers and adventurers, they settle in the four parts of the globe, as if their country be wherever is good; and yet no people are more fond or more proud of their native land, nowhere are national traditions and prejudices more inveterately cherished. But behind the shores of Genoa, and along the whole chain of the Apennines down to Abruzzo and Calabria, there lives a primitive race, distinguished by many names, in Venice, owing, as we have seen, its origin different districts, but still one and the same to the barbaric invasions, was, perhaps, the race, entirely unknown to all foreign visiters, only spot in all Italy pure from barbaric-perhaps that same rude population of the Aborigines that gave up the shores and the plains to civilisation, and retired to the crest of the mountains for the enjoyment of independence, and which, under no government, the weight of bondage can reach. Too poor for taxes, too undisciplined for military conscription, those mountaineers are left to be governed by themselves, or, at the best, by their priests. These are the men against whom all the power and policy, all the summary justice of Napoleon failed; from their numbers the ranks are supplied of those smugglers and banditti, whose exploits, disfigured by the exaggerations of romance, are still forming the delight of idle readers. Tuscany in all times, perhaps even before the Grecian era, the ruler of letters and arts, is now occupied by a soft, gentle, highly refined people, in whose slender and gracile frames, in whose elegant but effeminate features it would not be easy to recognise the successors of those fierce partisans who, after receiving liberty as a gift from their brothers of Lombardy, were so loose and violent in abusing it, but no less warm and intrepid and desperately obstinate before they consented to give it up. Traces of the antique The southern part of the peninsula, and Tuscan valour are to be found in Arezzo, the adjacent island of Sicily, were early setin Pistoia, and wherever, indeed, you rise tled by Dorian colonists, who gave the maritowards the Apennines; but the capital, time part of the country an indelible Grecian Florence the beautiful, the Athens of modern character. Magna Grecia had schools, Italy, she alone the mother of genius, who has games, poets, and philosophers, which rivalgiven birth to a greater number of eminent led those of the father land. The Romans men than all the rest of Italy put together, conquered, but did not demolish; they took Florence is now idly and voluptuously lying from the Greeks more than they gave. They in the lap of her green vale of Arno,like a never changed what was good with the hope beautiful pearl set in emerald," as if lulled of doing better. At the fall of the western by the murmur of her river, and by the fas- empire those Greek seaports remained, as cination of the smiles of her climate. Sink- we have seen, to the Greeks. The Saracens ing into a state of dejection, proportionate to never had long abode beyond the Strait of the excitement of the ages of the Strozzi, Messina, and the Normans were too few to worn out, undermined, enervated by a long print any durable trace on the national chapeace, and by the artful tyranny of their racter. Hence the character of the Neapoprinces, these people are scarcely aware that litans (as Botta observes) is essentially their silken ties have now been changed into Greek, and their levity and playfulness, their an iron chain. Gay and thoughtless, vain of taste for sophisms and specious arguments, their bygone greatness, of their polished lan- as well as their national dances and festivals, guage, of their wide-spread scholarship, of all is Greek among them. The calamities their nice taste, of their villas, of their churches and of themselves,-the Florentines are called, perhaps not unjustly, the French of Italy. not priest in Rome, or priestly in family, or connection, or servants of priest-the populace of the eternal city, the Transteverini display in their features, costume, and manners, and more in their sudden and often generous sallies of passion, the antique Roman air, such as may, with a better education, become one day the freemen of the capital of the redeemed country; for, notwithstanding the opinion of fatalists asserting that there are no two ages for the same country and city, the sound part of the Italian believers hope that exception has been and must be made for Rome; and, elated by juvenile enthusiasm, they run with their fancy to meet the dawn of the day when their ancient and natural metropolis shall be cleared of all the priestly crowd that soil its streets, and repeopled with the élite of active and robust Lombards, hardy Genoese, and fiery Sicilians,-when the halls of the Vatican shall throw open their doors to receive the representatives of the different states, to dictate the act of union and confederacy, and provide for the security and happiness of generations to come. of the feudal system, of the Austrian and Spanish yoke, by turns afflicted and quenched the liveliness of that unfortunate population, so that so large a part of the country never played a very conspicuous part in its annals. Rome, sitting in an unhealthy desert, a venerable corpse, a dissolute convent of prelates and cardinals, whose vast empire and The people of the capital and of the parainfluence have been reduced to those totter-dise of Campania, never very active or ing walls, the head of a church that has out- energetic, are now perhaps more destitute lived her age, the capital of a state in open of dignity and noble feelings than any rebellion,-Rome, like Tithonus of the fable, other race in Italy; while the provinces, has reached the last stage of decrepitude, under a stupid, improvident administration, without being permitted to die. Not only wallow in ignorance and misery, without the capital, but all the provinces south of the industry, without commerce, nay, without Apennines, the lands of the Sabini and Um. any intercourse with the civilized world. bri, have contracted that levitical spirit, by Yet it must not be forgotten that that is the which all talents and eminence are exclu- land of volcanoes and earthquakes,-that sively directed to the altar and its intrigues. we tread on the ashes of half-quenched Hence that tinge of Jesuitism that taints the fires, which can revive and glow with sudRoman character in the highest classes, paint-den ignition. What the Neapolitans want ed as it were in the lines of their countenance, in education and culture, they make up by in the sound of their accent. Save what is natural intelligence and discernment. What in other countries is the fruit of long expe- hospitality at home, or joined their hands rience and study, is there the result of sud-as brothers abroad in the hour of exile. den tits and starts. Thus in the late con- But are not even now, and since more than spiracies of their carbonari the lowest class-three centuries, Milan and Pavia, Pisa and es displayed a quickness of apprehension, Florence, Naples and Palermo, obeying the a prudence, an energy, which needed only same rule? Shall then brute force and to be better guided to arrive at the most oppression prevail over the feelings of men fortunate results; for it must be remarked better than the progress of civilisation and that, in the Roman and Neapolitan states, humanity-better than a hard-won expethe populace is physically and morally a better race than the nobler and higher classes, because those Transteverini and Lazzaroni are, what they look, the genuine stock of those Greeks and Romans who subdued and enlightened the world; while the nobility are the descendants of Normans and other strangers, who, transplanted into a softer climate, degenerated from their original vigour without being well acclimated to their adopted country. The islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, a desolation of swamps and morasses, with the malaria gaining ground over them, as the sands of the desert over the fertile shores of Barbary-without roads, without canals, with scarcely any sign of agriculture, and yet so smiling, so lovely, so spontaneously rich-will be one day returned, together with the Tuscan and Pontine marshes, into the hands of Italy, (whenever there shall be an Italy,) to be reconquered inch by inch from the plague to which the perversity of fortune and the negligence of men have abandoned them. The traces of the Moorish spirit, the noble and chivalrous, sober and melan. choly, but revengeful and passionate temper, which characterises the Spanish blood, remain easily distinguished in the dark olive complexion, in the pale, bilious tempers, in the guttural accent, of the islanders. More addicted to mental than to bodily exercise, fond of meditation and solitude, their passions acquire in depth what they lose in vehemence. Ambitious, vindictive, and fanatic, they pursue their schemes with unremitting perseverance, whether they meditate the deliverance of their country or the subjugation of the world. Placed in favourable circumstances, it is not very rare to find in Sicily a Procida, in Corsica a Napoleon. These different origins of the Italian races, and their physical and moral discordance of temper, are no longer, as we have said, an impediment to the hopes of future unity or confederacy, notwithstanding the contrary opinion emitted by foreign politicians, and even cherished by a few narrow-minded patriots; no more so than the same obstacle prevents now Welsh, Scotch, and English heterogeneous races from living at peace under the same commonwealth, in spite of their old bloody grudges and long-indulged antipathy. The Italians have long since recovered from their blind municipal jealousies; they have been all educated in a severe school of common misfortunes, and the sons of different races have exchanged sympathy and rience and a sense of common interests? Shall liberty fail where despotism succeeded ?-shall independence revive what a long bondage has quenched? Ah no! all their memories and hopes, the cultivation of the same language and literature, their common religion, and the all-absorbing influence of climate, have effaced all hostile prejudices in the heart of the Italians, and what remains of their original differences can have no worse consequences than to excite a generous emulation, and conspire, by the multifariousness of their different resources, to the speediest promotion of their national resurrection. "Through various streams”—to make use of our bard's fine comparison Nor-though unbidden may intrude And thou, sweet sister!-words are vain Soon shall thy task of love be o'er; In life's last sad decline, I mourned my lover's erring life- I little feared to see A trivial and delusive crowd Preferred to love and me. Untaught of God, unused to prayer, A victim from the subtle snare Of soul-destroying sin. Thou know'st the rest-oh, sister, shun Nor deem thou canst be loved by one Still o'er the wanderer watchful prove, Nor trust him with thy peace ;- THE MAID OF HONOUR. MISREPRESENTATION," BY THE AUTHOR OF 66 walls; and the churchyard, where children play and sheep feed-and where, amidst the mouldering grave-stones, relics may be found of those chivalrous days, whose shadowy recollection is so dear to every imaginative mind. And Bryanstoke has also its beer-shops, its public-houses, one of which calls itself an inn; and the usual variety of dwellings to be seen in country villages-a variety which ranges from the pauper's hovel to the white stone building close upon the road, where lives the mighty man of law. And there are also ducks and children, dogs and old women, pigs, politicians, and apothecaries. At no great distance from Bryanstoke, closely embowered in wood, stands the mansion of Home Tracey; a picturesque, though somewhat gloomy-looking place, built, in the days of good Queen Bess, by one Sir Lucas Hamilton, and still belonging to a descendant of that worthy alderman and hosier, for such had been Sir Lucas's dignity and station. Marmaduke Hamilton, the present occupier of Home Tracey, was a proud, ambitious man-proud of his family, proud of the alliances which connected him with many of the leading country people-proud of his talents, which he believed would one day place within his grasp those honours his ambitious spirit panted to enjoy—and he had also been proud of his ancestral residence; but, alas! alas! the blight of poverty had fallen on his family, and Home Tracey was no longer such as even he could remember it. His uncle had been extravagant-his grandfather profuse-his cousin careless; and when the demise of that cousin, without male heir, transferred the property to Marmaduke, he found the house dilapidated, the estate heavily burdened, and an entire deficiency of that most useful article of life-ready money. course he resolved to remedy the evil in the quickest, easiest manner; and ere very long, it was rumoured in the neighbourhood and village, that Marmaduke Hamilton, the representative of a long line of ancestors-the proud and supercilious Marmaduke Hamilton, was on the point of resorting to the same source whence the distinction of his family had originally sprung; he was about to enrich himself and improve his property by means of gold acquired in trade. And the report was true-six months after his succession to the estate, Mr. Hamilton married the only daughter of a merchant, who was universally considered immensely rich. Of The union proved scarcely happy. Marmaduke's offer had not been prompted by affection, and it was suspected that the SITUATED in a retired part of a remote indifference with which he had always recounty, there is little to distinguish the vil-garded Miss Farley, instead of diminishing, lage of Bryanstoke from other country villages. It has its squire, its rectory, snug, sheltered, comfortable; and close at hand, the old grey church, much too large for the congregation weekly assembling within the increased materially during their engagement. Indeed, at one period, that is to say, when the settlements were under conside. ration, he would gladly have put an end to the connection altogether, so greatly was he |