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plicity as that ever-fresh story of the Vicar of Wakefield . ¥ e extract the following morceaux as interesting in the topics they treat of , and also as exponent of the writer ' s style .

ITALIANS AT HOME . a Facts are stubborn things , Miss Davenne , and observation of facts will show you that amongst us there is scarcely an example of wives and daughters bearing the marks of the brutality of their husbands and fathers ! that drunkenness is a very rare thing , and so is crime ; that there are whole provinces —that of San Bemo is one—in which no murder has been committed within the

memory of man . Property is so divided , that the two extremes of great riches and great poverty are almost unknown , and so , fortunately , are most of the evils arising out of them , —beggary for instance . I am not speaking of the great towns of course , but of the country districts , in which nearly every man owns his little bit of land , which he cultivates as well as he can . The small proprietor , who has

time to spare , hires his services to the neighbour , who , possessing more land , requires more hands ; but both employer and employed deal and converse with each other on a footing of perfect equality . The hired labourer no more considers himself the inferior of his employer because he takes money from him , than the employer thinks himself the labourer ' s superior for paying it . " " You are describing a real Arcadia , " said laicy .

"I wish it were so , " continued Antonio , shaking his head ; " but there are deep shades to the picture . The baneful action of despotism makes itself felt here , as everywhere else in Italy . The state of utter ignorance in which the populations I am speaking of are left by a government systematically hostile to all sorts of instruction : the worship of the dead letter in lieu of the spirit that vivifies , in

which they are nursed and kept by their priests ; the habits of dissembling grievances , for which there is no possible redress , and which it would be dangerous to resent ;—all these deleterious influences combine to keep the standard of morality rather low . The man who would not for the world eat a morsel of meat on Friday , or miss hearing a mass on a saint ' s day , will not scruple to cheat his master of an hour ' s work , or to say the thing that is not , to obtain an abatement

in the rent he pays to his landlord . "

HOW TO TREAT PATKIOTS ,, " On the names of the prisoners being called over , one of them , Margherita ( a custom-house officer ) , rises to retract his former declaration , extorted , he says-, through physical and moral coercion , and suggested by the Judge Inquisitore himself . Another , Pittera ( a writing-master ) , declares , that when taken out of a criminate ( an underground cell , almost or wholly without light ) to be examined in the Castello ( dell' Uovo ) , he was , in consequence of constant privations and

repeated menaces , overcome by mental stupor . A third , Antonietti ( a customhouse agent ) , follows , saying that , when interrogated , he was so exhausted in mind and body he would willingly have signed his own sentence of death . If any wish to know more distinctly what kind of pressure it was that could thus unnerve and unman far from sensitive weakly persons , Pironto and many besides him , will tell us the particulars . Pironto , a late deputy and magistrate , relates having been in solitary confinement in a dungeon , where he had to lie on the naked

ground , amid every sort of vermin , for forty-two days . His hair and beard , by special orders , were shaved by a galley-slave . He then underwent an insidious examination from the commandant of the castle , who tried first threats , then wheedling promising him the royal clemency , to induce him to make revelations , i . e . turn king's evidence . De Simone , a perfumer , was threatened with two

hundred blows of sticks soaked in water , Paucitano ( a contract-builder , he of the explosive bottle ) was dragged to the Prefecture of Police by twenty Swiss guards , aix police-inspectors , and twelve sbirri , who beat him , spat on him , tore lus clothes , hair , and board . Ho was kept for two hours at the police-ofncc bound with wet ropes , then conducted to the castle , thrust down into a dark , damp criminalc , without even a handful of straw to lie on , and detained there for nine