for a wrong; a very different class of men
to the peasantry of Kent and the bluff
yeomanry of Yorkshire. The Italian
contadini enter the army because they are
obliged to do so. Every strong and hearty
lad, whether he be peer or peasant, is liable
to be claimed by the conscription as soon
as he attains his nineteenth year, provided
he be not maimed, or below the average
height, or proved to be the only support
and comfort of a widowed mother. Of
course the peer is bought off from the rank
and file; he is enabled to enter the army
as an officer if he be so inclined, but once
the fine paid he is exempt from the
conscription, and the government must look
elsewhere for his substitute. The peasantry
are thus called into requisition twice over
—once for themselves, and once for their
fine-paying neighbours. But they reap
many advantages from their forced service
in the camp: they learn Italian; they
become civilised; they go back to their
native villages (at the age of twenty-five),
with an acquired taste for books and letter-
writing, and are looked upon as gentlemen
—perhaps as heroes—by their old associates.

A considerable number of the non-
readers in Italy are good story-tellers
and reciters of ballads, and some of them
make what is called poetry on their own
account. This is particularly the case in
the South and in some of the central
provinces, where education of a practical kind
has (until recently) been much neglected.
Where schools flourish, home-philosophy,
sometimes called mother-wit, is generally
found to be on the decline. Old women
lose their importance; old men look to
their sons and daughters, and not to the
priest, for instruction. No more peasants,
brooding over the old classics, make a
reputation as local poets; no more village
sybils thunder forth anathemas in blank
verse, or lull their children, or their
children's children, to sleep with cradle-
songs in seventy or eighty verses,
interspersed with Litanies and Ave Marias.
To find such customs now-a-days you must
go to secluded spots, far away trom the
track of the schoolmaster; to romantic
hills and valleys where the priest is still
supreme; to villages suspended from the
crags like eagles' nests, and supposed (but
not proved) to have been built at the
breaking up of the Roman empire by
feudal chiefs, or robbers, who were making
war on their sovereign. It would almost
appear as if poetry of a certain class cannot
exist in an enlightened age. Ivy looks
best on a ruin; ballads do not flourish in
an age of newspapers. Perhaps it is
because ballads, being in one sense an inferior
kind of newspaper, are driven out of the
market by the real article. Look at
education, what it is doing in Italy; how it
is breaking the soil (like a large steam
plough), and preparing the country for a
new harvest! But in removing the
rubbish and obstructions which beset its
path, it removes many beautiful things;
not alone the weeds of ignorance and
superstition, but the wild flowers of tradition
and poetry. And these are the sights
which one sees in Italy in this year of
grace: the lazzaroni of Naples swept away,
or forced to become honest members of
society; the gondoliers of Venice reformed,
and educated, and properly controlled by
the authorities; the brigands of Calabria
and the Roman States shot or imprisoned
as convicts; the pifferari and wandering
minstrels—poor peasants, with their wives
and families, who used to sing so prettily
at the wayside shrines and in front of the
pictures of the Virgin Mary—sent to the
reformatory or the workhouse. But it is
impossible not to regret some of the old
customs and traditions which are being
destroyed along with these errors and
abuses.

Tuscany and Lombardy, as well as Naples
and the Roman States, contain many of
the secluded spots above alluded to, "spots"
composed of villages, and even small towns,
where newspapers are unknown, books a
forbidden rarity, and candles (tallow, wax,
and composite) highly esteemed as articles
of religion. The peasantry of these places
are still in the sixteenth century. Every
man, woman, and child places his and her
conscience in the hands of the local priest.
Soul money, or a tax on dead people, is
levied, and paid with cheerfulness. Taxes
are raised on sin, indulgences (or permission
to sin) are bought and sold in secret,
and people are taught that the wages of
sin is not death, as stated in the Scriptures,
but absolution and eternal life. The
fact is the Italian peasantry are the great
bulwark of the Church of Rome. When
these fall off the pope may begin to
despair; but so long as these remain
faithful—that is to say, as long as they
remain ignorant and superstitious—there
will be no prospect of a change of tactics
on the part of the priesthood, either as
regards soul-money for the dead, or sin-
money for the living, or the worship of