remain without danger to life? And this when
the most effectual means for welding together
in one homogeneous whole, the different peoples
of the Italian family will consist in the
concourse at the capital which the necessities of
representative government occasion and
promote; when the sole agency by which all that
is best in each of the widely differing races of
the peninsula can be selected and preserved,
and all that each has of bad can be diminished
and eradicated, will be the social mixing in the
capital arising from those necessities, and the
active propagandism of ideas and habits which
a society so constituted in the capital would
exercise in the remotest corners of the kingdom.

Either of the reasons above stated would
amply suffice for setting aside the mere poetical
claims of the great "nominis umbra," which has,
at all events in our own day, so balefully
overshadowed all that has stagnated and rotted
beneath its upas-tree shelter. But there are
others which will suggest themselves readily
to the readers of that picture of the Eternal
City above referred to, and which may be further
illustrated by contrasting them with the
characteristics of the Tuscan candidate for the
promotion.

In the days when every Italian city had an
independent life and social characteristics of its
own, each of the fair sisterhood was familiarly
known by some special epithet appropriated to
it, as compendiously descriptive ot its peculiar
charms and idiosyncrasy. Rome, as all the
world knows, was "the Eternal;"—Naples, "la
bella;" Genoa, "la superba;" Lucca, "la
industriosa;" Padua, "la dotta;" and Bologna,
"la grassa," &c. And Naples the beautiful,
Genoa the superb, Lucca the industrious, Padua
the learned, and Bologna the fat, were deemed,
not only by their own inhabitants but by the
general consent of Italy, to merit these special
distinctions. And Florence, in many respects
the noblest of them all, what was the peculiar
characteristic of fair Florence? "Firenze la
gentile" was the style and title accorded by
universal consent to the city which historians
have designated as the most republican of
republics; and the qualities expressed by the term
are readily recognised to be especially characteristic
of the "city of fair flowers and flower of
fair cities" by those who know her well. But
the complete sense of the word is not so readily
rendered by any one English adjective as in the
case of the epithets applied to other cities which
have been quoted. The reader will have seen at
once that the word "gentile" is etymologically
equivalent to our adjective genteel. But, apart
from the disagreeable vulgarity which the cant
use of this unlucky word has stamped it with,
"genteel" in its best day only partially
conveyed the ideas comprised in the Italian word
"gentile." In the mouth of an Italian the
idea expressed by it includes all the amenities
and agreeabilities, which result from a high state
of civilisation and social culture. It is of all
words that which most completely expresses
what is in truth the especial quality of Florence
and the Florentines, and never was epithet more
happily applied. The population of Florence
does manifest assuredly more than that of any
other city of Italy, perhaps more than that of
any city in the world, the results of long and
highly cultivated civilisation. Of course such a
statement will seem monstrous to Londoners
or Parisians; but I think that, even bearing
in mind all the triumphs of those rival centres of
the civilised world, what I have said may be
maintained. I have not said, be it observed, that
Florence is a more civilised capital than London,
or that a Florentine is a more civilised man.
than a Londoner. Guizot defines civilisation to
be progress;—not badly perhaps. And assuredly
Florence can lay no claim to rivalry with the
great centres of movement in that respect. But
she possesses a more universally diffused result
of former high civilisation. Her people are in a
more marked degree the product of a long ancestry
of highly civilised forefathers. The habits
and modes of feeling of the population supply a
curious confirmation of the truth of old Ovid's
dictum,

       Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
       Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.

To have well studied the liberal arts softens
the character, and prevents men from being
brutal;—prevents even their descendants for a
long time from becoming so;—for, though the
"faithful" study of art may be more a thing of
the past than of the present in Florence, it is
impossible not to recognise the humanising
effects on this people of a traditional as well as
organic love for, and appreciation of, the beautiful.
A Florentine, of whatsoever class, is never
brutal;—he is rarely vulgar. He is often insincere,
and not unfrequently dishonest; for princes
and priests have through many a generation
perseveringly and consistently striven to educate
him to falsehood and fraud. But he is in these
respects assuredly no worse than the populations
of other Italian cities; similar causes
have, in them also, been at work to produce
similar results. When these causes shall have been
removed entirely, as they have been in great
part removed already, the lapse of one generation
will suffice to efface the consequences of
their evil teaching. But the lapse of many
generations has not availed to destroy the
essentially social nature, the love of order, and the
respect for law, which have been the product of
those happier previous centuries when each
citizen had his part in the making of the laws he
was called on to obey.

The old civic nurture crops out remarkably
also in that special courteousness and good
breeding which has helped to gain for Florence
the epithet of "la gentile." It is not too much
to say, that when, after having been accustomed
for some time to the manners of the Tuscan
people, one is brought into contact with other
populations, whether Italian or on the northern
side of the Alps, the world seems suddenly to
have become full of angles and roughnesses.
The universal and rarely failing good humour of
the people of Florence contributes much also, it