32 of society in the Neapolitan dominions, | posterity is too often deceived b and in some parts of the Ecclesiastical vague hyperboles of poets and State, more nearly resembled that which toricians, who mistake the splend existed in the great monarchies of Eu- a court for the happiness of a p rope. But the governments of Lom- Fortunately, John Villani has giv bardy and Tuscany, through all their an ample and precise account revolutions, preserved a different cha- state of Florence in the early p racter. A people, when assembled in a the fourteenth century. The re town, is far more formidable to its of the Republic amounted to three rulers than when dispersed over a wide dred thousand florins; a sum extent of country. The most arbitrary allowing for the depreciation of the Cæsars found it necessary to feed precious metals, was at least equi and divert the inhabitants of their un- to six hundred thousand pound wieldy capital at the expense of the ling; a larger sum than Englan The citizens of Madrid Ireland, two centuries ago, J provinces. have more than once besieged their annually to Elizabeth. The ma sovereign in his own palace, and ex-ture of wool alone employed tw The cloth annuall torted from him the most humiliating dred factories and thirty th concessions. The Sultans have often workmen. been compelled to propitiate the fu-duced sold, at an average, for rious rabble of Constantinople with the hundred thousand florins; a su head of an unpopular Vizier. From equal in exchangeable value the same cause there was a certain millions and a half of our tinge of democracy in the monarchies and aristocracies of Northern Italy. Four hundred thousand flori annually coined. Eighty bank ducted the commercial operatio of Florence only but of all The transactions of these es ments were sometimes of a ma which may surprise even the Two houses advanced poraries of the Barings and the childs. Thus liberty, partially indeed and transiently, revisited Italy; and with liberty came commerce and empire, science and taste, all the comforts and all the ornaments of life. The Crusades, from which the inhabitants of other countries gained nothing but relics and wounds, brought to the rising ward the Third of England commonwealths of the Adriatic and of three hundred thousand ma Tyrrhene seas a large increase of time when the mark containe wealth, dominion, and knowledge. The silver than fifty shillings of the moral and geographical position of day, and when the value of si those commonwealths enabled them to more than quadruple of what i profit alike by the barbarism of the The city and its environs con West and by the civilisation of the hundred and seventy thousa East. Italian ships covered every sea. bitants. In the various schoo Italian factories rose on every shore. ten thousand children were ta The tables of Italian moneychangers read; twelve hundred studie were set in every city. Manufactures metic; six hundred received a flourished. Banks were established. education. The progress of elegant 'The operations of the commercial machine were facilitated by many useful and of the fine arts was prop and beautiful inventions. We doubt to that of the public prosperity whether any country of Europe, our the despotic successors of A own excepted, have at the present time all the fields of the intellect reached so high a point of wealth and turned into arid wastes, still civilisation as some parts of Italy had out by formal boundaries, still attained four hundred years ago. His-the traces of old cultivation, torians rarely descend to those details ing neither flowers nor fruit. from which alone the real state of a luge of barbarism came. Hence away all the landmarks. It o coinmunity can be collected. he Neapolitan dominions, | posterity is too often deceived by the The progress of elegant literature all the signs of former till fertilised while it devasta it receded, the wilderness garden of God, rejoicing o laughing, clapping its har forth, in spontaneous abun thing brilliant, or fragrant ing. A new language, by simple sweetness and si had attained perfection. ever furnished more gorge tints to poetry; nor was a poet appeared who k employ them. Early in th century came forth the Di beyond comparison the g of imagination which h since the poems of Home lowing generation produc second Dante: but it wa distinguished by general in tivity. The study of the had never been wholly Italy. But Petrarch introd profound, liberal, and eleg ship, and communicated to men that enthusiasm for t the history, and the a Rome, which divided hi with a frigid mistress and Muse. Boccaccio turned tion to the more sublime models of Greece. From this time, the a learning and genius becan idolatry among the peop Kings and republics, c doges, vied with each oth ing and flattering Petrarch from rival states solicited of his instructions. Hi agitated the Court of Na people of Rome as much important political trans have done. To collect b tiques, to found professor tronise men of learning, b universal fashions among The spirit of literary re itself to that of commerci Every place to which t princes of Florence ex gigantic traffic, from the Tigris to the monasteries was ransacked for medal scripts. Architecture, p tian, the statues on which the young | during which the fields did no "Le donne, e i cavalier, gli affanni, e gli agi, In the Italian States, as in many natural bodies, untimely decrepitude was the penalty of precocious maturity. Their early greatness, and their early decline, are principally to be attributed to the same cause, the preponderance which the towns acquired in the political system. In a community of hunters or of shepherds, every man casily and necessarily becomes a soldier. His ordinary avocations are perfectly compatible with all the duties of military service. However remote may be the expedition on which he is bound, he finds it easy to transport with him the stock from which he derives his subsistence. The whole people is an army; the whole year a march. Such was the state of society which facilitated the gigantic conquests of Attila and Tamerlane. But a people which subsists by the cultivation of the earth is in a very different situation. The husbandman is bound to the soil on which he labours. A long campaign would be ruinous to him. Still his pursuits are such as give to his frame both the active and the passive strength necessary to a soldier. Nor do they, at least in the infancy of agricultural science, demand his uninterrupted attention. At particular times of the year he is almost wholly unemployed, and can, without injury to himself, afford the time necessary for a short expedition. Thus the legions of Rome were supplied during its earlier wars. The season But when commerce and m tures begin to flourish a great takes place. The sedentary h the desk and the loom render t tions and hardships of war ins able. The business of trad artisans requires their consta sence and attention. In such munity there is little superfluou but there is generally much fluous money. Some members society are, therefore, hired to the rest from a task inconsiste their habits and engagements. As The history of Greece is, in in many other respects, the bes mentary on the history of Italy. hundred years before the Christi the citizens of the republics rou Egean Sea formed perhaps the militia that ever existed. and refinement advanced, the underwent a gradual alteration. Ionian States were the first in commerce and the arts were cult and the first in which the ancie cipline decayed. Within eighty after the battle of Platæa, merc troops were every where plyin battles and sieges. In the time mosthenes, it was scarcely possi persuade or compel the Athenia enlist for foreign service. The la Lycurgus prohibited trade and I factures. The Spartans, therefore tinued to form a national force after their neighbours had beg hire soldiers. But their military declined with their singular in tions. In the second century t Christ, Greece contained only on tion of warriors, the savage highla of Ætolia, who were some genera behind their countrymen in civilisation | growing power of the cities, where it and intelligence. had not exterminated this order of When war becomes the trade of a separate class, the least dangerous course left to a government is to form that class into a standing army. It is scarcely possible, that men can pass their lives in the service of one state, without feeling some interest in its greatness. Its victories are their victorics. Its defeats are their defeats. The contract loses something of its mercantile character. The services of the soldier are considered as the effects of patriotic zeal, his pay as the tribute of national gratitude. To betray the power which employs him, to be even remiss in its service, are in his eyes the most atrocious and degrading of All the causes which produced these men, had completely changed their effects among the Greeks acted still habits. Here, therefore, the practice of more strongly on the modern Italians. employing mercenaries became uniInstead of a power like Sparta, in its versal, at a time when it was almost nature warlike, they had amongst them unknown in other countries. an ecclesiastical state, in its nature pacific. Where there are numerous slaves, every freeman is induced by the strongest motives to familiarise himself with the use of arms. The commonwealths of Italy did not, like those of Greece, swarm with thousands of these household enemies. Lastly, the mode in which military operations were conducted during the prosperous times of Italy was peculiarly unfavourable to the formation of an efficient militia. Men covered with iron from head to foot, armed with ponderous lances, and mounted on horses of the largest breed, were considered as composing the strength of an army. The infantry was regarded as comparatively worth- crimes. less, and was neglected till it became When the princes and commonreally so. These tactics maintained wealths of Italy began to use hired their ground for centuries in most parts troops, their wisest course would have of Europe. That foot soldiers could been to form separate military estab withstand the charge of heavy cavalry | lishments. was thought utterly impossible, till, towards the close of the fifteenth century, the rude mountaineers of Switzerland dissolved the spell, and astounded the most experienced generals by receiving the dreaded shock on an impenetrable forest of pikes. The use of the Grecian spear, the Roman sword, or the modern bayonet, might be acquired with comparative ease. But nothing short of the daily exercise of years could train the man at arms to support his ponderous panoply, and manage his unwieldy weapon. Throughout Europe this most important branch of war became a separate profession. Beyond the Alps, indeed, though a profession, it was not generally a trade. It was the duty and the amusement of a large class of country gentlemen. It was the service by which they held their lands, and the diversion by which, in the absence of mental resources, they beguiled their leisure. But in the Northern States of Italy, as we have already remarked, the Unhappily this was not done. The mercenary warriors of the Peninsula, instead of being attached to the service of different powers, were regarded as the common property of all. The connection between the state and its defenders was reduced to the most simple and naked traffic. The adventurer brought his horse, his weapons, his strength, and his experience, into the market. Whether the King of Naples or the Duke of Milan, the Pope or the Signory of Florence, struck the bargain, was to him a matter of perfect indifference. He was for the highest wages and the longest term. When the campaign for which he had contracted was finished, there was neither law nor punctilio to prevent him from instantly turning his arms against his late masters. The soldier was altogether disjoined from the citizen and from the subject. The natural consequences followed. Left to the conduct of men who neither loved those whom they defended, nor hated those whom they opposed, who 36 were often bound by stronger the army against which they than to the state which they who lost by the termination of th flict, and gained by its prolon war completely changed its cha Every man came into the field of impressed with the knowledge t a few days, he might be taking t of the power against which he wa employed, and fighting by the his enemies against his associates strongest interests and the str feelings concurred to mitigate th tility of those who had lately brethren in arms, and who migh be brethren in arms once more. common profession was a bond of not to be forgotten even when were engaged in the service o tending parties. Hence it wa operations, languid and indecisi yond any recorded in history, ma and counter-marches, pillaging e tions and blockades, bloodless c lations and equally bloodless co make up the military history of during the course of nearly two turies. Mighty armies fight from rise to sunset. A great victory is Thousands of prisoners are taken hardly a life is lost. A pitched seems to have been really less dang than an ordinary civil tumult. Courage was now no longer sary even to the military char Men grew old in camps, and acc the highest renown by their w achievements, without being ond quired to face serious danger. political consequences are too known. The richest and mos lightened part of the world wa undefended to the assaults of barbarous invader, to the brutal Switzerland, the insolence of F and the fierce rapacity of Ar The moral effects which followed this state of things were still remarkable. Among the rude nations whic beyond the Alps, valour was abso indispensable. Without it none be eminent; few could be s Cowardice was, therefore, nat considered as the foulest rep |