her under the shady cypress trees, and
the still, rich twilights of Ferrara?

Ferrara was the first town subject to the Pope I had entered; and I had
here an opportunity of marking the peculiar benefits which attend
infallible government. This city is only less wretched than Padua; and
the difference seems to lie rather in the more cheerful look of its
buildings, than in any superior wealth or comfort enjoyed by its people.
Its trade is equally ruined; it is even more empty of inhabitants; its
walls, of seven miles' circuit, enclose but a handful of men, and these
have a wasted and sickly look, owing to the unhealthy character of the
country around. The view from its ramparts reminded me of the prospect
from the walls of York. The plain is equally level; the soil is
naturally more rich; but the drainage and cultivation of the English
landscape are wanting. The town once enjoyed a flourishing trade in
hemp,--an article which found its way to our dockyards; but this branch
of traffic now scarcely exists. The native manufactures of Ferrara have
been ruined; and a feeble trade in corn is almost all that is left it.
How is this? Is its soil less fertile? Has its natural canal, the Po,
dried up? No; but the Government, afraid perhaps that its fields would
yield too plenteously, its artizans become too ingenious, and its
citizens too wealthy in foreign markets, has laid a heavy duty on its
exports, and on every article of home manufacture. Hence the desolate
Polesina without, and the extinct forges and empty workshops within, its
walls. A city whose manufactures were met with in all the markets of
Europe is now dependent for its own supply on the Swiss. The ruin of its
trade dates from its annexation to the Papal States. The decay of
intelligence has kept pace with that of trade. At the beginning of the
sixteenth century Ferrara was one of the lights of Europe: now I know
not that there is a single scholar in its university; and its library of
eighty thousand volumes and nine hundred manuscripts, among which are
the Greek palimpsests of Gregory Nazianzen and Chrysostom, and the
manuscripts of Ariosto and Tasso, is becoming, equally with Ariosto's
dust, which reposes in its halls, the prey of the worm.

I have to thank the papal police at Ponte Lagoscuro for the opportunity
of seeing Ferrara; for, with the bad taste which most travellers in
Italy display on this head, I had overlooked this town, and booked
myself right through