English physician, in
company with an Austrian surgeon, found him with lacerated skin, and the
vertebral bones uncovered. He was enduring at the same time so acute
pain from inflammation of the bowels, that he was unable, but by hints,
to express his misery. It was here that the atrocities of the Papal
Nuncio BEDINI were perpetrated,--the same man who was afterwards chased
from the soil of America by a storm of execration evoked against him by
the friends and countrymen of the victims who had been tortured and shot
during his sway in Bologna. In short, the acts of the Holy Office are
imitated and renewed; so that numbers, distracted and maddened by the
torments which they endure, avow offences which they never committed,
and name accomplices whom they never had; and the retractations of these
unhappy beings are of no avail to prevent new arrests. The Bolognese are
permitted to weep their complicated evils only in secret; to do so
openly would be charged as a crime.

The fiscal oppression is nearly as unbearable as the political and
social. The taxation, both as regards its amount and the mode of
enforcing it, is ruinous to the individual, and operates as a fatal
check to the progress of industry. The country is eaten up with foreign
soldiers. The great hotels in all the principal towns resemble casernes.
The reader may judge of my surprise on opening my bed-room door one
morning, to find that a couple of Croats had slept on the mat outside of
it all night. It might be a special mark of honour to myself; but I
rather think that they are accustomed to bivouac in the passages and
lobbies. The eternal drumming in the streets is enough to deafen one for
life. To the traveller it is sufficiently annoying; how much more so to
the Bolognese, who knows that that is music for which he must pay dear!
Since 1848, the aggregate of taxation between Leghorn and Ancona has
been increased about 40 per cent.; and the taxes are levied upon a
principle of arbitrary assessment which compels the rich to simulate
poverty, as in Turkey, lest they should be stripped of their last
farthing. In Bologna, the payments of the house and land tax, which used
to be made every two months, are now collected for the same sums every
seven weeks; and a per centage is added at the pleasure of the
Government, of which no one knows the amount till the collector calls
with his demand. In other towns an income-tax is levied upon trades and
professions, framed up