f
race. Some of these conditions exist among the nobility of other
countries, but not, I believe, to the same extent. In Germany, the
aristocratic body takes a certain uniform hue, so to speak, from the
army, in which it plays so important a part, and the patriarchal system
is broken up by the long absences from the ancestral home of the
soldier-sons. In France, the main divisions of republicans, monarchists,
and imperialists have absorbed and unified the ideas and principles of
large bodies of families into bodies politic. In England, the practice of
allowing younger sons to shift for themselves, and the division of the
whole aristocracy into two main political parties, destroy the
patriarchal spirit; while it must also be remembered, that at a period
when in Italy the hand of every house was against its neighbour, and the
struggles of Guelph and Ghibelline were but an excuse for the prosecution
of private feuds, England was engaged in great wars which enlisted vast
bodies of men under a common standard for a common principle. Whether
the principle involved chanced to be that of English domination in
France, or whether men flocked to the standards of the White Rose of York
or the Red Rose of Lancaster, was of little importance; the result was
the same,--the tendency of powerful families to maintain internecine
traditional feuds was stamped out, or rather was absorbed in the
maintenance of the perpetual feud between the great principles of Tory
and Whig--of the party for the absolute monarch, and the party for the
freedom of the people.

Be the causes what they may, the Roman nobility has many characteristics
peculiar to it and to no other aristocracy. It is cosmopolitan by its
foreign marriages, renewed in every generation; it is patriarchal and
feudal by its own unbroken traditions of family life; and it is only
essentially Roman by its speech and social customs. It has undergone
great vicissitudes during twenty years; but most of these features remain
in spite of new and larger parties, new and bitter political hatreds, new
ideas of domestic life, and new fashions in dress and cookery.

In considering an account of the life of Giovanni Saracinesca from the
time when, in 1865, he was thirty years of age, down to the present day,
it is therefore just that he should be judged with a knowledge of some of
these peculiarities of his class. He is not a Roman of the people like
Giovanni Cardegna, the great tenor, and few of