urning in stillness on its rocky seat;
That guiding star so oft the only one,
When those now glowing in the azure vault
Are dark and silent

Smollett's description of Genoa is decidedly more interesting. He
arrived at a moment specially propitious to so sardonic an observer,
for the Republic had fallen on evil times, having escaped from the
clutches of Austria in 1746 by means of a popular riot, during which
the aristocracy considerately looked the other way, only to fall into
an even more embarrassed and unheroic position vis-a-vis of so
diminutive an opponent as Corsica. The whole story is a curious
prototype of the nineteenth century imbroglio between Spain and Cuba.
Of commonplaces about the palaces fruitful of verbiage in Addison and
Gray, who says with perfect truth, "I should make you sick of marble
were I to tell you how it is lavished here," Smollett is sparing
enough, though he evidently regards the inherited inclination of
Genoese noblemen to build beyond their means as an amiable weakness.
His description of the proud old Genoese nobleman, who lives in marble
and feeds on scraps, is not unsympathetic, and suggests that the
"deceipt of the Ligurians," which Virgil censures in the line

Haud Ligurum extremus, dum fallere fata sinebant

may possibly have been of this Balderstonian variety. But Smollett had
little room in his economy for such vapouring speculations. He was as
unsentimental a critic as Sydney Smith or Sir Leslie Stephen. He wants
to know the assets of a place more than its associations. Facts,
figures, trade and revenue returns are the data his shrewd mind
requires to feed on. He has a keen eye for harbours suitable for an
English frigate to lie up in, and can hardly rest until his sagacity
has collected material for a political horoscope.

Smollett's remarks upon the mysterious dispensations of Providence in
regard to Genoa and the retreat of the Austrians are charged to the
full with his saturnine spirit. His suspicions were probably well
founded. Ever since 1685 Genoa had been the more or less humiliated
satellite of France, and her once famous Bank had been bled pretty
extensively by both belligerents. The Senate was helpless before the
Austrian engineers in 1745, and the emancipation of the city was due
wholly to a popular emeute. She had relapsed again into a completely
enervated condition. Smollett thought she would have been happier under
British protection. But it is a vicio