ed as gaiety, and a clamour that would make
deafness a blessing being taken for the delight of a charmed assembly.

I have been told that Cavour once said, that no great change would be
accomplished in Italy till the Italians introduced the public-school
system of England. So long as the youth of the country were given up
for education to the priests--the most illiterate, narrow-minded, and
bigoted class in Europe--so long would they carry with them through life
the petty prejudices of their early days; or, in emancipating themselves
from these, fall into a scepticism whose baneful distrust would damp
the ardour of all patriotism, and sap the strength of every high and
generous emulation. As the great statesman said, "I want Italians to be
Italians, and not to be bad Frenchmen."

With a Peninsular Eton or Rugby at work, who is to say what might not
come of a people whose intellectual qualities are unquestionably
so great? The system which imparts to boys the honourable sense of
responsibility, the high value of truthfulness, the scorn of all that is
mean,--this is what is wanting here. Let the Italian start in life with
these, and it would not be easy to set limits to what his country may
become in greatness.

I have never heard of a people with so little self-control; and their
crimes are, in a large majority of cases, the results of some passionate
impulse rather than of a matured determination to do wrong. It is by no
means uncommon to find that your butler or your coachman has taken to
his bed ill of a _rabbia_, as they call it--a fit of passion, in plain
words, brought on by a reproof he has considered unjust. This same
_rabbia_ is occasionally a serious affair. Some short time ago, an
actor, who was hissed off the stage at Turin, went home and died of it;
and within a very few weeks, a case occurred in Florence which would
be laughable if it had not terminated so tragically. One of the new
guardians of the public safety, habited in a strange travestie of an
English police-costume, was followed through the streets by a crowd of
boys, who mocked and jeered him on his dress. Seeing that he resented
their remarks with temper, they only became more aggressive, and at last
went so far as to pursue him through the city with yells and cries. The
man, overcome with passion, got _rabbia_, and died. Ridicule is the one
thing no Italian can bear. When you lose temper with an Italian, and
give way to any show of violence bef