ess remote from each other than
with most nations of Europe.

Every Italian is a conspirator, whether the question be the gravest
or the lightest; all must be done in it ambiguously--secretly--
mysteriously. Whatever is conducted openly is deemed to be done
stupidly. To take a house, buy a horse, or hire a servant without the
intervention of another man to disparage the article, chaffer over the
price, and disgust the vendor, is an act of impetuous folly. "Why didn't
you tell _me!_" says your friend, "that you wished to have that villa?
My coachman is half-brother to the wife of the _fattore_. I could have
learned everything that could be urged against its convenience, and
learned, besides, what peculiar pressure for money affected the owner."
Besides this, everything must be done as though by mere hazard: you
really never knew there was a house there, never noticed it; you even
sneer at the taste of the man who selected the spot, and wonder "what he
meant by it." In nine cases out of ten the other party is not deceived
by this skirmishing; he fires a little blank-cartridge too, and so goes
on the engagement. All have great patience; life, at least in Italy, is
quite long enough for all this; no one is overburdened with business;
the days are usually wearisome, and the theatres are only open of an
evening!

It is, besides, so pleasant and so interesting to the Italian to pit
his craft against another man's, and back his own subtlety against his
neighbour's. It is a sort of gambling of which he never wearies; for
the game is one that demands not merely tact, address, and cunning,
but face, voice, manner, and bearing. It is temperament. Individuality
itself is on the table; and so is it, that you may assume it as certain
that the higher organisation will invariably rise the winner.

Imagine Bull in such a combat, and you have a picture of the most
hopeless incapacity. He frets, fumes, storms, and sulks; but what avails
it? he is "done" in the end; but he is no more aware that the struggle
he has been engaged in is an intellectual one, than was the Bourgeois
Gentilhomme conscious that he had been for forty years "talking prose."

The Priest was doubtless the great originator of all this mechanism
of secrecy and fraud. For centuries the Church has been the Tyrant of
Italy. The whole fate and fortunes of families depended on the will of
a poor, ill-clad, ignoble-looking creature, who, though he sat at meals
with the mast