l-employed talents, or swiftly-acquired riches, of men born on the
other side the thin partition; whilst in Italy the gulph is totally
impassable, and birth alone can entitle man or woman to the society of
gentlemen and ladies. This firmly-fixed idea of subordination (which I
once heard a Venetian say, he believed must exist in heaven from one
angel to another) accounts immediately for a little conversation which I
am now going to relate.

Here were two men taken up last week, one for murdering his
fellow-servant in cold blood, while the undefended creature had the
lemonade tray in his hand going in to serve company; the other for
breaking the new lamps lately set up with intention to light this town
in the manner of the streets at Paris. "I hope," said I, "that they will
hang the murderer." "I rather hope," replied a very sensible lady who
sate near me, "that they will hang the person who broke the lamps: for,"
added she, "the first committed his crime only out of revenge, poor
fellow! because the other had got his mistress from him by treachery;
but this creature has had the impudence to break our fine new lamps, all
for the sake of spiting _the Arch-duke_." The Arch-duke meantime hangs
nobody at all; but sets his prisoners to work upon the roads, public
buildings, &c. where they labour in their chains; and where, strange to
tell! they often insult passengers who refuse them alms when asked as
they go by; and, stranger still! they are not punished for it when they
do.

Here is certainly much despotic power in Italy, but, I fancy, very
little oppression; perhaps authority, once acknowledged, does not
delight itself always by the fatigue of exertion. _Sat est prostrasse
leoni_ is an old adage, with which perhaps I may be the better
acquainted, as it is the motto to my own coat of arms; and unless
sovereignty is hungry, for ought I see, he does not certainly _devour_.

The certainty of their irrevocable doom, softened by kind usage from
their superiors, makes, in the mean time, an odd sort of humorous
drollery spring up among the common people, who are much happier here at
Milan than I expected to find them: every great house giving meat,
broth, &c. to poor dependents with liberal good-nature enough, so that
mighty little wandering misery is seen in the streets; unlike those of
Genoa, who seem mocked with the word _liberty_, while sorrow, sickness,
and the most pinching want, pine at the doors of marble palaces, whose