s to me, and which I recommend to the attention of Mr. Galton
and his co-investigators, that the girls were prettier then than they
are in these days, or that there were more of them! The stupid
people, who are always discovering subjective reasons for objective
observations, are as impertinent as stupid!

The Duke of Lucca used to do his utmost to make the baths attractive
and agreeable. There is no Duke of Lucca now, as all the world knows.
The Congress of Vienna put an end to him by ordaining that, when the
ducal throne of Parma should become vacant, the reigning Duke of Lucca
should succeed to it, while his duchy of Lucca should be united to
Florence. This change took place while I was still a Florentine.
The Duke of Lucca would none of the new dukedom proposed to him. He
abdicated, and his son became Duke of Parma. This son was, in truth, a
great ne'er-do-well, and very shortly got murdered in the streets of
his new capital by an offended husband.

The change was most unwelcome to Lucca, and especially to the baths,
which had thriven and prospered under the fostering care of the old
Duke. He used to pass every summer there, and give constant very
pleasant, but very little royal, balls at his villa. The Tuscan
satirist Giusti, in the celebrated little poem in which he
characterises the different reigning sovereigns in the peninsula,
calls him the Protestant Don Giovanni, and says that in the roll of
tyrants he is neither fish nor flesh.

Of the first two epithets I take it he deserved the second more than
the first. His Protestantising tendencies might, I think, have been
more accurately described as non-Catholicising. But people are
very apt to judge in this matter after the fashion of the would-be
dramatist, who, on being assured that he had no genius for tragedy,
concluded that he must therefore have one for comedy. The Duke's
Protestantism, I suspect, limited itself to, and showed itself in, his
dislike and resistance to being bothered by the rulers of neighbouring
states into bothering anybody else about their religious opinions. As
for his place in the "roll of tyrants," he was always accused of (or
praised for) liberalising ideas and tendencies, which would in those
days have very soon put an end to him and his tiny duchy, if he had
attempted to govern it in accordance with them. As matters were, his
"policy," I take it, was pretty well confined to the endeavour to make
his sovereignty as little troublesom