eeded, and certainly uncared for during the thirty centuries of
European history.... These islands have dialects, but no language;
records of battles, but no history. They have customs, but no laws;
the _vendetta_, but no justice. They have wants and wealth, but no
commerce, timber and ports, but no shipping. They have legends, but no
poetry, beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could still be said
that they had universities, but no students.... That Sardinia, with
all her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a
single artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself.... Near
the focus of European civilization, in the very spot which an _a
priori_ geographer would point out as the most favorable place for
material and intellectual, commercial, and political development, these
strange sister islands have slept their secular sleep, like _nodes_ on
the sounding-board of history."

This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some
detail. All the material advantages are in favor of Sardinia, "and the
Sardinian population, being of an ancestry more mixed than that of the
English race, would justify far higher expectations than that of
Sicily." Yet Sicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme,
and her commerce to-day is great. Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theory
of the historic torpor of these favored isles. He thinks they
stagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being always
owned by some Continental power. I will not dispute the theory; but I
will ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simply
because no individuals were {242} born there with patriotism and
ability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride,
ambition, and thirst for independent life. Corsicans and Sardinians
are probably as good stuff as any of their neighbors. But the best
wood-pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriate
torches seem to have been wanting.[12]

Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get
vibrating through and through {243} with intensely active life, many
geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is
why great epochs are so rare,--why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an
early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so
fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the
nation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pur