n the banks of the Guadiana, nine thousand men fell sick in
Wellington's army in three days. The savannas of America, where "death
bestrides the evening gale," when first ploughed up, produce
intermittent fevers far more deadly than the malaria of the Roman
Campagna. But the energy of man overcomes the difficulty, and, ere a few
years have passed away, health and salubrity prevail in the regions of
former pestilence. It was the same with the Roman Campagna in the early
days of the Republic; it is the same now with the Campagna of Naples,
and the marshy plains around Parma and Lodi, to the full as unhealthy in
a desert state as the environs of Rome. It would be the same with the
Agro Romano, if moral causes did not step in to prevent the efforts and
industry of man, from here, as elsewhere, correcting the insalubrity of
uncultivated nature.

And for decisive evidence that this desolation of the Campagna is owing
to moral or political, not physical causes, and that, under a different
system of administration, it might be rendered as salubrious and
populous as it was in the early days of the Roman Republic, reference
may be made to the fact, that in many parts of Italy, equally unhealthy
and in this desert state, cultivation has taken place, a dense
population has arisen, and the dangerous qualities of the atmosphere
have disappeared. Within the last twenty years, the district called
Grossete has been reclaimed, in the most pestilential part of the
Maremma of Tuscany, by an industrious population, which has succeeded in
introducing agriculture and banishing the malaria; and the ruins of the
Roman villas on the banks of the Tiber, near the sea, prove that the
Romans went to seek salubrity and the healthful breezes of the sea,
where now they could meet with nothing but pestilence and death. The
rocky and dry slopes of the Campagna are admirably adapted for raising
olives and vines; while the difference of the soil and exposure in
different places, promises a similar variety in their wines. The Pontine
marshes themselves, and the vast plain which extends from them to the
foot of the cluster of hills called the Alban Mount, are not more
oppressed by water, or lower in point of level, than the plains of Pisa;
and yet there the earth yields magnificent crops of grain and succulent
herbs, while the poplars, by which the fields are intersected, support
to their very summits the most luxuriant vines. The Campagna of Naples
is more