did not hold their influence over their unruly flocks more dear than every other consideration. In fact, the parroco has no power, except in articulo mortis, to absolve for murder and other crimes of the deepest dye; all these must be referred to the consideration of the penitentiaries. The sin which in rural districts he is most constantly called on to combat or forced to yield to is dishonesty, to which the metayer system holds out a constantly recurring temptation. The cultivator being bound to divide the produce with the proprietor in certain proportions, is for ever attempting to deceive the factor or agent, and the struggle often ends in a collusion between both to cheat the owner. The factor grows rich, and the absent noble sinks every year deeper into debt. With the exception of this plague-spot, the peasantry are a moral, frugal, and self-denying people. Their faith is unbounded. With noble impulses they unite fierce passions, which when roused may lead to deeds of wild extravagance, but which in the course of their toilsome, uneventful lives, often leave their owner at peace, and never warn him by their uneasy throes of the volcano which is slumbering in his breast. In the education of the upper classes the influence of the clergy is disadvantageously felt; but the remedy is neither ready nor safe. To place education at the present moment into other hands would be (not as a logical but as a practical consequence) to make it professedly irreligious. In most provinces of Italy the young man of rank is consigned from the nursery to a priest, who teaches him little, but dogs him as his shadow. He is never permitted to think or act for himself: he is kept from all contact, as far as may be, with the world, and then at twenty-one years of age is plunged at once into its dangers and temptations. The public education, speaking generally, is better, but it is marred by the same fault which infects all systems conducted by the Romish priesthood-that of a too jealous inspection, a too constant interference. system of espionage is established; tale-bearing and delation are encouraged, and no independence of character can be developed. From the over-care to root up weeds, the good seed is not allowed to grow; weeds, however, will spring up, and under such a system of culture they are apt to be of the meanest and most creeping kind. Happily there is a certain degree of the vis medicatrix in the mind as well as the body, else it would be difficult to understand how, with such a plan of education, the Italian character could possess those qualities which we are happy to recognise in it, or how Italian society could boast so many well qualified to adorn and elevate it. A * In material improvement the progress has of late years been prodigious, though it must often cause a pang to the lovers of the picturesque. Naples is now blazing with gas, though some may be still living who admired the extreme ingenuity with which Padre Rocco, in order to illuminate the darkest and most dangerous corners, put up images to the Virgin, and persuaded the faithful to burn candles before them. Omnibuses have superseded the corricoli and other characteristic carriages of the country. Railways and suspension-bridges have defaced some of the most beautiful and romantic spots of Europe. Mr. Hillard's sympathies are all in favour of progress; but on whichever side the traveller pleases to turn sentences, the Italians will not sacrifice their comfort to our notions of beauty; and, unluckily for us, those relics of ancient forms and manners which we view with so much interest, they associate with the humiliating idea of backwardness in the race of civilisation. Mr. Hillard gives a chapter on the English in Italy, and while we accept his praise with thanks it may seem unreasonable to carp at his mild censure, but there is a point on which we should like to set our countrymen right with so candid a critic. There are, we acknowledge it, two faults, or rather misfortunes, which pursue the generality of our travellers wherever they go. Shyness, and want of animal spirits-and these not being recognised for what they are, are made the ground of heavier accusations. The want of animal spirits prevents an Englishman exhibiting that air of enjoyment, that genial cheerfulness, which invites intercourse, and consequently it passes for pride or dullness. His shyness deprives him of presence of mind, and prevents him, though full of the best intentions, from saying or doing the right thing at the right moment. His diffidence torments him with a perpetual dread of being intrusive. 'Exclusive' is a word which applies to English society in a very different sense. Every society becomes exclusive when it is too numerous. But to call an Englishman exclusive, because he is sitting alone in the restaurant, or remains silent at the table d'hôte, is a mistake. If Mr. Hillard ever comes amongst us again, let him only try the experiment of addressing the first proud and exclusivelooking solitary whom he meets, and if he encounters a rebuff let him plead in his defence that he has been misled by the too partial nationality of the Quarterly Review.' Mr. Hillard has the great merit of feeling the vast extent of his subject, and the inability of any one writer to grasp more * A Dominican friar, whose popularity with the mob was unbounded. He was in the pay of the government; and in a popular tumult could restore order better than a whole regiment of guards. than than a part of it; and in this respect he shows himself superior to the great majority of tour-writers. The tendency of all his remarks is to refute the popular error, that, because much has been repeated over and over again, therefore all has been said which can be said of Italy. Let the travelled reader take his map or his handbook, and note the cities, each once the seat of government, and possessing a school of art of its own, which he has never visited, and of which he can obtain no detailed account, and let him calculate the vast tracts of the most romantic scenery-the most interesting ruins of antiquity and of the middle ages which are unknown to him, and he may form some idea of what remains to be done. In the places best known, if he desires to enter minutely into details, he will be surprised to find how little is ready prepared to his hands, how much he must search out for himself, and what tedious and laborious work it is to hunt for facts which he fancied must be notorious, in the lettered wilderness of libraries and archives. We wish that our remarks on the unavoidable shortcomings of ordinary tourists may induce such of our countrymen as have lived long in Italy, and have devoted themselves to the study of its history and antiquities, to give the result of their labours to the public. They would thus put on record information to which time will only give additional value, and every year makes it more difficult to obtain. ART. IV.-1. Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. Vols. I. to XVIII. 2. Gisborne's Essays on Agriculture. London, 1854. 3. Journal d'Agriculture Pratique. Paris, 1857. 4. The Smithfield Club: a Condensed History of its Origin and Progress. By B. T. Brandreth Gibbs, Honorary Secretary of the Club. London, 1857. 5. Journal of the Society of Arts, Vol. VI., No. 264: On the Progress of the Agricultural Implement Trade,' by S. Sidney. 6. Report on the Metropolitan Market, for the French Minister of Agriculture. By Mr. Robert Morgan. (Unpublished.) IN N the year 1856 a few Englishmen accepted the invitation of the French Government, crossed the Channel with their best live-stock and implements, entered into competition with the picked agricultural and mechanical skill of continental Europe, and found themselves by a long interval first in the arts and sciences required for producing meat and corn in the most economical manner, under a climate not eminently favourable, and and on land which has long lost its virgin fertility. This is the problem which modern cultivators have to solve. The live-stock of the British islands are distinguished for three merits the early period at which they become ripe for the butcher, the great amount of food they produce in return for the food they consume, and the large proportion of prime meat which they yield. The agricultural implements of England are distinguished for solidity of construction, simplicity of details, and economy in price, as well as for the rapidity and completeness with which they execute their work-especially that class of work which in other countries is more imperfectly and expensively performed by the labour of men or cattle. The best evidence of the superiority of British live-stock and agricultural machinery will be found, not in the premiums and medals awarded to them in Vienna or Paris, but in the constantly increasing exportation of both to every part of the world where scientific cultivation has superseded the rude expedients of earlier times. As to implements, said the Earl of Carlisle, in addressing an agricultural gathering of Yorkshiremen, 'I saw on the plains of Troy the clodcrusher of Crosskill, the drills, the horse-hoes of Garrett, and the ploughs of Howard and Ransome.' On the banks of the Danube, the Scheldt, and the Po, of the Mississippi and the Amazon, on the shores of the Baltic and the Black Sea, in the new continent of Australia, or in Flanders, the cradle of modern agriculture, English implements have the same preference as on the plains of Troy. Farmers are prosperous, landlords are intent on improving their estates, labourers have ceased to hate the drill and the threshing machine; during the past harvest the reaping machine has come into working use; and competent judges are of opinion that an economical steam-cultivator has been almost perfected. The time seems propitious for reviewing the series of events which during the last hundred years have combined to place English agriculture in the position which it now by universal consent enjoys. Different men and different means have, in important particulars, founded the agricultural prosperity of Scotland, although the two kingdoms have more than once exchanged improvements. A Scotchman only can do justice to the unwritten history of Scotch agriculture. There is rarely a great invention received by the world of which the germ is not to be found in some preceding age. This is the case with the system of artificial manures, which has recently worked such wonders in agriculture, and which is touched upon as follows in The new and admirable Arte of Vol. 103.-No. 206. 2 D Setting Setting Corne,' by H. Platte, Esquire, published in 1601 by Peter Shorte, dwelling at ye signe of ye Starne on Bred Street Hill:' 'Shanvings of horne, upon mine owne experience, I must of necessity commende, by means whereof I obtagned a more flourishing garden at Bishopshal, in a most barren and unfruitful plot of grounde, which none of my predecessors could ever grace or beautifie either with knots or flowers. I have had good experience, with singular good success, by strewing the waste sope ashes upon a border of summer barley. Malte duste may here also challenge his place, for foure or five quarters thereof are sufficient for an acre of ground. And sal armoniake, being a volatile salt first incorporated and rotted in common earth, is thought to bee a rich mould to plant or set in. Dogges and cattes and other beastes, and generally all carrion, buried under ye rootes of trees, in due time will make them flourish and bring forth in great abundance.' Thus we find that so long as two hundred and fifty-seven years ago an Englishman had discovered the utility of ammonia in bones and flesh.' Even in agricultural implements great inventions were suggested, and forgotten, because the farmers of England were not prepared to receive them. The reapingmachine carries us back to the agriculture of the Gauls. The horse-hoe, the drill, and the water or wind driven threshing machines were employed in a few obscure localities, but it was not until necessity made farmers adventurous, and facilities of communication rendered one district conversant with the doings of another, that they grew into general use. Whatever, therefore, might have been effected on particular estates, the condition of English agriculture at the close of the eighteenth century nearly resembled that of the greater part of continental Europe at the present time. Wheat in many districts was rarely cultivated and rarely eaten by the labouring classes. Rye, oats, and barley were the prevailing crops: a naked fallow, that is to say, a year of barrenness, which was too often a year of exhausting weeds, was the ordinary expedient for restoring the fertility of soil. Farm-yard dung, exposed to the dissolving influence of rain, and carelessly applied, was almost the only manure. Artificial grasses, with beans, peas, and cabbages, were rarely grown, and turnips were confined to a few counties, where they were sown broadcast. Cultivation (except ploughing and harrowing) was performed almost entirely by manual labour; the rude implements were usually constructed on the farm, and often in a way to increase labour instead of to economise it. The cattle were chiefly valued for their dairy qualities or for their powers of draught, and were only fatted when they would milk or draw no longer. The greater number of breeds were large-boned and ill-shaped, greedy eaters, and slow in arriving at maturity: while as very little winter |