the wit and the learning, the genius and the love!

"Le donne, e i cavalier, gli affanni, e gli agi,
Che ne 'nvogliava amore e cortesia
La dove i cuor son fatti si malvagi."

A time was at hand, when all the seven vials of the Apocalypse
were to be poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant
countries, a time of slaughter, famine, beggary, infamy, slavery,
despair.

In the Italian States, as in many natural bodies, untimely
decrepitude was the penalty of precocious maturity. Their early
greatness, and their early decline, are principally to be
attributed to the same cause, the preponderance which the towns
acquired in the political system.

In a community of hunters or of shepherds, every man easily and
necessarily becomes a soldier. His ordinary avocations are
perfectly compatible with all the duties of military service.
However remote may be the expedition on which he is bound, he
finds it easy to transport with him the stock from which he
derives his subsistence. The whole people is an army; the whole
year a march. Such was the state of society which facilitated the
gigantic conquests of Attila and Tamerlane.

But a people which subsists by the cultivation of the earth is in
a very different situation. The husbandman is bound to the soil
on which he labours. A long campaign would be ruinous to him.
Still his pursuits are such as give to his frame both the active