time of Charles IV. The nobles had therefore nothing to do. They could
not go into business; if they entered the army it was not to fight;
the civil service was of course actually performed by subordinates;
there were not cures for half the priests, and there grew up that odd,
polite rabble of _abbati_, like our good Frugoni, priests without
cures, sometimes attached to noble families as chaplains, sometimes
devoting themselves to literature or science, sometimes leading lives
of mere leisure and fashion; they were mostly of plebeian origin when
they did anything at all besides pay court to the ladies.

In Milan the nobles were exempt from many taxes paid by the plebeians;
they had separate courts of law, with judges of their own order,
before whom a plebeian plaintiff appeared with what hope of justice
can be imagined. Yet they were not oppressive; they were at worst only
insolent to their inferiors, and they commonly used them with the
gentleness which an Italian can hardly fail in. There were many ties
of kindness between the classes, the memory of favors and services
between master and servant, landlord and tenant, in relations which
then lasted a life-time, and even for generations. In Venice, where it
was one of the high privileges of the patrician to spit from his box
at the theater upon the heads of the people in the pit, the familiar
bond of patron and client so endeared the old republican nobles to the
populace that the Venetian poor of this day, who know them only by
tradition, still lament them. But, on the whole, men have found it
at Venice, as elsewhere, better not to be spit upon, even by an
affectionate nobility.

The patricians were luxurious everywhere. In Rome they built splendid
palaces, in Milan they gave gorgeous dinners. Goldoni, in his charming
memoirs, tells us that the Milanese of his time never met anywhere