without talking of eating, and they did eat upon all possible
occasions, public, domestic, and religious; throughout Italy they have
yet the nickname of _lupi lombardi_ (Lombard wolves) which their
good appetites won them. The nobles of that gay old Milan were very
hospitable, easy of access to persons of the proper number of
descents, and full of invitations for the stranger. A French writer
found their cooking delicate and estimable as that of his own nation;
but he adds that many of these friendly, well-dining aristocrats had
not good _ton_. One can think of them at our distance of time and
place with a kindness which Italian critics, especially those of the
bitter period of struggle about the middle of this century, do not
affect. Emiliani-Giudici, for example, does not, when he calls them
and their order throughout Italy an aristocratic leprosy. He assures
us that at the time of that long peace "the moral degradation of what
the French call the great world was the inveterate habit of centuries;
the nobles wallowed in their filth untouched by remorse"; and he
speaks of them as "gilded swine, vain of the glories of their blazons,
which they dragged through the mire of their vices."


II

This is when he is about to consider a poem in which the Lombard
nobility are satirized--if it was satire to paint them to the life. He
says that he would be at a loss what passages to quote from it, but
fortunately "an unanimous posterity has done Parini due honor"; and he
supposes "now there is no man, of whatever sect or opinion, but has
read his immortal poem, and has its finest scenes by heart." It is
this fact which embarrasses me, however, for how am I to rehabilitate
a certain obsolete characteristic figure without quoting from Parini,