But if it be indeed true, that intellectual and material decadence is the proof and guarantee of a people's spiritual advancement; if the desolating blight which marks unmistakeably every land overshadowed by the wings of the Roman Church, be indeed an indication of its ripeness for a better harvest than any to be garnered on this side of the grave; then assuredly may we expect to find the purest and brightest spiritual life ever yet manifested by a nation, among the happy populations—_fortunati nimium sua si bona nôrint_—subjected to the immediate sway of the successors of St. Peter. And should any curious student of the _modus operandi_ and results of ecclesiastical government, desire to know where he may advantageously examine such phenomena in their most unmitigated form and perfect development, he may be safely advised to bestow his researches on the city and district of Ferrara. There, indeed, the lesson he is in search of, is so written, that he who runs, even though he speed on with the haste of the posting traveller, eager to leave the abomination of desolation behind him, may read it without fear of blundering. There indeed is a city and people unmistakably marked by Holy Mother Church, as her own; silence and solitude, decay, dilapidation, neglect, and sordid squallor, characterise the impress of her paternal hand. And yet more forcibly to point the moral of the spectacle, there remains sufficient traces of what Ferrara was in the young ungodly days of her lay government, to give all the force of contrast to her present condition. There is the gaunt frame of a city calculated to house four times the amount of its present population. The lofty walls of vast palaces enclose wide and spacious streets, over which the green weeds are growing, and a dead silence broods. In the centre is the moated castle of the old Dukes of Ferrara, now the monstrously disproportioned residence of the priest, who governs (!) Ferrara and its legation. Around this still lingers what little of life and movement is left in the paralysis–struck city. The more distant streets may be traversed from end to end without the sight of a living creature, save perhaps a group of half–naked mendicants basking in the sun, or the still more unpleasing figure of a capuchin friar, sauntering along with his wallet over his shoulder, on his daily quest, like some unclean reptile of ill omen crawling among ruins which are its appropriate dwelling–place. [Sidenote: FERRARA UNDER HER DUKES.]