A Parliamentary Commission is at present engaged in the investigation of the whole question of Brigandage, and their “Report” will probably be before the world in a few days. It is very doubtful, however, if that world will be made much the wiser by their labours. There is, in fact, no mystery as to the nature of this pestilence, its source, or its progress. It may suit the views of a party to endeavour to connect it with Bourbonism, but it would be equally true to assert that the peasant-murderers in Ireland were adherents of the Stuarts! The men who take to the mountains in the Capitanata are not politicians. They have no other “cause” at heart than their own subsistence, for which they would rather provide at the risk of their heads than by the labour of their hands. All that they know of civilisation is taxation and the conscription. In these respects the old _régime_ was less severe than the present; neither the imposts were so heavy, nor the levies so large; not to add that, under the Bourbons, soldiers led lives of lounging indolence, and “no one was ever cruel enough to lead them against the Austrians.” The Bourbon Government of Naples had many faults, but the Piedmontese rule has had no successes. There is that of ungeniality in the Northern temperament that renders even favours at their hands little better than burdens, and their justice has a smack of severity in it that wonderfully resembles revenge. What may be the future fate of Southern Italy it is not easy to say; but one thing at least is certain, the influence of Piedmont has not obtained that footing there which promises to make _her_ cause _their_ cause, or _her_ civilisation _their_ civilisation. If the Bourbons governed badly, their successors do not govern at all! LUDWIG UHLAND. Incontestably, since the death of Goethe, Ludwig Uhland has been, at least in the hearts of the people, the Laureate of Germany. He is not a poet who took the world by storm with his earliest productions; but he has been gradually growing in favour and general acceptance, until his death is now deplored as a national affliction. He died quietly at Tübingen, the place of his birth, on the 13th of November 1862, in his seventy-sixth year, having been born on the 26th of April 1787. He was said never to have known a day’s illness until his last, which was occasioned by his attending the funeral of a friend and brother poet, Justin Kerner, in inclement weather.