In England, we have our trades and our professions;--abroad, all callings are trades; medicine is a trade; theology a trade; law no better. With us, the title of professor carries with it something of rank, being always conferred by authority, and not, as in Italy, a dignity at once self-imposed and assumed by any party who chooses to adopt it. Furthermore, at home it must be a grave subject indeed that is entitled to the honour of being represented by a professor; whilst abroad, the commonest accomplishments are raised to the dignity which we restrict to science; and every private teacher of fencing, fiddling, juggling, and dancing, affixes professor to his card. The art of cheating, _ingannazione_, seems to be at present the only one in Italy irrepresented, _eo nomine_, by a teacher. Whether it be that there is properly no such art, but, as was formerly alleged of rhetoric, that every man persuades best in the subject of his own craft, the principles of cheating in like manner vary with the occupation of the cheater; or because, where all men are more or less proficients, the instructions of a professor may be dispensed with. Nevertheless, if mere pre-eminence in the dark dexterity of imposing on one's neighbour deserved this coronal, whose brows were fitter to wear it than yours, ye professors of natural history and of _virtù_, with whom _ingannation_ is but a collateral branch of these your severer studies? The very name of naturalist, which in England falls so refreshingly on our ears, accustomed as we are to link with it the memory of such men as White, Ray, Derham, Darwin, Paley, and a host of others, there, is but too frequently bestowed on a class of dishonest collectors, who fill their rooms (which they dub their museum) with a collection of modern mummies, and study nature but to jocky amateurs in the sale of her specimens! Nor is the man called _antiquaro_ in Italy, a whit a better representative of him whom we so designate, than is the _soi-disant_ professor of _taxidermy_ and seller of embalmed pole-cats of our own naturalist. Not that our thoroughbred antiquary at home stands high in our classification of English citizens. It was not as a reward for tracing sites, by following the vestiges of dry rubbish near a place ending in _chester_, that the mural crown (probably a chaplet of wallflowers) was devised by the Romans; and we, too, have a weakness for ranging the precedents of our fellow-citizens according to their usefulness. We have no sympathy with soulless bodies; with miserly old men of starved affections, who are too parsimonious even for the gout; who prefer bronze _puttini_ to babies in flesh, and marble mistresses to a fond and pleasing wife! But this is their affair, not ours; if they choose thus to sacrifice to the cold manes of antiquity the sweetest and most endearing sympathies of life, the sacrifice and the loss is their own; whilst Englishmen must admit, that