The history of the Italian republics is an unhappy record for the advocates of republicanism. It was a history of perpetual feuds among the higher ranks, and perpetual misery among the people. The mediæval annals of Italy, with all their activity and lustre, might be wisely exchanged by any nation on earth for the quiet obscurity of a German marsh, or the remote safety of an island in the heart of the ocean. The only palliation was in the stimulus which all republics give to human energy, by relaxing all impediments to the exertion of the individual. But this good is strangely counteracted by the habitual uncertainty of republics. No man's fortune _can_ be safe while it remains under a popular government. A decree of the party in power may strip him of his property in a day. The general object of the rule of the rabble is the seizure of property, and the man of wealth to-day may be the beggar to-morrow. The most despotic monarchy seldom preys on the individual, and still seldomer takes him by surprise. For the long period of five hundred years, Lombardy was one of the most unfortunate countries in the world, from its republican propensities. Factions, of every degree of tyranny and vice, tore it asunder. The names of the Torriani, the Visconti, and the Sforze, are seen successively floating on the tide of blood and misery which covered this noblest of the Italian provinces; and each faction, at its sinking, left little more than a new evidence of the guilt of profligate governments, each exceeding the other in professions of public virtue. A single, vigorous sceptre--a settled constitution, however stern--a dynasty even of despots, which had the simple merit of stability, would have rescued Lombardy from a condition scarcely to be envied by a galley-slave. The historians of Italy recur to this period in words of horror. The romancers find in it an exhaustless fund of their darkest scenes. The poets revert to it for their deepest-coloured images of national destruction. What must be the condition of a country, when a military despotism, and that too the despotism of a foreign power, was a desirable change? In the middle of the sixteenth century this change occurred, in the transfer of Lombardy to Charles V. After a century and a half of subjection to the Spanish dynasty, it again passed, by the failure of the line, into the hands of Austria. But at length, under the well-intentioned government of the Empress Maria Theresa, property became secure, the factions were suppressed by the strong hand of authority, commerce felt new confidence, and the natural advantages of climate, soil, and talent suddenly raised the country into a new and vigorous prosperity; within a quarter of a century, its population rose from less than a million to nearly a million and a quarter; and the produce of the soil not only fed its population, but was largely exported.