The Lombard system had been subsequently applied to the Venetian provinces; where, twenty years ago, the number of schools had risen to between fourteen and fifteen hundred. The number of boys then attending the schools was upwards of sixty thousand. Higher still, there were eighty-six gymnasia or colleges, with three hundred professors, and attended by upwards of seven thousand students, with thirty-four colleges for females. Higher still were the twelve Lyceums, for philosophical studies; and, at the summit of all, the two universities of Padua and Pavia. The whole system being superintended by the general boards at Milan and Venice. Whether all those regulations are applicable to our own country, may be a matter of question. But the grand difficulty experienced here, the power of making the parents avail themselves of those admirable opportunities, is easily solved by the German discipline. A register is kept in every commune, of all the children from six to twelve years old; and they are all _compelled_ to attend the schools, except in case of illness, or some other sufficient cause. But the tuition is gratuitous, the expense and the schoolmaster being paid by the commune. Corporal punishment is wholly forbidden. Such were the benefits lavished by Austria upon her Italian subjects; benefits which they never would have dreamed of if left to themselves; and which, in all probability, the pauperised exchequer of the revolt will never be able to sustain. Under this government, too, Lombardy had become the most fertile province of Italy, the most densely peopled, and the most opulent, of the south of Europe. Venice, too, which had been crushed almost into ruins by the French, rose again into a resemblance of that commercial power, and civil splendour, which once made her famous throughout the Mediterranean; and Milan, though characterised in the Italian annals as the most luckless of all the cities of earth, having been besieged forty times, taken twenty times, and almost levelled with the ground by the conqueror four times,--yet, when the late Emperor Francis visited her about twenty years ago, exhibited a pomp of private wealth, and a magnificence of public festivity, which astonished Europe, and was the most eloquent refutation of the declamatory ravings of the mob of patriotism. That Austria should be unwilling to give up so fine a possession is perfectly natural; constituting, as it does, the noblest portion of the Italian peninsula; or, in the striking language of the historian Alison,--