It must be wholly unnecessary for Protestantism to expose the superficial glitter of those views, and the feeble foundations of this visionary empire. The true respondent is the actual condition of Europe. Every Protestant nation has left Italy behind. Even the Romish nations, which have borrowed their vigour from intercourse with Protestantism, have left her behind. Of what great invention for the benefit of man has Italy been the parent during the last three hundred years? What command has she given us over nature? what territory has she added to the civilised world in an age of perpetual discovery? what enlargement of the human mind has she exhibited in her philosophy? what advance in the amelioration of the popular condition signalises her intelligent benevolence? what manly inquiry into any one of the means by which governments or individuals distinguish themselves as benefactors to posterity, and live in the memory of mankind? It is painful to answer queries like these with a direct negation; but that negation would be truth. Italy has nothing to show for her intellectual products during centuries, but the carnival and the opera; for her gallantry, but the sufferings of French and German invasions; for her political progress, but the indolent submission to generations of petty kings, themselves living in vassalage to France, Austria, and Spain; and for her religion, but the worship of saints, of whom no living man knows any thing--miracles so absurd as to make even the sacristans who narrate them laugh; new legends of every conceivable nonsense, and leases of purgatory shortened according to the pence dropped into the purse of the confessional. Italy has two evils, either of which would be enough to break down the most vigorous nation--if a vigorous nation would not have broken down both, ages ago. These two are the nobles and the priesthood--both ruinously numberless, both contemptibly idle, and both interested in resisting every useful change, which might shake their supremacy. Every period of Italian convulsion has left a class of men calling themselves nobles, and perpetuating the title to their sons. The Gothic, the Norman, the papal, the "nouveaux riches," every man who buys an estate--in fact, nearly every man who desires a title--all swell the lists of the nobility to an intolerable size. Of course, a noble can never do any thing--his dignity stands in the way.