The Italians like this; it flatters national pride, and it suits national indolence. The outer barbarians from the Neva or the Thames have fine houses and give costly entertainments. Their sterner looks and more robust habits are meet subject for the faint little jests that are bandied in some _patois_; and each thinks himself the superior of his neighbour. But as for the home life of these people, who has seen it? What is known of it? Into that long, lofty, arched-ceilinged drawing-room, lighted by its one lamp, where sits the Signora with her daughter and the grimy-looking, ill-shaven priest, there is not, perhaps, much temptation to enter, nor is the conversation of a kind one would care to join in; and there is but this, and the noisy, almost riotous, reception after the opera, where a dozen people are contending at “Lansquenet,” while one or perhaps two thump the piano, and some three or four shout rather than sing the last popular melody of the season, din being accepted as gaiety, and a clamour that would make deafness a blessing being taken for the delight of a charmed assembly. I have been told that Cavour once said, that no great change would be accomplished in Italy till the Italians introduced the public-school system of England. So long as the youth of the country were given up for education to the priests--the most illiterate, narrow-minded, and bigoted class in Europe--so long would they carry with them through life the petty prejudices of their early days; or, in emancipating themselves from these, fall into a scepticism whose baneful distrust would damp the ardour of all patriotism, and sap the strength of every high and generous emulation. As the great statesman said, “I want Italians to be Italians, and not to be bad Frenchmen.” With a Peninsular Eton or Rugby at work, who is to say what might not come of a people whose intellectual qualities are unquestionably so great? The system which imparts to boys the honourable sense of responsibility, the high value of truthfulness, the scorn of all that is mean,--this is what is wanting here. Let the Italian start in life with these, and it would not be easy to set limits to what his country may become in greatness.