These, then, are my immediate reasons for not advertising. Indirect ones, I have, which weigh with me no less. I write this morning, wearily, and without spirit, being nearly deaf with the bell-ringing and bawling which goes on here, at Florence, ceaselessly, in advertisement of prayers, and wares; as if people could not wait on God for what they wanted, but God had to ring for them, like waiters, for what He wanted: and as if they could think of nothing they were in need of, till the need was suggested to them by bellowing at their doors, or bill-posting on their house-corners. Indeed, the fresco-painting of the bill-sticker is likely, so far as I see, to become the principal fine art of modern Europe: here, at all events, it is now the principal source of street effect. Giotto's time is past, like Oderigi's; but the bill-poster succeeds: and the Ponte Vecchio, the principal thoroughfare across the Arno, is on one side plastered over with bills in the exact centre, while the other side, for various reasons not to be specified, is little available to passengers. The bills on the bridge are theatrical, announcing cheap operas; but religious bills, inviting to ecclesiastical festivities, are similarly plastered over the front of the church once called "the Bride" for its beauty; and the pious bill-stickers paste them ingeniously in and out upon the sculptured bearings of the shields of the old Florentine knights. Political bills, in various stages of decomposition, decorate the street-corners and sheds of the markets; and among the last year's rags of these, one may still read here and there the heroic apostrophe, "Rome! or Death." It never was clear to me, until now, what the desperately-minded persons who found themselves in that dilemma, wanted with Rome; and now it is quite clear to me that they never did want it,--but only the ground it was once built on, for finance offices and railroad stations; or, it may be, for new graves, when Death, to young Italy, as to old, comes without alternative. For, indeed, young Italy has just chosen the most precious piece of ground above Florence, and a twelfth-century church in the midst of it, to bury itself in, at its leisure; and make the summer air loathsome and pestiferous, from San Miniato to Arcetri.