You want me to say something of manufacturing and agricultural industry, but you apply to a very incompetent person, as my attention is too strongly directed to other inquiries, to allow me time to enter into the details of these subjects. Yet, of the first, if I say little, I might plead that there is little to be said. I saw, indeed, at Milan, some very beautiful cloth. There was a public exhibition for premiums; but these hot-bed productions, fostered by the government more for shew than utility, are no criterion by which to judge of the productions of the country. The political revolutions to which Italy has lately been subject must have had an adverse influence, and an arbitrary and changing system of taxation must prevent the employment of any considerable capital. As to the agriculture, it seems very generally extended, though not perhaps very perfect. The proprietor is in a sort of partnership with the cultivator, finding the necessary capital, while the latter finds labour, and there is commonly an agent employed by the large proprietors, to see that the countryman performs his part of the bargain, without secreting any of the profits. With the exception of the Campagna, even the Roman states are generally in cultivation, and in that there are considerable difficulties in the way, though the accounts of mal aria may be exaggerated. The mountains are often better cultivated than the plains, where the slope is not too steep to admit of it. In our climate, when we arrive at the height of twelve or fifteen hundred feet, the cold and wet will hardly permit any profit to the agriculturist; but in Italy, corn will ripen well in elevations of between three and four thousand, and deciduous trees flourish. This gives to Italian mountain scenery a character extremely different from that of our own country. There are no dreary moors, no wide bogs, and even no heathy commons. The sandy shores, steep, crumbling banks of clay or sand, and soil of naked rock, are necessarily abandoned, but elsewhere the land is employed, and seems in general fertile. This year has been remarkably dry, and they say that the crops of Indian corn are suffering on that account. The wheat harvest has been good, and the grapes are very abundant; the market at Bologna exhibited a profusion of fruit. Peaches were in immense abundance; more than you will see of apples and pears in any London market. The best were sold to me as a stranger, at three bajocs the pound, containing about four full sized peaches. Figs two bajocs. Of melons there is also a prodigious number. A good sized one costs four or five bajocs; the water-melons cost more, because they are larger. There are plenty of pears, but not very good; few apples. Grapes are just coming in; they are hardly in fact yet ripe, but the Italians give a decided preference to unripe fruit. LETTER XL. RAVENNA.