"Italy, parcelled out amongst different powers, presented upon the whole, the same political aspect as Germany, only with this difference, that it was totally divested of the shadow of unity, which the latter at least appeared to present. Upper, and a great part of middle Italy, being dismembered, were entirely subservient to foreign impulse. The lower part, with the fertile island on the other side of the Pharos, presented, to be sure, since 1735, the outward appearance of one national whole, but was too weak to withstand the fate of the more powerful Bourbon families, from which, according to treaties, it had derived its sovereigns. There reigned in the papal state alone, which could not derive its weight from its worldly sovereignty, but from the spiritual supremacy of its ruler, the ancient maxims of the Romish pontificate, with the economical state faults of a clerical government. But the consideration and the power of the former were visibly sunk; the journeys of the pope of that period to Vienna, were like the contemporary ones of the Hierarch of Thibet to China, rather prejudicial, than favourable to spiritual dignity; and the faulty internal administration of the state seemed to invite every attempt at innovation. The republics on the east and the west of the Adriatic Gulf, were, since the rise of the other great naval states, only the ruins of past glory, sinking daily into insignificance. But notwithstanding this, neither was the image of former greatness blotted from their memories, nor a proper feeling for it extinguished in the minds of the inhabitants of the luxuriant peninsula. The pride of the more noble, fed itself on the sublime remains of lionian antiquity; and the monuments of the golden age of the family of Medicis indemnified a people given to the arts, and full of imagination for the loss of present grandeur, and kept up a lively anticipation of a better futurity, founded on the merits of its ancestors. "Helvetia, hemmed in between Italy, Germany, and France, by its mountains, continued in the peaceable enjoyment of its liberties through the respect its venerable age had universally diffused. Nevertheless, the disturbances at Geneva, and the increased spirit of emigration, were sufficient to indicate that a people who become indifferent to the present order of things, would willingly have recourse to a system of innovation, and that the ancient ties which had held the Swiss nation so many centuries together, were gradually relaxing.