Literature may be said to be dead in Rome. There is not only no free press there, but no press at all. The "Diario Romano" contains about as much news as the "Acta Diurna" of the ancient Romans, and perhaps less. I doubt whether at present such facts as those given by Petronius, in an extract from the latter, would now be permitted to be published. However, we know that Augustus prohibited the "Acta Diurna,"--and the "Diario Romano" exists still; so that some progress has been made. And it must be confessed that Tuscany is scarcely in advance of Rome in this respect; and Naples is behind both. Even the introduction of foreign works is so strictly watched and the censorship so severe, that few liberal books pass the cordon. The arguments in favor of a censorship are very plain, but not very conclusive. The more compressed the energies and desires of a people, the more danger of their bursting into revolution. There is no safety-valve to passions and desires like the utterance of them,--no better corrective to false ideas than the free expression of them. Freedom of thought can never be suppressed, and ideas kept too long pent up in the bosom, when heated by some sudden crisis of passion, will explode into license and fury. Let me put a column from Milton here into my own weak plaster; the words are well known, but cannot be too well known. "Though all the winds of doctrine," he says, "were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing." Here in Rome genius rots. The saddest words I almost ever heard were from a young Italian of ability and _esprit_. "Why," said I, in conversation with him, one day, "do you not devote your talents to some worthy object, instead of frittering them away in dancing, chatting, fencing, and morning-calls?" "What would you have me do?" he answered. "Devote yourself to some course of study. Write something." "_Mio caro_" was his reply, "it is useless. How can I write what I think? How can I publish what I write? I have now manuscript works begun in my desk, which it would be better to burn. Our only way to be happy is to be idle and ignorant. The more we know, the unhappier we must be. There is but one avenue for ambition,--the Church. I was not made for that."