What a deal of balderdash people talk about Italian liberty, and the cause of constitutional freedom! There are--and these only in the cities--some twenty or thirty highly cultivated, well-thinking men--lawyers, professors, or physicians, usually--who have taken pains to study the institutions of other countries, and aspire to see some of the benefits that attend them applied to their own; but there ends the party. The nobles are a wretched set, satisfied with the second-hand vices of France and England grafted upon some native rascalities of even less merit. They neither read nor think: their lives are spent in intrigue and play. Now and then a brilliant exception stands forth, distinguished by intellect as well as station; but the little influence he wields is the evidence of what estimation such qualities are held in. My doctor is a Liberal, and a very clever fellow too; and I only wish you heard him describe the men who have assumed the part of "Italian Regenerators." Their "antecedents" show that in Italy, as elsewhere, patriotism is too often but the last refuge of a scoundrel. I know how all this will grate and jar upon your very Irish ears; and, to say truth, I don't like saying it myself; but still I cannot help feeling that the "Cause of Liberty" in the peninsula is remarkably like the process of grape-gathering that now goes on beneath my window,--there is no care, no selection,--good, bad, ripe, and unripe,--the clean, the filthy, the ruddy, and the sapless, are all huddled together, pressed and squeezed down into a common vat, to ferment into bad wine or--a revolution, as the case may be. It does not require much chemistry to foresee that it is the crude, the acrid, the unhealthy, and the bad that will give the flavor to the liquor. The small element of what is really good is utterly overborne in the vast Maelstrom of the noxious; and so we see in the late Italian struggle. Who are the men that exercise the widest influence in affairs? Not the calm and reasoning minds that gave the first impulse to wise measures of Reform, and guided their sovereigns to concessions that would have formed the strong foundations of future freedom. No; it was the advocate of the wildest doctrines of Socialism,--the true disciple of the old guillotine school, that ravaged the earth at the close of the last century. These are the fellows who scream "Blood! blood!" till they are hoarse; but, in justice to their discretion, it must be said, they always do it from a good distance off.