Scarcely had a few distinguished painters--such as Macrino and Gaudenzio Ferrari, shown themselves at Novara, at Alba, and at Vercelli, than others were immediately seen to appear; and, in our own day, wherever military influence has been entirely superseded by social, this province has furnished, in proportion to its size, as many artists as the rest, or even more, and those of quite equal standing--_e.g._, Gastaldi, Mosso, Pittara, &c. Had any one undertaken, 300 years ago, to draw up the statistics of Scotch thought, he would scarcely have found a single name to include in his list. Yet Scotland, delivered from the leaden mantle of religious intolerance, has become, as we have seen, one of the richest centres in Europe for bold and original thinkers. On the other hand, Greece, placed in ancient times by race and nature in the first rank, as regards intellectual creation, no longer shows any trace of her superiority. Nature and the race have not changed, but slavery, political struggles, and hard living have exhausted all her strength; for a nation does not afford itself the luxury of art and high thinking till its existence is assured and easy. Thus the influences of agglomeration might often have been disguised by the influence of national well-being. Not that the action of race and climate disappears, but its manifestations remain latent. The mighty intellect due to the Tuscan race and climate, reveals itself at the present day--after the enervating influence of the Medici, the priests, and the linguistic pedants, has done its work--in the improvisations of Pistoian peasant women, and the subtle epigrams of the Florentine populace. Genius (such as that of Pacini, Carrara, Betti, Giusti, Guerrazzi, Carducci) is no longer endemic, but occurs sporadically. It appears to me that, in many cases, social influences are more apparent than real--analogous rather to the peck of the chicken which cracks the egg-shell than to the spermatozoid which generates the embryo. We see that Florence, like Athens, supplied at the epoch of republican agitations the _maximum_ of Italian genius. But similar agitations in South America and in France (1789) did not yield as many great men; but simply a number of men who, being useful in the emergency of the time, passed for great.[278] One might even be inclined to suspect that the numerous great men who appeared at Florence were themselves the cause of her revolutions.[279] The same assertion holds good of opportunity. Opportunity appears, sometimes, to have assisted the development of genius. Thus Mutius Scaevola, having been reproached by Servius Sulpicius with ignorance of his country’s laws, became a great jurisconsult.