The fact is, I suppose, that codes of manners and of conduct, evolved under particular conditions of society, are not always applicable to alien conditions. During the era of the aristocracy in England, powder and punctilio were some visible tokens of an amelioration in the old order of things, which had considered overbearance and pugnacity essential to the man of spirit; they spoke a real improvement in the attitude of class towards class; and, if that attitude was at first superficial, its practice gradually engendered the consideration which it had begun only by affecting. In Italy, it is to be feared, society adopted the code but eschewed its moral. All the observances, all the extravagances of an accepted fashion were seized upon by it with greed; only the underlying truth was never recognised or developed. The essential inhumanity remained the same; the arrogance of rank was unsoftened; torture survived without a thought of its outrage, not to man but to reason. Fashion, in its baser aspects, produced, I suppose, more preposterous fops in eighteenth-century Italy than in any other country of Europe. And all because that hot, vivid Latin race had accepted the imposition of a code which was quite alien to its blood and its instincts. It was not yet ripe for the change implied. It was idle dressing-up for a part it did not understand. It could not, in bagwig and velvet shorts, think Garrick and play Macbeth. It is most natural to picture the monarchs and Infantes of Spain in trunk-hose and with bristling “stiletto” beards--fierce, haughty tyrants, of a piece with the colour and fury of their times. You must picture Don Philip, however, under a very different aspect. He sits at the moment at a table in his private cabinet at Parma, a rather solemn-looking macaroni of thirty-eight, writing, like Buffon, in lace ruffles with a gold pen, and appearing more concerned over the right balance of his toupet than over the equilibrium of the European concert. You would observe, were he to rise, that he has a defect, still noticeable though mitigated by the craft of his tailor. One of his shoulders is distinctly higher than the other, which gives him, in his efforts to correct the discrepancy, a rather stiff unelastic appearance. In his younger days, he was said, by flattering chroniclers, to possess, nevertheless, a charming figure. He had also an equable temper, which, for an Infante of Spain and son of that moody monarch Philip V. and his imperious spouse Elizabeth Farnese was something to his credit. It is more to his credit now, perhaps, that, through much and prolonged test of its qualities, his temper preserves its even character. He takes life, in fact, very easily, and has no objection in the world to have his wife described, and treated, as the better horse. He is quite willing to take the picturesque lead in the tandem while she pulls the cart of state. After all, he has played his