bureaucratically or socially.  The spirit which had informed the policy and government of the famous Leopoldine laws was still sufficiently alive in the mental habitudes of both governors and governed to render Tuscany a rather suspected and disliked region in the mind of the Vatican and of the secular governments which sympathised with the Vatican’s views and sentiments.  The change that has taken place is therefore a very notable one.  I have no such sufficiently intimate knowledge of the subject as would justify me in linking together the two changes I have noticed in the connection of cause and effect.  I only note the synchronism.

On the other hand there are not wanting sociologists who maintain that the cause of the outburst of lawlessness and crime which has undeniably characterised Florence of late years is to be sought for exactly in that old-time, easy-going tolerance in religious matters, which they say is now producing a tardy but sure crop from seeds that, however long in disclosing the true nature of the harvest to be expected from them, ought never to have been expected by wise legislators to produce any other.

Non nostrum est tantas componere lites! But Florence is certainly no longer Firenze la Gentile as she so eminently was in the days when I knew her so well.

Whether any of the other cities of Italy have in any degree ceased to merit the traditional epithets which so many successive generations assigned to them—­how far Genoa is still la Superba, Bologna la Grassa, Padua la Dotta, Lucca la Industriosa—­I cannot say.  Venezia is unquestionably still la Bella.  And as for old Rome, she vindicates more than ever her title to the epithet Eterna, by her similitude to those nursery toys which, throw them about as you will, still with infallible certitude come down heads uppermost.

As for the Florence of my old recollections, there were in the early days of them many little old-world sights and sounds which are to be seen and heard no longer, and which differentiated the place from other social centres.

I remember a striking incident of this sort which happened to my mother and myself “in the days before the flood,” therefore very shortly after our arrival there.

It was the practice in those days to carry the bodies of the dead on open biers, with uncovered faces, to their burial.  It had doubtless been customary in old times so to carry all the dead; but the custom was retained at the time of which I am writing only in the case of distinguished persons, and very generally of the priesthood.  I remember, for instance, a poor little humpbacked Grand Duchess being so carried through the street magnificently bedecked as if she were going to a ball, and with painted cheeks.  She had been a beneficent little body, and the people, as far as they knew anything about her, revered her, and looked on her last presentation to them with sympathetic feelings.  But it was a sorry sight to see the poor little body, looking much like a bedizened monkey, so paraded.