downward-tending ways.  But Providence, in the shape of the ambitions and intrigues of the great powers, had better things in store for them than they dreamed of.  The princes of the Lorraine dynasty so ruled as not only quickly to gain the respect and affection of their subjects, but gradually to render Tuscany by far the most civilized and prosperous portion of Italy.  The first three princes of the Lorraine line were enlightened men, far in advance not only of the generality of their own subjects, but of their contemporaries in general.  They were conscientious rulers, earnestly desirous of ameliorating the condition of the people they were called on to govern.  Of the last of the line the same cannot in its entirety be said.  A portion of the eulogy deserved by his predecessors may be awarded to him unquestionably.  He was, I fully believe, a good and conscientious man, anxious to do his duty, and desirous of the happiness and well being of his people.  But he was by no means a wise or enlightened man.  It could hardly be said that he was popular or beloved by his subjects at the time when I first knew Florence.  The Tuscans were very far better off than any other Italians at that time, and they were fully conscious that they were so.  But this superiority was justly credited to the wise rule of the grand duke’s father and grandfather, rather than to any merit of his own.  Yet he was liked in a sort of way—­I am afraid I must say in a contemptuous sort of way.  The general notion was that he was what is generally described by the expressive term “a poor creature.”  He probably was so, in truth, from his birth upward.  It was said—­and I believe with truth—­that he had been in his childish years reared with the greatest difficulty; and strange as it may seem, it is, I believe, a fact that a wet-nurse made an important part of the establishment of the prince at the Pitti Palace till he was about twenty years old.  How far physiologists may deem that such an abnormal circumstance may have been influential in producing a diathesis of mind and body deficient in vigor, energy and “hard grit” of any kind, I do not know.  But if that is what such a bringing-up may be expected to produce, then the expectation was in the case in question certainly justified.  Nevertheless, Italians had been for so many generations and centuries taught by bitter experience to consider kings and princes of all sorts as malevolent and maleficent scourges of humanity that a sovereign who really did no harm to any one was, after a fashion, as I have said, popular.  Accessibility is always one sure means of making a sovereign acceptable to large classes of his subjects; and nothing could be easier than to gain access to the presence of Leopold II., grand duke of Tuscany.  A little anecdote of an occurrence that took place at the time when Lord Holland, to the regret of everybody in Florence, English or Italian, ceased to be the representative of England at the grand ducal court, will show the sort of thing that used to prevail in the matter of the admission of foreigners to the Pitti Palace.