In this land of chastity, where the modest vine is entwined with every branch of science, a doctor in surgery, attached to an hospital, once told me he had never seen the bosom of a woman.  “We have,” he said,

“two degrees of Doctor to take; one theoretical, the other practical.  Between the first and the second, we practise in the hospitals, as you see.  But the prelates who control our studies, will not allow a doctor to be present at a confinement until he has passed his second, or practical examination.  They are afraid of our being scandalized.  We obtain our practical knowledge of midwifery by practising upon dolls.  In six months I shall have taken all my degrees, and I may be called in to act as accoucheur to any number of women, without ever having witnessed a single accouchement!”

The Roman artists would endow the middle-class with both fame and money, if they were differently treated.  The Italian race has not degenerated, whatever its enemies and its masters may say:  it is as naturally capable of distinction in all the arts as ever it was.  Put a paint-brush into the hands of a child, and he will acquire the practice of painting in no time.  An apprenticeship of three or four years enables him to gain a livelihood.  The misfortune is, that they seldom get beyond this.  I think, nay, I am almost sure, they are not less richly gifted than the pupils of Raphael; and they reach the same point as the pupils of M. Galimard.  Is it their fault?  No.  I accuse but the medium into which their birth has cast them.  It may be, that if they were at Paris, they would produce masterpieces.  Give them parts to play in the world, competition, exhibitions, the support of a government, the encouragement of a public, the counsels of an enlightened criticism.  All these benefits which we enjoy abundantly, are wholly denied to them, and are only known to them by hearsay.

Their sole motive for work is hunger, their sole encouragement the flying visits of foreigners.  Their work is always done in a hurry; they knock off a copy in a week, and when it is sold, they begin another.

If some one, more ambitious than his fellows, undertakes an original work, whose opinion can he obtain as to its merits or demerits?  The men of the reigning class know nothing about it, and the princes very little.  The owner of the finest gallery in Rome said last year, in the salon of an Ambassador, “I admire nothing but what you French call chic” Prince Piombino gave the painter Gagliardi an order to paint him a ceiling, and proposed to pay him by the day.  The Government has plenty to attend to without encouraging the arts:  the four little newspapers which circulate at remote periods amuse themselves by puffing their particular friends in the silliest manner.

The foreigners who come and go are often men of taste, but they do not make a public.  In Paris, Munich, Duesseldorf, and London, the public has an individuality; it is a man of a thousand heads.  When it has marked a rising artist, it notes his progress, encourages him, blames him, urges him on, checks him.  It takes such a one into its favour, is extremely wroth with such another.  It is, of course, sometimes in the wrong; it is subject to ridiculous infatuations, and unjust revulsions of feeling; yet it lives, and it vivifies, and it is worth working for.