[Sidenote:  Ecclesiastical State.]

In the States of the Church, notwithstanding their strictness in banishing the French out of that country, there are not wanting the seeds of a revolution.  The spirit of nepotism prevails there nearly as strong as ever.  Every Pope of course is to give origin or restoration to a great family by the means of large donations.  The foreign revenues have long been gradually on the decline, and seem now in a manner dried up.  To supply this defect, the resource of vexatious and impolitic jobbing at home, if anything, is rather increased than lessened.  Various well-intended, but ill-understood practices, some of them existing, in their spirit at least, from the time of the old Roman Empire, still prevail; and that government is as blindly attached to old abusive customs as others are wildly disposed to all sorts of innovations and experiments.  These abuses were less felt whilst the Pontificate drew riches from abroad, which in some measure counterbalanced the evils of their remiss and jobbish government at home.  But now it can subsist only on the resources of domestic management; and abuses in that management of course will be more intimately and more severely felt.

In the midst of the apparently torpid languor of the Ecclesiastical State, those who have had opportunity of a near observation have seen a little rippling in that smooth water, which indicates something alive under it.  There is in the Ecclesiastical State a personage who seems capable of acting (but with more force and steadiness) the part of the tribune Rienzi.  The people, once inflamed, will not be destitute of a leader.  They have such an one already in the Cardinal or Archbishop Boncompagni.  He is, of all men, if I am not ill-informed, the most turbulent, seditious, intriguing, bold, and desperate.  He is not at all made for a Roman of the present day.  I think he lately held the first office of their state, that of Great Chamberlain, which is equivalent to High Treasurer.  At present he is out of employment, and in disgrace.  If he should be elected Pope, or even come to have any weight with a new Pope, he will infallibly conjure up a democratic spirit in that country.  He may, indeed, be able to effect it without these advantages.  The nest interregnum will probably show more of him.  There may be others of the same character, who have not come to my knowledge.  This much is certain,—­that the Roman people, if once the blind reverence they bear to the sanctity of the Pope, which is their only bridle, should relax, are naturally turbulent, ferocious, and headlong, whilst the police is defective, and the government feeble and resourceless beyond all imagination.

[Sidenote:  Spain]