VI.

The state of Italy was yet worse; for it was severed into pieces that, unlike the snake, were unable to reunite.  Naples was under the severe sway of Spain, and the yoke of Austria pressed on Milan and Lombardy.  Rome was nought but the capital of an idea—­her people had disappeared, and she had now become the modern Ephesus, at which each cabinet sought an oracle favourable to its own cause, and paid for this purpose the members of the sacred college.  Although the centre of all diplomatic intrigue, and the spot where all worldly ambition humbled itself but to increase its power,—­although this court could shake Europe to its foundations, it was yet unable to govern it.  The elective aristocracy, cardinals chosen by powers at variance with each other; the elective monarchy, a pope whose qualifications were old age and feebleness, and who was only crowned on condition of a speedy decease:  such was the temporal government of the Roman States.  This government combined in itself all the weakness of anarchy, and all the vices of despotism.  It had produced its inevitable result, the servitude of the state, the poverty of the government and the misery of the population; Rome was no longer anything but the great Catholic municipality, and her government nought save a republic of diplomatists.  Rome possessed a temple enriched with the offerings of the Christian world, a sovereign and ambassadors, but neither population, treasure, nor army.  It was the venerated shadow of that universal monarchy to which the popes had pretended in the golden age of Catholicism, and of which they had only preserved the capital and the court.

VII.

Venice drew near its fall, but the silence and mystery of its government concealed even from the Venetians the decrepitude of the state.  The government was an aristocratic sovereignty, founded on the corruption of the people and treachery, for the master sinew of the government was espionage; its prestige, mystery; its power, the torture.  It lived on terror and voluptuousness; its police was a system of secret confession, of each against the other.  Its cells, termed the Piombi or Leads, and which were entered at night by the Bridge of Sighs, were a hell that closed on the captive never to re-open.  The wealth of the East flowed in on Venice from the fall of the Lower Empire.  She became the refuge of Greek civilisation, and the Constantinople of the Adriatic; and the arts had emigrated thither from Byzance, with commerce.  Its marvellous palaces, washed by the waves, were crowded together on a narrow spot of ground, so that the city was like a vessel at anchor, on board which a people driven from the land have taken refuge with all their treasures.  She was thus impregnable, but could not exercise the least influence over Italy.

VIII.