But this institution, like everything else in the Roman States, has fallen into such decay, and its professors are under such restrictions, that at the conclusion of his academical career, unless a youth has more than average abilities, particularly if he belongs to the higher classes, the general range of his attainments may be rated as beneath mediocrity. Debarred by the prejudices of caste from entering any profession but that of the Church, conscious that he will never have a field on which to display his abilities, without stimulus to exertion or prospects for the future, the young noble seems to resign himself to the conviction that his safest course is to vegetate unthinking, unquestioning, unknowing, and unknown.
Even the desire for distinction in arms, or the excitement of merely holiday soldiering, parades, reviews, and a gay garrison life, so common to most young men, cannot stir the dull waters of his patrician existence; for there is no military career open to the pontifical subjects, with the exception of the Guardia Nobile at Rome, which is limited to a small number of the sons of the old nobility. The few miserable regiments which compose the Pope's army are so low in the scale of social estimation, that to say a man is only fit to become a Papalino soldier is almost the grossest insult that can be passed upon him.
The ranks, wholly composed of volunteers, there being no conscription, are recruited from the dregs of the population, spies, quondam thieves, and so forth. As for the officers, I know not whence they are procured, never having been acquainted with a family owning to the discredit of relationship with an individual thus engaged, although one or two, who had scapegraces of sons, whose existence it was desirable to ignore, were supposed to have sent them, by way of punishment, into the service.
The ignorance of some of these young nobles on most subjects of general information was perfectly startling. Many of them were quite unacquainted with the nature of tenets which had rent Europe asunder, with the geographical position of neighbouring countries, or with the best-known historical facts. Not having access to any easy literature, such as our magazines and miscellanies afford, owing to the extraordinary limitations imposed upon the press, they had been left without an inducement to read, or an opportunity of discovering their own deficiency.
One or two anecdotes, the first of which I heard my cousins relate, will prove there is no exaggeration in these remarks.
During the wild excitement of the early part of 1849, a youthful count, glowing with new-born patriotism, confided to them one day that he and all the Gioventù—that is, Young Ancona—had determined upon turning Protestant, in order to get rid of the preti, and to conciliate England. Presently a shade of embarrassment came over his face, and he said, “Pardon me, but now I think of it, tell me, do the Protestants believe in God?”
On one occasion, I was present when some conversation took place before a youth fresh from Bologna, in which an allusion was made to Cleopatra and the asp. “How can I know anything about these matters?” he exclaimed; “I have never read the Bible!” Another time, I remember hearing my uncle gravely asked, in reference to a journey he was meditating, whether he meant to go by sea from Marseilles to Paris?
It was melancholy in the extreme to see the number of young men thus idling away their lives, filling the caffès and casino, and subsisting on a stipend that an English younger son would consider inadequate to purchase gloves for a London season. The plan pursued is, to give each son an apartment in the family residence, his dinner, and the allowance of from ten to twelve dollars a month, which is to provide for his dress, his breakfast, the theatre, and cigars.
How they contrived, with these limited means, to keep up the appearance they did is perfectly inexplicable. They even seemed able to gratify little harmless flights of fancy, such as coming out unexpectedly in singular suits of Brobdignagian checks or startling green cut-aways, which, with a pair of luxuriant whiskers, a hasty, determined walk, and a peculiar flourish of the stick, were supposed to constitute the faithful portraiture of an Englishman, than to resemble whom there could be no greater privilege, so great was the Anglomania that prevailed.
And now, I fancy, I hear the remark, “All this time you have been describing the manners of the Italian nobility. What are their gentry like—their middle classes?” Which inquiries shall be answered, as fully as circumstances admit, in my next chapter.