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Lewis's "Jamaica Journal" is delightful; it is almost the only unaffected book of travels or touring I have read of late years. You have the man himself, and not an inconsiderable man,—certainly a much finer mind than I supposed before from the perusal of his romances, &c. It is by far his best work, and will live and be popular. Those verses on the Hours are very pretty; but the Isle of Devils is, like his romances,—a fever dream— horrible, without point or terror.
April 16. 1834.
SICILY.—MALTA—SIR ALEXANDER BALL.
I found that every thing in and about Sicily had been exaggerated by travellers, except two things—the folly of the government and the wretchedness of the people. They did not admit of exaggeration.
Really you may learn the fundamental principles of political economy in a very compendious way, by taking a short tour through Sicily, and simply reversing in your own mind every law, custom, and ordinance you meet with. I never was in a country in which every thing proceeding from man was so exactly wrong. You have peremptory ordinances against making roads, taxes on the passage of common vegetables from one miserable village to another, and so on.
By the by, do you know any parallel in modern history to the absurdity of our giving a legislative assembly to the Sicilians? It exceeds any thing I know. This precious legislature passed two bills before it was knocked on the head: the first was, to render lands inalienable; and the second, to cancel all debts due before the date of the bill.
And then consider the gross ignorance and folly of our laying a tax upon the Sicilians! Taxation in its proper sense can only exist where there is a free circulation of capital, labour, and commodities throughout the community. But to tax the people in countries like Sicily and Corsica, where there is no internal communication, is mere robbery and confiscation. A crown taken from a Corsican living in the sierras would not get back to him again in ten years.
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It is interesting to pass from Malta to Sicily—from the highest specimen of an inferior race, the Saracenic, to the most degraded class of a superior race, the European.