of the English This is the main

simply-cooked mutton and potatoes dinner of the man of the same class. economical advantage, indeed, which absentee families promise themselves from settling abroad. It is to them, no doubt, an advantage. They eat and drink more sumptuously than they could at home for the same money. But this way of living is of great social disadvantage to the people among whom it is habitual. Its cheapness is but a delusion. The political economist will differ widely from the traveller, in his opinion of its superiority. It costs a vast deal more time and labour to bring all this finely-cooked food together: it costs, at the least, twice as much of human time and labour to dine five millions of French or German people, as to dine five millions of English; and time and labour, be it remembered, are the basis of all national wealth and prosperity. Time and labour employed unreproductively are capital thrown away. The meals of the Englishman and of the Continental man end equally in satiating appetite, and recruiting strength. If this end be attained in England, by an hour's work of one person in a family of five in the ordinary station of life of our working and middle class, cooking generally but a single meal in the day in the simplest way, and on the Continent, owing to the general habit of living, the more complicated forms of cookery, and the more frequent meals, if the cooking for such a family occupies one of its members the whole day, the English family evidently has saved most capital, or that from which alone capital is produced -time and labour in a given period. The loss of time in the eating and preparation of food, the numerous meals, dishes, and modes of cookery, form a very important drawback on the prosperity of families on the Continent in that station in which with us very little time, indeed, is expended in eating or cooking. It is an important diminution of the means of national wealth. Gourmandise is found also to be a vice as troublesome to deal with among the French soldiery, as tippling among

ours.

The craving for variety of food and cookery leads to most of the irregularities and depredations in the field, of which the French armies are accused. The variety in food, and in its complicated preparation, which is so blended with the habits of living on the Continent that even the poor have the craving for it, appears by no means necessary or conducive to health. A remarkably smaller proportion of the labouring and middle classes abroad are healthy-looking individuals with blooming looks, pure teeth, and all external indications of vigorous animal condition, than in our more simply fed population. It is evidently such a drawback on the acquiring of capital in the lower stations of life, that the want of a middle class of capitalists of men who rise by industry and frugality from common labour to a wider circle of business-is very much to be ascribed to this habitual waste of time and labour in their family living and house-keeping. They spend in immediate gratification the beginnings of a working capital. The national wealth and prosperity is materially affected by this cause, trifling and ridiculous as it appears to be in stating it in a single case. In the total, however, it is fully a fifth of the time and labour of a continental population, that is daily wasted in cookery and eating.

CHAP. XVI.

NOTES ON GENOA. -POOR OF GENOA-CAUSES OF THE DECLINE OF GENOA.

GENOA Genoa the superb! I first set my foot on Italian land on the mole of Genoa. Who does not picture to himself, on approaching the mole of Genoa, the grand days of this once powerful republic - her doges, her Doria, and all her magnificent aristocracy stepping in splendid array on board of gallant fleets that carried her dominion over the realms of the East? How unromantic is reality! The moles of Genoa, as works of magnificence and art, are but shabby quays, not to be named on the same day with the quays of Leith, Dundee, Aberdeen, or dozens of our third-rate shipping towns on the British coast. I see in Genoa only a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, covering about as much ground as Aberdeen, built at the foot and on the slopes of some rocky barren knolls of about the same elevation, and as bare as the upper half of Arthur's Seat near Edinburgh, and which surround a bight of the coast, called by courtesy a bay, of about the size of one of the larger wet docks of Liverpool, at the bottom of a gulph of the Mediterranean. This bight is made a tolerably secure port by two piers or moles dividing it into an outer and inner harbour; the latter for small craft, and containing a good many of them, and the other for larger vessels, of which, that is of brigs and traders to foreign parts, there might be a score or more - a show of masts certainly inferior to what we see daily in our third-rate ports, such as Dundee, Aberdeen, or Leith. This is, next to Leghorn, the greatest commercial port on this side of Italy - one of the main mouths of the export and import of a population equal

to that of Great Britain so that the poor muster of sea-going vessels in it surprises the traveller.

The streets of Genoa are in general so narrow that two ladies in the huge sleeves lately in fashion would certainly stick if they met each other. They are all paved with flat stones of a foot or two square, laid diagonally, and with an open channel in the middle of the alley for the run of water. Climate is a better

scavenger than the dean of guild, or dirt-baillie of our ancient Scotch burghs. These narrow wynds and closes of Genoa are not dirty, and from the constant draught of air through such narrow funnels, are sweet and cool in hot weather. The buildings on each side of these narrow alleys are palaces lofty, magnificent, extensive palaces rising to the skies, excluding heat and even light from the two-legged insects dressed in brown woollen cloaks crawling between them.

Here in Genoa, the imaginative traveller may revel in his descriptions of orange groves, vine-clad hills, and marble palaces, mingled in luxuriant magnificence, and rising against a background of heaven-high peaks of snow cutting into a deep blue sky above, and washed beneath by a sea still more intensely blue. But that miserable proseman, the political economist, goes dodging about this magnificent city, the city of palaces, the Genova la Superba, asking, Where do your middle classes live? Where did they live in the days of Genoa's greatness? He sees now that the same roof covers the beggar and the prince; for, on the groundfloors, under the marble staircases, and marble-paved halls, and superb state rooms on the first-floor, there are vaults, holes, and coachhouse-like places opening into the streets, in which the labouring class and small shopkeepers pig together, living, cooking, and doing all family work half and half in the open air. But was this always so? Where did, or where do they live, who are neither princes nor beggars? who are a degree above porters, or day labourers, or the small shopkeeper or tradesman living by their custom, in the means and

Yet

habits of a civilised existence ? Where be the snug, comfortable, suitable dwellings for this middle class, the pith and marrow of a nation, which cover the land in England and Scotland so entirely that the great mansion is the exception, not the rule, in our national habitations, wealthy as the nation is? Here, all is palace, and all is noblesse, public functionary, and beggar. They reckon in Genoa, in clerical function alone, 6,000 persons, and 7,000 military. Sweep away the edifices of nobility, those appropriated to public functionaries and their business, together with churches, convents, hospitals, barracks, theatres, and such public buildings, and Genoa would scarcely be a town. Genoa is not a poor town in one sense. Many of these palaces are inhabited by a wealthy nobility, and, it is said, there are more capitalists, more great capitalists in Genoa, than in any town in Italy. To have erected, and to keep up such palaces as they live in, or even to afford so much dead stock as is invested in the mere material, the marble, gilding, pictures of value, ornaments, and costly funiture, speaks of enormous wealth, both in past and present days. Some traveller tells us, that the Italian noble will go on building and building at a family palace from generation to generation, living in the meantime in a corner of it, or in a garret, poorly and shabbily. This is certainly not the case here. I underwent the usual sight-seeing penance of the traveller, and was trotted by a valet-de-place through sundry magnificent palaces the Palavicini, the Brignoli, the Durazzi, and others. These appeared to me as complete in furniture, establishment of servants, and all the magnificence of life, as any nobleman's mansion in any country. In one palace, for instance, as we entered the hall in the morning about 9 o'clock, the chaplain of the family was going into the drawing-room to read family prayers, the servants went in after him, a goodly number neatly dressed, just as in any orderly English family of high rank, and we were asked to wait in an adjoining room, until the service was over and the