dent on the will of an individual, there are few where the people have so much a will of their own, or, at least, are so little questionable by authority for any of their follies. One of the most discretionary governments on record, ruled by men of the cloister, or by Cardinals, who lead the coxcombry of the capital, and with a decrepit old priest at their head, generally chosen expressly for his decrepitude, Rome has contrived to wind her way with sufficient security through the difficulties of a thousand years; and though undoubtedly undergoing a formidable share of the common calamities of Italy, for she has been repeatedly sacked, been claimed by rival Popes, and deeply smitten by the furious feuds of the Italian Barons, yet, in the midst of change, has contrived to preserve her dominions, scarcely altered, since the day of their original donation.

The Papal government, or what may be entitled the cabinet and the ministerial officers, is wholly constituted of prelates. But those prelates are not all priests. The greater part are laymen, though they wear the prelatical habit and the tonsure. They are numerous too, generally not less than three hundred. From those prelates the Popes choose the Cardinals; some of whom are, by custom, entitled to their rank, from having, as prelates, served peculiar public offices. Those are all persons of considerable trust, and their places are termed pasti cardinalizie, as being, in fact, preparatory to the red hat. They are the offices of governor of Rome, treasurer, major domo, secretary of the consulta, auditor of the chamber, and president of Urbino, with some others of inferior activity.

Those prelates form a species of Roman peerage. Their origin dates as old as the Crusades. On the conquest of Palestine, the Papal government amply reinforced the ecclesiastical part of the invasion. A crowd of priests, decorated with the titles of the primitive bishops, were sent out to take possession of the sees conquered by the swords of the Godfreys and Tancreds. The camp overflowed with Bishops of Ephesus, Antioch, Cæsarea, &c.; but the Saracen lances and arrows soon forbade the

residence of those saints of the west, and year by year their dioceses were curtailed, until the whole tribe were thrown back upon the hands of their original fabricator. Palestine was left to darkness and Saladin, while Rome was fearfully overstocked with claimants and complainants, whom she had looked on as handsomely provided for at least in this world. Many of those returned bishops were connected with powerful Italian families; and as connexion is a natural element of promotion even in the unworldly Church of Rome, the Popes were involved in the dilemma of giving them either places or pensions. The places were decided on, and the Italians saw with some surprise those pious pilgrims and grave confessors embarked in all kinds of secular employments. But in Italy all indignation is discreet; the layman is a proverbial idler; the Pope is God's vicegerent; and Infallibility and the Inquisition settle every thing between them. The bishops are still consecrated for dioceses in partibus infidelium, wear imaginary mitres, and have the spiritual watching of provinces in which they dare not set a foot, and govern their grim population of Turks and Arabs at a distance, which amply provides for safety in life and limb. The time is confidently expected, when they shall find the Mussulmans strewing the ground before their triumphant return; but in the mean time they draw their incomes out of the Roman purse, and are dispatched to serve the State as nuncios, and all the various public and private diplomacy of the Popedom. But there are classes and ranks even in this prelacy. And added to episcopate in partibus infidelium, are many prelati whose title depends on their being unmarried, and being able to deposit in the Papal stock a sum whose interest is not less than twelve hundred crowns (about L.280 a-year), or who can make an estate chargeable with this stipend. Others are appointed by the simple dictum of the Pope, without the security, to which, however, he generally gives some equivalent, in the salary of a place. Others are made prelates in consequence of having a prelacy left as a rent charge upon the family estate, as a provision for younger brothers. The stipend is to be paid out of the general income, and the chosen individual is tonsured, frocked, and pensioned accordingly.

There are three Cardinal Legates, or viceroys, over the provinces, who are generally chosen from the more mature and the better-educated of the prelates; but the majority are satisfied with as little learning as will car

ry them through the mere routine of their offices; a tolerably fluent use of Latin of a very low temperature, and a little civil law, are enough for public honours; and if the price is thus easy, who can wonder at their taking no further trouble on the subject? From such men as ministers and magistrates, he must be sanguine who should expect any wonders in politics or legislation. But, to prevent palpable blunders, they are assisted in the courts of law by assessors, who are generally advocates by profession, and who, if they know nothing else, are acquainted with the forms of proceeding. ng. Yet from time to time a man starts up who, in spite of every fault of national habit and personal neglect, exhibits ability. The late Cardinal Gonsalvi was one of those. He was intelligent for a monk, manly for a Roman, and learned for a priest. As a Cardinal and Minister he was a miracle. All was not much. But he transacted the public business with diligence, coerced the fashionable openness of robbery, tried to coerce the gamingtables, but they were too fashionable for his powers; was civil to strangers, and had the good sense to feel that the English were better worth civili. ty than all Europeans besides; lived without nephews, and died without filching fortunes for them from the public purse.

In all governments, finance is one of the most essential points, and among the phenomena of the Popedom has always been reckoned its being always comparatively rich. The secret, however, chiefly lay in the large sums which it gathered from all Popish Christendom. Previously to the Reformation, it is notorious that Rome raised a revenue out of every community of Europe, out of every province and parish, and out of the income of every bishop and priest, as it is that the remorselessness of her extortion furnished one of the prin

cipal weapons against her supremacy. Europe, in the 16th century, was governed by a nest of tyrants, and the lay extortioner grew jealous of the priestly peculator. The populace, fleeced by both alike, hated both with the same inveteracy; but the first thing to be overthrown was the Papal plunderer; and for this the assistance of the princely plunderer was called on, used, and successful. Luther's vigour, sincerity, and truth, did much; but without the princes of Germany the cause must have gone to the bottom. Yet, even so late as a few years before the French Revolution, the Papal receipts from foreign countries amounted to not less than two millions and a half of Roman crowns (L.566,000 sterling.) The list, from the office of the Roman datary, is curious, as somewhat ascertaining the influence of the Papacy surviving in the various continental dominions, even on the verge of its overthrow. Spain stands at the head of this pious munificence.

The revenue arising from the Pa pal territory, or, " Income of the Apostolical Chamber," about the same period, was full three millions two hundred thousand Romancrowns (L.744,186 sterling), arising from the various heads of indeed blown The farming of the lands belong,

The lottery 0 to 192 One duty more is levied on a class of persons, whom we should scarcely expect to find among the ways and means of an ecclesiastical state. But the easy policy of the government, taking it for granted that license will exist under all circumstances, has evidently thought that it may as well make a profit of it, and thus those stray members of the com monwealth contribute to the reple tion of the priestly pocket.om dil The lottery had been so long an expedient of our own finance, that we can scarcely exclaim against the foreign governments by which it is still suffered to exist. But our lot tery, for many years before its extinction, was so cleansed of its evils as to be comparatively harmless, and even in its worst of times held no comparison with the sweeping al lurement and perpetual gaming of the Roman one. In Rome, the lot tery is drawn nine times a year, and, as there is a lottery going on in Nag ples, in the intervals of the Roman drawing, in which, too, the Roman populace dabble as regularly as in their own, they, in fact, have eighteen drawings in the twelve months, And, to level the mischief to all, ranks, they can play for about a halfpenny. The temptation, too, is of the exact order to inflame the cupidity of the rabble. A ticket worth three baioes may win a terno, or sequence, worth one hundred and eighty crowns. This would be grand affair to the gamesters of the streets. But the chances against the terno are no less than 117,479 to one. priftotechnog

On those conditions, it may be

themselves; ma sinking fund bank bills to half-a-dozen times the amount of the capital a national debt regur larly increasing, and without the smallest hope of ever being dimis nished and pawnbroking on the grandest scale possible. There is nothing new under the sun ft រມ

The Roman national debt is as old as the sixteenth century, the mer morable period when the stars of the Queen City first began to wane; and, like all other national debts, it took its rise in war Charles Voua thorough politician, mors in mother words, a thorough hypocrite, was the champion of the Popedom, for the purpose of availing himself of the Papal influence in securing the fidelity of dominions that already felt themselves too large for a tyr rant and too enlightened for asperr secutor. But if the battle WAS fought in Germany, it was to be paid for in Rome; and Clement VI soon found, that to have Emperors for his champions was to the full as costly as it might be glorious an Thie Papal ducats were sent flying about the world, slaying the twin heretica, Turks and Protestants. But the trea sury was sinking even in this, ple thora of triumph, an and Pope Clement was at once in sight of universal do minion, and in the jaws of bankı ruptcy In this crisis the Italian genius, awoke. An invention untried or unthought of by all the struggling monarchs of the last three thousand years, was engendered in the brilliant brain of a an Italian chairman of the committee of ways and means. It was proposed that every man who put into the treasury one hundred crowns, should receive an interest of ten per cent. The idea was incomparably congenial to Lalian life, in a country where the infinite ma jority whether through fear, indot lence, or avarice, keep then money in specie. The prospect of an out! let for this cumbrous deposit, where the outlet was safe, and the inlet sure, where the income was grow ing, and the possessor had no trouble in its growth was the most poput lar invention imaginable Clement raised the money. His successors found the simplicity of the expedient admirably adapted to their tastes, and they continued to raise the mo. ney, and swell the debt, until Sixtus V., a man of vigour, who ought to have lived in later times, gave the last finish to the system, by raising a loan of ten millions of crowns at onceado prodigious sum in those times, and hoarding enough of it to have bought the whole baronage of Romel sidieron sista tesburg But the interest must be paid, and unless he were inclined to bring the forebodings of the people upon his head, there must be some prospect offered of defraying the principal at some time for other in the course of futurity. US Sixtus had found his got vernment thronged with sinecurists! A duller financier would have at tempted to relieve the state by extinguishing the sinecures. But Italian subtilty saw further into things. He put all the sinecures up to sale! They were all for life were named Vacabili from their nar ture, and brought in a quiet income of about eight per cent for their pur chase money. It was in fact bat another mode of borrowing money by annuity at eight pen cent. Thus we find all our modern expedients anticipated. The practical inconvel mence of having so many placemen with nothing to do, the contenipt thro wn upon all efficient governa ment offices by their ir connexion with this swarm of idlers, and the gene ral degradation of public honours by this traffic and sale, were matters of no consideration to the thorough love of money, and passion for power, that made the character of Sixtus of The proceeds of the Vacabili had been nominally intended to form a sinking fund. Bat Sixtus found bet ter employment for the money in intriguing through all the European courts with one part, and building churches and palaces with the other.

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He was a bold, proud, and arrogant priest. But the Italians had no right to exclaim at his vices; for he was Italian to the heart's core, and the Romans had some reason to thank him for his furor of embellishment; he would have built a new Rome if he had found the valley of the Tiber naked; he found it full of ruins, and he spent his energies in patching what he would have taken delight in creatingitub ads to grimust od

The history of all national debts is the same dif we except that of President Jackson's empire, where, however, the experiment is too green, the country too unfinished, and the precariousness of public power in cabinets and councils too annual, to suffer the natural course of things. But America will yet have her national debt in full vigour, like her more civilized ancestors. The Roman treasury never put a ducat in progress to pay off its debt. The money of the Vacabili went in feasts and fasts, in the erection of a new opera house, or the hire of a new ballerina, or dresses de chant, or in the pensions of a whole host of nephews and nieces, who suddenly came to light upon the announcement that their uncle was elected by the Cardinals to carry the keys of St Peter, and for whom the venerable head of the state felt all the emotions of paternity. The legacy of public debt which Sixtus bequeathed for the perplexity of future generations, to the amount of twenty millions of crowns, gradually mounted to thirty, forty, till at the close of the last century it was fifty, or a little short of twelve millions of pounds sterling. conAnd what are twelve millions sterling will the English man of clubs and coffeehouses say, as he runs down the tremendous columns of Easter budget. Yet even our angry politician should remember, that what is but twelve millions in land, would be at any period four times the value in Italy, and that, from the universal rise of expenses, public and private, in every country, forty eight millions, forty years ago, would go as far as twice the number now. On this fair calculation, the Papal debt, at the close of of t the eighteenth century, would be better represented by a hundred millions of pounds sterling. 'Tis true, that this still dwindles beside our eight hun

dred millions-that it is but a molehill beside our mountain. But we must recollect, too, the difference in the grounds of the two accumulations; the pressure of the whole defence of Europe on England, the indefatigable labour, the impregnable resistance, the unequalled triumph; that we had to support the credit of every failing exchequer, from the Pole to the Line; that we had to recruit every rising army, and refit every beaten one; to fight for one king in his last ditch, and to carry another to his last colony; to teach the Russians to stand fire, and to help the Grand Turk to pay for his gunpowder; that we were the soldiers and sailors of every shore and sea, the bottleholders or the champions of every battle; that we were the suppliers of Portugal with port, of Spain with corn, of Italy with macaroni, and of Turkey with opium; that we were the bakers, the brewers, and the bankers of mankind, busy with the paupers and patriots of the earth, from Lima to Labrador, and from Labrador round the world to Loo Choo; England the fighter, the footman, the factotum of the universal family of man.

What was this stirring life to the gilded sofas and lazy purple of Rome, feeding on beccaficoes, and cooling its fingers in vases of rose water, pining over a picture, or panting after a canzone? The nation boutiquiere has been in the right after all, in spite of the whole legion of Cardinali and Prelati. Foreigners let their money slip through their fingers. England may throw it away. But she has something to remember for it. She has name, and fame, and activity, and health for it. All may be paupers alike, and this is the natural conclusion of all. But let us be contented with our fate. Nations are not like men; no nation ever dies rich. But let Italy, Germany, and France die like broken up spendthrifts, wrapped in the remnants of their finery, in the workhouse. Let England die, if die she must, like her own soldiers and sailors, without a shilling, and not caring a straw about the matter; die in action, high and hot-blooded to the last, and finished by a blow worthy to end the life of the bold!

This oratio honorifica to the praise of the "Tellus alma virorum," has

drawn us away from the history of Papal finance. In what proportion the glass runs down within the last few years, is difficult to say, in a country where there are no committees of supply open to the world, no chancellors of the exchequer to make a hebdomadal discovery of the na tional bankruptcy, and no Humes and Burdetts to threaten them with the scaffold for the deficit of a farthing. But we may follow the instinct of nature, and pledge ourselves that French visits and Papal restorations, insurrections once a month, and Austrian marches to put them down, have not reinforced the energies of the Papal purse since, and that the Luoghi di Monte, the national debt, is swelling as rapidly as ever. Forty years ago, the interest, even at three per cent, had reduced the government income to a little more than a million and a half of crowns, (about L.395,000 sterling.)

Braschi, Pius VI., a graceful and accomplished man, very ill used by his enemies the French, and not much better used by his friends the Austrians, added his own extravagance to the debt. He was by nature a projector, and, if he had been without a shilling of other men's money, would probably have made a fortune. But as Pope, he was more naturally amused in wasting a treasury. Every government has always some problem in petto, some peculiar hobby on which it rides, till poverty forces it to dismount. The Roman hobby has been for a thousand years the draining of the Pontine Marshes. Braschi's riding this hobby cost the people nearly half a million of English pounds, the loss of lives to a considerable amount, and gained nothing in return but an obvious increase of the miasmata. The conclusion seems to be, that the pestilence holds its ground by right of nature, and that neither Pope nor Cardinal will ever eject it. We shall not come to this conclusion, until we see the question fairly tried by an English engineer, with English money, English workmen, and an army of steam engines. But the impression produced by so many centuries of failure is, that the Pontine Marshes are irreclaimable. They lie too low for drainage, and the utmost that can be done is to make the soil solid enought