titude, and may serve to show how profoundly veneration and love for the real benefactors of humanity strike their undying roots into the popular mind.

Not that Frederick Borromeo was, as it should seem, either a bad man, or a negligent pastor, or niggardly of his exertions or his money in the emergencies of the great catastrophe of 1630; but he does not appear to have possessed the art of conciliating the affection of the masses in the same degree as his greater cousin. And then he had the misfortune to follow and be compared with one, whom the love of the populace, as violent and unmeasured as its hate, had already surrounded with a magnifying halo of admiration and gratitude.

Although the memory of the great pestilence of 1630 seems to have perished from among the people of Milan, or rather to have been absorbed by the fame of that which preceded it in 1576, the memorials of it preserved by history are far from scanty. Besides the history by Ripamonti now before us, there exists in the Ambrosian library at Milan a MS. in the handwriting of Cardinal Frederick Borromeo, entitled 'De Pestilentiâ quæ Mediolani anno 1630 magnam stragem edidit.' The cardinal has set forth in this writing principally the facts of which he was himself a witness, the measures which he caused to be adopted, and his opinions on the progress of the calamity.

Alexander Tadino, one of the first physicians of his day, and first medical officer to the Board of Health at Milan during the plague, wrote, in Italian, An Account of the Origin and daily Events of the great contagious, poisonous, and baleful Plague, which arose in Milan and its Duchy, in the Years 1629 to 1631.' It is a 4to. volume of 150 pages, printed in 1642; and contains, according to the testimony of Signor Cusani, a mass of historical, medical, and statistical particulars, which cannot be found elsewhere. He has availed himself to a considerable extent of Signor Tadino's work in his notes.

Pio della Croce, prior of the Cappuchins at Milan, also wrote a history of the plague, especially for the purpose of recording the services rendered by the Cappuchins during its ravages. He wrote fifty years after the event, and appears to have availed himself of a chronicle or contemporary journal kept in the monastery.

Finally the public archives at Milan, and the collections of many private families of the city abound, says Cusani, in edicts, accounts, letters, and documents of every kind respecting the plague, in such plenty, that the historian is only embarrassed by the necessity of selection.

It is well that there exists such abundance of testimony, that

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every assertion almost of any of the writers on the subject can be corroborated by the evidence of more than one witness; for some of the facts recorded are of a nature to startle the credulity even of the least sceptical reader of history.

Ripamonti's first book-his history is divided into five-treats of the condition of the city previous to the commencement of the contagion, of the scarcity which preceded it, and of the first spread of the pestilence.

Milan, says Ripamonti, reckoned at one time 300,000 inhabitants, and it contained 200,000 immediately before the pestilence of 1630. Tadino says that the population of the city was then 250,000. Bonvicino calculates it, in the year 1288, at 200,000; and Morigia says that in 1590 there were 264,000 inhabitants. But all these assertions are to be received with much suspicion:-a remark which may equally be applied to all the statements of Italian chroniclers and historians, which have for their object the exaltation and glorification of their own native city. The narrow spirit of that spurious patriotism which limited its sympathies and its benevolence to the extent of the tiny territory of each independent city, was too powerful among the citizens of the rival republics of medieval Italy, to permit their historians to be very truthful expositors of the greatness and magnificence of their own cities. Nor did this rivalry by any means cease with the independent existence of the cities between which it arose. The old antipathies and prejudices were transmitted from generation to generation; and most unhappily continue to the present day to exist to a degree, which will yet, it is to be feared, form the greatest impediment to the progress of the country towards a renewed and regenerated national existence.

But we are touching here on a large and most important subject, which cannot be treated of in the limits of a digression. It is one which has begun to occupy the serious attention of the most elevated and enlightened among the numerous and increasing band of Italian patriots, and which demands the earnest consideration of all those who mourn the present degradation of fallen Italy, and look forward with hope to its resurrection. On some other occasion, therefore, we may perhaps endeavour to ascertain the real state of popular feeling in Italy in this respect at the present day, and the amount of progress which has been made towards a more healthy and hopeful sentiment of nationality. But we must now return to Milan and the seventeenth century.

We do not believe Messieurs Ripamonti and Tadino, when they assert that the population of Milan, previous to the pestilence of 1630 amounted to 250,000, or-as the more moderate of the two calculates-to 200,000 souls. And that'-as Signor Cu

VOL. XXXIV. NO. LXVII.

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sani well remarks in a sort of 'excursus' which he has written on this especial point of the population of the city and the amount of the mortality-and that when the Spanish dominion had for a century past ruined manufactures and commerce.' Signor Cusani has taken a good deal of trouble in the investigation of this point. The record of the census of the population which Ripamonti states to have been taken during the period of scarcity which preceded the plague, has apparently perished; for the most persevering search among the various depositories of public archives in the city has failed to discover any such document. But our author's labour was rewarded by the discovery of a register of deaths kept regularly year by year and month by month from the year 1452, with important marginal annotations respecting the various epidemics and contagions that at different periods increased the number of deaths. From this register it appears that the number of deaths in the four years preceding the scarcity were as follows:

which gives an average in round numbers of 3600 as the yearly mortality. Now assuming, says Signor Cusani, the yearly deaths to be four per cent. on the population, and adding two per cent. for deaths in the hospitals and in the convents not registered, it would result that the population of the city at that period was from 140,000 to 150,000 souls; a result which other facts concur in pointing to as a tolerable approximation to the truth.

It is probable that some corresponding deductions should also be made from the magnificence of the worthy canon's glowing description of the riches and splendour of Milan and its citizens at that epoch.

"The dwellings and the attire of the citizens," says he, "were such as to evidence princely wealth. The great imitated regal splendour. The merchants and bankers had become so rich, that abandoning commerce, and careless of further gain, they began to be ambitious of power, and many aspired to deck their names with crested arms, things unthought of by their obscure ancestors. The middle classes were emboldened to occupy the stations deserted by their superiors; the lowest populace were no longer clothed in rags; and every husband thought little of his wife, unless she wore silk brocaded with gold. Clothes of simple silk were henceforward left to the beggars. The habit of wearing rings, gems, and ear-rings of great value began to be considered vulgar ostentation; and the noble matrons, to whom such ornaments

Lombardy ravaged by German Troops.

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had become annoying, gratified their pride by dressing with the utmost simplicity, as if to distinguish themselves in this manner from the ple

beian dames."

This last trait of Milanese manners in the seventeenth century is curious enough. Of a surety there is nothing new under the sun; and least of all is novelty to be expected in any of the various manifestations of the darling vice of that pride, which is ever urging its votaries to find out fresh means of demonstrating, that they are not as other men are.'

But mind was as flourishing as matter in those happy days at Milan, according to our chronicler. In literature, says he,

"The poor vied with the rich, stimulated, not as the latter were by the love of glory, and the desire of augmenting their ancestral nobility, but by the love of gain, and by the hope of reward in a city where literature obtained the pre-eminence with the powerful. In fact, the liberality of our princes towards literary men was ever such,”—(this is a sop thrown by the sly old canon to his own patrons,)-" that the children of the poor had as much opportunity of instruction as those of the rich; and the entire city appeared a temple consecrated by the muses."

Such, according to our author, was the prosperous condition of the city, when the desolating calamity which he is about to record burst upon it. After the close of the wars between Charles V. and Francis I., which had, among many other results, determined the fate of the duchy of Milan, Lombardy had the rare felicity of reposing in peace for near a hundred years. The blame of disturbing this peace is thrown by Ripamonti on Henry IV.; though his ambitious plans were all cut short, says the pious canon, by the hand of one single man, if, indeed, it were not the hand of God.' But the more immediate cause of the disasters, which fell on the Milanese, was the Duke of Savoy, who took it into his head to invade the territory of Mantua; thus, says Ripamonti, disturbing the peace of Italy, and giving the worst possible example to the other princes of the peninsula. The King of Spain forthwith interposed, and marched an army of German troops into Lombardy to protect the weaker party. It is once again, as ever, the oldQuidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi.'

The passage of these troops on their way southward through the duchy of Milan is described by our historian, as in itself a desolating calamity. Ill-disciplined under all circumstances, and totally unrestrained by any attempt on the part of their leaders to protect the unhappy inhabitants from their outrages, their march through the Milanese resembled rather that of a victorious army through a country avowedly given up to plunder, than that of friendly troops through the dominions of their own master. The line of their passage was marked by desolation. The helpless in

habitants of the villages on their line of march fled from their dwellings at the approach of the advancing army, and left their all to be plundered, or consumed by the locust host on their passage, a work of destruction so thoroughly accomplished by the plunderers, who marched at the head of the army, that those who followed, enraged at finding nothing left to satisfy their cupidity, gratified at least their anger and brutality by ill-treating the already ruined inhabitants.

The result of these miseries, increased by the unlucky coincidence of a deficient harvest, showed itself in a scarcity of corn, so great that the price of wheat shortly rose to a hundred lire (equivalent to about 51. 8s. of our present money) a bushel. Rye was seventy lire a bushel, and millet sixty. These last particulars are recorded by the circumstantial and accurate Tadino, first physician to the Board of Health. The consequences of so tremendous a scarcity of the primary necessaries of life soon made themselves felt and seen in a still more fearful form within the walls of the thickly-peopled city, than in the surrounding country. All commerce, all employment ceased; for every man applied what capital he had to the purchase of food for his own needs. The classes of the people whose daily bread was supplied by their daily labour, thus finding that supply cut off, filled the streets in gaunt and famine-stricken crowds; and were the first to perish by starvation. But the distress gradually, though with appalling rapidity, crept upwards in the social scale. Soon the shops were closed; and numbers of those, who had been used to all the comforts as well as the necessaries of life, were compelled to join the wretched and squalid bands, who wandered through the streets in restless misery, imploring the morsel of bread necessary to prolong their miserable lives yet a few hours. The only difference, says Ripamonti, between the old beggars, and those thus added to their band, was that the latter suffered more from being less used to misery, and less inured to the humiliation and disappointment of repulse. The mass of suffering thus exposed to the public eye throughout the city, soon began to be increased by the influx of starving peasants from the surrounding country, who deluded, says Ripamonti, by the name of Milan, and their idea of its inexhaustible riches, fancied that famine could never dare to approach the metropolis, and thought that they should find there the food that their own fields no longer supplied.

And soon the streets of Milan the wealthy began to be encumbered with the corpses of the dead, and the skeleton-like bodies of the dying.

"I myself," says Ripamonti, "saw while walking with some companions along the military road which skirts the walls, a woman lying