Various

“ Not a field is ploughed, not a blade of corn grows, hardly a house is to be seen, in this immense and dreary expanse. On entering it, you feel as if you were suddenly transported from the garden of Europe to the wilds of Tartary. Shepherds armed with long lances, as on the steppes of the Don, and mounted on small and hardy horses, alone are occasionally seen following, or searching in the wilds for the herds of savage buffaloes and cattle which pasture the district. ”

“ For with no message of evil have I to thy dwelling descended,
But with a kindly intent, and I come from the throne of Kronion,
Who, though afar be his seat, with concern and compassion beholds thee.
Thee the Olympian calls to go forth for the ransom of Hector,
Laden with gifts for Peleides, wherewith to appease and content him.
Go thou alone: not a man from the gates of the city attending;
Only for guiding the mules be some elderly herald appointed,
Who may have charge of the wain with its treasure, and back to the city
Carefully carry the dead that was slain by the godlike Achilles. ”

“ We know not when, since our boyhood, we have met with an adventurer more ardent and daring, a companion more fascinating and agreeable, than Mr Brooke, the Rajah or Governor of Sarāwak. Essentially British, in as much as he practises our national virtues when circumstances call them into action, he reminds us at all times of those Eastern men, famous in their generation, who delighted us many years ago, and secured our wonder by their devoted love of enterprise, and the moral ascendency that waited on their efforts. In truth, Mr Brooke belongs not to the present generation. ”

“ Truly Peleides, as oft as the east is revived with the day-beam,
Ruthlessly drags him around by the tomb of his brotherly comrade;
But yet he mars not the dead; and with wonder thine eyes would behold him
How he in freshness lies: from about him the blood has been cleanséd,
Dust has not tarnisht the hue, and all clos'd are the lips of the gashes,
All that he had, and not few were the brass-beat lances that pierc'd him.
Guarded so well is thy son by the grace of the blessed Immortals,
Dead though he be; of a surety in life they had favour'd him dearly. ”

“ For here, it appears, that during the four hundred years that the Western Empire endured, while the cultivation of grain in Italy was constantly declining, and at last wholly ceased, insomuch that the country relapsed entirely into a state of nature, or was devoted to the mere raising of grass for sheep and cattle, agriculture was flourishing in the highest degree in the remoter provinces of the Empire; and the exportation of grain from Africa had become so great and regular, that it had come to be regarded as the granaries of Rome and of the world! ”

“ M'Dermot and I stood aghast and helpless, gazing with open mouths and strained eyeballs at our unhappy friend. What could we do? Were we to dare the leap, which one far more active and vigorous than ourselves had unsuccessfully attempted? It would have been courting destruction, without a chance of saving Ashley. But Dora put us to shame. One scream, and only one, she uttered, and then, gathering up her habit, she sprang unaided from her mule. ”

“ For without profit and vain is the fulness of sad lamentation,
Since it was destined so of the Gods for unfortunate mortals
Ever in trouble to live, but they only partake not of sorrow;
For by the threshold of Zeus two urns have their station of old time,
Whereof the one holds dolings of good, but the other of evil;
And to whom mixt are the doles of the thunder-delighting Kronion,
He sometime is of blessing partaker, of misery sometime ”

“ Would it be wise in the agriculturist to insist upon such an abandonment, in order that he might wear a cheaper dress, whilst the practical effect of the measure must be to annihilate the capital now invested in manufactures, to starve the workman, and of course to narrow within the lowest limits his capability of purchasing food? In like manner we say, that it is not wise in the manufacturer to co-operate in this scheme; for sooner or later the evil effects of it must fall upon his own head. Cheap bread may be an evil, and a great one. ”

“ If millions of the Irish will not work, and will not grow corn—if they prefer trusting to the potato, and the potato happens to fail—are we to be punished for that defect, be it one of carelessness, of improvidence, or of misgovernment? Better that we had no reason at all than one so obviously flimsy. If we turn to the petitions which, about the end of autumn, were forwarded from different towns, praying for that favourite measure of the League, the opening of the ports, it will be seen that one and all of them were founded on the assumed fact, that the grain crop was a deficient one. ”

“ It is the necessity under which the ecclesiastical government felt itself, of yielding every thing to the clamour for a constant supply of cheap bread for the people of the town which has done the whole. It is the ceaseless importation of foreign grain into the Tiber by government, to provide cheap food for the people, which has reduced the Campagna to a wilderness, and rendered Rome in modern, not less than Tadmor in ancient times, a city in the desert. ”

“ A sure-footed mule, and indifferent side-saddle, had been procured for Miss M'Dermot, and was attended by a wild-looking Bearnese boy, or gossoon, as her brother called him, a creature like a grasshopper, all legs and arms, with a scared countenance, and long lank black hair hanging in irregular shreds about his face.
There is no season more agreeable in the Pyrenees than the month of September. People are very apt to expatiate on the delights of autumn, its mellow beauty, pensive charms, and suchlike. ”

“ The government was the same, the slavery was the same, in Africa as in Italy. Yet in the one country agriculture rose, during four centuries, to the highest point of elevation; while in the other, during the same period, it sunk to the lowest depression, until it became wellnigh extinct, so far as the raising of grain was concerned. How did this come to pass? It could not have been that the labour of slaves was too costly to raise grain; for it was raised at a great profit, and to a prodigious extent, almost entirely by slaves, in Egypt and Lybia. ”

“ Total abolition of protective duties in this country must lower the price of corn, and that is the smallest of the evils we anticipate;—for an evil it is, if the effect of it be to reduce the labourer's wages—and it must also tend to throw land out of cultivation. But what will the relaxation of the tariff do? Will it lower the price of manufactured goods in this country to the agricultural labourer?—that is, after the diminished duty is paid, can foreign manufactures be imported here at a price which shall compete with the home manufactures? ”

“ No "marble wilderness" or olive-darkened upland, no dilapidated "Osterie," famine within doors and fever without, here press desolation into the service of the picturesque. Neither here have we those huge masses of arched brickwork, consolidated with Roman cement, pierced by wild fig-trees, crowned with pink valerians or acanthus, and giving issue to companies of those gloomy funeral-paced insects of the Melasome family, (the Avis, the Pimelia, and the Blaps,) whose dress is deep mourning, and whose favoured haunt is the tomb! ”

“ The times are past, indeed, when gratuitous distributions of grain will be made to an idle population, as under the Roman emperors, or bread be sold for centuries by government at a fixed and low price, as under their papal successors. But the same causes which produced these effects are still in full operation. The cry for cheap bread in a popular state, is as menacing as it was to the emperors or popes of Rome. The only difference is, the sacrifice of domestic industry is now more disguised. ”

“ The Pontine marshes themselves, and the vast plain which extends from them to the foot of the cluster of hills called the Alban Mount, are not more oppressed by water, or lower in point of level, than the plains of Pisa; and yet there the earth yields magnificent crops of grain and succulent herbs, while the poplars, by which the fields are intersected, support to their very summits the most luxuriant vines. The Campagna of Naples is more volcanic and level than that of Rome; the hills and valleys of Baiæ are nothing but the cones and craters of extinguished volcanoes ”

“ No—most distinctly not; for while, on the one side, the corn duties are abolished, on the other the tariff is relaxed. Is the sacrifice to be a mutual one—that is, is the agriculturist to be compensated by cheaper home manufactures, and the manufacturer to be compensated by cheaper home-grown bread? No—the benefit to either class springs from no such source. The duties on the one side are to be abolished, and on the other side relaxed, in order that the agriculturist may get cheap foreign manufactures, and the manufacturer cheap foreign grain. ”

“ Great was Paco's vexation at finding that the person he had come so far to seek, had been all the while at a village within a day's march of the Dominican convent. His annoyance was so legibly written upon his countenance, that one of the soldiers took upon himself to offer a word of consolation.
"Never mind, comrade," said he, "if you want to see Tio Tomas, you can't do better than remain here. You won't have long to wait. He has only got a scratch on the leg, and we expect every day to see him ride into the lines. He's not the man to be laid up long by such a trifle." ”

“ Gradually the abandonment of agriculture extended from one district to another. The true country of the Romans—central Italy—had scarcely achieved the conquest of the globe, when it found itself without an agricultural population. In the provinces peasants were no longer to be found to recruit the legions; as few corn-fields to nourish them. Vast tracts of pasturage, where a few slave shepherds conducted herds of thousands of horned cattle, had supplanted the nations who had brought their greatest triumphs to the Roman people. ”

“ A hundred times Lord Downy had cursed his fate, which had not made him an able-bodied porter, or an independent labourer in the fields, rather than that saddest of all sad contradictions, a nobleman without the means of sustaining nobility—a man of rank with no dignity—a superior without the shadow of pre-eminence ”

“ Here, I, indeed, behold nature fresh from the bosom of creation, unchanged by man, and stamped with the same impress she originally bore! Here I behold God's design when He formed this tropical land, and left its culture and improvement to the agency of man! The Creator's gift as yet neglected by the creature; and yet the time may be confidently looked for when the axe shall level the forest, and the plough turn the ground. ”

“ It is then that the relative value of wages and prices is developed. The standard which is invariably fixed upon to regulate the rate of the former, is the price of bread. No class understand this better than the master-manufacturers, who have the command of capital, and are not only the council, but the absolute incarnation of the League. It is in these circumstances that the labouring artisan is driven to the lowest possible rate of wages, which is calculated simply upon the price of the quartern loaf. In order to work he must live. ”

“ Rome was supplied by the former, Constantinople by the latter. If the Mediterranean wafted the legions out in the rise of the empire, it wafted foreign grain in in its later stages, and the last undid all that the former had done. The race of agricultural freemen in Italy, the bone and muscle of the legions which had conquered the world, became extinct; the rabble of towns were unfit for the labours, and averse to the dangers of war; mercenaries became the only resource. ”

“ If the land of this country is once allowed to recede—as it must do if the power of foreign competition in grain should prove too much for native industry—the consequences may be more ruinous than any of us can yet foresee.
We need hardly say that a period of agricultural depression is of all things that which the manufacturer has most reason to dread. Exportation never can be carried to such a height, that the home consumption shall be a matter of indifference. At present, from eight to nine-tenths of the manufacturing population are dependent for support upon articles consumed at home. ”