On Malaria. 319 



Sometime in the sixteenth century, a sweeping pestilence^ cut off 

 from this whole region a great part of tlie population ; after which 

 the price of property declined, and the lands fell into the possession 

 of the great capitalists. " From this time all productive activity was 

 banished," and although Leopold, Duke of Tuscany, made several 

 attempts to plant colonies in the maremma, they were each unsuccess- 

 ful, because the colonists died of the fever before a settlement could be 

 established. Thus the remnants of a people, who were distinguished 

 among the Volsci and Arretinii as warriors, and who improved upon 

 the science and taste of Greece and Tyre in the arts of peace, have 

 gradually wasted away before the ravages of the pestilence. The 

 genial climate allows the progress of vegetation through the winter, 

 when multitudes of shepherds and herdsmen descend from the Ap- 

 penines with their flocks and cattle, to pasture on the spontaneous 

 herbage : but during the summer, companies of wild horses, and 

 herds of black cattle, sweep over these immense pastures, revelling 

 at will in the produce of the fields. The voices or the footsteps of 

 men never interrupt these solitudes except in the ruined cities, and 

 an occasional hamlet in the valleys, which shelter a few manufactur- 

 ers of alabaster and alum. Even these employments are not fol- 

 lowed from March to November ; all is resigned to the dominion of 

 malaria, which " increases in proportion as the resistance of civiliza- 

 tion diminishes." 



But it is in the States of the Church that this pestilence exercises 

 its most hideous sway, and spreads the darkest ruin. The lands are 

 more fertile than the maremma of Tuscany ; fig trees and aloes grow 

 amongst the ruins ; vegetation is too luxuriant to be employed in 

 pasturage ; " the eye cannot penetrate the depth of the majestic 

 woods, and the imagination peoples their gloom with the Manes of 

 that ancient people who formerly rendered these solitudes illus- 

 trious." 



When the papal throne was established at Avignon in the begin- 

 ning of the fourteenth century, Rome was given up to the most des- 

 perate factions. Nothing can surpass the misery occasioned by 

 those civil wars. One ambitious family succeeded to another ; one 

 demagogue displaced another in such rapid succession, that when 

 Gregory XI. returned to Rome in 1377, he found that the country 

 was laid waste ; that the suburbs had disappeared ; that the walls, 

 in many places, were broken down, and that the diminished and dis- 



" I believe it was the plague, but am not certain. 



