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CARRARA AND CHIAVARI.

THE inhabitants of the principality of Lucca are among the most intelligent of the Italians, and their territory is the best cultivated. The route to Genoa overland possesses great interest; nowhere is the traveller better recompensed for the fatigue which must be endured on a road impassable for carriages, but which is sufficiently well supplied with post horses.

The country, after leaving Lucca, becomes more beautiful and picturesque, when we begin to wind through the hills and by the banks of the rapid streams, as we advance towards the Appenines.

The first place of great curiosity that we saw was Carrara, which is embosomed in the moun

tains. Numerous labourers in statuary marble> reside here for the convenience of choosing their blocks from the neighbouring quarries. The marble is of the purest white, and the quarries apparently inexhaustible, for they have been worked since the time of the Romans.

That a large portion of the population of any country should gain their subsistence by the arts of statuary and painting, proves certainly a very polished state of society; but is far less conducive to its moral interests than employments, which excite less our natural sensibilities. The imagination is at all times a dangerous enemy to sober principle; and in proportion as the pictures which fill it, and which it combines and multiplies with infinite address and rapidity, are touching and refined, a colouring and enchantment are given to those passions, which at best have a dubious alliance with virtue.

Ab

stractedly speaking, the imitation of the beau

G

ty of the human figure is a most suitable exercise of talent; but he must be little acquainted with the operation of the most powerful incentives to irregular emotions, who does not know that it needs not the picturing of the beau ideal, to enable sense to vanquish conscience. It may seem Gothic to ascribe the prevalent immoralities of the Italians to their taste in the fine arts; but as every thing good has been perverted, painting and sculpture, as well as poetry, have not escaped the general infection. Cause and effect operate reciprocally; artists choose models in which vicious examples are exhibited, because they are themselves vicious; and the spectators, who might at first have been chiefly attracted by the exhibition of talent, now advance to a sympathy with vice itself.

But it is impossible to enter the galleries of any palace, rich in the works of genius, without perceiving that artists now infringe upon the

first laws of nature, and offend against the best feelings of delicacy. In our age, the customs could not have been originated which now prevail among them; according to which, those descriptions are lawful and proper in the painter and sculptor, which would condemn the poet to the company of the shameless and vulgar. The copying the fashion set in the Apollo Belvidere and the Venus de Medicis, is counted a sufficient warrant for such transgressions of decency as our religion must ever abhor, however it suited the paganism of Rome and Athens.

It were better to walk backward with the pall upon our shoulders to conceal the disgraceful image, than to look at what is daily exhibited in the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence to some fifty striplings drawing from the life. That which is wrong in essence must be wrong presentation; and the very plea, that the frequency of beholding naked statues, and pictures without drapery, prevents all immoral im

in re

pression, proves, that without this frequency, the evil effect exists; and we may doubt whether that which is evil in the beginning, can be good in the end.

I believe that this universal license of artists could not have been taken, had it not commenced in a stage of society widely distant from ours; when the female sex had no influence upon its habits; when religion was sensuality deified; when lust was enshrined, and infamous passion personified and worshipped; when Phidias selected his models, and afterwards adored his own workmanship. The excellence which he attained in his unholy study should not carry us in our imitation beyond the line of decency; nor does it justify what we continually see in the studii of artists on either side of the Alps.

That this is a subject of grave interest, cannot be denied by any one who has been in Italy, where the passages in the houses, and the walks in the gardens, are ornamented with statues