The physician who attends them, and generally cures
them, belongs to the middle class. But as these professional men have
fixed salaries, and as salaries resemble wages, contempt is thrown
into the bargain. Still the contempt is a magnanimous sort of
contempt--that of a patron for his client. At Paris, when an advocate
pleads a prince's cause, it is the prince who is the client: at Rome,
it is the advocate.
But the individual who is visited by the most withering contempt of
the Roman princes is the farmer, or _mercante di campagna_; and I
don't wonder at it.
The _mercante di campagna_ is an obscure individual, usually very
honest, very intelligent, very active, and very rich. He undertakes to
farm several thousand acres of land, pasture or arable as may be,
which the prince would never be able to farm himself, because he
neither knows how, nor has the means to do so. Upon this princely
territory the farmer lets loose, in the most disrespectful manner,
droves of bullocks, and cows, and horses, and flocks of sheep. Should
his lease permit him, he cultivates a square league or so, and sows it
with wheat. When harvest-time arrives, down from the mountains troop a
thousand or twelve hundred peasants, who overrun the prince's land in
the farmer's service. The corn is reaped, threshed in the open field,
put into sacks, and carted away. The prince sees it go by, as he
stands on his princely balcony. He learns that a man of the _mezzo
ceto_, a man who passes his life on horseback, has harvested on his
land so many sacks of corn, which have produced him so much money.
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