dered fastidious by a quarter
of a century's sojourn in England, complains, in his recent work on
his native country, of the tawdriness and dirt of the Turin _cafés_,
they were so superior, in my humble scale of comparison, to those of
the other parts of Italy where I had resided, that I found them most
welcome and inviting. There was a luxurious sense of repose in looking
forth upon the fierce sunshine on the Piazza di Castello through
the softened twilight in which we sat, discussing, for the moderate
consideration of twenty centimes each, two pyramidical masses of _crême
à la vanille_, while plants and flowers in the window-sills, without
impeding the view of the busy life without, screened those within
from the gaze of the passers-by. In such an atmosphere the _dolce far
niente_ would have seemed likely to predominate, but I noticed in the
people as they came and went, in the earnestness with which they read
the newspapers, the quick, short sentences in which they commented
to each other on their contents, even while sipping the mixture of
coffee and chocolate which is the favourite beverage of the Turinese,
a certain air of decision and promptitude not elsewhere to be found
in Italy. Men of every grade were amongst them, from those pointed
out to me by the comtesse in a whisper as senators and deputies, to
some whose dress would have required no sumptuary laws to define their
position. I also observed that Italian was almost universally spoken,
the Piedmontese _patois_ comparatively rarely, French not at all.
This was an indication of the _café's_ politics. By the persevering
use or rejection of the Italian language, political sentiments in
this country can be pretty well ascertained. The ministry, bent on
its general adoption, have caused it to be substituted in the infant
schools for the native dialect, of all the dialects of the peninsula
the most guttural and the most mutilated, an innovation the wisdom
of which it requires thorough stiff-necked _codino_-ism not to
recognise. Instead of learning to r