light scoffer understand me. I speak of the soul, and of spiritual and
moral matters. All my good fortune, and I have had much, was due to my
ability to indulge that spiritual urgency of mine, and to my having been
dealt with as I desired to deal; all my troubles, and they were not few,
were bruises inflicted upon my simple soul by others, who opposed their
mail-clad might to my tenderness. Not once, but many times, in the
course of this narration, I have had occasion to show how the poor, the
outcast, the forsaken and the very young entreated me, as one must
suppose the Saviour of us all, His Divine Mother, and the guardian
angels would entreat each other or us. The proud, the greatly
circumstanced, the rich, the enclosed, the sitters in chief seats,
wounded me, shocked, rebuffed, cast me down. But in this land the Genius
of the place delights only to dwell in the hearts of the poor. They are
the true Tuscan nations, and in spite of governments they remain the
salt of the earth and the heirs of all that is good in it. In England it
is not so. There the poor are serfs; there feudalism forbids
intercourse; there the weak suspect (and rightly) the benevolence of the
strong; and the strong can only be benevolent in proportion as they are
weak. Consider for a moment what flows from these axiomata; it will
result, I think, that Honour, Religion, and Love, the three fortresses
of the human soul, will be found deeply involved with them.

Honour, as I understand it, consists in the nice adjustment of what is
due to me from my neighbours, and to them from me. Here, among the poor,
where a native reserve has not grown, as a fungus upon it, a native
cant, where there is no desire to seem better than one is, and no belief
that one is so by seeming--here, I say, among the Tuscan poor, there is
never any difficulty, for here there is no excrescence to the
substantial quality of the soul, but precisely to the contrary, there
is, if anything, a denudation. The fault of the Tuscans is, perhaps, a