In fact, he has multifarious
interests and seems to have known several languages besides the
classics. He can hit off a thing neatly, as, when contrasting our
sepulchral epitaphs with those of olden days, he says that the key-note
of ours is Hope, and of theirs, Peace; or "wherever we find a river in
this country (Calabria) we are sure to discover that it is a source of
danger and not of profit." He knew these southern torrents and
river-beds! He garners information about the Jewish and Albanian
colonies of South Italy; he studies Romaic "under one of the few Greeks
who survived the fatal siege of Missolonghi" and collects words of Greek
speech still surviving at Bova and Maratea (Maratea, by the way, has a
Phoenician smack; the Greeks must have arrived later on the scene, as
they did at Marathon itself).
A shrewd book, indeed. Like many of his countrymen, he was specially
bent on economic and social questions; he is driven to the prophetic
conclusion, in 1828, that "the government rests on a very insecure
basis, and the great mass of the intelligence of the country would
gladly welcome a change." Religion and schooling are subjects near his
heart and, in order to obtain a first-hand knowledge of these things in
Italy, he enters upon a friendship, a kind of intellectual flirtation,
with the Jesuits. That is as it should be. Extremes can always respect
one another. The Jesuits, I doubt not, learnt as much from Ramage as he
from them....
I wish I had encountered this book earlier.
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