In many places they have the monopoly of the wine and spirit shops, and retail trade generally; and as they are always willing to advance money on usury, and are more intelligent and better educated than the ordinary peasant, there is little doubt that in a country where the large landowners are proverbially extravagant, and the peasant proprietors needy, the soil would soon fall into the hands of the Jews were it not for the stringent laws which prevent them from owning land outside the towns.
It is probable that what he had suffered during his first year in London had often reminded him of some parts of the satire in which Juvenal had described the misery and degradation of a needy man of letters, lodged among the pigeons' nests in the tottering garrets which overhung the streets of Rome.
This experiment met with little more success than his former attempts, and in 1869 he returned to Paris, where he lived in retirement, needy and forgotten, till his death in 1893.
The measures taken to relieve distress had allured a multitude of needy and desperate men from the surrounding country.
At first in Sicily and afterwards throughout Italy the Ghibellines gave them a warm welcome; the rigorists and the malcontents who had either left the church or were on the point of leaving it, were attracted by these communities of needy rebels; and the tribune Rienzi was at one time disposed to join them.
