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The same sentiments inspired the verses in which Galeotto del Carretto, one of the most accomplished poets of Beatrice's court, celebrated Lodovico's improvements in this his favourite country house: "Vigevano, che gia fu gleba vile, Ha fatto adorno, e gli agri a quel contigui Ha coltivati con saper utile, E i steril campi, e al far fructo ambigui Fertili ha facto et abondanti prati, E d'acqua ticinèse tutti irigui."
Falat, is the region of sands in the immensity of steril wastes. But all these distinctions are arbitrary, and can be predicated of tracts of country lying on the North Coast of Africa, as well as the boundless Sahara. On the coast of Tripoli we have the oasis, the arid plain, and the groups of sand-hills of eternal sterility.
As I have mentioned something of the country between Botany-Bay and Port Jackson, I must farther observe, that in the neighbourhood of Sydney Cove, which is that part of this harbour in which Governor Phillip has fixed his residence, there are many spots of tolerably good land, but they are in general of but small extent; exclusive of those particular spots, it is rather a poor steril soil, full of stones; but near, and at the head of the harbour, there is a very considerable extent of tolerable land, and which may be cultivated without waiting for its being cleared of wood; for the trees stand very wide of each other, and have no underwood: in short, the woods on the spot I am speaking of resemble a deer park, as much as if they had been intended for such a purpose; but the soil appears to me to be rather sandy and shallow, and will require much manure to improve it, which is here a very scarce article; however, there are people whose judgment may probably be better than mine, that think it good land; I confess that farming has never made any part of my studies.
Let those who please believe that one man, without the intervention of arms not as a conqueror, but a friend could succeed in establishing a constitution, resting not upon laws, but manners not upon force, but usage utterly hostile to all the tastes, desires, and affections of human nature: moulding every the minutest detail of social life into one system that system offering no temptation to sense, to ambition, to the desire of pleasure, or the love of gain, or the propensity to ease but painful, hard, steril, and unjoyous; let those who please believe that a system so created could at once be received, be popularly embraced, and last uninterrupted, unbroken, and without exciting even the desire of change for four hundred years, without having had any previous foundation in the habits of a people without being previously rooted by time, custom, superstition, and character into their breasts.
A steril soil, a limited territory, a scanty population all these the drawbacks and disadvantages of nature the wonderful energy and confident daring of a free state might conceal in prosperity; but the first calamity could not fail to expose them to jealous and hostile eyes.
VIII. The conduct of the fable is as follows: two vast demons, Strength and Force, accompanied by Vulcan, appear in a remote plain of earth an unpeopled desert. There, on a steril and lofty rock, hard by the sea, Prometheus is chained by Vulcan "a reward for his disposition to be tender to mankind."
Far from the fertile fields and gorgeous capital of Lydia, amid steril mountains, inhabited by a simple and hardy race, rose the portentous star of the Persian Cyrus.
No where are critics more severe, on the one hand, against redundance that is steril, and on the other, respecting the essential composition of verse, which ought always to flow with grace, even when under restraint.
Does it not tell them, that a steril repentance will, even at the moment of death, disarm the celestial wrath; that it will purify the filthy souls of sinners? Do not even the priests, in some superstitions, arrogate to themselves the right of remitting to the dying the punishment due to the crimes committed during the course of a disorderly life?
VII. The construction of these vessels, the very sacrifice of the citizens, the general interest that must have attached to an undertaking that was at once novel in itself, and yet congenial not more to the passions of a people, who daily saw from their own heights the hostile rock of Aegina, "the eyesore of the Piraeus," than to the habits of men placed in a steril land that on three sides tempted to the sea all combined to assist Themistocles in his master policy a policy which had for its design gradually to convert the Athenians from an agricultural into a maritime people.
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