The physician who attends them, and generally cures them, belongs to the middle class.

But as these professional men have fixed salaries, and as salaries resemble wages, contempt is thrown into the bargain.

Still the contempt is a magnanimous sort of contempt--that of a patron for his client.

At Paris, when an advocate pleads a prince's cause, it is the prince who is the client: at Rome, it is the advocate.
But the individual who is visited by the most withering contempt of the Roman princes is the farmer, or _mercante di campagna_; and I don't wonder at it.
The _mercante di campagna_ is an obscure individual, usually very honest, very intelligent, very active, and very rich.

He undertakes to farm several thousand acres of land, pasture or arable as may be, which the prince would never be able to farm himself, because he neither knows how, nor has the means to do so.