21st June 1786.

After rejoicing over my house and my friends; after asking a hundred questions, and hearing a hundred stories of those long left; after reciprocating common civilities, and talking over common topics, we observed how much the general look of Milan was improved in these last fifteen months; how the town was become neater, the ordinary people smarter, the roads round their city mended, and the beggars cleared away from the streets. We did not find however that the people we talked to were at all charmed with these new advantages: their convents demolished, their processions put an end to, the number of their priests of course contracted, and their church plate carried by cart-loads to the mint; holidays forbidden, and every saint’s name erased from the calendar, excepting only St. Peter and St. Paul; whilst those shopkeepers who worked for monasteries, and those musicians who sung or played in oratorios, are left to find employment how they can;—cloud the countenances of all, and justly; as such sudden and rough reforms shock the feelings of the multitude; offend the delicacy of the nobles; make a general stagnation of business and of pleasure, in a country where both depend upon religious functions; and terrify the clergy into no ill-grounded apprehensions of being found in a few years more wholly useless, and as such dismissed.—Well! whatever is done hastily, can scarcely be done quite well; and wherever much is done, a great part of it will doubtless be done wrong. A considerable portion of all this however will be confessed useful, and even necessary, when the hour of violence on one side, and prejudice on the other, is past away; as the fire of London has been found beneficial by those who live in the newly-restored town. Meantime I think the present precipitation indecent enough for my own part; a thousand little errors would burn out of themselves, were they suffered to die quietly away; and when the morning breaks in naturally, it is superfluous as awkward to put the stars out with one’s fingers, like the Hours in Guercino’s Aurora[38]. Whoever therefore will be at the pains a little to pick their principles, not grasp them by the bunch, will find as many unripe at one end, I believe, as there are rotten at the other: for could we see these hasty innovators erecting public schools for the instruction of the poor, or public work-houses for their employment; did they unlock the treasure-house of true religion, by publishing the Bible in every dialect of their dominions, and oblige their clergy to read it with the souls committed to their charge;—I should have a better idea of their sincerity and disinterested zeal for God’s glory, than they give by tearing down his statues, or those of his blessed Virgin Mother, which Carlo BorromÆo set up.

The folly of hanging churches with red damask would surely fade away of itself; among people of good sense and good taste; who could not long be simple enough to suppose, that concealing Greek architecture with such transient finery, and giving to God’s house the air of a tattered theatre, could in any wife promote his service, or their salvation. Many superstitious and many unmeaning ceremonies do die off every day, because unsupported by reason or religion: Doctor Carpanni, a learned lawyer, told me but to-day, that here in Lombardy they had a custom, no longer ago than in his father’s time, of burying a great lord or possessor of lands, with a ceremony of killing on his grave the favourite horse, dog, &c. that he delighted in when alive; a usage borrowed from the Oriental Pagans, who burn even the widows of the deceased upon their funeral pile; and among our monuments in Westminster Abbey, set up in the days of darkness, I have minded now and then the hawk and greyhound of a nobleman lying in marble at his feet; some of our antiquarians should tell us if they killed them.

Another odd affinity strikes me. Half a century ago there was an annual procession at Shrewsbury, called by way of pre-eminence Shrewsbury Show; when a handsome young girl of about twelve years old rode round the town, and wished prosperity to every trade assembled at the fair: I forget what else made the amusement interesting; but have heard my mother tell of the particular beauty of some wench, who was ever after called the Queen, because she had been carried in triumph as such on the day of Shrewsbury Show. Now if nobody gives a better derivation of that old custom, it may perhaps be found a dreg of the Romish superstition, which as many years ago, in various parts of Italy, prompted people to dress up a pretty girl, on the 25th of March, or other season dedicated to the Virgin, and carry her in procession about the streets, singing litanies to her, &c. and ending, in profaneness of admiration, a day begun in idleness and folly. At Rome however no such indecorous absurdities are encouraged: we saw a beautiful figure of the Madonna, dressed from a picture of Guido Rheni, borne about one day; but no human creature in the street offered to kneel, or gave one the slightest reason to say or suppose that she was worshipped: some sweet hymns were sung in her praise, as the procession moved slowly on; but no impropriety could I discern, who watched with great attention.

It is time to have done with all this though, and go see the Ambrosian library; which, as far as I can judge, is perfectly respectable. The Prefect’s politeness kindly offered my curiosity any thing I was particularly anxious to see, and the learned Mr. Dugati was exceedingly obliging. The old Virgil preserved here with Petrarch’s marginal notes in his own hand-writing, interest one much; this little narration, evidently written for his own fancy to feed on, of the day and hour he first felt the impression of Laura’s charms, is the best proof of his genuine passion for that lady, as he certainly never meant for our inspection what he wrote down in his own Virgil. Here is likewise the valuable MS. of Flavius Josephus the Jewish historian, a curiosity deservedly admired and esteemed: it is kept with peculiar care I think, and is in high preservation: A Syriac bible too, very fine indeed, from which I understand they are now going to print off some copies. I have been taught by the scholars not to think a Syriac bible of the Samaritan text so very rare; but the Septuagint in that language is so exceedingly scarce, that many are persuaded this is the only one extant; and as our Lord, in his quotations from the old law, usually cites that version, it is justly preferred to all others. Leonardo da Vinci’s famous folio preserved in this library, for which James I. of England offered three thousand ducats, an event recorded here over the chest that contains it on a tablet of marble, deserves attention and reverence: nothing seems above, nothing below, the observation of that prodigious genius. He has in this, and other volumes of the same curious work, apparently put down every painter’s or mathematician’s thought that crossed his imagination. It is a Leonardiana[39], the common-place book of a great and wise man; nor did our British sovereign ever with more good sense evince his true love of learning, than by his princely offer of its purchase.

Till now the looking at friends, and rarities, and telling old stories, and seeing new sights, &c. has lulled my conscience asleep, nor suffered me to recollect that, dazzled by the brightness of the Corregios at Parma, the account of their press, the finest in Europe, and infinitely superior to our Baskerville, escaped me. They have a glorious collection too of bibles in their library; their illuminations are most delicate, and their bindings pompous, but they possess a modern MS. of such singular perfection, that none of those finished when chirography was more cultivated than it is now, can at all pretend to compare with it. The characters are all gilt, the leaves vellum, the miniatures finished with a degree of nicety rarely found in union, as here, with the utmost elegance and taste. No words I can use will give a just idea of this little MS.: whoever is a true fancier of such things, would find his trouble well repaid, if he left London only to look at it. The book contains private devotions for the duchess with suitable ornaments—I will talk no more of it.

The fine colossal figure of the Virgin Mary in heaven crowned by her Son’s hand, painted in the cieling of some church at Parma, has a bad light, and it is difficult to comprehend its sublimity. One approaches nearer to understand the merits of that singular performance when one looks at Caracci’s copy of it, kept in the Ambrosian library here at Milan. But how was I surprised to hear related as a fact happening to him, the old story told to all who go to see St. Paul’s cathedral in London, of our Sir James Thornhill, who, while he was intent on painting the cupola, walked backward to look at the effect, till, arriving at the very edge of the scaffold, he was in danger of dashing his brains out by falling from that horrible height upon the marble below, had not some bystander possessed readiness of mind to run suddenly forward, and throw a pencil daubed in white stuff which stood near him, at the figure Sir James’s eyes were fixed on, which provoked the painter to follow him threatening, and so saved his life. Could such an accident have happened twice? and is it likely that to either of these persons it ever happened at all? Would such men as Annibal Caracci and Sir James Thornhill have exposed themselves upon an undefended scaffold, without railing it round to prevent their tumbling down, when engaged in a work that would take them many days, nay weeks, to finish it? Impossible! in every nation traditionary tales shake my belief exceedingly; and what astonishes one more than it disgusts, if possible, is to see the same story fitted to more nations than one.

It is now many years since a counsellor related at my house in Surrey the following narration, of which I had then no doubts, or idea of suspicion; for he said he was himself witness to the fact, and laid the scene at St. Edmondsbury, a town in our county of Suffolk: how a man accused of murder, with every corroborating circumstance, escaped by the steady resolution of one juryman, who could not, by any arguments or remonstrances of his companions, be prevailed on to pronounce the fellow guilty, though every possible circumstance combined to ascertain him as the person who took the deceased’s life; and how, after all was over, the juryman confessed privately to the judge, that he himself, by such and such an accident, had killed the farmer, of whose death the other stood accused. This event, true or false, of which I have since found the rudiments in a French Recueil, was told me at Venice by a gentleman as having happened there, under the immediate inspection of a friend he named. Quere, whether any such thing ever happened at all in any time or place? but laxity of narration, and contempt of all exactness, at last extinguish one’s best-founded confidence in the lips of mortal man. It is, however, clearly proved, that no duty is so difficult as to preserve truth in all our transactions, while no transaction is so trifling as to preclude temptation of infringing it: for if there is no interest that prompts a liar, his vanity suffices; nor will we mention the suggestions of cowardice, malignity, or any species of vice, when, as in these last-mentioned stories, many fictions are invented by well-meaning people, who hope to prevent mischief, inculcate the possibility of hanging innocence, &c. and violate truth out of regard to virtue.

Well, well! our good Italians here will not condescend to live or lie, if now and then they scruple not to tell one. No man in this country pretends either to tenderness or to indifference, when he feels no disposition to be indifferent or tender; and so removed are they from all affectation of sensibility or of refinement, that when a conceited Englishman starts back in pretended rapture from a Raphael he has perhaps little taste for, it is difficult to persuade these sincerer people that his transports are possibly put on, only to deceive some of his countrymen who stand by, and who, if he took no notice of so fine a picture, would laugh, and say he had been throwing his time away, without making even the common and necessary improvements expected from every gentleman who travels through Italy; yet surely it is a choice delight to live where the everlasting scourge held over London and Bath, of what will they think? and what will they say? has no existence; and to reflect that I have now sojourned near two years in Italy, and scarcely can name one conceited man, or one affected woman, with whom, in any rank of life, I have been in the least connected.

In Naples we see the works of nature displayed; at Rome and Florence we survey the performances of art; at every place in Italy there is much worthy one’s esteem, said the Venetian Resident one day very elegantly; and at Milan there is the Abate Bossi. Should I forbear to add my testimony to such talents and such virtue, which, expanded by nature to the wide range of human benevolence, he knows how to concentre occasionally for the service of private friendship, how great would be my ingratitude and neglect, while no character ever so completely resembled his, as that of the famous Hough well known in England by the title of the good Bishop of Worcester. His ingenuity in composing and placing these words on the 13th of May 1775, is perhaps one of his least valuable jeux d’esprit; but pretty, when one knows that on that day the empress was born, on that day the archduke arrived at Milan on a visit to his brother, and on that day the duchess was delivered of a son. The words may be read our way or the Chinese:

What a foolish thing it is in princes to give pain in a place like this, where all are disposed to derive pleasure even from praising them! There is a natural loyalty among the Lombards, which oppression can scarcely extinguish, or tyranny destroy; and, as I have said a thousand times, they pretend to love no one; they do love their rulers; and, rather grieve than growl at the afflictions caused by their rapacity.

I was told that I should find few discriminations of character in Italy; but the contrary proves true, and I do not wonder at it. Among those people who, by being folded or driven all together in flocks as the French are, with one fashion to serve for the whole society, a man may easily contract a similarity of manners by rubbing down each asperity of character against his nearest neighbour, no less plastic than himself; but here, where there is little apprehension of ridicule, and little spirit of imitation, monotonous tediousness is almost sure to be escaped. The very word polite comes from polish I suppose; and at Paris the place where you enjoy le veritable vernis St. Martin in perfection, the people can scarcely be termed polished, or even varnished: they are glazed; and everything slides off the exterieur of course, leaving the heart untouched. It is the same thing with other productions of nature; in caverns we see petrifactions shooting out in angular and excentric forms, because in Castleton Hole dame Nature has fair play; while the broad beach at Brighthelmstone, evermore battered by the same ocean, exhibits only a heap of round pebbles, and those round pebbles all alike.

But we must cease reflections, and begin describing again. We have got a country house for the remaining part of the hot weather upon the confines of the Milanese dominions, where Switzerland first begins to bow her bleak head, and soften gradually in the sunshine of Italian fertility. From every walk and villa round this delightful spot, one sees an assemblage of beauties rarely to be met with: and there is a resemblance in it to the Vale of Llwydd, which makes it still more interesting to me. But we have obtained leave to spend a week of our destined Villeggiatura at the BorromÆan palace, situated in the middle of Lago Maggiore, on the island so truly termed Isola Bella; every step to which from our villa at Varese teems with new beauties, and only wants the sea to render it, in point of mere landscape, superior to any thing we have seen yet.

Our manner of living here is positively like nothing real, and the fanciful description of oriental magnificence, with Seged’s retirement in the Rambler to his palace on the Lake Dambea, is all I ever read that could come in competition with it: for here is one barge full of friends from Milan, another carrying a complete band of thirteen of the best musicians in Italy, to amuse ourselves and them with concerts every evening upon the water by moonlight, while the inhabitants of these elysian regions who live upon the banks, come down in crowds to the shores glad to receive additional delight, where satiety of pleasure seems the sole evil to be dreaded.

It is well known that the wild mountains of Savoy, the rich plains of Lombardy, the verdant pastures of Piedmont, and the pointed Alps of Switzerland, form the limits of Lago Maggiore: where, upon a naked rock, torn I trust from some surrounding hill, or happily thrown up in the middle of the water by a subterranean volcano, the Count BorromÆo, in the year 1613, began to carry earth; and lay out a pretty garden, which from that day has been perpetually improving, till an appearance of eastern grandeur which it now wears, is rendered still more charming by all the studied elegance of art, and the conveniencies of common life. The palace is constructed as if to realise Johnson’s ideas in his Prince of Abyssinia: the garden consists of ten terraces; the walls of which are completely covered with orange, lemon, and cedrati trees, whose glowing colours and whose fragrant scent are easily discerned at a considerable distance, and the perfume particularly often reaches as far as to the opposite shore: nor are standards of the same plants wanting. I measured one not the largest in the grove, which had been planted one hundred and five years; it was a full yard and a quarter round. There were forty-six of them set near each other, and formed a delightful shade. The cedrati fruit grows as large as a late romana melon with us in England; and every thing one sees, and every thing one hears, and every thing one tastes, brings to one’s mind the fortunate islands and the golden age. Walks, woods, and terraces within the island, and a prospect of unequalled variety without, make this a kind of fairy habitation, so like something one has seen represented on theatres, that my female companion cried out as we approached the place, “If we go any nearer now, I am sure it will all vanish into air.” There is solidity enough however: a little village consisting of eighteen fishermen’s houses, and a pretty church, with a dozen of well-grown poplars before it, together with the palace and garden, compose the territory, which commodiously contains two hundred and fifty souls, as the circuit is somewhat more than a measured mile and a half, but not two miles in all: and we have cannons to guard our Calypso-like dominion, for which Count BorromÆo pays tribute to the king of Sardinia; but has himself the right of raising men upon the main land, and of coining money at Macau, a little town amid the hollows of these rocks, which present their irregular fronts to the lake in a manner surprisingly beautiful. He has three other islets on the same water, for change of amusement; of which that named la Superiore is covered with a hamlet, and l’Isola Madre with a wood full of game, guinea fowl, and common poultry; a summer-house beside furnished with chintz, and containing so many apartments, that I am told the uncle of the present possessor, having quarrelled with his wife, and resolving in a pet to leave the world, shut himself up on that little spot of earth, and never touched the continent, as I may call it, for the last seventeen years of his life. Let me add, that he had there his church and his chaplain, three musical professors in constant pay, and a pretty yatcht to row or sail, and fetch in friends, physicians, &c. from the main land. His nephew has not the same taste at all, seldom spending more than a week, and that only once a-year, among his islands, which are kept however quite in a princely style: the family crest, a unicorn, made in white marble, and of colossal greatness, proudly overlooking ten broad terraces which rise in a pyramidal form from the water: each wall richly covered with orange and lemon trees, and every parapet concealed under thickly-flowering shrubs of incessant variety, as if every climate had been culled, to adorn this tiny spot. More than a hundred beds are made in the palace, which has likewise a grotto floor of infinite ingenuity, and beautiful from being happily contrasted against the general splendour of the house itself. I have seen no such effort of what we call taste since I left England, as these apartments on a level with the lake exhibit, being all roofed and wainscotted with well-disposed shellwork, and decorated with fountains in a lively and pleasing manner. The library up stairs had many curious books in it—a Camden’s Britannia particularly, translated into Spanish; an Arabic Bible worthy of the Bodleian collection, and well-chosen volumes of natural history to a very serious degree of expence. Painting is not the first or second boast of Count BorromÆo, but there are some tolerable landscapes by Tempesta, and three famous pictures of Luca Giordano, well known in London by the general diffusion of their prints, representing the Rape of the Sabines, the Judgment of Paris, and the Triumph of Galatea. These large history pieces adorn the walls of the vast room we dine in; where, though we never sit down fewer than twenty or twenty-five people to table, all seem lost from the greatness of its size, till the concert fills it in the evening.

It is the garden however more than the palace which deserves description. He who has the care of it was born upon the island, and never strayed further than four miles, he tells me, from the borders of his master’s lake. Sure he must think the fall of man a fable: he lives in Eden still. How much must such a fellow be confounded, could he be carried blind-folded in the midst of winter to London or to Paris! and set down in Fleet-street or Rue St. HonorÉ! That he understands his business so as to need no tuition from the inhabitants of either city, may be seen by a fig-tree which I found here ingrafted on a lemon; both bear fruit at the same moment, whilst a vine curls up the stem of the lemon-tree, dangling her grapes in that delicious company with apparent satisfaction to herself. Another inoculation of a moss-rose upon an orange, and a third of a carnation upon a cedrati tree, gave me new knowledge of what the gardener’s art, aided by a happy climate, could perform. But when rowing round the lake with our band of music yesterday, we touched at a country seat upon the side which joins the Milanese dominion, and I found myself presented with currants and gooseberries by a kind family, who having made their fortune in Amsterdam, had imbibed some Dutch ideas; my mind immediately felt her elastic force, and willingly confessed that liberty, security, and opulence alone give the true relish to productions either of art or nature; that freedom can make the currants of Holland and golden pippins of Great Britain sweeter than all the grapes of Italy; while to every manly understanding some share of the government in a well-regulated state, with the every-day comforts of common life made durable and certain by the laws of a prosperous country, are at last far preferable to splendid luxuries precariously enjoyed under the consciousness of their possible privation when least expected by the hand of despotic power.

St. Carlo BorromÆo’s colossal statue in bronze fixed up at the place of his nativity by the side of this beautiful water, fifteen miles from l’Isola Bella, was our next object of curiosity. It is wonderfully well proportioned for its prodigious magnitude, which, though often measured and well known, will never cease to astonish travellers, while twelve men can be easily contained in his head only, as some of our company had the curiosity to prove; but repented their frolic, as the metal heated by such a sun became insupportable. Abate Bianconi bid me remark that it was just the height of twelve men, each six feet high; that it is but just once and a half less than that erected by Nero, which gives name to the Roman Colosseo; that it is to be seen clearly at the distance of twelve miles, though placed to no advantage, as situation has been sacrificed to the greater propriety of setting it up upon the place where he was actually born, whose memory they hold, and justly, in such perfect veneration. I returned home persuaded that the cardinal’s dress, though an unfavourable one to pictures, is very happily adapted to a colossal statue, as the three cloaks or petticoats made a sort of step-ladder drapery which takes off exceedingly from the offence that is given by too long lines to the eye.

We returned to our enchanted palace with music playing by our side: I never saw a party of pleasure carried on so happily. The weather was singularly bright and clear, the moon at full, the French-horns breaking the silence of the night, invited echo to answer them. The nine days (and we enjoyed seventeen or eighteen hours out of every twenty-four) seemed nine minutes. When we came home to our country-house in the Varesotto, verses and sonnets saluted our arrival, and congratulated our wedding-day.

The Madonna del Monte was the next show which called us abroad; it is within a few miles of our present sweet habitation, is celebrated for its prospect, and is indeed a very astonishing spot of ground, exhibiting at one view the three cities of Turin, Milan, and Genoa; and leading the eye still forward into the South of France. The lakes, which to those who go o’pleasuring upon them, seem like seas, and very like the mouth of our river Dart, where she disgorges her elegantly-ornamented stream into the harbour at Kingsweare, here afford too little water in proportion, though five in number, and the largest fifty miles round. I scarcely ever saw so much land within the eye from any place. That the road should be adorned with chapels up the mountain is less strange: there is a church dedicated to the Virgin at top. We have one here in Italy in every district almost, as the rage of worshipping on high places, so expressly and repeatedly forbidden in scripture, has lasted surprisingly in the world. Every resting-place is marked, and decorated with statues cut in wood, and painted to imitate human life with very extraordinary skill. They are capital performances of their kind, and most resemble, but I think excel, Mrs. Wright’s finest figures in wax. A convent of nuns, situated on the summit of the hill, where these chapels end in an exceeding pretty church, entertained our large party with the most hospitable kindness; gave us a handsome dinner and delicious dessert. We diverted the ladies with a little concert in return, and passed a truly delightful day.

All the environs of this Varesotto are very charmingly varied with mountains, lakes, and cultivated life; the only fault in our prospect is the want of water. Had I told my companions of yesterday perhaps, that the view from Madonna del Monte reminded me of Chirk Castle Hill in North Wales, they would have laughed; yet from that extraordinary spot are to be distinctly seen several fertile counties, with many great, and many small towns, and a most extensive landscape, watered by the large and navigable rivers Severn and Dee, roughened by the mountains of Merionethshire, and bounded by the Irish sea: I think that view has scarce its equal any where; and, if any where, it is here in the vicinity of Varese, where many gay villas interspersed contribute to variegate and enliven a scene highly finished by the hand of Nature, and wanting little addition from her attendant Art.

Of the noblemen’s feats in the neighbourhood it may indeed be remarked, that however spacious the house, and however splendid the furniture may prove upon examination, however pompous the garden may be to the first glance, and the terraces however magnificent,—spiders are seldom excluded from the mansion, or weeds from the pleasure-ground of the possessor. A climate so warm would afford some excuse for this nastiness, could one observe the inhabitants were discomposed at such an effect from a good cause, or if one could flatter one’s self that they themselves were hurt at it; but when they gravely display an embroidered bed or counterpane worthy of Arachne’s fingers before her metamorphosis, covered over by her present labours, who can forbear laughing?—The gardener in two minutes arriving to assist you up slopes, all flourishing with cat’s-tail and poppy; while your friends cry,—“Here, this is nature! is it not? pure nature!—Tutto naturale si, secondo l’uso Inglese[40].”

Well! we have really passed a prodigiously gay villegiatura here in this charming country, where the snowy cap of the gros St. Bernard cools the air, though at so great a distance; and we have the pleasure of seeing Switzerland, without the pain of feeling its cold, or the fatigue of climbing its glacieres: the Alps of the Grisons rise up like a fortification behind us; the sun glows hot in our rich and fertile valleys, and throws up every vegetable production with all the poignant flavour that Summer can bestow; nor is shade wanting from the walnut and large chesnut trees, under which we often dine, and sing, and play at tarocco, and hear the horns and clarinets, while sipping our ice or swallowing our lemonade. The cicala now feels the genial influence of that heat she requires, but her voice here is weak, compared to the powers she displayed so much to our disturbance in Tuscany; and the lucciola has lost much of her scintillant beauty, but she darts up and down the hedges now and then. Here is an emerald-coloured butterfly, whose name I know not, plays over the lakes and standing pools, in a very pleasing abundance; the most exquisitely-tinted Æphemera frolic before one all day long; and Antiope flutters in every parterre, and shares the garden sweets with a pale primrose-coloured creature of her own kind, whose wings are edged with brown, and, if I can remember right, bears the name of hyale. But we are not yet past the residence of scorpions, which certainly do commit suicide when provoked beyond all endurance; a story I had always heard, but never gave much credit to.

But I am disturbed from writing my book by the good-humoured gaiety of our cheerful friends, with whom we never sit down fewer than fourteen or fifteen to table I think, and surely never rise from it without many a genuine burst of honest merriment undisguised by affectation, unfettered by restraint. Our gentlemen make improviso rhymes, and cut comical faces; go out to the field after dinner, and play at a sort of blindman’s buff, which they call breaking the pan; nor do the low ones in company arrange their minds as I see in compliment to the high ones, but tell their opinions with a freedom I little expected to find: mixed society is very rare among them, almost unknown it seems; but when they do mix at a country place like this, the great are kind, to do them justice, and the little not servile. They are wise indeed in making society easy to them, for no human being suffers solitude so ill as does an Italian. An English lady once made me observe, that a cat never purs when she is alone, let her have what meat and warmth she will; I think these social-spirited Milanese are like her, for they can hardly believe that there is existing a person, who would not willingly prefer any company to none: when we were at the islands three weeks ago,—“A charming place,” says one of our companions,—“CioÈ con un mondo d’amici cosi[41].”—“But with one’s own family, methinks,” said I, “and a good library of books, and this sweet lake to bathe in:”—“O!” cried they all at once, “Dio ne liberi[42].”—This is national character.

Why there are no birds of the watery kind, coots, wild ducks, cargeese, upon these lakes, nobody informs me: I have been often told that of Geneva swarms with them, and it is but a very few miles off: our people though have little care to ascertain such matters, and no desire at all to investigate effects and causes; those who study among them, study classic authors and learn rhetoric; poetry too is by no means uncultivated at Milan, where the Abate Parini’s satires are admirable, and so esteemed by those who themselves know very well how to write, and how to judge: common philosophy (la physique, as the French call it), geography, astronomy, chymistry, are oddly left behind somehow; and it is to their ignorance of these matters that I am apt to impute Italian credulity, to which every wonder is welcome.

We have now passed one day in Switzerland however, rowing to the little town Lugano over its pretty lake. The mountains at the end are a neat miniature of Vesuvius, Somma, &c.; and the situation altogether looks as a picture of Naples would look, if painted by Brughuel; but not so full of figures. A fanciful traveller too might be tempted to think he could discern some streaks of liberty in the manners of the people, if it were but in the inn-keeper at whose house we dined; this may however be merely my own prejudice, and somebody told me it was so.

We were shewn on one side the water as we went across, a small place called Campioni, which is feudo Imperiale, and governed by the Padre Abate of a neighbouring convent, who has power even over the lives of his subjects for six years; at the expiration of which term another despot of the day is chosen—appointed I should have said; and the last returns to his original state, amenable however for any very shocking thing he may have done during the course of his dictatorship; and no complaint has been ever made yet of any such governor so circumstanced and appointed, whose conduct is commonly but too mild and clement. This I thought worth remarking, as consolatory to one’s feelings.

Lugano meantime scorns absolute authority: our Cicerone there, in reply to the question asked in Italy three times a-day I believe—Che Principe fÀ qui la sua residenza?[43]—replied, that they were plagued with no Principi at all, while the thirteen Cantons protected all their subjects; and though, as the man expressed it, only half of them were Christians, and the other half Protestants; no church or convent had ever wanted respect; while their town regularly received a monthly governor from every canton, and was perfectly contented with this ambulatory dominion. Here was the first gallows I have seen these two years. They have a pretty commerce too at Lugano for the size of the place, and the shopkeepers shew that officiousness and attention seldom observed in arbitrary states, where

soon leads people to neglect the trouble of getting, for the pleasure of spending their money. One therefore sees the inhabitants of Italian cities for the most part merry and cheerful, or else pious and penitent; little attentive to their shops, but easily disposed to loiter under their mistress’s window with a guitar, or rove about the streets at night with a pretty girl under their arm, singing as they go, or squeaking with a droll accent, if it is the time for masquerades. Fraud, avarice, ambition, are the vices of republican states and a cold climate; idleness, sensuality, and revenge, are the weeds of a warm country and monarchical governments. If these people are not good, they at least wish they were better; they do not applaud their own conduct when their passions carry them too far; nor rejoice, like old Moneytrap or Sir Giles Overreach, in their successful sins: but rather say with Racine’s hero, translated by Philips, that

They beat their bosoms at the feet of a crucifix in the street, with no more hypocrisy than they beat a tambourine there; perhaps with no more effect neither, if no alteration of behaviour succeeds their contrition: yet when an Englishman (who is probably more ashamed of repenting than of sinning) accuses them of false pretensions to pious fervour, he wrongs them, and would do well to repent himself.

But a natural curiosity seen at Milan this 16th day of August 1786, leads my mind into another channel. I went to wait upon and thank the lady, or the relations of the lady, who lent us her house at Varese, and make our proper acknowledgments; and at that visit saw something very uncommon surely: though I remember Doctor Johnson once said, that nobody had ever seen a very strange thing; and challenged the company (about seventeen people, myself among them) to produce a strange thing;—but I had not then seen Avvocato B——, a lawyer here at Milan, and a man respected in his profession, who actually chews the cud like an ox; which he did at my request, and in my presence: he is apparently much like another tall stout man, but has many extraordinary properties, being eminent for strength, and possessing a set of ribs and sternum very surprising, and worthy the attention of anatomists: his body, upon the slightest touch, even through all his clothes, throws out electric sparks; he can reject his meals from his stomach at pleasure, and did absolutely in the course of two hours, the only two I ever passed in his company, go through, to oblige me, the whole operation of eating, masticating, swallowing, and returning by the mouth, a large piece of bread and a peach. With all this conviction, nothing more was wanting; but I obtained beside, the confirmation of common friends, who were willing likewise to bear testimony of this strange accidental variety. What I hear of his character is, that he is a low-spirited, nervous man; and I suppose his ruminating moments are spent in lamenting the singularities of his frame:—be this how it will, we have now no time to think any more of them, as we are packing up for a trip to Bergamo, a city I have not yet seen.