We passed through Mantua the 18th of June, where nothing much attracted my notice, except a female figure in the street, veiled from head to foot, and covered wholly in black; she walked backward and forward along the same portion of the same street, from one to three o’clock, in the heat of the burning sun; her hand held out; but when I, more from curiosity than any better motive put money in it, she threw it silently away, and the beggars picked it up, while she held her hand again as before. This conduct, in any town of England, would be deemed madness or mischief; the woman would be carried before a magistrate to give an account of herself, should the mob forbear to uncase her till they came; or some charitable person would seize and carry her home, fill her pockets with money, and coax her out of the anecdotes of her past life to put in the Magazine; her print would be published, and many engravers struggle for its profits; the name at bottom, Annabella, or the Sable Matron; while novels would be written without end, and the circulating libraries would lend them out all the live-long day. Things are differently carried on however at Mantua: I asked one shopkeeper, and she gravely replied, “per divozione,” and took no further notice: another (to my inquiries, which appeared to him far odder than the woman’s conduct) said, The lady was possibly doing a little penance; that he had not minded her till I spoke, but that perhaps it might be some woman of fashion, who having refused a poor person roughly on some occasion, was condemned by her confessor to try for a couple of hours what begging was, and learn humanity from experience of evil. The idea charmed me; while the man coolly said, all this was only his conjecture; but that such things were done too often to attract attention; and hoped such virtue was not rare enough to excite wonder. My just applause of such sentiments was stopt by the laquais de place calling me to dinner; when he informed me, that he had asked about the person whose behaviour struck me so, and could now tell me all there was to be known; she was a lady of quality, he said, who had lost a dear friend on that day some years past, and that she wore black for two hours ever since upon its anniversary; but that she would now change her dress, and I should see her in the evening at the opera. My recollecting that if this were her case, I ought to have been keeping her company (as no one ever lost a friend so dear to them as was my incomparable mother, who likewise left me to mourn her loss on this day thirteen years), spoiled my appetite, and took from me all power of meeting the lady at the theatre.

We went again however to see Virgil’s field, and recollected that tenet nunc Parthenope; congratulated the giants on their superiority over Pietro de Cortona’s paltry creatures, in one of the Roman palaces; and drove forward to Parma, through bad roads enough.

This Mantua is a very disagreeable town; nor was Romeo wrong in lamenting his banishment to it; for though I will not say with him that—

yet it must be allowed that few places do unite such various excellencies, and that the contrast is very striking between that city and this.

Parma exhibits an appearance somewhat different from all the rest; yet we should scarcely have visited it but for the sake of the four surprising pictures it contains: the Madona della Scodella is nature itself; and St. Girolamo exhibits such a proof of fancy and fervour, as are almost inconceivable; the general effect, and the difficulty one has to take one’s eye off it, afford conviction of its superior merit, and greatly compensate for that taste, character, and expression, which are found only in the Caraccis and their school. Corregio was perhaps one of the most powerful geniusses that has appeared on earth; destitute of knowledge, or of the means of acquiring it, he has left glorious proofs of what uninstructed man may do, and is perhaps a greater honour to the human species, than those who, from fermenting erudition of various kinds, produce performances of more complicated worth. The Fatal Curiosity, and Pilgrim’s Progress, will live as long as the Prince of Abyssinia, or Les Avantures de Telemaque, perhaps: and who shall dare say, that Lillo, Bunyan, and Antonio Corregio, were not naturally equal to Johnson, Michael Angelo, and the Archbishop of Cambray?—Have I said enough, or can enough be ever said in praise of a painter, whose works the great Annibale Caracci delighted to study, to copy, and to praise?

Piacenza we found to offer us few objects of attention: an improvisatore, and not a very bad one, amused that time which would otherwise have been passed in lamenting our paucity of entertainment; while his artful praises of England put me in good humour, spite of the weather, which is too hot to bear. With all our lamentations about the heat however, here is no cicala on the trees, or lucciola in the hedges, as at Florence; the days are a little longer too, and the crepuscule less abrupt in its departure. How often, upon the Ponte della TrinitÁ, have I secretly regretted the long-drawn evenings of an English summer; when the dewy night-fall refreshes the air, and silent dusk brings on a train of meditations uninspired by Italian skies! In this decided country all that is not broad day is dark night; all that is not loud mirth, is penitence and grief; when the rain falls, it falls in a torrent; when the sun shines, it glows like a burning-glass; where the people are rich, they stick gems in their very walls, and make their chimneys of amethyst; where they are poor, they clasp your knees in an agony of pinching want, and display diseases which cannot be a day survived!

Talking on about Italy in which there is no mediocrity, and of England in which there is nothing else, we arrived at Lodi; where I began to rejoice in hearing the people cry no’ cor’ altr’ again, in reply to our commands; because we were now once more returned to the district and dialect of dear Milan, where we have cool apartments and warm friends; and where, after an absence of fifteen months, we shall again see those acquaintance with whom we lived much before; a sensation always delightfully soothing, even when one returns to less amiable scenes, and less productive of innocent pleasure than these have been to me. The consciousness of having, while at a distance, seen few people more agreeable than those one left behind; the natural thankfulness of one’s heart to God, for having preserved one’s life so as to see them again, expands philanthropy; and gives unaffected comfort in the restored society of companions long concealed from one by accident or distance.