“Lord Fitzwilliam arrived here three days ago; he came to see me the next day, as all the English do, who are much surprised at the civilities and familiarity which I am with the noble ladies.  Everybody tells me ’tis what never was done but to myself; and I own I have a little vanity in it, because the French ambassador told me when I first came, that though the Procurator Grimani might persuade them to visit me, he defied me to enter into any sort of intimacy with them:  instead of which they call me out almost every day on some diversion or other, and are desirous to have me in all their parties of pleasure.  I am invited to-morrow to the Foscarini to dinner, which is to be followed by a concert and a ball, where I shall be the only stranger, though here are at present a great number come to see the regatta, which is fixed for the 29th of this month, N.S.  I shall see it at the Procurator Grimani’s, where there will be a great entertainment that day.  My own house is very well situated to see it, being on the Grand Canal; but I would not refuse him and his niece, since they seem desirous of my company, and I shall oblige some other ladies with my windows.  They are hired at a great rate to see the show.”

There was just one fly in the ointment.  “I am impatient to hear good sense pronounced in my native tongue; having only heard my language out of the mouths of boys and governors for these five months” (she complained to Lady Pomfret).  “Here are inundations of them broke in upon us this carnival, and my apartment must be their refuge; the greater part of them having kept an inviolable fidelity to the languages their nurses taught them; their whole business abroad (as far as I can perceive) being to buy new clothes, in which they shine in some obscure coffee-house, where they are sure of meeting only one another; and after the important conquest of some waiting gentlewoman of an opera queen, whom perhaps they remember as long as they live, return to England excellent judges of men and manners.  I find the spirit of patriotism so strong in me every time I see them, that I look on them as the greatest blockheads in nature; and, to say truth, the compound of booby and petit maitre makes up a very odd sort of animal.”

It was not until the middle of August (1740) that Lady Mary left Venice, going first to Bologna, where she stayed a day or two “to prepare for the dreadful passage of the Apennines.”  On her way to Florence, she visited the monastery of La Trappe—­her account of which may be given as a companion portrait to that of the nunnery printed in an earlier chapter.