In Italy, so far at least as I have gone, there is no impertinent desire of appearing what one is not:  no searching for talk, and torturing expression to vary its phrases with something new and something fine; or else sinking into silence from despair of diverting the company, and taking up the opposite method, contriving to impress them with an idea of bright intelligence, concealed by modest doubts of our own powers, and stifled by deep thought upon abstruse and difficult topics.  To get quit of all these deep-laid systems of enjoyment, where

    To take our breakfast we project a scheme,
    Nor drink our tea without a stratagem,

like the lady in Doctor Young; the surest method is to drop into Italy; where a conversazione at Venice or Florence, after the society of London, or les petit soupers de Paris, where, in their own phrase, un tableau n’attend pas l’autre[Footnote:  One picture don’t wait for another.], is like taking a walk in Ham Gardens, or the Leasowes, after les parterres de Versailles ed i Terrazzi di Genoa.  We are affected in the house, but natural in the gardens.  Italians are natural in society, affected and constrained in the disposition of their grounds.  No one, however, is good or bad, or wise or foolish without a reason why.  Restraint is made for man, and where religious and political liberty is enjoyed to its full extent, as in Great Britain, the people will forge shackles for themselves, and lay the yoke heavy on society, to which, on the contrary, Italians give a loose, as compensation for their want of freedom in affairs of church or state.

It is, I think, observable of uncontradicted, homebred, and, as we say, spoiled children, that when a dozen of them get together for the purpose of passing a day in mutual amusement, they will make to themselves the strictest laws for their game, and rigidly punish whatever breach of rule has been made while the time allotted for diversion lasts:  but in a school of girls, strictly kept, at their hours of permitted recreation no distinct sounds can be heard through the general clamour of joy and confusion; nor does any thing come less into their heads than the notion of imposing regulations on themselves, or making sport out of the harsh sounds of rule and government.

Ridicule too points her arrows only among highly-polished societies—­Paris and London, in the first of which all wit is comprised in the power of ridiculing one’s neighbours, and in the other every artifice is put in practice to escape it.  In Italy no such terrors restrain conversation; no public censure pursues that fantastical behaviour which leads to no public offence; and as it is only fear which can beget falsehood, these people seek such behavior as naturally suits them; and in our theatrical phrase, they let the character come to them, they do not go to the character.