Let us not fail to remember after all, that such severity as we use, quickens the desire of pleasing, and deadens the diffusion of immoral sentiments, or indelicate language, in England; where, I must add, for the honour of my country, that if such liberties were taken upon the stage as are frequent in the first ranks of Italian society, they would be hissed by those who paid only a shilling for their entrance:  so that affectation and a forced refinement may be considered as the bad leaden statues still left in our delicately-neat and highly-ornamented gardens; of which elegance and science are the white and red roses:  but to be possessed of their sweets, one must venture a little through the thorns.—­Thorns, though figurative, remind one of the cicala, a creature which leaves nothing else untouched here.  Surely their clamours and depredations have no equal.  I used to walk in the Boboli Gardens, defying the heat, till they had eaten up the little shade some hedges there afforded me; and till, by their incessant noise, all thought is disturbed, and no line presented itself to my memory but

    Sole sob ardenti resonant arbusta Cicadis[W];

[Footnote W: 
    While in the scorching sun I trace in vain
    Thy flying footsteps o’er the burning plain,
    The creaking locusts with my voice conspire,
    They fried with heat, and I with fierce desire.

DRYDEN.
]

till Mr. Merry’s sweet ode to summer here at Florence made one less discontented,

    To hear the light cicala’s ceaseless din,
    That vibrates shrill; or the near-weeping brook
    That feebly winds along,
    And mourns his channel shrunk.

    MERRY.

This animal has four wings, four eyes, and two membranes like parchment under the hard scales he is covered with; and these, it is said, create the uncommon noise he makes, by blowing them somewhat like bellows, to sharpen the sound; which, whatever it proceeds from, is louder than can be guessed at by those who have not heard it in Tuscany.  He is of the locust kind, an inch and a half long, and wonderfully light in proportion; though no small feeder, I should imagine, by the total destruction his noisy tribe make amongst the leaves, which are now wholly stript by them of all their verdure, the fibres only being left; and I observed yesterday evening, as we returned from airing, another strange deprivation practised on the mulberry leaves round the city, which being all forcibly torn away for the use of the silk-worms, make an odd fort of artificial winter near the town walls; and remind one of the wretched geese in Lincolnshire, plucked once a year for their feathers by their truly unfeeling proprietors.  I am told indeed, that both revegetate, though I trust neither tree nor bird can fail to experience fatal effects one day or other in consequence of so unnatural an operation.  Here is some ivy of uncommon