growth, but I have seen larger both at Beaumaris castle in North Wales, and at the abbey of Glastonbury in Somersetshire:  but the great pines in the Caseine woods have, I suppose, no rival nearer than the Castagno a Cento Cavalli, mentioned by Mr. Brydone.  They afford little shade or shelter from heat however, as their umbrella-like covering is strangely small in proportion to their height and size; some of them being ten, and some twelve feet in diameter.  These venerable, these glorious productions of nature are all now marked for destruction however; all going to be put in wicker baskets, and feed the Grand Duke’s fires.  I saw a fellow hewing one down to-day, and the rest are all to follow;—­the feeble Florentines had much ado to master it;

    Seemed the harmful hatchet to fear,
    And to wound holy Eld would forbear,

as Spenser says:  I did half hope they could not get it down; but the loyal Tuscans (evermore awed by the name principe) told us it was right to get rid of them, as one of the cones, of which they bore vast quantities, might chance to drop upon the head of a Principettino, or little Prince, as he passed along.

I was observing that restraint was necessary to man; I have now learned a notion that noise is necessary too.  The clatter made here in the Piazza del Duomo, where you sit in your carriage at a coffee-house door, and chat with your friends according to Italian custom, while one eats ice, and another calls for lemonade, to while away the time after dinner, the noise made then and there, I say, is beyond endurance.

Our Florentines have nothing on earth to do; yet a dozen fellows crying ciambelli, little cakes, about the square, assisted by beggars, who lie upon the church steps, and pray or rather promise to pray as loud as their lungs will let them, for the anime sante di purgatorio[Footnote:  Holy souls in purgatory.]; ballad-singers meantime endeavouring to drown these clamours in their own, and gentlemen’s servants disputing at the doors, whose master shall be first served; ripping up the pedigrees of each to prove superior claims for a biscuit or macaroon; do make such an intolerable clatter among them, that one cannot, for one’s life, hear one another speak:  and I did say just now, that it were as good live at Brest or Portsmouth when the rival fleets were fitting out, as here; where real tranquillity subsists under a bustle merely imaginary.  Our Grand Duke lives with little state for aught I can observe here; but where there is least pomp, there is commonly most power; for a man must have something pour se de dommages[Footnote:  To make himself amends.], as the French express it; and this gentleman possessing the solide has no care for the clinquant, I trow.  He tells his subjects when to go to bed, and who to dance with, till the hour he chuses they should retire to rest, with exactly that sort of old-fashioned