We were a walking last night in the gardens of Porto St. Gallo, and met two or three well-looking women of the second rank, with a baby, four or five years old at most, dressed in the habit of a Dominican Friar, bestowing the benediction as he walked along like an officiating Priest.  I felt a shock given to all my nerves at once, and asked Cavalier D’Elci the meaning of so strange a device.  His reply to me was, “E divozione mal intesa, Signora[Footnote:  ’Tis ill-understood devotion, madam.];” and turning round to the other gentlemen, “Now this folly,” said he, “a hundred years ago would have been the object of profound veneration and prodigious applause.  Fifty years hence it would be censured as hypocritical; it is now passed by wholly unnoticed, except by this foreign Lady, who, I believe, thought it was done for a joke.

I have had a little fever since I came hither from the intense heat I trust; but my maid has a worse still.  Doctor Bicchierei, with that liberality which ever is found to attend real learning, prescribed James’s powders to her, and bid me attend to Buchan’s Domestick Medicine, and I should do well enough he said.

Mr. Greatheed, Mr. Parsons, Mr. Biddulph, and Mr. Piozzi, have been together on a party of pleasure to see the renowned Vallombrosa, and came home contradicting Milton, who says the devils lay bestrewn

    Thick as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa: 

Whereas, say they, the trees are all evergreen in those woods.  Milton, it seems, was right notwithstanding:  for the botanists tell me, that nothing makes more litter than the shedding of leaves, which, replace themselves by others, as on the plants stiled ever-green, which change like every tree, but only do not change all at once, and remain stript till spring.  They spoke highly of their very kind and hospitable reception at the convent, where

    Safe from pangs the worldling knows,
    Here secure in calm repose,
    Far from life’s perplexing maze,
    The pious fathers pass their days;
    While the bell’s shrill-tinkling sound
    Regulates their constant round.

And

    Here the traveller elate
    Finds an ever-open gate: 
    All his wants find quick supply,
    While welcome beams from every eye.

    PARSONS.

This pious foundation of retired Benedictines, situated in the Appenines, about eighteen miles from Florence, owes its original to Giovanni Gualberto, a Tuscan nobleman, whose brother Hugo having been killed by a relation in the year 1015, he resolved to avenge his death; but happening to meet the assassin alone and in a solitary place, whither he appeared to have been driven by a sense of guilt, and seeing him suddenly drop down at his feet, and without uttering a word produce from his bosom a crucifix, holding it up in a supplicating gesture, with look submissively imploring, he felt the force of this silent rhetoric, and generously gave his enemy free pardon.