So charming Thomson wrote from his lodgings at a milliner’s in Bond-street, whence he seldom rose early enough to see the sun do more than glisten on the opposing windows of the street:  but genius, like truth, cannot be kept down.  So he wrote, and so they painted! Ut pictura poesis.

The music is not in a state so capital as we left it in the north of Italy; we regret Nardini of Florence, Alessandri of Venice, and Ronzi of Milan; and who that has heard Signior Marchesi sing, could ever hear a successor (for rival he has none), without feeling total indifference to all their best endeavours?

The conversations of Cardinal de Bernis and Madame de Boccapaduli are what my countrywomen talk most of; but the Roman ladies cannot endure perfumes, and faint away even at an artificial rose.  I went but once among them, when Memmo the Venetian ambassador did me the honour to introduce me somewhere, but the conversation was soon over, not so my shame; when I perceived all the company shrink from me very oddly, and stop their noses with rue, which a servant brought to their assistance on open salvers.  I was by this time more like to faint away than they—­from confusion and distress; my kind protector informed me of the cause; said I had some grains of marechale powder in my hair perhaps, and led me out of the assembly; to which no intreaties could prevail on me ever to return, or make further attempts to associate with a delicacy so very susceptible of offence.

Mean time the weather is exceedingly bad, heavy, thick, and foggy as our own, for aught I see; but so it was at Milan too I well remember:  one’s eye would not reach many mornings across the Naviglio that ran directly under our windows.  For fine bright Novembers we must go to Constantinople I fancy; certain it is that Rome will not supply them.

What however can make these Roman ladies fly from odori so, that a drop of lavenderwater in one’s handkerchief, or a carnation in one’s stomacher, is to throw them all into, convulsions thus?  Sure this is the only instance in which they forbear to fabbricare fu l’antico[Footnote:  Build upon the old foundations.], in their own phrase:  the dames, of whom Juvenal delights to tell, liked perfumes well enough if I remember; and Horace and Martial cry “Carpe rosas” perpetually.  Are the modern inhabitants still more refined than they in their researches after pleasure? and are the present race of ladies capable of increasing, beyond that of their ancestors, the keenness of any corporeal sense?  I should think not.  Here are however amusements enough at Rome without trying for their conversations.