The Dorian palace is exceedingly fine; the Durazzo palace, for ought I know, is finer; and marble here seems like what one reads of silver in King Solomon’s time, which, says the Scripture, “was nothing counted on in the days of Solomon” Casa Brignoli too is splendid and commodious; the terraces and gardens on the house-tops, and the fresco paintings outside, give one new ideas of human life; and exhibits a degree of luxury unthought-on in colder climates.  But here we live on green pease and figs the first day of November, while orange and lemon trees flaunt over the walls more common than pears in England.

The Balbi mansion, filled with pictures, detained us from the churches filled with more.  I have heard some of the Italians confess that Genoa even pretends to vie with Rome herself in ecclesiastical splendour.  In devotion I should think she would be with difficulty outdone:  the people drop down on their knees in the street, and crowd to the church doors while the benediction is pronouncing, with a zeal which one might hope would draw down stores of grace upon their heads.  Yet I hear from the inhabitants of other provinces, that they have a bad character among their neighbours, who love not the base Ligurian and accuse them of many immoralities.  They tell one too of a disreputable saying here, how there are at Genoa men without honesty, women without modesty, a sea with no fish, and a wood with no birds.  Birds, however, here certainly are by the million, and we have eaten fish since we came every day; but I am informed they are neither cheap nor plentiful, nor considered as excellent in their kinds.  Here is macaroni enough however!—­the people bring in such a vast dish of it at a time, it disgusts one.

The streets of the town are much too narrow for beauty or convenience—­impracticable to coaches, and so beset with beggars that it is dreadful.  A chair is therefore, above all things, necessary to be carried in, even a dozen steps, if you are likely to feel shocked at having your knees suddenly clasped by a figure hardly human; who perhaps holding you forcibly for a minute, conjures you loudly, by the sacred wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ, to have compassion upon his; shewing you at the same time such undeniable and horrid proofs of the anguish he is suffering, that one must be a monster to quit him unrelieved.  Such pathetic misery, such disgusting distress, did I never see before, as I have been witness to in this gaudy city—­and that not occasionally or by accident, but all day long, and in such numbers that humanity shrinks from the description.  Sure, charity is not the virtue that they pray for, when begging a blessing at the church-door.