On Saturday next then am I to forsake—­but I hope not for ever—­this gay, this gallant city, so often described, so certainly admired; seen with rapture, quitted with regret:  seat of enchantment! head-quarters of pleasure, farewell!

    Leave us as we ought to be,
    Leave the Britons rough and free.

It was on the twenty-first of May then that we returned up the Brenta in a barge to Padua, stopping from time to time to give refreshment to our conductors and their horse, which draws on the side, as one sees them at Richmond; where the banks are scarcely more beautifully adorned by art, than here by nature; though the Brenta is a much narrower river than the Thames at Richmond, and its villas, so justly celebrated, far less frequent.  The sublimity of their architecture however, the magnificence of their orangeries, the happy construction of the cool arcades, and general air of festivity which breathes upon the banks of this truly wizard stream, planted with dancing, not weeping willows, to which on a bright evening the lads and lasses run for shelter from the sun beams,

    Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri[T];

[Footnote T: 
    While tripping to the wood my wanton hies,
    She wishes to be seen before she flies.
]

are I suppose peculiar to itself, and best described by Monsieur de Voltaire, whose Pococurante the Venetian senator in Candide that possesses all delights in his villa upon the banks of the Brenta, is a very lively portrait, and would be natural too; but that Voltaire, as a Frenchman, could not forbear making his character speak in a very unItalian manner, boasting of his felicity in a style they never use, for they are really no puffers, no vaunters of that which they possess; make no disgraceful comparisons between their own rarities and the want of them in other countries, nor offend you as the French do, with false pity and hateful consolations.

If any thing in England seem to excite their wonder and ill-placed compassion, it is our coal fires, which they persist in thinking strangely unwholesome—­and a melancholy proof that we are grievously devoid of wood, before we can prevail upon ourselves to dig the bowels of old earth for fewel, at the hazard of our precious health, if not of its certain loss; nor could I convince the wisest man I tried at, that wood burned to chark is a real poison, while it would be difficult by any process of chemistry to force much evil out of coal.  They are steadily of opinion, that consumptions are occasioned by these fires, and that all the subjects of Great Britain are consumptively disposed, merely because those who are so, go into Italy for change of air:  though I never heard that the wood smoke helped their breath, or a brazierfull of ashes under the table their appetite.  Mean time, whoever seeks to convince instead of persuade an Italian, will find he has been employed in a Sisyphean labour; the stone may roll to the top, but is sure to return, and rest at his feet who had courage to try the experiment.  Logic is a science they love not, and I think steadily refuse to cultivate; nor is argument a style of conversation they naturally affect—­as Lady Macbeth says, “Question enrageth him;” and the dialogues of Socrates would to them be as disgusting as the violence of Xantippe.