Lucca, April 23.—­Lucca disappoints me in every respect:  it was once, when a republic, one of the most flourishing, rich, and populous cities in Italy; it is now consigned over to the Ex-queen of Etruria; and its fate will be perhaps the same as that of Venice, Pisa, and Sienna, which, when they lost their independence, lost also their public spirit, their public virtue, and their prosperity.

It is impossible to conceive any thing more rich and beautiful, than the country between Florence and Lucca, though it can boast little of the elevated picturesque, and is destitute of poetical associations.  The road lay through valleys, with the Apennines (which are here softened down into gently sunny hills) on each side.  Every spot of ground is in the highest state of cultivation; the boundaries between the small fields of wheat or lupines, were rows of olives or mulberries, with an interminable treillage of vines flung from tree to tree.  In England we should be obliged to cut them all down for fear of depriving the crops of heat and sunshine, but here they have no such fears.  The style of husbandry is exquisitely neat, and in general performed by manual labour.  The only plough I saw would have excited the amusement and amazement of an English farmer:  I should think it was exactly similar to the ploughs of Virgil’s time:  it was drawn by an ox and an ass yoked together, and guided by a woman.  The whole country looked as if it had been laid out by skilful gardeners, and the hills in many parts were cut into terraces, that not one available inch of soil might be lost.  The products of this luxuriant country are corn, silk, wine, and principally oil:  potteries abound, the making of jars and flasks being an immense and necessary branch of trade.

The city of Lucca has an appearance in itself of stately solemn dulness, and bears no trace of the smiling prosperity of the adjacent country:  the shops are poor and empty, there are no signs of business, and the streets swarm with beggars.  The interior of the Duomo is a fine specimen of Gothic:  the exterior is Greek, Gothic, and Saracenic jumbled together in vile taste:  it contains nothing very interesting.  The palace is like other palaces, very fine and so forth; and only remarkable for not containing one good picture, or one valuable work of art.

Pisa, April 25.—­Pisa has a look of elegant tranquillity, which is not exactly dulness, and pleases me particularly:  if the thought of its past independence, the memory of its once proud name in arts, arms, and literature, came across the mind, it is not accompanied by any painful regret caused by the sight of present misery and degradation, but by that philosophic melancholy with which we are used to contemplate the mutability of earthly greatness.