dresses of their respective countries:  there was no appearance of devotion, no solemnity; all wore their hats, some were poring over ragged books, some were talking, some sleeping, or lounging, or smoking.  While I stood looking about me, without exciting the smallest attention, I heard at every pause a prodigious chattering and whispering, which seemed to come from the regions above, and looking up I saw a row of latticed and skreened galleries where the women were caged up like the monkies at a menagerie, and seemed as noisy, as restless, and as impatient of confinement:  the door-keeper offered to introduce me among them, but I was already tired and glad to depart.

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We have visited the pretty English burial-ground, and the tomb of Smollet, which in the true English style is cut and scratched all over with the names of fools, who think thus to link their own insignificance to his immortality.  We have also seen whatever else is to be seen, and what all travellers describe:  to-morrow we leave Leghorn—­for myself without regret:  it is a place with which I have no sympathies, and the hot, languid, damp atmosphere, which depresses the spirits and relaxes the nerves, has made me suffer ever since we arrived.

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Lucca.—­Had I never visited Italy I think I should never have understood the word picturesque.  In England we apply it generally to rural objects or natural scenery, for nothing else in England can deserve the epithet.  Civilization, cleanliness, and comfort are excellent things, but they are sworn enemies to the picturesque:  they have banished it gradually from our towns, and habitations, into remote countries, and little nooks and corners, where we are obliged to hunt after it to find it; but in Italy the picturesque is every where, in every variety of form; it meets us at every turn, in town and in country, at all times and seasons; the commonest objects of every-day life here become picturesque, and assume from a thousand causes a certain character of poetical interest it cannot have elsewhere.  In England, when travelling in some distant county, we see perhaps a craggy hill, a thatched cottage, a mill on a winding stream, a rosy milkmaid, or a smock-frocked labourer whistling after his plough, and we exclaim “How picturesque!” Travelling in Italy we see a piny mountain, a little dilapidated village on its declivity, the ruined temple of Jupiter or Apollo on its summit; a peasant with a bunch of roses hanging from his hat, and singing to his guitar, or a cotadina in her white veil and scarlet petticoat, and we exclaim “How picturesque!” but how different!  Again—­a tidy drill or a hay-cart, with a team of fine horses, is a very useful, valuable, civilized machine; but a grape-waggon reeling under its load of purple clusters, and drawn by a pair of oxen in their clumsy, ill-contrived harness, and bowing their patient heads to the earth,