FOOTNOTES:
[O] How goes the profession?
[P] Why since the quality has taken to it ma'am, it brings us in very little indeed.
Will Naples, the original seat of Ulysses's seducers, shew us any thing stronger than this? I hardly expect or wish it. The state
of music in Italy, if one may believe those who ought to know it best, is not what it was. The manner of singing is much changed, I am told; and some affectations have been suffered to encroach upon their natural graces. Among the persons who exhibited their talents at the Countess of Rosenberg's last week, our country-woman's performance was most applauded; but when I name Lady Clarges, no one will wonder.
It is said that painting is now but little cultivated among them; Rome will however be the place for such enquiries. Angelica Kauffman being settled there, seems a proof of their taste for living merit; and if one thing more than another evinces Italian candour and true good-nature, it is perhaps their generous willingness to be ever happy in acknowledging foreign excellence, and their delight in bringing forward the eminent qualities of every other nation; never insolently vaunting or bragging of their own. Unlike to this is the national spirit and confined ideas of perfection inherent in a Gallic mind, whose sole politeness is an appliquè stuck upon the coat, but never embroidered into it.
The observation made here last night by a Parisian lady, gave me a proof of this I little wanted. We met at the Casino of the Senator Angelo Quirini, where a sort of literary coterïe assemble every evening, and form a society so instructive and amusing, so sure to be filled with the first company in Venice, and so hospitably open to all travellers of character, that nothing can now be to me a higher intellectual gratification than my admittance among them; as in future no place will ever be recollected with more pleasure, no hours with more gratitude, than those passed most delightfully by me in that most agreeable apartment.
I expressed to the French lady my admiration of St. Mark's Place. "C'est que vous n'avez jamais vue la foire St. Ovide," said she; "je vous assure que cela surpasse beaucoup ces trifles palais qu'on vantetant[Q]." And this could only have been arrogance, for she was a very sensible and a very accomplished woman; and when talked to about the literary
merits of her own countrymen, spoke with great acuteness and judgment.
[Q] You admire it, says she, only because you never saw the fair at St. Ovid's in Paris; I assure you there is no comparison between those gay illuminations and these dismal palaces the Venetians are so fond of.