It is really pity ever to quit the sweet seducements of a place so pleasing; which attracts the inclination and flatters the vanity of one, who, like myself, has received the most polite attentions, and been diverted with every amusement that could be devised. Kind, friendly, lovely Venetians! who appear to feel real fondness for the inhabitants of Great Britain, while Cavalier Pindemonte writes such verses in its praise. Yet must
the journey go forward, no staying to pick every flower upon the road.
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];
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.