We have crossed the Po, which I expected to have found more magnificent, considering the respectable state I left it in at Cremona; but scarcely any thing answers that expectation which fancy has long been fermenting in one's mind.
I took a young woman once with me to the coast of Sussex, who, at twenty-seven years old and a native of England, had never seen the sea; nor any thing else indeed ten miles out of London:—And well, child! said I, are not you much surprised?—"It is a fine sight, to be sure," replied she coldly, "but,"—but what? you are not disappointed are you?—"No, not disappointed, but it is not quite what I expected when I saw the ocean." Tell me then, pray good girl, and tell me quickly, what did you expect to see? "Why I expected," with a hesitating accent, "I expected to see a great deal of water." This answer set me then into a fit of laugh
ter, but I have now found out that I am not a whit wiser than Peggy: for what did I figure to myself that I should find the Po? only a great deal of water to be sure; and a very great deal of water it certainly is, and much more, God knows, than I ever saw before, except between the shores of Calais and Dover; yet I did feel something like disappointment too; when my imagination wandering over all that the poets had said about it, and finding earth too little to contain their fables, recollected that they had thought Eridanus worthy of a place among the constellations, I wished to see such a river as was worthy all these praises, and even then, says I,
O'er golden sands let rich Pactolus flow.
And trees weep amber on the banks of Po.
But are we sure after all it was upon the banks these trees, not now existing, were ever to be found? they grew in the Electrides if I remember right, and even there Lucian laughingly said, that he spread his garments in vain to catch the valuable distillation which poetry had taught him to expect; and Strabo (worse news still!) said that there
were no Electrides neither; so as we knew before—fiction is false: and had I not discovered it by any other means, I might have recollected a comical contest enough between a literary lady once, and Doctor Johnson, to which I was myself a witness;—when she, maintaining the happiness and purity of a country life and rural manners, with her best eloquence, and she had a great deal; added as corroborative and almost incontestable authority, that the Poets said so: "and didst thou not know then," replied he, my darling dear, that the Poets lye?
When they tell us, however, that great rivers have horns, which twisted off become cornua copiæ, dispensing pleasure and plenty, they entertain us it must be confessed; and never was allegory more nearly allied with truth, than in the lines of Virgil;
Gemina auratus taurino cornua vultu,
Eridanus, quo non alius per pinguia culta,
In mare purpureuin violentior influit amnis[U];
Whence bull-fac'd, so adorn'd with gilded horns,
Than whom no river through such level meads,
Down to the sea in swifter torrents speeds.