At Tuillemont, an English gentleman once told me he had the misfortune to sleep one night where all the people's heads were full of the Emperor, who had dined there the day before; and some wise fellow of the place wrote these lines under his picture:
Ingreditur magnus magno de Cæsare Cæsar,
Thenas, sub signo Cervi, sua prandia sumit.
He immediately set down this distich under them:
Our poor little town has no little to brag,
The Emperor was here, and he dined at the Stag.
The people of the inn concluding that this must be a high-strained compliment, it produced him many thanks from all, and a better breakfast than he would otherwise have obtained at Tuillemont.
To-morrow we go forward to Bologna.
BOLOGNA.
SEEMS at first sight a very sorrowful town, and has a general air of melancholy that surprises one, as it is very handsomely and regularly built; and set in a country so particularly beautiful, that it is not easy to express the nature of its beauty, and to express it so that those who inhabit other countries can understand me.
The territory belonging to Bologna la Grassa concenters all its charms in a happy embonpoint, which leaves no wrinkle unfilled up, no bone to be discerned; like the fat figure of Gunhilda at Fonthill, painted by Chevalier Cafali, with a face full of woe, but with a sleekness of skin that denotes nothing less than affliction. From the top of the only eminence, one looks down here upon a country which to me has a new and singular appearance; the whole horizon appearing one thick carpet of the softest and most vivid green, from the vicinity of the broad-leaved mulberry trees, I trust, drawn still closer and closer together by