Thus do the inhabitants of every place forfeit or fling away those pleasures, which the inhabitants of another place think they would use in a much wiser manner, had Providence bestowed the blessing upon them.
A young Milanese once, whom I met in London, saw me treat a hatter that lives in Pallmall with the respect due to his merit: when the man was gone, "Pray, madam, says the Italian, "is this a gran riccone?"[Heavy-pursed fellow.] "He is perhaps," replied I, "worth twenty or thirty thousand pounds; I do not know what ideas you annex to a gran riccone" "Oh santissima vergine!" exclaims the youth, "s'avessi io mai settanta mila zecchini! non so pur troppo cosa nesarei; ma questo é chiaro—non venderei mai cappelli"—"Oh dear me! had I once seventy thousand sequins in my pocket,
I would—dear—I cannot think myself what I should do with them all: but this at least is certain, I would not sell hats"
I have been carried to the Laurentian library, where the librarian Bandi shewed me all possible, and many unmerited civilities; which, for want of deeper erudition, I could not make the use I wished of. We asked however to see some famous manuscripts. The Virgil has had a fac simile made of it, and a printed copy besides; so that it cannot now escape being known all over Europe. The Bible in Chaldaic characters, spoken of by Langius as inestimable, and brought hither, with many other valuable treasures of the same nature, by Lascaris, after the death of Lorenzo de Medici, who had sent him for the second time to Constantinople for the purpose of collecting Greek and Oriental books, but died before his return, is in admirable preservation. The old geographical maps, made out in a very early age, afforded me much amusement; and the Latin letters of Petrarch, with the portrait of his Laura, were interesting to me perhaps more than many other things rated much
higher by the learned, among those rarities which adorn a library so comprehensive.
Every great nation except ours, which was immersed in barbarism, and engaged in civil broils, seems to have courted the residence of Lascaris, but the university of Paris fixed his regard: and though Leo X. treated with favour, and even friendship, the man whom he had encouraged to intimacy when Cardinal John of Medicis; though he made him superintendant of a Greek college at Rome; it is said he always wished to die in France, whither he returned in the reign of Francis the First; and wrote his Latin epigrams, which I have heard Doctor Johnson prefer even to the Greek ones preserved in Anthologia; and of which our Queen Elizabeth, inspired by Roger Ascham, desired to see the author; but he was then upon a visit to Rome, where he died of the gout at ninety-three years old.
June 24, 1785.
St. John the Baptist is the tutelary Saint of this city, and upon this day of course all
possible rejoicings are made. After attending divine service in the morning, we were carried to a house whence we could conveniently see the procession pass by. It was not solemn and stately as that I saw at Bologna, neither was it gaudy and jocund like the show made at Venice upon St. George's day; but consisted chiefly in vast heavy pageants, or a sort of temporary building set on wheels, and drawn by oxen some, and some by horses; others carried upon things made not unlike a chairman's horse in London, and supported by men, while priests, in various coloured dresses, according to their several stations in the church, and to distinguish the parishes, &c. to which they belong, follow singing in praise of the saint.