Bologna la Grassa
Ma Padua la passa[31],
say the Venetians: and round this town where the heat is indeed prodigious, they get the best vipers for the Venice treacle, I am told. Here are quantities of curious plants to be seen blooming now in the botanical garden, and our kind professor told me I need not languish so for horse chesnuts; for they would all be in flower as we returned up the Brenta from Venice. “They are all in flower now, Sir,” said I, “in my own grounds, eight miles from London: but our English oaks are not half so forward as yours are.” He recollected the aphorism so much a favourite with our country folks; how a British heart ought not to dilate with the early sunshine of prosperity, or droop at the first blasts of adverse fortune, as the British oak refuses to put out his leaves at summer’s early felicitations, and scorns to drop them at winter’s first rude shake.
Well! I have once more walked over St. Antony’s church, and examined the bas-reliefs that adorn his shrine; but their effect has ceased. Whoever has spent some time in the Musæum Clementinum is callous to the wonders which sculpture can perform.
Has one not read in Ulloa’s travels, of a resting-place on the side of a Cordillera among the Andes, where the ascending traveller is regularly observed to put on additional clothing, while he who comes down the mountain feels so hot that he throws his clothes away? So it is with the shrine of St. Antonio di Padua, and one’s passion for the sculpture that adorns it: while Santa Giustina’s church regains her power over the mind, a power never missed by simplicity, while great effort has often small effect. But we are hastening to Venice, and shall leave our cares and our coach behind; superfluous as they both are, in a city which admits of neither.
VENICE.
Our watery journey was indeed delightful; friendship, music, poetry combined their charms with those of nature to enchant us, and make one think the passage was too short, though longing to embrace our much-regretted sweet companions. The scent of odoriferous plants, the smoothness of the water, the sweetness of the piano forte, which allured to its banks many of the gay inhabitants, who glad of a change in the variety of their amusements, came down to the shores and danced or sang, as we went by, seized every sense at once, and filled me with unaffected pleasure. I longed to see the weeping willow planted along this elegant stream; but the Venetians like to see nothing weep I fancy: yet the Salix Babylonica would have a fine effect here, and spread to a prodigious growth, like those on which the captive Israelites once hung their harps, on the banks of the river Euphrates. “Of all Europe however,” Millar says, “it prospers best in pensive Britain;”