In Naples we see the works of nature displayed; at Rome and Florence we survey the performances of art; at every place in Italy there is much worthy one’s esteem, said the Venetian Resident one day very elegantly; and at Milan there is the Abate Bossi. Should I forbear to add my testimony to such talents and such virtue, which, expanded by nature to the wide range of human benevolence, he knows how to concentre occasionally for the service of private friendship, how great would be my ingratitude and neglect, while no character ever so completely resembled his, as that of the famous Hough well known in England by the title of the good Bishop of Worcester. His ingenuity in composing and placing these words on the 13th of May 1775, is perhaps one of his least valuable jeux d’esprit; but pretty, when one knows that on that day the empress was born, on that day the archduke arrived at Milan on a visit to his brother, and on that day the duchess was delivered of a son. The words may be read our way or the Chinese:
| Natalis | Adventus | Partus |
| Matris | Fratris | Conjugis |
| Felix | Optatus | Incolumis |
| Principem | Aulam | Urbem |
| Lectificabant. | ||
What a foolish thing it is in princes to give pain in a place like this, where all are disposed to derive pleasure even from praising them! There is a natural loyalty among the Lombards, which oppression can scarcely extinguish, or tyranny destroy; and, as I have said a thousand times, they pretend to love no one; they do love their rulers; and, rather grieve than growl at the afflictions caused by their rapacity.
I was told that I should find few discriminations of character in Italy; but the contrary proves true, and I do not wonder at it. Among those people who, by being folded or driven all together in flocks as the French are, with one fashion to serve for the whole society, a man may easily contract a similarity of manners by rubbing down each asperity of character against his nearest neighbour, no less plastic than himself; but here, where there is little apprehension of ridicule, and little spirit of imitation, monotonous tediousness is almost sure to be escaped. The very word polite comes from polish I suppose; and at Paris the place where you enjoy le veritable vernis St. Martin in perfection, the people can scarcely be termed polished, or even varnished: they are glazed; and everything slides off the exterieur of course, leaving the heart untouched. It is the same thing with other productions of nature; in caverns we see petrifactions shooting out in angular and excentric forms, because in Castleton Hole dame Nature has fair play; while the broad beach at Brighthelmstone, evermore battered by the same ocean, exhibits only a heap of round pebbles, and those round pebbles all alike.
But we must cease reflections, and begin describing again. We have got a country house for the remaining part of the hot weather upon the confines of the Milanese dominions, where Switzerland first begins to bow her bleak head, and soften gradually in the sunshine of Italian fertility. From every walk and villa round this delightful spot, one sees an assemblage of beauties rarely to be met with: and there is a resemblance in it to the Vale of Llwydd, which makes it still more interesting to me. But we have obtained leave to spend a week of our destined Villeggiatura at the Borromæan palace, situated in the middle of Lago Maggiore, on the island so truly termed Isola Bella; every step to which from our villa at Varese teems with new beauties, and only wants the sea to render it, in point of mere landscape, superior to any thing we have seen yet.
Our manner of living here is positively like nothing real, and the fanciful description of oriental magnificence, with Seged’s retirement in the Rambler to his palace on the Lake Dambea, is all I ever read that could come in competition with it: for here is one barge full of friends from Milan, another carrying a complete band of thirteen of the best musicians in Italy, to amuse ourselves and them with concerts every evening upon the water by moonlight, while the inhabitants of these elysian regions who live upon the banks, come down in crowds to the shores glad to receive additional delight, where satiety of pleasure seems the sole evil to be dreaded.
It is well known that the wild mountains of Savoy, the rich plains of Lombardy, the verdant pastures of Piedmont, and the pointed Alps of Switzerland, form the limits of Lago Maggiore: where, upon a naked rock, torn I trust from some surrounding hill, or happily thrown up in the middle of the water by a subterranean volcano, the Count Borromæo, in the year 1613, began to carry earth; and lay out a pretty garden, which from that day has been perpetually improving, till an appearance of eastern grandeur which it now wears, is rendered still more charming by all the studied elegance of art, and the conveniencies of common life. The palace is constructed as if to realise Johnson’s ideas in his Prince of Abyssinia: the garden consists of ten terraces; the walls of which are completely covered with orange, lemon, and cedrati trees, whose glowing colours and whose fragrant scent are easily discerned at a considerable distance, and the perfume particularly often reaches as far as to the opposite shore: nor are standards of the same plants wanting. I measured one not the largest in the grove, which had been planted one hundred and five years; it was a full yard and a quarter round. There were forty-six of them set near each other, and formed a delightful shade. The cedrati fruit grows as large as a late romana melon with us in England; and every thing one sees, and every thing one hears, and every thing one tastes, brings to one’s mind the fortunate islands and the golden age. Walks, woods, and terraces within the island, and a prospect of unequalled variety without, make this a kind of fairy habitation, so like something one has seen represented on theatres, that my female companion cried out as we approached the place, “If we go any nearer now, I am sure it will all vanish into air.” There is solidity enough however: a little village consisting of eighteen fishermen’s houses, and a pretty church, with a dozen of well-grown poplars before it, together with the palace and garden, compose the territory, which commodiously contains two hundred and fifty souls, as the circuit is somewhat more than a measured mile and a half, but not two miles in all: and we have cannons to guard our Calypso-like dominion, for which Count Borromæo pays tribute to the king of Sardinia; but has himself the right of raising men upon the main land, and of coining money at Macau, a little town amid the hollows of these rocks, which present their irregular fronts to the lake in a manner surprisingly beautiful. He has three other islets on the same water, for change of amusement; of which that named la Superiore is covered with a hamlet, and l’Isola Madre with a wood full of game, guinea fowl, and common poultry; a summer-house beside furnished with chintz, and containing so many apartments, that I am told the uncle of the present possessor, having quarrelled with his wife, and resolving in a pet to leave the world, shut himself up on that little spot of earth, and never touched the continent, as I may call it, for the last seventeen years of his life. Let me add, that he had there his church and his chaplain, three musical professors in constant pay, and a pretty yatcht to row or sail, and fetch in friends, physicians, &c. from the main land. His nephew has not the same taste at all, seldom spending more than a week, and that only once a-year, among his islands, which are kept however quite in a princely style: the family crest, a unicorn, made in white marble, and of colossal greatness, proudly overlooking ten broad terraces which rise in a pyramidal form from the water: each wall richly covered with orange and lemon trees, and every parapet concealed under thickly-flowering shrubs of incessant variety, as if every climate had been culled, to adorn this tiny spot. More than a hundred beds are made in the palace, which has likewise a grotto floor of infinite ingenuity, and beautiful from being happily contrasted against the general splendour of the house itself. I have seen no such effort of what we call taste since I left England, as these apartments on a level with the lake exhibit, being all roofed and wainscotted with well-disposed shellwork, and decorated with fountains in a lively and pleasing manner. The library up stairs had many curious books in it—a Camden’s Britannia particularly, translated into Spanish; an Arabic Bible worthy of the Bodleian collection, and well-chosen volumes of natural history to a very serious degree of expence. Painting is not the first or second boast of Count Borromæo, but there are some tolerable landscapes by Tempesta, and three famous pictures of Luca Giordano, well known in London by the general diffusion of their prints, representing the Rape of the Sabines, the Judgment of Paris, and the Triumph of Galatea. These large history pieces adorn the walls of the vast room we dine in; where, though we never sit down fewer than twenty or twenty-five people to table, all seem lost from the greatness of its size, till the concert fills it in the evening.
It is the garden however more than the palace which deserves description. He who has the care of it was born upon the island, and never strayed further than four miles, he tells me, from the borders of his master’s lake. Sure he must think the fall of man a fable: he lives in Eden still. How much must such a fellow be confounded, could he be carried blind-folded in the midst of winter to London or to Paris! and set down in Fleet-street or Rue St. Honoré! That he understands his business so as to need no tuition from the inhabitants of either city, may be seen by a fig-tree which I found here ingrafted on a lemon; both bear fruit at the same moment, whilst a vine curls up the stem of the lemon-tree, dangling her grapes in that delicious company with apparent satisfaction to herself. Another inoculation of a moss-rose upon an orange, and a third of a carnation upon a cedrati tree, gave me new knowledge of what the gardener’s art, aided by a happy climate, could perform. But when rowing round the lake with our band of music yesterday, we touched at a country seat upon the side which joins the Milanese dominion, and I found myself presented with currants and gooseberries by a kind family, who having made their fortune in Amsterdam, had imbibed some Dutch ideas; my mind immediately felt her elastic force, and willingly confessed that liberty, security, and opulence alone give the true relish to productions either of art or nature; that freedom can make the currants of Holland and golden pippins of Great Britain sweeter than all the grapes of Italy; while to every manly understanding some share of the government in a well-regulated state, with the every-day comforts of common life made durable and certain by the laws of a prosperous country, are at last far preferable to splendid luxuries precariously enjoyed under the consciousness of their possible privation when least expected by the hand of despotic power.
St. Carlo Borromæo’s colossal statue in bronze fixed up at the place of his nativity by the side of this beautiful water, fifteen miles from l’Isola Bella, was our next object of curiosity. It is wonderfully well proportioned for its prodigious magnitude, which, though often measured and well known, will never cease to astonish travellers, while twelve men can be easily contained in his head only, as some of our company had the curiosity to prove; but repented their frolic, as the metal heated by such a sun became insupportable. Abate Bianconi bid me remark that it was just the height of twelve men, each six feet high; that it is but just once and a half less than that erected by Nero, which gives name to the Roman Colosseo; that it is to be seen clearly at the distance of twelve miles, though placed to no advantage, as situation has been sacrificed to the greater propriety of setting it up upon the place where he was actually born, whose memory they hold, and justly, in such perfect veneration. I returned home persuaded that the cardinal’s dress, though an unfavourable one to pictures, is very happily adapted to a colossal statue, as the three cloaks or petticoats made a sort of step-ladder drapery which takes off exceedingly from the offence that is given by too long lines to the eye.