Lugano meantime scorns absolute authority: our Cicerone there, in reply to the question asked in Italy three times a-day I believe—Che Principe fà qui la sua residenza?[43]—replied, that they were plagued with no Principi at all, while the thirteen Cantons protected all their subjects; and though, as the man expressed it, only half of them were Christians, and the other half Protestants; no church or convent had ever wanted respect; while their town regularly received a monthly governor from every canton, and was perfectly contented with this ambulatory dominion. Here was the first gallows I have seen these two years. They have a pretty commerce too at Lugano for the size of the place, and the shopkeepers shew that officiousness and attention seldom observed in arbitrary states, where
Content, the bane of industry,
soon leads people to neglect the trouble of getting, for the pleasure of spending their money. One therefore sees the inhabitants of Italian cities for the most part merry and cheerful, or else pious and penitent; little attentive to their shops, but easily disposed to loiter under their mistress’s window with a guitar, or rove about the streets at night with a pretty girl under their arm, singing as they go, or squeaking with a droll accent, if it is the time for masquerades. Fraud, avarice, ambition, are the vices of republican states and a cold climate; idleness, sensuality, and revenge, are the weeds of a warm country and monarchical governments. If these people are not good, they at least wish they were better; they do not applaud their own conduct when their passions carry them too far; nor rejoice, like old Moneytrap or Sir Giles Overreach, in their successful sins: but rather say with Racine’s hero, translated by Philips, that
Pyrrhus will ne’er approve his own injustice,
Or form excuses while his heart condemns him.
They beat their bosoms at the feet of a crucifix in the street, with no more hypocrisy than they beat a tambourine there; perhaps with no more effect neither, if no alteration of behaviour succeeds their contrition: yet when an Englishman (who is probably more ashamed of repenting than of sinning) accuses them of false pretensions to pious fervour, he wrongs them, and would do well to repent himself.
But a natural curiosity seen at Milan this 16th day of August 1786, leads my mind into another channel. I went to wait upon and thank the lady, or the relations of the lady, who lent us her house at Varese, and make our proper acknowledgments; and at that visit saw something very uncommon surely: though I remember Doctor Johnson once said, that nobody had ever seen a very strange thing; and challenged the company (about seventeen people, myself among them) to produce a strange thing;—but I had not then seen Avvocato B——, a lawyer here at Milan, and a man respected in his profession, who actually chews the cud like an ox; which he did at my request, and in my presence: he is apparently much like another tall stout man, but has many extraordinary properties, being eminent for strength, and possessing a set of ribs and sternum very surprising, and worthy the attention of anatomists: his body, upon the slightest touch, even through all his clothes, throws out electric sparks; he can reject his meals from his stomach at pleasure, and did absolutely in the course of two hours, the only two I ever passed in his company, go through, to oblige me, the whole operation of eating, masticating, swallowing, and returning by the mouth, a large piece of bread and a peach. With all this conviction, nothing more was wanting; but I obtained beside, the confirmation of common friends, who were willing likewise to bear testimony of this strange accidental variety. What I hear of his character is, that he is a low-spirited, nervous man; and I suppose his ruminating moments are spent in lamenting the singularities of his frame:—be this how it will, we have now no time to think any more of them, as we are packing up for a trip to Bergamo, a city I have not yet seen.