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have ever seen. Losing or winning, their countenance undergoes no alteration. In this they have a great advantage over the imprudent stranger, who suffers himself to be heated with his game. Not long since, an English officer, who had obtained a furlough, came to Naples to pass a few months, and had devoted a thousand guineas for his expenses. A few evenings after his arrival, being introduced at one of the principal conversazioni, he unluckily approached the table of trente un; he lost only a hundred guineas, because it was all he had about him; but in the course of two or three evenings, in regaining this, he lost the rest, and employed the last fifty in rejoining his regiment.

The company generally retire about two or three in the morning. No refreshment is given at these parties but iced water; and these conversazioni comprize the hospitality of Naples. As every person comes attended with one or more servants, they are playing for copper in the antichamber while their masters in the saloon are playing for gold. This rage for gaming appears to be universal. Every rank is engaged in it, and I have never been in any house at Naples, except the French ambassador's, where cards have not been introduced, and formed the principal amusement.

Hospitality is not a virtue of the Neapolitans. A stranger very rarely partakes of a dinner or supper in one of their houses. They are very temperate, and their repasts of the frugal kind. Fish of various kinds, which are caught in the bay, is the food they esteem the most luxurious. They have a singular prejudice against all kinds of tame water fowl; and ducks and geese, which

are favourite food with other nations, are seldom placed on their tables. Their most common food is maccaroni, and many thousands in this city live on this food alone. A dish of boiled maccaroni with a little cheese grated over it, forms the breakfast, dinner, and supper of the mass of the people, and in one shape or another, they always form a part of a Neapolitan repast. The frugality of their tables is perhaps the reason, why strangers are excluded from them, whose sturdy appetites would be indignant at the insipidity of maccaroni. Excess in drinking is a vice almost unknown, and toasts are never given. The common hour of dining is at two o'clock, the hottest hour of the day the dinner is soon finished, and then, overcome with lassitude, they strip themselves to the skin, and lay down. After the heat of the day is past, and the approach of evening invites them to partake of its refreshing coolness they rise and drive in their carriages to the Corso, which extends from the city toPausilipo; here they turn and return for an hour or two, criticise each other, rehearse the anecdote of the day, and when the last purple ray has faded from the summit of Vesuvius, and the distant shores of the bay are enveloped in obscurity, they return to the city, and stopping their carriages at the ice houses, they regale themselves with ices in their carriages. This is with them a favourite luxury, and in no part of the world are they so well made, as at Naples.

After going home and adjusting their dress, they go to the theatre, which is generally over before midnight, and then they go to a conversazione, or, in the heat of summer, to a supper party at Pausilipo, and an excursion on the bay. At the approach of mora

ing they retire to repose from their fatigue, and to prepare themselves for the next day. I have been so well initiated into this regular mode of life, that I seldom see my bed before three or four o'clock in the morning, the hour when the industrious farmer in America has already begun his daily labour.

The Neapolitan men are of superiour stature to most other nations; it is rare in any country to see so many large men as are in this city. Some of them are celebrated for their personal strength but their indolent manners and inactive appearance make them appear incapable of strong exertions. They are the slaves of voluptuousness, and extremely serious. Gaiety requires a degree of elasticity, both physical and moral, which they never possess, or which the climate destroys. The vivacity, the sprightly activity of a Frenchman forms the most striking contrast, with the grave indolence of the Neapolitans.

The appearance of the women is inferiour to that of the men. The climate soon matures and soon destroys their charms. A fine complexion is seldom seen, and their excessive indolence encourages corpulency, to which they are most of them subject. Yet one feature they have in perfection; they have universally fine eyes, sparkling, penetrating, and full of expression. They never walk; but when they go out it is always in a carriage. The publick promenade, called the villa, is a very pleasing one, yet it is little frequented. There are not more than a dozen ladies who walk in it, and only four or five of these often use this exercise. As they are never seen, except in a carriage, or sitting in a room, pains are bestowed only on the bust, and their head

and shoulders are generally arranged with care and taste, whilst the rest of the dress is awkward and slovenly; like the graceful neck and snowy breast of the swan, which appears so beautiful when he is swimming on the water, but which is wholly destroyed by his clumsy gait in walking. The Neapolitan ladies should not be seen walking, as their waddling gait and uncouth dress are always ridiculous, and sometimes disgusting. Rouge is little used. They are affable to strangers, and appear sometimes to prefer their society to that of their own countrymen. Most travellers have attributed to the sex in this country a strong disposition for amorous gallantry and intrigue; and Dupaty says, that they deceive with singular adroitness. What all concur in,is generally true; I have no reason to contradict their opinions.

Both sexes are generally very slovenly, and the people are very dirty. They have many fine fountains, and might easily have hot and cold baths in every part of the city; but they appear to have an antipathy to water, and there are only three months in the year that they bathe; when temporary sheds are erected upon the borders of the bay for this purpose. It is singu lar,that the luxury of warm baths, so natural to an effeminate people, and which was so common under the ancient Romans, that even the meanest people made use of them, should be wholly unknown at Naples, when they might be so easily obtained, and would be so important both to their health and pleasure.

The little fidelity that is found in matrimonial life, and of course the corrupt state of society, must be attributed to the manner in which marriages are forined. Con

versing on this subject with a lady, whose own conduct was irreproachable, she asked me how it was possible, that it could be otherwise, when the marriages were formed by the parents, directed by motives of interest and ambition, and in which the parties themselves were never consulted! A young girl is taken from a convent, and espoused to a man, who may be wholly disgusting to her she complains for some time of her destiny; the seduction and example of society soon persuade her to meliorate it. The husband, who has taken his wife from convenience, sees her lover with as much indifference as the rest of society, and derives his consolation in making the injury mutual.

After having dwelt on the defect of hospitality, and the insipid, degraded state of society in this great city, I should be unjust, if I did not inform you, that several causes have contributed to make it peculiarly bad at the present moment. The revolution produced the most fatal effects; some of the best characters fell sa

crifices to the rage of different parties, and many noble families were constrained by their political opinions to abandon their country. Those, who remained, were plundered of their property, and their estates were ruined. The king is at Palermo, where he holds his court. The queen is at Vienna, and a part of the court is with her. The hereditary prince is the only one of the royal family now at Naples, except a little prince, of six years old, and the courtiers know too well the danger of paying much attention to him. Sir William Hamilton, whose hospitable house was frequented by the best society, is no longer here, and the French influence is so predom, inant, that the present English minister lives in rather a retired manner. At the house of Mr. Alguier, the French ambassador, there are no Neapolitans cards admitted, and this is the only house, where I have seen that kind of society, and enjoyed that rational, liberal conversation, which are found in the circles of some other countries.

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Oh may I yet, by fame forgotten, dwell
By gushing fount, wild wood, and shadowy dell.

THE love of nature is a passion of the soul, pure and intellectual. Its energy is sublime, without the violence of animal impulse, and its enjoyment fine and exquisite, without the riot and confusion of mental and physical indulgence. It is purely spiritual, because it is produced by the perceptions of the mind, of what is abstractly beautiful, and it is rapturous in that

SOTHEBY.

No. 10.

sympathy, which rebounds from the coincidence of natural and ideal beauty. This sympathy, however, is not merely confined to such a harmony of beauties; it mingles also with what is tranquil in nature, and it extends with what is sublime. The softness of the landscape at sun-setting breathes itself to the bosom with the tender, est melancholy, and the stillness of

the lake under moonlight soothes the soul into sweetest repose. In the terror of the mighty evolutions of nature, man is also prepared for ruin. His genius bounds at the approach of the whirlwind; it rushes with the swiftness of its fury, and tracks it through its rustling path to the boundaries of the heavens. It is transcendent amid the horrours of the tempest, and, as the lightning breaks from the thunder cloud, it leaps with sublimity, and moves on its blazing line into the profundity of darkness.

Man thus appears to hold an intimate connexion, and grand alliance with nature. But the enjoyment of this blessing seems negative by habitual experience, though the consciousness of it is necessarily deduced from the supremacy of his power, and the sublimity of his position over all surrounding existence. Still, however, must he remain contented with the certainty of its possession, though it be in some measure unaccountable to himself. He must learn to satisfy his mind with the resemblances of facts, on subjects too subtle for their operation, and he must not sicken at the disappointment of defining, what is infinite. The brightness of beauty should enlighten the mistiness of its exist ence, and that sublimity which is not instantaneous and universal, may be produced by elevation of thought and combination of magnitudes. His mind may, for a moment, stand and gaze on the very borders of its own perfection; but before it can even catch a glimpse of what rolls beyond, it perceives light and vision blended, and lost in the deep void of boundless space.

There is, moreover, the sweetest union of the pleasures of sense

and intellect in the delight of nature. Through this bright medium the vision of fancy has an infinite series of delightful views, sometimes breaking into the bright opening of rapture, and sometimes lengthening and expanding into the luxuriant extent of enjoyment. Every pleasurable impulse of sense urges incipient action into the execution of delight; and every great passion riots in indulgence, more rapturous by progression, and more vacant by excess; not forbidden by reason, nor tainted by disgust. He, who thus gives himself up to nature, is in the brightness and purity of his existence. His mind philosophizes with itself in the loneliness of meditation, and his passions receive ordinance from the solemn convention of philosophy and religion.

Human nature, thus ennobled with powers so sublime, and softened with sensibilities so delicate, each qualified with capacities of enjoyment, extensive as the subjects are exhaustless, must indeed be inveterate against its own happiness by renouncing the experience of it. We too niggardly encroach on the rights of intellect in the vain enterprize of meliorating that, which is already essentially below the standard of human dignity. Few are even aware of the freedom and range of nature, for half mankind come into the world with manacles and fetters. With the smile of slaves, they are pleased and exult with the freedom of breath, and the liberty of life. They sicken and rot within the impalement of a city, without once brightening their eye with a gleam of pure light, or refreshing their lungs with the balmy inhalations of pure expanse. There is a feebleness about them, which is not

the relaxation of strength, and a languor, which is not the repose of enjoyment. At death their eye shuts blankly on the walls of their prison, while the vision of him, who has communed with nature, slowly fades with the melancholy dimness of things, and vanishes with their departure.

How truly inglorious is exist ence, thus drawn out by the continual motives of business, and fretted away by the vain anxieties of city life. How vacant the mind, without the intelligence of nature, and how spiritless the brain, without the thrills of her emotions. He, who is thus kennelled in the city, prefers the bustle of noisy nothingness to the soothing serenity of country life; an atmosphere darkened with the dust of drudgery and labour to the blue expanse, over the fresh landscape; the jargon of brokers, and the brawlings and heavings of "fat and greasy citizens" to the sound of the spring bird at evening, or the broken song of the peasant on his doorstone. To all the exquisite niceties and delicacies of cultured product, even his senses are blunt. He had rather sit, of a dog-day, with four and twenty trenchermen, "big and burly," at the head of a table, whose loaded extent presents the perspective of a market place, than to retire to the cool cell in the grove, to regale himself amid the freshness of fruit, and the raciness of vegetables.

On the contrary, how pleasantly and how naturally flows the life of him, who breathes it in the cool shades of silent retirement, his soul expanding with the pure sentiments, which rural imagery inspires; who loves to stretch himself, at noon day, in the deep shade of the mountain brow, and follow the huge shadow of the

dark cloud, as it sails over the plain, deepening the luxuriance of the vallies, and reflecting bright and glaring light on the edges of cliffs and precipices; or in the stillness of a summer's evening, aside the old oak that sighs in the night breeze, to catch the bright forms of departed friends in the white clouds, which wave over the

moon.

The constant action of thought in retirement, adds another charm to it. The mind here is not left merely to its own operation, reasoning on subjects of its own suggestion, without the standard of perceptible truth for the conclusion of such abstractions. But it has the constant presentation of the sublime experiment of universal cause and effect, free from the anxieties of chance, and unincumbered with the ponderous mass of human follies, prejudices, and absurdities. Its acquisition is the wisdom of nature, and its truth is that certainty of conclusion, which is deduced from determinate causes, invariably efficient of consequential ef fects.

There is yet another charm in this retreat from the town, and the throng, which is beyond even the fascination of poetry. We here feel, that description is only imitative of nature, and we turn from the transcription, however charming and exact, to the raptures of the original. We are no longer content with the ideal sympathy of visionary existence, but we extend all the pleasures of fic tion into the emotions of sensible truth. In the presence of nature, even the minuteness and exactitude of Cowper is indiscriminate and unsatisfactory; the mellow luxuriance of Thomson barren and wasteful. In the bright expanse, which surrounds her, even

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