acquaintance L----, from whom we had parted last on the pave of
Piccadilly. I remember that in London I used to think him not
remarkable for wisdom,--and his travels have infinitely improved
him--in folly. He boasted to us triumphantly that he had run over
sixteen thousand miles in sixteen months: that he had bowed at the
levee of the Emperor Alexander,--been slapped on the shoulder by the
Archduke Constantine,--shaken hands with a Lapland witch,--and been
presented in full volunteer uniform at every court between Stockholm
and Milan. Yet is he not one particle wiser than if he had spent the
same time in walking up and down the Strand. He has contrived,
however, to pick up on his tour, strange odds and ends of foreign
follies, which stick upon the coarse-grained materials of his own John
Bull character like tinfoil upon sackcloth: so that I see little
difference between what he was, and what he is, except that from a
_simple goose_,--he has become a compound one. With all this, L---- is
not unbearable--not _yet_ at least. He amuses others as a butt--and me
as a specimen of a new genus of fools: for his folly is not like any
thing one usually meets with. It is not, _par exemple_, the folly of
stupidity, for he talks much; nor of dullness, for he laughs much; nor
of ignorance, for he has seen much; nor of wrong-headedness, for he
can be guided right; nor of bad-heartedness, for he is good-natured;
nor of thoughtlessness, for he is prudent; nor of extravagance, for he
can calculate even to the value of half a lira: but it is an essence
of folly, peculiar to himself, and like Monsieur Jacques's melancholy,
"compounded of many simples, extracted from various objects, and the
sundry contemplation of his travels." So much, for the present, of our
friend L----.

We left Brescia early yesterday morning, and after passing Desenzano,
came in sight of the Lago di Garda. I had from early associations a
delightful impression of the beauty of this lake, and it did not
disappoint me. It is far superior, I think, to the Lago Maggiore,
because the scenery is more _resserre_, lies in a smaller compass, so
that the eye takes in the separate features more easily. The mountains
to the north are dark, broken, and wild in their forms, and their
bases seemed to extend to the water edge: the hills to the south are
smiling, beautiful, and cultivated, studded with white flat-roofed
buildings, which glitter one above another in the sunshine. Our d