Innumerous footsteps print the sandy shore;
While verse might easier name the scaly tribe, }
That in her seas their nourishment imbibe, }
Than Venice and her various charms describe. }

It is really pity ever to quit the sweet seducements of a place so
pleasing; which attracts the inclination and flatters the vanity of one,
who, like myself, has received the most polite attentions, and been
diverted with every amusement that could be devised. Kind, friendly,
lovely Venetians! who appear to feel real fondness for the inhabitants
of Great Britain, while Cavalier Pindemonte writes such verses in its
praise. Yet _must_ the journey go forward, no staying to pick every
flower upon the road.

On Saturday next then am I to forsake--but I hope not for ever--this
gay, this gallant city, so often described, so certainly admired; seen
with rapture, quitted with regret: seat of enchantment! head-quarters of
pleasure, farewell!

Leave us as we ought to be,
Leave the Britons rough and free.

It was on the twenty-first of May then that we returned up the Brenta in
a barge to _Padua_, stopping from time to time to give refreshment to
our conductors and their horse, which draws on the side, as one sees
them at Richmond; where the banks are scarcely more beautifully adorned
by art, than here by nature; though the Brenta is a much narrower river
than the Thames at Richmond, and its villas, so justly celebrated, far
less frequent. The sublimity of their architecture however, the
magnificence of their orangeries, the happy construction of the cool
arcades, and general air of festivity which breathes upon the banks of
this truly _wizard stream_, planted with _dancing_, not _weeping_
willows, to which on a bright evening the lads and lasses run for
shelter from the sun beams,

Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri[T];

[Footnote T:
While tripping to the wood my wanton hies,
She wishes to be seen before she flies.
]

are I suppose peculiar to itself, and best described by Monsieur de
Voltaire, whose Pococurante the Venetian senator in Candide that
possesses all delights in his villa upon the banks of the Brenta, is a
very lively portrait, and would be natural too; but that Voltaire, as a
Frenchman, could not forbear making his character speak in a very
unItalian manner, boasting of his felicity in a style they never use,
for they are really no puffers, no vaunters o