at the opera. One really expects the
flower-girls with baskets, or garlands, and scarcely can persuade one's
self that all is real.

Never sure was any thing more rejoicing to the heart, than this lovely
season in this lovely country. The city of Ferrara too is a fine one;
Ferrara _la civile_, the Italians call it, but it seems rather to merit
the epithet _solenne_; so stately are its buildings, so wide and uniform
its streets. My pen was just upon the point of praising its cleanliness
too, till I reflected there was nobody to dirty it. I looked half an
hour before I could find one beggar, a bad account of poor Ferrara; but
it brought to my mind how unreasonably my daughter and myself had
laughed seven years ago, at reading in an extract from some of the
foreign gazettes, how the famous Improvisatore Talassi, who was in
England about the year 1770, and entertained with his justly-admired
talents the literati at London; had published an account of his visit to
Mr. Thrale, at a villa eight miles from Westminster-bridge, during that
time, when he had the good fortune, he said, to meet many celebrated
characters at his country-seat; and the mortification which nearly
overbalanced it, to miss seeing the immortal Garrick then confined by
illness. In all this, however, there was nothing ridiculous; but we
fancied his description of Streatham village truly so; when we read that
he called it _Luogo assai popolato ed ameno_[Footnote: A populous and
delightful place.], an expression apparently pompous, and inadequate to
the subject: but the jest disappeared when I got into _his_ town; a
place which perhaps may be said to possess every other excellence but
that of being _popolato ed ameno_; and I sincerely believe that no
Ferrara-man could have missed making the same or a like observation; as
in this finely-constructed city, the grass literally grows in the
street; nor do I hear that the state of the air and water is such as is
likely to tempt new inhabitants. How much then, and how reasonably must
he have wondered, and how easily must he have been led to express his
wonder, at seeing a village no bigger than that of Streatham, contain a
number of people equal, as I doubt not but it does, to all the dwellers
in Ferrara!

Mr. Talassi is reckoned in his own country a man of great genius; in
ours he was, as I recollect, received with much attention, as a person
able and willing to give us demonstration that improviso verses might be