at Tuillemont.

To-morrow we go forward to Bologna.

BOLOGNA

SEEMS at first sight a very sorrowful town, and has a general air of
melancholy that surprises one, as it is very handsomely and regularly
built; and set in a country so particularly beautiful, that it is not
easy to express the nature of its beauty, and to express it so that
those who inhabit other countries can understand me.

The territory belonging to Bologna la Grassa concenters all its charms
in a happy _embonpoint_, which leaves no wrinkle unfilled up, no bone to
be discerned; like the fat figure of Gunhilda at Fonthill, painted by
Chevalier Cafali, with a face full of woe, but with a sleekness of skin
that denotes nothing less than affliction. From the top of the only
eminence, one looks down here upon a country which to me has a new and
singular appearance; the whole horizon appearing one thick carpet of the
softest and most vivid green, from the vicinity of the broad-leaved
mulberry trees, I trust, drawn still closer and closer together by
their amicable and pacific companions the vines, which keep cluttering
round, and connect them so intimately that no object can be separately
or distinctly viewed, any more than the habitations formed by animals
who live in moss, when a large portion of it is presented to the
philosopher for speculation. One would not therefore, on a flight and
cursory inspection, suspect this of being a painter's country, where no
prominence of features arrests the sight, no expression of latent
meaning employs the mind, and no abruptness of transition tempts fancy
to follow, or imagination to supply, the sudden loss of what it
contemplated before.

Here however the great Caraccis kept their school; here then was every
idea of dignity and majestic beauty to be met with; and if _I_ meet with
nothing in nature near this place to excite such ideas, it is _my_
fault, not Bologna's.

If vain the toil,
We ought to blame the culture,--not the soil.

Wonderful indeed! yet not at all distracting is the variety of
excellence that one contemplates here; such matters! and such scholars!
The sweetly playful pencil of Albano, I would compare to Waller among
our English poets; Domenichino to Otway, and Guido Rheni to Rowe; if
such liberties might be permitted on the old notion of _ut pictura
poesis_. But there is an idea about the world, that one ought in
delicacy to declare one's utter incapacity of understanding pictur