cheap,
and would make one _so_ happy in London or at Bath. But these
Customhouse officers! these _rats de cave_, as the French comically call
them, will not let a ribbon pass. Such is the restless jealousy of
little states, and such their unremitted attention to keep the goods
made in one place out of the gates of another. Few things upon a journey
contribute to torment and disgust one more than the teasing enquiries at
the door of every city, who one is, what one's name is? what one's rank
in life or employment is; that so all may be written down and carried to
the chief magistrate for his information, who immediately dispatches a
proper person to examine whether you gave in a true report; where you
lodge, why you came, how long you mean to stay; with twenty more
inquisitive speeches, which to a subject of more liberal governments
must necessarily appear impertinent as frivolous, and make all my hopes
of bringing home the most trifling presents for a friend abortive. So
there is an end of that felicity, and we must sit like the girl at the
fair, described by Gay,

Where the coy nymph knives, combs, and scissars spies,
And looks on thimbles with desiring eyes.

The Specola, so they call their museum here, of natural and artificial
rarities, is very fine indeed; the inscription too denoting its
universality, is sublimely generous: I thought of our Bath hospital in
England; more usefully, if not more magnificently so; but durst not tell
the professor, who shewed the place. At our going in he was apparently
much out of humour, and unwilling to talk, but grew gradually kinder,
and more communicative; and I had at last a thousand thanks to pay for
an attention that rendered the sight of all more valuable. Nothing can
surpass the neatness and precision with which this elegant repository is
kept, and the curiosities contained in it have specimens very uncommon.
The native gold shewed here is supposed to be the largest and most
perfect lump in Europe; wonderfully beautiful it certainly is, and the
coral here is such as can be seen nowhere else; they shewed me some
which looked like an actual tree.

It might reasonably lower the spirits of philosophy, and tend to
restraining the genius of remote enquiry, did we reflect that the very
first substance given into our hand as an amusement, or subject of
speculation, as soon as we arrive in this great world of wonders, never
gets fully understood by those who study hardest,