le has been made while the time allotted for diversion lasts: but in a
school of girls, strictly kept, at _their_ hours of permitted recreation
no distinct sounds can be heard through the general clamour of joy and
confusion; nor does any thing come less into their heads than the notion
of imposing regulations on themselves, or making sport out of the harsh
sounds of _rule and government_.

Ridicule too points her arrows only among highly-polished
societies--_Paris_ and _London_, in the first of which all wit is
comprised in the power of ridiculing one's neighbours, and in the other
every artifice is put in practice to escape it. In Italy no such
terrors restrain conversation; no public censure pursues that
fantastical behaviour which leads to no public offence; and as it is
only fear which can beget falsehood, these people seek such behavior as
naturally suits them; and in our theatrical phrase, they let the
character come to them, they do not go to the character.

Let us not fail to remember after all, that such severity as we use,
quickens the desire of pleasing, and deadens the diffusion of immoral
sentiments, or indelicate language, in England; where, I must add, for
the honour of my country, that if such liberties were taken upon the
stage as are frequent in the first ranks of Italian society, they would
be hissed by those who paid only a shilling for their entrance: so that
affectation and a forced refinement may be considered as the bad leaden
statues still left in our delicately-neat and highly-ornamented gardens;
of which elegance and science are the white and red roses: but to be
possessed of their _sweets_, one must venture a little through the
_thorns_.--_Thorns_, though figurative, remind one of the _cicala_, a
creature which leaves nothing else untouched here. Surely their clamours
and depredations have no equal. I used to walk in the Boboli Gardens,
defying the heat, till they had eaten up the little shade some hedges
there afforded me; and till, by their incessant noise, all thought is
disturbed, and no line presented itself to my memory but

Sole sob ardenti resonant arbusta Cicadis[W];

[Footnote W:
While in the scorching sun I trace in vain
Thy flying footsteps o'er the burning plain,
The creaking locusts with my voice conspire,
They fried with heat, and I with fierce desire.

DRYDEN.
]

till Mr. Merry's sweet ode to summer here at Florence made one less
discontented,