ar, but abounding with classical
expressions that rejoice one's heart, and fill one with the oddest but
most pleasing sensations imaginable. I heard a lady there call a runaway
nobleman _Profugo_ mighty prettily; and added, that his conduct had put
all the town into _orgasmo grande_. All this, however, the Tuscans may
possibly have in common with them. My knowledge of the language must
remain ever too imperfect for me to depend on my own skill in it; all I
can assert is, that the Florentines _appear_, as far as I have been
competent to observe, to depend more on their own copious and beautiful
language for expression, than the Milanese do; who run to Spanish,
Greek, or Latin for assistance, while half their tongue is avowedly
borrowed from the French, whose pronunciation, in the letter _u_, they
even profess to retain.

At Venice, the sweetness of the patois is irresistible; their lips,
incapable of uttering any but the sweetest sounds, reject all
consonants they can get quit of; and make their mouths drop honey more
completely than it can be said by any eloquence less mellifluous than
their own.

The Bolognese dialect is detested by the other Italians, as gross and
disagreeable in its sounds: but every nation has the good word of its
own inhabitants; and the language which Abbate Bianconi praises as
nervous and expressive, I would advise no person, less learned than
himself, to censure as disgusting, or condemn as dull. I staid very
little at Bologna; saw nothing but their pictures, and heard nothing but
their prayers: those were superior, I fancy, to all rivals. Language can
be never spoken of by a foreigner to any effect of conviction. I have
heard our countryman. Mr. Greatheed himself, who perhaps possesses more
Italian than almost any Englishman, and studies it more closely, refuse
to decide in critical disputations among his literary friends here,
though the sonnets he writes in the Tuscan language are praised by the
natives, who best understand it, and have been by some of them preferred
to those written by Milton himself. Mean time this is acknowledged to
be the prime city for purity of phrase and delicacy of expression,
which, at last, is so disguised to me by the guttural manner in which
many sounds are pronounced, that I feel half weary of running about from
town to town so, and never arriving at any, where I can understand the
conversation without putting all the attention possible to their
discourse. I am