the Grand Duke suffers the pride of birth to last no
longer than life however, and demolishes every hope of the woman of
quality lying in a separate grave from the distressed object who begged
at her carriage door when she was last on an airing.

Let me add, that his liberality of sentiment extends to virtue on the
one hand, if hardness of heart may be complained of on the other. He
suffers no difference of opinions to operate on his philosophy, and I
believe we heretics here should sleep among the best of his Tuscan
nobles. But there is no comfort in the possibility of being buried alive
by the excessive haste with which people are catched up and hurried
away, before it can be known almost whether all sparks of life are
extinct or no. Such management, and the lamentations one hears made by
the great, that they should thus be forced to keep _bad company_ after
death, remind me for ever of an old French epigram, the sentiment of
which I perfectly recollect, but have forgotten the verses, of which
however these lines are no unfaithful translation;

I dreamt that in my house of clay,
A beggar buried by me lay;
Rascal! go stink apart, I cry'd,
Nor thus disgrace my noble side.
Heyday! cries he, what's here to do?
I'm on my dunghill sure, as well as you.

Of elegant Florence then, so ornamented and so lovely, so neat that it
is said she should be seen only on holidays; dedicated of old to Flora,
and still the residence of sweetness, grace, and the fine arts
particularly; of these kind friends too, so amiable, so hospitable,
where I had the choice of four boxes every night at the theatre, and a
certainty of charming society in each, we must at last unwillingly take
leave; and on to-morrow, the twelfth day of September 1785, once more
commit ourselves to our coach, which has hitherto met with no accident
that could affect us, and in which, with God's protection, I fear not my
journey through what is left of Italy; though such tremendous tales are
told in many of our travelling books, of terrible roads and wicked
postillions, and ladies labouring through the mire on foot, to arrive at
bad inns where nothing eatable could be found. All which however is less
despicable than Tournefort, the great French botanist; who, while his
works swell with learning, and sparkle with general knowledge; while he
enlarges _your_ stock of ideas, and displays _his own_; laments
pathetically that he could not get down the