not totally and invariably the same, though I doubt
not but it is so in their native deserts. Let it once become a fashion
for sovereigns and other great men to keep and to caress them, we shall
see camels as variegated as cats, which in the woods are all of the
uniformly-streaked tabby--the males inclining to the brown shade--the
females to blue among them;--but being bred _down_, become
tortoise-shell, and red, and every variety of colour, which
domestication alone can bestow.

The misery of Tuscany is, that _all animals_ thrive so happily under
this productive sun; so that if you scorn the Zanzariere, you are
half-devoured before morning, and so disfigured, that I defy one's
nearest friends to recollect one's countenance; while the spiders sting
as much as any of their insects; and one of them bit me this very day
till the blood came.

With all this not ill-founded complaint of these our active companions,
my constant wonder is, that the grapes hang untouched this 20th of
September, in vast heavy clusters covered with bloom; and unmolested by
insects, which, with a quarter of this heat in England, are encouraged
to destroy all our fruit in spite of the gardener's diligence to blow up
nests, cover the walls with netting, and hang them about with bottles of
syrup, to court the creatures in, who otherwise so damage every fig and
grape and plum of ours, that nothing but the skins are left remaining
_by now. Here_ no such contrivances are either wanted or thought on;
and while our islanders are sedulously bent to guard, and studious to
invent new devices to protect their half dozen peaches from their half
dozen wasps, the standard trees of Italy are loaded with high-flavoured
and delicious fruits.

Here figs sky-dy'd a purple hue disclose,
Green looks the olive, the pomegranate glows;
Here dangling pears exalted scents unfold,
And yellow apples ripen into gold.

The roadside is indeed hedged with festoons of vines, crawling from
olive to olive, which they plant in the ditches of Tuscany as we do
willows in Britain: mulberry trees too by the thousand, and some
pollarded poplars serve for support to the glorious grapes that will now
soon be gathered. What least contributes to the beauty of the country
however, is perhaps most subservient to its profits. I am ashamed to
write down the returns of money gained by the oil alone in this
territory and that of Lucca, where I was much struck with the colour as