enice, and so for the rest of Italy. Yet
I cannot deny that as every Gazette gave us some accounts of the
conquests and victories of this glorious prince, it prepossessed my
thoughts with secret wishes of seeing him, but these were so young
and unsettled, that I drew no resolutions from them for a long while
after.

About the middle of January I left Milan and came to Genoa, from
thence by sea to Leghorn, then to Naples, Rome, and Venice, but saw
nothing in Italy that gave me any diversion.

As for what is modern, I saw nothing but lewdness, private murders,
stabbing men at the corner of a street, or in the dark, hiring of
bravos, and the like. These were to me the modern excellencies of
Italy; and I had no gust to antiquities.

'Twas pleasant indeed when I was at Rome to say here stood the
Capitol, there the Colossus of Nero, here was the Amphitheatre of
Titus, there the Aqueduct of----, here the Forum, there the Catacombs,
here the Temple of Venus, there of Jupiter, here the Pantheon, and the
like; but I never designed to write a book. As much as was useful I
kept in my head, and for the rest, I left it to others.

I observed the people degenerated from the ancient glorious
inhabitants, who were generous, brave, and the most valiant of all
nations, to a vicious baseness of soul, barbarous, treacherous,
jealous and revengeful, lewd and cowardly, intolerably proud and
haughty, bigoted to blind, incoherent devotion, and the grossest of
idolatry.

Indeed, I think the unsuitableness of the people made the place
unpleasant to me, for there is so little in a country to recommend it
when the people disgrace it, that no beauties of the creation can make
up for the want of those excellencies which suitable society procure
the defect of. This made Italy a very unpleasant country to me;
the people were the foil to the place, all manner of hateful vices
reigning in their general way of living.

I confess I was not very religious myself, and being come abroad into
the world young enough, might easily have been drawn into evils that
had recommended themselves with any tolerable agreeableness to nature
and common manners; but when wickedness presented itself full-grown in
its grossest freedoms and liberties, it quite took away all the gust
to vice that the devil had furnished me with.

The prodigious stupid bigotry of the people also was irksome to me; I
thought there was something in it very sordid. The entire empire the
p