with it fresh matter to admire, and every stage you come to
presents at night customs and manners new and unknown before.

The stupendous mountains of the Alps, after the plains and soft
embowered recesses of Avignon, gave perhaps a no less grateful
sensation to the mind of Natura: he wanted indeed such a companion as
death had deprived him of in his good governor, to instruct him how to
improve contemplation, and to moralize on the amazing and different
objects he beheld; yet as his thoughts were now wholly at liberty, and
his reason unclouded by any passions of what kind soever, he did not
fail to make reflections suitable to the different occasions.

Whoever has seen Rome will acknowledge he must find sufficient there
to exercise all his faculties; but though the architecture, and the
paintings which ornament that august city might have engrossed his
whole attention, the many venerable reliques which were shewn him of
old Rome, appeared yet more lovely in his eyes; which shews the charms
antiquity has for persons even of the most gay dispositions: but this,
according to my opinion, is greatly owing to the prejudice of
education, which forces us as it were to an admiration of the
antients, meerly because they are so, and not that they are in any
essential respect always deserving that vast preference given them
over the moderns:--this may be easily proved by the exorbitant prices
some of our virtuoso's give for pieces of old copper, which are
reckoned the most valuable, as the inscriptions or figures on them are
least legible.

Natura, however, was not so absorbed in his admiration of the ruined
corner of a bath, or the half-demolished portico of an amphitheatre,
as to neglect those entertainments which more affect the senses, and
consequently give the most natural delight;--the exquisite music
performed at the churches, carried him there much oftener than
devotion would have done, and rarely did he fail the opera at night.

As the Romans are allowed to be the best bred people upon earth,
especially to strangers, be they of what country or perswasion soever,
neither the being an Englishman or a Protestant hindered him from
making very good acquaintance, and receiving the greatest civilities
from them; but the person to whom he was most obliged, and who indeed
had taken a particular fancy to him, was the younger son of the family
of Caranna: this nobleman, knowing his taste for music, would
frequently take him with