nd any spot where they
can kill an hour, and get a cup of coffee, are daily at her command. All
those fellows, too, are counts; the title being about as common, and as
cheap, as chimney-sweepers among us, though not belonging to so valuable
fraternity.
After a month's training of this kind, the poor fool is fit for nothing
else, to the last hour of her being. She is a flirt and a _figurante_,
as long as she lives. Duty and decorum are things too icy for the
"ardour of her soul." The life of England is utterly barbarian to the
refinement of the land of macaroni.
And it is unquestionably much better that the whole tribe should remain
where they are, and roam among the lazzaroni, than return to corrupt the
decencies of English life. If this sentimentalist has money, she is sure
to be picked up by some "superb chevalier," some rambling
fortune-hunter, or known swindler, hunted from the gambling table;
probably beginning his career as a frizeur or a footman, and making
rapid progress towards the galleys. If she has none, she returns to
England, to grumble, for the next fifty years, at the climate, the
country, and the people; to drawl out her maudlin regrets for olive
groves, and pout for the Bay of Naples; to talk of her loves; exhibit a
cameo or a crucifix, (the parting pledge of some inamorato, probably
since hanged), prate papistry, and profess _liberalism_; pronounce the
Roman holidays "charming things," and long to see the carnival, and the
worship of the Virgin together, imported to relieve the _ennui_ of
London.
The subject is startling: and we recommend any thing, and every thing,
in the shape of employment, in preference to the vitiating follies of a
life of Touring.
Another tribe of female authorship ought to be extinguished without a
moment's delay. Those are the yearly travellers. A woman of this kind
scampers over the Continent, like a queen's messenger, every season; she
rushes along with the rapidity and the regularity of the "Royal Mail."
The month of May no sooner appears in the calendar, than she packs up
her trunk, and crosses to Boulogne, "to make a book." One year she takes
the north, another the south; to her, all points of the compass are
equal. But whether the _roulage_ carries her to the Baltic or the
Mediterranean, her affair is done, if she adds a page a day to her
journal. She gossips along, and scribbles, with the indefatigable finger
of a maker of bobbin lace, or a German knitter of st
|