, men and women, in their best apparel, and dance
to the musick of fiddles, and pipe and tabor, or rather pipe and drum.
There are hucksters' stands, with pedlary ware and knick-knacks for
presents; cakes and bread, liqueurs and wine; and thither generally
resort all the company of Nice. I have seen our whole noblesse at one
of these festins, kept on the highway in summer, mingled with an
immense crowd of peasants, mules, and asses, covered with dust, and
sweating at every pore with the excessive heat of the weather. I should
be much puzzled to tell whence their enjoyment arises on such
occasions; or to explain their motives for going thither, unless they
are prescribed it for pennance, as a fore-taste of purgatory.

Now I am speaking of religious institutions, I cannot help observing,
that the antient Romans were still more superstitious than the modern
Italians; and that the number of their religious feasts, sacrifices,
fasts, and holidays, was even greater than those of the Christian
church of Rome. They had their festi and profesti, their feriae
stativae, and conceptivae, their fixed and moveable feasts; their
esuriales, or fasting days, and their precidaneae, or vigils. The
agonales were celebrated in January; the carmentales, in January and
February; the lupercales and matronales, in March; the megalesia in
April; the floralia, in May; and the matralia in June. They had their
saturnalia, robigalia, venalia, vertumnalia, fornacalia, palilia, and
laralia, their latinae, their paganales, their sementinae, their
compitales, and their imperativae; such as the novemdalia, instituted
by the senate, on account of a supposed shower of stones. Besides,
every private family had a number of feriae, kept either by way of
rejoicing for some benefit, or mourning for some calamity. Every time
it thundered, the day was kept holy. Every ninth day was a holiday,
thence called nundinae quasi novendinae. There was the dies
denominalis, which was the fourth of the kalends; nones and ides of
every month, over and above the anniversary of every great defeat which
the republic had sustained, particularly the dies alliensis, or
fifteenth of the kalends of December, on which the Romans were totally
defeated by the Gauls and Veientes; as Lucan says--et damnata diu
Romanis allia fastis, and Allia in Rome's Calendar condemn'd. The vast
variety of their deities, said to amount to thirty thousand, with their
respective rites of adoration, could