t out,
even to the most ignorant, that those accursed bandages must heat the
tender infant into a fever; must hinder the action of the muscles, and
the play of the joints, so necessary to health and nutrition; and that
while the refluent blood is obstructed in the veins, which run on the
surface of the body, the arteries, which lie deep, without the reach of
compression, are continually pouring their contents into the head,
where the blood meets with no resistance? The vessels of the brain are
naturally lax, and the very sutures of the skull are yet unclosed. What
are the consequences of this cruel swaddling? the limbs are wasted; the
joints grow rickety; the brain is compressed, and a hydrocephalus, with
a great head and sore eyes, ensues. I take this abominable practice to
be one great cause of the bandy legs, diminutive bodies, and large
heads, so frequent in the south of France, and in Italy.

I was no less surprised to find the modern fashion of curling the hair,
borrowed in a great measure from the coxcombs and coquettes of
antiquity. I saw a bust of Nero in the gallery at Florence, the hair
represented in rows of buckles, like that of a French petit-maitre,
conformable to the picture drawn of him by Suetonius. Circa cultum adeo
pudendum, ut coman semper in gradus formatam peregrinatione achaica,
etiam pene verticem sumpserit, So very finical in his dress, that he
wore his hair in the Greek fashion, curled in rows almost to the crown
of his head. I was very sorry however to find that this foppery came
from Greece. As for Otho, he wore a galericulum, or tour, on account of
thin hair, propter raritatem capillorum. He had no right to imitate the
example of Julius Caesar, who concealed his bald head with a wreath of
laurel. But there is a bust in the Capitol of Julia Pia, the second
wife of Septimius Severus, with a moveable peruke, dressed exactly in
the fashionable mode, with this difference, that there is no part of it
frizzled; nor is there any appearance of pomatum and powder. These
improvements the beau-monde have borrowed from the natives of the Cape
of Good Hope.

Modern Rome does not cover more than one-third of the space within the
walls; and those parts that were most frequented of old are now
intirely abandoned. From the Capitol to the Coliseo, including the
Forum Romanum and Boarium, there is nothing intire but one or two
churches, built with the fragments of ancient edifices. You descend
from the Capit