ligion who worshipped
that luminary, at least held it in the highest veneration, as the
residence of Oromasdes the good Principle, who was considered by the
Magians as for ever clothed with light: I will consider _that_, I say,
if they insist upon it, as a marble of less consequence than the last
will and testament of an old inhabitant of Sparta which is shewn at
Verona, and which _they say_ disposes of the iron money used during the
first of many years that the laws of Lycurgus lasted.

Here is a very fine palace belonging to the Bevi-l'acqua family, besides
the Casa Verzi, as famous for its elegant Doric architecture, as the
charming mistress of it for her Attic wit.

St. Zeno is the church which struck me most: the eternal and all-seeing
eye placed over the door; Fortune's wheel too, composed of six figures
curiously disposed, and not unlike our man alphabet, two mounting, two
sitting, and two tumbling, over against it: on the outside of the wheel
this distich,

En ego Fortuna moderor mortalibus usum,
Elevo, depono, bona cunctis vel mala dono[J]--

this other on the inside of the wheel, less plainly to be read:

Induo nudatos, denudo veste paratos,
In me confidit, si quis derisus abibit[K].

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote J:
Here I Madam Fortune my favours bestow,
Some good and some ill to the high and the low.
]

[Footnote K:
The naked I clothe, and the pompous I strip;
If in me you confide, I may give you the slip.
]

This is a town full of beauties, wits, and rarities: numberless persons
of the first eminence have always adorned it, and the present
inhabitants have no mind to degenerate; while the Nobleman that is
immediately descended from that house which Giambattista della Torre
made famous for his skill in astronomy, employs himself in a much more
useful, if not a nobler study; and is completing for the press a new
system of education. It was very petulantly, and very spitefully said by
Voltaire, that Italy was now no more than _la boutique_[Footnote: The
old clothes shop.], and the Italians, _les merchands fripiers de
l'Europe_[Footnote: The slop-sellers of Europe]. The Greek remains here
have still an air of youthful elegance about them, which strikes one
very forcibly where so good opportunity offers of comparing them with
the fabrics formed by their destructive successors, the Goths; who have
left some fine old black-looking monuments (which look as if they had
stood