my present
state of remoteness from English manners. The party consisted of an old
nobleman, who could trace his genealogy unblemished up to one of the old
Roman emperors, but whose fortune is now in a hopeless state of
decay:--his lady, not inferior to himself in birth or haughtiness of air
and carriage, but much impaired by age, ill health, and pecuniary
distress; these had however no way lessened her ideas of her own
dignity, or the respect of her cavalier servente and her son, who waited
on her with an unremitted attention; presenting her their little dirty
tin snuff-boxes upon one knee by turns; which ceremony the less
surprised me, as having seen her train made of a dyed and watered
lutestring, borne gravely after her up stairs by a footman, the express
image of Edgar in the storm-scene of king Lear--who, as the fool says,
"_wisely reserv'd a blanket, else had we all been 'shamed_."

Our conversation was meagre, but serious. There was music; and the door
being left at jar, as we call it, I watched the wretched servant who
staid in the antichamber, and found that he was listening in spight of
sorrow and starving.

With this slight sketch of national manners I finish my chapter, and
proceed to the description of, or rather observations and reflections
made during a winter's residence at

MILAN.

For we did not stay at Pavia to see any thing: it rained so, that no
pleasure could have been obtained by the sight of a botanical garden;
and as to the university, I have the promise of seeing it upon a future
day, in company of some literary friends. Truth to tell, our weather is
suddenly become so wet, the roads so heavy with incessant rain, that
king William's departure from his own foggy country, or his welcome to
our gloomy one, where this month is melancholy even, to a proverb, could
not have been clouded with a thicker atmosphere surely, than was mine to
Milan upon the fourth day of dismal November, 1784.

Italians, by what I can observe, suffer their minds to be much under the
dominion of the sky; and attribute every change in their health, or even
humour, as seriously to its influence, as if there were no nearer causes
of alteration than the state of the air, and as if no doubt remained of
its immediate power, though they are willing enough here to poison it
with the scent of wood-ashes within doors, while fires in the grate seem
to run rather low, and a brazier full of that pernicious stuff is
substit