for assuring you, that it is nothing
else but such a damp (continued by the neighborhood of certain sulphur
mines) as through accidental heat does sometimes happen in our coalpits.
But ingratitude must not discourage an honest man from doing good.
There is not, I say, such a tongue-tied generation under heaven as your
Italian, that you should not wonder if he makes signs. But our people
must have something in their diurnals; we must ever and anon be telling
them our minds; or if we be at it when we raise taxes, like those
gentlemen with the finger and the thumb, they will swear that we are
cutpurses. Come, I know what I have heard them say, when some men had
money that wrought hard enough for it; and do you conceive they will be
better pleased when they shall be told that upon like occasions you are
at mumchance or stool-ball?

"I do not speak for myself; for though I shall always acknowledge that
I got more by one year's sitting in the house than by my three years'
travels, it was not of that kind. But I hate that this same Spy, for
pretending to have played at billiards with the most serene Commonwealth
of Venice, should make such fools of us here, when I know that he must
have had his intelligence from some corn-cutter upon the Rialto; for a
noble Venetian would be hanged if he should keep such a fellow company.
And yet if I do not think he has made you all dote, never trust me, my
Lord Archon is sometimes in such strange raptures. Well, good my lord,
let me be heard as well as your apple squire. Venice has fresh blood
in her cheeks, I must confess, yet she is but an old lady. N or has he
picked her cabinet; these he sends you are none of her receipts, I can
assure you; he bought them for a Julio at St. Mark's of a mountebank.
She has no other wash, upon my knowledge, for that same envied
complexion of hers but her marshes, being a little better scented,
saving your presence, than a chamber-pot. My lords, I know what I say,
but you will never have done with it, that neither the great Turk, nor
any of those little Turks her neighbors, have been able to spoil her!
Why you may as well wonder that weasels do not suck eggs in swans'
nests. Do you think that it has lain in the devotion of her beads; which
you that have puked so much at popery, are now at length resolved shall
consecrate M. Parson, and be dropped by every one of his congregation,
while those same whimsical intelligences your surveyors (you will break
my he