erman,
which you would all understand. The conventual education, the
cavalier servitude, the habits of thought and living are so
entirely different, and the difference becomes so much more
striking the more you live intimately with them, that I know not
how to make you comprehend a people who are at once temperate and
profligate, serious in their characters and buffoons in their
amusements, capable of impressions and passions, which are at once
_sudden_ and _durable_ (what you find in no other nation), and who
actually have no society (what we would call so), as you may see by
their comedies; they have no real comedy, not even in Goldoni, and
that is because they have no society to draw it from.

"Their conversazioni are not society at all. They go to the theatre
to talk, and into company to hold their tongues. The _women_ sit in
a circle, and the men gather into groups, or they play at dreary
faro, or 'lotto reale,' for small sums. Their academic are concerts
like our own, with better music and more form. Their best things
are the carnival balls and masquerades, when every body runs mad
for six weeks. After their dinners and suppers they make extempore
verses and buffoon one another; but it is in a humour which you
would not enter into, ye of the north.

"In their houses it is better. I should know something of the
matter, having had a pretty general experience among their women,
from the fisherman's wife up to the Nobil Dama, whom I serve. Their
system has its rules, and its fitnesses, and its decorums, so as to
be reduced to a kind of discipline or game at hearts, which admits
few deviations, unless you wish to lose it. They are extremely
tenacious, and jealous as furies, not permitting their lovers even
to marry if they can help it, and keeping them always close to them
in public as in private, whenever they can. In short, they transfer
marriage to adultery, and strike the _not_ out of that commandment.
The reason is, that they marry for their parents, and love for
themselves. They exact fidelity from a lover as a debt of honour,
while they pay the husband as a tradesman, that is, not at all. You
hear a person's character, male or female, canvassed not as
depending on their conduct to their husbands or wives, but to their
mistress or love