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This morning, in consequence of an invitation 
from the French ambassador, we went to hear mass 
performed for the Abbé de Bourbon, natural son of 
the late King of France, who died here of the small- 
pox, aged 24, the day we arrived. It was the most 
superb thing of the kind I ever saw. The church 
was hung with black, and an astonishing profusion 
of cloth of gold and ermine, and lighted with about 
four thousand large wax tapers. In the centre was a 
most magnificent Ionic temple of wood, painted like 
gray marble and gilt, in which was a sarcophagus of 
purple velvet embroidered with gold, at each of the 
corners of which stood a skeleton holding a great 
torch. 
The body was buried on Saturday. Mass was 
performed by the Pope’s nuncio; the music was 
quite heavenly ; there were a hundred instrumental 
and fifty vocal performers, and two organs. The 
company consisted of the first people of both sexes, 
all in mourning. The abbé is much regretted, par- 
ticularly by the English; and the French say he 
was an Englishman in his heart. 
Naples is a very long and extensive town, ama- 
zingly populous; the people very dirty,and the most 
barefaced villains that ever I met with. 
Here are some rich churches, and many tolerable 
pictures ; but none very fine. The architecture in 
general, as well as the taste of the ornaments of the 
town are very bad; some of them like the taste of 
our James the First’s time ; others like the flounc- 
ing, fluttering, scrawling style of the Dutch burgo- 
masters, or London and Norwich aldermen. How 
