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France, the pleasures that we find, like those of our 
youth, are of the gay fluttering kind, which grow 
by degrees as we advance towards Italy, more solid, 
manly, and rational, but attain not their full per- 
fection till we reach Rome ; from which paimt we 
no sooner turn homewards, than they begin again 
gradually to decline; and though sustained for a 
while in some degree of vigour through the other 
stages and cities of Italy, yet dwindle at last into 
weariness and fatigue, and a desire to be at home, 
where the traveller finishes his course, as the old 
man does his days, with the usual privilege of being 
tiresome to his friends by a perpetual repetition of 
past adventures. This last is only to finish the 
climax, and by no means applicable to you. You 
have a fair opportunity of adding your suffrage to 
the above, or giving your dissent; and as this re- 
mark was made more than fifty years since, you 
will observe how far manners may have changed 
with time. I must give you another quotation. 
Brydone, in his Travels through Sicily, speaks of 
large aloes making a magnificent appearance, and I 
believe thought them indigenous, and enumerated 
sundry plants, which, when I read him, struck me 
with surprise ; but you assign a very probable rea- 
son why more southern plants should flourish in 
that country. In the west of England, near the sea, 
tis no unusual sight to observe myrtles in the open 
air bear the winter well; and I have noticed some 
springs, when near London the severity of weather 
has destroyed the blossom of the wall-fruits, near 
the sea in Sussex they have not perished. 
VOL. I. a 
