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having been accustomed to the gravity of Turks, I can scarcely look with an easy and familiar aspect at the levity and agility of the airy phantoms that are dancing about me here, and I often think that I am at a puppetshow amidst the representations of real life. I stare prodigiously, but nobody remarks it, for everybody stares here; staring is a-la-mode-there is a stare of attention and interét, a stare of curiosity, a stare of expectation, a stare of surprise, and it would greatly amuse you to see what trifling objects excite all this staring. This staring would have rather a solemn kind of air, were it not alleviated by grinning, for at the end of a stare there comes always a grin, and very commonly the entrance of a gentleman or a lady into a room is accompanied with a grin, which is designed to express complacence and social pleasure, but really shows nothing more than a certain contortion of muscles that must make a stranger laugh really, as they laugh artificially. The French grin is equally remote from the cheerful serenity of a smile, and the cordial mirth of an honest English horse-laugh. I shall not perhaps stay here long enough to form a just idea of French manners and characters, though this I believe would require but little study, as there is no great depth in either. It appears on a superficial view, to be a frivolous, restless, and agreeable people. The abbot is my guide, and I could not easily light upon a better; he tells me that here the women form the character of the men, and I am convinced in the persuasion of this by every company into which I enter. There seems here to be no intermediate state between infancy and manhood; for as soon as the boy has quit his leading-strings, he is set agog in the world; the ladies are his tutors, they make the first impressions, which generally remain, and they render the men ridiculous by the imitation of their humours and

graces, so that dignity in manners is a rare thing here before the age of sixty. Does not king David say somewhere, that man walketh in a vain show? I think he does, and I am sure this is peculiarly true of the Frenchman; but he walks merrily, and seems to enjoy the vision, and may he not therefore be esteemed more happy than many of our solid thinkers, whose brows are furrowed by deep reflection, and whose wisdom is so often clothed with a misty mantle of spleen and vapours?

What delights me most here is a view of the magnificence, often accompanied with taste, that reigns in the king's palaces and gardens; for though I do not admire much the architecture, in which there is great irregularity and want of proportion, yet the statues, paintings, and other decorations afford me high entertainment. One of the pieces of antiquity that struck me most in the gardens of Versailles, was the famous colossean statue of Jupiter, the workmanship of Myron, which Mark Antony carried away from Samos, and Augustus ordered to be placed in the Capitol. It is of Parian marble, and though it has suffered in the ruin of time, it still preserves striking lines of majesty. But surely, if marble could feel, the god would frown with a generous indignation to see himself transported from the Capitol into a French garden; and after having received the homage of the Roman emperors, who laid their laurels at his feet when they returned from their conquests, to behold now nothing but frizzled beaus passing by him with indifference.

I propose setting out soon from this place, so that you are to expect no more letters from this side of the water; besides, I am hurried to death, and my head swims with that vast variety of objects which I am obliged to view with such rapidity, the shortness of my time not allowing me to examine them at my leisure.

There is here an excessive prodigality of ornaments and decorations, that is just the opposite extreme to what appears in our royal gardens; this prodigality is owing to the levity and inconstancy of the French taste, which always pants after something new, and thus heaps ornament upon ornament without end or measure. is time, however, that I should put an end to my letter; so I wish you good night,

It

And am, &c.

MADAM,

LETTER XXII.

TO LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.

September 1, 1718. was till now) in I was informed

I HAVE been (what I never debt to you for a letter some weeks. you were at sea, and that it was to no purpose to write till some news had been heard of your arriving somewhere or other. Besides, I have had a second dangerous illness, from which I was more diligent to be recovered than from the first, having now some hopes of seeing you again. If you make any tour in Italy, I shall not easily forgive you for not acquainting me soon enough to have met you there. I am very certain I can never be polite unless I travel with you: and it is never to be repaired, the loss that Homer has sustained, for want of my translating him in Asia. You will come hither full of criticisms against a man who wanted nothing to be in the right but to have kept you company; you have no way of making me amends, but by continuing an Asiatic when you return to me, whatever English airs you may put on to other people.

I prodigiously long for your sonnets, your remarks, your oriental learning; but I long for nothing so much as your oriental self. You must of necessity be

advanced so far back into true nature and simplicity of manners, by these three years' residence in the East, that I shall look upon you as so many years younger than you was, so much nearer innocence, (that is, truth,) and infancy (that is, openness). I expect to see your soul as much thinner dressed as your body; and that you have left off, as unwieldy and cumbersome, a great many damned European habits. Without offence to your modesty be it spoken, I have a burning desire to see your soul stark naked, for I am confident it is the prettiest kind of white soul in the universe. But I forget whom I am talking to; you may possibly by this time believe, according to the prophet, that you have none; if so, show me that which comes next to a soul; you may easily put it upon a poor ignorant Christian for a soul, and please him as well with it; I mean your heart;—Mahomet, I think, allows you hearts; which (together with fine eyes and other agreeable equivalents), are worth all the souls on this side the world. But if I must be content with seeing your body only, God send it to come quickly: I honour it more than the diamond-casket that held Homer's Iliads; for in the very twinkle of one eye of it there is more wit, and in the very dimple of one cheek of it there is more meaning, than all the souls that ever were casually put into women since men had the making of them.

I have a mind to fill the rest of this paper with an accident that happened just under my eyes, and has made a great impression upon me. I have just passed part of this summer at an old romantic seat of my Lord Harcourt's, which he lent me. It overlooks a commonfield, where, under the shade of a haycock, sat two lovers, as constant as ever were found in romance, beneath a spreading beech. The name of the one (let it sound as it will) was John Hewet; of the other,

Sarah Drew. John was a well-set man about five and twenty, Sarah a brown woman of eighteen. John had for several months borne the labour of the day in the same field with Sarah; when she milked, it was his morning and evening charge to bring the cows to her pail. Their love was the talk, but not the scandal, of the whole neighbourhood; for all they aimed at was the blameless possession of each other in marriage. It was but this very morning that he had obtained her parents' consent, and it was but till the next week that they were to wait to be happy. Perhaps this very day, in the intervals of their work, they were talking of their wedding clothes; and John was now matching several kinds of poppies and field-flowers to her complexion, to make her a present of knots for the day. While they were thus employed, (it was on the last of July,) a terrible storm of thunder and lightning arose, that drove the labourers to what shelter the trees or hedges afforded. Sarah, frighted and out of breath, sunk on a haycock, and John (who never separated from her) sate by her side, having raked two or three heaps together to secure her. Immediately there was heard so loud a crack as if heaven had burst asunder. The labourers, all solicitous for each other's safety, called to one another: those that were nearest our lovers, hearing no answer, stepped to the place where they lay they first saw a little smoke, and after, this faithful pair;-John, with one arm about his Sarah's neck, and the other held over her face, as if to screen her from the lightning. They were struck dead, and already grown stiff and cold in this tender posture. There was no mark or discolouring on their bodies, only that Sarah's eyebrow was a little singed, and a small spot between her breasts. They were buried the next day in one grave, in the parish of Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire; where my Lord Harcourt, at my request,

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