into Greece by Orpheus. Nor has that prodigious genius, Dr. Thomas
Burnet, scorned to adopt it seriously in his _Telluris Theoria sacra_,
written less than a century ago, adapting it with wonderful ingenuity
to the Christian system and Mosaical account of things; to which it
certainly does accommodate itself the better, as the form of an egg well
resembles that of our habitable globe; and the internal divisions, our
four elements, leaving the central fire for the yolk. I therefore
regarded our pantomime here at Padua with a degree of reverence I should
have found difficult to excite in myself at Sadler's Wells; where ideas
of antiquity would have been little likely to cross my fancy. Sure I am,
however, that the original inventor of this old pantomime had his head
very full at the time of some very ancient learning.

Now then I must leave this lovely state of Venice, where if the paupers
in every town of it did not crowd about one, tormenting passengers with
unextinguishable clamour, and surrounding them with sights of horror
unfit to be surveyed by any eyes except those of the surgeon, who should
alleviate their anguish, or at least conceal their truly unspeakable
distresses--one should break one's heart almost at the thoughts of
quitting people who show such tenderness towards their friends, that
less than ocular conviction would scarce persuade me to believe such
wandering misery could remain disregarded among the most amiable and
pleasing people in the world. His excellency Bragadin half promised me
that some steps should be taken at Venice at least, to remove a nuisance
so disgraceful; and said, that when I came again, I should walk about
the town in white sattin slippers, and never see a beggar from one end
of it to the other.

On the twenty-sixth of May then, with the senator Quirini's letters to
Corilla, with the Countess of Starenberg's letters to some Tuscan