and manner with which I am obliged to express them.

By the indulgence of private friendship, I have now enjoyed the uncommon
amusement of seeing a theatrical exhibition performed by friars in a
convent for their own diversion, and that of some select friends. The
monks of St. Victor had, it seems, obtained permission, this carnival,
to represent a little odd sort of play, written by one of their
community chiefly in the Milanese dialect, though the upper characters
spoke Tuscan. The subject of this drama was taken, naturally enough,
from some events, real or fictitious, which were supposed to have
happened in, the environs of Milan, about a hundred years ago, when the
Torriani and Visconti families disputed for superiority. Its
construction was compounded of comic and distressful scenes, of which
the last gave me most delight; and much was I amazed, indeed, to feel my
cheeks wet with tears at a friar's play, founded on ideas of parental
tenderness. The comic part, however, was intolerably gross; the jokes
coarse, and incapable of diverting any but babies, or men who, by a kind
of intellectual privation, contrive to perpetuate babyhood, in the vain
hope of preferring innocence: nor could I shelter myself by saying how
little I understood of the dialect it was written in, as the action was
nothing less than equivocal; and in the burletta which was tacked to it
by way of farce, I saw the soprano fingers who played the women's parts,
and who see more of the world than these friars, blush for shame, two or
three times, while the company, most of them grave ecclesiastics,
applauded with rapturous delight.

The wearisome length of the whole would, however, have surfeited me, had
the amusement been more eligible; but these dear monks do not get a
holiday often, I trust; so in the manner of school-boys, or rather
school-girls in England (for our boys are soon above such stuff), they