Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I by Hester Lynch Piozzi
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page 6 of 281 (02%)
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translation of Addison's Spectators, and Rapin's Dissertation on the
contending Parties of England called Whig and Tory. He had likewise a violin, and some printed music, for his entertainment. I was glad to hear he was well, and travelling to Barcelona on foot by orders of the superior. After dinner we set out to see Miss Grey, at her convent of Dominican Nuns; who, I hoped, would have remembered me, as many of the ladies there had seized much of my attention when last abroad; they had however all forgotten me, nor could call to mind how much they had once admired the beauty of my eldest daughter, then a child, which I thought impossible to forget: one is always more important in one's own eyes than in those of others; but no one is of importance to a Nun, who is and ought to be employed in other speculations. When the Great Mogul showed his splendour to a travelling dervise, who expressed his little admiration of it--"Shall you not often be thinking of me in future?" said the monarch. "Perhaps I might," replied the religieux, "if I were not always thinking upon God." The women spinning at their doors here, or making lace, or employing themselves in some manner, is particularly consolatory to a British eye; yet I do not recollect it struck me last time I was over: industry without bustle, and some appearance of gain without fraud, comfort one's heart; while all the profits of commerce scarcely can be said to make immediate compensation to a delicate mind, for the noise and brutality observed in an English port. I looked again for the chapel, where the model of a ship, elegantly constructed, hung from the top, and found it in good preservation: some scrupulous man had made the ship, it seems, and thought, perhaps justly too, that he had spent a greater portion of |
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