prosperity of trade must give commerce full liberty; only being careful
to prevent the frauds which private interests, often wrongly understood,
might invent at the expense of public and general interests. In fact, the
government must hold the scales, and allow the citizens to load them as
they please.

In Lyons I met the most famous courtezan of Venice. It was generally
admitted that her equal had never been seen. Her name was Ancilla. Every
man who saw her coveted her, and she was so kindly disposed that she
could not refuse her favours to anyone; for if all men loved her one
after the other, she returned the compliment by loving them all at once,
and with her pecuniary advantages were only a very secondary
consideration.

Venice has always been blessed with courtezans more celebrated by their
beauty than their wit. Those who were most famous in my younger days were
Ancilla and another called Spina, both the daughters of gondoliers, and
both killed very young by the excesses of a profession which, in their
eyes, was a noble one. At the age of twenty-two, Ancilla turned a dancer
and Spina became a singer. Campioni, a celebrated Venetian dancer,
imparted to the lovely Ancilla all the graces and the talents of which
her physical perfections were susceptible, and married her. Spina had for
her master a castrato who succeeded in making of her only a very ordinary
singer, and in the absence of talent she was compelled, in order to get a
living, to make the most of the beauty she had received from nature.

I shall have occasion to speak again of Ancilla before her death. She was
then in Lyons with her husband; they had just returned from England,
where they had been greatly applauded at the Haymarket Theatre. She had
stopped in Lyons only for her pleasure, and, the moment she shewed