gloomy:  behind it, through some dark passages, you pass into a large obscure hall, which looks like a combination-chamber for some hellish council.  The large cloister surrounds their burying-ground.  The cloisters are very narrow and very long, and let into the cells, which are built like little huts detached from each other.  We were carried into one, where lived a middle-aged man not long initiated into the order.  He was extremely civil, and called himself Dom Victor.  We have promised to visit him often.  Their habit is all white:  but besides this he was infinitely clean in his person; and his apartment and garden, which he keeps and cultivates without any assistance, was neat to a degree.  He has four little rooms, furnished in the prettiest manner, and hung with good prints.  One of them is a library, and another a gallery.  He has several canary-birds disposed in a pretty manner in breeding-cages.  In his garden was a bed of good tulips in bloom, flowers and fruit-trees, and all neatly kept.  They are permitted at certain hours to talk to strangers, but never to one another, or to go out of their convent.  But what we chiefly went to see was the small cloister, with the history of St. Bruno, their founder, painted by Le Soeur.  It consists of twenty-two pictures, the figures a good deal less than life.  But sure they are amazing!  I don’t know what Raphael may be in Rome, but these pictures excel all I have seen in Paris and England.  The figure of the dead man who spoke at his burial, contains all the strongest and horridest ideas, of ghastliness, hypocrisy discovered, and the height of damnation, pain and cursing.  A Benedictine monk, who was there at the same time, said to me of this picture:  C’est une fable, mais on la croyoit autrefois. Another, who showed me relics in one of their churches, expressed as much ridicule for them.  The pictures I have been speaking of are ill preserved, and some of the finest heads defaced, which was done at first by a rival of Le Soeur’s.  Adieu! dear West, take care of your health; and some time or other we will talk over all these things with more pleasure than I have had in seeing them.

Yours ever.

THE CARNIVAL—­THE FLORENTINES CIVIL, GOOD-NATURED, AND FOND OF THE ENGLISH—­A CURIOUS CHALLENGE.

TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.

FLORENCE, February 27, 1740, N.S.

Well, West, I have found a little unmasqued moment to write to you; but for this week past I have been so muffled up in my domino, that I have not had the command of my elbows.  But what have you been doing all the mornings?  Could you not write then?—­No, then I was masqued too; I have done nothing but slip out of my domino into bed, and out of bed into my domino.  The end of the Carnival is frantic, bacchanalian; all the morn one makes parties in masque to the shops and coffee-houses, and all the evening to the operas and balls. Then I have danced, good gods! how have