Dear West,—­T’other night as we (you know who we are) were walking on the charming bridge, just before going to a wedding assembly, we said, “Lord, I wish, just as we are got into the room, they would call us out, and say, West is arrived!  We would make him dress instantly, and carry him back to the entertainment.  How he would stare and wonder at a thousand things, that no longer strike us as odd!” Would not you?  One agreed that you should have come directly by sea from Dover, and be set down at Leghorn, without setting foot in any other foreign town, and so land at Us, in all your first full amaze; for you are to know, that astonishment rubs off violently; we did not cry out Lord! half so much at Rome as at Calais, which to this hour I look upon as one of the most surprising cities in the universe.  My dear child, what if you were to take this little sea-jaunt?  One would recommend Sir John Norris’s convoy to you, but one should be laughed at now for supposing that he is ever to sail beyond Torbay.[1] The Italians take Torbay for an English town in the hands of the Spaniards, after the fashion of Gibraltar, and imagine ’tis a wonderful strong place, by our fleet’s having retired from before it so often, and so often returned.

[Footnote 1:  Sir John Norris was one of the most gallant and skilful seamen of his time; but an expedition in which he had had the command had lately proved fruitless.  He had been instructed to cruise about the Bay of Biscay, in the hope of intercepting some of the Spanish treasure-ships; but the weather had been so uninterruptedly stormy that he had been compelled to return to port without having even seen an enemy.  The following lines were addressed to him upon this occasion: 

    Homeward, oh! bend thy course; the seas are rough;
    To the Land’s End who sails, has sailed enough.]

We went to this wedding that I told you of; ’twas a charming feast:  a large palace finely illuminated; there were all the beauties, all the jewels, and all the sugar-plums of Florence.  Servants loaded with great chargers full of comfits heap the tables with them, the women fall on with both hands, and stuff their pockets and every creek and corner about them.  You would be as much amazed at us as at anything you saw:  instead of being deep in the liberal arts, and being in the Gallery every morning, as I thought of course to be sure I would be, we are in all the idleness and amusements of the town.  For me, I am grown so lazy, and so tired of seeing sights, that, though I have been at Florence six months, I have not seen Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca, or Pistoia; nay, not so much as one of the Great Duke’s villas.  I have contracted so great an aversion to inns and post-chaises, and have so absolutely lost all curiosity, that, except the towns in the straight road to Great Britain, I shall scarce see a jot more of a foreign land; and trust me, when I return, I will not visit Welsh mountains, like Mr. Williams.  After Mount Cenis, the Boccheto, the Giogo, Radicofani, and the Appian Way, one has mighty little hunger after travelling.  I shall be mighty apt to set up my staff at Hyde-park-corner:  the alehouseman there at Hercules’s Pillars[1] was certainly returned from his travels into foreign parts.