found it too long.  Remember this, and don’t imagine that there could be any other motive.  The whole is about 225 stanzas, more or less, and a lyric of 96 lines, so that they are no longer than the first single cantos:  but the truth is, that I made the first too long, and should have cut those down also had I thought better.  Instead of saying in future for so many cantos, say so many stanzas or pages:  it was Jacob Tonson’s way, and certainly the best; it prevents mistakes.  I might have sent you a dozen cantos of 40 stanzas each,—­those of ‘The Minstrel’ (Beattie’s) are no longer,—­and ruined you at once, if you don’t suffer as it is.  But recollect that you are not pinned down to any thing you say in a letter, and that, calculating even these two cantos as one only (which they were and are to be reckoned), you are not bound by your offer.  Act as may seem fair to all parties.

“I have finished my translation of the first Canto of ’The Morgante Maggiore’ of Pulci, which I will transcribe and send.  It is the parent, not only of Whistlecraft, but of all jocose Italian poetry.  You must print it side by side with the original Italian, because I wish the reader to judge of the fidelity:  it is stanza for stanza, and often line for line, if not word for word.

“You ask me for a volume of manners, &c. on Italy.  Perhaps I am in the case to know more of them than most Englishmen, because I have lived among the natives, and in parts of the country where Englishmen never resided before (I speak of Romagna and this place particularly); but there are many reasons why I do not choose to treat in print on such a subject.  I have lived in their houses and in the heart of their families, sometimes merely as ’amico di casa,’ and sometimes as ‘amico di cuore’ of the Dama, and in neither case do I feel myself authorised in making a book of them.  Their moral is not your moral; their life is not your life; you would not understand it; it is not English, nor French, nor German, which you would all understand.  The conventual education, the cavalier servitude, the habits of thought and living are so entirely different, and the difference becomes so much more striking the more you live intimately with them, that I know not how to make you comprehend a people who are at once temperate and profligate, serious in their characters and buffoons in their amusements, capable of impressions and passions, which are at once sudden and durable (what you find in no other nation), and who actually have no society (what we would call so), as you may see by their comedies; they have no real comedy, not even in Goldoni, and that is because they have no society to draw it from.

“Their conversazioni are not society at all.  They go to the theatre to talk, and into company to hold their tongues.  The women sit in a circle, and the men gather into groups, or they play at dreary faro,