and twice nearly run us over, in order to ensure our approbation.

Siena is a very dull place. Some English friends of ours who spent a winter there, found a great want of cultivated society. A few ancient, ill-educated noble families inhabit their hereditary mansions, but even these mix little with each other; it being the laudable custom for every lady to sit at home every evening to receive company, never making a visit to another. The gentlemen are divided among these rival queens, some of whom, I understand, are very charming women, and all are happy to receive respectable strangers of either sex ;-but what is there in such societies to attract? There is no theatre, nor opera, nor public amusement of any kind. Life stagnates here; for its active pursuits, its interests, its honours, its pleasures, and its hopes, can have no place. No happy Briton can see and know what Siena is, without looking back with a swelling heart to his own country.

We paid a visit to the house of St Catherine of Siena, where is still to be seen-besides an ugly chapel painted in fresco-the stony couch on which the poor little saint used to sleep at nights, and the very identical spot where our Saviour stood when he espoused her, and put the wedding-ring on her finger! My astonishment was unutterable. I have seen the marriage of Christ and St Catherine a thousand times in painting, but I always concluded it to be metaphorical, or thought at most, that credulity had magnified some accidental dream into a vision sent by heaven; but it never once entered

into my head, that any human being had ever imagined, or pretended, that such a marriage really did take place. Yet here I was repeatedly and most solemnly assured by every body present,-consisting of a priest, a lacquey, a tailor, and two women-that our Saviour actually appeared on this spot in his own proper person, invested her with the ring, though how he came by it nobody knows, -for rings, I suppose, are not made in heaven, whatever marriages may be-and declared her his spouse, notwithstanding that he had been crucified several hundred years before this-his wife Catherine was born! Nay, they declared that he carried on a most affectionate correspondence with her, and that many of his letters of conjugal love are still extant. Of these, however, I could not obtain a sight, but I saw, in the public library in this city, several epistles on her side, to her dear husband Jesus Christ, and her mother-in-law the Virgin Mary.

That such a legend ever should have been accredited in the darkest ages of extravagant fanaticism, I could scarcely have believed; but that it should have been gravely repeated as authentic in the nineteenth century, nothing, I think, short of the evidence of my senses, could have convinced me.

Leaving the library, which contains a great quantity of books, though I would not answer for their value, we passed through the Piazza Pubblica, a singular place, shaped like a theatre, or rather like a fan, with its paved radii like fan-sticks converging together, and rivetted at the bottom by the

Palazzo Pubblico, a building answering to our town hall. What it contains I don't know, for we had no time to enter, the vetturino by this time becoming furious at our delay, and indeed night closed in upon us long before we reached our destined place of rest, the wretched osteria of the still more wretched village of Buon Convento. Thither, when a wearisome pilgrimage of four mortal hours had at last conducted us, its half-starved looking denizens would not admit us into the horrible pig-stye in which they wallowed themselves, but conducted us to a lone uninhabited house on the other side of the way, in which there was not a human being. We were ushered up an old ghastly staircase, along which the wind whistled mournfully, into an open hall, the raftered roof of which was overhung with cobwebs, and the stone floor was deep in filth. Four doors entered into this forlorn looking place, two of which led to the chill, dirty, miserable holes which were our destined places of repose; and the other two, to rooms that the people said did not belong to them; neither did they give any very distinct or satisfactory account of who might be their tenants,-one old woman assuring us they were inhabited by "Nessuno,"* while the other maintained they were occupied by "Galant'uomini."+ In the meantime, it was certain that the frail doors of our dormitories would yield on the slightest push; that the door of the hall itself leading upon the stairs had no fastening

* Nobody. + Very honest people.

at all; that the stairs were open to the road in front, and to the fields behind, the house itself having no door whatever; and thus, that whoever chose to pay us a nocturnal visit, might do so without the smallest inconvenience or difficulty to himself.

What was far worse, it was miserably cold; the wind blew about us, and we could get no fire. But there was no remedy for these grievances, and we resigned ourselves to fate and to bed. The two hideous old beldames who had brought us our wretched supper had left us for the night, and no human being was near us, when we heard the sound of a heavy foot on the creaking staircase, and a man wrapped in a cloak, and armed with a sword and musket, stalked into the hall.

If we had been heroines, what terrors might have agitated, and what adventures might not have befallen us! But as were not heroical, we neither screamed nor fainted, we only looked at him; and notwithstanding his formidable appearance, and that he had long black mustachios and bushy eyebrows, he did us no mischief, though he might have cut our throats with all the ease in the world: indeed he had still abundance of leisure for the exploit, for he informed us that he had the honour of lodging in the house, that he was the only person who had that honour, and that he should have the honour of sleeping in the next room to ours.

Finding him so courteous, and being aware there was no means of getting quit of him, we treated him on our parts with the utmost civility, perhaps upon the principle that the Indians worship the devil ;

and exchanging the salutation of "Felicissima Notte!" (a wish which, however benevolent, there seemed small prospect of being granted,) our whiskered neighbour retreated into his apartment, the key of which he had in his pocket, and we contented ourselves with barricadoing our doors with the only table and chair that our desolate chambers contained; then in uncurtained and uncoverleted wretchedness, upon flock beds, the prey of innumerable fleas, and shaking with cold, if not with fear, we lay the live-long night; not even having wherewithal to cover us, for the potent smell of the filthy rug which performed the double duties of blanket and quilt, obliged us to discard it, and our carriage-cloaks were but an inadequate defence against the blasts that whistled through the manifold chinks of the room.