cism from the disciples of Rousseau, and familiarity, insolence, and sickly sentimentality, from the vulgar circles of citizens.

Turin is beautifully situated on the northern bank of the Po, at the foot of a ridge of fine hills, rising southward beyond the river; while northward extends a plain bounded by the Alps ascending sometimes in gigantic groupes like battlemented towers, and at other times, presenting detached points darting to the clouds like spires glittering with unmelted icicles, and with snows that never yield to the rays of summer.

The interior of the town is not unworthy its fame and situation; its streets are wide and strait, intersecting each other at right angles, and running in a direct line from gate to gate, through some large and regular squares. The royal palace is spacious, and surrounded with delightful gardens. There are many edifices, both public and private, which present long and magnificent fronts, and intermingled with at least one hundred churches, give the whole city a rich and splendid appearance. Such are the general features of Turin, both grand and airy. Among these features, the four gates of the city were formerly numbered, and as they were adorned with pillars, and cased with marble, they were represented as very striking and majestic entrances. But these celebrated gates the French had levelled to the ground, together with the ramparts, and the walks and plantations, that formerly encircled the town as with a forest. In the churches and palaces, marble of every vein and colour is lavished with prodigality, and decorations of all kinds are scattered with profusion; to such a degree indeed, as to encumber rather than to grace these edifices.

The misfortune of Turin has been, that while both its sovereigns and its inhabitants wanted neither means nor inclination to embellish it, no architect of taste and judgment was found to second their wishes. The two principal persons of that description employed at Turin, Guarini and Juvara, whatever might have been their talents, were deficient in judgment, and preferred the twisted, tortured curves and angles of Borromini, to the unbroken lines and simple forms of antiquity. Novelty, not purity, and prettiness instead of majesty, seem to have been their sole object. Hence this city does not, I believe, present one chaste model, one simple grand specimen in the ancient style, to challenge the admiration of the traveller. Every edifice, whatsoever its destination may be, whether church or theatre, hospital or palace, is encumbered with whimsical ornaments, is all glare and glitter, gaiety and confusion. In vain does the eye seek for repose, the mind long for simplicity. Gilding and flourishing blaze on all sides, and we turn away from the gaudy shew, dazzled and disgusted. The cathedral is an old Gothic edifice, in no respect remarkable; at its end is the chapel royal Della Santissima Sindone, rich in the highest degree, and surmounted with a heavy dome. The Corpus Domini, S. Lorenzo, S. Philippo Neri, Sta. Cristina, S. Rocco, SS. Maurizio et Lazzaro, and several other churches, deserve a particular inspection either by their magnitude or their pillars, or by the variety of marbles employed in their decoration.

The university of Turin occupied a most extensive building, containing a library of more than fifty thousand volumes; a museum furnished with a numerous collection of statues, vases, and other antiques of various denominations; a very

fine collection of medals; a hall of anatomy, admirably furnished; and an observatory. It was endowed for four-andtwenty professors, all of whom gave daily lectures. They were generally authors and men of great reputation in their respective sciences. There are two colleges dependent upon the university, remarkable also for their spaciousness and magnificence, as well as for the number of

young students which they contained. To these we must add the academy which I mentioned above, forming altogether a very noble establishment for the purpose of public education in all its branches and modifications, highly honourable to the judgment and munificence of Victor Amedeus, who, by enlarging and reforming its different parts, may justly be considered its founder.

In hospitals Turin was, like the other cities of Italy, richly endowed. The Regio Spedale della Carita, was on the plan of the celebrated hospital at Rome, and furnished at the same time provisions and employment to the poor, education to orphans, an asylum to the sick and to the decayed, and a dowry to unmarried girls. Eight or more establishments of a similar nature, though on a lesser scale, contributed to the same object in different parts of the city, and left no form of misery without the means of adequate and speedy relief.

The palaces, though some are large and spacious, are yet so disfigured by ill-placed decorations and grotesque architecture, as to make little impression on the eye, and consequently to deserve little attention. The pictures which formerly adorned their galleries and apartments have been transported to France,

and their rich furniture carried off and sold by the plunderers.

We will pass therefore to the country immediately round Turin, which is by no means deficient in beauty. Its first and most conspicuous feature is the Po, which gives its name to the principal street of the city, and bathes its walls as it rolls by in all its magnificence. I need not here inform the reader that the Ligurians, a tribe of Gallic or German origin, gave this river the name of Bodinco or bottomless, on account of its depth; nor need I enlarge upon its different appellations and their origin. He will smile however, when he is informed by a learned Dutchman*, that the Eridanus, consecrated by the fall of Phaethon, shaded by his sister poplars, and enriched by their amber tears, is not the celebrated river that gives fertility and fame to one of the noblest provinces of Italy, but the Raddaune, a stream that intersects the plains of Prussia, and falls into the Vistula near Dantzic! This change of site, climate, and scenery, will add much, without doubt, to the ideal charms which poesy has thrown over the Eridanus, and considerably enhance the pleasure which the reader receives from the various classic passages in which it is described. But to drop alike the fictions of the Greek poets, and the dreams of the German critics, we may observe that the account which Pliny the Elder has given of the Po, is still found to be tolerably accurate, though physical commotions, aided by human exertions, may be allowed to have made some petty alterations. Of the

power of the former we have two striking instances in the destruction of two ancient cities in this very region by the fall of mountains, one of which, Industria, lay near the road between Turin and Vercelli, and consequently not far from the channel of the Po. As to the latter, it has been exerted principally in opening new outlets at the mouth of the river, and in giving a better direction to its vast mass of waters, in order to prevent the consequences of inundations, and to recover some portions of land covered by its waves. This magnificent river takes its rise about five-and-twenty or thirty miles from Turin, in the recesses of Monte Viso or Vesulus, celebrated by Virgil for its forests of pines, and for the size and the fierceness of the boars that fed in them *. It becomes navigable even before it reaches Turin, though so near its source, and in a course which, including its windings, extends to three hundred miles, receives thirty rivers, bathes the walls of fifty towns and cities, and gives life, fertility, and opulence to the celebrated plains called from it Regio Circumpadana. Its average breadth from Turin to Ariano may be about twelve hundred feet, its depth is every where considerable, and its current strong and equal. It may justly therefore be called the king of Italian rivers, and ranked among the principal streams of southern Europe. We had beheld it frequently in the course of our wanderings between the Alps and Apennines, and always beheld it with interest and admiration. We now had to take leave of it, and turn for ever from the plain,

qua

Eridanus centum fluviis comitatus in æquor

Centum urbes rigat et placidis interluit undis. Fracast. Syph. h. x,