Useful and
indispensable in Italy to make the evening pass, as cards are in England.
I intend to stop several days here on my return from Naples, for which
place I shall start the day after to-morrow having engaged a place in a
vettura for two and half louis d'or and to be spesato. I am not to be
deterred from my journey by the many stories of robberies and
assassinations which are said to occur so frequently on that road.
By the bye, talking of robberies and murders, a man was executed the day
before yesterday on the Piazza del Popolo for a triple murder. I saw the
guillotine, which is now the usual mode of punishment, fixed on the centre
of the Piazza and the criminal escorted there by a body of troops; but I
did not stop to witness the decapitation, having no taste for that sort of
pleasuring. This man richly deserved his punishment.
[84] These lines are from Voltaire's Henriade, a poem which no Frenchman
reads nowadays, but that Major Frye could quote from memory. The
correct reading of the first verse is: Des pretres fortunes, etc.
(Henriade, canto iv. ed. Kehl, vol. x, p. 97.) - ED.
[85] Horace, Sat., 1, 9, 4. - ED.
