It was on the twenty-first of May then that we returned up the Brenta in
a barge to _Padua_, stopping from time to time to give refreshment to
our conductors and their horse, which draws on the side, as one sees
them at Richmond; where the banks are scarcely more beautifully adorned
by art, than here by nature; though the Brenta is a much narrower river
than the Thames at Richmond, and its villas, so justly celebrated, far
less frequent. The sublimity of their architecture however, the
magnificence of their orangeries, the happy construction of the cool
arcades, and general air of festivity which breathes upon the banks of
this truly _wizard stream_, planted with _dancing_, not _weeping_
willows, to which on a bright evening the lads and lasses run for
shelter from the sun beams,
Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri[T];
[Footnote T:
While tripping to the wood my wanton hies,
She wishes to be seen before she flies.
]
are I suppose peculiar to itself, and best described by Monsieur de
Voltaire, whose Pococurante the Venetian senator in Candide that
possesses all delights in his villa upon the banks of the Brenta, is a
very lively portrait, and would be natural too; but that Voltaire, as a
Frenchman, could not forbear making his character speak in a very
unItalian manner, boasting of his felicity in a style they never use,
for they are really no puffers, no vaunters of that which they possess;
make no disgraceful comparisons between their own rarities and the want
of them in other countries, nor offend you as the French do, with false
pity and hateful consolations.
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