Memoirs of a Cavalier. Daniel Defoe

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СКАЧАТЬ journey to Venice, and so for the rest of Italy. Yet I cannot deny that as every Gazette gave us some accounts of the conquests and victories of this glorious prince, it prepossessed my thoughts with secret wishes of seeing him, but these were so young and unsettled, that I drew no resolutions from them for a long while after.

      About the middle of January I left Milan and came to Genoa, from thence by sea to Leghorn, then to Naples, Rome, and Venice, but saw nothing in Italy that gave me any diversion.

      As for what is modern, I saw nothing but lewdness, private murders, stabbing men at the corner of a street, or in the dark, hiring of bravos, and the like. These were to me the modern excellencies of Italy; and I had no gust to antiquities.

      'Twas pleasant indeed when I was at Rome to say here stood the Capitol, there the Colossus of Nero, here was the Amphitheatre of Titus, there the Aqueduct of——, here the Forum, there the Catacombs, here the Temple of Venus, there of Jupiter, here the Pantheon, and the like; but I never designed to write a book. As much as was useful I kept in my head, and for the rest, I left it to others.

      I observed the people degenerated from the ancient glorious inhabitants, who were generous, brave, and the most valiant of all nations, to a vicious baseness of soul, barbarous, treacherous, jealous and revengeful, lewd and cowardly, intolerably proud and haughty, bigoted to blind, incoherent devotion, and the grossest of idolatry.

      Indeed, I think the unsuitableness of the people made the place unpleasant to me, for there is so little in a country to recommend it when the people disgrace it, that no beauties of the creation can make up for the want of those excellencies which suitable society procure the defect of. This made Italy a very unpleasant country to me; the people were the foil to the place, all manner of hateful vices reigning in their general way of living.

      I confess I was not very religious myself, and being come abroad into the world young enough, might easily have been drawn into evils that had recommended themselves with any tolerable agreeableness to nature and common manners; but when wickedness presented itself full-grown in its grossest freedoms and liberties, it quite took away all the gust to vice that the devil had furnished me with.

      The prodigious stupid bigotry of the people also was irksome to me; I thought there was something in it very sordid. The entire empire the priests have over both the souls and bodies of the people, gave me a specimen of that meanness of spirit, which is nowhere else to be seen but in Italy, especially in the city of Rome.

      At Venice I perceived it quite different, the civil authority having a visible superiority over the ecclesiastic, and the Church being more subject there to the State than in any other part of Italy.

      For these reasons I took no pleasure in filling my memoirs of Italy with remarks of places or things. All the antiquities and valuable remains of the Roman nation are done better than I can pretend to by such people who made it more their business; as for me, I went to see, and not to write, and as little thought then of these Memoirs as I ill furnished myself to write them.

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