A View of Society and Manners in Italy, Volume 2 (of 2): With Anecdotes Relating to some Eminent CharactersMoore, John
History
A View of Society and Manners in Italy, Volume 2 (of 2): With Anecdotes Relating to some Eminent Characters
Moore, John
Italy -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800; Italy -- Social life and customs -- Early works to 1800
However persuaded he may be of the advantages enjoyed by the people of
England, he will see the harshness and impropriety of insulting the
natives of other countries with an ostentatious enumeration of those
advantages; he will perceive how odious those travellers make themselves,
who laugh at the religion, ridicule the customs, and insult the police of
the countries through which they pass, and who never fail to insinuate to
the inhabitants that they are all slaves and bigots. Such bold Britons
we have sometimes met with, _fighting_ their way through Europe, who, by
their continual broils and disputes, would lead one to imagine that the
angel of the Lord had pronounced on each of them the same denunciation
which he did on Ishmael the son of Abraham, by his handmaid Hagar. “And
he will be a wild man, and his hand will be against every man, and every
man’s hand against him[12].” If the same unsocial disposition should
creep into our politics, it might arm all the powers in Europe against
Great Britain, before she gets clear of her unhappy contest with America.
A young man, whose mind has been formed as it ought, before he goes
abroad, when he sees many individuals preserve personal dignity in spite
of arbitrary government, an independent mind amidst poverty, liberal and
philosophic sentiments amidst bigotry and superstition; must naturally
have the highest esteem for such characters, and allow them more merit
than those even of his own country, who think and act in the same manner
in less unfavourable circumstances.
Besides these advantages, a young man of fortune, by spending a few
years abroad, will gratify a natural and laudable curiosity, and pass
a certain portion of his life in an agreeable manner. He will form
an acquaintance with that boasted nation, whose superior taste and
politeness are universally acknowledged; whose fashions and language are
adopted by all Europe; and who, in science, power, and commerce, are
the rivals of Great Britain. He will have opportunities of observing
the political constitution of the German empire; that complex body,
formed by a confederacy of princes, ecclesiastics, and free cities,
comprehending countries of vast extent, inhabited by a hardy race of men,
distinguished for solid sense and integrity, who, without having equalled
their sprightlier neighbours in works of taste or imagination, have shewn
what prodigious efforts of application the human mind is capable of in
the severest and least amusing studies, and whose armies exhibit at
present the most perfect models of military discipline. In contemplating
these, he will naturally consider, whether those armies tend most to the
aggrandizement of the Monarch, or to defend or preserve any thing to the
people who maintain them, and the soldiers who compose them, equivalent
to the vast expence of money, and the still greater quantity of misery
which they occasion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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