I know not what may be the case at the opera; but I can assure you there are none of those busts among the auditories which the street-performers at Naples gather around them. I saw very lately a large cluster of men, women, and children, entertained to the highest degree, and to all appearance made exceedingly happy, by a poor fellow with a mask on his face, and a guitar in his hands. He assembled his audience by the songs he sung to the music of his instrument, and by a thousand merry stories he told them with infinite drollery. This assembly was in an open place, facing the bay, and near the palace. The old women sat listening, with their distaffs, spinning a kind of coarse flax, and wetting the thread with their spittle; their grandchildren sprawled at their feet, amused with the twirling of the spindle. The men and their wives, the youths and their mistresses, sat in a circle, with their eyes fixed on the musician, who kept them laughing for a great part of the evening with his stories, which he enlivened occasionally with tunes upon the guitar. At length, when the company was most numerous, and at the highest pitch of good humour, he suddenly pulled off his mask, laid down his guitar, and opened a little box which stood before him, and addressed the audience in the following words, as literally as I can translate them:—“Ladies and gentlemen, there is a time for all things; we have had enough of jesting; innocent mirth is excellent for the health of the body, but other things are requisite for the health of the soul. I will now, with your permission, my honourable masters and mistresses, entertain you with something serious, and of infinitely greater importance; something for which all of you will have reason to bless me as long as you live.” Here he shook out of a bag a great number of little leaden crucifixes.—“I am just come from the Holy House of Loretto, my fellow christians,” continued he, “on purpose to furnish you with those jewels, more precious than all the gold of Peru, and all the pearls of the ocean. Now, my beloved brethren and sisters, you are afraid that I shall demand a price for those sacred crosses, far above your abilities, and something correspondent with their value, by way of indemnification for the fatigue and expence of the long journey which I have made on your account, all the way from the habitation of the Blessed Virgin to this thrice renowned city of Naples, the riches and liberality of whose inhabitants are celebrated all over the globe. No, my generous Neapolitans; I do not wish to take the advantage of your pious and liberal dispositions, I will not ask for those invaluable crucifixes (all of which, let me inform you, have touched the soot of the holy image of the Blessed Virgin, which was formed by the hands of St. Luke; and, moreover, each of them has been shaken in the Santissima Scodella, the sacred porringer in which the Virgin made the pap for the infant Jesus); I will not, I say, ask an