"If your letter concerned no one but me, my Lord, I should not attempt to justify myself. My character is so easily known, that he who cannot comprehend it intuitively, would not be enlightened by any explanation I could give. The virtuous reserve of Englishwomen, and the more artful graces of the French, often conceal one half of what passes in their bosoms; and what you are pleased to call magic in me, is nothing but an unconstrained disposition, which permits my varying, my inconsistent thoughts to be heard, without my taking the pains of bringing them into tune. Such harmony is nearly always factitious; for most genuine characters are heedlessly confiding. But it is not of myself that I would speak to you; it is of the unfortunate nation which you attack so cruelly. Can my regard for my friends have instilled this bitter malignity? You know me too well to be jealous of them: nor have I the vanity to suppose that any such sentiment has rendered you thus unjust. You say but what all foreigners say of the Italians, what must strike every one at first; but you should look deeper ere you thus sentence a people once so great. Whence came it that, in the Roman day, they were the most military in the world; during the republics of the Middle Ages, the most tenacious of their freedom; and, in the sixteenth century, the most illustrious for literature, science, and the arts? Has not Italy pursued fame in every shape? If it be lost to her now, blame her political situation; since, in other circumstances, she showed herself so unlike all she is. I may be wrong, but the faults of the Italians only enhance my pity for their fate. Strangers, from time to time, have conquered and distracted this fair land, the object of their perpetual ambition; yet strangers forever reproach her natives with the defects inevitable to a vanquished race.