This is the age of cosmopolitism, real or pretended; and Florence, just at this moment, is an epitome, both of its spirit and of its representatives. So many people travel, that one is apt to ask who can be left at home; and some aim at distinction in this era of migration by making it a point to see every thing. Of this number is a certain Count di V----, whom I met in America just before leaving home. This gentleman went through the United States, tablets in hand, seeming to be dissatisfied with himself if he quitted one of our common-place towns with a hospital unexamined, a mineral unregistered, or a church unentered. It struck me at the time that he was making a toil of a pleasure, especially in a country that has so little worth examining. But a short time since, I dined with my banker here. At table, I was seated between the Marchese G----, a Sardinian, and the Baron P----, a Neapolitan. Alluding to the locomotive propensities of our times, I mentioned the ardour for travelling, and the industry I had witnessed in the aforesaid Count di V----. Signor G---- told me that he knew him intimately, having himself visited all the North of Europe in his company, previously to which his friend had explored Greece, Egypt, Northern Africa, and the West of Asia, by himself. “When he left the United States,” continued Signor G----, “it was to go--where?” “To the West Indies and Mexico.” “True; and from the latter he came through Columbia to Brazil, where I was at the time. He left me there to cross the Andes, and I cannot tell you what has become of him.” “Why do you not come to the East Indies?” said an English woman to me the same evening, and to whom I had been introduced as to a lady who lived in that part of the world, but who had taken run from Calcutta to pass the summer in Switzerland, and the winter in Italy. “I fancy few mere travellers get as far as Hindostan?” “Oh, we have them occasionally. Now, the winter before I left home, we had one for several weeks in our own house; he only left us to go to the Himalayah mountains and return a few months before I sailed.”--“An Englishman, of course?”--“No, indeed; an Italian.”--“Pray, ma’am, was it Count Carlo di V----!”--“Yes it was.”--“And may I ask what has become of him?”--“He left Calcutta to go to Ceylon and Manilla, on his way to China.” So much for our own times![1]