The English novels in general, more particularly those written a few years since, give very false notions of the state of the Continental society; as, indeed, do those of the Continent give false notions of that of the English. Nothing, for instance, can be more outrageously absurd than Richardson’s story of Clementina, in Sir Charles Grandison, which betrays an entire ignorance of Italian usages. But Richardson evidently knew very little of the better classes of his own country; for though lords and ladies in his time may have worn wigs and hoops, they were not the arrant coxcombs and formalists he has made them. This morning, walking ahead of the carriages, we amused ourselves for several hours on the beach. I felt what wanderers we had truly become, when I beheld the children I had seen gathering shells on the coast of America, on the shores of the Mediterranean, and those of the North Sea, now amusing themselves in the same way on the beach of the Adriatic. We quitted the duchy of Urbino and entered the Romagna, as it is called, near La Catolica. The scenery improved as we advanced, the mountains drawing nearer to the coast, and the foreground becoming undulating and verdant.—We had the sea always on our right, and seized every good occasion to stroll on its beach. Our day’s works were easy, the towns lying at convenient distances asunder, and, what rendered this part of the journey more pleasant, not a travelling vehicle of any sort was met on the road: even the _Grognon_ had vanished, a defeated man. The second night from Ancona we slept at Rimini. At this town the Emilian and Flaminian Ways joined each other; for we had followed, most of the distance from Rome, the great route of the ancients between the capital of the world and Cis-Alpine Gaul. Here is still a triumphal arch in honour of Augustus, and a bridge as old, or nearly as old, as his age. They show a tribune, also, from which it is said Cæsar harangued the people the morning after he had passed the Rubicon! There was, at least, something manly in the audacity of this tradition.