The Italian ladies are affable and polite, and have in general a good deal of taste and imagination. At the theatres are a class of performers, called improvisatrice, who recite extempore poetry upon any subject the audience suggest, and often in such metre as they prescribe. An English traveller describes an improvisatrice whom he heard in the winter of 1818, as a pale girl about seventeen, with large black eyes full of fire. When she first began to declaim, her cheeks glowed and her whole frame quivered with convulsive effort; but as she proceeded her language became more flowing and impassioned, and the audience expressed their delight by loud and frequent applause. The literature of Italy has several illustrious female names. Their writings, like every thing in that sunny clime, are full of fervor and enthusiasm. It has already been mentioned that a woman filled one of the learned professorships in Bologna in the thirteenth century; the same thing occurred in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and eighteenth centuries. Polish women resemble the French in gayety and love of pleasure, and the Italians in ardor of passion and vividness of imagination. Their manners are said to be a seductive mixture of languid voluptuousness and sprightly coquetry. The state of public opinion is not favorable to female virtue; a circumstance which at once indicates corruption, and increases it. The Poles are fond of pageantry and splendor, but are charged with sluttishness in the interior arrangement of their houses. I presume there is no nation, whose ladies are so universally acknowledged to be pre-eminent in beauty. They have fine forms, and an exceedingly graceful carriage. Their complexions are generally very fair and clear; but all except the young make use of rouge, and some to an excessive degree. The eyes and hair are generally light, but there are numerous exceptions. During all the struggles of unhappy Poland, the women have manifested an heroic spirit. When king John Sobieski departed from home to raise the siege of Vienna, then closely invested by the Turks, his wife looked at him tearfully, and then at a little boy, the youngest of her sons. “Why do you weep so bitterly?” inquired the king. “It is because this boy is not old enough to accompany his father,” she replied.