The modern Italians seem a miserable people, without sensibility, or imagination, or understanding. Their outside is polished, and an intercourse with them seems to proceed with much facility, though it ends in nothing, and produces nothing. The women are particularly empty, and though possessed of the same kind of superficial grace, are devoid of every cultivation and refinement. They have a ball at the Casino here every Sunday, which we attend--but neither Mary nor C---- dance. I do not know whether they refrain from philosophy or protestantism. I hear that poor Mary’s book is attacked most violently in the Quarterly Review. We have heard some praise of it, and among others, an article of Walter Scott’s in Blackwood’s Magazine. If you should have anything to send us--and, I assure you, anything relating to England is interesting to us--commit it to the care of Ollier the bookseller, or P***--they send me a parcel every quarter. My health is, I think, better, and, I imagine, continues to improve; but I still have busy thoughts and dispiriting cares, which I would shake off--and it is now summer.----A thousand good wishes to yourself and your undertakings. Ever most affectionately yours, P. B. S. TO MRS. SHELLEY (BAGNI DI LUCCA). _Florence, Thursday, 11 o’clock._ (_20th August, 1818._) Dearest Mary, We have been delayed in this city four hours, for the Austrian minister’s passport, but are now on the point of setting out with a vetturino, who engages to take us on the third day to Padua; that is, we shall only sleep three nights on the road. * * * * * Yesterday’s journey, performed in a one-horse cabriolet, almost without springs, over a rough road, was excessively fatiguing. *** suffered most from it; for, as to myself, there are occasions in which fatigue seems a useful medicine, as I have felt no pain in my side--a most delightful respite--since I left you. The country was various and exceedingly beautiful. Sometimes there were those low cultivated lands, with their vine festoons, and large bunches of grapes just becoming purple--at others we passed between high mountains, crowned with some of the most majestic Gothic ruins I ever saw, which frowned from the bare precipices, or were half seen among the olive copses. As we approached Florence, the country became cultivated to a very high degree, the plain was filled with the most beautiful villas, and, as far as the eye could reach, the mountains were covered with them; for the plains are bounded on all sides by blue and misty mountains. The vines are here trailed on low trellises of reeds interwoven into crosses to support them, and the grapes, now almost ripe, are exceedingly abundant. You everywhere meet those teams of beautiful white oxen, which are now labouring the little vine-divided fields with their Virgilian ploughs and carts.