They are hired at a great rate to see the show." There was just one fly in the ointment.

"I am impatient to hear good sense pronounced in my native tongue; having only heard my language out of the mouths of boys and governors for these five months" (she complained to Lady Pomfret).

"Here are inundations of them broke in upon us this carnival, and my apartment must be their refuge; the greater part of them having kept an inviolable fidelity to the languages their nurses taught them; their whole business abroad (as far as I can perceive) being to buy new clothes, in which they shine in some obscure coffee-house, where they are sure of meeting only one another; and after the important conquest of some waiting gentlewoman of an opera queen, whom perhaps they remember as long as they live, return to England excellent judges of men and manners.

I find the spirit of patriotism so strong in me every time I see them, that I look on them as the greatest blockheads in nature; and, to say truth, the compound of booby and _petit maitre_ makes up a very odd sort of animal." It was not until the middle of August (1740) that Lady Mary left Venice, going first to Bologna, where she stayed a day or two "to prepare for the dreadful passage of the Apennines." On her way to Florence, she visited the monastery of La Trappe--her account of which may be given as a companion portrait to that of the nunnery printed in an earlier chapter.
"The monastery of La Trappe, is of French origin, and one of the most austere and self-denying orders I have met with.

In this gloomy retreat it gave me pain to observe the infatuation of men, who have devoutly reduced themselves to a much worse condition than that of the beasts.
Folly, you see, is the lot of humanity, whether it arises in the flowery paths of pleasure, or the thorny ones of an ill-judged devotion.