The Porto Franco, Or Free Port (Where Goods
Brought In From Foreign Countries Pay No Duty Until They Are Sold
And taken out, as in a bonded warehouse in England), is down here
also; and two portentous officials, in cocked
Hats, stand at the
gate to search you if they choose, and to keep out Monks and
Ladies. For, Sanctity as well as Beauty has been known to yield to
the temptation of smuggling, and in the same way: that is to say,
by concealing the smuggled property beneath the loose folds of its
dress. So Sanctity and Beauty may, by no means, enter.
The streets of Genoa would be all the better for the importation of
a few Priests of prepossessing appearance. Every fourth or fifth
man in the streets is a Priest or a Monk; and there is pretty sure
to be at least one itinerant ecclesiastic inside or outside every
hackney carriage on the neighbouring roads. I have no knowledge,
elsewhere, of more repulsive countenances than are to be found
among these gentry. If Nature's handwriting be at all legible,
greater varieties of sloth, deceit, and intellectual torpor, could
hardly be observed among any class of men in the world.
MR. PEPYS once heard a clergyman assert in his sermon, in
illustration of his respect for the Priestly office, that if he
could meet a Priest and angel together, he would salute the Priest
first. I am rather of the opinion of PETRARCH, who, when his pupil
BOCCACCIO wrote to him in great tribulation, that he had been
visited and admonished for his writings by a Carthusian Friar who
claimed to be a messenger immediately commissioned by Heaven for
that purpose, replied, that for his own part, he would take the
liberty of testing the reality of the commission by personal
observation of the Messenger's face, eyes, forehead, behaviour, and
discourse.
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