Wednesday, 17th, they actually arrive.

Poor Wilhelmina, she finds her Brother changed; become a King in fact, and sternly solitary; alone in soul, even as a King must be! [Wilhelmina, ii.

322, 323.]-- "Algarotti, one of the first BEAUX-ESPRITS of this age," as Wilhelmina defines him,--Friend Algarotti, the young Venetian gentleman of elegance, in dusky skin, in very white linen and frills, with his fervid black eyes, "does the expenses of the conversation." He is full of elegant logic, has speculations on the great world and the little, on Nature, Art, Papistry, Anti-Papistry, and takes up the Opera in an earnest manner, as capable of being a school of virtue and the moral sublime.

His respectable Books on the Opera and other topics are now all forgotten, and crave not to be mentioned.

To me he is not supremely beautiful, though much the gentleman in manners as in ruffles, and ingeniously logical:--rather yellow to me, in mind as in skin, and with a taint of obsolete Venetian Macassar.