Item 68 - Letter from Richard Sheepshanks

4 pp.

Thanks WW for his letter full of Cambridge news: 'I shall be entirely happy to have any opportunity of showing my teeth or even hitting the heads...our opponents are the very ones of all others that I should like to hurl defiance against'. RS gives an account of his European tour: 'It was hot at Rome and so hot during our return that I think we did not travel more than one day from there to Milan'. 'Terni is as Lord Byron says worth all the waterfalls in Switzerland but together twofold'. However the 'number of beggars and idle rascals who want to be paid for sweeping and cleaning the paths and making bridges where they have never laid a finger is very provoking'. RS was not pleased with his courier who ordered a meal above his status: 'we took him on to Milan and dismissed him there as we had had a set purpose to do some time before. There too we got rid of our femme de chambre who was a sad useless idle impertinent and unprincipled little baggage'. RS gives his architectural observations of various cities in Italy. He thinks the painted arch originated on the northern side of the Alps: 'The prevalence in Italy of round arches and insulated columns in the later age as far as I can understand of all the painted arches I have yet seen makes me almost sure of this'. There is some good and early Gothic at Dijon.