ABSTRACT
It was in the fifth week of my forced stay at Messina, that, stepping into a coffee-house to beguile the weary hours, I overheard a conversation in an adjoining box which immediately arrested my attention. The principal speaker was a young officer, who had just arrived from Taranto in Apulia. a He said, the greatest novelty of the place at the time he left it, was an improvvisatore, not more than twenty years of age, who greatly surpassed every thing he had before heard of the kind. He was countenanced by the duke of Taranto and the archbishop. Nobody seemed to know where he came from. One of the compositions that the officer had / heard from his lips was a poem in which he represented himself as an orphan, who had just lost his only parent, shot by a company of banditti in the mountains, and who was left without a friend. He complained of a cruel guardian, that had treated him with intolerable austerity. He related that, flying from this guardian, he had taken refuge in the woods, had fallen in with banditti, and even made one among them. He was at that time wholly unconscious in what manner his father had come to his untimely end, and had by the most unexpected accident discovered, that the individual with whom he had entered into terms of the closest friendship, had fired the musket that rendered him fatherless. He described in the most expressive language the horror with which he was seized, the instantaneousness with which he quitted his new associates, and the detestation he conceived of their pursuits, and in a most eloquent peroration threw himself / upon the compassion and pity of his auditors. The whole company was in tears; and nothing was to be heard for some time after he had concluded, but sobs and groans from every one present. In a short while however they recovered from this transport; and the clapping and applause that followed lasted a considerable time.
