Watkins, Thomas
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- Watkins, Thomas
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(1761 - 1829), s. of Pannoyre Watkins of Brecon; Ch.Ch. Oxf. 1779; FRS 1794; m. 1795 Susanna Vaughan; rect. of Llandefailog 1799, vic. of Llandefalley 1800 - 29.
1787 - 9 Mont Cenis (16 Sep. 1787), Turin (Sep.), Genoa (by 6 Oct.), Milan (11 Oct.), Bologna (by 19 Oct.), Florence (late Oct.), Leghorn (15 Nov.), Siena, Viterbo, Rome (by 25 Nov. 1787 - Jan. 1788), Naples (by 20 Jan.), Sicily (Feb. - Apr.), Naples (Apr.), Rome ( - 24 Apr.), Loreto, Bologna, Venice (by 1 May - Jul.) [Turkey, Greece, Jul. 1788 - Feb. 1789] Venice (1 Mar. - 3 Apr. 1789), Padua, Vicenza, Verona [Brussels late May]
Thomas Watkins went to Italy with George Pocock, with whom he had been at Christ Church, and he described his tour in a series of letters to his father which were published in 1792 (Watkins, Letters). They passed two months in Switzerland before entering Italy in September 1787. Turin tired them ('which I can only attribute to the uniform appearance of the place'); they spent three weeks in Florence, staying at Megit's hotel (which Watkins warmly commended), and they reached Rome in November. Watkins disparaged those travellers who spent only three weeks in Rome '(as I should suppose) for no other purpose than to to tell their acquaintance in England they had seen St Peters' (2:90). They spent some six weeks there, reading Tasso, Ariosto and Metastasio with their language masters, and being entertained by Cardinal de Bernis, to whom they had a letter of introduction from Lord Lansdowne (formerly 2nd Earl of Shelburne).
In January 1788 they went on to Naples and then made an excursion to Sicily between February and April. Returning to Naples in April, they ascended Vesuvius by night, 'and never', wrote Watkins, 'did I behold anything so dreadfully sublime', the contrast between the mountain and the Bay of Naples in the morning sun seeming 'like the passage from the Tartarean to the Elysian fields'. In April they were back in Rome revisiting 'the most interesting ruins, paintings and sculpture', which included Du Quesnoy's Susanna, 'infinitely superior to the extravagant figures of Michael Angelo, or to the quaint productions of Bernini'(2:90 - 1). Thomas Jenkins presented them to the Pope, who received them affably in his dressing gown and talked in Italian about hunting until it began to appear that 'the gentlemen, who were most acquainted with the subject, were the least conversant in Italian', and the Pope 'politely shifted the conversation to the Villa Borghese' (2:92). Watkins and Pocock left Rome on 24 April for Venice which they reached in time for Ascension on 1 May. In June Pocock returned alone to England while Watkins stayed behind, having been invited by Niccolo Foscarini, the newly-appointed Venetian ambassador to Turkey, to travel with him to Constantinople.
After spending nine months in Turkey, Greece and Dalmatia, Watkins returned to Venice in March 1789 to witness the election of the Doge, Lodovico Manin. He left early in April, and his last letter is dated Brussels, July 1789.
Watkins loved Italy and enjoyed the society of Italians, whose character was often, he thought, 'grossly misrepresented by prejudice and ignorance'; 'if crimes be more prevalent here than in other countries', he wrote, 'they do not arise from the natural disposition of the inhabitants, but from bad government and superstition'. Their one serious shortcoming was marital infidelity and even there Watkins considered them less culpable 'than the British women, whose consorts are generally the objects of their own, not of their parents' choice'. He found the Italians 'infinitely more attentive to us than we to them, more temperate, less arrogant, and less prejudiced'.