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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Venetian Life, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Venetian Life
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: March 8, 2003 [eBook #7083]
+[Most recently updated: August 8, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, David Widger and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VENETIAN LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+VENETIAN LIFE
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.
+
+In correcting this book for a second edition, I have sought to complete
+it without altering its original plan: I have given a new chapter
+sketching the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the present
+trade and industry of Venice; I have amplified somewhat the chapter on
+the national holidays, and have affixed an index to the chief historical
+persons, incidents, and places mentioned.
+
+Believing that such value as my book may have is in fidelity to what
+I actually saw and knew of Venice, I have not attempted to follow
+speculatively the grand and happy events of last summer in their effects
+upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that in the traits at which I loved most
+to look, the life of Venice is not so much changed as her fortunes; but
+at any rate I am content to remain true to what was fact one year ago.
+
+W. D. H.
+
+Cambridge, January 1, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+   CHAPTER I. Venice in Venice
+   CHAPTER II. Arrival and first Days in Venice
+   CHAPTER III. The Winter in Venice
+   CHAPTER IV. Comincia far Caldo
+   CHAPTER V. Opera and Theatres
+   CHAPTER VI. Venetian Dinners and Diners
+   CHAPTER VII. Housekeeping in Venice
+   CHAPTER VIII. The Balcony on the Grand Canal
+   CHAPTER IX. A Day-Break Ramble
+   CHAPTER X. The Mouse
+   CHAPTER XI. Churches and Pictures
+   CHAPTER XII. Some Islands of the Lagoons
+   CHAPTER XIII. The Armenians
+   CHAPTER XIV. The Ghetto and the Jews of Venice
+   CHAPTER XV. Some Memorable Places
+   CHAPTER XVI. Commerce
+   CHAPTER XVII. Venetian Holidays
+   CHAPTER XVIII. Christmas Holidays
+   CHAPTER XIX. Love-making and Marrying; Baptisms and Burials
+   CHAPTER XX. Venetian Traits and Characters
+   CHAPTER XXI. Society
+   CHAPTER XXII. Our Last Year in Venice
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+VENICE IN VENICE.
+
+
+One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the
+stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and
+the byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief
+part in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian
+theatre), and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters.
+We could not help seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the
+villain of the piece, pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all
+tears and desperation, upon the stage; and we were dismayed to behold
+the injured husband and his abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the
+scenes. All the shabbiness of the theatre was perfectly apparent to
+us; we saw the grossness of the painting and the unreality of the
+properties. And yet I cannot say that the play lost one whit of its
+charm for me, or that the working of the machinery and its inevitable
+clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the least. There was so much truth
+and beauty in the playing, that I did not care for the sham of the ropes
+and gilding, and presently ceased to take any note of them. The illusion
+which I had thought an essential in the dramatic spectacle, turned out
+to be a condition of small importance.
+
+It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box
+at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this
+VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the
+theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that
+melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place
+without learning to know it differently from those writers who have
+described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help
+seeing from my point of observation the sham and cheapness with which
+Venice is usually brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the
+same time, it has never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise
+and regard, nor the fascination of its excellent beauty, its peerless
+picturesqueness, its sole and wondrous grandeur. It is true that the
+streets in Venice are canals; and yet you can walk to any part of the
+city, and need not take boat whenever you go out of doors, as I once
+fondly thought you must. But after all, though I find dry land enough
+in it, I do not find the place less unique, less a mystery, or less a
+charm. By day, the canals are still the main thoroughfares; and if
+these avenues are not so full of light and color as some would have us
+believe, they, at least, do not smell so offensively as others pretend.
+And by night, they are still as dark and silent as when the secret
+vengeance of the Republic plunged its victims into the ungossiping
+depths of the Canalazzo!
+
+Did the vengeance of the Republic ever do any such thing?
+
+Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to question that reputation
+for vindictive and gloomy cruelty alien historians have given to a
+government which endured so many centuries in the willing obedience
+of its subjects; but to think that the careful student of the old
+Republican system will condemn it for faults far different from those
+for which it is chiefly blamed. At all events, I find it hard to
+understand why, if the Republic was an oligarchy utterly selfish and
+despotic, it has left to all classes of Venetians so much regret and
+sorrow for its fall.
+
+So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will
+hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams--the
+Venice of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his
+prejudices--the merciless Venice of Darù, and of the historians who
+follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he
+sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion
+removed; and--to take leave of our theatrical metaphor--I promise to
+fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to them may
+go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer no
+annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often
+get from travelers’ beds into their books.
+
+Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors
+concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves
+hereafter, but which no doubt form a large part of every one’s
+associations with the name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that
+pathetic swindle, the Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will
+hear it mentioned without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the
+taciturn justice of the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the
+Serenest Republic’s policy. When I entered it the first time I was at
+the pains to call about me the sad company of those who had passed its
+corridors from imprisonment to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent
+tourists have done the same. I was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward
+that I had, on this occasion, been in very low society, and that the
+melancholy assemblage which I then conjured up was composed entirely
+of honest rogues, who might indeed have given as graceful and ingenious
+excuses for being in misfortune as the galley-slaves rescued by Don
+Quixote,--who might even have been very picturesque,--but who were not
+at all the material with which a well-regulated imagination would deal.
+The Bridge of Sighs was not built till the end of the sixteenth century,
+and no romantic episode of political imprisonment and punishment (except
+that of Antonio Foscarini) occurs in Venetian history later than that
+period. But the Bridge of Sighs could have nowise a savor of sentiment
+from any such episode, being, as it was, merely a means of communication
+between the Criminal Courts sitting in the Ducal Palace, and the
+Criminal Prison across the little canal. Housebreakers, cut-purse
+knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a poetic interest to places
+which have known them; and yet these are the only sufferers on whose
+Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has looked with pathetic
+sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The name of the bridge
+was given by the people from that opulence of compassion which enables
+the Italians to pity even rascality in difficulties.[1]
+
+    [1] The reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said in a few
+    words, much better than I have said in many, the same thing of
+    sentimental errors about Venice:--
+
+    “The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a
+    mere efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of
+    daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth
+    remembering, or whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that
+    Bridge of Sighs, which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of
+    Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under
+    which the traveler now pauses with breathless interest; the statue
+    which Byron makes Faliero address at one of his great ancestors,
+    was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after
+    Faliero’s death.”--_Stories of Venice_.]
+
+Political offenders were not confined in the “prison on each hand” of
+the poet, but in the famous _pozzi_ (literally, wells) or dungeons under
+the Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been
+uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for
+their exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom
+some foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to
+be afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say
+now that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with
+prison-life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped.
+They are not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants
+could have suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden
+casing of the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the
+state to inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.
+
+But on whose account had I to be interested in the _pozzi_? It was
+difficult to learn, unless I took the word of sentimental hearsay.
+I began with Marin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to
+languish in these dungeons for a moment. He was imprisoned in the
+apartments of state, and during one night only. His fellow-conspirators
+were hanged nearly as fast as taken.
+
+Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several other political
+prisoners of sad and famous memory with scarcely better effect. To a
+man, they struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and
+escaped from the _pozzi_ by every artifice of fact and figure.
+
+The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their
+story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history. But it
+was not the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed their cruel
+taking-off: they were strangled in the prison formerly existing at
+the top of the palace, called the Torresella. [Footnote: Galliciolli,
+_Memorie Venete_.] It is possible, however, that Jacopo Foscari may have
+been confined in the _pozzi_ at different times about the middle of the
+fifteenth century. With his fate alone, then, can the horror of these
+cells be satisfactorily associated by those who relish the dark romance
+of Venetian annals; for it is not to be expected that the less tragic
+fortunes of Carlo Zeno and Vittore Pisani, who may also have been
+imprisoned in the _pozzi_, can move the true sentimentalizer. Certainly,
+there has been anguish enough in the prisons of the Ducal Palace, but we
+know little of it by name, and cannot confidently relate it to any great
+historic presence.
+
+Touching the Giant’s Stairs in the court of the palace, the inexorable
+dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin
+Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground--at the
+end of Lord Byron’s tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of
+the Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed
+the traitor’s death to the people from between the two red columns in
+the southern gallery of the palace;--that façade was not built till
+nearly a century later.
+
+I suppose,--always judging by my own average experience,--that besides
+these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up scenes of
+brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the brightest
+picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight, romantic
+adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old
+merry-making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this
+way, the conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is become
+as gross a fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of which
+I have but spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social
+dullness and sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.
+
+The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the
+whole world’s civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the
+city, doomed four hundred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly
+(the Venetians would be apt to tell you wholly) in the implacable anger,
+the inconsolable discontent, with which the people regard their present
+political condition.
+
+If there be more than one opinion among men elsewhere concerning the
+means by which Austria acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she
+holds the province, there would certainly seem to be no division on the
+question in Venice. To the stranger first inquiring into public feeling,
+there is something almost sublime in the unanimity with which the
+Venetians appear to believe that these means were iniquitous, and that
+this tenure is abominable; and though shrewder study and carefuler
+observation will develop some interested attachment to the present
+government, and some interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge
+will discover, in the hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness,
+and selfish ignorance to take off its sublimity, the hatred is still
+found marvelously unanimous and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no
+disposition to discuss the question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising
+at Venice official functions by permission and trust of the Austrian
+government, I cannot regard the cessation of those functions as release
+from obligations both to that government and my own, which render it
+improper for me, so long as the Austrians remain in Venice, to criticize
+their rule, or contribute, by comment on existing things, to embitter
+the feeling against them elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, speak
+dispassionately of facts of the abnormal social and political state of
+the place; and I can certainly do this, for the present situation is
+so disagreeable in many ways to the stranger forced to live there,--the
+inappeasable hatred of the Austrians by the Italians is so illiberal in
+application to those in any wise consorting with them, and so stupid and
+puerile in many respects, that I think the annoyance which it gives
+the foreigner might well damp any passion with which he was disposed to
+speak of its cause.
+
+This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity from the defeat of
+patriotic hopes of union with Italy in 1859, when Napoleon found the
+Adriatic at Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was concluded. But
+it is not to be supposed that a feeling so general, and so thoroughly
+interwoven with Venetian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to
+the Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the subjection into which she
+fell a second time after Napoleon’s ruin, by the treaties of the Holy
+Alliance, defeated in several attempts to throw off her yoke, and loaded
+with heavier servitude after the fall of the short-lived Republic of
+1849,--Venice has always hated her masters with an exasperation deepened
+by each remove from the hope of independence, and she now detests them
+with a rancor which no concession short of absolute relinquishment of
+dominion would appease.
+
+Instead, therefore, of finding that public gayety and private
+hospitality in Venice for which the city was once famous, the stranger
+finds himself planted between two hostile camps, with merely the choice
+of sides open to him. Neutrality is solitude and friendship with neither
+party; society is exclusive association with the Austrians or with the
+Italians. The latter do not spare one of their own number if he
+consorts with their masters, and though a foreigner might expect greater
+allowance, it is seldom shown to him. To be seen in the company of
+officers is enmity to Venetian freedom, and in the case of Italians it
+is treason to country and to race. Of course, in a city where there is
+a large garrison and a great many officers who have nothing else to
+do, there is inevitably some international love-making, although
+the Austrian officers are rigidly excluded from association with the
+citizens. But the Italian who marries an Austrian severs the dearest
+ties that bind her to life, and remains an exile in the heart of her
+country. Her friends mercilessly cast her off, as they cast off every
+body who associates with the dominant race. In rare cases I have known
+Italians to receive foreigners who had Austrian friends, but this with
+the explicit understanding that there was to be no sign of recognition
+if they met them in the company of these detested acquaintance.
+
+There are all degrees of intensity in Venetian hatred, and after hearing
+certain persons pour out the gall of bitterness upon the Austrians, you
+may chance to hear these persons spoken of as tepid in their patriotism
+by yet more fiery haters. Yet it must not be supposed that the Italians
+hate the Austrians as individuals. On the contrary, they have rather
+a liking for them--rather a contemptuous liking, for they think them
+somewhat slow and dull-witted--and individually the Austrians are
+amiable people, and try not to give offence. The government is also very
+strict in its control of the military. I have never seen the slightest
+affront offered by a soldier to a citizen; and there is evidently no
+personal ill-will engendered. The Austrians are simply hated as the
+means by which an alien and despotic government is imposed upon a people
+believing themselves born for freedom and independence. This hatred,
+then, is a feeling purely political, and there is political machinery by
+which it is kept in a state of perpetual tension.
+
+The Comitato Veneto is a body of Venetians residing within the province
+and abroad, who have charge of the Italian interests, and who work in
+every way to promote union with the dominions of Victor Emanuel. They
+live for the most part in Venice, where they have a secret press for the
+publication of their addresses and proclamations, and where they remain
+unknown to the police, upon whose spies they maintain an espionage. On
+every occasion of interest, the Committee is sure to make its presence
+felt; and from time to time persons find themselves in the possession
+of its printed circulars, stamped with the Committee’s seal; but no one
+knows how or whence they came. Constant arrests of suspected persons are
+made, but no member of the Committee has yet been identified; and it is
+said that the mysterious body has its agents in every department of the
+government, who keep it informed of inimical action. The functions of
+the Committee are multiplied and various. It takes care that on all
+patriotic anniversaries (such as that of the establishment of the
+Republic in 1848, and that of the union of the Italian States under
+Victor Emanuel in 1860) salutes shall be fired in Venice, and a
+proper number of red, white, and green lights displayed. It inscribes
+revolutionary sentiments on the walls; and all attempts on the part
+of the Austrians to revive popular festivities are frustrated by the
+Committee, which causes petards to be exploded in the Place of St. Mark,
+and on the different promenades. Even the churches are not exempt from
+these demonstrations: I was present at the Te Deum performed on the
+Emperor’s birthday, in St. Mark’s, when the moment of elevating the
+host was signalized by the bursting of a petard in the centre of the
+cathedral. All this, which seems of questionable utility, and worse than
+questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of the Italianissimi, and
+though possibly the strictness of the patriotic discipline in which the
+members of the Committee keep their fellow-citizens may gall some of
+them, yet any public demonstration of content, such as going to the
+opera, or to the Piazza while the Austrian band plays, is promptly
+discontinued at a warning from the Committee. It is, of course, the
+Committee’s business to keep the world informed of public feeling
+in Venice, and of each new act of Austrian severity. Its members are
+inflexible men, whose ability has been as frequently manifested as their
+patriotism.
+
+The Venetians are now, therefore, a nation in mourning, and have, as I
+said, disused all their former pleasures and merry-makings. Every class,
+except a small part of the resident _titled_ nobility (a great part
+of the nobility is in either forced or voluntary exile), seems to be
+comprehended by this feeling of despondency and suspense. The poor of
+the city formerly found their respite and diversion in the numerous
+holidays which fell in different parts of the year, and which, though
+religious in their general character, were still inseparably bound up in
+their origin with ideas of patriotism and national glory. Such of these
+holidays as related to the victories and pride of the Republic naturally
+ended with her fall. Many others, however, survived this event in all
+their splendor, but there is not one celebrated now as in other days. It
+is true that the churches still parade their pomps in the Piazza on the
+day of Corpus Christi; it is true that the bridges of boats are still
+built across the Canalazzo to the church of Our Lady of Salvation, and
+across the Canal of the Giudecca to the temple of the Redeemer, on the
+respective festivals of these churches; but the concourse is always
+meagre, and the mirth is forced and ghastly. The Italianissimi have
+so far imbued the people with their own ideas and feelings, that
+the recurrence of the famous holidays now merely awakens them to
+lamentations over the past and vague longings for the future.
+
+As for the carnival, which once lasted six months of the year, charming
+hither all the idlers of the world by its peculiar splendor and variety
+of pleasure, it does not, as I said, any longer exist. It is dead, and
+its shabby, wretched ghost is a party of beggars, hideously dressed
+out with masks and horns and women’s habits, who go from shop to shop
+droning forth a stupid song, and levying tribute upon the shopkeepers.
+The crowd through which these melancholy jesters pass, regards them with
+a pensive scorn, and goes about its business untempted by the delights
+of carnival.
+
+All other social amusements have shared in greater or less degree the
+fate of the carnival. At some houses conversazioni are still held,
+and it is impossible that balls and parties should not now and then
+be given. But the greater number of the nobles and the richer of
+the professional classes lead for the most part a life of listless
+seclusion, and attempts to lighten the general gloom and heaviness
+in any way are not looked upon with favor. By no sort of chance are
+Austrians, or Austriacanti ever invited to participate in the pleasures
+of Venetian society.
+
+As the social life of Italy, and especially of Venice, was in great
+part to be once enjoyed at the theatres, at the caffè, and at the other
+places of public resort, so is its absence now to be chiefly noted in
+those places. No lady of perfect standing among her people goes to
+the opera, and the men never go in the boxes, but if they frequent the
+theatre at all, they take places in the pit, in order that the house may
+wear as empty and dispirited a look as possible. Occasionally a bomb is
+exploded in the theatre, as a note of reminder, and as means of keeping
+away such of the nobles as are not enemies of the government. As it is
+less easy for the Austrians to participate in the diversion of comedy,
+it is a less offence to attend the comedy, though even this is not good
+Italianissimism. In regard to the caffè there is a perfectly understood
+system by which the Austrians go to one, and the Italians to another;
+and Florian’s, in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground in the
+city on which the hostile forces consent to meet. This is because it is
+thronged with foreigners of all nations, and to go there is not thought
+a demonstration of any kind. But the other caffè in the Piazza do not
+enjoy Florian’s cosmopolitan immunity, and nothing would create more
+wonder in Venice than to see an Austrian officer at the Specchi, unless,
+indeed, it were the presence of a good Italian at the Quadri.
+
+It is in the Piazza that the tacit demonstration of hatred and
+discontent chiefly takes place. Here, thrice a week, in winter and
+summer, the military band plays that exquisite music for which the
+Austrians are famous. The selections are usually from Italian operas,
+and the attraction is the hardest of all others for the music-loving
+Italian to resist. But he does resist it. There are some noble ladies
+who have not entered the Piazza while the band was playing there,
+since the fall of the Republic of 1849; and none of good standing for
+patriotism has attended the concerts since the treaty of Villafranca in
+‘59. Until very lately, the promenaders in the Piazza were exclusively
+foreigners, or else the families of such government officials as were
+obliged to show themselves there. Last summer, however, before the
+Franco-Italian convention for the evacuation of Rome revived the
+drooping hopes of the Venetians, they had begun visibly to falter
+in their long endurance. But this was, after all, only a slight and
+transient weakness. As a general thing, now, they pass from the Piazza
+when the music begins, and walk upon the long quay at the sea-side of
+the Ducal Palace; or if they remain in the Piazza they pace up and
+down under the arcades on either side; for Venetian patriotism makes
+a delicate distinction between listening to the Austrian band in the
+Piazza and hearing it under the Procuratie, forbidding the first
+and permitting the last. As soon as the music ceases the Austrians
+disappear, and the Italians return to the Piazza.
+
+But since the catalogue of demonstrations cannot be made full, it need
+not be made any longer. The political feeling in Venice affects her
+prosperity in a far greater degree than may appear to those who do not
+understand how large an income the city formerly derived from making
+merry. The poor have to lament not merely the loss of their holidays,
+but also of the fat employments and bountiful largess which these
+occasions threw into their hands. With the exile or the seclusion of the
+richer families, and the reluctance of foreigners to make a residence
+of the gloomy and dejected city, the trade of the shopkeepers has fallen
+off; the larger commerce of the place has also languished and dwindled
+year by year; while the cost of living has constantly increased, and
+heavier burdens of taxation have been laid upon the impoverished and
+despondent people. And in all this, Venice is but a type of the whole
+province of Venetia.
+
+The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely worth noting. The
+Austrians have a _casino_, and they give balls and parties, and now and
+then make some public manifestation of gayety. But they detest Venice as
+a place of residence, being naturally averse to living in the midst of a
+people who shun them like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are
+obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, and it is amusing
+enough to find the few English residents divided into Austriacanti and
+Italianissimi. [Footnote: Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics,
+though not of Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union
+with Italy at any cost.]
+
+Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in every way bound to
+neutrality and indifference, are popularly reputed to be of one party or
+the other, and my predecessor, whose unhappy knowledge of German threw
+him on his arrival among people of that race, was always regarded as the
+enemy of Venetian freedom, though I believe his principles were of the
+most vivid republican tint in the United States.
+
+The present situation has now endured five years, with only slight
+modifications by time, and only faint murmurs from some of the more
+impatient, that _bisogna, una volta o l’altra, romper il chiodo_,
+(sooner or later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are a people
+of indomitable perseverance, long schooled to obstinacy by oppression,
+I suppose they will hold out till their union with the kingdom of Italy.
+They can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content to wait forever
+in their present gloom. How deeply their attitude affects their national
+character I shall inquire hereafter, when I come to look somewhat more
+closely at the spirit of their demonstration.
+
+For the present, it is certain that the discontent of the people has its
+peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a
+glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving
+it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing
+that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be
+faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
+
+
+I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday
+and to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five
+o’clock, and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer
+weather. Yet I was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the
+large, many-seated boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for
+myself and my luggage. The porter who seized my valise in the station,
+inferred from some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of
+my wish, and ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into a
+gondola. I followed, lighted to my seat by a beggar in picturesque and
+desultory costume. He was one of a class of mendicants whom I came, for
+my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I dare say every traveler
+recollects,--the merciless tribe who hold your gondola to shore, and
+affect to do you a service and not a displeasure, and pretend not to
+be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call them _gransieri_, or
+crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the name or the purpose of this
+_poverino_ [Footnote: _Poverino_ is the compassionate generic for all
+unhappy persons who work for a living in Venice, as well as many who
+decline to do so.] at the station, but merely saw that he had the
+Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and arrangement of his
+fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous effects of red, and
+he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend of brigands would
+like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab me and sink
+my body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I felt that
+he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly know now
+whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and left him
+empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings which he
+had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard nothing,
+for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my nether-spirit, so
+to speak, was dulled and jaded by the long, cold, railway journey
+from Vienna, while every surface-sense was taken and tangled in the
+bewildering brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think there can be
+nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite surprise,
+as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches as he
+issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon her peerless
+strangeness. There is something in the blessed breath of Italy (how
+quickly, coming south, you know it, and how bland it is, after the
+harsh, transalpine air!) which prepares you for your nocturnal advent
+into the place; and O you! whoever you are, that journey toward this
+enchanted city for the first time, let me tell you how happy I count
+you! There lies before you for your pleasure, the spectacle of
+such singular beauty as no picture can ever show you nor book tell
+you,--beauty which you shall feel perfectly but once, and regret
+forever.
+
+For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze and bustle
+of the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot
+that I had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment
+very cold and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that
+beautiful silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars.
+Then on either hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the
+dark waters, holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which
+brought balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief,
+and threw long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that
+uncertain glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so,
+unhaunted by any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the
+forlorn beauty of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper
+time to think all the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them;
+but they passed vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the
+sensations of sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there,
+and the moral and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty
+and surprise. The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and
+unlooked-for events gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and
+safely around sharp corners of life. And all the while I knew that this
+was a progress through narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles
+of palaces. But I did not know then that this fine confusion of sense
+and spirit was the first faint impression of the charm of life in
+Venice.
+
+Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had
+warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the
+lines of balconied palaces had never ended;--here and there at
+their doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving
+uncertainly about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the
+Grand Canal into one of the smaller channels, and from comparative light
+into a darkness only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner
+lamp. But always the pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven
+with its trembling stars above, and the dark water with its trembling
+stars below; but now innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness,
+and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could not resist a vague
+feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary passages, which was
+part of the strange enjoyment of the time, and which was referable to
+the novelty, the hush, the darkness, and the piratical appearance and
+unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not
+Venice forever associated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts?
+That valise of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the uncultivated
+imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts of the
+Situation--(as we say in the journals)? To move on was relief; to pause
+was regret for past transgressions mingled with good resolutions for the
+future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of all these emotions, when,
+slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola suddenly rested at the
+foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door. The gondoliers rang and
+rang again, while their passenger
+
+    “Divided the swift mind,”
+
+in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could
+possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles
+and service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest
+swindling countenance of a hotel _portier_, he felt secure against every
+thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and conjecture at
+once faded from his thought, when the _portier_ suffered the gondoliers
+to make him pay a florin too much.
+
+So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that
+complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most
+alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any
+fragment of her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had
+been penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had
+been touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
+presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
+occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
+
+I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my
+arrival need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I
+would not wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and
+alien to the place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the
+first. I believe it was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the
+beautiful that I here found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full
+of society and friendship, speaking a language which, even in its
+unfamiliar forms, I could partly understand, and at once making me
+citizen of that Venice from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in
+the presence of the great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt
+at home--indeed, I could as yet understand their excellence and grandeur
+only very imperfectly--but wherever I wandered through the quaint and
+marvelous city, I found the good company of
+
+    “The fair, the old;”
+
+and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and
+I learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of
+relief.
+
+My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
+locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or
+destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest,
+crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left
+me cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible
+from the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for
+my blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to
+surrender by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden
+brinks of canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable
+churches of the city were equally victorious, and continually took me
+prisoner. But all places had something rare and worthy to be seen:
+if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture, at least interesting
+squalor and picturesque wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight
+in proper Objects of Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that
+reeked with unwholesome winter damps below, and peered curiously out
+with frowzy heads and beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered
+casements above. Every court had its carven well to show me, in the
+noisy keeping of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque
+gossips of the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic
+with empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the
+sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched the
+lofty windows with obsolete hats.
+
+I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
+the brilliancy of St. Mark’s and the glittering streets of shops that
+branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
+courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little
+oil-lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines
+of the Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole
+means of street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and
+deepening the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches.
+I remember distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft
+night of late winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from
+the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli
+Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I
+turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a
+solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its
+moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the
+vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the
+Piazzetta to the Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and
+casting deep into the water under them a crimson glory that sank also
+down and down in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty
+and delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and
+palace; the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the gondola
+drifted away to the northward; the islands of the lagoons seemed to rise
+and sink with the light palpitations of the waves like pictures on the
+undulating fields of banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black
+against the sky, the Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore
+had composed itself to sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music
+of the surge that gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of
+the trees above me stirred themselves together, and out of one of those
+trembling towers in the lagoons, one rich, full sob burst from the heart
+of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the scene, and suffused
+the languid night with the murmur of luxurious, ineffable sadness.
+
+But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful, and
+whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how
+low its origin or humble its composition; and the magnificence of that
+moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I won from the fine spectacle
+of an old man whom I saw burning coffee one night in the little
+court behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as one of the most
+interesting people I saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the
+air of that neighbourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant
+berry, and all day long this patient old man--sage, let me call him--had
+turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over an open
+fire after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. Now
+that the night had fallen, and the stars shone down upon him, and
+the red of the flame luridly illumined him, he showed more grand and
+venerable than ever. Simple, abstract humanity, has its own grandeur
+in Italy; and it is not hard here for the artist to find the primitive
+types with which genius loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had
+the beard of a saint, and the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the
+squalor of a beggar, superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious
+grandeur of humanity. A vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to
+do with burning coffee, dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had
+been some dread supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and
+doing men, instead of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly
+and weirdly impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and
+lifted the cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after
+it, and he shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and
+glorified him--then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond
+art, and turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless
+magnificence.
+
+At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the
+aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked
+Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and
+whom I often noted from the windows of the little caffè there, where you
+get an excellent _caffè bianco_ (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and one
+to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly
+with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of
+the sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than
+olive; and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of
+lustrous black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket
+and pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity
+of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes.
+Habitually came a barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and
+
+    “Took the soul
+    Of that waste place with joy;”
+
+and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw
+his whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved
+ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus
+embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of figures, in which there
+was something grotesquely rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric
+magnificence, spiritualized into a grace of movement superior to the
+energy of the North and the extravagant fervor of the East. It was
+coffee and not wine that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw
+reflected in this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of
+dancing in that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that
+combated and vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea-washed
+sands in marble structures of airy and stately splendor, and gave to
+architecture new glories full of eternal surprise.
+
+So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with Venice, and
+being newly from a land where every thing, morally and materially, was
+in good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the
+pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of every thing about me here. It
+was not yet the season to behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door
+life of the place; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that great
+part of the people, both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do,
+and that nobody seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse.
+When, however, I ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a spectator of
+this idleness, and learned that I too must assume my share of the common
+indolence, I found it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old habits
+of hope, made my endless leisure irksome to me, and almost intolerable
+when I ascertained fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill
+long-cherished, but, after all, merely general designs of literary
+study, I had forsaken wholesome struggle in the currents where I felt
+the motion of the age, only to drift into a lifeless eddy of the world,
+remote from incentive and sensation.
+
+For such is Venice, and the will must be strong and the faith
+indomitable in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her
+stagnant quiet, a practical belief in God’s purpose of a great moving,
+anxious, toiling, aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as
+after a while I yielded, to these influences, a gentle incredulity
+possesses you, and if you consent that such a thing is as earnest and
+useful life, you cannot help wondering why it need be. The charm of
+the place sweetens your temper, but corrupts you; and I found it a sad
+condition of my perception of the beauty of Venice and friendship with
+it, that I came in some unconscious way to regard her fate as my own;
+and when I began to write the sketches which go to form this book, it
+was as hard to speak of any ugliness in her, or of the doom written
+against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of her crumbling
+masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine. I do not so greatly
+blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so many sins of
+omission concerning her, and made her all light, color, canals,
+and palaces. One’s conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant
+elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is
+more virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the
+city, and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there
+might have been some incentive to keep one’s thoughts and words from
+lapsing into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the
+whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But
+now, what matter?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE WINTER IN VENICE
+
+
+It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my
+experiences of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was,
+indeed, an every-day roughness and discomfort in the weather, which
+travelers passing their first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile
+with the habitual ideas of the season’s clemency in the South. But
+winter is apt to be very severe in mild climates. People do not
+acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense that it is summer only a
+little out of humor.
+
+The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much
+favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure
+a degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the
+winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd
+prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer
+equally with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the
+cold, objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the
+effort to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It
+is not a pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the
+affliction among people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh
+you out sugar, by no means reconciles the Northern stomach to its
+prevalence. I have observed that priests, and those who have much to do
+in the frigid churches, are the worst sufferers in this way; and I
+think no one can help noting in the harsh, raw winter-complexion (for
+in summer the tone is quite different) of the women of all classes, the
+protest of systems cruelly starved of the warmth which health demands.
+
+The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight
+months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in
+summer, and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very
+large, lofty, and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of
+apartments--the smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the
+winter, and the grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for
+defence against the insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most
+part, people must occupy the same room summer and winter, the sole
+change being in the strip of carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during
+the latter season. In the comparatively few houses where carpets are
+the rule and not the exception, they are always removed during the
+summer--for the triple purpose of sparing them some months’ wear,
+banishing fleas and other domestic insects, and showing off the beauty
+of the oiled and shining pavement, which in the meanest houses is
+tasteful, and in many of the better sort is often in-wrought with
+figures and designs of mosaic work.
+
+All the floors in Venice are of stone, and whether of marble flags, or
+of that species of composition formed of dark cement, with fragments of
+colored marble imbedded and smoothed and polished to the most glassy
+and even surface, and the general effect and complexion of petrified
+plum-pudding, all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with
+their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded
+gowns. When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too
+heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian
+sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the
+only legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous
+prices to such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.
+
+It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the
+utmost rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as
+possible in the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm
+afternoon sun in its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders
+of every class, condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines
+in the Piazza, shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men
+crowd the close little caffè, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration,
+and animal heat, and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and
+beguile the time with solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself,
+throughout this book, the use of the expressive American words
+_loaf_ and _loafer_, as the only terms adequate to the description of
+professional idling in Venice] and the perusal of dingy little
+journals, drinking small cups of black coffee, and playing long games of
+chess,--an evening that seemed to me as torpid and lifeless as a Lap’s,
+and intolerable when I remembered the bright, social winter evenings of
+another and happier land and civilization.
+
+Sometimes you find a heated stove--that is to say, one in which there
+has been a fire during the day--in a Venetian house; but the stove seems
+usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged
+only in diffusing a very acrid smoke,--as if the Venetian preferred to
+take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove
+itself is a curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and
+plastering,--whitewashed and painted outside. It is a great consumer
+of fuel, and radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wooding
+I contrived to warm mine; but my Italian friends always avoided its
+vicinity when they came to see me, and most amusingly regarded my
+determination to be comfortable as part of the eccentricity inseparable
+from the Anglo-Saxon character.
+
+I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in
+his northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his
+severity is the _scaldino_, and this is made chiefly by the yielding
+sex, who are denied the warmth of the caffè. The use of the scaldino
+is known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are
+most addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware,
+having an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and
+the pot full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana’s defense against cold
+is complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room
+to room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been
+my fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting
+over the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while
+she sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with
+religion, baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino.
+In one of the public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the
+walls, intended to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea
+of the four seasons. There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization
+of Spring, Summer, and Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by
+a fine lady dressed in furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned
+foot-stool, and a scaldino in her lap! When we talk of being invaded in
+the north, we poetize the idea of defense by the figure of defending our
+hearthstones. Alas! _could_ we fight for our sacred _scaldini_?
+
+Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell hot pumpkins and pears,
+for they can unite pleasure and profit. There are some degrees of
+poverty below the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars and the
+wretcheder poor keep themselves warm, I think, by sultry recollections
+of summer, as Don Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remembrances,
+during one of his periods of fast. One mendicant whom I know, and who
+always sits upon the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe,
+as the season advances, in heating the marble beneath him by firm and
+unswerving adhesion, and establishes a reciprocity of warmth with it.
+I have no reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a moment
+during the whole winter; and indeed, it would be a vicious waste of
+comfort to do so.
+
+In the winter, the whole city _sniffs_, and if the Pipchin theory of the
+effect of sniffing upon the eternal interests of the soul be true,
+few people go to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly wondered if
+Desdemona, in _her_ time, sniffed, and found little comfort in the
+reflection that Shylock must have had a cold in his head. There is
+comparative warmth in the broad squares before the churches, but the
+narrow streets are bitter thorough-draughts, and fell influenza lies in
+wait for its prey in all those picturesque, seducing little courts of
+which I have spoken.
+
+It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twilight and airy height one
+finds so grateful in summer, that the sharpest malice of the winter
+is felt; and having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, I
+deferred the remaining seventy-five or eighty, together with the gallery
+of the Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have
+mitigated the severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination
+affected me, I thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the
+temples of Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge
+marbles, and their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their
+frescoed roofs and broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of
+Palladio’s architecture was especially grievous to the sense in cold
+weather; and I warn the traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of
+Bellini to beware how he trusts himself in winter to the gusty, arctic
+magnificence of the church of the Redentore. But by all means the
+coldest church in the city is that of the Jesuits, which those who
+have seen it will remember for its famous marble drapery. This base,
+mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not art) is effected by
+inlaying the white marble of columns and pulpits and altars with
+a certain pattern of verd-antique. The workmanship is marvelously
+skillful, and the material costly, but it only gives the church the
+effect of being draped in damask linen; and even where the marble is
+carven in vast and heavy folds over a pulpit to simulate a curtain, or
+wrought in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent a carpet,
+it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a coldness, a harshness
+indescribably table-clothy. I think all this has tended to chill the
+soul of the sacristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan
+conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his temples quite incapable
+of thawing. In this dreary sanctuary is one of Titian’s great paintings,
+The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly
+disposed as to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once)
+you turn involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on
+his gridiron amid all that frigidity.
+
+The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much
+severer than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less
+support in fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to claim that
+such weather as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen
+before. In fine, the winter climate of north Italy is really very harsh,
+and though the season is not so severe in Venice as in Milan, or even
+Florence, it is still so sharp as to make foreigners regret the generous
+fires and warmly-built houses of the north. There was snow but once
+during my first Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none
+at all; but the third, which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to
+considerable depth, and lay unmelted for many weeks in the shade. The
+lagoons were frozen for miles in every direction; and under our windows
+on the Grand Canal, great sheets of ice went up and down with the
+rising and the falling tide for nearly a whole month. The visible misery
+throughout the fireless city was great; and it was a problem I never
+could solve, whether people in-doors were greater sufferers from the
+cold than those who weathered the cruel winds sweeping the squares and
+the canals, and whistling through the streets of stone and brine. The
+boys had an unwonted season of sliding on the frozen lagoons, though
+a good deal persecuted by the police, who must have looked upon such a
+tremendous innovation as little better than revolution; and it was said
+that there were card-parties on the ice; but the only creatures which
+seemed really to enjoy the weather were the seagulls. These birds, which
+flock into the city in vast numbers at the first approach of cold,
+and, sailing up and down the canals between the palaces, bring to
+the dwellers in the city a full sense of mid-ocean forlornness and
+desolation, now rioted on the savage winds, with harsh cries, and
+danced upon the waves of the bitter brine, with a clamorous joy that had
+something eldritch and unearthly in it.
+
+A place so much given to gossip as Venice did not fail to produce many
+memorable incidents of the cold; but the most singular adventure was
+that of the old man employed at the Armenian Convent to bring milk from
+the island of San Lazzaro to the city. One night, shortly after the
+coldest weather set in, he lost his oar as he was returning to the
+island. The wind, which is particularly furious in that part of the
+lagoon, blew his boat away into the night, and the good brothers at the
+convent naturally gave up their milkman for lost. The winds and waters
+drifted him eight miles from the city into the northern lagoon, and
+there lodged his boat in the marshes, where it froze fast in the
+stiffening mud. The luckless occupant had nothing to eat or drink in his
+boat, where he remained five days and nights, exposed to the inclemency
+of cold many degrees below friendship in severity. He made continual
+signs of distress, but no boat came near enough to discover him. At
+last, when the whole marsh was frozen solid, he was taken off by some
+fishermen, and carried to the convent, where he remains in perfectly
+recovered health, and where no doubt he will be preserved alive many
+years in an atmosphere which renders dying at San Lazzaro a matter of
+no small difficulty. During the whole time of his imprisonment, he
+sustained life against hunger and cold by smoking. I suppose no one will
+be surprised to learn that he was rescued by the fishermen through the
+miraculous interposition of the Madonna--as any one might have seen by
+the votive picture hung up at her shrine on a bridge of the Riva degli
+Schiavoni, wherein the Virgin was represented breaking through the
+clouds in one corner of the sky, and unmistakably directing the
+operations of the fishermen.
+
+It is said that no such winter as that of 1863-4 has been known in
+Venice since the famous _Anno del Ghiaccio_ (Year of the Ice), which
+fell about the beginning of the last century. This year is celebrated in
+the local literature; the play which commemorates it always draws full
+houses at the people’s theatre, Malibran; and the often-copied picture,
+by a painter of the time, representing Lustrissime and Lustrissimi in
+hoops and bag-wigs on the ice, never fails to block up the street before
+the shop-window in which it is exposed. The King of Denmark was then the
+guest of the Republic, and as the unprecedented cold defeated all the
+plans arranged for his diversion, the pleasure-loving government
+turned the cold itself to account, and made the ice occasion of novel
+brilliancy in its festivities. The duties on commerce between the city
+and the mainland were suspended for as long time as the lagoon should
+remain frozen, and the ice became a scene of the liveliest traffic, and
+was everywhere covered with sledges, bringing the produce of the country
+to the capital, and carrying away its stuffs in return. The Venetians
+of every class amused themselves in visiting this free mart, and the
+gentler and more delicate sex pressed eagerly forward to traverse
+with their feet a space hitherto passable only in gondolas. [Footnote:
+_Origine delle Feste Veneziane_, di Giustina Renier-Michiel] The lagoon
+remained frozen, and these pleasures lasted eighteen days, a period of
+cold unequaled till last winter. A popular song now declares that the
+present generation has known a winter quite as marvelous as that of the
+Year of the Ice, and celebrates the wonder of walking on the water:--
+
+    Che bell’ affar!
+    Che patetico affar!
+    Che immenso affar!
+    Sora l’acqua camminar!
+
+But after all the disagreeable winter, which hardly commences before
+Christmas, and which ends about the middle of March, is but a small part
+of the glorious Venetian year; and even this ungracious season has a
+loveliness, at times, which it can have nowhere but in Venice. What
+summer-delight of other lands could match the beauty of the first
+Venetian snow-fall which I saw? It had snowed overnight, and in the
+morning when I woke it was still snowing. The flakes fell softly and
+vertically through the motionless air, and all the senses were full
+of languor and repose. It was rapture to lie still, and after a faint
+glimpse of the golden-winged angel on the bell-tower of St. Mark’s,
+to give indolent eye solely to the contemplation of the roof opposite,
+where the snow lay half an inch deep upon the brown tiles. The
+little scene--a few square yards of roof, a chimney-pot, and a
+dormer-window--was all that the most covetous spirit could demand; and I
+lazily lorded it over that domain of pleasure, while the lingering mists
+of a dream of new-world events blent themselves with the luxurious humor
+of the moment and the calm of the snow-fall, and made my reverie one of
+the perfectest things in the world. When I was lost the deepest in it, I
+was inexpressibly touched and gratified by the appearance of a black
+cat at the dormer-window. In Venice, roofs commanding pleasant exposures
+seem to be chiefly devoted to the cultivation of this animal, and there
+are many cats in Venice. My black cat looked wonderingly upon the snow
+for a moment, and then ran across the roof. Nothing could have been
+better. Any creature less silent, or in point of movement less soothing
+to the eye than a cat, would have been torture of the spirit. As it
+was, this little piece of action contented me so well, that I left every
+thing else out of my reverie, and could only think how deliciously the
+cat harmonized with the snow-covered tiles, the chimney-pot, and the
+dormer-window. I began to long for her reappearance, but when she did
+come forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased to have the slightest
+interest in the matter, and experienced only the disgust of satiety. I
+had felt _ennui_--nothing remained but to get up and change my relations
+with the world.
+
+In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at
+once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked _facchini_;
+[Footnote: The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve
+long seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters
+and day-laborers.] and now in St. Mark’s Place the music of innumerable
+shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as
+it engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the
+Piazza. But the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the
+descending flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary
+kind of effort in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only
+to renew the task. The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the
+folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon
+its summit. But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of
+St. Mark’s Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting
+threads of the snow-fall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment
+around a structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its
+fantastic loveliness to be any thing but the creation of magic. The
+tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs
+of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as
+if just from the hand of the builder--or, better said, just from the
+brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of
+the mosaics in the great arches of the façade, and all that gracious
+harmony into which the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy
+exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred
+times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting
+flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble like
+peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white;
+it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work, as if
+exulting in its beauty--beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish
+yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer
+of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless
+shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.
+
+Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the
+granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is,
+and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so mild
+and gentle he looked by the tender light of the storm. [Footnote: St.
+Theodore was the first patron of Venice, but he was deposed and St. Mark
+adopted, when the bones of the latter were brought from Alexandria. The
+Venetians seem to have felt some compunctions for this desertion of an
+early friend, and they have given St. Theodore a place on one of the
+granite pillars, while the other is surmounted by the Lion, representing
+St. Mark. _Fra Marco e Todaro_, is a Venetian proverb expressing the
+state of perplexity which we indicate by the figure of an ass between
+two bundles of hay.] The towers of the island churches loomed faint and
+far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships that
+lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas
+stole in and out of the opaque distance more noiselessly and dreamily
+than ever; and a silence, almost palpable, lay upon the mutest city in
+the world.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+COMINCIA FAR CALDO.
+
+
+The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and from this beats her
+life in every direction through an intricate system of streets and
+canals that bring it back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest
+uneasiness had attended the frequency with which I lost my way in the
+city at first, there would always have been this comfort: that the place
+was very small in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I must
+reach the Piazza sooner or later. There is a crowd constantly tending to
+and from it, and you have but to take this tide, and be drifted to St.
+Mark’s--or to the Rialto Bridge, whence it is directly accessible.
+
+Of all the open spaces in the city, that before the Church of St. Mark
+alone bears the name of Piazza, and the rest are called merely _campi_,
+or fields. But if the company of the noblest architecture can give
+honor, the Piazza San Marco merits its distinction, not in Venice only,
+but in the whole world; for I fancy that no other place in the world
+is set in such goodly bounds. Its westward length is terminated by
+the Imperial Palace; its lateral borders are formed by lines of palace
+called the New Procuratie on the right, and the Old Procuratie on the
+left; [Footnote: In Republican days the palaces of the _Procuratori di
+San Marco_.] and the Church of St. Mark fills up almost its whole width
+upon the east, leaving space enough, however, for a glimpse of the
+Gothic perfection of the Ducal Palace. The place then opens southward
+with the name of Piazzetta, between the eastern façade of the Ducal
+Palace and the classic front of the Libreria Vecchia, and expands and
+ends at last on the mole, where stand the pillars of St. Mark and St.
+Theodore; and then this mole, passing the southern façade of the Doge’s
+Palace, stretches away to the Public Gardens at the eastern extremity
+of the city, over half a score of bridges, between lines of houses and
+shipping--stone and wooden walls--in the long, crescent-shaped quay
+called Riva degli Schiavoni. Looking northward up the Piazzetta from the
+Molo, the vision traverses the eastern breadth of the Piazza, and rests
+upon the Clock Tower, gleaming with blue and gold, on which the bronze
+Giants beat the hours; or it climbs the great mass of the Campanile
+San Marco, standing apart from the church at the corner of the New
+Procuratie, and rising four hundred feet toward the sky--the sky where
+the Venetian might well place his heaven, as the Moors bounded Paradise
+in the celestial expanse that roofed Granada.
+
+My first lodging was but a step out of the Piazza, and this vicinity
+brought me early into familiar acquaintance with its beauty. But I
+never, during three years, passed through it in my daily walks, without
+feeling as freshly as at first the greatness of this beauty. The church,
+which the mighty bell-tower and the lofty height of the palace-lines
+make to look low, is in nowise humbled by the contrast, but is like
+a queen enthroned amid upright reverence. The religious sentiment is
+deeply appealed to, I think, in the interior of St. Mark’s; but if its
+interior is heaven’s, its exterior, like a good man’s daily life, is
+earth’s; and it is this winning loveliness of earth that first attracts
+you to it, and when you emerge from its portals, you enter upon
+spaces of such sunny length and breadth, set round with such exquisite
+architecture, that it makes you glad to be living in this world. Before
+you expands the great Piazza, peopled with its various life; on your
+left, between the Pillars of the Piazzetta, swims the blue lagoon, and
+overhead climb the arches, one above another, in excesses of fantastic
+grace.
+
+Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to have brought hither and
+made part of his Piazza, that it might remain forever the city’s supreme
+grace; and so, though there are public gardens and several pleasant
+walks in the city, the great resort in summer and winter, by day and by
+night, is the Piazza San Marco. Its ground-level, under the Procuratie,
+is belted with a glittering line of shops and caffè, the most tasteful
+and brilliant in the world, and the arcades that pass round three of its
+sides are filled with loungers and shoppers, even when there is music
+by the Austrian bands; for, as we have seen, the purest patriot may then
+walk under the Procuratie, without stain to the principles which would
+be hopelessly blackened if he set foot in the Piazza. The absence of
+dust and noisy hoofs and wheels tempts social life out of doors in
+Venice more than in any other Italian city, though the tendency to this
+sort of expansion is common throughout Italy. Beginning with the warm
+days of early May, and continuing till the _villeggiatura_ (the period
+spent at the country seat) interrupts it late in September, all Venice
+goes by a single impulse of _dolce far niente_, and sits gossiping at
+the doors of the innumerable caffè on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the
+Piazza San Marco, and in the different squares in every part of the
+city. But, of course, the most brilliant scene of this kind is in St.
+Mark’s Place, which has a night-time glory indescribable, won from
+the light of uncounted lamps upon its architectural groups. The superb
+Imperial Palace--the sculptured, arcaded, and pillared Procuratie--the
+Byzantine magic and splendor of the church--will it all be there when
+you come again to-morrow night? The unfathomable heaven above seems part
+of the place, for I think it is never so tenderly blue over any other
+spot of earth. And when the sky is blurred with clouds, shall not the
+Piazza vanish with the azure?--People, I say, come to drink coffee, and
+eat ices here in the summer evenings, and then, what with the promenades
+in the arcades and in the Piazza, the music, the sound of feet, and the
+hum of voices, unbroken by the ruder uproar of cities where there are
+horses and wheels--the effect is that of a large evening party, and in
+this aspect the Piazza, is like a vast drawing-room.
+
+I liked well to see that strange life, which even the stout,
+dead-in-earnest little Bohemian musicians, piping in the centre of the
+Piazza, could not altogether substantialize, and which constantly took
+immateriality from the loveliness of its environment. In the winter the
+scene was the most purely Venetian, and in my first winter, when I had
+abandoned all thought of churches till spring, I settled down to steady
+habits of idleness and coffee, and contemplated the life of the Piazza.
+
+By all odds, the loungers at Florian’s were the most interesting,
+because they were the most various. People of all shades of politics met
+in the dainty little saloons, though there were shades of division
+even there, and they did not mingle. The Italians carefully assorted
+themselves in a room furnished with green velvet, and the Austrians and
+the Austriacanti frequented a red-velvet room. They were curious to look
+at, those tranquil, indolent, Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon
+relish for them. They seldom spoke together, and when they did speak,
+they burst from silence into tumultuous controversy, and then lapsed
+again into perfect silence. The elder among them sat with their hands
+carefully folded on the heads of their sticks, gazing upon the ground,
+or else buried themselves in the perusal of the French journals. The
+younger stood a good deal about the doorways, and now and then passed
+a gentle, gentle jest with the elegant waiters in black coats and white
+cravats, who hurried to and fro with the orders, and called them out in
+strident tones to the accountant at his little table; or sometimes these
+young idlers make a journey to the room devoted to ladies and forbidden
+to smokers, looked long and deliberately in upon its loveliness, and
+then returned to the bosom of their taciturn companions. By chance I
+found them playing chess, but very rarely. They were all well-dressed,
+handsome men, with beards carefully cut, brilliant hats and boots, and
+conspicuously clean linen. I used to wonder who they were, to what order
+of society they belonged, and whether they, like my worthless self, had
+never any thing else but lounging at Florian’s to do; but I really know
+none of these things to this day. Some men in Venice spend their noble,
+useful lives in this way, and it was the proud reply of a Venetian
+father, when asked of what profession his son was, “_È in Piazza!_”
+ That was, he bore a cane, wore light gloves, and stared from Florian’s
+windows at the ladies who went by.
+
+At the Caffè Quadri, immediately across the Piazza, there was a scene
+of equal hopefulness. But there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and
+the idling was carried on with a great noise of conversation in
+Austrian-German. Heaven knows what it was all about, but I presume the
+talk was upon topics of mutual improvement, calculated to advance the
+interests of self-government and mankind. These officers were very
+comely, intelligent-looking people with the most good-natured faces.
+They came and went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel
+scabbards against the tables, or rising and straddling off with their
+long swords kicking against their legs. They are the most stylish
+soldiers in the world, and one has no notion how ill they can dress when
+left to themselves, till one sees them in civil clothes.
+
+Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the Imperial Palace is called),
+under the Procuratie Vecchie, is the Caffè Specchi, frequented only by
+young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those who go to Florian’s.
+Across from this caffè is that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to
+chiefly by non-commissioned officers, and civilian officials of lower
+grade. You know the latter, at a glance, by their beard, which in Venice
+is an index to every man’s politics: no Austriacante wears the imperial,
+no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caffè Suttil, rather Austrian,
+and frequented by Italian _codini_, or old fogies, in politics: gray old
+fellows, who caress their sticks with more constant zeal than even the
+elders at Florian’s. Quite at the other end of the Procuratie Nuove is
+the Caffè of the Greeks, a nation which I have commonly seen represented
+there by two or three Albanians with an Albanian boy, who, being dressed
+exactly like his father, curiously impressed me, as if he were the young
+of some Oriental animal--say a boy-elephant or infant camel.
+
+I hope that the reader adds to this sketch, even in the winter time,
+occasional tourists under the Procuratie, at the caffè, and in the
+shops, where the shop-keepers are devouring them with the keenness of
+an appetite unsated by the hordes of summer visitors. I hope that the
+reader also groups me fishermen, gondoliers, beggars, and loutish boys
+about the base of St. Mark’s, and at the feet of the three flag-staffs
+before the church; that he passes me a slatternly woman and a frowzy
+girl or two through the Piazza occasionally; and that he calls down the
+flocks of pigeons hovering near. I fancy the latter half ashamed to
+show themselves, as being aware that they are a great humbug, and
+unrightfully in the guide-books.
+
+Meantime, while I sit at Florian’s, sharing and studying the universal
+worthlessness about me, the brief winter passes, and the spring of the
+south--so unlike the ardent season of the north, where it burns full
+summer before the snows are dried upon the fields--descends upon the
+city and the sea. But except in the little gardens of the palaces, and
+where here and there a fig-tree lifts its head to peer over a lofty
+stone wall, the spring finds no response of swelling bud and unfolding
+leaf, and it is human nature alone which welcomes it. Perhaps it is for
+this reason that the welcome is more visible in Venice than elsewhere,
+and that here, where the effect of the season is narrowed and limited
+to men’s hearts, the joy it brings is all the keener and deeper. It is
+certain at least that the rapture is more demonstrative. The city at all
+times voiceful, seems to burst into song with the advent of these
+golden days and silver nights. Bands of young men go singing through the
+moonlit streets, and the Grand Canal reëchoes the music of the parties
+of young girls as they drift along in the scarcely moving boats,
+and sing the glories of the lagoons and the loves of fishermen and
+gondoliers. In the Public Gardens they walk and sing; and wandering
+minstrels come forth before the caffè, and it is hard to get beyond the
+tinkling of guitars and the scraping of fiddles. It is as if the city
+had put off its winter humor with its winter dress; and as Venice in
+winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the world, so in spring
+it is the fullest of joy and light. There is a pleasant bustle in the
+streets, a ceaseless clatter of feet over the stones of the squares, and
+a constant movement of boats upon the canals.
+
+We say, in a cheap and careless way, that the southern peoples have no
+_homes_. But this is true only in a restricted sense, for the Italian,
+and the Venetian especially, makes the whole city his home in pleasant
+weather. No one remains under a roof who can help it; and now, as I said
+before, the fascinating out-door life begins. All day long the people
+sit and drink coffee and eat ices and gossip together before the caffè,
+and the soft midnight sees the same diligent idlers in their places. The
+promenade is at all seasons the favorite Italian amusement; it has its
+rigidly fixed hours, and its limits are also fixed: but now, in spring,
+even the promenade is a little lawless, and the crowds upon the Riva
+sometimes walk as far as the Public Gardens, and throng all the wider
+avenues and the Piazza; while young Venice comes to take the sun at St.
+Mark’s in the arms of its high-breasted nurses,--mighty country-women,
+who, in their bright costumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses
+of gold and silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high,
+free-stepping movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some
+elder race of barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had
+passed away from our puny, dull-clad times.
+
+    “_È la stagion che ognuno s’innamora;_”
+
+and now young girls steal to their balconies, and linger there for
+hours, subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and
+looking up at them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the
+Venetian housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their
+heads and gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers,
+filling their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their
+work. Every street down which you look is likewise vocal with gossip;
+and if the picturesque projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys,
+of which the vista is full, hide the heads of the gossipers, be sure
+there is a face looking out of every window for all that, and the
+social, expansive presence of the season is felt there.
+
+The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish the spring upon
+themselves unsparingly. They come forth from their dark dens in
+crumbling palaces and damp basements, and live in the sunlight and the
+welcome air. They work, they eat, they sleep out of doors. Mothers of
+families sit about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down
+with other slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while
+their raven-haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the
+covert insects that haunt the tangles of the children’s locks. Within
+doors shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases
+talking for an instant.
+
+Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near
+the Piazza, to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the
+busiest street in Venice passes, from St. Mark’s to the Rialto Bridge.
+It is one of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest,
+and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms
+early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a
+cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke, and
+the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society.
+
+Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.
+Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the
+burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary’s
+shop, a mercer’s and draper’s shop, a blacksmith’s and shoemaker’s shop,
+a caffè more or less brilliant, a green-grocer’s and fruiterer’s, a
+family grocery--nay, there is also a second-hand merchant’s shop where
+you buy and sell every kind of worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of
+course there is a coppersmith’s and a watchmaker’s, and pretty certainly
+a wood-carver’s and gilder’s, while without a barber’s shop no campo
+could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and
+political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle
+and disturbance, San Bartolomeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with
+the bargains of the Rialto market.
+
+Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamor for the absence of
+quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an
+almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper
+of hair-pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils.
+Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays
+of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back
+and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who
+advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of
+toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples
+of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets
+of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the
+crowd;--these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and
+friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolomeo.
+
+Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and I spent much time in
+the study of the vociferous life under my windows, trying to make out
+the meaning of the different cries, and to trace them back to their
+sources. There was one which puzzled me for a long time--a sharp,
+pealing cry that ended in a wail of angry despair, and, rising high
+above all other sounds, impressed the spirit like the cry of that bird
+in the tropic forests which the terrified Spaniards called the _alma
+perdida_. After many days of listening and trembling, I found that it
+proceeded from a wretched, sun-burnt girl, who carried about some
+dozens of knotty pears, and whose hair hung disheveled round her eyes,
+bloodshot with the strain of her incessant shrieks.
+
+In San Bartolomeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above
+and shops below. The ground-floor is devoted to the small commerce of
+various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied
+by tradesmen’s families; and on the third or fourth floor is the
+_appartamento signorile_. From the balconies of these stories hung the
+cages of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots,
+which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the
+crowd. All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the
+casements was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite
+was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By
+all odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant
+serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief,
+and a bright-colored gown, and wearing long dangling ear-rings of
+yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over
+the balcony-rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made
+love at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in
+the crowd. On another balcony, a lady sat and knitted with crimson yarn;
+and at the window of still another house, a damsel now looked out
+upon the square, and now gave a glance into the room, in the evident
+direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbors have the amiable custom of
+studying one another’s features through opera-glasses; but I could not
+persuade myself to use this means of learning the mirror’s response to
+the damsel’s constant “Fair or not?” being a believer in every woman’s
+right to look well a little way off. I shunned whatever trifling
+temptation there was in the case, and turned again to the campo
+beneath--to the placid dandies about the door of the caffè; to the tide
+of passers from the Merceria; the smooth-shaven Venetians of other days,
+and the bearded Venetians of these; the dark-eyed, white-faced Venetian
+girls, hooped in cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly
+clad, and moving with southern grace; the files of heavily burdened
+soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily about with their swords
+at their sides, and in their spotless Austrian uniforms.
+
+As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat increases, the expansive
+delight with which the city hails its coming passes into a tranquiler
+humor, as if the joy of the beautiful season had sunk too deeply into
+the city’s heart for utterance. I, too, felt this longing for quiet,
+and as San Bartolomeo continued untouched by it, and all day roared
+and thundered under my windows, and all night long gave itself up to
+sleepless youths who there melodiously bayed the moon in chorus, I was
+obliged to abandon San Bartolomeo, and seek calmer quarters where I
+might enjoy the last luxurious sensations of the spring-time in peace.
+
+Now, with the city’s lapse into this tranquiler humor, the promenades
+cease. The facchino gives all his leisure to sleeping in the sun; and
+in the mellow afternoons there is scarcely a space of six feet square on
+the Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its brown-cloaked peasant,
+basking face-downward in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are
+by right the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in
+their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated
+by the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamors
+at the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard
+of _valets de place_. Even the play of the children ceases, except in
+the Public Gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games,
+and sport as noiselessly as the lizards that slide from shadow to shadow
+and glitter in the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses
+you,--the stranger in it,--not with sadness, not with melancholy, but
+with a deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference
+to all purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on
+men’s tongues, behold! that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise
+would strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a
+wild and frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her
+inmost heart, and you learn her secrets--arcana unintelligible to you in
+the new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win
+new color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once
+charmed away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your
+motion. Now, at last, you know _why_
+
+    “It was an Abyssinian maid”
+
+who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu? It is the land in which you
+were born!
+
+The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail
+faints into the white distance; the gondola slides athwart the sheeted
+silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes
+at his post.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+OPERA AND THEATRES.
+
+
+With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the
+existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The
+Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private
+persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were
+intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor
+Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly
+not so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and
+tasteful theatre. The best opera was formerly given in it, and now that
+it is closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. The Italians seldom
+go to it, and as there is not a sufficient number of foreign residents
+to support it in good style, the opera commonly conforms to the
+character of the theatre San Benedetto, in which it is given, and is
+second-rate. It is nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of
+several thousand florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this
+account, of supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in
+the little German cities. A box does not cost a great deal; but as the
+theatre is carried on in Italy by two different managements,--one of
+which receives the money for the boxes and seats, and the other the fee
+of admission to the theatre,--there is always the demand of the latter
+to be satisfied with nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before
+you can reach your place. The pit is fitted up with seats, of course,
+but you do not sit down there without paying. So, most Italians (who
+if they go at all go without ladies) and the poorer sort of government
+officials stand; the orchestra seats are reserved for the officers of
+the garrison. The first row of boxes, which is on a level with the
+heads of people in the pit, is well enough, but rank and fashion take a
+loftier flight, and sit in the second tier.
+
+You look about in vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which
+once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety,--the visits from box to
+box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations.
+The people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the
+beauty is the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter
+being the fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the
+opera, some of the Venetian ladies yielded to it, but went plainly
+dressed, and sat far back in boxes of the third tier, and when they
+issued forth after the opera were veiled beyond recognition. The
+audience usually takes its enjoyment quietly; hissing now and then for
+silence in the house, and clapping hands for applause, without calling
+_bravo_,--an Italian custom which I have noted to be chiefly habitual
+with foreigners: with Germans, for instance; who spell it with a _p_ and
+_f_.
+
+I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must seek it somewhere out
+of Italy,--at London, or Paris, or New York,--though possibly it might
+be chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in Naples. The cause
+of the decay of the musical art in Venice must be looked for among the
+events which seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing; certainly
+it cannot be discerned in any indifference of the people to music. The
+_dimostrazione_ keeps the better class of citizens from the opera,
+but the passion for it still exists in every order; and God’s gift of
+beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race by any Situation. You
+hear the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as
+our own colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has
+an inborn sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the
+cultivated tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth--
+
+    “That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole.”
+
+In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that
+theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now
+an imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her
+stages, and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so
+famous, have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular
+in Venice as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the
+care of the state for the drama existed from the first. The government,
+which always piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as
+the theatre advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the
+Old or New Testament, began about the close of the century to protect
+and encourage the instruction of music in the different foundling
+hospitals and public refuges in the city. The young girls in these
+institutions were taught to play on instruments, and to sing,--at first
+for the alleviation of their own dull and solitary life, and afterward
+for the delight of the public. In the merry days that passed just before
+the fall of the Republic, the Latin oratorios which they performed in
+the churches attached to the hospitals were among the most fashionable
+diversions in Venice. The singers were instructed by the best masters
+of the time; and at the close of the last century, the conservatories
+of the Incurables, the Foundlings, and the Mendicants were famous
+throughout Europe for their dramatic concerts, and for those pupils who
+found the transition from sacred to profane opera natural and easy.
+
+With increasing knowledge of the language, I learned to enjoy best the
+unmusical theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It
+is hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen
+excellent acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian
+comedy, which is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of
+Goldoni--compositions deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where
+alone their admirable fidelity of drawing and coloring can be perfectly
+appreciated. The best comedy is usually given to the educated classes at
+the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a bloodier and louder drama is offered
+to the populace at Teatro Malibran, where on a Sunday night you may
+see the plebeian life of the city in one of its most entertaining and
+characteristic phases. The sparings of the whole week which have not
+been laid out for chances in the lottery, are spent for this evening’s
+amusement; and in the vast pit you see, besides the families of
+comfortable artisans who can evidently afford it, a multitude of the
+ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low rate of eight or ten soldi
+[Footnote: The soldo is the hundredth part of the Austrian florin, which
+is worth about forty-nine cents of American money.] apiece, it is hard
+to account for. It is very peremptory, this audience, in its likes and
+dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great vehemence. It likes best
+the sanguinary local spectacular drama; it cheers and cheers again
+every allusion to Venice; and when the curtain rises on some well-known
+Venetian scene, it has out the scene-painter by name three times--which
+is all the police permits. The auditors wear their hats in the pit, but
+deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, and raise stormy and
+wrathful cries of _cappello!_ till these uncover. Between acts, they
+indulge in excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go to the
+extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are hawked about the theatre,
+and sold for two soldi the stick,--with the tooth-pick on which they are
+spitted thrown into the bargain.
+
+The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday night, but the one
+entertainment which never fails of drawing and delighting full houses is
+the theatre of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like best
+to go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of
+these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a
+frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude
+delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and
+traditionary tricks of the stage.
+
+The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street
+opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and
+simplest appointments. There are no boxes--the whole theatre is scarcely
+larger than a stage-box--and you pay ten soldi to go into the pit, where
+you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have paid fifteen
+for places in the dress-circle above. The stage is very small, and the
+scenery a kind of coarse miniature painting. But it is very complete,
+and every thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and to
+produce an illusion of magnitude in their figures. They are very
+artlessly introduced, and are maneuvered, according to the exigencies of
+the scene, by means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs
+to the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all
+the vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to
+mention a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral.
+
+The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated and ambitious tone
+than that of the Burattini, which exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse
+assassinations in little punch-shows on the Riva, and in the larger
+squares; but the standard characters are nearly the same with both, and
+are all descended from the _commedia a braccio_ [Footnote: Comedy by the
+yard.] which flourished on the Italian stage before the time of Goldoni.
+And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have great and
+peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing the
+most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the
+Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have
+such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only
+remember to have made out one of their comedies,--a play in which an
+ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested
+for lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other
+was raging in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic
+audiences; but for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini
+appears to be a sardonic farce, in which the chief character--a puppet
+ten inches high, with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean
+good-nature and wickedness--deludes other and weak-minded puppets into
+trusting him, and then beats them with a club upon the back of the head
+until they die. The murders of this infamous creature, which are always
+executed in a spirit of jocose _sang-froid_, and accompanied by humorous
+remarks, are received with the keenest relish by the spectators and,
+indeed, the action is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit
+of the Italian race seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they
+perform their parts with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is
+wonderful. I have witnessed death agonies on these little stages which
+the great American tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could
+not surpass in degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the
+greater credit because they are agitated by the legs from below the
+scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette
+Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and
+comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size;
+then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then
+Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat
+sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced,
+statuesque, with the drapery of their cloaks thrown over their
+shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick black hair; old women,
+all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with hooded cloaks of coarse
+brown; then boys--and boys. They all enjoy the spectacle with approval,
+and take the drama _au grand sérieux_, uttering none of the gibes which
+sometimes attend efforts to please in our own country. Even when the
+hat, or other instrument of extortion, is passed round, and they give
+nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of fury and disappointment,
+calls out, “Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to you!” and closes the
+theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse. Though, indeed, _fioi
+de cani_ means no great reproach in Venetian parlance; and parents of
+the lower classes caressingly address their children in these terms.
+Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak upon him the deadliest
+insult which can be put into words.
+
+In the _commedia a braccio_, before mentioned as the inheritance of the
+Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline of
+the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any
+people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must
+have been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till
+the middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris
+he furnished his Italian players with the _commedia a braccio_. I
+have heard some very passable _gags_ at the Marionette, but the real
+_commedia a braccio_ no longer exists, and its familiar and invariable
+characters perform written plays.
+
+Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of _dramatis personae_,
+and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice. He is
+always, like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always a
+merchant, Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands.
+He is a dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of
+black knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black
+coat, and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in
+all his characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a
+glutton and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins
+the heart. To tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he
+has no part and I have learned to think a certain trick of his--lifting
+his leg rigidly to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying,
+“Capisse la?” or “Sa la?” (You understand? You know?)--one of the finest
+things in the world.
+
+In nearly all of Goldoni’s Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote
+in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa,--Arlecchino, il
+Dottore, Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first
+puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni’s witty
+management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete _commedia
+a braccio_, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by
+immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and
+commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son,
+figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The
+second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the
+University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a
+sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and
+foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley--a gibe at the poverty
+of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and
+cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion in
+Italy.
+
+The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are
+much shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace,
+however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce,
+as you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes
+for any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed
+to have been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the
+Sleeping King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna,
+with Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated
+several nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can
+fancy people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying
+it with the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward
+realizing to yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will
+also suppose great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own
+part, I find few things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never
+tired of their bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their
+irresistible touches of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the
+relenting parent (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while
+Arlecchino, as the large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of
+the erring son when the prodigal was about to be cast into the street,
+looked on and rubbed his hands with amiable satisfaction and the
+conventional delight in benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed
+the base terrors of Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the
+keen spiritual agonies of the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of
+Sebastopol. Not many passages of real life have affected me as deeply
+as the atrocious behavior of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when
+he responds to the expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,--a
+puppet of shaky and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:
+
+“Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she
+is thy brother’s wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the
+sacred name of virtue.” (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and
+gesticulations toward the pit.)
+
+To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh,
+“Honor?--I know it not! Virtue?--I detest it!” and attempting to
+pass the knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his
+sister-in-law, he yields to the natural infirmities of rags and
+pasteboard, and topples against him.
+
+Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous.
+You discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and
+reading his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets
+when they cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly
+noises in the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the
+dark corners of the room, and to look under the bed. When at last
+the spectral head appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a
+miserable cry under the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically
+the scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a
+spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible.
+
+The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is
+extremely funny. The _prima ballerina_ has all the difficult grace and
+far-fetched arts of the _prima ballerina_ of flesh and blood; and when
+the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is humanly
+delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike _empressement_.
+I have no doubt the _corps de ballet_ have their private jealousies
+and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all
+positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and
+legs. The puppets are great in _pirouette_ and _pas seul_; but I think
+the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall of
+Carthage, is their strong point.
+
+The people who witness their performances are of all ages and
+conditions--I remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some
+German countesses in the pit--but the greater number of spectators are
+young men of the middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and
+their wives and children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place
+for lovers in humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama
+going on between the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of
+the Venetian populace take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and
+Facanapa of the stage. I one day discovered a letter at the bottom of
+the Canal of the Giudecca, to which watery resting-place some recreant,
+addressed as “Caro Antonio,” had consigned it; and from this letter I
+came to know certainly of at least one love affair at the Marionette.
+“Caro Antonio” was humbly besought, “if his heart still felt the force
+of love,” to meet the writer (who softly reproached him with neglect) at
+the Marionette the night of date, at six o’clock; and I would not like
+to believe he could resist so tender a prayer, though perhaps it fell
+out so. I fished up through the lucent water this despairing little
+epistle,--it was full of womanly sweetness and bad spelling,--and dried
+away its briny tears on the blade of my oar. If ever I thought to
+keep it, with some vague purpose of offering it to any particularly
+anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as to the probable writer--its
+unaccountable loss spared me the delicate office. Still, however, when
+I go to see the puppets, it is with an interest divided between the
+drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence of expectation somewhere
+among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who wear such immense hoops
+under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at one side, and call
+each other “Ciò!” Where art thou, O fickle and cruel, yet ever dear
+Antonio? All unconscious, I think,--gallantly posed against the wall,
+thy slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long cigar, the arms
+of thy velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy ear-rings softly
+twinkling in the light.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.
+
+
+When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men
+on the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the
+restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to
+conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while
+the restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy,
+for every bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the
+restaurants are very dirty--if you wipe your plate and glass carefully
+before using them, they need not stomach you; it is not because the
+rooms are cold--if you sit near the great vase of smoldering embers in
+the centre of each room you may suffocate in comparative comfort; it is
+not because the prices are great--they are really very reasonable; it
+is not for any very tangible fault that I object to life at the
+restaurants, and yet I cannot think of its hopeless homelessness without
+rebellion against the whole system it implies, as something unnatural
+and insufferable.
+
+But before we come to look closely at this aspect of Italian
+civilization, it is better to look first at a very noticeable trait of
+Italian character,--temperance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer
+classes, one observes without great surprise how slenderly they fare,
+and how with a great habit of talking of meat and drink, the verb
+_mangiare_ remains in fact for the most part inactive with them. But
+it is only just to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be not
+wholly the result of necessity, for it prevails with other classes which
+could well afford the opposite vice. Meat and drink do not form the
+substance of conviviality with Venetians, as with the Germans and the
+English, and in degree with ourselves; and I have often noticed on the
+Mondays-at-the-Gardens, and other social festivals of the people,
+how the crowd amused itself with any thing--music, dancing, walking,
+talking--any thing but the great northern pastime of gluttony. Knowing
+the life of the place, I make quite sure that Venetian gayety is on few
+occasions connected with repletion; and I am ashamed to confess that I
+have not always been able to repress a feeling of stupid scorn for the
+empty stomachs everywhere, which do not even ask to be filled, or, at
+least, do not insist upon it. The truth is, the North has a gloomy
+pride in gastronomic excess, which unfits her children to appreciate the
+cheerful prudence of the South.
+
+Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. They breakfast on
+a piece of bread with coffee and milk; supper is a little cup of black
+coffee, or an ice, taken at a caffè. The coffee, however, is repeated
+frequently throughout the day, and in the summertime fruit is eaten, but
+eaten sparingly, like everything else. As to the nature of the dinner,
+it of course varies somewhat according to the nature of the diner; but
+in most families of the middle class a dinner at home consists of a
+piece of boiled beef, a _minestra_ (a soup thickened with vegetables,
+tripe, and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the wine of the
+country. The failings of the repast among all classes lean to the
+side of simplicity, and the abstemious character of the Venetian finds
+sufficient comment in his familiar invitation to dinner: “_Venga a
+mangiar quattro risi con me_.” (Come eat four grains of rice with me.)
+
+But invitations to dinner have never formed a prime element of
+hospitality in Venice. Goldoni notices this fact in his memoirs, and
+speaking of the city in the early half of the last century, he says
+that the number and excellence of the eating-houses in the city made
+invitations to dinner at private houses rare, and superfluous among the
+courtesies offered to strangers.
+
+The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place his house at your
+disposition, and, having extended this splendid invitation, consider the
+duties of hospitality fulfilled; he does not appear to think you want to
+make use of his house for social purposes, preferring himself the caffè,
+and finding home and comfort there, rather than under his own roof.
+“What caffè do you frequent? Ah! so do I. We shall meet often there.”
+ This is frequently your new acquaintance’s promise of friendship. And
+one may even learn to like the social footing on which people meet at
+the caffè, as well as that of the parlor or drawing-room. I could not
+help thinking one evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some
+pleasant Paduans in one of the magnificent saloons of the Caffè
+Pedrocchi, that I should like to go there for society, if I could always
+find it there, much better than to private houses. There is far greater
+ease and freedom, more elegance and luxury, and not the slightest weight
+of obligation laid upon you for the gratification your friend’s company
+has given you. One has not to be a debtor in the sum of a friend’s
+outlay for house, servants, refreshments, and the like. Nowhere in
+Europe is the senseless and wasteful American custom of _treating_
+known; and nothing could be more especially foreign to the frugal
+instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a party of friends at a
+caffè eat or drink, each one pays for what he takes, and pecuniarily,
+the enjoyment of the evening is uncostly or not, according as each
+prefers. Of course no one sits down in such a place without calling for
+something; but I have frequently seen people respond to this demand of
+custom by ordering a glass of water with anise, at the expense of two
+soldi. A cup of black coffee, for five soldi, secures a chair, a table,
+and as many journals as you like, for as long time as you like.
+
+I say, a stranger may learn to like the life of the caffè,--that of the
+restaurant never; though the habit of frequenting the restaurants, to
+which Goldoni somewhat vaingloriously refers, seems to have grown upon
+the Venetians with the lapse of time. The eating-houses are almost
+without number, and are of every degree, from the shop of the
+sausage-maker, who supplies gondoliers and facchini with bowls of
+_sguassetto_, to the Caffè Florian. They all have names which are not
+strange to European ears, but which ape sufficiently amusing to people
+who come from a land where nearly every public thing is named from
+some inspiration of patriotism or local pride. In Venice the principal
+restaurants are called The Steamboat, The Savage, The Little Horse, The
+Black Hat, and The Pictures; and I do not know that any one of them is
+more uncomfortable, uncleanly, or noisy than another, or that any one of
+them suffers from the fact that all are bad.
+
+You do not get breakfast at the restaurant for the reason, before
+stated, of the breakfast’s unsubstantiality. The dining commences about
+three o’clock in the afternoon, and continues till nine o’clock, most
+people dining at five or six. As a rule the attendance is insufficient,
+and no guest is served until he has made a savage clapping on the
+tables, or clinking on his glass or plate. Then a hard-pushed waiter
+appears, and calls out, dramatically, “Behold me!” takes the order,
+shrieks it to the cook, and returning with the dinner, cries out again,
+more dramatically than ever, “Behold it ready!” and arrays it with a
+great flourish on the table. I have dined in an hotel at Niagara, to the
+music of a brass band; but I did not find that so utterly bewildering,
+so destructive of the individual savor of the dishes, and so conducive
+to absent-minded gluttony, as I at first found the constant rush and
+clamor of the waiters in the Venetian restaurants. The guests are,
+for the most part, patient and quiet enough, eating their minestra and
+boiled beef in such peace as the surrounding uproar permits them, and
+seldom making acquaintance with each other. It is a mistake, I think,
+to expect much talk from any people at dinner. The ingenious English
+tourists who visit the United States from time to time, find us silent
+over our meat, and I have noticed the like trait among people of divers
+races in Europe.
+
+As I have said, the greater part of the diners at the restaurants are
+single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill
+of the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals,
+is rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a
+drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,--no, not at evening
+parties,--and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the caffè and
+the restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the higher
+privileges of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once the
+most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the
+world. Our boarding-house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as
+it often is, seems to me infinitely better than the restaurant life
+of young Italy. It is creditable to Latin Europe that, with all this
+homelessness and domestic outlawry, its young men still preserve the
+gentleness of civilization.
+
+The families that share the exile of the eating-houses sometimes make
+together a feeble buzz of conversation, but the unfriendly spirit of
+the place seems soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent the
+restaurant for economy’s sake. Fuel is costly, and the restaurant is
+cheap, and its cooking better than they could perhaps otherwise afford
+to have. Indeed, so cheap is the restaurant that actual experience
+proved the cost of a dinner there to be little more than the cost of
+the raw material in the market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the
+custom, which is common, of sending home to purchasers meals from the
+eating-houses.
+
+As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, the difference is not
+so noticeable in the prices of the same dishes, as in the substitution
+of cheaper varieties of food. At the best eating-houses, the Gallic
+traditions bear sway more or less, but in the poorer sort the cooking
+is done entirely by native artists, deriving their inspirations from
+the unsophisticated tastes of exclusively native diners. It is perhaps
+needless to say that they grow characteristic and picturesque as they
+grow dirty and cheap, until at last the cook-shop perfects the descent
+with a triumph of raciness and local coloring. The cook-shop in Venice
+opens upon you at almost every turn,--everywhere, in fact, but in the
+Piazza and the Merceria,--and looking in, you see its vast heaps of
+frying fish, and its huge caldrons of ever-boiling broth which smell
+to heaven with garlic and onions. In the seducing windows smoke golden
+mountains of _polenta_ (a thicker kind of mush or hasty-pudding, made
+of Indian meal, and universally eaten in North Italy), platters of crisp
+minnows, bowls of rice, roast poultry, dishes of snails and liver; and
+around the fascinating walls hang huge plates of bronzed earthenware
+for a lavish and a hospitable show, and for the representation of those
+scenes of Venetian story which are modeled upon them in bass-relief.
+Here I like to take my unknown friend--my scoundrel facchino or rascal
+gondolier--as he comes to buy his dinner, and bargains eloquently with
+the cook, who stands with a huge ladle in his hand capable of skimming
+mysterious things from vasty depths. I am spell-bound by the drama which
+ensues, and in which all the chords of the human heart are touched, from
+those that tremble at high tragedy, to those that are shaken by broad
+farce. When the diner has bought his dinner, and issues forth with
+his polenta in one hand, and his fried minnows or stewed snails in the
+other, my fancy fondly follows him to his gondola-station, where he eats
+it, and quarrels volubly with other gondoliers across the Grand Canal.
+
+A simpler and less ambitious sort of cook-shop abounds in the region
+of Rialto, where on market mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious
+business with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more limited
+resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, polenta, and
+_sguassetto_. The latter is a true _roba veneziana_, and is a
+loud-flavored broth, made of those desperate scraps of meat which
+are found impracticable even by the sausage-makers. Another, but more
+delicate dish, peculiar to the place, is the clotted blood of poultry,
+fried in slices with onions. A great number of the families of the poor
+breakfast at these shops very abundantly, for three soldi each person.
+
+In Venice every holiday has its appropriate viand. During carnival all
+the butter and cheese shop-windows are whitened with the snow of
+beaten cream--_panamontata_. At San Martino the bakers parade troops of
+gingerbread warriors. Later, for Christmas, comes _mandorlato_, which is
+a candy made of honey and enriched with almonds. In its season only can
+any of these devotional delicacies be had; but there is a species
+of cruller, fried in oil, which has all seasons for its own. On the
+occasion of every _festa_, and of every _sagra_ (which is the holiday of
+one parish only), stalls are erected in the squares for the cooking and
+sale of these crullers, between which and the religious sentiment proper
+to the whole year there seems to be some occult relation.
+
+In the winter, the whole city appears to abandon herself to cooking for
+the public, till she threatens to hopelessly disorder the law of demand
+and supply. There are, to begin with, the caffè and restaurants of
+every class. Then there are the cook-shops, and the poulterers’, and the
+sausage-makers’. Then, also, every fruit-stall is misty and odorous with
+roast apples, boiled beans, cabbage, and potatoes. The chestnut-roasters
+infest every corner, and men, women, and children cry roast pumpkin at
+every turn--till, at last, hunger seems an absurd and foolish vice,
+and the ubiquitous beggars, no less than the habitual abstemiousness of
+every class of the population, become the most perplexing and maddening
+of anomalies.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.
+
+
+I hope that it is by a not unnatural progress I pass from speaking of
+dinners and diners to the kindred subject of the present chapter, and I
+trust the reader will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this
+mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I
+had found most books of travel very slow to tell,--as much as possible
+of the everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our
+own; endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not only
+from the show-traits which strangers are most likely to see, but also
+from experience of such things as strangers are most likely to miss.
+
+The absolute want of society of my own nation in Venice would have
+thrown me upon study of the people for my amusement, even if I had cared
+to learn nothing of them; and the necessity of economical housekeeping
+would have caused me to live in the frugal Venetian fashion, even if
+I had been disposed to remain a foreigner in every thing. Of bachelor
+lodgings I had sufficient experience during my first year; but as most
+prudent travelers who visit the city for a week take lodgings, I need
+not describe my own particularly. You can tell the houses in which
+there are rooms to let, by the squares of white paper fastened to the
+window-shutters; and a casual glance as you pass through the streets,
+gives you the idea that the chief income of the place is derived from
+letting lodgings. Carpetless, dreary barracks the rooms usually are,
+with an uncompromising squareness of prints upon the wall, an appalling
+breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of wash-bowl, and an obduracy of
+sofa, never, never to be dissociated in their victim’s mind from the
+idea of the villanous hard bread of Venice on which the gloomy landlady
+sustains her life with its immutable purposes of plunder. Flabbiness
+without softness is the tone of these discouraging chambers, which are
+dear or not according to the season and the situation. On the sunlit
+Riva during winter, and on the Grand Canal in summer, they are costly
+enough, but they are to be found on nearly all the squares at reasonable
+rates. On the narrow streets, where most native bachelors have them,
+they are absurdly cheap.
+
+As in nearly all places on the Continent, a house in Venice means a
+number of rooms, including a whole story in a building, or part of it
+only, but always completely separated from the story above and below, or
+from the other rooms on the same floor. Every house has its own entrance
+from the street, or by a common hall and stairway from the ground-floor,
+where are the cellars or store-rooms, while each kitchen is usually on
+a level with the other rooms of the house to which it belongs. The
+isolation of the different families is secured (as perfectly as where
+a building is solely appropriated to each), either by the exclusive
+possession of a streetdoor, [Footnote: Where the street entrance is in
+common, every floor has its bell, which being sounded, summons a servant
+to some upper window with the demand, most formidable to strangers,
+“_Chi xe?_” (Who is it?) But you do not answer with your name. You
+reply, “_Amici!_” (Friends!) on which comforting reassurance, the
+servant draws the latch of the door by a wire running upward to her
+hand, and permits you to enter and wander about at your leisure till you
+reach her secret height. This is, supposing the master or mistress of
+the house to be at home. If they are not in, she answers your “_Amici!_”
+ with “_No ghe ne xe!_” (Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a
+string outside the window, and fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial
+domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give good-day to the people whom
+you meet in the common hall and on the common stairway, but you rarely
+know more of them than their names, and you certainly care nothing about
+them. The sociability of Europe, and more especially of Southern Europe,
+is shown abroad; under the domestic roof it dwindles and disappears. And
+indeed it is no wonder, considering how dispiriting and comfortless most
+of the houses are. The lower windows are heavily barred with iron; the
+wood-work is rude, even in many palaces in Venice; the rest is stone
+and stucco; the walls are not often papered, though they are sometimes
+painted: the most pleasing and inviting feature of the interior is the
+frescoed ceiling of the better rooms. The windows shut imperfectly,
+the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth while to observe that
+there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?); the doors lift slantingly from
+the floor, in which their lower hinges are imbedded; the stoves are of
+plaster, and consume fuel without just return of heat; the balconies
+alone are always charming, whether they hang high over the streets, or
+look out upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted ceilings, go far
+to make the houses habitable.
+
+It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly every thing else in
+Italy, that you pay about the same price for half the comfort that you
+get in America. In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on the
+Grand Canal; but here the rents are something absurdly high, when taken
+in consideration with the fact that the city is not made a place of
+residence by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial
+activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these
+circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment
+to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a
+tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with
+coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls
+like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all
+recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa is at present occupying
+these pleasant apartments, and you only gain admission to them after
+an embassy to procure her permission. Madama la Baronessa receives
+you courteously, and you pass through her rooms, which are a little
+in disorder, the Baronessa being on the point of removal. Madama la
+Baronessa’s hoop-skirts prevail upon the floors; and at the side of the
+couch which her form lately pressed in slumber, you observe a French
+novel and a wasted candle in the society of a half-bottle of the wine of
+the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the whole suite, and through the
+open window comes a curious stench explained as the odor of Madama la
+Baronessa’s guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that she has had their
+sty placed immediately under her window in the garden. It is this garden
+which has first taken your heart, with a glimpse caught through the
+great open door of the palace. It is disordered and wild, but so much
+the better; its firs are very thick and dark, and there are certain
+statues, fauns and nymphs, which weather stains and mosses have made
+much decenter than the sculptor intended. You think that for this
+garden’s sake you could put up with the house, which must be very cheap.
+What is the price of the rooms? you ask of the smiling landlord. He
+answers, without winking, “If taken for several years, a thousand
+florins a year.” At which you suppress the whistle of disdainful
+surprise, and say you think it will not suit. He calls your attention to
+the sun, which comes in at every side, which will roast you in summer,
+and will not (as he would have you think) warm you in winter. “But there
+is another apartment,”--through which you drag languidly. It is empty
+now, being last inhabited by an English Ledi,--and her stove-pipes
+went out of the windows, and blackened the shabby stucco front of the
+villanous old palace.
+
+In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the
+curiously frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which
+has a lady and gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony
+to balcony, on the façade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of
+leaping from the second to the third story, promises something. Promises
+something, but does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh,
+clean, and new, and cold and dark as a cellar. This house--that is to
+say, a floor of the house--you may have for four hundred florins a year;
+and then farewell the world and the light of the sun! for neither will
+ever find you in that back court, and you will never see any body but
+the neighboring laundresses and their children, who cannot enough admire
+the front of your house.
+
+_E via in seguito!_ This is of house keeping, not house-hunting. There
+are pleasant and habitable houses in Venice--but they are not cheap, as
+many of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, discomfort and ruin
+have their price, and the tumble-down is patched up and sold at rates
+astonishing to innocent strangers who come from countries in good
+repair, where the tumble-down is worth nothing. If I were not ashamed
+of the idle and foolish old superstitions in which I once believed
+concerning life in Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect
+very little for a great deal; and how a knowledge of many houses to let,
+made me more and more contented with the house we had taken.
+
+It was in one corner of an old palace on the Grand Canal, and the window
+of the little parlor looked down upon the water, which had made friends
+with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, golden smiles upon
+it when the sun shone. The dining-room was not so much favored by the
+water, but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling tree-tops,
+that rose to it from a tiny garden-ground, no bigger than a pocket
+handkerchief. Through this window, also, we could see the quaint,
+picturesque life of the canal; and from another room we could reach
+a little terrace above the water. We were not in the _appartamento
+signorile_, [Footnote: The noble floor--as the second or third story
+of the palace is called.]--that was above,--but we were more snugly
+quartered on the first story from the ground-floor, commonly used as a
+winter apartment in the old times. But it had been cut up, and suites of
+rooms had been broken according to the caprice of successive landlords,
+till it was not at all palatial any more. The upper stories still
+retained something of former grandeur, and had acquired with time more
+than former discomfort. We were not envious of them, for they were
+humbly let at a price less than we paid; though we could not quite
+repress a covetous yearning for their arched and carven windows, which
+we saw sometimes from the canal, above the tops of the garden trees.
+
+The gondoliers used always to point out our palace (which was called
+Casa Falier) as the house in which Marino Faliero was born; and for a
+long time we clung to the hope that it might be so. But however
+pleasant it was, we were forced, on reading up the subject a little, to
+relinquish our illusion, and accredit an old palace at Santi Apostoli
+with the distinction we would fain have claimed for ours. I am rather at
+a loss to explain how it made our lives in Casa Falier any pleasanter to
+think that a beheaded traitor had been born in it, but we relished the
+superstition amazingly as long as we could possibly believe in it. What
+went far to confirm us at first in our credulity was the residence, in
+another part of the palace, of the Canonico Falier, a lineal descendant
+of the unhappy doge. He was a very mild-faced old priest, with a white
+head, which he carried downcast, and crimson legs, on which he moved but
+feebly. He owned the rooms in which he lived, and the apartment in the
+front of the palace just above our own. The rest of the house belonged
+to another, for in Venice many of the palaces are divided up and sold
+among different purchasers, floor by floor, and sometimes even room by
+room.
+
+But the tenantry of Casa Falier was far more various than its
+proprietorship. Over our heads dwelt a Dalmatian family; below our feet
+a Frenchwoman; at our right, upon the same floor, an English gentleman;
+under him a French family; and over him the family of a marquis in exile
+from Modena. Except with Mr. ----, the Englishman, who was at once our
+friend and landlord (impossible as this may appear to those who know
+any thing of landlords in Italy), we had no acquaintance, beyond that of
+salutation, with the many nations represented in our house. We could not
+help holding the French people in some sort responsible for the
+invasion of Mexico; and, though opportunity offered for cultivating the
+acquaintance of the Modenese, we did not improve it.
+
+As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and bowed to them a great
+deal, and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving
+noise as of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal
+on their balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed
+seeing them admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling.
+The father of this family was a little man of a solemn and impressive
+demeanor, who had no other occupation but to walk up and down the city
+and view its monuments, for which purpose he one day informed us he had
+left his native place in Dalmatia, after forty years’ study of Venetian
+history. He further told us that this was by no means worth the time
+given it; that whereas the streets of Venice were sepulchres in point
+of narrowness and obscurity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows
+of which you might see for miles uninterruptedly! This little gentleman
+wore a black hat, in the last vivid polish of respectability, and I
+think fortune was not his friend. The hat was too large for him, as the
+hats of Italians always are; it came down to his eyes, and he carried a
+cane. Every evening he marched solemnly at the head of a procession of
+his handsome young children, who went to hear the military music in St.
+Mark’s Square.
+
+The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians--we never knew their
+names--gave access also to a house in the story above them, which
+belonged to some mysterious person described on his door-plate as “Co.
+Prata.” I think we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance
+some members of his family when they came back from their summer in the
+country to spend the winter in the city. Prata’s “Co.,” we gradually
+learnt, meant “Conte,” and the little counts and countesses, his
+children, immediately on their arrival took an active part in the
+exercises of the Dalmatian cavalry. Later in the fall, certain of the
+count’s vassals came to the _riva_ [Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs
+which descend to the water before palace-doors and at the ends of
+streets.] in one of the great boats of the Po, with a load of brush and
+corncobs for fuel--and this is all we ever knew of our neighbors on the
+fourth floor. As long as he remained “Co.” we yearned to know who and
+what he was; being interpreted as Conte Prata, he ceased to interest us.
+
+Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little
+people, just married, came to live in Venice.
+
+They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence,
+tempering the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.
+
+The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with
+it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and “This is my wife, the
+new mistress,” said the young _Paron_ [Footnote: _Padrone_ in Italian.
+A salutation with Venetian friends, and the title by which Venetian
+servants always designate their employers.] with the bashful pride
+proper to the time and place. Giovanna glowed welcome, and said, with
+adventurous politeness, she was very glad of it.
+
+“_Serva sua!_”
+
+The _Parona_, not knowing Italian, laughed in English.
+
+So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting upon the great truth that
+handsome is that handsome does, began at once to make herself a thing of
+beauty.
+
+As a measure of convenience and of deference to her feelings, we
+immediately resolved to call her G., merely, when speaking of her
+in English, instead of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with
+conjecture concerning what was said of her. And as G. thus became the
+centre around which our domestic life revolved, she must be somewhat
+particularly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. I suppose
+that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances, this would
+have been much like keeping play-house anywhere; in Venice it had, but
+for the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious property of unreality
+and impermanency. It is sufficiently bad to live in a rented house; in
+a house which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till your life
+takes root, and Home blossoms up in the alien place. For a great while
+we regarded our house merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were slow
+to form any relations which could take from our residence its temporary
+character. Had we but thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker,
+and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish ourselves at once;
+but we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us
+to our fellow-creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by housekeepers
+on a scale surprisingly small to one accustomed to wholesale American
+ways, and G., having the purse, made our little purchases in cash,
+never buying more than enough for one meal at a time. Every morning,
+the fruits and vegetables are distributed from the great market at the
+Rialto among a hundred greengrocers’ stalls in all parts of the city;
+bread (which is never made at home) is found fresh at the baker’s; there
+is a butcher’s stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are
+therefore resorted to for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay
+in provisions there in portions graduated to a soldo of their ready
+means. A great Bostonian whom I remember to have heard speculate on the
+superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents’
+worth of beef to that in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable,
+would find the system perfected here, where you can buy half a cent’s
+worth. It is a system friendly to poverty, and the small retail prices
+approximate very closely the real value of the stuff sold, as we
+sometimes proved by offering to purchase in quantity. Usually no
+reduction would be made from the retail rate, and it was sufficiently
+amusing to have the dealer figure up the cost of the quantity we
+proposed to buy, and then exhibit an exact multiplication of his retail
+rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is worth a soldo: you get no
+more than a hundred for a florin, though the dealer will cheerfully go
+under that number if he can cheat you in the count. So in most things
+we found it better to let G. do the marketing in her own small Venetian
+fashion, and “guard our strangeness.”
+
+But there were some things which must be brought to the house by the
+dealers, such as water for drinking and cooking, which is drawn from
+public cisterns in the squares, and carried by stout young girls to all
+the houses. These _bigolanti_ all come from the mountains of Friuli;
+they all have rosy cheeks, white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists
+whatever (in the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The cisterns
+are opened about eight o’clock in the morning, and then their day’s
+work begins with chatter, and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the
+wells; and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots off under a burden
+of two buckets,--one appended from either end of a bow resting upon the
+right shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain which
+falls on the shelving surface of the campo, and soaks through a bed of
+sea-sand around the cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante
+comes every morning and empties her brazen buckets into the great
+picturesque jars of porous earthenware which ornament Venetian kitchens;
+and the daily supply of water costs a moderate family about a florin a
+month.
+
+Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this arrives in boats. It is
+cut upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small
+coasting vessels, each of which has a plump captain in command, whose
+red face is so cunningly blended with his cap of scarlet flannel that it
+is hard on a breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other ends.
+These vessels anchor off the Custom House in the Guidecca Canal in the
+fall, and lie there all winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a
+great part of the time under the charge solely of a small yellow dog of
+the irascible breed common to the boats of the Po. Thither the smaller
+dealers in firewood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all
+parts of the city, melodiously crying their wares up and down the
+canals, and penetrating the land on foot with specimen bundles of fagots
+in their arms. They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think--their
+fancy seldom rising beyond the invention that their fagots are beautiful
+and sound and dry. But our particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted
+man. Long before I had dealings with him, I knew him by the superb song,
+or rather incantation, with which he announced his coming on the Grand
+Canal. The purport of this was merely that his bark was called the
+Beautiful Caroline, and that his fagots were fine; but he so dwelt upon
+the hidden beauties of this idea, and so prolonged their effect upon the
+mind by artful repetition, and the full, round, and resonant roar with
+which he closed his triumphal hymn, that the spirit was taken with the
+charm, and held in breathless admiration. By all odds, this woodman’s
+cry was the most impressive of all the street cries of Venice. There
+may have been an exquisite sadness and sweetness in the wail of the
+chimney-sweep; a winning pathos in the voice of the vender of roast
+pumpkin; an oriental fancy and splendor in the fruiterers who cried
+“Melons with hearts of fire!” and “Juicy pears that bathe your
+beard!”--there may have been something peculiarly effective in the song
+of the chestnut-man who shouted “Fat chestnuts,” and added, after a
+lapse in which you got almost beyond hearing, “and well cooked!”--I do
+not deny that there was a seductive sincerity in the proclamation of
+one whose peaches could _not_ be called beautiful to look upon, and were
+consequently advertised as “Ugly, but good!”--I say nothing to detract
+from the merits of harmonious chair-menders;--to my ears the shout
+of the melodious fisherman was delectable music, and all the birds of
+summer sang in the voices of the countrymen who sold finches and larks
+in cages, and roses and pinks in pots;--but I say, after all, none
+of these people combined the vocal power, the sonorous movement, the
+delicate grace, and the vast compass of our woodman. Yet this man, as
+far as virtue went, was _vox et praeterea nihil_. He was a vagabond of
+the most abandoned; he was habitually in drink, and I think his sins
+had gone near to make him mad--at any rate he was of a most lunatical
+deportment. In other lands, the man of whom you are a regular purchaser,
+serves you well; in Italy he conceives that his long service gives him
+the right to plunder you if possible. I felt in every fibre that this
+woodman invariably cheated me in measurement, and, indeed, he
+scarcely denied it on accusation. But my single experience of the
+more magnificent scoundrels of whom _he_ bought the wood originally,
+contented me with the swindle with which I had become familiarized. On
+this occasion I took a boat and went to the Custom House, to get my fuel
+at first hand. The captain of the ship which I boarded wished me to pay
+more than I gave for fuel delivered at my door, and thereupon ensued the
+tragic scene of bargaining, as these things are conducted in Italy. We
+stood up and bargained, we sat down and bargained; the captain turned
+his back upon me in indignation; I parted from him and took to my boat
+in scorn; he called me back and displayed the wood--good, sound, dryer
+than bones; he pointed to the threatening heavens, and declared that it
+would snow that night, and on the morrow I could not get wood for twice
+the present price; but I laughed incredulously. Then my captain took
+another tack, and tried to make the contract in obsolete currencies, in
+Austrian pounds, in Venetian pounds, but as I inexorably reduced these
+into familiar money, he paused desperately, and made me an offer which
+I accepted with mistaken exultation. For my captain was shrewder than I,
+and held arts of measurement in reserve against me. He agreed that
+the measurement and transportation should not cost me the value of his
+tooth-pick--quite an old and worthless one--which he showed me. Yet I
+was surprised into the payment of a youth whom this man called to assist
+at the measurement, and I had to give the boatman drink-money at the
+end. He promised that the measure should be just: yet if I lifted my eye
+from the work he placed the logs slantingly on the measure, and threw
+in knotty chunks that crowded wholesome fuel out, and let the daylight
+through and through the pile. I protested, and he admitted the wrong
+when I pointed it out: “_Ga razon, lu!_” (He’s right!) he said to
+his fellows in infamy, and throwing aside the objectionable pieces,
+proceeded to evade justice by new artifices. When I had this memorable
+load of wood housed at home, I found that it had cost just what I paid
+my woodman, and that I had additionally lost my self-respect in being
+plundered before my face, and I resolved thereafter to be cheated
+in quiet dignity behind my back. The woodman exulted in his restored
+sovereignty, and I lost nothing in penalty for my revolt.
+
+Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice, are those
+ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed
+in baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares
+by the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their
+general stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to
+their own comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling
+ear-rings of yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning
+streets of Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of
+the country’s clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great
+cream-colored cows.
+
+Fishermen, also, come down the little _calli_--with shallow baskets
+of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles and
+mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to
+bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling
+drama proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser’s own
+price. “Beautiful and all alive!” is the engaging cry with which they
+hawk their fish.
+
+Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come
+to exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely,
+but glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all,
+chair-menders,--who bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a
+sign, with pieces of white wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a
+hammer, and a sheaf of rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait
+the rush bottoms of your kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant
+whittlings with their knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.
+
+But in the mean time our own serving-woman Giovanna, the great central
+principle of our housekeeping, is waiting to be personally presented to
+the company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, that it is hard
+not to believe them created just as crooked, and foul, and full of fluff
+and years as you behold them, and you cannot understand how so much
+frowziness and so little hair, so great show of fangs and so few teeth,
+are growths from any ordinary human birth. G. is no longer young, but
+she is not after the likeness of these old women. It is of a middle age,
+unbeginning, interminable, of which she gives you the impression.
+She has brown apple-cheeks, just touched with frost; her nose is of a
+strawberry formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly
+shrunken effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned.
+A tough, pleasant, indestructible woman--for use, we thought, not
+ornament--the mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower of
+serving-women.
+
+I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a class, given to
+pilfering; but knowing ourselves subject by nature to pillage, we cannot
+repress a feeling of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. She
+strictly accounts for all money given her at the close of each week, and
+to this end keeps a kind of account-book, which I cannot help regarding
+as in some sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, confirmed
+by her own confession, that G. is not good for reading and writing. On
+settling with her I have been permitted to look into this book, which is
+all in capital letters,--each the evident result of serious labor,--with
+figures representing combinations of the pot-hook according to bold
+and original conceptions. The spelling is also a remarkable effort of
+creative genius. The only difficulty under which the author labors in
+regard to the book is the confusion naturally resulting from the effort
+to get literature right side up when it has got upside down. The writing
+is a kind of pugilism--the strokes being made straight out from the
+shoulder. The account-book is always carried about with her in a
+fathomless pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a housekeeper
+who can throw nothing away, to wit: matchboxes, now appointed to hold
+buttons and hooks-and-eyes; beeswax in the lump; the door-key (which
+in Venice takes a formidable size, and impresses you at first sight as
+ordnance); a patch-bag; a porte-monnaie; many lead-pencils in the stump;
+scissors, pincushions, and the Beata Vergine in a frame. Indeed, this
+incapability of throwing things away is made to bear rather severely
+upon us in some things, such as the continual reappearance of familiar
+dishes at table--particularly veteran _bifsteca_. But we fancy that the
+same frugal instinct is exercised to our advantage and comfort in other
+things, for G. makes a great show and merit of denying our charity to
+those bold and adventurous children of sorrow, who do not scruple to
+ring your door-bell, and demand alms. It is true that with G., as
+with every Italian, almsgiving enters into the theory and practice of
+Christian life, but she will not suffer misery to abuse its privileges.
+She has no hesitation, however, in bringing certain objects of
+compassion to our notice, and she procures small services to be done for
+us by many lame and halt of her acquaintance. Having bought my boat (I
+come, in time, to be willing to sell it again for half its cost to me),
+I require a menial to clean it now and then, and Giovanna first calls
+me a youthful Gobbo for the work,--a festive hunchback, a bright-hearted
+whistler of comic opera. Whether this blithe humor is not considered
+decent, I do not know, but though the Gobbo serves me faithfully, I find
+him one day replaced by a venerable old man, whom--from his personal
+resemblance to Time--I should think much better occupied with an
+hourglass, or engaged with a scythe in mowing me and other mortals down,
+than in cleaning my boat. But all day long he sits on my riva in the
+sun, when it shines, gazing fixedly at my boat; and when the day is
+dark, he lurks about the street, accessible to my slightest boating
+impulse. He salutes my going out and coming in with grave reverence,
+and I think he has no work to do but that which G.’s wise compassion has
+given him from me. Suddenly, like the Gobbo, the Veccio also disappears,
+and I hear vaguely--for in Venice you never know any thing with
+precision--that he has found a regular employment in Padua, and again
+that he is dead. While he lasts, G. has a pleasant, even a sportive
+manner with this poor old man, calculated to cheer his declining years;
+but, as I say, cases of insolent and aggressive misery fail to touch
+her. The kind of wretchedness that comes breathing woe and _sciampagnin_
+[Footnote: Little champagne,--the name which the Venetian populace gave
+to a fierce and deadly kind of brandy drunk during the scarcity of wine.
+After the introduction of coal-oil this liquor came to be jocosely known
+as _petrolio_.] under our window, and there spends a leisure hour in the
+rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim either upon her pity or her
+weakness. She is deaf to the voice of that sorrow, and the monotonous
+whine of that dolor cannot move her to the purchase of a guilty
+tranquillity. I imagine, however, that she is afraid to deny charity to
+the fat Capuchin friar in spectacles and bare feet, who comes twice a
+month to levy contributions of bread and fuel for his convent, for
+we hear her declare from the window that the master is not at home,
+whenever the good brother rings; and at last, as this excuse gives out,
+she ceases to respond to his ring at all.
+
+Sometimes, during the summer weather, comes down our street a certain
+tremulous old troubadour with an aged cithern, on which he strums
+feebly with bones which remain to him from former fingers, and in a thin
+quivering voice pipes worn-out ditties of youth and love. Sadder music
+I have never heard, but though it has at times drawn from me the sigh of
+sensibility without referring sympathy to my pocket, I always hear the
+compassionate soldo of Giovanna clink reproof to me upon the pavement.
+Perhaps that slender note touches something finer than habitual charity
+in her middle-aged bosom, for these were songs she says that they used
+to sing when she was a girl, and Venice was gay and glad, and different
+from now--_veramente, tutt’ altro, signor!_
+
+It is through Giovanna’s charitable disposition that we make the
+acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle
+Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures--_creatura_
+being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being
+somewhat more pitiable than a _poveretta_. Our Creatures are both well
+stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which
+frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with
+the invalid’s husband,--a mild, pleasant-faced man, a tailor by trade,
+and of batlike habits, who hovers about their dusky doorway in the
+summer twilight. These people have but one room, and a little nook of
+kitchen at the side; and not only does the sun never find his way into
+their habitation, but even the daylight cannot penetrate it. They pay
+about four florins a month for the place, and I hope their landlord is
+as happy as his tenants. For though one is sick, and all are wretchedly
+poor, they are far from being discontented. They are opulent in the
+possession of a small dog, which they have raised from the cradle, as it
+were, and adopted into the family. They are never tired of playing
+with their dog,--the poor old children,--and every slight display of
+intelligence on his part delights them. They think it fine in him to
+follow us as we go by, but pretend to beat him; and then they excuse
+him, and call him ill names, and catch him up, and hug him and kiss him.
+He feeds upon their slender means and the pickings that G. carefully
+carries him from our kitchen, and gives to him on our doorstep in spite
+of us, while she gossips with his mistresses, who chorus our appearance
+at such times with “_I miei rispetti, signori!_” We often see them in
+the street, and at a distance from home, carrying mysterious bundles of
+clothes; and at last we learn their vocation, which is one not known
+out of Italian cities, I think. There the state is Uncle to the
+hard-pressed, and instead of many pawnbrokers’ shops there is one large
+municipal spout, which is called the Monte di Pietà, where the needy
+pawn their goods. The system is centuries old in Italy, but there are
+people who to this day cannot summon courage to repair in person to the
+Mount of Pity, and, to meet their wants, there has grown up a class of
+frowzy old women who transact the business for them, and receive a small
+percentage for their trouble. Our poor old Creatures were of this class,
+and as there were many persons in impoverished, decaying Venice who had
+need of the succor they procured, they made out to earn a living when
+both were well, and to eke out existence by charity when one was ill.
+They were harmless neighbors, and I believe they regretted our removal,
+when this took place, for they used to sit down under an arcade
+opposite our new house, and spend the duller intervals of trade in the
+contemplation of our windows.
+
+The alarming spirit of nepotism which Giovanna developed at a later
+day was, I fear, a growth from the encouragement we gave her charitable
+disposition. But for several months it was merely from the fact of a boy
+who came and whistled at the door until Giovanna opened it and reproved
+him in the name of all the saints and powers of darkness, that we knew
+her to be a mother; and we merely had her word for the existence of
+a husband, who dealt in poultry. Without seeing Giovanna’s husband, I
+nevertheless knew him to be a man of downy exterior, wearing a canvas
+apron, thickly crusted with the gore of fowls, who sat at the door of
+his shop and plucked chickens forever, as with the tireless hand of
+Fate. I divined that he lived in an atmosphere of scalded pullet;
+that three earthen cups of clotted chickens’ blood, placed upon his
+window-shelf, formed his idea of an attractive display, and that he
+shadowed forth his conceptions of the beautiful in symmetrical rows of
+plucked chickens, presenting to the public eye rear views embellished
+with a single feather erect in the tail of each bird; that he must be,
+through the ethics of competition, the sworn foe of those illogical
+peasants who bring dead poultry to town in cages, like singing birds,
+and equally the friend of those restaurateurs who furnish you a meal of
+victuals and a feather-bed in the same _mezzo-polio arrosto_. He turned
+out on actual appearance to be all I had prefigured him, with the
+additional merit of having a large red nose, a sidelong, fugitive gait,
+and a hangdog countenance. He furnished us poultry at rates slightly
+advanced, I think.
+
+As for the boy, he turned up after a while as a constant guest, and
+took possession of the kitchen. He came near banishment at one time for
+catching a large number of sea-crabs in the canal, and confining them in
+a basket in the kitchen, which they left at the dead hour of night, to
+wander all over our house,--making a mysterious and alarming sound of
+snapping, like an army of death-watches, and eluding the cunningest
+efforts at capture. On another occasion, he fell into the canal before
+our house, and terrified us by going under twice before the arrival of
+the old gondolier, who called out to him “_Petta! petta!_” (Wait!
+wait!) as he placidly pushed his boat to the spot. Developing other
+disagreeable traits, Beppi was finally driven into exile, from which he
+nevertheless furtively returned on holidays.
+
+The family of Giovanna thus gradually encroaching upon us, we came
+also to know her mother,--a dread and loathly old lady, whom we would
+willingly have seen burned at the stake for a witch. She was commonly
+encountered at nightfall in our street, where she lay in wait, as it
+were, to prey upon the fragrance of dinner drifting from the kitchen
+windows of our neighbor, the Duchess of Parma. Here was heard the voice
+of cooks and of scullions, and the ecstasies of helpless voracity in
+which we sometimes beheld this old lady were fearful to witness. Nor did
+we find her more comfortable in our own kitchen, where we often saw
+her. The place itself is weird and terrible--low ceiled, with the stone
+hearth built far out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of
+Venetian cookery dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day
+cheerfulness of cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the
+bristling embers, and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it.
+When Giovanna’s mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to
+do us reverence from the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her
+good wishes for our long life, continued health, and endless happiness,
+it has the effect upon our spirits of the darkest malediction.
+
+Not more pleasing, though altogether lighter and cheerfuler, was
+Giovanna’s sister-in-law, whom we knew only as the Cognata. Making her
+appearance first upon the occasion of Giovanna’s sickness, she slowly
+but surely established herself as an habitual presence, and threatened
+at one time, as we fancied, to become our paid servant. But a happy
+calamity which one night carried off a carpet and the window curtains
+of an unoccupied room, cast an evil suspicion upon the Cognata, and she
+never appeared after the discovery of the theft. We suspected her of
+having invented some dishes of which we were very fond, and we hated
+her for oppressing us with a sense of many surreptitious favors.
+Objectively, she was a slim, hoopless little woman, with a tendency to
+be always at the street-door when we opened it. She had a narrow, narrow
+face, with eyes of terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a demeanor
+of slavish patronage. Our kitchen, after her addition to the household,
+became the banqueting-hall of Giovanna’s family, who dined there every
+day upon dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the house the general
+savor of a low cook-shop.
+
+As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural tendency of excellent
+people to place others in subjection. Our servitude at first was
+not hard, and consisted chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to
+extraordinary efforts when G. had attempted to please us with some
+novelty in cooking. She held us to a strict account in this respect; but
+indeed our applause was for the most part willing enough. Her culinary
+execution, first revealing itself in a noble rendering of our ideas of
+roast potatoes,--a delicacy foreign to the Venetian kitchen,--culminated
+at last in the same style of _polpetti_ [Footnote: I confess a
+tenderness for this dish, which is a delicater kind of hash skillfully
+flavored and baked in rolls of a mellow complexion and fascinating
+appearance.] which furnished forth the table of our neighbor, the
+Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph with us.
+
+But G.’s spirit was not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in
+her the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a
+great babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things,
+when there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions
+of bad weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The
+crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as
+springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian
+abuse is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of
+opprobrium with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ends with the
+attribution of doggishness.) The conscription was held in the campo near
+us, and G. declared the place to have become unendurable--“_proprio un
+campo di sospiri!_” (Really a field of sighs.) “_Staga comodo!_” she
+said to a guest of ours who would have moved his chair to let her pass
+between him and the wall. “Don’t move; the way to Paradise is not wider
+than this.” We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did not sleep in
+the house, should come to us so late in the morning, but we could not
+deal harshly with her on that account, met, as we always were, with
+plentiful and admirable excuses. Who were we, indeed, to place our
+wishes in the balance against the welfare of the sick neighbor with whom
+Giovanna passed so many nights of vigil? Should we reproach her with
+tardiness when she had not closed the eye all night for a headache
+properly of the devil? If she came late in the morning, she stayed late
+at night; and it sometimes happened that when the Paron and Parona,
+supposing her gone, made a stealthy expedition to the kitchen for cold
+chicken, they found her there at midnight in the fell company of the
+Cognata, bibbing the wine of the country and holding a mild Italian
+revel with that vinegar and the stony bread of Venice.
+
+I have said G. was the flower of serving-women; and so at first
+she seemed, and it was long till we doubted her perfection. We knew
+ourselves to be very young, and weak, and unworthy. The Parona had the
+rare gift of learning to speak less and less Italian every day, and fell
+inevitably into subjection. The Paron in a domestic point of view was
+naturally nothing. It had been strange indeed if Giovanna, beholding the
+great contrast we presented to herself in many respects, had forborne to
+abuse her advantage over us. But we trusted her implicitly, and I hardly
+know how or when it was that we began to waver in our confidence. It is
+certain that with the lapse of time we came gradually to have breakfast
+at twelve o’clock, instead of nine, as we had originally appointed it,
+and that G. grew to consume the greater part of the day in making our
+small purchases, and to give us our belated dinners at seven o’clock.
+We protested, and temporary reforms ensued, only to be succeeded by more
+hopeless lapses; but it was not till all entreaties and threats failed
+that we began to think seriously it would be well to have done with
+Giovanna, as an unprofitable servant. I give the result, not all the
+nice causes from which it came. But the question was, How to get rid of
+a poor woman and a civil, and the mother of a family dependent in great
+part upon her labor? We solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss
+G., and we shrink a hundred times from inflicting the blow. At last,
+somewhat in the spirit of Charles Lamb’s Chinaman who invented roast
+pig, and discovered that the sole method of roasting it was to burn
+down a house in order to consume the adjacent pig-sty, and thus cook
+the roaster in the flames,--we hit upon an artifice by which we could
+dispense with Giovanna, and keep an easy conscience. We had long ceased
+to dine at home, in despair; and now we resolved to take another
+house, in which there were other servants. But even then, it was a sore
+struggle to part with the flower of serving-women, who was set over the
+vacated house to put it in order after our flitting, and with whom
+the imprudent Paron settled the last account in the familiar little
+dining-room, surrounded by the depressing influences of the empty
+chambers. The place was peopled after all, though we had left it, and
+I think the tenants who come after us will be haunted by our spectres,
+crowding them on the pleasant little balcony, and sitting down with
+them at table. G. stood there, the genius of the place, and wept six
+regretful tears, each one of which drew a florin from the purse of the
+Paron. She had hoped to remain with us always while we lived in Venice;
+but now that she could no longer look to us for support, the Lord must
+take care of her. The gush of grief was transient: it relieved her,
+and she came out sunnily a moment after. The Paron went his way more
+sorrowfully, taking leave at last with the fine burst of Christian
+philosophy: “We are none of us masters of ourselves in this world, and
+cannot do what we wish. _Ma! Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!_” Yet he was
+undeniably lightened in heart. He had cut adrift from old moorings, and
+had crossed the Grand Canal. G. did not follow him, nor any of the
+long line of pensioners who used to come on certain feast-days to levy
+tribute of eggs at the old house. (The postman was among these, on
+Christmas and New Year’s, and as he received eggs at every house, it was
+a problem with us, unsolved to this hour, how he carried them all,
+and what he did with them.) Not the least among the Paron’s causes for
+self-gratulation was the non-appearance at his new abode of two
+local newspapers, for which in an evil hour he subscribed, which were
+delivered with unsparing regularity, and which, being never read, formed
+the keenest reproach of his imprudent outlay and his idle neglect of
+their contents.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.
+
+
+The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic
+vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some
+morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that
+there never was any such city. There our race seems to be in earnest in
+nothing. People sometimes work, but as if without any aim; they suffer,
+and you fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark,
+standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its
+innumerable pillars, is not in the least gray with time--no grayer than
+a Greek lyric.
+
+    “All has suffered a sea-change
+    Into something rich and strange,”
+
+in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its
+baptism in the sea.
+
+And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes for a little while
+forget how marvelous she is, at any moment you may be startled into
+vivid remembrance. The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and
+step by step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads
+high up to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine
+green and purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching
+their heads to look into the lofty windows,--blind long ago to their
+leafy tenderness,--while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well,
+with the beauty of the sculptor’s soul wrought forever into the stone.
+Or Venice lures you in a gondola into one of her remote canals, where
+you glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under
+our work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates
+of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise, where the innumerable
+balconies are full of the Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames,
+gossiping and making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if
+the city’s mood is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very
+places where you think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of
+your forgetfulness, dares a wilder beauty, and enthralls with a yet
+more unearthly and incredible enchantment. It is in the Piazza, and the
+Austrian band is playing, and the promenaders pace solemnly up and down
+to the music, and the gentle Italian loafers at Florian’s brood vacantly
+over their little cups of coffee, and nothing can be more stupid; when
+suddenly every thing is changed, and a memorable tournament flashes up
+in many-glittering action upon the scene, and there upon the gallery of
+the church, before the horses of bronze, sit the Senators, bright-robed,
+and in the midst the bonneted Doge with his guest Petrarch at his side.
+Or the old Carnival, which had six months of every year to riot in,
+comes back and throngs the place with motley company,--dominoes,
+harlequins, pantaloni, illustrissimi and illustrissime, and perhaps even
+the Doge himself, who has the right of incognito when he wears a little
+mask of wax at his button-hole. Or may be the grander day revisits
+Venice when Doria has sent word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia
+that he will listen to the Senate when he has bridled the horses of
+Saint Mark,--and the whole Republic of rich and poor crowds the square,
+demanding the release of Pisani, who comes forth from his prison to
+create victory from the dust of the crumbling commonwealth.
+
+But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for
+your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay,
+what potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she
+will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal? Launched upon this
+great S have I not seen hardened travelers grow sentimental, and has not
+this prodigious sybillant, in my hearing, inspired white-haired Puritan
+ministers of the gospel to attempt to quote out of the guide-book “that
+line from Byron”? Upon my word, I have sat beside wandering editors in
+their gondolas, and witnessed the expulsion of the newspaper from
+their nature, while, lulled by the fascination of the place, they were
+powerless to take their own journals from their pockets, and instead of
+politics talked some bewildered nonsense about coming back with their
+families next summer. For myself, I must count as half-lost the year
+spent in Venice before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There
+alone can existence have the perfect local flavor. But by what witchery
+touched one’s being suffers the common sea-change, till life at last
+seems to ebb and flow with the tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it
+would be idle to attempt to tell. I can only take you to our dear little
+balcony at Casa Falier, and comment not very coherently on the scene
+upon the water under us.
+
+And I am sure (since it is either in the spring or the fall) you will
+not be surprised to see, the first thing, a boat-load of those English,
+who go by from the station to their hotels, every day, in well-freighted
+gondolas. These parties of traveling Englishry are all singularly alike,
+from the “Pa’ty” traveling alone with his opera-glass and satchel, to
+the party which fills a gondola with well-cushioned English middle age,
+ruddy English youth, and substantial English baggage. We have learnt
+to know them all very well: the father and the mother sit upon the back
+seat, and their comely girls at the sides and front. These girls all
+have the honest cabbage-roses of English health upon their cheeks; they
+all wear little rowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls of hair
+tumble upon their broad English backs. They are coming from Switzerland
+and Germany, and they are going south to Rome and to Naples, and they
+always pause at Venice a few days. To-morrow we shall see them in the
+Piazza, and at Florian’s, and St. Mark’s, and the Ducal Palace; and the
+young ladies will cross the Bridge of Sighs, and will sentimentally feed
+the vagabond pigeons of St. Mark which loaf about the Piazza and defile
+the sculptures. But now our travelers are themselves very hungry, and
+are more anxious than Americans can understand about the table-d’hôte of
+their hotel. It is perfectly certain that if they fall into talk there
+with any of our nation, the respectable English father will remark that
+this war in America is a very sad war, and will ask to know when it will
+all end. The truth is, Americans do not like these people, and I believe
+there is no love lost on the other side. But, in many things, they
+are travelers to be honored, if not liked: they voyage through all
+countries, and without awaking fervent affection in any land through
+which they pass; but their sterling honesty and truth have made the
+English tongue a draft upon the unlimited confidence of the continental
+peoples, and French, Germans, and Italians trust and respect private
+English faith as cordially as they hate public English perfidy.
+
+They come to Venice chiefly in the autumn, and October is the month of
+the Sunsets and the English. The former are best seen from the Public
+Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind
+the domes and towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the
+Redentore. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon
+is a fine thing; for then the sun goes down into the water with a broad
+trail of bloody red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had
+dragged himself landward across the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and
+died as he reached the land. But we (upon whom the idleness of Venice
+grows daily, and from whom the Gardens, therefore, grow farther and
+farther) are commonly content to take our bit of sunset as we get
+it from our balcony, through the avenue opened by the narrow canal
+opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a little rainy,
+when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate beauty--all
+tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little palace on the
+corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the Canalazzo, and
+from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an airy balcony.
+When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that pathetic and
+angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves rich in the
+neighborhood of that part of the “Palace of Art,” whereon
+
+    “The light aerial gallery, golden railed,
+    Burnt like a fringe of fire.”
+
+And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in
+not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists
+are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is
+splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga.
+
+It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon
+the Grand Canal during the day. But in the hours just before the summer
+twilight the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then you may see
+whatever is left of Venetian gayety and looking down upon the groups
+in the open gondolas may witness something of the home-life of the
+Italians, who live out-of-doors.
+
+The groups do not vary a great deal one from another: inevitably the
+pale-faced papa, the fat mamma, the over-dressed handsome young girls.
+We learned to look for certain gondolas, and grew to feel a fond
+interest in a very mild young man who took the air in company and
+contrast with a ferocious bull-dog--boule-dogue he called him, I
+suppose. He was always smoking languidly, that mild young man, and I
+fancied I could read in his countenance a gentle, gentle antagonism
+to life--the proportionate Byronic misanthropy, which might arise from
+sugar and water taken instead of gin. But we really knew nothing about
+him, and our conjecture was conjecture. Officers went by in their
+brilliant uniforms, and gave the scene an alien splendor. Among these we
+enjoyed best the spectacle of an old major, or perhaps general, in
+whom the arrogance of youth had stiffened into a chill hauteur, and who
+frowned above his gray overwhelming moustache upon the passers, like
+a citadel grim with battle and age. We used to fancy, with a certain
+luxurious sense of our own safety, that one broadside from those
+fortressed eyes could blow from the water the slight pleasure-boats in
+which the young Venetian idlers were innocently disporting. But again
+this was merely conjecture. The general’s glance may have had no such
+power. Indeed, the furniture of our apartment sustained no damage from
+it, even when concentrated through an opera-glass, by which means the
+brave officer at times perused our humble lodging from the balcony of
+his own over against us. He may have been no more dangerous in his way
+than two aged sisters (whom we saw every evening) were in theirs. They
+represented Beauty in its most implacable and persevering form, and
+perhaps they had one day been belles and could not forget it. They were
+very old indeed, but their dresses were new and their paint fresh, and
+as they glided by in the good-natured twilight, one had no heart to
+smile at them. We gave our smiles, and now and then our soldi, to the
+swarthy beggar, who, being short of legs, rowed up and down the canal
+in a boat, and overhauled Charity in the gondolas. He was a singular
+compromise, in his vocation and his equipment, between the mendicant
+and corsair: I fear he would not have hesitated to assume the
+pirate altogether in lonelier waters; and had I been a heavily laden
+oyster-boat returning by night through some remote and dark canal, I
+would have steered clear of that truculent-looking craft, of which the
+crew must have fought with a desperation proportioned to the lack of
+legs and the difficulty of running away, in case of defeat.
+
+About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market,
+bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the main-land; and far into
+the night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the
+boats was company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out
+again, we found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily
+happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved
+Venice, kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet
+seemed to rest.
+
+At night sometimes we saw from our balcony one of those _freschi_, which
+once formed the chief splendor of festive occasions in Venice, and are
+peculiar to the city, where alone their fine effects are possible.
+The fresco is a procession of boats with music and lights. Two immense
+barges, illumined with hundreds of paper lanterns, carry the military
+bands; the boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, and
+then the gondolas of such citizens as choose to take part in the
+display,--though since 1859 no Italian, unless a government official,
+has been seen in the procession. No gondola has less than two lanterns,
+and many have eight or ten, shedding mellow lights of blue, and red,
+and purple, over uniforms and silken robes. The soldiers of the bands
+breathe from their instruments music the most perfect and exquisite
+of its kind in the world; and as the procession takes the width of the
+Grand Canal in its magnificent course, soft crimson flushes play upon
+the old, weather-darkened palaces, and die tenderly away, giving to
+light and then to shadow the opulent sculptures of pillar, and arch, and
+spandrel, and weirdly illuminating the grim and bearded visages of stone
+that peer down from doorway and window. It is a sight more gracious and
+fairy than ever poet dreamed; and I feel that the lights and the music
+have only got into my description by name, and that you would not know
+them when you saw and heard them, from any thing I say. In other days,
+people tell you, the fresco was much more impressive than now. At
+intervals, rockets used to be sent up, and the Bengal lights, burned
+during the progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers’ spectral
+shadows, giant-huge, on the palace-walls. But, for my part, I do not
+care to have the fresco other than I know it: indeed, for my own selfish
+pleasure, I should be sorry to have Venice in any way less fallen and
+forlorn than she is.
+
+Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever seen on the Grand Canal
+are the great boats of the river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from
+Chioggia, come up to the city with the swelling sea. They are built with
+a pointed stern and bow rising with the sweep of a short curve from the
+water high above the cabin roof, which is always covered with a straw
+matting. Black is not the color of the gondolas alone, but of all boats
+in Venetia; and these of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any
+one of them might be sent to take King Arthur and bear him to Avilon,
+whither I think most of them are bound. A path runs along either
+gunwale, on which the men pace as they pole the boat up the canal,--her
+great sail folded and lying with the prostrate mast upon the deck. The
+rudder is a prodigious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly kind
+enough to wear a red cap with a blue tassel, and to smoke. The other
+persons on board are no less obliging and picturesque, from the
+dark-eyed young mother who sits with her child in her arms at the
+cabin-door, to the bronze boy who figures in play at her feet with a
+small yellow dog of the race already noticed in charge of the fuel-boats
+from Dalmatia. The father of the family, whom we take to be the
+commander of the vessel, occupies himself gracefully in sitting down and
+gazing at the babe and its mother. It is an old habit of mine, formed in
+childhood from looking at rafts upon the Ohio, to attribute, with a kind
+of heart-ache, supreme earthly happiness to the navigators of lazy
+river craft; and as we glance down upon these people from our balcony,
+I choose to think them immensely contented, and try, in a feeble, tacit
+way, to make friends with so much bliss. But I am always repelled
+in these advances by the small yellow dog, who is rendered extremely
+irascible by my contemplation of the boat under his care, and who,
+ruffling his hair as a hen ruffles her feathers, never fails to bark
+furious resentment of my longing.
+
+Far different from the picture presented by this boat’s progress--the
+peacefulness of which even the bad temper of the small yellow dog could
+not mar--was another scene which we witnessed upon the Grand Canal, when
+one morning we were roused from our breakfast by a wild and lamentable
+outcry. Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal opposite
+at the same time, had struck together with a violence that shook the
+boatmen to their inmost souls. One barge was laden with lime, and
+belonged to a plasterer of the city; the other was full of fuel, and
+commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival captains advanced toward the
+bows of their boats, with murderous looks,
+
+    “Con la test’alta e con rabbiosa fame,
+    Sì che parea che l’aer ne temesse,”
+
+and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with hands of deathful
+challenge, while I looked on with that noble interest which the
+enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other’s
+heads.
+
+But the storm burst in words.
+
+“Figure of a pig!” shrieked the Venetian, “you have ruined my boat
+forever!”
+
+“Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog!” returned the countryman, “and it
+was my right to enter the canal first.”
+
+They then, after this exchange of insult, abandoned the main subject of
+dispute, and took up the quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally
+questioning the reputation of all their female relatives to the third
+and fourth cousins, they defied each other as the offspring of assassins
+and prostitutes. As the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats
+asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and forth and hurled
+opprobrium with a foamy volubility that quite left my powers of
+comprehension behind. At last the townsman, executing a _pas seul_
+of uncommon violence, stooped and picked up a bit of lime, while the
+countryman, taking shelter at the stern of his boat, there attended
+the shot. To my infinite disappointment it was not fired. The
+Venetian seemed to have touched the climax of his passion in the mere
+demonstration of hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the
+countryman the right of way. The courage of the latter rose as the
+danger passed, and as far as he could be heard, he continued to exult
+in the wildest excesses of insult: “Ah-heigh! brutal executioner!
+Ah, hideous headsman!” _Da capo._ I now know that these people never
+intended to do more than quarrel, and no doubt they parted as well
+pleased as if they had actually carried broken heads from the encounter.
+But at the time I felt affronted and trifled with by the result, for my
+disappointments arising out of the dramatic manner of the Italians had
+not yet been frequent enough to teach me to expect nothing from it.
+
+There was some compensation for me--coming, like all compensation, a
+long while after the loss--in the spectacle of a funeral procession
+on the Grand Canal, which had a singular and imposing solemnity only
+possible to the place. It was the funeral of an Austrian general, whose
+coffin, mounted on a sable catafalco, was borne upon the middle boat of
+three that moved abreast. The barges on either side bristled with the
+bayonets of soldiery, but the dead man was alone in his boat, except for
+one strange figure that stood at the head of the coffin, and rested its
+glittering hand upon the black fall of the drapery. This was a man clad
+cap-a-pie in a perfect suit of gleaming mail, with his visor down, and
+his shoulders swept by the heavy raven plumes of his helm. As at times
+he moved from side to side, and glanced upward at the old palaces, sad
+in the yellow morning light, he put out of sight, for me, every thing
+else upon the Canal, and seemed the ghost of some crusader come back to
+Venice, in wonder if this city, lying dead under the hoofs of the Croat,
+were indeed that same haughty Lady of the Sea who had once sent her
+blind old Doge to beat down the pride of an empire and disdain its
+crown.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE.
+
+
+One summer morning the mosquitoes played for me with sleep, and won. It
+was half-past four, and as it had often been my humor to see Venice at
+that hour, I got up and sallied forth for a stroll through the city.
+
+This morning walk did not lay the foundation of a habit of early rising
+in me, but I nevertheless advise people always to get up at half-past
+four, if they wish to receive the most vivid impressions, and to take
+the most absorbing interest in every thing in the world. It was with a
+feeling absolutely novel that I looked about me that morning, and
+there was a breezy freshness and clearness in my perceptions altogether
+delightful, and I fraternized so cordially with Nature that I do not
+think, if I had sat down immediately after to write out the experience,
+I should have at all patronized her, as I am afraid scribbling people
+have sometimes the custom to do. I know that my feeling of brotherhood
+in the case of two sparrows, which obliged me by hopping down from a
+garden wall at the end of Calle Falier and promenading on the pavement,
+was quite humble and sincere; and that I resented the ill-nature of a
+cat,
+
+    “Whom love kept wakeful and the muse,”
+
+and who at that hour was spitefully reviling the morn from a window
+grating. As I went by the gate of the Canonico’s little garden,
+the flowers saluted me with a breath of perfume,--I think the white
+honey-suckle was first to offer me this politeness,--and the dumpy
+little statues looked far more engaging than usual.
+
+After passing the bridge, the first thing to do was to drink a cup of
+coffee at the Caffè Ponte di Ferro, where the eyebrows of the waiter
+expressed a mild surprise at my early presence. There was no one else
+in the place but an old gentleman talking thoughtfully to himself on
+the subject of two florins, while he poured his coffee into a glass of
+water, before drinking it. As I lingered a moment over my cup, I was
+reinforced by the appearance of a company of soldiers, marching to
+parade in the Campo di Marte. Their officers went at their head,
+laughing and chatting, and one of the lieutenants smoking a long pipe,
+gave me a feeling of satisfaction only comparable to that which I
+experienced shortly afterward in beholding a stoutly built small dog on
+the Ponte di San Moisè. The creature was only a few inches high, and it
+must have been through some mist of dreams yet hanging about me that
+he impressed me as having something elephantine in his manner. When I
+stooped down and patted him on the head, I felt colossal.
+
+On my way to the Piazza, I stopped in the church of Saint Mary of the
+Lily, where, in company with one other sinner, I found a relish in
+the early sacristan’s deliberate manner of lighting the candles on the
+altar. Saint Mary of the Lily has a façade in the taste of the declining
+Renaissance. The interior is in perfect keeping, and all is hideous,
+abominable, and abandoned. My fellow-sinner was kneeling, and repeating
+his prayers. He now and then tapped himself absent-mindedly on the
+breast and forehead, and gave a good deal of his attention to me as I
+stood at the door, hat in hand. The hour and the place invested him with
+so much interest, that I parted from him with emotion. My feelings were
+next involved by an abrupt separation from a young English East-Indian,
+whom I overheard asking the keeper of a caffè his way to the Campo di
+Marte. He was a claret-colored young fellow, tall, and wearing folds
+of white muslin around his hat. In another world I trust to know how he
+liked the parade that morning.
+
+I discovered that Piazza San Marco is every morning swept by troops
+of ragged facchini, who gossip noisily and quarrelsomely together over
+their work. Boot-blacks, also, were in attendance, and several followed
+my progress through the square, in the vague hope that I would relent
+and have my boots blacked. One peerless waiter stood alone amid the
+desert elegance of Caffè Florian, which is never shut, day or night,
+from year to year. At the Caffè of the Greeks, two individuals of the
+Greek nation were drinking coffee.
+
+I went upon the Molo, passing between the pillars of the Lion and the
+Saint, and walked freely back and forth, taking in the glory of that
+prospect of water and of vague islands breaking the silver of the
+lagoons, like those scenes cunningly wrought in apparent relief on old
+Venetian mirrors. I walked there freely, for though there were already
+many gondoliers at the station, not one took me for a foreigner or
+offered me a boat. At that hour, I was in myself so improbable, that if
+they saw me at all, I must have appeared to them as a dream. My sense
+of security was sweet, but it was false, for on going into the church
+of St. Mark, the keener eye of the sacristan detected me. He instantly
+offered to show me the Zeno Chapel; but I declined, preferring the
+church, where I found the space before the high altar filled with
+market-people come to hear the early mass. As I passed out of the
+church, I witnessed the partial awaking of a Venetian gentleman who had
+spent the night in a sitting posture, between the columns of the main
+entrance. He looked puffy, scornful, and uncomfortable, and at
+the moment of falling back to slumber, tried to smoke an unlighted
+cigarette, which he held between his lips. I found none of the shops
+open as I passed through the Merceria, and but for myself, and here and
+there a laborer going to work, the busy thoroughfare seemed deserted. In
+the mere wantonness of power, and the security of solitude, I indulged
+myself in snapping several door-latches, which gave me a pleasure as
+keen as that enjoyed in boyhood from passing a stick along the pickets
+of a fence. I was in nowise abashed to be discovered in this amusement
+by an old peasant-woman, bearing at either end of a yoke the usual
+basket with bottles of milk packed in straw.
+
+Entering Campo San Bartolomeo, I found trade already astir in that noisy
+place; the voice of cheap bargains, which by noonday swells into an
+intolerable uproar, was beginning to be heard. Having lived in Campo San
+Bartolomeo, I recognized several familiar faces there, and particularly
+noted among them that of a certain fruit-vender, who frequently swindled
+me in my small dealings with him. He now sat before his stand, and for a
+man of a fat and greasy presence, looked very fresh and brisk, and as if
+he had passed a pleasant night.
+
+On the other side of the Rialto Bridge, the market was preparing for
+the purchasers. Butchers were arranging their shops; fruit-stands, and
+stands for the sale of crockery, and--as I must say for want of a better
+word, if there is any--notions, were in a state of tasteful readiness.
+The person on the steps of the bridge who had exposed his stock of cheap
+clothing and coarse felt hats on the parapet, had so far completed his
+preparations as to have leisure to be talking himself hot and hoarse
+with the neighboring barber. He was in a perfectly good humor, and was
+merely giving a dramatic flavor to some question of six soldi.
+
+At the landings of the market-place squadrons of boats loaded with
+vegetables were arriving and unloading. Peasants were building
+cabbages into pyramids; collective squashes and cucumbers were taking a
+picturesque shape; wreaths of garlic and garlands of onions graced the
+scene. All the people were clamoring at the tops of their voices; and
+in the midst of the tumult and confusion, resting on heaps of
+cabbage-leaves and garbage, men lay on their bellies sweetly sleeping.
+Numbers of eating-houses were sending forth a savory smell, and
+everywhere were breakfasters with bowls of sguassetto. In one of the
+shops, somewhat prouder than the rest, a heated brunette was turning
+sections of eel on a gridiron, and hurriedly coqueting with the
+purchasers. Singularly calm amid all this bustle was the countenance
+of the statue called the Gobbo, as I looked at it in the centre of the
+market-place. The Gobbo (who is not a hunchback, either) was patiently
+supporting his burden, and looking with a quiet, thoughtful frown upon
+the ground, as if pondering some dream of change that had come to him
+since the statutes of the haughty Republic were read aloud to the people
+from the stone tribune on his shoulders.
+
+Indeed, it was a morning for thoughtful meditation; and as I sat at the
+feet of the four granite kings shortly after, waiting for the gate of
+the ducal palace to be opened, that I might see the girls drawing the
+water, I studied the group of the Judgment of Solomon, on the corner of
+the palace, and arrived at an entirely new interpretation of that Bible
+story, which I have now wholly forgotten.
+
+The gate remained closed too long for my patience, and I turned away
+from a scene momently losing its interest. The brilliant little shops
+opened like hollyhocks as I went home; the swelling tide of life filled
+the streets, and brought Venice back to my day-time remembrance, robbing
+her of that keen, delightful charm with which she greeted my early
+morning sense.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE MOUSE.
+
+
+Wishing to tell the story of our Mouse, because I think it illustrates
+some amusing traits of character in a certain class of Italians, I
+explain at once that he was not a mouse, but a man so called from his
+wretched, trembling little manner, his fugitive expression, and peaked
+visage.
+
+He first appeared to us on the driver’s seat of that carriage in which
+we posted so splendidly one spring-time from Padua to Ponte Lagoscuro.
+But though he mounted to his place just outside the city gate, we did
+not regard him much, nor, indeed, observe what a mouse he was, until
+the driver stopped to water his horses near Battaglia, and the Mouse got
+down to stretch his forlorn little legs. Then I got down too, and bade
+him good-day, and told him it was a very hot day--for he was a mouse
+apparently so plunged in wretchedness that I doubted if he knew what
+kind of day it was.
+
+When I had spoken, he began to praise (in the wary manner of the
+Venetians when they find themselves in the company of a foreigner who
+does not look like an Englishman) the Castle of the Obiza near by, which
+is now the country-seat of the ex-Duke of Modena; and he presently said
+something to imply that he thought me a German.
+
+“But I am not a German,” said I.
+
+“As many excuses,” said the Mouse sadly, but with evident relief; and
+then began to talk more freely, and of the evil times.
+
+“Are you going all the way with us to Florence?” I asked.
+
+“No, signor, to Bologna; from there to Ancona.”
+
+“Have you ever been in Venice? We are just coming from there.”
+
+“Oh, yes.”
+
+“It is a beautiful place. Do you like it?”
+
+“Sufficiently. But one does not enjoy himself very well there.”
+
+“But I thought Venice interesting.”
+
+“Sufficiently, signor. _Ma!_” said the Mouse, shrugging his shoulders,
+and putting on the air of being luxuriously fastidious in his choice of
+cities, “the water is so bad in Venice.”
+
+The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter overcoat, and has no garment to
+form a compromise with his shirt-sleeves, if he should wish to render
+the weather more endurable by throwing off the surtout. In spite of his
+momentary assumption of consequence, I suspect that his coat is in the
+Monte di Pietà. It comes out directly that he is a ship-carpenter who
+has worked in the Arsenal of Venice, and at the ship-yards in Trieste.
+
+But there is no work any more. He went to Trieste lately to get a job on
+the three frigates which the Sultan had ordered to be built there. _Ma!_
+After all, the frigates are to be built in Marseilles instead. There is
+nothing. And every thing is so dear. In Venetia you spend much and gain
+little. Perhaps there is work at Ancona.
+
+By this time the horses are watered; the Mouse regains his seat, and we
+almost forget him, till he jumps from his place, just before we reach
+the hotel in Rovigo, and disappears--down the first hole in the side of
+a house, perhaps. He might have done much worse, and spent the night at
+the hotel, as we did.
+
+The next morning at four o’clock, when we start, he is on the box again,
+nibbling bread and cheese, and glancing furtively back at us to say good
+morning. He has little twinkling black eyes, just like a mouse, and a
+sharp moustache, and sharp tuft on his chin--as like Victor Emanuel’s as
+a mouse’s tuft can be.
+
+The cold morning air seems to shrivel him, and he crouches into a little
+gelid ball on the seat beside the driver, while we wind along the Po on
+the smooth gray road; while the twilight lifts slowly from the distances
+of field and vineyard; while the black boats of the Po, with their gaunt
+white sails, show spectrally through the mists; while the trees and the
+bushes break into innumerable voice, and the birds are glad of another
+day in Italy; while the peasant drives his mellow-eyed, dun oxen
+afield; while his wife comes in her scarlet bodice to the door, and
+the children’s faces peer out from behind her skirts; while the air
+freshens, the east flushes, and the great miracle is wrought anew.
+
+Once again, before we reach the ferry of the Po, the Mouse leaps down
+and disappears as mysteriously as at Rovigo. We see him no more till we
+meet in the station on the other side of the river, where we hear him
+bargaining long and earnestly with the ticket-seller for a third-class
+passage to Bologna. He fails to get it, I think, at less than the usual
+rate, for he retires from the contest more shrunken and forlorn than
+ever, and walks up and down the station, startled at a word, shocked at
+any sudden noise.
+
+For curiosity, I ask how much he paid for crossing the river, mentioning
+the fabulous sum it had cost us.
+
+It appears that he paid sixteen soldi only. “What could they do when a
+man was in misery? I had nothing else.”
+
+Even while thus betraying his poverty, the Mouse did not beg, and we
+began to respect his poverty. In a little while we pitied it, witnessing
+the manner in which he sat down on the edge of a chair, with a smile of
+meek desperation.
+
+It is a more serious case when an artisan is out of work in the Old
+World than one can understand in the New. There the struggle for bread
+is so fierce and the competition so great; and, then, a man bred to one
+trade cannot turn his hand to another as in America. Even the rudest and
+least skilled labor has more to do it than are wanted. The Italians
+are very good to the poor, but the tradesman out of work must become a
+beggar before charity can help him.
+
+We, who are poor enough to be wise, consult foolishly together
+concerning the Mouse. It blesses him that gives, and him that
+takes--this business of charity. And then, there is something
+irresistibly relishing and splendid in the consciousness of being the
+instrument of a special providence! Have I all my life admired those
+beneficent characters in novels and comedies who rescue innocence,
+succor distress, and go about pressing gold into the palm of poverty,
+and telling it to take it and be happy; and now shall I reject an
+occasion, made to my hand, for emulating them in real life?
+
+“I think I will give the Mouse five francs,” I say.
+
+“Yes, certainly.”
+
+“But I will be prudent,” I continue. “I will not give him this money.
+I will tell him it is a loan which he may pay me back again whenever he
+can. In this way I shall relieve him now, and furnish him an incentive
+to economy.”
+
+I call to the Mouse, and he runs tremulously toward me.
+
+“Have you friends in Ancona?”
+
+“No, signor.”
+
+“How much money have you left?”
+
+He shows me three soldi. “Enough for a coffee.”
+
+“And then?”
+
+“God knows.”
+
+So I give him the five francs, and explain my little scheme of making it
+a loan, and not a gift; and then I give him my address.
+
+He does not appear to understand the scheme of the loan; but he takes
+the money, and is quite stunned by his good fortune. He thanks me
+absently, and goes and shows the piece to the guards, with a smile that
+illumines and transfigures his whole person. At Bologna, he has come
+to his senses; he loads me with blessings, he is ready to weep; he
+reverences me, he wishes me a good voyage, endless prosperity, and
+innumerable days; and takes the train for Ancona.
+
+“Ah, ah!” I congratulate myself,--“is it not a fine thing to be the
+instrument of a special providence?”
+
+It is pleasant to think of the Mouse during all that journey, and if we
+are never so tired, it rests us to say, “I wonder where the Mouse is
+by this time?” When we get home, and coldly count up our expenses, we
+rejoice in the five francs lent to the Mouse. “And I know he will pay it
+back if ever he can,” I say. “That was a Mouse of integrity.”
+
+Two weeks later comes a comely young woman, with a young child--a child
+strong on its legs, a child which tries to open every thing in the room,
+which wants to pull the cloth off the table, to throw itself out of
+the open window--a child of which I have never seen the peer for
+restlessness and curiosity. This young woman has been directed to call
+on me as a person likely to pay her way to Ferrara. “But who sent you?
+But, in fine, why should I pay your way to Ferrara? I have never seen
+you before.”
+
+“My husband, whom you benefited on his way to Ancona, sent me. Here is
+his letter and the card you gave him.”
+
+I call out to my fellow-victim,--“My dear, here is news of the Mouse!”
+
+“Don’t _tell_ me he’s sent you that money already!”
+
+“Not at all. He has sent me his wife and child, that I may forward them
+to him at Ferrara, out of my goodness, and the boundless prosperity
+which has followed his good wishes--I, who am a great signor in his
+eyes, and an insatiable giver of five-franc pieces--the instrument of a
+perpetual special providence. The Mouse has found work at Ferrara, and
+his wife comes here from Trieste. As for the rest, I am to send her to
+him, as I said.”
+
+“You are deceived,” I say solemnly to the Mouse’s wife. “I am not a rich
+man. I lent your husband five francs because he had nothing. I am sorry
+but I cannot spare twenty florins to send you to Ferrara. If _one_ will
+help you?”
+
+“Thanks the same,” said the young woman, who was well dressed enough;
+and blessed me, and gathered up her child, and went her way.
+
+But her blessing did not lighten my heart, depressed and troubled by
+so strange an end to my little scheme of a beneficent loan. After all,
+perhaps the Mouse may have been as keenly disappointed as myself. With
+the ineradicable idea of the Italians, that persons who speak English
+are wealthy by nature, and _tutti originali_, it was not such an absurd
+conception of the case to suppose that if I had lent him five francs
+once, I should like to do it continually. Perhaps he may yet pay back
+the loan with usury. But I doubt it. In the mean time, I am far from
+blaming the Mouse. I merely feel that there is a misunderstanding, which
+I can pardon if he can.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+CHURCHES AND PICTURES.
+
+
+One day in the gallery of the Venetian Academy a family party of the
+English, whom we had often seen from our balcony in their gondolas, were
+kind enough to pause before Titian’s John the Baptist. It was attention
+that the picture could scarcely demand in strict justice, for it hangs
+at the end of a suite of smaller rooms through which visitors usually
+return from the great halls, spent with looking at much larger
+paintings. As these people stood gazing at the sublime figure of the
+Baptist,--one of the most impressive, if not the most religious,
+that the master has painted,--and the wild and singular beauty of
+the landscape made itself felt through the infinite depths of their
+respectability, the father of the family and the head of the group
+uttered approval of the painter’s conception: “Quite my idea of the
+party’s character,” he said; and then silently and awfully led his
+domestic train away.
+
+I am so far from deriding the criticism of this honest gentleman that
+I would wish to have equal sincerity and boldness in saying what I
+thought--if I really thought any thing at all--concerning the art which
+I spent so great a share of my time at Venice in looking at. But I fear
+I should fall short of the terseness as well as the candor I applaud,
+and should presently find myself tediously rehearsing criticisms which
+I neither respect for their honesty, nor regard for their justice. It is
+the sad fortune of him who desires to arrive at full perception of the
+true and beautiful in art, to find that critics have no agreement except
+upon a few loose general principles; and that among the artists, to whom
+he turns in his despair, no two think alike concerning the same master,
+while his own little learning has made him distrust his natural likings
+and mislikings. Ruskin is undoubtedly the best guide you can have
+in your study of the Venetian painters; and after reading him, and
+suffering confusion and ignominy from his theories and egotisms, the
+exercises by which you are chastised into admission that he has taught
+you any thing cannot fail to end in a humility very favorable to your
+future as a Christian. But even in this subdued state you must distrust
+the methods by which he pretends to relate the aesthetic truths you
+perceive to certain civil and religious conditions: you scarcely
+understand how Tintoretto, who genteelly disdains (on one page) to paint
+well any person baser than a saint or senator, and with whom “exactly
+in proportion to the dignity of the character is the beauty of the
+painting,”--comes (on the next page) to paint a very “weak, mean, and
+painful” figure of Christ; and knowing a little the loose lives of the
+great Venetian painters, you must reject, with several other humorous
+postulates, the idea that good colorists are better men than bad
+colorists. Without any guide, I think, these painters may be studied and
+understood, up to a certain point, by one who lives in the atmosphere
+of their art at Venice, and who, insensibly breathing in its influence,
+acquires a feeling for it which all the critics in the world could not
+impart where the works themselves are not to be seen. I am sure that no
+one strange to the profession of artist ever received a just notion of
+any picture by reading the most accurate and faithful description of
+it: stated dimensions fail to convey ideas of size; adjectives are not
+adequate to the ideas of movement; and the names of the colors, however
+artfully and vividly introduced and repeated, cannot tell the reader
+of a painter’s coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian’s
+“Assumption” is like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any
+one who has seen it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning
+critic describe intelligibly the difference between the styles of
+Titian, of Tintoretto, and of Paolo Veronese,--that difference which no
+one with the slightest feeling for art can fail to discern after looking
+thrice at their works? It results from all this that I must believe
+special criticisms on art to have their small use only in the presence
+of the works they discuss. This is my sincere belief, and I could not,
+in any honesty, lumber my pages with descriptions or speculations which
+would be idle to most readers, even if I were a far wiser judge of art
+than I affect to be. As it is, doubting if I be gifted in that way at
+all, I think I may better devote myself to discussion of such things in
+Venice as can be understood by comparison with things elsewhere, and so
+rest happy in the thought that I have thrown no additional darkness on
+any of the pictures half obscured now by the religious dimness of the
+Venetian churches.
+
+Doubt, analogous to that expressed, has already made me hesitate to
+spend the reader’s patience upon many well-known wonders of Venice;
+and, looking back over the preceding chapters, I find that some of the
+principal edifices of the city have scarcely got into my book even by
+name. It is possible that the reader, after all, loses nothing by this;
+but I should regret it, if it seemed ingratitude to that expression of
+the beautiful which beguiled many dull hours for me, and kept me company
+in many lonesome ones. For kindnesses of this sort, indeed, I am under
+obligations to edifices in every part of the city; and there is hardly
+a bit of sculptured stone in the Ducal Palace to which I do not owe some
+pleasant thought or harmless fancy. Yet I am shy of endeavoring in
+my gratitude to transmute the substance of the Ducal Palace into some
+substance that shall be sensible to the eyes that look on this print;
+and I forgive myself the reluctance the more readily when I remember
+how, just after reading Mr. Ruskin’s description of St. Mark’s Church,
+I, who had seen it every day for three years, began to have dreadful
+doubts of its existence.
+
+To be sure, this was only for a moment, and I do not think all the
+descriptive talent in the world could make me again doubt St. Mark’s,
+which I remember with no less love than veneration. This church indeed
+has a beauty which touches and wins all hearts, while it appeals
+profoundly to the religious sentiment. It is as if there were a
+sheltering friendliness in its low-hovering domes and arches, which
+lures and caresses while it awes; as if here, where the meekest soul
+feels welcome and protection, the spirit oppressed with the heaviest
+load of sin might creep nearest to forgiveness, hiding the anguish of
+its repentance in the temple’s dim cavernous recesses, faintly starred
+with mosaic, and twilighted by twinkling altar-lamps.
+
+Though the temple is enriched with incalculable value of stone and
+sculpture, I cannot remember at any time to have been struck by its
+mere opulence. Preciousness of material has been sanctified to the
+highest uses, and there is such unity and justness in the solemn
+splendor, that wonder is scarcely appealed to. Even the priceless and
+rarely seen treasures of the church--such as the famous golden
+altarpiece, whose costly blaze of gems and gold was lighted in
+Constantinople six hundred years ago--failed to impress me with their
+pecuniary worth, though I
+
+    “Value the giddy pleasure of the eyes,”
+
+and like to marvel at precious things. The jewels of other churches are
+conspicuous and silly heaps of treasure; but St. Mark’s, where every
+line of space shows delicate labor in rich material, subdues the jewels
+to their place of subordinate adornment. So, too, the magnificence
+of the Romish service seems less vainly ostentatious there. In other
+churches the ceremonies may sometimes impress you with a sense of
+their grandeur, and even spirituality, but they all need the effect of
+twilight upon them. You want a foreground of kneeling figures, and faces
+half visible through heavy bars of shadow; little lamps must tremble
+before the shrines; and in the background must rise the high altar, all
+ablaze with candles from vault to pavement, while a hidden choir pours
+music from behind, and the organ shakes the heart with its heavy tones.
+But with the daylight on its splendors even the grand function of the
+_Te Deum_ fails to awe, and wearies by its length, except in St. Mark’s
+alone, which is given grace to spiritualize what elsewhere would be
+mere theatric pomp. [Footnote: The cardinal-patriarch officiates in the
+Basilica San Marco with some ceremonies which I believe are peculiar to
+the patriarchate of Venice, and which consist of an unusual number of
+robings and disrobings, and putting on and off of shoes. All this
+is performed with great gravity, and has, I suppose, some peculiar
+spiritual significance. The shoes are brought by a priest to the foot
+of the patriarchal throne, when a canon removes the profane, out-of-door
+_chaussure_, and places the sacred shoes on the patriarch’s feet. A like
+ceremony replaces the patriarch’s every-day gaiters, and the pious rite
+ends.] The basilica, however, is not in every thing the edifice best
+adapted to the Romish worship; for the incense, which is a main element
+of the function, is gathered and held there in choking clouds under the
+low wagon-roofs of the cross-naves.--Yet I do not know if I would
+banish incense from the formula of worship even in St. Mark’s. There is
+certainly a poetic if not a religious grace in the swinging censer and
+its curling fumes; and I think the perfume, as it steals mitigated to
+your nostrils, out of the open church door, is the reverendest smell in
+the world.
+
+The music in Venetian churches is not commonly very good: the best is
+to be heard at St. Mark’s, though the director of the choir always
+contrives to make so odious a slapping with his _bâton_ as nearly
+to spoil your enjoyment. The great musical event of the year is the
+performance (immediately after the _Festa del Redentore_) of the Soldini
+Masses. These are offered for the repose of one Guiseppe Soldini of
+Verona, who, dying possessed of about a million francs, bequeathed a
+part (some six thousand francs) annually to the church of St. Mark,
+on conditions named in his will. The terms are, that during three
+successive days, every year, there shall be said for the peace of his
+soul a certain number of masses,--all to be done in the richest and
+costliest manner. In case of delinquency, the bequest passes to the
+Philharmonic Society of Milan; but the priesthood of the basilica so
+strictly regard the wishes of the deceased that they never say less
+than four masses over and above the prescribed number. [Footnote: After
+hearing these masses, curiosity led me to visit the _Casa di Ricovero_,
+in order to look at Soldini’s will, and there I had the pleasure of
+recognizing the constantly recurring fact, that beneficent humanity
+is of all countries and religions. The Casa di Ricovero is an immense
+edifice dedicated to the shelter and support of the decrepit and
+helpless of either sex, who are collected there to the number of five
+hundred. The more modern quarter was erected from a bequest by Soldini;
+and eternal provision is also made by his will for ninety of the
+inmates. The Secretary of the Casa went through all the wards and
+infirmaries with me, and everywhere I saw cleanliness and comfort (and
+such content as is possible to sickness and old age), without surprise;
+for I had before seen the Civil Hospital of Venice, and knew something
+of the perfection of Venetian charities.
+
+At last we came to the wardrobe, where the clothes of the pensioners are
+made and kept. Here we were attended by a little, slender, pallid young
+nun, who exhibited the dresses with a simple pride altogether pathetic.
+She was a woman still, poor thing, though a nun, and she could not help
+loving new clothes. They called her Madre, who would never be it except
+in name and motherly tenderness. When we had seen all, she stood a
+moment before us, and as one of the coarse woolen lappets of her cape
+had hidden it, she drew out a heavy crucifix of gold, and placed it in
+sight, with a heavenly little ostentation, over her heart. Sweet and
+beautiful vanity! An angel could have done it without harm, but she
+blushed repentance, and glided away with downcast eyes. Poor little
+mother!]
+
+As there is so little in St. Mark’s of the paltry or revolting character
+of modern Romanism, one would form too exalted an idea of the dignity of
+Catholic worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the sincerity
+and nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown to the Romish faith of these
+times, are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell
+upon the present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith
+honors the superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition
+in all its proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the
+Renaissance churches,--fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming
+spirit which has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of
+religion; which has made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has
+rendered the population ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its
+friendship to tyranny and its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life
+of the Church that it may sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of
+this superstition are the foolish and hideous dolls which people bow to
+in most of the Venetian temples, and of which the most abominable is in
+the church of the Carmelites. It represents the Madonna with the Child,
+elevated breast-high to the worshipers. She is crowned with tinsel and
+garlanded with paper flowers; she has a blue ribbon about her tightly
+corseted waist; and she wears an immense spreading hoop. On her painted,
+silly face of wood, with its staring eyes shadowed by a wig, is figured
+a pert smile; and people come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs
+by a chain from her girdle, and utter their prayers to her; while the
+column near which she sits is hung over with pictures celebrating the
+miracles she has performed.
+
+These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on most altars of the
+Virgin, and are no less interesting as works of art than as expressions
+of hopeless superstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is
+dressed in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited,
+is the Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and
+hopeless sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her
+interference. You behold a carriage overturned and dragged along the
+ground by frantic horses, and the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman
+in the carriage about to be dashed into millions of pieces, when the
+havoc is instantly arrested by this Madonna who breaks the clouds,
+leaving them with jagged and shattered edges, like broken panes of
+glass, and visibly holds back the fashionable lady and gentleman from
+destruction. It is the fashionable lady and gentleman who have thus
+recorded their obligation; and it is the mother, doubtless, of the
+little boy miraculously preserved from death in his fall from the
+second-floor balcony, who has gratefully caused the miracle to be
+painted and hung at the Madonna’s shrine. Now and then you also find
+offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in acknowledgment of good
+crops which the Madonna has made to grow; and again you find rows of
+silver hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her intercession has
+caused to be purged. The greatest number of these, at any one shrine,
+is to be seen in the church of San Nicolò dei Tolentini, where I should
+think there were three hundred.
+
+Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna della Salute in pestilent
+times, I do not take it to be very great when the health of the city is
+good, if I may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in the church
+of her name: it is true that on the annual holiday commemorative of
+her interposition to save Venice from the plague, there is an immense
+concourse of people there; but at other times I found the masses and
+vespers slenderly attended, and I did not observe a great number of
+votive offerings in the temple,--though the great silver lamp placed
+there by the city, in memory of the Madonna’s goodness during the
+visitation of the cholera in 1849, may be counted, perhaps, as
+representative of much collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb
+church, lording it over the noblest breadth of the Grand Canal; and I do
+not know what it is saves it from being as hateful to the eye as other
+temples of the Renaissance architecture. But it has certainly a fine
+effect, with its twin belltowers and single massive dome, its majestic
+breadth of steps rising from the water’s edge, and the many-statued
+sculpture of its façade. Strangers go there to see the splendor of its
+high altar (where the melodramatic Madonna, as the centre of a marble
+group, responds to the prayer of the operatic Venezia, and drives away
+the haggard, theatrical Pest), and the excellent Titians and the grand
+Tintoretto in the sacristy.
+
+The Salute is one of the great show-churches, like that of San Giovanni
+e Paolo, which the common poverty of imagination has decided to call the
+Venetian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many famous tombs and
+monuments. But there is only one Westminster Abbey; and I am so far a
+believer in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose that vergers
+are nowhere possible but in England. There would be nothing to say,
+after Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San
+Giovanni e Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them; I only wonder that,
+in speaking of the bad art which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he
+failed to mention the successful approach to its depraved feeling, made
+by the single figure sitting on the case of a slender shaft, at the side
+of the first altar on the right of the main entrance. I suppose this
+figure typifies Grief, but it really represents a drunken woman, whose
+drapery has fallen, as if in some vile debauch, to her waist, and
+who broods, with a horrible, heavy stupor and chopfallen vacancy, on
+something which she supports with her left hand upon her knee. It is a
+round of marble, and if you have the daring to peer under the arm of
+the debauchee, and look at it as she does, you find that it contains the
+bass-relief of a skull in bronze. Nothing more ghastly and abominable
+than the whole thing can be conceived, and it seemed to me the fit type
+of the abandoned Venice which produced it; for one even less Ruskinian
+than I might have fancied that in the sculptured countenance could be
+seen the dismay of the pleasure-wasted harlot of the sea when, from time
+to time, death confronted her amid her revels.
+
+People go into the Chapel of the Rosary here to see the painting of
+Titian, representing The Death of Peter Martyr. Behind it stands a
+painting of equal size by John Bellini,--the Madonna, Child, and Saints,
+of course,--and it is curious to study in the two pictures those points
+in which Titian excelled and fell short of his master. The treatment
+of the sky in the landscape is singularly alike in both, but where the
+greater painter has gained in breadth and freedom, he has lost in that
+indefinable charm which belonged chiefly to Bellini, and only to that
+brief age of transition, of which his genius was the fairest flower and
+ripest fruit. I have looked again and again at nearly every painting of
+note in Venice, having a foolish shame to miss a single one, and having
+also a better wish to learn something of the beautiful from them; but
+at last I must say, that, while I wondered at the greatness of some,
+and tried to wonder at the greatness of others, the only paintings which
+gave me genuine and hearty pleasure were those of Bellini, Carpaccio,
+and a few others of that school and time.
+
+Every day we used to pass through the court of the old Augustinian
+convent adjoining the church of San Stefano. It is a long time since
+the monks were driven out of their snug hold; and the convent is now
+the headquarters of the Austrian engineer corps, and the colonnade
+surrounding the court is become a public thoroughfare. On one wall of
+this court are remains--very shadowy remains indeed--of frescos painted
+by Pordenone at the period of his fiercest rivalry with Titian; and it
+is said that Pordenone, while he wrought upon the scenes of scriptural
+story here represented, wore his sword and buckler, in readiness to
+repel an attack which he feared from his competitor. The story is very
+vague, and I hunted it down in divers authorities only to find it grow
+more and more intangible and uncertain. But it gave a singular relish
+to our daily walk through the old cloister, and I added, for my own
+pleasure (and chiefly out of my own fancy, I am afraid, for I can
+nowhere localize the fable on which I built), that the rivalry between
+the painters was partly a love-jealousy, and that the disputed object of
+their passion was that fair Violante, daughter of the elder Palma, who
+is to be seen in so many pictures painted by her father, and by her
+lover, Titian. No doubt there are readers will care less for this
+idleness of mine than for the fact that the hard-headed German monk,
+Martin Luther, once said mass in the adjoining church of San Stefano,
+and lodged in the convent, on his way to Rome. The unhappy Francesco
+Carrara, last Lord of Padua, is buried in this church; but Venetians
+are chiefly interested there now by the homilies of those fervent
+preacher-monks, who deliver powerful sermons during Lent. The monks are
+gifted men, with a most earnest and graceful eloquence, and they attract
+immense audiences, like popular and eccentric ministers among ourselves.
+It is a fashion to hear them, and although the atmosphere of the
+churches in the season of Lent is raw, damp, and most uncomfortable,
+the Venetians then throng the churches where they preach. After Lent
+the sermons and church-going cease, and the sanctuaries are once more
+abandoned to the possession of the priests, droning from the altars to
+the scattered kneelers on the floor,--the foul old women and the young
+girls of the poor, the old-fashioned old gentlemen and devout ladies
+of the better class, and that singular race of poverty-stricken old men
+proper to Italian churches, who, having dabbled themselves with holy
+water, wander forlornly and aimlessly about, and seem to consort with
+the foreigners looking at the objects of interest. Lounging young
+fellows of low degree appear with their caps in their hands, long enough
+to tap themselves upon the breast and nod recognition to the high-altar;
+and lounging young fellows of high degree step in to glance at the faces
+of the pretty girls, and then vanish. The droning ends, presently,
+and the devotees disappear, the last to go being that thin old woman,
+kneeling before a shrine, with a grease-gray shawl falling from her
+head to the ground. The sacristan, in his perennial enthusiasm about
+the great picture of the church, almost treads upon her as he brings
+the strangers to see it, and she gets meekly up and begs of them in
+a whispering whimper. The sacristan gradually expels her with the
+visitors, and at one o’clock locks the door and goes home.
+
+By chance I have got a fine effect in churches at the five o’clock mass
+in the morning, when the worshipers are nearly all peasants who have
+come to market, and who are pretty sure, each one, to have a bundle
+or basket. At this hour the sacristan is heavy with sleep; he dodges
+uncertainly at the tapers as he lights and extinguishes them; and his
+manner to the congregation, as he passes through it to the altar, is
+altogether rasped and nervous. I think it is best to be one’s self a
+little sleepy,--when the barefooted friar at the altar (if it is in the
+church of the Scalzi, say) has a habit of getting several centuries
+back from you, and of saying mass to the patrician ghosts from the
+tombs under your feet and there is nothing at all impossible in the
+Renaissance angels and cherubs in marble, floating and fatly tumbling
+about on the broken arches of the altars.
+
+I have sometimes been puzzled in Venice to know why churches should keep
+cats, church-mice being proverbially so poor, and so little capable of
+sustaining a cat in good condition; yet I have repeatedly found sleek
+and portly cats in the churches, where they seem to be on terms of
+perfect understanding with the priests, and to have no quarrel even with
+the little boys who assist at mass. There is, for instance, a cat in the
+sacristy of the Frari, which I have often seen in familiar association
+with the ecclesiastics there, when they came into his room to robe
+or disrobe, or warm their hands, numb with supplication, at the great
+brazier in the middle of the floor. I do not think this cat has the
+slightest interest in the lovely Madonna of Bellini which hangs in the
+sacristy; but I suspect him of dreadful knowledge concerning the tombs
+in the church. I have no doubt he has passed through the open door
+of Canova’s monument, and that he sees some coherence and meaning in
+Titian’s; he has been all over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro,
+and he knows whether the griffins descend from their perches at the
+midnight hour to bite the naked knees of the ragged black caryatides.
+This profound and awful animal I take to be a blood relation of the
+cat in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, who sleeps like a Christian
+during divine service, and loves a certain glorious bed on the top of a
+bench, where the sun strikes upon him through the great painted window,
+and dapples his tawny coat with lovely purples and crimsons.
+
+The church cats are apparently the friends of the sacristans, with whom
+their amity is maintained probably by entire cession of the spoils of
+visitors. In these, therefore, they seldom take any interest, merely
+opening a lazy eye now and then to wink at the sacristans as they drag
+the deluded strangers from altar to altar, with intense enjoyment of
+the absurdity, and a wicked satisfaction in the incredible stories
+rehearsed. I fancy, being Italian cats, they feel something like a
+national antipathy toward those troops of German tourists, who always
+seek the Sehenswürdigkeiten in companies of ten or twenty,--the men
+wearing their beards, and the women their hoops and hats, to look as
+much like English people as possible; while their valet marshals them
+forward with a stream of guttural information, unbroken by a single
+punctuation point. These wise cats know the real English by their
+“Murrays;” and I think they make a shrewd guess at the nationality of us
+Americans by the speed with which we pass from one thing to another, and
+by our national ignorance of all languages but English. They must also
+hear us vaunt the superiority of our own land in unpleasant comparisons,
+and I do not think they believe us, or like us, for our boastings. I
+am sure they would say to us, if they could, “_Quando finirà mai quella
+guerra? Che sangue! che orrore_!” [Footnote: “When will this war ever be
+ended? what blood! what horror!” I have often heard the question and the
+comment from many Italians who were not cats.] The French tourist they
+distinguish by his evident skepticism concerning his own wisdom in
+quitting Paris for the present purpose; and the traveling Italian, by
+his attention to his badly dressed, handsome wife, with whom he is now
+making his wedding trip.
+
+I have found churches undergoing repairs (as most of them always are in
+Venice) rather interesting. Under these circumstances, the sacristan is
+obliged to take you into all sorts of secret places and odd corners,
+to show you the objects of interest; and you may often get glimpses of
+pictures which, if not removed from their proper places, it would be
+impossible to see. The carpenters and masons work most deliberately, as
+if in a place so set against progress that speedy workmanship would be
+a kind of impiety. Besides the mechanics, there are always idle priests
+standing about, and vagabond boys clambering over the scaffolding.
+In San Giovanni e Paolo I remember we one day saw a small boy appear
+through an opening in the roof, and descend by means of some hundred
+feet of dangling rope. The spectacle, which made us ache with fear,
+delighted his companions so much that their applause was scarcely
+subdued by the sacred character of the place. As soon as he reached the
+ground in safety, a gentle, good-natured looking priest took him by the
+arm and cuffed his ears. It was a scene for a painter.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS.
+
+
+Nothing can be fairer to the eye than these “summer isles of Eden” lying
+all about Venice, far and near. The water forever trembles and changes,
+with every change of light, from one rainbow glory to another, as with
+the restless hues of an opal; and even when the splendid tides recede,
+and go down with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the
+empurpled mud of the shallows, all strewn with green, disheveled
+sea-weed. The lagoons have almost as wide a bound as your vision. On the
+east and west you can see their borders of sea-shore and main-land; but
+looking north and south, there seems no end to the charm of their vast,
+smooth, all-but melancholy expanses. Beyond their southern limit rise
+the blue Euganean Hills, where Petrarch died; on the north loom
+the Alps, white with snow. Dotting the stretches of lagoon in every
+direction lie the islands--now piles of airy architecture that the water
+seems to float under and bear upon its breast, now
+
+    “Sunny spots of greenery,”
+
+with the bell-towers of demolished cloisters shadowily showing above
+their trees;--for in the days of the Republic nearly every one of the
+islands had its monastery and its church. At present the greater
+number have been fortified by the Austrians, whose sentinel paces the
+once-peaceful shores, and challenges all passers with his sharp “_Halt!
+Wer da_!” and warns them not to approach too closely. Other islands have
+been devoted to different utilitarian purposes, and few are able to keep
+their distant promises of loveliness. One of the more faithful is the
+island of San Clemente, on which the old convent church is yet standing,
+empty and forlorn within, but without all draped in glossy ivy. After
+I had learned to row in the gondolier fashion, I voyaged much in the
+lagoon with my boat, and often stopped at this church. It has a curious
+feature in the chapel of the Madonna di Loreto, which is built in the
+middle of the nave, faced with marble, roofed, and isolated from the
+walls of the main edifice on all sides. On the back of this there is
+a bass-relief in bronze, representing the Nativity--a work much in
+the spirit of the bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo; and one of
+the chapels has an exquisite little altar, with gleaming columns of
+porphyry. There has been no service in the church for many years;
+and this altar had a strangely pathetic effect, won from the black
+four-cornered cap of a priest that lay before it, like an offering. I
+wondered who the priest was that wore it, and why he had left it there,
+as if he had fled away in haste. I might have thought it looked like the
+signal of the abdication of a system; the gondolier who was with me took
+it up and reviled it as representative of _birbanti matricolati_, who
+fed upon the poor, and in whose expulsion from that island he rejoiced.
+But he had little reason to do so, since the last use of the place was
+for the imprisonment of refractory ecclesiastics. Some of the tombs
+of the Morosini are in San Clemente--villanous monuments, with bronze
+Deaths popping out of apertures, and holding marble scrolls inscribed
+with undying deeds. Indeed, nearly all the decorations of the poor old
+church are horrible, and there is one statue in it meant for an angel,
+with absolutely the most lascivious face I ever saw in marble.
+
+The islands near Venice are all small, except the Giudecca (which is
+properly a part of the city), the Lido, and Murano. The Giudecca,
+from being anciently the bounds in which certain factious nobles were
+confined, was later laid out in pleasure-gardens, and built up with
+summer-palaces. The gardens still remain to some extent; but they are
+now chiefly turned to practical account in raising vegetables and
+fruits for the Venetian market, and the palaces have been converted into
+warehouses and factories. This island produces a variety of beggar, the
+most truculent and tenacious in all Venice, and it has a convent of lazy
+Capuchin friars, who are likewise beggars. To them belongs the church of
+the Redentore, which only the Madonnas of Bellini in the sacristy make
+worthy to be seen,--though the island is hardly less famed for this
+church than for the difficult etymology of its name.
+
+At the eastern extremity of the Giudecca lies the Island of San Giorgio
+Maggiore, with Palladio’s church of that name. There are some great
+Tintorettos in the church, and I like the beautiful wood-carvings in
+the choir. The island has a sad interest from the political prison into
+which part of the old convent has been perverted; and the next island
+eastward is the scarcely sadder abode of the mad. Then comes the fair
+and happy seat of Armenian learning and piety, San Lazzaro, and then the
+Lido.
+
+The Lido is the sea-shore, and thither in more cheerful days the
+Venetians used to resort in great numbers on certain holidays, called
+the Mondays of the Lido, to enjoy the sea-breeze and the country
+scenery, and to lunch upon the flat tombs of the Hebrews, buried there
+in exile from the consecrated Christian ground. On a summer’s day there
+the sun glares down upon the sand and flat gravestones, and it seems
+the most desolate place where one’s bones might be laid. The Protestants
+were once also interred on the Lido, but now they rest (apart from the
+Catholics, however) in the cemetery of San Michele.
+
+The island is long and narrow: it stretches between the lagoons and the
+sea, with a village at either end, and with bath-houses on the beach,
+which is everywhere faced with forts. There are some poor little trees
+there, and grass,--things which we were thrice a week grateful for, when
+we went thither to bathe. I do not know whether it will give the place
+further interest to say, that it was among the tombs of the Hebrews
+Cooper’s ingenious Bravo had the incredible good luck to hide himself
+from the _sbirri_ of the Republic; or to relate that it was the habit of
+Lord Byron to gallop up and down the Lido in search of that conspicuous
+solitude of which the sincere bard was fond.
+
+One day of the first summer I spent in Venice (three years of Venetian
+life afterward removed it back into times of the remotest antiquity), a
+friend and I had the now-incredible enterprise to walk from one end of
+the Lido to the other,--from the port of San Nicolò (through which the
+Bucintoro passed when the Doges went to espouse the Adriatic) to the
+port of Malamocco, at the southern extremity.
+
+We began with that delicious bath which you may have in the Adriatic,
+where the light surf breaks with a pensive cadence on the soft sand, all
+strewn with brilliant shells. The Adriatic is the bluest water I have
+ever seen; and it is an ineffable, lazy delight to lie and watch the
+fishing sails of purple and yellow dotting its surface, and the greater
+ships dipping down its utmost rim. It was particularly good to do this
+after coming out of the water; but our American blood could not brook
+much repose, and we got up presently, and started on our walk to the
+little village of Malamocco, some three miles away. The double-headed
+eagle keeps watch and ward from a continuous line of forts along the
+shore, and the white-coated sentinels never cease to pace the bastions,
+night or day. Their vision of the sea must not be interrupted by even so
+much as the form of a stray passer; and as we went by the forts, we had
+to descend from the sea-wall, and walk under it, until we got beyond the
+sentry’s beat. The crimson poppies grow everywhere on this sandy little
+isle, and they fringe the edges of the bastions with their bloom, as
+if the “blood-red blossoms of war” had there sprung from the seeds of
+battle sown in old forgotten fights. But otherwise the forts were not
+very engaging in appearance. A sentry-box of yellow and black, a sentry,
+a row of seaward frowning cannon--there was not much in all this to
+interest us; and so we walked idly along, and looked either to the city
+rising from the lagoons on one hand, or the ships going down the sea on
+the other. In the fields, along the road, were vines and Indian corn;
+but instead of those effigies of humanity, doubly fearful from their
+wide unlikeness to any thing human, which we contrive to scare away
+the birds, the devout peasant-folks had here displayed on poles the
+instruments of the Passion of the Lord--the hammer, the cords, the
+nails--which at once protected and blessed the fields. But I doubt if
+even these would save them from the New-World pigs, and certainly the
+fences here would not turn pork, for they are made of a matting of
+reeds, woven together, and feebly secured to tremulous posts. The
+fields were well cultivated, and the vines and garden vegetables looked
+flourishing; but the corn was spindling, and had, I thought, a homesick
+look, as if it dreamed vainly of wide ancestral bottom-lands, on
+the mighty streams that run through the heart of the Great West. The
+Italians call our corn _gran turco_, but I knew that it was for the West
+that it yearned, and not for the East.
+
+No doubt there were once finer dwellings than the peasants’ houses which
+are now the only habitations on the Lido; and I suspect that a genteel
+villa must formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we found
+surmounted by broken statues of Venus and Diana. The poor goddesses were
+both headless, and some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and
+they looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering attitudes of the absurd
+period of art to which they belonged: they extended their mutilated arms
+toward the sea for pity, but it regarded them not; and we passed before
+them scoffing at their bad taste, for we were hungry, and it was yet
+some distance to Malamocco.
+
+This dirty little village was the capital of the Venetian islands before
+King Pepin and his Franks burned it, and the shifting sands of empire
+gathered solidly about the Rialto in Venice. It is a thousand years
+since that time, and Malamocco has long been given over to fishermen’s
+families and the soldiers of the forts. We found the latter lounging
+about the unwholesome streets; and the former seated at their
+thresholds, engaged in those pursuits of the chase which the use of a
+fine-tooth comb would undignify to mere slaughter.
+
+There is a church at Malamocco, but it was closed, and we could not find
+the sacristan; so we went to the little restaurant, as the next best
+place, and demanded something to eat. What had the padrone? He answered
+pretty much to the same effect as the innkeeper in “Don Quixote,” who
+told his guests that they could have any thing that walked on the earth,
+or swam in the sea, or flew in the air. We would take, then, some fish,
+or a bit of veal, or some mutton chops. The padrone sweetly shrugged the
+shoulders of apology. There was nothing of all this, but what would we
+say to some liver or gizzards of chickens, fried upon the instant and
+ready the next breath? No, we did not want them; so we compromised on
+some ham fried in a batter of eggs, and reeking with its own fatness.
+The truth is, it was a very bad little lunch we made, and nothing
+redeemed it but the amiability of the smiling padrone and the bustling
+padrona, who served us as kings and princes. It was a clean hostelry,
+though, and that was a merit in Malamocco, of which the chief modern
+virtue is that it cannot hold you long. No doubt it was more interesting
+in other times. In the days when the Venetians chose it for their
+capital, it was a walled town, and fortified with towers. It has been
+more than once inundated by the sea, and it might again be washed out
+with advantage.
+
+In the spring, two years after my visit to Malamocco, we people in Casa
+Falier made a long-intended expedition to the island of Torcello, which
+is perhaps the most interesting of the islands of the lagoons. We had
+talked of it all winter, and had acquired enough property there to put
+up some light Spanish castles on the desolate site of the ancient city,
+that, so many years ago, sickened of the swamp air and died. A Count
+from Torcello is the title which Venetian persiflage gives to improbable
+noblemen; and thus even the pride of the dead Republic of Torcello has
+passed into matter of scornful jest, as that of the dead Republic of
+Venice may likewise in its day.
+
+When we leave the riva of Casa Falier, we pass down the Grand Canal,
+cross the Basin of St. Mark, and enter one of the narrow canals
+that intersect the Riva degli Schiavoni, whence we wind and deviate
+southwestward till we emerge near the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on
+the Fondamenta Nuove. On our way we notice that a tree, hanging over the
+water from a little garden, is in full leaf, and at Murano we see the
+tender bloom of peaches and the drifted blossom of cherry-trees.
+
+As we go by the Cemetery of San Michele, Piero the gondolier and
+Giovanna improve us with a little solemn pleasantry.
+
+“It is a small place,” says Piero, “but there is room enough for all
+Venice in it.”
+
+“It is true,” assents Giovanna, “and here we poor folks become
+landholders at last.”
+
+At Murano we stop a moment to look at the old Duomo, and to enjoy its
+quaint mosaics within, and the fine and graceful spirit of the _apsis_
+without. It is very old, this architecture; but the eternal youth of the
+beautiful belongs to it, and there is scarce a stone fallen from it that
+I would replace.
+
+The manufacture of glass at Murano, of which the origin is so remote,
+may be said to form the only branch of industry which still flourishes
+in the lagoons. Muranese beads are exported to all quarters in vast
+quantities, and the process of making them is one of the things that
+strangers feel they must see when visiting Venice. The famous mirrors
+are no longer made, and the glass has deteriorated in quality, as well
+as in the beauty of the thousand curious forms it took. The test of the
+old glass, which is now imitated a great deal, is its extreme lightness.
+I suppose the charming notion that glass was once wrought at Murano of
+such fineness that it burst into fragments if poison were poured into
+it, must be fabulous. And yet it would have been an excellent thing in
+the good old toxicological days of Italy; and people of noble family
+would have found a sensitive goblet of this sort as sovereign against
+the arts of venomers as an exclusive diet of boiled eggs. The city of
+Murano has dwindled from thirty to five thousand in population. It is
+intersected by a system of canals like Venice, and has a Grand Canal of
+its own, of as stately breadth as that of the capital. The finer houses
+are built on this canal; but the beautiful palaces, once occupied in
+_villeggiatura_ by the noble Venetians, are now inhabited by herds of
+poor, or converted into glass-works. The famous Cardinal Bembo and other
+literati made the island their retreat, and beautified it with gardens
+and fountains. Casa Priuli in that day was, according to Venetian ideas,
+“a terrestrial Paradise,” and a proper haunt of “nymphs and demi-gods.”
+ But the wealth, the learning, and the elegance of former times, which
+planted “groves of Academe” at Murano, have passed away, and the fair
+pleasure-gardens are now weed-grown wastes, or turned into honest
+cabbage and potato patches. It is a poor, dreary little town, with an
+inexplicable charm in its decay. The city arms are still displayed upon
+the public buildings (for Murano was ruled, independently of Venice, by
+its own council); and the heraldic cock, with a snake in its beak, has
+yet a lusty and haughty air amid the ruin of the place.
+
+The way in which the spring made itself felt upon the lagoon was full of
+curious delight. It was not so early in the season that we should know
+the spring by the first raw warmth in the air, and there was as yet
+no assurance of her presence in the growth--later so luxuriant--of the
+coarse grasses of the shallows. But somehow the spring was there, giving
+us new life with every breath. There were fewer gulls than usual, and
+those we saw sailed far overhead, debating departure. There was deeper
+languor in the laziness of the soldiers of finance, as they lounged and
+slept upon their floating custom houses in every channel of the lagoons;
+and the hollow voices of the boatmen, yelling to each other as their
+wont is, had an uncommon tendency to diffuse themselves in echo. Over
+all, the heavens had put on their summer blue, in promise of that
+delicious weather which in the lagoons lasts half the year, and which
+makes every other climate seem niggard of sunshine and azure skies.
+I know we have beautiful days at home--days of which the sumptuous
+splendor used to take my memory with unspeakable longing and regret even
+in Italy;--but we do not have, week after week, month after month, that
+
+    “Blue, unclouded weather,”
+
+which, at Venice, contents all your senses, and makes you exult to be
+alive with the inarticulate gladness of children, or of the swallows
+that there all day wheel and dart through the air, and shriek out a
+delight too intense and precipitate for song.
+
+The island of Torcello is some five miles away from Venice, in the
+northern lagoon. The city was founded far back in the troubled morning
+of Christian civilization, by refugees from barbarian invasion, and
+built with stones quarried from the ruins of old Altinum, over which
+Attila had passed desolating. During the first ages of its existence
+Torcello enjoyed the doubtful advantage of protection from the Greek
+emperors, but fell afterward under the domination of Venice. In the
+thirteenth century the _debris_ of the river that emptied into the
+lagoon there began to choke up the wholesome salt canals, and to poison
+the air with swampy malaria; and in the seventeenth century the city had
+so dwindled that the Venetian _podestà_ removed his residence from
+the depopulated island to Burano,--though the bishopric established
+immediately after the settlement of the refugees at Torcello continued
+there till 1814, to the satisfaction, no doubt, of the frogs and
+mosquitoes that had long inherited the former citizens.
+
+I confess that I know little more of the history of Torcello than I
+found in my guide-book. There I read that the city had once stately
+civic and religious edifices, and that in the tenth century the Emperor
+Porphorygenitus called it “_magnum emporium Torcellanorum_.” The
+much-restored cathedral of the seventh century, a little church, a
+building supposed to have been the public palace, and other edifices so
+ruinous and so old that their exact use in other days is not now known,
+are all that remain of the _magnum emporium_, except some lines of
+moldering wall that wander along the canals, and through pastures and
+vineyards, in the last imbecile stages of dilapidation and decay. There
+is a lofty bell-tower, also, from which, no doubt, the Torcellani
+used to descry afar off the devouring hordes of the barbarians on the
+main-land, and prepare for defense. As their city was never actually
+invaded, I am at a loss to account for the so-called Throne of Attila,
+which stands in the grass-grown piazza before the cathedral; and I fear
+that it may really have been after all only the seat which the ancient
+Tribunes of Torcello occupied on public occasions. It is a stone
+arm-chair, of a rude stateliness, and though I questioned its
+authenticity, I went and sat down in it a little while, to give myself
+the benefit of a doubt in case Attila had really pressed the same seat.
+
+As soon as our gondola touched the grassy shores at Torcello, Giovanna’s
+children, Beppi and Nina, whom we had brought with us to give a first
+experience of trees and flowers and mother earth, leaped from the boat
+and took possession of land and water. By a curious fatality the little
+girl, who was bred safely amid the hundred canals of Venice, signalized
+her absence from their perils by presently falling into the only
+canal in Torcello, whence she was taken dripping, to be confined at
+a farm-house during the rest of our stay. The children were wild with
+pleasure, being absolutely new to the country, and ran over the island,
+plucking bouquets of weeds and flowers by armsful. A rake, borne afield
+upon the shoulder of a peasant, afterwhile fascinated the Venetian
+Beppi, and drew him away to study its strange and wonderful uses.
+
+The simple inhabitants of Torcello came forth with gifts, or rather
+bargains, of flowers, to meet their discoverers, and, in a little while,
+exhausted our soldi. They also attended us in full force when we sat
+down to lunch,--the old, the young men and maidens, and the little
+children, all alike sallow, tattered, and dirty. Under these
+circumstances, a sense of the idyllic and the patriarchal gave zest to
+our collation, and moved us to bestow, in a splendid manner, fragments
+of the feast among the poor Torcellani. Knowing the abstemiousness
+of Italians everywhere, and seeing the hungry fashion in which the
+islanders clutched our gifts and devoured them, it was our doubt whether
+any one of them had ever experienced perfect repletion. I incline to
+think that a chronic famine gnawed their entrails, and that they never
+filled their bellies but with draughts of the east wind disdained of
+Job. The smaller among them even scrambled with the dog for the bones,
+until a little girl was bitten, when a terrific tumult arose, and the
+dog was driven home by the whole multitude. The children presently
+returned. They all had that gift of beauty which Nature seldom denies to
+the children of their race; but being, as I said, so dirty, their
+beauty shone forth chiefly from their large soft eyes. They had a very
+graceful, bashful archness of manner, and they insinuated beggary so
+winningly, that it would have been impossible for hungry people to deny
+them. As for us, having lunched, we gave them every thing that remained,
+and went off to feast our enthusiasm for art and antiquity in the
+cathedral.
+
+Of course, I have not the least intention of describing it. I remember
+best among its wonders the bearing of certain impenitents in one of
+the mosaics on the walls, whom the earnest early artist had meant to
+represent as suffering in the flames of torment. I think, however, I
+have never seen complacence equal to that of these sinners, unless it
+was in the countenances of the seven fat kine, which, as represented in
+the vestibule of St. Mark’s, wear an air of the sleepiest and laziest
+enjoyment, while the seven lean kine, having just come up from the
+river, devour steaks from their bleeding haunches. There are other
+mosaics in the Torcello cathedral, especially those in the _apsis_ and
+in one of the side chapels, which are in a beautiful spirit of art, and
+form the widest possible contrast to the eighteenth-century high altar,
+with its insane and ribald angels flying off at the sides, and poising
+themselves in the rope-dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly
+persons in the decline of the Renaissance. The choir is peculiarly
+built, in the form of a half-circle, with seats rising one above
+another, as in an amphitheatre, and a flight of steps ascending to the
+bishop’s seat above all,--after the manner of the earliest Christian
+churches. The partition parapet before the high altar is of almost
+transparent marble, delicately and quaintly sculptured with peacocks and
+lions, as the Byzantines loved to carve them; and the capitals of the
+columns dividing the naves are of infinite richness. Part of the marble
+pulpit has a curious bass-relief, said to be representative of the
+worship of Mercury; and indeed the Torcellani owe much of the beauty of
+their Duomo to unrequited antiquity. (They came to be robbed in their
+turn: for the opulence of their churches was so great that in the
+fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the severest penalties had to be
+enacted against those who stole from them. No one will be surprised to
+learn that the clergy themselves participated in these spoliations; but
+I believe no ecclesiastic was ever lashed in the piazza, or deprived of
+an eye or a hand for his offense.) The Duomo has the peculiar Catholic
+interest, and the horrible fascination, of a dead saint’s mortal part in
+a glass case.
+
+An arcade runs along the facade of the cathedral, and around the side
+and front of the adjoining church of Santa Fosca, which is likewise very
+old. But we found nothing in it but a dusty, cadaverous stench, and so
+we came away and ascended the campanile. From the top of this you have
+a view of the lagoon, in all its iridescent hues, and of the heaven-blue
+sea. Here, looking toward the main-land, I would have been glad to
+experience the feelings of the Torcellani of old, as they descried the
+smoking advance of Huns or Vandals. But the finer emotions are like
+gifted children, and are seldom equal to occasions. I am ashamed to say
+that mine got no further than Castle Bluebeard, with Lady Bluebeard’s
+sister looking out for her brothers, and tearfully responding to Lady
+B.’s repeated and agonized entreaty, “O sister, do you see them yet?”
+
+The old woman who had opened the door of the campanile was surprised
+into hospitality by the sum of money we gave her, and took us through
+her house (which was certainly very neat and clean) into her garden,
+where she explained the nature of many familiar trees and shrubs to us
+poor Venetians.
+
+We went back home over the twilight lagoon, and Giovanna expressed the
+general feeling when she said: “_Torsello xe beo--no si pol negar--la
+campagna xe bea; ma, benedetta la mia Venezia!_”
+
+(The country is beautiful--it can’t be denied--Torcello is beautiful;
+but blessed be my Venice!)
+
+The panorama of the southern lagoon is best seen in a voyage to
+Chioggia, or Ciozza, the quaint and historic little city that lies
+twenty miles away from Venice, at one of the ports of the harbor. The
+Giant Sea-wall, built there by the Republic in her decline, is a work of
+Roman grandeur, which impresses you more deeply than any other monument
+of the past with a sense of her former industrial and commercial
+greatness. Strips of village border the narrow Littorale all the way
+to Chioggia, and on the right lie the islands of the lagoon. Chioggia
+itself is hardly more than a village,--a Venice in miniature, like
+Murano, with canals and boats and bridges. But here the character of
+life is more amphibious than in brine-bound Venice; and though there is
+no horse to be seen in the central streets of Chioggia, peasants’ teams
+penetrate her borders by means of a long bridge from the main-land.
+
+Of course Chioggia has passed through the customary vicissitudes of
+Italian towns, and has been depopulated at divers times by pestilence,
+famine, and war. It suffered cruelly in the war with the Genoese in
+1380, when it was taken by those enemies of St. Mark; and its people
+were so wasted by the struggle that the Venetians, on regaining it, were
+obliged to invite immigration to repopulate its emptiness. I do not know
+how great comfort the Chiozzotti of that unhappy day took in the fact
+that some of the earliest experiments with cannon were made in the
+contest that destroyed them, but I can hardly offer them less tribute
+than to mention it here. At present the place is peopled almost entirely
+by sailors and fishermen, whose wives are more famous for their beauty
+than their amiability. Goldoni’s “Baruffe Chiozzotte” is an amusing and
+vivid picture of the daily battles which the high-spirited ladies of
+the city fought in the dramatist’s [Footnote: Goldoni’s family went from
+Venice to Chioggia when the dramatist was very young. The description
+of his life there form some of the most interesting chapters of his
+Memoirs.] time, and which are said to be of frequent occurrence at this
+day. The Chiozzotte are the only women of this part of Italy who still
+preserve a semblance of national costume; and this remnant of more
+picturesque times consists merely of a skirt of white, which, being open
+in front, is drawn from the waist over the head and gathered in the hand
+under the chin, giving to the flashing black eyes and swarthy features
+of the youthful wearer a look of very dangerous slyness and cunning.
+The dialect of the Chiozzotti is said to be that of the early Venetians,
+with an admixture of Greek, and it is infinitely more sweet and musical
+than the dialect now spoken in Venice. “Whether derived,” says the
+author of the “Fiore di Venezia,” alluding to the speech of these
+peculiar people, “from those who first settled these shores, or
+resulting from other physical and moral causes, it is certain that the
+tone of the voice is here more varied and powerful: the mouth is thrown
+wide open in speaking; a passion, a lament mingles with laughter itself,
+and there is a continual _ritornello_ of words previously spoken. But
+this speech is full of energy; whoever would study brief and strong
+modes of expression should come here.”
+
+Chioggia was once the residence of noble and distinguished persons,
+among whom was the painter Rosalba Carrera, famed throughout Europe for
+her crayon miniatures; and the place produced in the sixteenth century
+the great maestro Giuseppe Zarlino, “who passes,” says Cantù, “for the
+restorer of modern music,” and “whose ‘Orfeo’ heralded the invention
+of the musical drama.” This composer claimed for his birthplace the
+doubtful honor of the institution of the order of the Capuchins, which
+he declared to have been founded by Fra Paolo (Giovanni Sambi) of
+Chioggia. There is not much now to see in poor little Chioggia except
+its common people, who, after a few minutes’ contemplation, can hardly
+interest any one but the artist. There are no dwellings in the town
+which approach palatial grandeur, and nothing in the Renaissance
+churches to claim attention, unless it be an attributive Bellini in
+one of them. Yet if you have the courage to climb the bell-tower of
+the cathedral, you get from its summit the loveliest imaginable view of
+many-purpled lagoon and silver-flashing sea; and if you are sufficiently
+acquainted with Italy and Italians to observe a curious fact, and care
+to study the subject, you may note the great difference between the
+inhabitants of Chioggia and those of Palestrina,--an island divided from
+Chioggia by a half mile of lagoon, and by quite different costume, type
+of face, and accent.
+
+Just between Chioggia and the sea lies the lazy town of Sottomarina, and
+I should say that the population of Sottomarina chiefly spent its time
+in lounging up and down the Sea-wall; while that of Chioggia, when not
+professionally engaged with the net, gave its leisure to playing _mora_
+[Footnote: Mora is the game which the Italians play with their fingers,
+one throwing out two, three, or four fingers, as the case may be, and
+calling the number at the same instant. If (so I understood the game)
+the player mistakes the number of fingers he throws out, he loses; if he
+hits the number with both voice and fingers he wins. It is played with
+tempestuous interest, and is altogether fiendish in appearance.] in the
+shade, or pitilessly pursuing strangers, and offering them boats. For my
+own part, I refused the subtlest advances of this kind which were made
+me in Chiozzotto, but fell a helpless prey to a boatman who addressed me
+in some words of wonderful English, and then rowed me to the Sea-wall at
+about thrice the usual fare.
+
+These primitive people are bent, in their out-of-the-world, remote way,
+upon fleecing the passing stranger quite as earnestly as other Italians,
+and they naïvely improve every occasion for plunder. As we passed up the
+shady side of their wide street, we came upon a plump little blond boy,
+lying asleep on the stones, with his head upon his arm; and as no
+one was near, the artist of our party stopped to sketch the sleeper.
+Atmospheric knowledge of the fact spread rapidly, and in a few minutes
+we were the centre of a general assembly of the people of Chioggia,
+who discussed us, and the artist’s treatment of her subject, in open
+congress. They handed round the airy chaff as usual, but were very
+orderly and respectful, nevertheless,--one father of the place quelling
+every tendency to tumult by kicking his next neighbor, who passed on the
+penalty till, by this simple and ingenious process, the guilty cause of
+the trouble was infallibly reached and kicked at last. I placed a number
+of soldi in the boy’s hand, to the visible sensation of the crowd, and
+then we moved away and left him, heading, as we went, a procession of
+Chiozzotti, who could not make up their minds to relinquish us till
+we took refuge in a church. When we came out the procession had
+disappeared, but all round the church door, and picturesquely scattered
+upon the pavement in every direction, lay boys asleep, with their
+heads upon their arms. As we passed laughing through the midst of these
+slumberers, they rose and followed us with cries of “_Mi tiri zu! Mi
+tiri zu!_” (Take me down! Take me down!) They ran ahead, and fell asleep
+again in our path, and round every corner we came upon a sleeping boy;
+and, indeed, we never got out of that atmosphere of slumber till we
+returned to the steamer for Venice, when Chioggia shook off her drowsy
+stupor, and began to tempt us to throw soldi into the water, to be dived
+for by her awakened children.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE ARMENIANS.
+
+
+Among the pleasantest friends we made in Venice were the monks of the
+Armenian Convent, whose cloistral buildings rise from the glassy lagoon,
+upon the south of the city, near a mile away. This bulk
+
+    “Of mellow brick-work on an isle of bowers”
+
+is walled in with solid masonry from the sea, and encloses a
+garden-court, filled with all beautiful flowers, and with the memorable
+trees of the East; while another garden encompasses the monastery
+itself, and yields those honest fruits and vegetables which supply the
+wants of the well-cared-for mortal part of the good brothers. The island
+is called San Lazzaro, and the convent was established in 1717 by a
+learned and devoted Armenian priest named Mechithar, from whom the
+present order of monks is called Mechitharist. He was the first who
+formed the idea of educating a class of priests to act as missionaries
+among the Armenian nation in the East, and infuse into its civil and
+religious decay the life of European piety and learning. He founded at
+Sebaste, therefore, a religious order of which the seat was presently
+removed to Constantinople, where the friars met with so much persecution
+from Armenian heterodoxy that it was again transferred, and fixed at
+Modone in Morea. That territory falling into the hands of the Turks,
+the Mechitharists fled with their leader to Venice, where the Republic
+bestowed upon them a waste and desolate island, which had formerly
+been used as a place of refuge for lepers; and the monks made it the
+loveliest spot in all the lagoons.
+
+The little island has such a celebrity in travel and romance, that I
+feel my pen catching in the tatters of a threadbare theme. And yet I
+love the place and its people so well, that I could scarcely pass it
+without mention. Every tourist who spends a week in Venice goes to see
+the convent, and every one is charmed with it and the courteous welcome
+of the fathers. Its best interest is the intrinsic interest attaching
+to it as a seat of Armenian culture; but persons who relish the
+cheap sentimentalism of Byron’s life, find the convent all the more
+entertaining from the fact that he did the Armenian language the favor
+to study it there, a little. The monks show his autograph, together with
+those of other distinguished persons, and the Armenian Bible which
+he used to read. I understood from one of the friars, Padre Giacomo
+Issaverdanz, that the brothers knew little or nothing of Byron’s
+celebrity as a poet while he studied with them, and that his proficiency
+as an Armenian scholar was not such as to win high regard from them.
+
+I think most readers who have visited the convent will recall the
+pleasant face and manners of the young father mentioned, who shows the
+place to English-speaking travelers, and will care to know that Padre
+Giacomo was born at Smyrna, and dwelt there in the family of an English
+lady, till he came to Venice, and entered on his monastic life at San
+Lazzaro.
+
+He came one morning to breakfast with us, bringing with him Padre
+Alessio, a teacher in the Armenian College in the city. As for the
+latter, it was not without a certain shock that I heard Mesopotamia
+mentioned as his birthplace, having somehow in childhood learned to
+regard that formidable name as little better than a kind of profane
+swearing. But I soon came to know Padre Alessio apart from his
+birthplace, and to find him very interesting as a scholar and an artist.
+He threw a little grace of poetry around our simple feast, by repeating
+some Armenian verses,--grace all the more ethereal from our entire
+ignorance of what the verses meant. Our breakfast-table talk wrought to
+friendship the acquaintance made some time before, and the next morning
+we received the photograph of Padre Giacomo, and the compliments of the
+Orient, in a heaped basket of ripe and luscious figs from the garden
+of the Convent San Lazzaro. When, in turn, we went to visit him at
+the convent, we had experience of a more curious oriental hospitality.
+Refreshments were offered to us as to friends, and we lunched fairily
+upon little dishes of rose leaves, delicately preserved, with all
+their fragrance, in a “lucent sirup.” It seemed that this was a common
+conserve in the East; but we could hardly divest ourselves of the notion
+of sacrilege, as we thus fed upon the very most luxurious sweetness
+and perfume of the soul of summer. Pleasant talk accompanied the dainty
+repast,--Padre Giacomo recounting for us some of his adventures with
+the people whom he had to show about the convent, and of whom many
+were disappointed at not finding a gallery or museum, and went away in
+extreme disgust; and relating with a sly, sarcastic relish that blent
+curiously with his sweetness and gentleness of spirit, how some English
+people once came with the notion that Lord Byron was an Armenian; how an
+unhappy French gentleman, who had been robbed in Southern Italy, would
+not be parted a moment from a huge bludgeon which he carried in
+his hand, and (probably disordered by his troubles) could hardly be
+persuaded from attacking the mummy which is in one of the halls; how
+a sharp, bustling, go-ahead Yankee rushed in one morning, rubbing his
+hands, and demanding, “Show me all you can in five minutes.”
+
+As a seat of learning, San Lazzaro is famed throughout the Armenian
+world, and gathers under its roof the best scholars and poets of that
+nation. In the printing-office of the convent books are printed in
+some thirty different languages; and a number of the fathers employ
+themselves constantly in works of translation. The most distinguished of
+the Armenian literati now living at San Lazzaro is the Reverend Father
+Gomidas Pakraduni, who has published an Armenian version of “Paradise
+Lost,” and whose great labor the translation of Homer, has been recently
+issued from the convent press. He was born at Constantinople of an
+ancient and illustrious family, and took religious orders at San
+Lazzaro, where he was educated, and where for twenty-five years after
+his consecration he held the professorship of his native tongue. He
+devoted himself especially to the culture of the ancient Armenian, and
+developed it for the expression of modern ideas, he made exhaustive
+study of the vast collection of old manuscripts at San Lazzaro, and then
+went to Paris in pursuance of his purpose, and acquainted himself with
+all the treasures of Armenian learning in the Bibliothèque Royale.
+He became the first scholar of the age in his national language, and
+acquired at the same time a profound knowledge of Latin and Greek.
+
+Returning to Constantinople, Father Pakraduni, whose fame had preceded
+him, took up his residence in the family of a noble Armenian, high in
+the service of the Turkish government; and while assuming the care of
+educating his friend’s children, began those labors of translation
+which have since so largely employed him. He made an Armenian version
+of Pindar, and wrote a work on Rhetoric, both of which were destroyed
+by fire while yet in the manuscript. He labored, meanwhile, on his
+translation of the Iliad,--a youthful purpose which he did not see
+fulfilled till the year 1860, when he had already touched the Psalmist’s
+limit of life. In this translation he revived with admirable success
+an ancient species of Armenian verse, which bears, in flexibility and
+strength, comparison with the original Greek. Another of his great
+labors was the production of an Armenian Grammar, in which he reduced
+to rule and order the numerous forms of his native tongue, never before
+presented by one work in all its eastern variety.
+
+Padre Giacomo, to whose great kindness I am indebted for a biographic
+and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic
+poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological
+treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed,
+this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar
+and the Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began his work anew, and after
+eight years gave his epic of twenty books and twenty-two thousand verses
+to the press. The hero of the poem is Haïk, the first Armenian patriarch
+after the flood, and the founder of a kingly dynasty. Nimrod, the great
+hunter, drunk with his victories, declares himself a god, and ordains
+his own worship throughout the Orient. Haïk refuses to obey the commands
+of the tyrant, takes up arms against him, and finally kills him in
+battle. “In the style of this poem,” writes Padre Giacomo, “it is hard
+to tell whether to admire most its richness, its energy, its sweetness,
+its melancholy, its freedom, its dignity, or its harmony, for it has
+all these virtues in turn. The descriptive parts are depicted with the
+faithfulest pencil: the battle scenes can only be matched in the Iliad.”
+
+Father Pakraduni returned, after twenty-five years’ sojourn at
+Constantinople, to publish his epic at San Lazzaro, where he still
+lives, a tranquil, gentle old man, with a patriarchal beauty and
+goodness of face. In 1861 he printed his translation of Milton, with
+a dedication to Queen Victoria. His other works bear witness to the
+genuineness of his inspiration and piety, and the diligence of his
+study: they are poems, poetic translations from the Italian, religious
+essays, and grammatical treatises.
+
+Indeed, the existence of all the friars at San Lazzaro is one of close
+and earnest study; and life grows so fond of these quiet monks that it
+will hardly part with them at last. One of them is ninety-five years
+old, and, until 1863, there was a lay-brother among them whose years
+numbered a hundred and eight, and who died of old age, on the 17th
+of September, after passing fifty-eight years at San Lazzaro. From
+biographic memoranda furnished me by Padre Giacomo, I learn that the
+name of this patriarch was George Karabagiak, and that he was a native
+of Kutaieh in Asia Minor. He was for a long time the disciple of Dèdè
+Vartabied, a renowned preacher of the Armenian faith, and he afterward
+taught the doctrines of his master in the Armenian schools. Failing
+in his desire to enter upon the sacerdotal life at Constantinople, he
+procured his admission as lay-brother at San Lazzaro, where all his
+remaining days were spent. He was but little learned; but he had great
+passion for poetry, and he was the author of some thirty small works
+on different subjects. During the course of his long and diligent life,
+which was chiefly spent in learning and teaching, he may be said to have
+hardly known a day’s sickness. And at last he died of no perceptible
+disorder. The years tired him to death. He had a trifling illness in
+August, and as he convalesced, he grew impatient of the tenacious life
+which held him to earth. Slowly pacing up and down the corridors of
+the convent, he used to crave the prayers of the brothers whom he met,
+beseeching them to intercede with Heaven that he might be suffered to
+die. One day he said to the archbishop, “I fear that God has abandoned
+me, and I shall live.” Only a little while before his death he wrote
+some verses, as Padre Giacomo’s memorandum witnesses, “with a firm and
+steady hand,” and the manner of his death was this,--as recorded in the
+grave and simple words of my friend’s note:--“Finally, on the 17th of
+September, very early in the morning, a brother entering his chamber,
+asked him how he was. ‘Well,’ he replied, turning his face to the wall,
+and spoke no more. He had passed to a better life.”
+
+It seems to me there is a pathos in the close of this old man’s
+life,--which I hope has not been lost by my way of describing it,--and
+there is certainly a moral. I have read of an unlucky sage who
+discovered the Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renewing his
+existence, at last voluntarily resigned himself to death, because he had
+exhausted all that life had to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew
+all its vicissitudes but the very last. Brother Karabagiak seems to have
+had no humor to take even a second ease of life. It is perhaps as well
+that most men die before reaching the over-ripeness of a hundred
+and eight years; and, doubtless, with all our human willfulness and
+ignorance, we would readily consent, if we could fix the time, to go
+sooner--say, at a hundred and seven years, friends?
+
+Besides the Convent of San Lazzaro, where Armenian boys from all parts
+of the East are educated for the priesthood, the nation has a college
+in the city in which boys intended for secular careers receive their
+schooling. The Palazzo Zenobia is devoted to the use of this college,
+where, besides room for study, the boys have abundant space and
+apparatus for gymnastics, and ample grounds for gardening. We once
+passed a pleasant summer evening there, strolling through the fragrant
+alleys of the garden, in talk with the father-professors, and looking
+on at the gymnastic feats of the boys; and when the annual exhibition of
+the school took place in the fall, we were invited to be present.
+
+The room appointed for the exhibition was the great hall of the palace,
+which in other days had evidently been a ball-room. The ceiling was
+frescoed in the manner of the last century, with Cupids and Venuses,
+Vices and Virtues, fruits and fiddles, dwarfs and blackamoors; and the
+painted faces looked down on a scene of as curious interest as ever the
+extravagant loves and graces of Tiepolo might hope to see, when the boys
+of the college, after assisting at _Te Deum_ in the chapel, entered the
+room, and took their places.
+
+At the head of the hall sat the archbishop in his dark robes, with
+his heavy gold chain about his neck--a figure and a countenance in all
+things spiritual, gracious, and reverend. There is small difference, I
+believe, between the creeds of the Armenians and the Roman Catholics,
+but a very great disparity in the looks of the two priesthoods, which is
+all in favor of the former. The Armenian wears his beard, and the
+Latin shaves--which may have a great deal to do with the holiness of
+appearance. Perhaps, also, the gentle and mild nature of the
+oriental yields more sweetly and entirely to the self-denials of the
+ecclesiastical vocation, and thus wins a fairer grace from them. At any
+rate, I have not seen any thing but content and calm in the visages of
+the Armenian fathers, among whom the priest-face, as a type, does not
+exist, though it would mark the Romish ecclesiastic in whatever dress he
+wore. There is, moreover, a look of such entire confidence and unworldly
+sincerity in their eyes, that I could not help thinking, as I turned
+from the portly young fathers to the dark-faced, grave, old-fashioned
+school-boys, that an exchange of beard only was needed to effect an
+exchange of character between those youthful elders and their pupils.
+The gray-haired archbishop is a tall and slender man; but nearly all the
+fathers take kindly to curves and circles, and glancing down a row of
+these amiable priests I could scarcely repress a smile at the constant
+recurrence of the line of beauty in their well-rounded persons.
+
+On the right and left of the archbishop were the few invited guests,
+and at the other end of the saloon sat one of the fathers, the plump
+key-stone of an arch of comfortable young students expanding toward
+us. Most of the boys are from Turkey (the Armenians of Venice, though
+acknowledging the Pope as their spiritual head, are the subjects of the
+Sultan), others are of Asiatic birth, and two are Egyptians.
+
+As to the last, I think the Sphinx and the Pyramid could hardly have
+impressed me more than their dark faces, that seemed to look vaguely
+on our modern world from the remote twilights of old, and in their very
+infancy to be reverend through the antiquity of their race. The mother
+of these boys--a black-eyed, olive-cheeked lady, very handsome and
+stylish--was present with their younger brother. I hardly know whether
+to be ashamed of having been awed by hearing of the little Egyptian that
+his native tongue was Arabic, and that he spoke nothing more occidental
+than Turkish. But, indeed, was it wholly absurd to offer a tacit homage
+to this favored boy, who must know the “Arabian Nights” in the original?
+
+The exercises began with a theme in Armenian--a language which, but for
+its English abundance of sibilants, and a certain German rhythm, was
+wholly outlandish to our ears. Themes in Italian, German, and French
+succeeded, and then came one in English. We afterward had speech with
+the author of this essay, who expressed the liveliest passion for
+English, in the philosophy and poetry of which it seemed he particularly
+delighted. He told us that he was a Constantinopolitan, and that in
+six months more he would complete his collegiate course, when he would
+return to his native city, and take employment in the service of the
+Turkish Government. Many others of the Armenian students here also find
+this career open to them in the East.
+
+The literary exercises closed with another essay in Armenian; and then
+the archbishop delivered, very gracefully and impressively, an address
+to the boys. After this, the distribution of the premiums--medals of
+silver and bronze, and books--took place at the desk of the archbishop.
+Each boy, as he advanced to receive his premium, knelt and touched the
+hand of the priest with his lips and forehead,--a quaint and pleasing
+ceremony which had preceded and followed the reading of all the themes.
+
+The social greetings and congratulations that now took place ended
+an entertainment throughout which every body was pleased, and the
+goodnatured fathers seemed to be moved with a delight no less hearty
+than that of the boys themselves. Indeed, the ground of affection and
+confidence on which the lads and their teachers seemed to meet, was
+something very novel and attractive. We shook hands with our smiling
+friends among the padri, took leave of the archbishop, and then visited
+the studio of Padre Alessio, who had just finished a faithful and
+spirited portrait of monsignore. Adieux to the artist and to Padre
+Giacomo brought our visit to an end; and so, from that scene of oriental
+learning, simplicity, and kindliness, we walked into our western life
+once more, and resumed our citizenship and burden in the Venetian
+world--out of the waters of which, like a hydra or other water beast, a
+bathing boy instantly issued and begged of us.
+
+A few days later our good Armenians went to pass a month on the
+main-land near Padua, where they have comfortable possessions. Peace
+followed them, and they came back as plump as they went.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE.
+
+
+As I think it extremely questionable whether I could get through a
+chapter on this subject without some feeble pleasantry about Shylock,
+and whether, if I did, the reader would be at all satisfied that I had
+treated the matter fully and fairly, I say at the beginning that Shylock
+is dead; that if he lived, Antonio would hardly spit upon his gorgeous
+pantaloons or his Parisian coat, as he met him on the Rialto; that
+he would far rather call out to him, “_Ció Shylock! Bon dí! Go piaser
+vederla;_” [Footnote: “Shylock, old fellow, good-day. Glad to see you.”]
+that if Shylock by any chance entrapped Antonio into a foolish promise
+to pay him a pound of his flesh on certain conditions, the honest
+commissary of police before whom they brought their affair would dismiss
+them both to the madhouse at San Servolo. In a word, the present social
+relations of Jew and Christian in this city render the “Merchant of
+Venice” quite impossible; and the reader, though he will find the Ghetto
+sufficiently noisome and dirty, will not find an oppressed people there,
+nor be edified by any of those insults or beatings which it was once a
+large share of Christian duty to inflict upon the enemies of our
+faith. The Catholic Venetian certainly understands that his Jewish
+fellow-citizen is destined to some very unpleasant experiences in the
+next world, but _Corpo di Bacco_! that is no reason why he should not
+be friends with him in this. He meets him daily on exchange and at the
+Casino, and he partakes of the hospitality of his conversazioni. If he
+still despises him--and I think he does, a little--he keeps his contempt
+to himself, for the Jew is gathering into his own hands great part of
+the trade of the city, and has the power that belongs to wealth. He is
+educated, liberal, and enlightened, and the last great name in Venetian
+literature is that of the Jewish historian of the Republic, Romanin.
+The Jew’s political sympathies are invariably patriotic, and he calls
+himself, not Ebreo, but Veneziano. He lives, when rich, in a palace or a
+fine house on the Grand Canal, and he furnishes and lets many others (I
+must say at rates which savor of the loan secured by the pound of flesh)
+in which he does not live. The famous and beautiful Ca’ Doro now belongs
+to a Jewish family; and an Israelite, the most distinguished physician
+in Venice, occupies the _appartamento signorile_ in the palace of the
+famous Cardinal Bembo. The Jew is a physician, a banker, a manufacturer,
+a merchant; and he makes himself respected for his intelligence and
+his probity,--which perhaps does not infringe more than that of Italian
+Catholics. He dresses well,--with that indefinable difference, however,
+which distinguishes him in every thing from a Christian,--and his wife
+and daughter are fashionable and stylish, They are sometimes, also, very
+pretty; and I have seen one Jewish lady who might have stepped out
+of the sacred page, down from the patriarchal age, and been known for
+Rebecca, with her oriental grace, and delicate, sensitive, high-bred
+look and bearing--no more western and modern than a lily of Palestine.
+
+But it is to the Ghetto I want to take you now (by the way we went one
+sunny day late last fall), that I may show you something of the Jewish
+past, which has survived to the nineteenth century in much of the
+discomfort and rank savor of the dark ages.
+
+In the fifteenth century all the riches of the Orient had been poured
+into the lap of Venice, and a spirit of reckless profusion took
+possession of her citizens. The money, hastily and easily amassed, went
+as rapidly as it came. It went chiefly for dress, in which the Venetian
+still indulges very often to the stint of his stomach; and the ladies of
+that bright-colored, showy day bore fortunes on their delicate persons
+in the shape of costly vestments of scarlet, black, green, white,
+maroon, or violet, covered with gems, glittering with silver buttons,
+and ringing with silver bells. The fine gentlemen of the period were not
+behind them in extravagance; and the priests were peculiarly luxurious
+in dress, wearing gay silken robes, with cowls of fur, and girdles
+of gold and silver. Sumptuary laws were vainly passed to repress the
+general license, and fortunes were wasted, and wealthy families reduced
+to beggary. [Footnote: Galliciolli, _Memorie Venete_.] At this time,
+when so many worthy gentlemen and ladies had need of the Uncle to whom
+hard-pressed nephews fly to pledge the wrecks of prosperity, there
+was yet no Monte di Pietà, and the demand for pawnbrokers becoming
+imperative, the Republic was obliged to recall the Hebrews from the
+exile into which they had been driven some time before, that they might
+set up pawnshops and succor necessity. They came back, however, only for
+a limited time, and were obliged to wear a badge of yellow color upon
+the breast, to distinguish them from the Christians, and later a yellow
+cap, then a red hat, and then a hat of oil-cloth. They could not acquire
+houses or lands in Venice, nor practice any trade, nor exercise any
+noble art but medicine. They were assigned a dwelling-place in the
+vilest and unhealthiest part of the city, and their quarter was
+called Ghetto, from the Hebrew _nghedah_, a congregation. [Footnote:
+Mutinelli.] They were obliged to pay their landlords a third more rent
+than Christians paid; the Ghetto was walled in, and its gates were kept
+by Christian guards, who every day opened them at dawn and closed them
+at dark, and who were paid by the Jews. They were not allowed to issue
+at all from the Ghetto on holidays; and two barges, with armed men,
+watched over them night and day, while a special magistracy had
+charge of their affairs. Their synagogues were built at Mestre, on the
+main-land; and their dead were buried in the sand upon the seashore,
+whither, on the Mondays of September, the baser sort of Venetians went
+to make merry, and drunken men and women danced above their desecrated
+tombs. These unhappy people were forced also to pay tribute to the state
+at first every third year, then every fifth year, and then every tenth
+year, the privilege of residence being ingeniously renewed to them at
+these periods for a round sum; but, in spite of all, they flourished
+upon the waste and wickedness of their oppressors, waxed rich as these
+waxed poor, and were not again expelled from the city. [Footnote: _Del
+Commercia del Veneziani_. Mutinelli.]
+
+There never was any attempt to disturb the Hebrews by violence, except
+on one occasion, about the close of the fifteenth century, when a tumult
+was raised against them for child-murder. This, however, was promptly
+quelled by the Republic before any harm was done them; and they dwelt
+peacefully in their Ghetto till the lofty gates of their prison caught
+the sunlight of modern civilization, and crumbled beneath it. Then many
+of the Jews came forth and fixed their habitations in different parts
+of the city, but many others clung to the spot where their temples still
+remain, and which was hallowed by long suffering, and soaked with the
+blood of innumerable generations of geese. So, although you find Jews
+everywhere in Venice, you never find a Christian in the Ghetto, which is
+held to this day by a large Hebrew population.
+
+We had not started purposely to see the Ghetto, and for this reason it
+had that purely incidental relish, which is the keenest possible savor
+of the object of interest. We were on an expedition to find Sior Antonio
+Rioba, who has been, from time immemorial, the means of ponderous
+practical jokes in Venice. Sior Antonio is a rough-hewn statue set in
+the corner of an ordinary grocery, near the Ghetto. He has a pack on
+his back and a staff in his hand; his face is painted, and is habitually
+dishonored with dirt thrown upon it by boys. On the wall near him is
+painted a bell-pull, with the legend, _Sior Antonio Rioba_. Rustics,
+raw apprentices, and honest Germans new to the city, are furnished with
+packages to be carried to Sior Antonio Rioba, who is very hard to find,
+and not able to receive the messages when found, though there is always
+a crowd of loafers near to receive the unlucky simpleton who brings
+them. _“E poi, che commedia vederli arrabiarsi! Che ridere_!” That is
+the Venetian notion of fun, and no doubt the scene is amusing. I was
+curious to see Sior Antonio, because a comic journal bearing his name
+had been published during the time of the Republic of 1848, and from the
+fact that he was then a sort of Venetian Pasquino. But I question now
+if he was worth seeing, except as something that brought me into the
+neighborhood of the Ghetto, and suggested to me the idea of visiting
+that quarter.
+
+As we left him and passed up the canal in our gondola, we came unawares
+upon the church of Santa Maria dell’ Orto, one of the most graceful
+Gothic churches in the city. The façade is exquisite, and has two Gothic
+windows of that religious and heavenly beauty which pains the heart
+with its inexhaustible richness. One longed to fall down on the space
+of green turf before the church, now bathed in the soft golden October
+sunshine, and recant these happy, commonplace centuries of heresy,
+and have back again the good old believing days of bigotry, and
+superstition, and roasting, and racking, if only to have once more the
+men who dreamed those windows out of their faith and piety (if they did,
+which I doubt), and made them with their patient, reverent hands (if
+their hands _were_ reverent, which I doubt). The church is called Santa
+Maria dell’ Orto, from the miraculous image of Our Lady which was
+found in an orchard where the temple now stands. We saw this miraculous
+sculpture, and thought it reflected little credit upon the supernatural
+artist. The church is properly that of Saint Christopher, but the
+saint has been titularly vanquished by the Madonna, though he comes out
+gigantically triumphant in a fresco above the high altar, and leads to
+confused and puzzling reminiscences of Bluebeard and Morgante Maggiore,
+to both of which characters he bears a bewildering personal resemblance.
+
+There were once many fine paintings by Tintoretto and Bellini in
+this church; but as the interior is now in course of restoration, the
+paintings have been removed to the Academy, and we only saw one, which
+was by the former master, and had all his striking imagination in the
+conception, all his strength in the drawing and all his lampblack in the
+faded coloring. In the centre of the church, the sacristan scraped the
+carpenter’s rubbish away from a flat tablet in the floor, and said that
+it was Tintoretto’s tomb. It is a sad thing to doubt even a sacristan,
+but I pointed out that the tomb bore any name in the world rather than
+Robusti. “Ah!” said the sacristan, “it is just that which makes it so
+very curious,--that Tintoretto should wish to be buried under another
+name!” [Footnote: Members of the family of Tintoretto are actually
+buried in this church; and no sacristan of right feeling could do less
+than point out some tomb as that of the great painter himself.]
+
+It was a warm, sunny day in the fall, as I said; yet as we drew near the
+Ghetto, we noticed in the air many white, floating particles, like lazy,
+straggling flakes of snow. These we afterward found to be the down of
+multitudes of geese, which are forever plucked by the whole apparent
+force of the populace,--the fat of the devoted birds being substituted
+for lard in the kitchens of the Ghetto, and their flesh for pork. As
+we approached the obscene little riva at which we landed, a blond young
+Israelite, lavishly adorned with feathers, came running to know if we
+wished to see the church--by which name he put the synagogue to the
+Gentile comprehension. The street through which we passed had shops
+on either hand, and at the doors groups of jocular Hebrew youth sat
+plucking geese; while within, long files of all that was mortal of geese
+hung from the rafters and the walls. The ground was webbed with the feet
+of geese, and certain loutish boys, who paused to look at us, had each
+a goose dragging at his heels, in the forlorn and elongated manner
+peculiar to dead poultry. The ground was stained with the blood of
+geese, and the smell of roasting geese came out of the windows of the
+grim and lofty houses.
+
+Our guide was picturesque, but the most helpless and inconclusive
+cicerone I ever knew; and while his long, hooked Hebrew nose caught my
+idle fancy, and his soft blue eyes excused a great deal of inefficiency,
+the aimless fashion in which he mounted dirty staircases for the keys
+of the synagogue, and came down without them, and the manner in which
+he shouted to the heads of unctuous Jessicas thrust out of windows, and
+never gained the slightest information by his efforts, were imbecilities
+that we presently found insupportable, and we gladly cast him off for a
+dark-faced Hebrew boy who brought us at once to the door of the Spanish
+synagogue.
+
+Of seven synagogues in the Ghetto, the principal was built in 1655, by
+the Spanish Jews who had fled to Venice from the terrors of the Holy
+Office. Its exterior has nothing to distinguish it as a place of
+worship, and we reached the interior of the temple by means of some dark
+and narrow stairs. In the floor and on the walls of the passage-way
+were set tablets to the memory of rich and pious Israelites who had
+bequeathed their substance for the behoof of the sanctuary; and the
+sacristan informed us that the synagogue was also endowed with a fund by
+rich descendants of Spanish Jews in Amsterdam. These moneys are kept to
+furnish indigent Israelitish couples with the means of marrying, and
+who claim the benefit of the fund are entitled to it. The sacristan--a
+little wiry man, with bead-black eyes, and of a shoemakerish
+presence--told us with evident pride that he was himself a descendant of
+the Spanish Jews. Howbeit, he was now many centuries from speaking the
+Castilian, which, I had read, was still used in the families of the
+Jewish fugitives from Spain to the Levant. He spoke, instead, the
+abominable Venetian of Cannaregio, with that Jewish thickness which
+distinguishes the race’s utterance, no matter what language its children
+are born to. It is a curious philological fact, which I have heard
+repeatedly alleged by Venetians, and which is perhaps worth noting
+here, that Jews speaking their dialect, have not only this thickness of
+accent, but also a peculiarity of construction which marks them at once.
+
+We found the contracted interior of the synagogue hardly worth
+looking at. Instead of having any thing oriental or peculiar in its
+architecture, it was in a bad spirit of Renaissance art. A gallery
+encircled the inside, and here the women, during worship, sat apart
+from the men, who had seats below, running back from either side of the
+altar. I had no right, coming from a Protestant land of pews, to indulge
+in that sentimentality; but I could not help being offended to see that
+each of these seats might be lifted up and locked into the upright back
+and thus placed beyond question at the disposal of the owner: I like the
+freedom and equality in the Catholic churches much better. The sacristan
+brought a ponderous silver key, and unlocking the door behind the
+pulpit, showed us the Hebrew Scriptures used during the service by the
+Rabbi. They formed an immense parchment volume, and were rolled in
+silk upon a wooden staff. This was the sole object of interest in the
+synagogue, and its inspection concluded our visit.
+
+We descended the narrow stairs and emerged upon the piazza which we
+had left. It was only partly paved with brick, and was very dirty. The
+houses which surrounded it were on the outside old and shabby, and,
+even in this Venice of lofty edifices, remarkably high. A wooden bridge
+crossed a vile canal to another open space, where once congregated
+the merchants who sell antique furniture, old pictures, and objects of
+vertu. They are now, however, found everywhere in the city, and most
+of them are on the Grand Canal, where they heap together marvelous
+collections, and establish authenticities beyond cavil. “Is it an
+original?” asked a young lady who was visiting one of their shops, as
+she paused before an attributive Veronese, or--what know I?--perhaps a
+Titian. “_Si, signora, originalissimo_!”
+
+I do not understand why any class of Jews should still remain in the
+Ghetto, but it is certain, as I said, that they do remain there in great
+numbers. It may be that the impurity of the place and the atmosphere is
+conducive to purity of race; but I question if the Jews buried on the
+sandy slope of the Lido, and blown over by the sweet sea wind--it must
+needs blow many centuries to cleanse them of the Ghetto--are not rather
+to be envied by the inhabitants of those high dirty houses and low dirty
+lanes. There was not a touch of any thing wholesome, or pleasant, or
+attractive, to relieve the noisomeness of the Ghetto to its visitors;
+and they applauded, with a common voice, the neatness which had prompted
+Andrea the gondolier to roll up the carpet from the floor of his
+gondola, and not to spread it again within the limits of that quarter.
+
+In the good old times, when pestilence avenged the poor and oppressed
+upon their oppressors, what grim and dismal plagues may not have stalked
+by night and noonday out of those hideous streets, and passed the marble
+bounds of patrician palaces, and brought to the bedsides of the rich and
+proud the filthy misery of the Ghetto turned to poison! Thank God that
+the good old times are gone and going. One learns in these aged lands to
+hate and execrate the past.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+SOME MEMORABLE PLACES.
+
+
+We came away from the Ghetto, as we had arrived, in a gentle fall of
+goose-down, and winding crookedly through a dirty canal, glided into
+purer air and cleaner waters. I cannot well say how it was we came
+upon the old Servite Convent, which I had often looked for in vain, and
+which, associated with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of
+the most memorable places in Venice. We reached it, after passing by
+that old, old palace, which was appointed in the early ages of Venetian
+commerce for the reception of oriental traffic and traffickers, and
+where it is said the Moorish merchants resided till the later time of
+the Fondaco dei Turchi on the Grand Canal. The façade of the palace is
+richly sculptured; and near one corner is the bass-relief of a camel
+and his turbaned driver,--in token, perhaps, that man and beast (as
+orientals would understand them) were here entertained.
+
+We had lived long enough in Venice to know that it was by no means worth
+while to explore the interior of this old palace because the outside was
+attractive, and so we left it; and turning a corner, found ourselves
+in a shallow canal, with houses on one side, and a grassy bank on the
+other. The bank sloped gently from the water up to the walls of some
+edifice, on which ruin seemed to have fastened soon after the architect
+had begun his work. The vast walls, embracing several acres in their
+close, rose only some thirty or forty feet from the ground--only high
+enough, indeed, to join over the top of the great Gothic gates, which
+pierced them on two façades. There must have been barracks near; for on
+the sward, under the walls, muskets were stacked, and Austrian soldiers
+were practicing the bayonet-exercise with long poles padded at the
+point. “_Ein, zwei, drei,--vorwärts! Ein, zwei, drei,--ruckwärts_!”
+ snarled the drill-sergeant, and the dark-faced Hungarian soldiers--who
+may have soon afterward prodded their Danish fellow-beings all the
+more effectively for that day’s training--stooped, writhed, and leaped
+obedient. I, who had already caught sight of a little tablet in the wall
+bearing the name of Paolo Sarpi, could not feel the propriety of the
+military performance on that scene; yet I was very glad, dismounting
+from the gondola, to get by the soldiers without being forced back at
+the padded point of a pole, and offered no audible objection to their
+presence.
+
+So passing to the other side, I found entrance through a disused chapel
+to the interior of the convent. The gates on the outside were richly
+sculptured, and were reverend and clean; tufts of harsh grass grew
+from their arches, and hung down like the “overwhelming brows” of age.
+Within, at first light, I saw nothing but heaps of rubbish, piles of
+stone, and here and there a mutilated statue. I remember two pathetic
+caryatides, that seemed to have broken and sunk under too heavy a weight
+for their gentle beauty--and everywhere the unnamable filth with which
+ruin is always dishonored in Italy, and which makes the most picturesque
+and historic places inaccessible to the foot, and intolerable to the
+senses and the soul. I was thinking with a savage indignation on this
+incurable _porcheria_, of the Italian poor (who are guilty of such
+desecrations), when my eye fell upon an enclosed space in one corner,
+where some odd-looking boulders were heaped together. It was a space
+about six feet in depth, and twenty feet square; and the boulders, on
+closer inspection, turned out to be human skulls, nestling on piles of
+human bones. In any other land than Italy I think I should have turned
+from the grisly sight with a cowardly sickness and shuddering;
+but here!--Why, heaven and earth seem to take the loss of men so
+good-naturedly,--so many men have died and passed away with their
+difficult, ambitious, and troublesome little schemes,--and the great
+mass of mankind is taken so small account of in the course of destiny,
+that the idea of death does not appear so alien and repulsive as
+elsewhere, and the presence of such evidences of our poor mortality can
+scarcely offend sensibility. These were doubtless the bones of the good
+Servite friars who had been buried in their convent, and had been digged
+up to make way for certain improvements now taking place within its
+walls. I have no doubt that their deaths were a rest to their bodies,
+to say nothing of their souls. If they were at all in their lives
+like those who have come after them, the sun baked their bald brows in
+Summer, and their naked feet--poor feet! clapping round in wooden-soled
+sandals over the frozen stones of Venice--were swollen and gnawed with
+chilblains in winter; and no doubt some fat friar of their number,
+looking all the droller in his bare feet for the spectacles on his nose,
+came down Calle Falier then, as now, to collect the charity of bread and
+fuel, far oftener than the dwellers in that aristocratic precinct wished
+to see him.
+
+The friars’ skulls looked contented enough, and smiled after the hearty
+manner of skulls; and some of the leg-bones were thrust through the
+enclosing fence, and hung rakishly over the top. As to their spirits,
+I suppose they must have found out by this time that these confused
+and shattered tabernacles which they left behind them are not nearly so
+corrupt and dead as the monastic system which still cumbers the earth.
+People are building on the site of the old convent a hospital for
+indigent and decrepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have care
+of the inmates. It is a good end enough, but I think it would be the
+true compensation if all the rubbish of the old cloister were cleared
+from the area of those walls, and a great garden planted in the space,
+where lovers might whisper their wise nonsense, and children might
+romp and frolic, till the crumbling masonry forgot its old office of
+imprisonment and the memory of its prisoners. For here, one could only
+think of the moping and mumming herd of monks, who were certainly not
+worth remembering, while the fame of Paolo Sarpi, and the good which
+he did, refused to be localized. That good is an inheritance which has
+enriched the world; but the share of Venice has been comparatively
+small in it, and that of this old convent ground still less. I rather
+wondered, indeed, that I should have taken the trouble to look up the
+place; but it is a harmless, if even a very foolish, pastime to go
+seeking for the sublime secret of the glory of the palm in the earth
+where it struck root and flourished. So far as the lifelong presence and
+the death of a man of clear brain and true heart could hallow any scene,
+this ground was holy; for here Sarpi lived, and here in his cell
+he died, a simple Servite friar--he who had caught the bolts of
+excommunication launched against the Republic from Rome, and broken
+them in his hand,--who had breathed upon the mighty arm of the temporal
+power, and withered it to the juiceless stock it now remains. And yet I
+could not feel that the ground _was_ holy, and it did not make me think
+of Sarpi; and I believe that only those travelers who invent in cold
+blood their impressions of memorable places ever have remarkable
+impressions to record.
+
+Once, before the time of Sarpi, an excommunication was pronounced
+against the Republic with a result as terrible as that of the later
+interdict was absurd. Venice took possession, early in the fourteenth
+century, of Ferrara, by virtue of a bargain which the high contracting
+parties--the Republic and an exiled claimant to the ducal crown of
+Ferrara--had no right to make. The father of the banished prince had
+displeased him by marrying late in life, when the thoughts of a good
+man should be turned on other things, and the son compassed the sire’s
+death. For this the Ferrarese drove him away, and as they would not take
+him back to reign over them at the suggestion of Venice, he resigned his
+rights in favor of the Republic, and the Republic at once annexed the
+city to its territories. The Ferrarese appealed to the pope for his
+protection, and Clement V., supporting an ancient but long quiescent
+claim to Ferrara on the part of the Church, called upon the Venetians
+to surrender the city, and, on their refusal, excommunicated them. All
+Christian peoples were commanded “to arm against the Venetians, to spoil
+them of their goods, as separated from the union of Christians, and as
+enemies of the Roman Church.” They were driven out of Ferrara, but
+their troubles did not end with their loss of the city. Giustina
+Renier-Michiel says the nations, under the shelter of the pope’s
+permission and command, “exercised against them every species of
+cruelty; there was no wrong or violence of which they were not victims.
+All the rich merchandise which they had in France, in Flanders, and
+in other places, was confiscated; their merchants were arrested,
+maltreated, and some of them killed. Woe to us, if the Saracens had been
+baptized Christians! our nation would have been utterly destroyed.” Such
+was the ruin brought upon us by this excommunication that to this day it
+is a popular saying, concerning a man of gloomy aspect, “_He looks as if
+he were bringing the excommunication of Ferrara_.”
+
+No proverb, sprung from the popular terror, commemorates the interdict
+of the Republic which took place in 1606, and which, I believe, does not
+survive in popular recollection at Venice. It was at first a collision
+of the Venetian and Papal authorities at Ferrara, and then an
+interference of the pope to prevent the execution of secular justice
+upon certain ecclesiastical offenders in Venetia, which resulted in the
+excommunication of the Republic, and finally in the defeat of St. Peter
+and the triumph of St. Mark. Chief among the ecclesiastical offenders
+mentioned were the worthy Abbate Brandolino of Narvesa, who was accused,
+among other things, of poisoning his own father; and the good Canonico
+Saraceni of Vicenza, who was repulsed in overtures made to his beautiful
+cousin, and who revenged himself by defaming her character, and
+“filthily defacing” the doors of her palace. The abbate was arrested,
+and the canon, on this lady’s complaint to the Ten at Venice, was thrown
+into prison, and the weak and furious Pope Paul V., being refused their
+release by the Ten, excommunicated the whole Republic.
+
+In the same year, that is to say 1552, the bane and antidote, Paul the
+Pope and Paul Sarpi the friar, were sent into the world. The latter
+grew in piety, fame, and learning, and at the time the former began his
+quarrel with the Republic, there was none in Venice so fit and prompt
+as Sarpi to stand forth in her defense. He was at once taken into the
+service of St. Mark, and his clear, acute mind fashioned the spiritual
+weapons of the Republic, and helped to shape the secular measures taken
+to annul the interdict. As soon as the bull of excommunication was
+issued, the Republic instructed her officers to stop every copy of it
+at the frontier, and it was never read in any church in the Venetian
+dominions. The Senate refused to receive it from the Papal Nuncio. All
+priests, monks, and other servants of the Church, as well as all secular
+persons, were commanded to disregard it; and refractory ecclesiastics
+were forced to open their churches on pain of death. The Jesuits and
+Capuchins were banished; and clerical intriguers, whom Rome sent in
+swarms to corrupt social and family relations, by declaring an end of
+civil government in Venice, and preaching among women disobedience to
+patriotic husbands and fathers, were severely punished. With internal
+safety thus provided for, the Republic intrusted her moral, religious,
+and political defense entirely to Sarpi, who devoted himself to his
+trust with fidelity, zeal, and power.
+
+It might have been expected that the friend of Galileo, and the most
+learned and enlightened man of his country, would have taken the short
+and decisive method of discarding all allegiance to Rome as the most
+logical resistance to the unjust interdict. But the Venetians have ever
+been faithful Catholics, [Footnote: It is convenient here to attest
+the truth of certain views of religious sentiment in Italy, which Mr.
+Trollope, in his _Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar_, quotes from an
+“Italian author, by no means friendly to Catholicism, and very well
+qualified to speak of the progress of opinions and tendencies among his
+fellow-countrymen.”
+
+This author is Bianchi Giovini, who, speaking of modern Catholicism as
+the heir of the old materialistic paganism, says: “The Italians have
+identified themselves with this mode of religion. Cultivated men find
+in it the truth there is in it, and the people find what is agreeable
+to them. But both the former and the latter approve it as conformable to
+the national character. And whatever may be the religious system which
+shall govern our descendants twenty centuries hence, I venture to affirm
+that the exterior forms of it will be pretty nearly the same as those
+which prevail at present, and which did prevail twenty centuries ago.”
+ Mr. Trollope generously dissents from the “_pessimism_” of these views.
+The views are discouraging for some reasons; but, with considerable
+disposition and fair opportunity to observe Italian character in this
+respect, I had arrived at precisely these conclusions. I wish here to
+state that in my slight sketch of Sarpi and his times I have availed
+myself freely of Mr. Trollope’s delightful book--it is near being too
+much of a good thing--named above.] and Sarpi was (or, according to
+the papal writers, seemed to be) a sincere and obedient Servite friar,
+believing in the spiritual supremacy of the pope, and revering the
+religion of Rome. He therefore fought Paul inside of the Church, and his
+writings on the interdict remain the monument of his polemical success.
+He was the heart and brain of the Republic’s whole resistance,--he
+supplied her with inexhaustible reasons and answers,--and, though
+tempted, accused, and threatened, he never swerved from his fidelity to
+her.
+
+As he was the means of her triumph, [Footnote: The triumph was such only
+so far as the successful resistance to the interdict was concerned;
+for at the intercession of the Catholic powers the Republic gave up the
+ecclesiastical prisoners, and he allowed all the banished priests except
+the Jesuits to return. The Venetians utterly refused to perform any
+act of humiliation or penance. The interdict had been defied, and it
+remained despised.] remained the object of her love. He could never be
+persuaded to desert his cell in the Minorite Convent for the apartments
+appointed him by the State; and even when his busy days were spent in
+council at the Ducal Palace, he returned each night to sleep in the
+cloister. After the harmless interdict had been removed by Paul, and the
+unyielding Republic forgiven, the wrath of Rome remained kindled against
+the friar whose logic had been too keen for the last reason of popes. He
+had been tried for heresy in his youth at Milan, and acquitted; again,
+during the progress of St. Mark’s quarrel with Rome, his orthodoxy had
+been questioned; and now that all was over, and Rome could turn
+her attention to one particular offender, he was entreated, coaxed,
+commanded to come to her, and put her heart at rest concerning these old
+accusations. But Sarpi was very well in Venice. He had been appointed
+Consultor in Theology to the Republic, and had received free admission
+to the secret archives of the State,--a favor, till then, never bestowed
+on any. So he would not go to Rome, and Rome sent assassins to take his
+life. One evening, as he was returning from the Ducal Palace in company
+with a lay-brother of the convent, and an old patrician, very infirm and
+helpless, he was attacked by these _nuncios_ of the papal court: one of
+them seized the lay-brother, and another the patrician, while a third
+dealt Sarpi innumerable dagger thrusts. He fell as if dead, and the
+ruffians made off in the confusion.
+
+Sarpi had been fearfully wounded, but he recovered. The action of the
+Republic in this affair is a comforting refutation of the saying
+that Republics are ungrateful, and the common belief that Venice was
+particularly so. The most strenuous and unprecedented efforts were made
+to take the assassins, and the most terrific penalties were denounced
+against them. What was much better, new honors were showered upon Sarpi,
+and extraordinary and affectionate measures were taken to provide for
+his safety.
+
+And, in fine, he lived in the service of the Republic, revered and
+beloved, till his seventieth year, when he died with zeal for her good
+shaping his last utterance: “I must go to St. Mark, for it is late, and
+I have much to do.”
+
+Brave Sarpi, and brave Republic! Men cannot honor them enough. For
+though the terrors of the interdict were doubted to be harmless even
+at that time, it had remained for them to prove the interdict, then and
+forever, an instrument as obsolete as the catapult.
+
+I was so curious as to make some inquiry among the workmen on the old
+convent ground, whether any stone or other record commemorative of Sarpi
+had been found in the demolished cells. I hoped, not very confidently,
+to gather some trace of his presence there--to have, perhaps, the spot
+on which he died shown me. To a man, they were utterly ignorant of
+Sarpi, while affecting, in the Italian manner, to be perfectly informed
+on the subject. I was passed, with my curiosity, from one to another,
+till I fell into the hands of a kind of foreman, to whom I put my
+questions anew. He was a man of Napoleonic beard, and such fair
+red-and-white complexion that he impressed me as having escaped from
+a show of wax-works, and I was not at all surprised to find him a wax
+figure in point of intelligence. He seemed to think my questions the
+greatest misfortunes which had ever befallen him, and to regard each
+suggestion of Sarpi--_tempo della Repubblica--scomunica di Paolo
+Quinto_--as an intolerable oppression. He could only tell me that on
+a certain spot (which he pointed out with his foot) in the demolished
+church, there had been found a stone with Sarpi’s name upon it.
+The padrone, who had the contract for building the new convent, had
+said,--“Truly, I have heard speak of this Sarpi;” but the stone had been
+broken, and he did not know what had become of it.
+
+And, in fact, the only thing that remembered Sarpi, on the site of the
+convent where he spent his life, died, and was buried, was the little
+tablet on the outside of the wall, of which the abbreviated Latin
+announced that he had been Theologue to the Republic, and that his dust
+was now removed to the island of San Michele. After this failure, I
+had no humor to make researches for the bridge on which the friar
+was attacked by his assassins. But, indeed, why should I look for it?
+Finding it, could I have kept in my mind the fine dramatic picture I now
+have, of Sarpi returning to his convent on a mild October evening, weary
+with his long walk from St. Mark’s, and pacing with downcast eyes,--the
+old patrician and the lay-brother at his side, and the masked and
+stealthy assassins, with uplifted daggers, behind him? Nay, I fear I
+should have found the bridge with some scene of modern life upon it,
+and brought away in my remembrance an old woman with an oil-bottle, or a
+straggling boy with a tumbler, and a very little wine in it.
+
+On our way home from the Servite Convent, we stopped again near the
+corner and bridge of Sior Antonio Rioba,--this time to go into the house
+of Tintoretto, which stands close at the right hand, on the same quay.
+The house, indeed, might make some pretensions to be called a palace: it
+is large, and has a carved and balconied front, in which are set a
+now illegible tablet describing it as the painter’s dwelling, and
+a medallion portrait of Robusti. It would have been well if I had
+contented myself with this goodly outside; for penetrating, by a long
+narrow passage and complicated stairway, to the interior of the house,
+I found that it had nothing to offer me but the usual number of
+commonplace rooms in the usual blighting state of restoration. I must
+say that the people of the house, considering they had nothing in
+the world to show me, were kind and patient under the intrusion, and
+answered with very polite affirmation my discouraged inquiry if this
+were really Tintoretto’s house.
+
+Their conduct was different from that of the present inmates of Titian’s
+house, near the Fondamenta Nuove, in a little court at the left of
+the church of the Jesuits. These unreasonable persons think it an
+intolerable bore that the enlightened traveling public should break in
+upon their privacy. They put their heads out of the upper windows, and
+assure the strangers that the house is as utterly restored within as
+they behold it without (and it _is_ extremely restored), that it merely
+occupies the site of the painter’s dwelling, and that there is nothing
+whatever to see in it. I never myself had the heart to force an entrance
+after these protests; but an acquaintance of the more obdurate sex, whom
+I had the honor to accompany thither, once did so, and came out with a
+story of rafters of the original Titianic kitchen being still visible in
+the new one. After a lapse of two years I revisited the house, and found
+that so far from having learned patience by frequent trial, the inmates
+had been apparently goaded into madness during the interval. They seemed
+to know of our approach by instinct, and thrust their heads out, ready
+for protest, before we were near enough to speak. The lazy, frowzy
+women, the worthless men, and idle, loafing boys of the neighborhood,
+gathered round to witness the encounter; but though repeatedly commanded
+to ring (I was again in company with ladies), and try to force the
+place, I refused decidedly to do so. The garrison were strengthening
+their position by plastering and renewed renovation, and I doubt that by
+this time the original rafters are no longer to be seen. A plasterer’s
+boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood clapping his trowel on his board,
+inside the house, while we debated retreat, and derisively invited us
+to enter: _“Suoni pure, O signore! Questa e la famosa casa del gran
+pittore, l’immortale Tiziano,--suoni, signore!_” (Ring, by all means,
+sir. This is the famous house of the great painter, the immortal Titian.
+Ring!) _Da capo_. We retired amid the scorn of the populace. But
+indeed I could not blame the inhabitants of Titian’s house; and were
+I condemned to live in a place so famous as to attract idle curiosity,
+flushed and insolent with travel, I should go to the verge of man-traps
+and shot-guns to protect myself.
+
+This house, which is now hemmed in by larger buildings of later date,
+had in the painter’s time an incomparably “lovely and delightful
+situation.” Standing near the northern boundary of the city, it
+looked out over the lagoon,--across the quiet isle of sepulchres, San
+Michele,--across the smoking chimneys of the Murano glass-works, and the
+bell-towers of her churches,--to the long line of the sea-shore on the
+right and to the mainland on the left; and beyond the nearer lagoon
+islands and the faintly penciled outlines of Torcello and Burano in
+front, to the sublime distance of the Alps, shining in silver and
+purple, and resting their snowy heads against the clouds. It had a
+pleasant garden of flowers and trees, into which the painter descended
+by an open stairway, and in which he is said to have studied the famous
+tree in The Death of Peter Martyr. Here he entertained the great and
+noble of his day, and here he feasted and made merry with the gentle
+sculptor Sansovino, and with their common friend, the rascal-poet
+Aretino. The painter’s and the sculptor’s wives knew each other, and
+Sansovino’s Paola was often in the house of Cecilia Vecellio; [Footnote:
+The wife of Titian’s youth was, according to Ticozzi, named Lucia. It is
+in Mutinelli that I find allusion to Cecilia. The author of the _Annali
+Urbani_, speaking of the friendship and frequent meetings of Titian and
+Sansovino, says,--“Vivevano ... allora ambedue di un amore fatto sacro
+dalle leggi divine, essendo moglie di Tiziano una Cecilia.” I would not
+advise the reader to place too fond a trust in any thing concerning the
+house of Titian. Mutinelli refers to but one house of the painter, while
+Ticozzi makes him proprietor of two.] and any one who is wise enough not
+to visit the place, can easily think of those ladies there, talking at
+an open window that gives upon the pleasant garden, where their husbands
+walk up and down together in the purple evening light.
+
+In the palace where Goldoni was born a servant showed me an entirely new
+room near the roof, in which he said the great dramatist had composed
+his immortal comedies. As I knew, however, that Goldoni had left the
+house when a child, I could scarcely believe what the cicerone said,
+though I was glad he said it, and that he knew any thing at all of
+Goldoni. It is a fine old Gothic palace on a small canal near the Frari,
+and on the Calle del Nomboli, just across from a shop of indigestible
+pastry. It is known by an inscription, and by the medallion of the
+dramatist above the land-door; and there is no harm in looking in at the
+court on the ground-floor, where you may be pleased with the picturesque
+old stairway, wandering upward I hardly know how high, and adorned with
+many little heads of lions.
+
+Several palaces dispute the honor of being Bianca Cappello’s birthplace,
+but Mutinelli awards the distinction to the palace at Sant’ Appollinare
+near the Ponte Storto. One day a gondolier vaingloriously rowed us to
+the water-gate of the edifice through a very narrow, damp, and uncleanly
+canal, pretending that there was a beautiful staircase in its court. At
+the moment of our arrival, however, Bianca happened to be hanging out
+clothes from a window, and shrilly disclaimed the staircase, attributing
+this merit to another Palazzo Cappello. We were less pleased with her
+appearance here, than with that portrait of her which we saw on another
+occasion in the palace of a lady of her name and blood. This lady has
+since been married, and the name of Cappello is now extinct.
+
+The Palazzo Mocenigo, in which Byron lived, is galvanized into ghastly
+newness by recent repairs, and as it is one of the ugliest palaces on
+the Grand Canal, it has less claim than ever upon one’s interest. The
+custodian shows people the rooms where the poet wrote, dined, and slept,
+and I suppose it was from the hideous basket-balcony over the main door
+that one of his mistresses threw herself into the canal. Another of
+these interesting relicts is pointed out in the small butter-and-cheese
+shop which she keeps in the street leading from Campo Sant’ Angelo to
+San Paterinan: she is a fat sinner, long past beauty, bald, and somewhat
+melancholy to behold. Indeed, Byron’s memory is not a presence which I
+approach with pleasure, and I had most enjoyment in his palace when
+I thought of good-natured little Thomas Moore, who once visited his
+lordship there. Byron himself hated the recollection of his life in
+Venice, and I am sure no one else need like it. But he is become a _cosa
+di Venezia_, and you cannot pass his palace without having it pointed
+out to you by the gondoliers. Early after my arrival in the city I made
+the acquaintance of an old smooth-shaven, smooth-mannered Venetian, who
+said he had known Byron, and who told me that he once swam with him from
+the Port of San Nicolò to his palace-door. The distance is something
+over three miles, but if the swimmers came in with the sea the feat
+was not so great as it seems, for the tide is as swift and strong as a
+mill-race. I think it would be impossible to make the distance against
+the tide.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+COMMERCE.
+
+
+To make an annual report in September upon the Commercial Transactions
+of the port, was an official duty to which I looked forward at Venice
+with a vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted
+tranquillity. It was not because the preparation of the report was an
+affair of so great labor that I shrank from it; but because the material
+was wanting with which to make a respectable show among my consular
+peers in the large and handsomely misprinted volume of Commercial
+Relations annually issued by the enterprising Congressional publishers.
+It grieved me that upstart ports like Marseilles, Liverpool, and Bremen,
+should occupy so much larger space in this important volume than my
+beloved Venice; and it was with a feeling of profound mortification that
+I used to post my meagre account of a commerce that once was greater
+than all the rest of the world’s together. I sometimes desperately eked
+out the material furnished me in the statistics of the Venetian Chamber
+of Commerce by an agricultural essay on the disease of the grapes and
+its cure, or by a few wretched figures representative of a very slender
+mining interest in the province. But at last I determined to end these
+displeasures, and to make such researches into the history of her
+Commerce as should furnish me forth material for a report worthy of the
+high place Venice held in my reverence.
+
+Indeed, it seemed to be by a sort of anachronism that I had ever
+mentioned contemporary Venetian Commerce; and I turned with exultation
+from the phantom transactions of the present to that solid and
+magnificent prosperity of the past, of which the long-enduring
+foundations were laid in the earliest Christian times. For the new
+cities formed by the fugitives from barbarian invasion of the main-land,
+during the fifth century, had hardly settled around a common democratic
+government on the islands of the lagoons, when they began to develop
+maritime energies and resources; and long before this government was
+finally established at Rialto, (the ancient sea-port of Padua,) or
+Venice had become the capital of the young Republic, the Veneti had
+thriftily begun to turn the wild invaders of the main-land to account,
+to traffic with them, and to make treaties of commerce with their
+rulers. Theodoric, the king of the Goths, had fixed his capital at
+Ravenna, in the sixth century, and would have been glad to introduce
+Italian civilization among his people; but this warlike race were not
+prepared to practice the useful arts, and although they inhabited one of
+the most fruitful parts of Italy, with ample borders of sea, they were
+neither sailors nor tillers of the ground. The Venetians supplied them
+(at a fine profit, no doubt,) with the salt made in the lagoons, and
+with wines brought from Istria. The Goths viewed with especial amazement
+their skill in the management of their river-craft, by means of which
+the dauntless traders ascended the shallowest streams to penetrate the
+main-land, “running on the grass of the meadows, and between the stalks
+of the harvest field,”--just as in this day our own western steamers are
+known to run in a heavy dew.
+
+The Venetians continued to extend and confirm their commerce with those
+helpless and hungry warriors, and were ready also to open a lucrative
+trade with the Longobards when they descended into Italy about the year
+570. They had, in fact, abetted the Longobards in their war with the
+Greek Emperor Justinian, (who had opposed their incursion,) and in
+return the barbarians gave them the right to hold great free marts or
+fairs on the shores of the lagoons, whither the people resorted from
+every part of the Longobard kingdom to buy the salt of the lagoons,
+grain from Istria and Dalmatia, and slaves from every country.
+
+The slave-trade, indeed, formed then one of the most lucrative branches
+of Venetian commerce, as now it forms the greatest stain upon the annals
+of that commerce. The islanders, however, were not alone guilty of this
+infamous trade in men; other Italian states made profit of it, and it
+may be said to have been all but universal. But the Venetians were the
+most deeply involved in it, they pursued it the most unscrupulously,
+and they relinquished it the last. The pope forbade and execrated their
+commerce, and they sailed from the papal ports with cargoes of slaves
+for the infidels in Africa. In spite of the prohibitions of their own
+government, they bought Christians of kidnappers throughout Europe, and
+purchased the captives of the pirates on the seas, to sell them again to
+the Saracens. Nay, being an ingenious people, they turned their honest
+penny over and over again: they sold the Christians to the Saracens,
+and then for certain sums ransomed them and restored them to their
+countries; they sold Saracens to the Christians, and plundered the
+infidels in similar transactions of ransom and restoration. It is not
+easy to fix the dates of the rise or fall of this slave-trade; but
+slavery continued in Venice as late as the fifteenth century, and in
+earlier ages was so common that every prosperous person had two or
+three slaves. [Footnote: Mutinelli, _Del Costume Veneziano_. The present
+sketch of the history of Venetian commerce is based upon facts
+chiefly drawn from Mutinelli’s delightful treatise, _Del Commercio dei
+Veneziani_.] The corruption of the citizens at this time is properly
+attributed in part to the existence of slavery among them; and Mutinelli
+goes so far as to declare that the institution impressed permanent
+traits on the populace, rendering them idle and indisposed to honest
+labor, by degrading labor and making it the office of bondmen.
+
+While this hateful and enormous traffic in man was growing up,
+the Venetians enriched themselves by many other more blameless and
+legitimate forms of commerce, and gradually gathered into their grasp
+that whole trade of the East with Europe which passed through their
+hands for so many ages. After the dominion of the Franks was established
+in Italy in the eighth century, they began to supply that people, more
+luxurious than the Lombards, with the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry,
+and the perfumes of Byzantium; and held a great annual fair at the
+imperial city of Pavia, where they sold the Franks the manufactures of
+the polished and effeminate Greeks, and whence in return they carried
+back to the East the grain, wine, wool, iron, lumber, and excellent
+armor of Lombardy.
+
+From the time when they had assisted the Longobards against the Greeks,
+the Venetians found it to their interest to cultivate the friendship of
+the latter, until, in the twelfth century, they mastered the people
+so long caressed, and took their capital, under Enrico Dandolo. The
+privileges conceded to the wily and thrifty republican traders by the
+Greek Emperors, were extraordinary in their extent and value. Otho, the
+western Caesar, having succeeded the Franks in the dominion of Italy,
+had already absolved the Venetians from the annual tribute paid the
+Italian kings for the liberty of traffic, and had declared their
+commerce free throughout the Peninsula. In the mean time they had
+attacked and beaten the pirates of Dalmatia, and the Greeks now
+recognized their rule all over Dalmatia, thus securing to the Republic
+every port on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Then, as they aided
+the Greeks to repel the aggressions of the Saracens and Normans, their
+commerce was declared free in all the ports of the empire, and they were
+allowed to trade without restriction in all the cities, and to build
+warehouses and dépôts throughout the dominions of the Greeks, wherever
+they chose. The harvest they reaped from the vast field thus opened to
+their enterprise, must have more than compensated them for their losses
+in the barbarization of the Italian continent by the incessant civil
+wars which followed the disruption of the Lombard League, when trade and
+industry languished throughout Italy. When the Crusaders had taken the
+Holy Land, the king of Jerusalem bestowed upon the Venetians, in return
+for important services against the infidel, the same privileges conceded
+them by the Greek Emperor; and when, finally, Constantinople fell into
+the hands of the Crusaders, (whom they had skillfully diverted from the
+reconquest of Palestine to the siege of the Greek metropolis,) nearly
+all the Greek islands fell to the share of Venice; and the Latin
+emperors, who succeeded the Greeks in dominion, gave her such privileges
+as made her complete mistress of the commerce of the Levant.
+
+From this opulent traffic the insatiable enterprise of the Republic
+turned, without relinquishing the old, to new gains in the farthest
+Orient. Against her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the
+Egyptian ports, but she did not scruple to coax the barbarous prince of
+the Scythian Tartars, newly descended upon the shores of the Black Sea;
+and having secured his friendship, she proceeded, without imparting
+her design to her Latin allies at Constantinople, to plant a commercial
+colony at the mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands. Through
+this entrepôt, thenceforward, Venetian energy, with Tartar favor,
+directed the entire commerce of Asia with Europe, and incredibly
+enriched the Republic. The vastness and importance of such a trade, even
+at that day, when the wants of men were far simpler and fewer than now,
+could hardly be over-stated; and one nation then monopolized the traffic
+which is now free to the whole world. The Venetians bought their wares
+at the great marts of Samarcand, and crossed the country of Tartary
+in caravans to the shores of the Caspian Sea, where they set sail and
+voyaged to the River Volga, which they ascended to the point of its
+closest proximity to the Don. Their goods were then transported overland
+to the Don, and were again carried by water down to their mercantile
+colony at its mouth. Their ships, having free access to the Black Sea,
+could, after receiving their cargoes, return direct to Venice. The
+products of every country of Asia were carried into Europe by these
+dauntless traffickers, who, enlightened and animated by the travels and
+discoveries of Matteo, Nicolò, and Marco Polo, penetrated the remotest
+regions, and brought away the treasures which the prevalent fears and
+superstitions of other nations would have deterred them from seeking,
+even if they had possessed the means of access to them.
+
+The partial civilization of the age of chivalry had now reached its
+climax, and the class which had felt its refining effects was that
+best able to gratify the tastes still unknown to the great mass of the
+ignorant and impoverished people. It was a splendid time, and the robber
+counts and barons of the continent, newly tamed and Christianized into
+knights, spent splendidly, as became magnificent cavaliers serving noble
+ladies. The Venetians, who seldom did merely heroic things, who turned
+the Crusades to their own account and made money out of the Holy Land,
+and whom one always fancies as having a half scorn of the noisy grandeur
+of chivalry, were very glad to supply the knights and ladies with the
+gorgeous stuffs, precious stones, and costly perfumes of the East; and
+they now also began to establish manufactories, and to practice the
+industrial arts at home. Their jewelers and workers in precious metals
+soon became famous throughout Europe; the glass-works of Murano rose
+into celebrity and importance which they have never since lost (for they
+still supply the world with beads); and they began to weave stuffs of
+gold tissue at Venice, and silks so exquisitely dyed that no cavalier
+or dame of perfect fashion was content with any other. Besides this they
+gilded leather for lining walls, wove carpets, and wrought miracles of
+ornament in wax,--a material that modern taste is apt to disdain,--while
+Venetian candles in chandeliers of Venetian glass lighted up the palaces
+of the whole civilized world.
+
+The private enterprise of citizens was in every way protected and
+encouraged by the State, which did not, however, fail to make due and
+just profit out of it. The ships of the merchants always sailed to
+and from Venice in fleets, at stated seasons, seven fleets departing
+annually,--one for the Greek dominions, a second for Azof, a third for
+Trebizond, a fourth for Cyprus, a fifth for Armenia, a sixth for Spain,
+France, the Low Countries, and England, and a seventh for Africa. Each
+squadron of traders was accompanied and guarded from attacks of corsairs
+and other enemies, by a certain number of the state galleys, let
+severally to the highest bidders for the voyage, at a price never less
+than about five hundred dollars of our money. The galleys were all
+manned and armed by the State, and the crew of each amounted to three
+hundred persons; including a captain, four supercargoes, eight pilots,
+two carpenters, two calkers, a master of the oars, fifty cross-bowmen,
+three drummers, and two hundred rowers. The State also appointed a
+commandant of the whole squadron, with absolute authority to hear
+complaints, decide controversies, and punish offences.
+
+While the Republic was thus careful in the protection and discipline of
+its citizens in their commerce upon the seas, it was no less zealous for
+their security and its own dignity in their traffic with the continent
+of Europe. In that rude day, neither the life nor the property of the
+merchant who visited the ultramontane countries was safe; for the sorry
+device which he practiced, of taking with him a train of apes, buffoons,
+dancers, and singers, in order to divert his ferocious patrons from
+robbery and murder, was not always successful. The Venetians, therefore,
+were forbidden by the State to trade in those parts; and the Bohemians,
+Germans, and Hungarians, who wished to buy their wares, were obliged to
+come to the lagoons and buy them at the great marts which were held in
+different parts of the city, and on the neighboring main-land. A triple
+purpose was thus served,--the Venetian merchants were protected in their
+lives and goods, the national honor was saved from insult, and many an
+honest zecchino was turned by the innkeepers and others who lodged and
+entertained the customers of the merchants.
+
+Five of these great fairs were held every week, the chief market being
+at Rialto; and the transactions in trade were carefully supervised by
+the servants of the State. Among the magistracies especially appointed
+for the orderly conduct of the foreign and domestic commerce were the
+so-called Mercantile Consuls (_Ufficio dei Consoli dei Mercanti_), whose
+special duty it was to see that the traffic of the nation received
+no hurt from the schemes of any citizen or foreigner, and to punish
+offenses of this kind with banishment and even graver penalties. They
+measured every ship about to depart, to learn if her cargo exceeded the
+lawful amount; they guarded creditors against debtors and protected
+poor debtors against the rapacity of creditors, and they punished thefts
+sustained by the merchants. It is curious to find contemporary with
+this beneficent magistracy, a charge of equal dignity exercised by
+the College of Reprisals. A citizen offended in his person or property
+abroad, demanded justice of the government of the country in which the
+offense was committed. If the demand was refused, it was repeated by the
+Republic; if still refused, then the Republic, although at peace with
+the nation from which the offense came, seized any citizen of that
+country whom it could find, and, through its College of Reprisals,
+spoiled him of sufficient property to pay the damage done to its
+citizen. Finally, besides several other magistracies resident in Venice,
+the Republic appointed Consuls in its colonies and some foreign ports,
+to superintend the traffic of its citizens, and to compose their
+controversies. The Consuls were paid out of duties levied on the
+merchandise; they were usually nobles, and acted with the advice and
+consent of twelve other Venetian nobles or merchants.
+
+At this time, and, indeed, throughout its existence, the great lucrative
+monopoly of the Republic was the salt manufactured in the lagoons, and
+forced into every market, at rates that no other salt could compete
+with. Wherever alien enterprise attempted rivalry, it was instantly
+discouraged by Venice. There were troublesome salt mines, for example,
+in Croatia; and in 1381 the Republic caused them to be closed by paying
+the King of Hungary an annual pension of seven thousand crowns of gold.
+The exact income of the State, however, from the monopoly of salt, or
+from the various imposts and duties levied upon merchandise, it is now
+difficult to know, and it is impossible to compute accurately the value
+or extent of Venetian commerce at any one time. It reached the acme of
+its prosperity under Tommaso Mocenigo, who was Doge from 1414 to
+1423. There were then three thousand and three hundred vessels of the
+mercantile marine, giving employment to thirty-three thousand seamen,
+and netting to their owners a profit of forty per cent, on the capital
+invested. How great has been the decline of this trade may be understood
+from the fact that in 1863 it amounted, according to the careful
+statistics of the Chamber of Commerce, to only $60,229,740, and that the
+number of vessels now owned in Venice is one hundred and fifty. As the
+total tonnage of these is but 26,000, it may be inferred that they are
+small craft, and in fact they are nearly all coasting vessels. They no
+longer bring to Venice the drugs and spices and silks of Samarcand, or
+carry her own rare manufactures to the ports of western Europe; but they
+sail to and from her canals with humble freights of grain, lumber, and
+hemp. Almost as many Greek as Venetian ships now visit the old queen,
+who once levied a tax upon every foreign vessel in her Adriatic; and the
+shipping from the cities of the kingdom of Italy exceeds hers by ninety
+sail, while the tonnage of Great Britain is vastly greater. Her commerce
+has not only wasted to the shadow of its former magnitude, but it has
+also almost entirely lost its distinctive character. Glass of Murano is
+still exported to a value of about two millions of dollars annually; but
+in this industry, as in nearly all others of the lagoons, there is
+an annual decline. The trade of the port falls off from one to three
+millions of dollars yearly, and the manufacturing interests of the
+province have dwindled in the same proportion. So far as silk is
+concerned, there has been an immediate cause for the decrease in the
+disease which has afflicted the cocoons for several years past. Wine and
+oil are at present articles of import solely,--the former because of a
+malady of the grape, the latter because of negligent cultivation of the
+olive.
+
+A considerable number of persons are still employed in the manufacture
+of objects of taste and ornament; and in the Ruga Vecchia at Rialto they
+yet make the famous Venetian gold chain, which few visitors to the city
+can have failed to notice hanging in strands and wound upon spools, in
+the shop windows of the Old Procuratie and the Bridge of Rialto. It is
+wrought of all degrees of fineness, and is always so flexile that it
+may be folded and wound in any shape. It is now no longer made in great
+quantity, and is chiefly worn by contadine (as a safe investment of
+their ready money), [Footnote: Certain foreigners living in Venice were
+one day astonished to find their maid-servant in possession of a mass of
+this chain, and thought it their business to reprove her extravagance.
+“Signori,” she explained paradoxically, “if I keep my money, I spend
+it; if I buy this chain, it is always money (_è sempre soldi_).”] and
+old-fashioned people of the city, who display the finer sort in
+skeins or strands. At Chioggia, I remember to have seen a babe at its
+christening in church literally manacled and shackled with Venetian
+chain; and the little girl who came to us one day, to show us the
+splendors in which she had appeared at a _disputa_ (examination of
+children in doctrine), was loaded with it. Formerly, in the luxurious
+days of the Republic, it is said the chain was made as fine as
+sewing-silk, and worn embroidered on Genoa velvet by the patrician
+dames. It had then a cruel interest from the fact that its manufacture,
+after a time, cost the artisans their eyesight, so nice and subtle was
+the work. I could not help noticing that the workmen at the shops in the
+Ruga Vecchia still suffer in their eyes, even though the work is much
+coarser. I do not hope to describe the chain, except by saying that the
+links are horseshoe and oval shaped, and are connected by twos,--an
+oval being welded crosswise into a horseshoe, and so on, each two being
+linked loosely into the next.
+
+An infinitely more important art, in which Venice was distinguished a
+thousand years ago, has recently been revived there by Signor Salviati,
+an enthusiast in mosaic painting. His establishment is on the Grand
+Canal, not far from the Academy, and you might go by the old palace
+quite unsuspicious of the ancient art stirring with new life in its
+breast. “A. Salviati, Avvocato,” is the legend of the bell-pull, and you
+do not by any means take this legal style for that of the restorer of a
+neglected art, and a possessor of forgotten secrets in gilded glass and
+“smalts,” as they term the small delicate rods of vitreous substance,
+with which the wonders of the art are achieved. But inside of the palace
+are some two hundred artisans at work,--cutting the smalts and glass
+into the minute fragments of which the mosaics are made, grinding
+and smoothing these fragments, polishing the completed works, and
+reproducing, with incredible patience and skill, the lights and shadows
+of the pictures to be copied.
+
+You first enter the rooms of those whose talent distinguishes them as
+artists, and in whose work all the wonderful neatness and finish and
+long-suffering toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original
+life and inspiration alike impossible and profane to the elder
+mosaicists. Each artist has at hand a great variety of the slender stems
+of smalts already mentioned, and breaking these into minute fragments
+as he proceeds, he inserts them in the bed of cement prepared to receive
+his picture, and thus counterfeits in enduring mineral the perishable
+work of the painter.
+
+In other rooms artisans are at work upon various tasks of
+_marqueterie_,--table-tops, album-covers, paper-weights, brooches, pins
+and the like,--and in others they are sawing the smalts and glass into
+strips, and grinding the edges. Passing through yet another room, where
+the finished mosaic-works--of course not the pictorial mosaics--are
+polished by machinery, we enter the store-room, where the crowded
+shelves display blocks of smalts and glass of endless variety of
+color. By far the greater number of these colors are discoveries or
+improvements of the venerable mosaicist Lorenzo Radi, who has found
+again the Byzantine secrets of counterfeiting, in vitreous paste,
+aventurine (gold stone), onyx, chalcedony, malachite, and other natural
+stones, and who has been praised by the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice
+for producing mosaics even more durable in tint and workmanship than
+those of the Byzantine artists.
+
+In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart for the exhibition
+of the many beautiful and costly things which the art of the
+establishment produces. Here, besides pictures in mosaic, there are
+cunningly inlaid tables and cabinets, caskets, rich vases of chalcedony
+mounted in silver, and delicately wrought jewelry, while the floor is
+covered with a mosaic pavement ordered for the Viceroy of Egypt. There
+are here, moreover, to be seen the designs furnished by the Crown
+Princess of Prussia for the mosaics of the Queen’s Chapel at Windsor.
+These, like all other pictures and decorations in mosaic, are completed
+in the establishment on the Grand Canal, and are afterward put up as
+wholes in the places intended for them.
+
+In Venice nothing in decay is strange. But it is startling to find her
+in her old age nourishing into fresh life an art that, after feebly
+preserving the memory of painting for so many centuries, had decorated
+her prime only with the glories of its decline;--for Kugler ascribes the
+completion of the mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to
+the year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark’s to the tenth or
+eleventh centuries, when the Greek Church had already laid her ascetic
+hand on Byzantine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed its
+motives, and forbidden its inspirations. I think, however, one would
+look about him in vain for other evidences of a returning prosperity in
+the lagoons. The old prosperity of Venice, was based upon her monopoly
+of the most lucrative traffic in the world, as we have already
+seen,--upon her exclusive privileges in foreign countries, upon the
+enlightened zeal of her government, and upon men’s imperfect knowledge
+of geography, and the barbarism of the rest of Europe, as well as upon
+the indefatigable industry and intelligent enterprise of her citizens.
+America was still undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only
+one known; the people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty
+serfs, ruled and ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world’s ignorance,
+pride, and sloth were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions
+of the day, which, gross as they were, embodied perhaps its noblest
+and most hopeful sentiment, were a source of incalculable profit to
+the sharp-witted mistress of the Adriatic. It was the age of penances,
+pilgrimages, and relic-hunting, and the wealth which she wrung from the
+devotion of others was exceedingly great. Her ships carried the pilgrims
+to and from the Holy Land; her adventurers ransacked Palestine and
+the whole Orient for the bones and memorials of the saints; and her
+merchants sold the precious relics throughout Europe at an immense
+advance upon first cost.
+
+But the foundations of this prosperity were at last tapped by the tide
+of wealth which poured into Venice from every quarter of the world. Her
+citizens brought back the vices as well as the luxuries of the debauched
+Orient, and the city became that seat of splendid idleness and proud
+corruption which it continued till the Republic fell. It is needless
+here to rehearse the story of her magnificence and decay. At the time
+when the hardy, hungry people of other nations were opening paths to
+prosperity by land and sea, the Venetians, gorged with the spoils of
+ages, relinquished their old habits of daring enterprise, and dropped
+back into luxury and indolence. Their incessant wars with the Genoese
+began, and though they signally defeated the rival Republic in battle,
+Genoa finally excelled in commerce. A Greek prince had arisen to dispute
+the sovereignty of the Latin Emperors, whom the Venetians had helped
+to place upon the Byzantine throne; the Genoese, seeing the favorable
+fortunes of the Greek, threw the influence of their arms and intrigues
+in his favor, and the Latins were expelled from Constantinople in 1271.
+The new Greek Emperor had promised to give the sole navigation of the
+Black Sea to his allies, together with the church and palaces possessed
+by the Venetians in his capital, and he bestowed also upon the Genoese
+the city of Smyrna. It does not seem that he fulfilled literally all his
+promises, for the Venetians still continued to sail to and from their
+colony of Tana, at the head of the Sea of Azof, though it is certain
+that they had no longer the sovereignty of those waters; and the Genoese
+now planted on the shores of the Black Sea three large and important
+colonies to serve as entrepôts for the trade taken from their rivals.
+The oriental traffic of the latter was maintained through Tana, however,
+for nearly two centuries later, when, in 1410, the Mongol Tartars,
+under Tamerlane, fell upon the devoted colony, took, sacked, burnt,
+and utterly destroyed it. This was the first terrible blow to the
+most magnificent commerce which the world had ever seen, and which had
+endured for ages. No wonder that, on the day of Tana’s fall, terrible
+portents of woe were seen at Venice,--that meteors appeared, that demons
+rode the air, that the winds and waters rose and blew down houses and
+swallowed ships! A thousand persons are said to have perished in the
+calamities which commemorated a stroke so mortally disastrous to the
+national grandeur. After that the Venetians humbly divided with their
+ancient foes the possession and maintenance of the Genoese colony of
+Caffa, and continued, with greatly diminished glory, their traffic
+in the Black Sea; till the Turks having taken Constantinople, and the
+Greeks having acquired under their alien masters a zeal for commerce
+unknown to them during the times of their native princes, the Venetians
+were finally, on the first pretext of war, expelled from those waters in
+which they had latterly maintained themselves only by payment of heavy
+tribute to the Turks.
+
+In the mean time the industrial arts, in which Venice had heretofore
+excelled, began to be practiced elsewhere, and the Florentines and
+the English took that lead in the manufactures of the world, which the
+latter still retain. The league of the Hanseatic cities was established
+and rose daily in importance. At London, at Bruges, at Bergen, and
+Novogorod banks were opened under the protection and special favor of
+the Hanseatic League; its ships were preferred to any other, and the
+tide of commerce setting northward, the cities of the League persecuted
+the foreigners who would have traded in their ports. On the
+west, Barcelona began to dispute the preëminence of Venice in the
+Mediterranean, and Spanish salt was brought to Italy itself and sold
+by the enterprising Catalonians. Their corsairs vexed Venetian commerce
+everywhere; and in that day, as in our own, private English enterprise
+was employed in piratical depredations on the traffic of a friendly
+power.
+
+The Portuguese also began to extend their commerce, once so important,
+and catching the rage for discovery then prevalent, infested every sea
+in search of unknown land. One of their navigators, sailing by a chart
+which a monk named Fra Mauro, in his convent on the island of San
+Michele, had put together from the stories of travelers, and his own
+guesses at geography, discovered the Cape of Good Hope, and the trade
+of India with Europe was turned in that direction, and the old over-land
+traffic perished. The Venetian monopoly of this traffic had long been
+gone; had its recovery been possible, it would now have been useless to
+the declining prosperity of the Republic.
+
+It remained for Christopher Columbus, born of that Genoese nation which
+had hated the Venetians so long and so bitterly, to make the discovery
+of America, and thus to give the death-blow to the supremacy of Venice.
+While all these discoveries were taking place, the old queen of the seas
+had been weighed down with many and unequal wars. Her naval power
+had been everywhere crippled; her revenues had been reduced; her
+possessions, one after one, had been lopped away; and at the time
+Columbus was on his way to America half Europe, united in the League of
+Cambray, was attempting to crush the Republic of Venice.
+
+The whole world was now changed. Commerce sought new channels; fortune
+smiled on other nations. How Venice dragged onward from the end of
+her commercial greatness, and tottered with a delusive splendor to her
+political death, is surely one of the saddest of stories if not the
+sternest of lessons.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+VENETIAN HOLIDAYS.
+
+
+The national character of the Venetians was so largely influenced by the
+display and dissipation of the frequent festivals of the Republic, that
+it cannot be fairly estimated without taking them into consideration,
+nor can the disuse of these holidays (of which I have heretofore spoken)
+be appreciated in all its import, without particular allusion to their
+number and nature. They formed part of the aristocratic polity of the
+old commonwealth, which substituted popular indulgence for popular
+liberty, and gave the people costly pleasures in return for the
+priceless rights of which they had been robbed, set up national pride in
+the place of patriotism, and was as well satisfied with a drunken joy in
+its subjects as if they had possessed a true content.
+
+Full notice of these holidays would be history [Footnote: “Siccome,”
+ says the editor of Giustina Renier-Michiel’s _Origine delle Feste
+Veneziane_,--“Siccome l’illustre Autrice ha voluto applicare al suo
+lavoro il modesto titolo di _Origins delle Feste Veneziane_, e siccome
+questo potrebbe porgere un’ idea assai diversa dell’ opera a chi non ne
+ha alcuna cognizione, da quello che è sostanzialmente, si espone questo
+Epitome, perchè ognun regga almeno in parte, che quest’ opera sarebbe
+del titolo di _storia_ condegna, giacchè essa non è che una costante
+descrizione degli avvenimenti più importanti e luminosi della Repubblica
+di Venezia.” The work in question is one of much research and small
+philosophy, like most books which Venetians have written upon Venice;
+but it has admirably served my purpose, and I am indebted to it for most
+of the information contained in this chapter.] of Venice, for each one
+had its origin in some great event of her existence, and they were so
+numerous as to commemorate nearly every notable incident in her annals.
+Though, as has been before observed, they had nearly all a general
+religious character, the Church, as usual in Venice, only seemed to
+direct the ceremonies in its own honor, while it really ministered
+to the political glory of the oligarchy, which knew how to manage its
+priests as well as its prince and people. Nay, it happened in one case,
+at least, that a religious anniversary was selected by the Republic
+as the day on which to put to shame before the populace certain of the
+highest and reverendest dignitaries of the Church. In 1162, Ulrich, the
+Patriarch of Aquileja, seized, by a treacherous stratagem, the city of
+Grado, then subject to Venice. The Venetians immediately besieged and
+took the city, with the patriarch and twelve of his canons in it, and
+carried them prisoners to the lagoons. The turbulent patriarchs of
+Aquileja had long been disturbers of the Republic’s dominion, and
+the people now determined to make an end of these displeasures. They
+refused, therefore, to release the patriarch, except on condition that
+he should bind himself to send them annually a bull and twelve fat hogs.
+It is not known what meaning the patriarch attached to this singular
+ceremony; but with the Venetians the bull was typical of himself,
+and the swine of his canons, and they yearly suffered death in these
+animals, which were slaughtered during Shrovetide in the Piazza San
+Marco amid a great concourse of the people, in the presence of the
+Doge and Signory. The locksmiths, and other workers in iron, had
+distinguished themselves in the recapture of Grado, and to their guild
+was allotted the honor of putting to death the bull and swine. Great art
+was shown in striking off the bull’s head at one blow, without suffering
+the sword to touch the ground after passing through the animal’s neck;
+the swine were slain with lances. Athletic games among the people
+succeeded, and the Doge and his Senators attacked and destroyed, with
+staves, several lightly built wooden castles, to symbolize the abasement
+of the feudal power before the Republic. As the centuries advanced this
+part of the ceremony, together with the slaughter of the swine, was
+disused; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of a corrupt disdain of
+simple and healthy allegory on the part of the proud doges, but in which
+I think most people will discern only a natural wish to discontinue in
+more civilized times a puerile barbarity. Mr. Ruskin himself finds
+no evidence of “state pride” in the abolition of the slaughter of the
+swine. The festival was very popular, and continued a long time, though
+I believe not till the fall of the Republic.
+
+Another tribute, equally humiliating to those who paid it, was imposed
+upon the Paduans for an insult offered to St. Mark, and gave occasion
+for a national holiday, some fifty years after the Patriarch of Aquileja
+began atonement for his outrage. In the year 1214, the citizens of
+Treviso made an entertainment to which they invited the noble youth of
+the surrounding cities. In the chief piazza of the town a castle of wood
+exquisitely decorated was held against all comers by a garrison of the
+fairest Trevisan damsels. The weapons of defense were flowers, fruits,
+bonbons, and the bright eyes of the besieged; while the missiles of
+attack were much the same, with whatever added virtue might lie in
+tender prayers and sugared supplications. Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and
+Venice sent their gallantest youths, under their municipal banners, to
+take part in this famous enterprise; and the attack was carried on by
+the leagued forces with great vigor, but with no effect on the Castle
+of Love, as it was called, till the Venetians made a breach at a weak
+point. These young men were better skilled in the arts of war than their
+allies; they were richer, and had come to Treviso decked in the spoils
+of the recent sack of Constantinople, and at the moment they neared
+the castle it is reported that they corrupted the besieged by throwing
+handfuls of gold into the tower. Whether this be true or not, it is
+certain that the conduct of the Venetians in some manner roused the
+Paduans to insult, and that the hot youths came to blows. In an instant
+the standard of St. Mark was thrown down and trampled under the feet of
+the furious Paduans; blood flowed, and the indignant Trevisans drove the
+combatants out of their city. The spark of war spreading to the rival
+cities, the Paduans were soon worsted, and three hundred of their number
+were made prisoners. These they would willingly have ransomed at any
+price, but their enemies would not release them except on the payment of
+two white pullets for each warrior. The shameful ransom was paid in the
+Piazza, to the inextinguishable delight of the Venetians, who, never
+wanting in sharp and biting wit, abandoned themselves to sarcastic
+exultation. They demanded that the Paduans should, like the patriarch,
+repeat the tribute annually; but the prudent Doge Ziani judged the
+single humiliation sufficient, and refused to establish a yearly
+celebration of the feast.
+
+One of the most famous occasional festivals of Venice is described by
+Petrarch in a Latin letter to his friend Pietro Bolognese. It was in
+celebration of the reduction of the Greeks of Candia, an island which
+in 1361 had recently been ceded to the Republic. The Candiotes rose in
+general rebellion, but were so promptly subdued that the news of the
+outbreak scarcely anticipated the announcement of its suppression in
+Venice. Petrarch was at this time the guest of the Republic, and from
+his seat at the right of the Doge on the gallery of St. Mark’s Church,
+in front of the bronze horses, he witnessed the chivalric shows given
+in the Piazza below, which was then unpaved, and admirably adapted for
+equestrian feats of arms. It is curious to read the poet’s account of
+these in a city where there is now no four-footed beast larger than a
+dog. But in the age of chivalry even the Venetians were mounted, and
+rode up and down their narrow streets, and jousted in their great
+campos.
+
+Speaking of twenty-four noble and handsome youths, whose feats formed
+a chief part of a show of which he “does not know if in the whole world
+there has been seen the equal,” Petrarch says: “It was a gentle sight
+to see so many youths decked in purple and gold, as they ruled with
+the rein and urged with the spur their coursers, moving in glittering
+harness, with iron-shod feet which scarcely seemed to touch the ground.”
+ And it must have been a noble sight, indeed, to behold all this before
+the “golden façade of the temple,” in a place so packed with spectators
+“that a grain of barley could not have fallen to the ground. The great
+piazza, the church itself, the towers, the roofs, the arcades, the
+windows, all were--I will not say full, but running over, walled
+and paved with people.” At the right of the church was built a great
+platform, on which sat “four hundred honestest gentlewomen, chosen
+from the flower of the nobility, and distinguished in their dress and
+bearing, who, amid the continual homage offered them morning, noon, and
+night, presented the image of a celestial congress.” Some noblemen, come
+hither by chance, “from the part of Britain, comrades and kinsmen of
+their King, were present,” and attracted the notice of the poet. The
+feasts lasted many days, but on the third day Petrarch excused himself
+to the Doge, pleading, he says, his “ordinary occupations, already known
+to all.”
+
+Among remoter feasts in honor of national triumphs, was one on the Day
+of the Annunciation, commemorative of the removal of the capital of the
+Venetian isles to Rialto from Malamocco, after King Pepin had burnt the
+latter city, and when, advancing on Venice, he was met in the lagoons
+and beaten by the islanders and the tides: these by their recession
+stranding his boats in the mud, and those falling upon his helpless host
+with the fury of an insulted and imperiled people. The Doge annually
+assisted at mass in St. Mark’s in honor of the victory, but not long
+afterward the celebration of it ceased, as did that of a precisely
+similar defeat of the Hungarians, who had just descended from Asia into
+Europe. In 1339 there were great rejoicings in the Piazza for the peace
+with Mastino della Scala, who, beaten by the Republic, ceded his city of
+Treviso to her.
+
+Doubtless the most splendid of all the occasional festivals was that
+held for the Venetian share of the great Christian victory at Lepanto
+over the Turks. All orders of the State took part in it; but the most
+remarkable feature of the celebration was the roofing of the Merceria,
+all the way from St. Mark’s to Rialto, with fine blue cloth, studded
+with golden stars to represent the firmament, as the shopkeepers
+imagined it. The pictures of the famous painters of that day, Titian,
+Tintoretto, Palma, and the rest, were exposed under this canopy, at the
+end near Rialto. Later, the Venetian victories over the Turks at the
+Dardanelles were celebrated by a regatta, in 1658; and Morosini’s
+brilliant reconquest of the Morea, in 1688, was the occasion of other
+magnificent shows.
+
+The whole world has now adopted, with various modifications, the
+picturesque and exciting pastime of the regatta, which, according to
+Mutinelli, [Footnote: _Annali Urbani di Venezia_.] originated among the
+lagoons at a very early period, from a peculiar feature in the military
+discipline of the Republic. A target for practice with the bow and
+cross-bow was set up every week on the beach at the Lido, and nobles and
+plebeians rowed thither in barges of thirty oars, vying with each other
+in the speed and skill with which the boats were driven. To divert
+the popular discontent that followed the Serrar del Consiglio and the
+suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s conspiracy early in the fourteenth
+century, the proficiency arising from this rivalry was turned to
+account, and the spectacle of the regatta was instituted. Agreeably,
+however, to the aristocratic spirit of the newly established oligarchy,
+the patricians withdrew from the lists, and the regatta became the
+affair exclusively of the gondoliers. In other Italian cities, where
+horse and donkey races were the favorite amusement, the riders were of
+both sexes; and now at Venice women also entered into the rivalry of the
+regatta. But in gallant deference to their weakness, they were permitted
+to begin the course at the mouth of the Grand Canal before the Doganna
+di Mare, while the men were obliged to start from the Public Gardens.
+They followed the Grand Canal to its opposite extremity, beyond the
+present railway station, and there doubling a pole planted in the water
+near the Ponte della Croce, returned to the common goal before the
+Palazzo Foscari. Here was erected an ornate scaffolding to which the
+different prizes were attached. The first boat carried off a red banner;
+the next received a green flag; the third, a blue; and the fourth, a
+yellow one. With each of these was given a purse, and with the last was
+added, by way of gibe, a live pig, a picture of which was painted on the
+yellow banner. Every regatta included five courses, in which single and
+double oared boats, and single and double oared gondolas successively
+competed,--the fifth contest being that in which the women participated
+with two-oared boats. Four prizes like those described were awarded to
+the winners in each course.
+
+The regatta was celebrated with all the pomp which the superb city could
+assume. As soon as the government announced that it was to take place,
+the preparations of the champions began. “From that time the gondolier
+ceased to be a servant; he became almost an adoptive son;” [Footnote:
+_Feste Veneziane_.] his master giving him every possible assistance and
+encouragement in the daily exercises by which he trained himself for the
+contest, and his parish priest visiting him in his own house, to bless
+his person, his boat, and the image of the Madonna or other saint
+attached to the gondola. When the great day arrived the Canalazzo
+swarmed with boats of every kind. “All the trades and callings,” says
+Giustina Renier-Michiel, [Footnote: _Feste Veneziane_] with that pride
+in the Venetian past which does not always pass from verbosity to
+eloquence, “had each its boats appropriately mounted and adorned; and
+private societies filled an hundred more. The chief families among the
+nobility appeared in their boats, on which they had lavished their taste
+and wealth.” The rowers were dressed with the most profuse and
+elaborate luxury, and the barges were made to represent historical and
+mythological conceptions. “To this end the builders employed carving and
+sculpture, together with all manner of costly stuffs of silk and velvet,
+gorgeous fringes and tassels of silver and gold, flowers, fruits,
+shrubs, mirrors, furs, and plumage of rare birds.... Young patricians,
+in fleet and narrow craft, propelled by swift rowers, preceded the
+champions and cleared the way for them, obliging the spectators to
+withdraw on either side.... They knelt on sumptuous cushions in the
+prows of their gondolas, cross-bow in hand, and launched little pellets
+of plaster at the directors of such obstinate boats as failed to obey
+their orders to retire....
+
+“To augment the brilliancy of the regatta the nature of the place
+concurred. Let us imagine that superb canal, flanked on either side by
+a long line of edifices of every sort; with great numbers of marble
+palaces,--nearly all of noble and majestic structure, some admirable
+for an antique and Gothic taste, some for the richest Greek and Roman
+architecture,--their windows and balconies decked with damasks, stuffs
+of the Levant, tapestries, and velvets, the vivid colors of which were
+animated still more by borders and fringes of gold, and on which leaned
+beautiful women richly dressed and wearing tremulous and glittering
+jewels in their hair. Wherever the eye turned, it beheld a vast
+multitude at doorways, on the rivas, and even on the roofs. Some of the
+spectators occupied scaffoldings erected at favorable points along the
+sides of the canal; and the patrician ladies did not disdain to leave
+their palaces, and, entering their gondolas, lose themselves among the
+infinite number of the boats....
+
+“The cannons give the signal of departure. The boats dart over the
+water with the rapidity of lightning.... They advance and fall behind
+alternately. One champion who seems to yield the way to a rival suddenly
+leaves him in the rear. The shouts of his friends and kinsmen hail his
+advantage, while others already passing him, force him to redouble his
+efforts. Some weaker ones succumb midway, exhausted.... They withdraw,
+and the kindly Venetian populace will not aggravate their shame with
+jeers; the spectators glance at them compassionately, and turn again to
+those still in the lists. Here and there they encourage them by
+waving handkerchiefs, and the women toss their shawls in the air. Each
+patrician following close upon his gondolier’s boat, incites him with
+his voice, salutes him by name, and flatters his pride and spirit....
+The water foams under the repeated strokes of the oars; it leaps up in
+spray and falls in showers on the backs of the rowers already dripping
+with their own sweat.... At last behold the dauntless mortal who seizes
+the red banner! His rival had almost clutched it, but one mighty stroke
+of the oar gave him the victory.... The air reverberates with a clapping
+of hands so loud that at the remotest point on the canal the moment of
+triumph is known. The victors plant on their agile boat the conquered
+flag, and instead of thinking to rest their weary arms, take up the oars
+again and retrace their course to receive congratulations and applause.”
+
+The regattas were by no means of frequent occurrence, for only forty-one
+took place during some five centuries. The first was given in 1315,
+and the last in 1857, in honor of the luckless Archduke Maximilian’s
+marriage with Princess Charlotte of Belgium. The most sumptuous and
+magnificent regatta of all was that given to the city in the year 1686,
+by Duke Ernest of Brunswick. This excellent prince having sold a great
+part of his subjects to the Republic for use in its wars against
+the Turk, generously spent their price in the costly and edifying
+entertainments of which Venice had already become the scene. The
+Judgment of Paris, and the Triumph of the Marine Goddesses had been
+represented at his expense on the Grand Canal, with great acceptance.
+And now the Triumph of Neptune formed a principal feature in the
+gayeties of his regatta. Nearly the whole of the salt-water mythology
+was employed in the ceremony. An immense wooden whale supporting a
+structure of dolphins and Tritons, surmounted by a statue of Neptune,
+and drawn by sea-horses, moved from the Piazzetta to the Palazzo
+Foscari, where numbers of Sirens sported about in every direction till
+the Regatta began. The whole company of the deities, very splendidly
+arrayed, then joined them as spectators, and behaved in the manner
+affected by gods and goddesses on these occasions. Mutinelli [Footnote:
+_Annali Urbani._] recounts the story with many sighs and sneers and
+great exactness; but it is not interesting. The miraculous recovery of
+the body of St. Mark, in 1094, after it had been lost for nearly two
+centuries, created a festive anniversary which was celebrated for a
+while with great religious pomp; but the rejoicings were not separately
+continued in after years. The festival was consolidated (if one may
+so speak) with two others in honor of the same saint, and the triple
+occasions were commemorated by a single holiday. The holidays annually
+distinguished by civil or ecclesiastical displays were twenty-five in
+number, of which only eleven were of religious origin, though all were
+of partly religious observance. One of the most curious and interesting
+of the former was of the earliest date, and was continued till the last
+years of the Republic. In 596 Narses, the general of the Greek Emperor,
+was furnished by the Venetians with means of transport by sea from
+Aquileja to Ravenna for the army which he was leading against the
+Ostrogoths; and he made a vow that if successful in his campaign, he
+would requite their generosity by erecting two churches in Venice.
+Accordingly, when he had beaten the Ostrogoths, he caused two votive
+churches to be built,--one to St. Theodore, on the site of the present
+St. Mark’s Church, and another to San Geminiano, on the opposite bank
+of the canal which then flowed there. In lapse of time the citizens,
+desiring to enlarge their Piazza, removed the church of San Geminiano
+back as far as the present Fabbrica Nuova, which Napoleon built on the
+site of the demolished temple, between the western ends of the New and
+Old Procuratie. The removal was effected without the pope’s leave, which
+had been asked, but was refused in these words,--“The Holy Father
+cannot sanction the commission of a sacrilege, though he can pardon
+it afterwards.” The pontiff, therefore, imposed on the Venetians for
+penance that the Doge should pay an annual visit forever to the church.
+On the occasion of this visit the parish priest met him at the door,
+and offered the holy water to him; and then the Doge, having assisted
+at mass, marched with his Signory and the clergy of the church to its
+original site, where the clergy demanded that it should be rebuilt, and
+the Doge replied with the promise,--“Next year.” A red stone was set
+in the pavement to mark the spot where the Doge renewed this
+never-fulfilled promise. [Footnote: As the author of the _Feste
+Veneziane_ tells this story it is less dramatic and characteristic. The
+clergy, she says, reminded the Doge of the occasion of his visit, and
+his obligation to renew it the following year, which he promised to do.
+I cling to the version in the text, for it seems to me that the Doge’s
+perpetual promise to rebuild the church was a return in kind for the
+pope’s astute answer to the petition asking him to allow its removal. So
+good a thing ought to be history.] The old church was destroyed by fire,
+and Sansovino built, in 1506, the temple thrown down by Napoleon to make
+room for his palace.
+
+The 31st of January, on which day in 828 the body of St. Mark was
+brought from Alexandria to Venice, is still observed, though the
+festival has lost all the splendor which it received from civil
+intervention. For a thousand years the day was hallowed by a solemn mass
+in St. Mark’s, at which the Doge and his Signory assisted.
+
+The chief of the State annually paid a number of festive visits, which
+were made the occasion of as many holidays. To the convent of San
+Zaccaria he went in commemoration of the visit paid to that retreat by
+Pope Benedict III., in 855, when the pontiff was so charmed by the piety
+and goodness of the fair nuns, that, after his return to Rome, he sent
+them great store of relics and indulgences. It thus became one of the
+most popular of the holidays, and the people repaired in great multitude
+with their Doge to the convent, on each recurrence of the day, that
+they might see the relics and buy the indulgences. The nuns were of the
+richest and noblest families of the city, and on the Doge’s first visit,
+they presented him with that bonnet which became the symbol of his
+sovereignty. It was wrought of pure gold, and set with precious stones
+of marvelous great beauty and value; and in order that the State might
+never seem forgetful of the munificence which bestowed the gift, the
+bonnet was annually taken from the treasury and shown by the Doge
+himself to the Sisters of San Zaccaria. The Doge Pietro Tradonico,
+to whom the bonnet was given, was killed in a popular tumult on this
+holiday, while going to the convent.
+
+There was likewise a vast concourse of people and traffic in indulgences
+at the church of Santa Maria della Carita (now the Academy of Fine
+Arts), on the anniversary of the day when Pope Alexander III., in 1177,
+flying from the Emperor Barbarossa, found refuge in that monastery.
+[Footnote: Selvatico and Lazari in their admirable _Guida Artistica e
+Storica di Veneza_, say that the pope merely lodged in the monastery on
+the day when he signed the treaty of peace with Barbarossa.] He bestowed
+great privileges upon it, and the Venetians honored the event to the end
+of their national existence.
+
+One of the rare occasions during the year when the Doge appeared
+officially in public after nightfall, was on St. Stephen’s Day. He then
+repaired at dusk in his gilded barge, with splendid attendance of nobles
+and citizens, to the island church of San Giorgio Maggiore, whither, in
+1009, the body of St. Stephen was brought from Constantinople. On the
+first of May the Doge visited the Convent of the Virgins, (the convent
+building now forms part of the Arsenal,) where the abbess presented
+him with a bouquet, and graceful and pleasing ceremonies took place in
+commemoration of the erection and endowment of the church. The head of
+the State also annually assisted at mass in St. Mark’s, to celebrate the
+arrival in Venice of St. Isidore’s body, which the Doge Domenico Michiel
+brought with him from the East, at the end of twenty-six years’ war
+against the infidels; and, finally, after the year 1485, when the
+Venetians stole the bones of San Rocco from the Milanese, and deposited
+them in the newly finished Scuola di San Rocco, a ducal visit was
+annually paid to that edifice.
+
+Two only of the national religious festivals yet survive the
+Republic,--that of the church of the Redentore on the Giudecca, and that
+of the church of the Salute on the Grand Canal,--both votive churches,
+built in commemoration of the city’s deliverances from the pest in 1578
+and 1630. In their general features the celebrations of the two holidays
+are much alike; but that of the Salute is the less important of the two,
+and is more entirely religious in its character. A bridge of boats
+is annually thrown across the Canalazzo, and on the day of the
+Purification, the people throng to the Virgin’s shrine to express their
+gratitude for her favor. This gratitude was so strong immediately after
+the cessation of the pest in 1630, that the Senate, while the architects
+were preparing their designs for the present church, caused a wooden
+one to be built on its site, and consecrated with ceremonies of singular
+splendor. On the Festa del Redentore (the third Sunday of July) a bridge
+of boats crosses the great canal of the Giudecca, and vast throngs
+constantly pass it, day and night. But though the small tradesmen who
+deal in fried cakes, and in apples, peaches, pears, and other fruits,
+make intolerable uproar behind their booths on the long quay before the
+church; though the venders of mulberries (for which the gardens of the
+Giudecca are famous) fill the air with their sweet jargoning (for
+their cries are like the shrill notes of so many singing-birds); though
+thousands of people pace up and down, and come and go upon the bridge,
+yet the Festa del Redentore has now none of the old-time gayety it wore
+when the Venetians thronged the gardens, and feasted, sang, danced,
+and flirted the night away, and at dawn went in their fleets of
+many-lanterned boats, covering the lagoon with fairy light, to behold
+the sunrise on the Adriatic Sea.
+
+Besides the religious festivals mentioned, there were five banquets
+annually given by the State on the several days of St. Mark, St. Vitus,
+St. Jerome, and St. Stephen, and the Day of the Ascension, all of which
+were attended with religious observances. Good Friday was especially
+hallowed by church processions in each of the campos; and St. Martha’s
+Day was occasion for junketings on the Giudecca Canal, when a favorite
+fish, being in season, was devotionally eaten.
+
+The civil and political holidays which lasted till the fall of the
+Republic were eleven. One of the earliest was the anniversary of
+the recapture of the Venetian Brides, who were snatched from their
+bridegrooms, at the altar of San Pietro di Castello, by Triestine
+pirates. The class of citizens most distinguished in the punishment
+of the abductors was the trade of carpenters, who lived chiefly in the
+parish of Santa Maria Formosa; and when the Doge in his gratitude bade
+them demand any reasonable grace, the trade asked that he should pay
+their quarter an annual visit. “But if it rains?” said the Doge. “We
+will give you a hat to cover you,” answered the carpenters. “And if I am
+hungry?” “We will give you to eat and drink.” So when the Doge made his
+visit on the day of the Virgin’s Purification, he was given a hat of
+gilded straw, a bottle of wine, and loaves of bread. On this occasion
+the State bestowed dowers upon twelve young girls among the fairest and
+best of Venice (chosen two from each of the six sections of the city),
+who marched in procession to the church of Santa Maria Formosa. But as
+time passed, the custom lost its simplicity and purity: pretty girls
+were said to make eyes at handsome youths in the crowd, and scandals
+occurred in public. Twelve wooden figures were then substituted, but the
+procession in which they were carried was followed by a disgusted
+and hooting populace, and assailed with a shower of turnips.
+The festivities, which used to last eight days, with incredible
+magnificence, fell into discredit, and were finally abolished during the
+war when the Genoese took Chioggia and threatened Venice, under Doria.
+This was the famous Festa delle Marie.
+
+In 997 the Venetians beat the Narentines at sea, and annexed all Istria,
+as far as Dalmatia, to the Republic. On the day of the Ascension, of
+the same year, the Doge, for the first time, celebrated the dominion of
+Venice over the Adriatic, though it was not till some two hundred years
+later that the Pope Alexander III. blessed the famous espousals, and
+confirmed the Republic in the possession of the sea forever. “What,”
+ cries Giustina Renier-Michiel, turning to speak of the holiday
+thus established, and destined to be the proudest in the Venetian
+calendar,--“what shall I say of the greatest of all our solemnities,
+that of the Ascension? Alas! I myself saw Frenchmen and Venetians, full
+of derision and insult, combine to dismantle the Bucintoro and burn it
+for the gold upon it!” [Footnote: That which follows is a translation
+of the report given by Cesare Cantù, in his _Grande Illustrazione
+del Lombardo-Veneto_, of a conversation with the author of _Feste
+Veneziane_. It is not necessary to remind readers of Venetian history
+that Renier and Michiel were of the foremost names in the Golden Book.
+She who bore them both was born before the fall of the Republic which
+she so much loved and lamented, and no doubt felt more than the grief
+she expresses for the fate of the last Bucintoro. It was destroyed, as
+she describes, in 1796, by the French Republicans and Venetian Democrats
+after the abdication of the oligarchy; but a fragment of its mast yet
+remains, and is to be seen in the museum of the Arsenal.].... (This
+was the nuptial-ship in which the Doge went to wed the sea, and the
+patriotic lady tells us concerning the Bucintoro of her day): “It was
+in the form of a galley, and two hundred feet long, with two decks.
+The first of these was occupied by an hundred and sixty rowers, the
+handsomest and strongest of the fleet, who sat four men to each oar, and
+there awaited their orders; forty other sailors completed the crew. The
+upper deck was divided lengthwise by a partition, pierced with arched
+doorways, ornamented with gilded figures, and covered with a roof
+supported by caryatides--the whole surmounted by a canopy of crimson
+velvet embroidered with gold. Under this were ninety seats, and at the
+stern a still richer chamber for the Doge’s throne, over which drooped
+the banner of St. Mark. The prow was double-beaked, and the sides of
+the vessel were enriched with figures of Justice, Peace, Sea, Land, and
+other allegories and ornaments.
+
+“Let me imagine those times--it is the habit of the old. At midday,
+having heard mass in the chapel of the Collegio, the Doge descends the
+Giant’s Stairs, issues from the Porta della Carta, [Footnote: The gate
+of the Ducal Palace which opens upon the Piazzetta next St. Mark’s.] and
+passes the booths of the mercers and glass-venders erected for the fair
+beginning that evening. He is preceded by eight standard-bearers with
+the flags of the Republic,--red, blue, white, and purple,--given by
+Alexander III. to the Doge Ziani. Six trumpets of silver, borne by as
+many boys, mix their notes with the clangor of the bells of the city.
+Behind come the retinues of the ambassadors in sumptuous liveries, and
+the fifty Comandadori in their flowing blue robes and red caps; then
+follow musicians, and the squires of the Doge in black velvet; then the
+guards of the Doge, two chancellors, the secretary of the Pregadi, a
+deacon clad in purple and bearing a wax taper, six canons, three parish
+priests in their sacerdotal robes, and the Doge’s chaplain dressed
+in crimson. The grand chancellor is known by his crimson vesture. Two
+squires bear the Doge’s chair and the cushion of cloth of gold. And
+the Doge--the representative, and not the master of his country; the
+executor, and not the maker of the laws; citizen and prince, revered and
+guarded, sovereign of individuals, servant of the State--comes clad in
+a long mantle of ermine, cassock of blue, and vest and hose of _tocca
+d’oro_ [Footnote: A gauze of gold and silk.] with the golden bonnet on
+his head, under the umbrella borne by a squire, and surrounded by the
+foreign ambassadors and the papal nuncio, while his drawn sword is
+carried by a patrician recently destined for some government of land or
+sea, and soon to depart upon his mission. In the rear comes a throng of
+personages,--the grand captain of the city, the judges, the three chiefs
+of the Forty, the Avogodori, the three chiefs of the Council of Ten,
+the three censors, and the sixty of the Senate with the sixty of the
+Aggiunta, all in robes of crimson silk.
+
+“On the Bucintoro, each takes the post assigned him, and the prince
+ascends the throne. The Admiral of the Arsenal and the Lido stands in
+front as pilot; at the helm is the Admiral of Malamacco, and around him
+the ship-carpenters of the Arsenal. The Bucintoro, amid redoubled clamor
+of bells and roar of cannon, quits the riva and majestically plows the
+lagoon, surrounded by innumerable boats of every form and size.
+
+“The Patriarch, who had already sent several vases of flowers to do
+courtesy to the company in the Bucintoro, joins them at the island of
+Sant’ Elena, and sprinkles their course with holy water. So they reach
+the port of Lido, whence they formerly issued out upon the open sea;
+but in my time they paused there, turning the stern of the vessel to the
+sea. Then the Doge, amid the thunders of the artillery of the fort, took
+the ring blessed by the Patriarch,--who now emptied a cup of holy water
+into the sea,--and, advancing into a little gallery behind his throne,
+threw the ring into the waves, pronouncing the words, _Desponsamus te,
+mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii_. Proceeding then to the
+church of San Nicoletto, they listened to a solemn mass, and returned to
+Venice, where the dignitaries were entertained at a banquet, while
+the multitude peacefully dispersed among the labyrinths of the booths
+erected for the fair.” [Footnote: One of the sops thrown to the populace
+on this occasion, as we learn from Mutinelli, was the admission to the
+train of gilded barges following the Bucintoro of a boat bearing
+the chief of the Nicolotti, one of the factions into which from time
+immemorial the lower classes of Venice had been divided. The distinction
+between the two parties seems to have been purely geographical; for
+there is no apparent reason why a man should have belonged to the
+Castellani except that he lived in the eastern quarter of the city,
+or to the Nicolotti, except that he lived in the western quarter. The
+government encouraged a rivalry not dangerous to itself, and for a long
+time the champions of the two sections met annually and beat each other
+with rods. The form of contest was afterwards modified, and became a
+struggle for the possession of certain bridges, in which the defeated
+were merely thrown into the canals. I often passed the scene of the
+fiercest of these curious battles at San Barnaba, where the Ponte de
+Pugni is adorned with four feet of stone let into the pavement, and
+defying each other from the four corners of the bridge. Finally, even
+these contests were given up and the Castellani and Nicolotti spent
+their rivalry in marvelous acrobatic feats.] This fair, which was
+established as early as 1180, was an industrial exhibition of the
+arts and trades peculiar to Venice, and was repeated annually, with
+increasing ostentation, till the end, in 1796. Indeed, the feasts of the
+Republic at last grew so numerous that it became necessary, as we have
+seen before, to make a single holiday pay a double or triple debt of
+rejoicing. When the Venetians recovered Chioggia after the terrible war
+of 1380, the Senate refused to yield them another _festa_, and merely
+ordered that St. Mark’s Day should be thereafter observed with some
+added ceremony: there was already one festival commemorative of a
+triumph over the Genoese (that of San Giovanni Decollate, on whose day,
+in 1358, the Venetians beat the Genoese at Negroponte), and the Senate
+declared that this was sufficient. A curious custom, however, on the
+Sunday after Ascension, celebrated a remoter victory over the same
+enemies, to which it is hard to attach any historic probability. It
+is not known exactly when the Genoese in immense force penetrated to
+Poveglia (one of the small islands of the lagoons), nor why being there
+they stopped to ask the islanders the best way of getting to Venice.
+But tradition says that the sly Povegliesi persuaded these silly Genoese
+that the best method of navigating the lagoons was by means of rafts,
+which they constructed for them, and on which they sent them afloat.
+About the time the Venetians came out to meet the armada, the withes
+binding the members of the rafts gave way, and the Genoese who were not
+drowned in the tides stuck in the mud, and were cut in pieces like so
+many melons. No one will be surprised to learn that not a soul of them
+escaped, and that only the Povegliesi lived to tell the tale. Special
+and considerable privileges were conferred on them for their part in
+this exploit, and were annually confirmed by the Doge, when a deputation
+of the islanders called on him in his palace, and hugged and kissed the
+devoted prince.
+
+People who _will_ sentimentalize over the pigeons of St. Mark’s, may
+like to know that they have been settled in the city ever since 877.
+After the religious services on Palm Sunday, it was anciently the custom
+of the sacristans of St. Mark’s to release doves fettered with fragments
+of paper, and thus partly disabled from flight, for the people to
+scramble for in the Piazza. The people fatted such of the birds as they
+caught, and ate them at Easter, but those pigeons which escaped took
+refuge in the roof of the church, where they gradually assumed a certain
+sacredness of character, and increased to enormous numbers. They were
+fed by provision of the Republic, and being neglected at the time of its
+fall, many of them were starved. But they now flourish on a bequest left
+by a pious lady for their maintenance, and on the largess of grain
+and polenta constantly bestowed by strangers. Besides the holidays
+mentioned, the 6th of December was religiously observed in honor of the
+taking of Constantinople, the Doge assisting at mass in the ducal chapel
+of St. Nicholas. He also annually visited, with his Signory in the state
+barges, and with great concourse of people, the church of San Vito
+on the 15th of June, in memory of the change of the government from a
+democracy to an oligarchy, and of the suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s
+conspiracy. On St. Isidore’s Day he went with his Signory, and the
+religious confraternities, in torchlight procession, to hear mass at St.
+Mark’s in celebration of the failure of Marin Falier’s plot. On the 17th
+of January he visited by water the hospital erected for invalid soldiers
+and sailors, and thus commemorated the famous defence of Scutari
+against the Turks, in 1413. For the peace of 1516, concluded after the
+dissolution of the League of Cambray, he went in his barge to the
+church of Santa Marina, who had potently exerted her influence for the
+preservation of the Republic against allied France, Austria, Spain, and
+Rome. On St. Jerome’s Day, when the newly-elected members of the Council
+of Ten took their seats, the Doge entertained them with a banquet, and
+there were great popular rejoicings over an affair in which the people
+had no interest.
+
+It is by a singular caprice of fortune that, while not only all the
+Venetian holidays in anywise connected with the glory of the Republic,
+but also those which peculiarly signalized her piety and gratitude, have
+ceased to be, a festival common to the whole Catholic world should still
+be observed in Venice with extraordinary display. On the day of Corpus
+Christi there is a superb ecclesiastical procession in the Piazza.
+
+The great splendor of the solemnization is said to date from the times
+when Enrico Dandolo and his fellow-Crusaders so far forgot their purpose
+of taking Palestine from the infidels as to take Constantinople from the
+schismatics. Up to that period the day of Corpus Christi was honored by
+a procession from what was then the Cathedral of San Pietro di Castello;
+but now all the thirty parishes of the city, with their hundred
+churches, have part in the procession, which is of such great length as
+to take some two hours in its progress round the Piazza.
+
+Several days before the holiday workmen begin to build, within the Place
+of St. Mark, the colonnade through which the procession is to pass; they
+roof it with blue cotton cloth, and adorn it with rolls of pasteboard
+representing garlands of palm. At last, on the festive morning,
+the dwellers on the Grand Canal are drawn to their balconies by the
+apparition of boat-loads of facchini, gorgeous in scarlet robes,
+and bearing banners, painted candles, and other movable elements of
+devotion, with which they pass to the Piazzetta, and thence into St.
+Mark’s. They re-appear presently, and, with a guard of Austrian troops
+to clear the way before them, begin their march under the canopy of the
+colonnade.
+
+When you have seen the Place of St. Mark by night your eye has tasted
+its most delicate delight, but then it is the delight given by a
+memory only, and it touches you with sadness. You must see the Piazza
+to-day,--every window fluttering with rich stuffs and vivid colors; the
+three great flag staffs [Footnote: Once bearing the standards of Cyprus,
+Candia, and Venice.] hanging their heavy flags; the brilliant square
+alive with a holiday population, with resplendent uniforms, with Italian
+gesture and movement, and that long glittering procession, bearing
+slowly on the august paraphernalia of the Church--you must see all this
+before you can enter into the old heart of Venetian magnificence, and
+feel its life about you.
+
+To-day, the ancient church of San Pietro di Castello comes first in the
+procession, and, with a proud humility, the Basilica San Marco last.
+Before each parochial division goes a banner displaying the picture
+or distinctive device of its titular saint, under the shadow of which
+chants a priest; there are the hosts of the different churches, and
+the gorgeous canopies under which they are elevated; then come facchini
+dressed in scarlet and bearing the painted candles, or the long
+carved and gilded candlesticks; and again facchini delicately robed
+in vestments of the purest white linen, with caps of azure, green, and
+purple, and shod with sandals or white shoes, carrying other apparatus
+of worship. Each banner and candlestick has a fluttering leaf of tinsel
+paper attached to it, and the procession makes a soft rustling as
+it passes. The matter-of-fact character of the external Church walks
+between those symbolists, the candle-bearers,--in the form of persons
+who gather the dropping fatness of the candles, and deposit it in a vase
+carried for that purpose. Citizens march in the procession with candles;
+and there are charity-schools which also take part, and sing in the
+harsh, shrill manner, of which I think only little boys who have their
+heads closely shorn are capable.
+
+On all this we looked down from a window of the Old Procuratie--of
+course with that calm sense of superiority which people are apt to have
+in regarding the solemnities of a religion different from their own.
+But that did not altogether prevent us from enjoying what was really
+beautiful and charming in the scene. I thought most of the priests, very
+good and gentle looking,--and in all respects they were much pleasanter
+to the eye than the monks of the Carmelite order, who, in shaving their
+heads to simulate the Saviour’s crown of thorns, produce a hideous
+burlesque of the divine humiliation. Yet many even of these had earnest
+and sincere faces, and I could not think so much as I ought, perhaps, of
+their idle life, and the fleas in their coarse brown cloaks. I confess,
+indeed, I felt rather a sadness than an indignation at all that
+self-sacrifice to an end of which I could but dimly see the usefulness.
+With some things in this grand spectacle we were wholly charmed, and
+doubtless had most delight in the little child who personated John the
+Baptist, and who was quite naked, but for a fleece folded about him: he
+bore the cross-headed staff in one small hand, and led with the other
+a lamb much tied up with blue ribbon. Here and there in the procession
+little girls, exquisitely dressed, and gifted by fond mothers with wings
+and aureoles, walked, scattering flowers. I likewise greatly relished
+the lively holiday air of a company of airy old men, the pensioners of
+some charity, who, in their white linen trousers and blue coats, formed
+a prominent feature of the display. Far from being puffed up with their
+consequence, they gossiped cheerfully with the spectators in the pauses
+of the march, and made jests to each other in that light-hearted,
+careless way observable in old men taken care of, and with nothing
+before them to do worth speaking of but to die. I must own that the
+honest facchini who bore the candles were equally affable, and even
+freer with their jokes. But in this they formed a fine contrast to here
+and there a closely hooded devotee, who, with hidden face and silent
+lips, was carrying a taper for religion, and not, like them, for money.
+I liked the great good-natured crowd, so orderly and amiable; and I
+enjoyed even that old citizen in the procession who, when the Patriarch
+gave his blessing, found it inconvenient to kneel, and compromised by
+stretching one leg a great way out behind him. These things, indeed,
+quite took my mind off of the splendors; and I let the canopy of the
+Scuola di San Rocco (worth 40,000 ducats) go by with scarce a glance,
+and did not bestow much more attention upon the brilliant liveries of
+the Patriarch’s servants,--though the appearance of these ecclesiastical
+flunkies is far more impressive than that of any of their secular
+brethren. They went gorgeously before the Patriarch, who was surrounded
+by the richly dressed clergy of St. Mark’s, and by clouds of incense
+rising from the smoking censers. He walked under the canopy in his
+cardinal’s robes, and with his eye fixed upon the Host.
+
+All at once the procession halted, and the Patriarch blessed the crowd,
+which knelt in a profound silence. Then the military band before him
+struck up an air from “Un Ballo in Maschera;” the procession moved on to
+the cathedral, and the crowd melted away.
+
+The once-magnificent day of the Ascension the Venetians now honor by
+closing all shop-doors behind them and putting all thought of labor
+out of their minds, and going forth to enjoy themselves in the mild,
+inexplosive fashion which seems to satisfy Italian nature. It is the
+same on all the feast-days: then the city sinks into profounder quiet;
+only bells are noisy, and where their clangor is so common as in
+Venice, it seems at last to make friends with the general stillness, and
+disturbs none but people of untranquil minds. We always go to the Piazza
+San Marco when we seek pleasure, and now, for eight days only of all the
+year, we have there the great spectacle of the Adoration of the Magi,
+performed every hour by automata within the little golden-railed gallery
+on the facade of the Giant’s Clock Tower. There the Virgin sits above
+the azure circle of the zodiac, all heavily gilded, and holding the
+Child, equally splendid. Through the doors on either side, usually
+occupied by the illuminated figures of the hours, appears the procession
+and disappears. The stately giant on the summit of the tower, at the
+hither side of the great bell, solemnly strikes the hour--as a giant
+should who has struck it for centuries--with a grand, whole-arm
+movement, and a slow, muscular pride. We look up--we tourists of the
+red-backed books; we peasant-girls radiant with converging darts of
+silver piercing the masses of our thick black hair; we Austrian soldiers
+in white coats and blue tights; we voiceful sellers of the cherries
+of Padua, and we calm loafers about the many-pillared base of the
+church--we look up and see the Adoration. First, the trumpeter, blowing
+the world news of the act; then the first king, turning softly to the
+Virgin, and bowing; then the second, that enthusiastic devotee,--the
+second who lifts his crown quite from his head; last the Ethiopian
+prince, gorgeous in green and gold, who, I am sorry to say, burlesques
+the whole solemnity. His devotion may be equally heart-felt, but it is
+more jerky than that of the others. He bows well and adequately, but
+recovers his balance with a prodigious start, altogether too suggestive
+of springs and wheels. Perhaps there is a touch of the pathetic in this
+grotesque fatality of the black king, whose suffering race has always
+held mankind between laughter and tears, and has seldom done a fine
+thing without leaving somewhere the neutralizing absurdity; but if
+there is, the sentimental may find it, not I. When the procession has
+disappeared, we wait till the other giant has struck the hour, and then
+we disperse.
+
+If it is six o’clock, and the sea has begun to breathe cool across the
+Basin of St. Mark, we find our account in strolling upon the long Riva
+degli Schiavoni towards the Public Gardens. One would suppose, at first
+thought, that here, on this magnificent quay, with its glorious lookout
+over the lagoons, the patricians would have built their finest palaces;
+whereas there is hardly any thing but architectural shabbiness from the
+Ponte della Paglia at one end, to the Ponte Santa Marina at the other.
+But there need be nothing surprising in the fact, after all. The feudal
+wealth and nobility of other cities kept the base at a respectful
+distance by means of lofty stone walls, and so shut in their palaces and
+gardens. Here equal seclusion could only be achieved by building flush
+upon the water, and therefore all the finest palaces rise sheer from
+the canals; and caffè, shops, barracks, and puppet-shows occupy the
+Riva degli Schiavoni. Nevertheless, it is the favorite promenade of the
+Venetians for the winter sunshine, and at such times in the summer as
+when the sun’s rage is tempered. There is always variety in the throng
+on the Riva, but the fashionable part of it is the least interesting:
+here and there a magnificent Greek flashes through the crowd, in
+dazzling white petticoats and gold-embroidered leggings and jacket;
+now and then a tall Dalmat or a solemn Turk; even the fishermen and
+the peasants, and the lower orders of the people, are picturesque; but
+polite Venice is hopelessly given to the pride of the eyes, and commits
+all the excesses of the French modes. The Venetian dandy, when dressed
+to his own satisfaction, is the worst-dressed man in the world. His
+hat curls outrageously in brim and sides; his coatsleeves are extremely
+full, and the garment pinches him at the waist; his pantaloons flow
+forth from the hips, and contract narrowly at the boot, which is
+square-toed and made too long. The whole effect is something not to
+be seen elsewhere, and is well calculated to move the beholder to
+desperation. [Footnote: These exaggerations of the fashions of 1862 have
+been succeeded by equal travesties of the present modes.] The Venetian
+fine lady, also, is prone to be superfine. Her dress is as full of color
+as a Paolo Veronese; in these narrow streets, where it is hard to expand
+an umbrella, she exaggerates hoops to the utmost; and she fatally hides
+her ankles in pantalets.
+
+In the wide thoroughfare leading from the last bridge of the Riva to the
+gate of the gardens there is always a clapping of wooden shoes on the
+stones, a braying of hand-organs, a shrieking of people who sell fish
+and fruit, at once insufferable and indescribable. The street is a _rio
+terrà_,--a filled-up canal,--and, as always happens with _rii terrai_,
+is abandoned to the poorest classes who manifest themselves, as the
+poorest classes are apt to do always, in groups of frowzy women, small
+girls carrying large babies, beggars, of course, and soldiers. I spoke
+of fruit-sellers; but in this quarter the traffic in pumpkin-seeds is
+the most popular,--the people finding these an inexpensive and pleasant
+excess, when taken with a glass of water flavored with anise.
+
+The Gardens were made by Napoleon, who demolished to that end some
+monasteries once cumbering the ground. They are pleasant enough, and
+are not gardens at all, but a park of formally-planted trees--sycamores,
+chiefly. I do not remember to have seen here any Venetians of the better
+class, except on the Mondays-of-the-Garden, in September. Usually the
+promenaders are fishermen, Austrian corporals, loutish youth of
+low degree, and women too old and too poor to have any thing to do.
+Strangers go there, and the German visitors even drink the exceptionable
+beer which is sold in the wooden cottage on the little hillock at the
+end of the Gardens. There is also a stable--where are the only horses
+in Venice. They are let at a florin an hour, and I do not know why the
+riders are always persons of the Hebrew faith. In a word, nothing can be
+drearier than the company in the Gardens, and nothing lovelier than the
+view they command,--from the sunset on the dome of the church of the
+Salute, all round the broad sweep of lagoon, to the tower at the port of
+San Nicolò, where you catch a glimpse of the Adriatic.
+
+The company is commonly stupid, but one evening, as we strolled idly
+through the walks, we came upon an interesting group--forty or fifty
+sailors, soldiers, youth of the people, gray-haired fishermen and
+contadini--sitting and lying on the grass, and listening with rapt
+attention to an old man reclining against a tree. I never saw a manner
+of sweeter or easier dignity than the speaker’s. Nature is so lavish of
+her grace to these people that grow near her heart--the sun! Infinite
+study could not have taught one northern-born the charm of oratory as
+this old man displayed it. I listened, and heard that he was speaking
+Tuscan. Do you guess with what he was enchanting his simple auditors?
+Nothing less than “Orlando Furioso.” They listened with the hungriest
+delight, and when Ariosto’s interpreter raised his finger and said,
+“Disse l’imperatore,” or, “Orlando disse, Carlomano mio,” they hardly
+breathed.
+
+On the _Lunedì dei Giardini_, already mentioned, all orders of the
+people flock thither, and promenade, and banquet on the grass. The trees
+get back the voices of their dryads, and the children fill the aisles
+with glancing movement and graceful sport.
+
+Of course, the hand-organ seeks here its proper element, the
+populace,--but here it brays to a peculiarly beautiful purpose. For
+no sooner does it sound than the young girls of the people wreathe
+themselves into dances, and improvise the poetry of motion. Over the
+grass they whirl, and up and down the broad avenues, and no one of all
+the gentle and peaceable crowd molests or makes them afraid. It is a
+scene to make you believe in Miriam dancing with Donatello there in that
+old garden at Rome, and reveals a simple beauty in the nature of the
+Italian poor, which shall one day, I hope, be counted in their favor
+when they are called to answer for lying and swindling.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.
+
+
+It often happens, even after the cold has announced itself in
+Venice, that the hesitating winter lingers in the Tyrol, and a mellow
+Indian-summer weather has possession of the first weeks of December.
+There was nothing in the December weather of 1863 to remind us
+Northerners that Christmas was coming. The skies were as blue as those
+of June, the sun was warm, and the air was bland, with only now and then
+a trenchant breath from the Alps, coming like a delicate sarcasm from
+loveliness unwilling to be thought insipidly amiable. But if there was
+no warning in the weather, there were other signs of Christmas-time
+not to be mistaken: a certain foolish leaping of the heart in one’s
+own breast, as if the dead raptures of childhood were stirred in their
+graves by the return of the happy season; and in Venice, in weary,
+forlorn Venice, there was the half-unconscious tumult, the expectant
+bustle which cities feel at the approach of holidays. The little shops
+put on their gayest airs; there was a great clapping and hammering
+on the stalls and booths which were building in the campos; the
+street-cries were more shrill and resonant than ever, and the air was
+shaken with the continual clangor of the church bells. All this note of
+preparation is rather bewildering to strangers, and is apt to disorder
+the best-disciplined intentions of seeing Christmas as the Venetians
+keep it. The public observance of the holiday in the churches and on the
+streets is evident and accessible to the most transient sojourner;
+but it is curious proof of the difficulty of knowledge concerning the
+in-door life and usages of the Italians, that I had already spent
+two Christmases in Venice without learning any thing of their home
+celebration of the day. Perhaps a degree of like difficulty attends like
+inquiry everywhere, for the happiness of Christmas contracts the
+family circle more exclusively than ever around the home hearth, or the
+domestic scaldino, as the case may be. But, at any rate, I was quite
+ready to say that the observance of Christmas in Venice was altogether
+public, when I thought it a measure of far-sighted prudence to consult
+my barber.
+
+In all Latin countries the barber is a source of information, which,
+skillfully tapped, pours forth in a stream of endless gossip and local
+intelligence. Every man talks with his barber; and perhaps a lingering
+dignity clings to this artist from his former profession of surgeon:
+it is certain the barber here prattles on with a freedom and importance
+perfectly admitted and respected by the interlocutory count under his
+razor. Those who care to know how things passed in an Italian barber
+shop three hundred years ago, may read it in Miss Evans’s “Romola;”
+ those who are willing to see Nello alive and carrying on his art in
+Venice at this day, must go to be shaved at his shop in the Frezzaria.
+Here there is a continual exchange of gossip, and I have often listened
+with profit to the sage and piquant remarks of the head barber and chief
+_ciarlone_, on the different events of human life brought to his notice.
+His shop is well known as a centre of scandal, and I have heard a fair
+Venetian declare that she had cut from her list all acquaintance who
+go there, as persons likely to become infected with the worst habits of
+gossip.
+
+To this Nello, however, I used to go only when in the most brilliant
+humor for listening, and my authority on Christmas observances is
+another and humbler barber, but not less a babbler, than the first. By
+birth, I believe, he is a Mantuan, and he prides himself on speaking
+Italian instead of Venetian. He has a defective eye, which obliges him
+to tack before bringing his razor to bear, but which is all the more
+favorable to conversation. On the whole, he is flattered to be asked
+about Christmas in Venice, and he first tells me that it is one of the
+chief holidays of the year:--
+
+“It is then, Signore, that the Venetians have the custom to make three
+sorts of peculiar presents: Mustard, Fish, and Mandorlato. You must have
+seen the mustard in the shop windows: it is a thick conserve of fruits,
+flavored with mustard; and the mandorlato is a candy made of honey, and
+filled with almonds. Well, they buy fish, as many as they will, and a
+vase of mustard, and a box of mandorlato, and make presents of them, one
+family to another, the day before Christmas. It is not too much for a
+rich family to present a hundred boxes of mandorlato and as many pots of
+mustard. These are exchanged between friends in the city, and Venetians
+also send them to acquaintance in the country, whence the gift is
+returned in cakes and eggs at Easter. Christmas Eve people invite each
+other to great dinners, and eat and drink, and make merry; but there
+are only fish and vegetables, for it is a meagre day, and meats are
+forbidden. This dinner lasts so long that, when it is over, it is almost
+time to so to midnight mass, which all must attend, or else hear three
+masses on the morrow; and no doubt it was some delinquent who made our
+saying,--‘Long as a Christmas mass.’ On Christmas Day people dine at
+home, keeping the day with family reunions. But the day after! Ah-heigh!
+That is the first of Carnival, and all the theatres are opened, and
+there is no end to the amusements--or was not, in the old time. Now,
+they never begin. A week later comes the day of the Lord’s Circumcision,
+and then the next holiday is Easter. The Nativity, the Circumcision, and
+the Resurrection--behold! these are the three mysteries of the Christian
+faith. Of what religion are the Americans, Signore?”
+
+I think I was justified in answering that we were Christians. My barber
+was politely surprised. “But there are so many different religions,” he
+said, in excuse.
+
+On the afternoon before Christmas I walked through the thronged Merceria
+to the Rialto Bridge, where the tumultuous mart which opens at Piazza
+San Marco culminates in a deafening uproar of bargains. At this time the
+Merceria, or street of the shops, presents the aspect of a fair, and is
+arranged with a tastefulness and a cunning ability to make the most of
+every thing, which are seldom applied to the abundance of our fairs at
+home. The shops in Venice are all very small, and the streets of lofty
+houses are so narrow and dark, that whatever goods are not exposed
+in the shop-windows are brought to the door to be clamored over by
+purchasers; so that the Merceria is roused by unusual effort to produce
+a more pronounced effect of traffic and noise than it always wears; but
+now the effort had been made and the effect produced. The street was
+choked with the throngs, through which all sorts of peddlers battled
+their way and cried their wares. In Campo San Bartolomeo, into which
+the Merceria expands, at the foot of Rialto Bridge, holiday traffic
+had built enormous barricades of stalls, and entrenched itself behind
+booths, whence purchasers were assailed with challenges to buy bargains.
+More than half the campo was paved with crockery from Rovigo and
+glass-ware from Murano; clothing of every sort, and all kinds of small
+household wares, were offered for sale; and among the other booths, in
+the proportion of two to one, were stalls of the inevitable Christmas
+mustard and mandorlato.
+
+But I cared rather for the crowd than what the crowd cared for. I had
+been long ago obliged to throw aside my preconceived notions of the
+Italian character, though they were not, I believe, more absurd than the
+impressions of others who have never studied Italian character in Italy.
+I hardly know what of bacchantic joyousness I had not attributed to them
+on their holidays: a people living in a mild climate under such a lovely
+sky, with wine cheap and abundant, might not unreasonably have been
+expected to put on a show of the greatest jollity when enjoying
+themselves. Venetian crowds are always perfectly gentle and kindly, but
+they are also as a whole usually serious; and this Christmas procession,
+moving up and down the Merceria, and to and fro between the markets of
+Rialto, was in the fullest sense a solemnity. It is true that the scene
+was dramatic, but the drama was not consciously comic. Whether these
+people bought or sold, or talked together, or walked up and down in
+silence, they were all equally in earnest. The crowd, in spite of its
+noisy bustle and passionate uproar, did not seem to me a blithe or
+light-hearted crowd. Its sole activity was that of traffic, for, far
+more dearly than any Yankee, a Venetian loves a bargain, and puts his
+whole heart into upholding and beating down demands.
+
+Across the Bridge began the vegetable and fruit market, where whole
+Hollands of cabbage and Spains of onions opened on the view, with every
+other succulent and toothsome growth; and beyond this we entered the
+glory of Rialto, the fish-market, which is now more lavishly supplied
+than at any other season. It was picturesque and full of gorgeous color
+for the fish of Venice seem all to catch the rainbow hues of the lagoon.
+There is a certain kind of red mullet, called _triglia_, which is
+as rich and tender in its dyes as if it had never swam in water
+less glorious than that which crimsons under October sunsets. But
+a fish-market, even at Rialto, with fishermen in scarlet caps and
+_triglie_ in sunset splendors, is only a fish-market after all: it is
+wet and slimy under foot, and the innumerable gigantic eels, writhing
+everywhere, set the soul asquirm, and soon-sated curiosity slides
+willingly away.
+
+We had an appointment with a young Venetian lady to attend midnight mass
+at the church of San Moisè, and thither about half-past eleven we went
+to welcome in Christmas. The church of San Moisè is in the highest style
+of the Renaissance art, which is, I believe, the lowest style of any
+other. The richly sculptured façade is divided into stories; the fluted
+columns are stilted upon pedestals, and their lines are broken by the
+bands which encircle them like broad barrel-hoops. At every possible
+point theatrical saints and angels, only sustained from falling to the
+ground by iron bars let into their backs, start from the niches and
+cling to the sculpture. The outside of the church is in every way
+detestable, and the inside is consistently bad. All the side-altars have
+broken arches, and the high altar is built of rough blocks of marble to
+represent Mount Sinai, on which a melodramatic statue of Moses receives
+the tables of the law from God the Father, with frescoed seraphim in
+the background. For the same reason, I suppose, that the devout prefer a
+hideous Bambino and a Madonna in crinoline to the most graceful artistic
+conception of those sacred personages, San Moisè is the most popular
+church for the midnight mass in Venice, and there is no mass at all in
+St. Mark’s, where its magnificence would be so peculiarly impressive.
+
+On Christmas Eve, then, this church was crowded, and the door-ways were
+constantly thronged with people passing in and out. I was puzzled to
+see so many young men present, for Young Italy is not usually in great
+number at church; but a friend explained the anomaly: “After the guests
+at our Christmas Eve dinners have well eaten and drunken, they all go to
+mass in at least one church, and the younger offer a multiplied devotion
+by going to all. It is a good thing in some ways, for by this means
+they manage to see every pretty face in the city, which that night has
+specially prepared itself to be seen;” and from this slender text my
+friend began to discourse at large about these Christmas Eve dinners,
+and chiefly how jollily the priests fared, ending with the devout wish,
+“Would God had made me nephew of a canonico!” The great dinners of the
+priests are a favorite theme with Italian talkers; but I doubt it is
+after all only a habit of speech. The priests are too numerous to feed
+sumptuously in most cases.
+
+We had a good place to see and hear, sitting in the middle of the main
+aisle, directly over the dust of John Law, who alighted in Venice
+when his great Mississippi bubble burst, and died here, and now sleeps
+peacefully under a marble tablet in the ugly church of San Moisè. The
+thought of that busy, ambitious life, come to this unscheming repose
+under our feet,--so far from the scene of its hopes, successes, and
+defeats,--gave its own touch of solemnity to the time and place, and
+helped the offended sense of propriety through the bursts of operatic
+music, which interspersed the mass. But on the whole, the music was good
+and the function sufficiently impressive,--what with the gloom of the
+temple everywhere starred with tapers, and the grand altar lighted to
+the mountain-top. The singing of the priests also was here much better
+than I had found it elsewhere in Venice.
+
+The equality of all classes in church is a noticeable thing always in
+Italy, but on this Christmas Eve it was unusually evident. The rags of
+the beggar brushed the silks of luxury, as the wearers knelt side by
+side on the marble floor; and on the night when God was born to poverty
+on earth, the rich seemed to feel that they drew nearer Him in the
+neighborhood of the poor. In these costly temples of the eldest
+Christianity, the poor seem to enter upon their inheritance of the
+future, for it is they who frequent them most and possess them with the
+deepest sense of ownership. The withered old woman, who creeps into St
+Mark’s with her scaldino in her hand, takes visible possession of its
+magnificence as God’s and hers, and Catholic wealth and rank would
+hardly, if challenged, dispute her claim.
+
+Even the longest mass comes to an end at last, and those of our party
+who could credit themselves with no gain of masses against the morrow,
+received the benediction at San Moisè with peculiar unction. We all
+issued forth, and passing through the lines of young men who draw
+themselves up on either side of the doors of public places in Venice, to
+look at the young ladies as they come out, we entered the Place of
+St. Mark. The Piazza was more gloriously beautiful than ever I saw it
+before, and the church had a saintly loveliness. The moon was full, and
+snowed down the mellowest light on the gray domes, which in their soft,
+elusive outlines, and strange effect of far-withdrawal, rhymed like
+faint-heard refrains to the bright and vivid arches of the façade. And
+if the bronze horses had been minded to quit their station before the
+great window over the central arch, they might have paced around the
+night’s whole half-world, and found no fairer resting-place.
+
+As for Christmas Day in Venice, it amounted to very little; every thing
+was closed, and whatever merry-making went on was all within doors.
+Although the shops and the places of amusement were opened the day
+following, the city entered very sparingly on the pleasures of
+Carnival, and Christmas week passed off in every-day fashion. It will be
+remembered that on St. Stephen’s Day--the first of Carnival--one of the
+five annual banquets took place at the Ducal Palace in the time of the
+Republic. A certain number of patricians received invitations to the
+dinner, and those for whom there was no room were presented with fish
+and poultry by the Doge. The populace were admitted to look on during
+the first course, and then, having sated their appetites with this
+savory observance, were invited to withdraw. The patriotic Giustina
+Renier-Michiel of course makes much of the courtesy thus extended to the
+people by the State, but I cannot help thinking it must have been hard
+to bear. The banquet, however, has passed away with the Republic which
+gave it, and the only savor of dinner which Venetian poverty now inhales
+on St. Stephen’s Day, is that which arises from its own proper pot of
+broth.
+
+New Year’s is the carnival of the beggars in Venice. Their business is
+carried on briskly throughout the year, but on this day it is pursued
+with an unusual degree of perseverance, and an enterprise worthy of all
+disinterested admiration. At every corner, on every bridge, under every
+door-way, hideous shapes of poverty, mutilation, and deformity stand
+waiting, and thrust out palms, plates, and pans, and advance good wishes
+and blessings to all who pass. It is an immemorial custom, and it is one
+in which all but the quite comfortable classes participate. The facchini
+in every square take up their collections; the gondoliers have their
+plates prepared for contribution at every ferry; at every caffè and
+restaurant begging-boxes appeal to charity. Whoever has lifted hand in
+your service in any way during the past year expects a reward on New
+Year’s for the complaisance, and in some cases the shop-keepers send to
+wish you a _bel capo d’anno_, with the same practical end in view. On
+New Year’s Eve and morning bands of facchini and gondoliers go about
+howling _vivas_ under charitable windows till they open and drop
+alms. The Piazza is invaded by the legions of beggary, and held in
+overpowering numbers against all comers; and to traverse it is like a
+progress through a lazar-house.
+
+Beyond encouraging so gross an abuse as this, I do not know that Venice
+celebrates New Year’s in a peculiar manner. It is a _festa_, and there
+are masses, of course. Presents are exchanged, which consist chiefly of
+books--printed for the season, and brilliant outside and dull within,
+like all annuals.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING; BAPTISMS AND BURIALS.
+
+
+The Venetians have had a practical and strictly business-like way of
+arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has
+always been made for the dower and for the good of the State; private
+and public interest being consulted, the small matters of affections
+have been left to the chances of association; and it does not seem that
+Venetian society has ever dealt severely with husbands or wives whom
+incompatibilities forced to seek consolation outside of matrimony.
+Herodotus relates that the Illyrian Veneti sold their daughters at
+auction to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably
+placed in life, the hard-favored were given to whomsoever would take
+them, with such dower as might be considered a reasonable compensation.
+The auction was discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts
+still partook of the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction.
+At a comparatively late period Venetian fathers went with their
+daughters to a great annual matrimonial fair at San Pietro di Castello
+Olivolo, and the youth of the lagoons repaired thither to choose wives
+from the number of the maidens. These were all dressed in white, with
+hair loose about the neck, and each bore her dower in a little box,
+slung over her shoulder by a ribbon. It is to be supposed that there was
+commonly a previous understanding between each damsel and some youth in
+the crowd: as soon as all had paired off, the bishop gave them a sermon
+and his benediction, and the young men gathered up their brides and
+boxes, and went away wedded. It was on one of these occasions, in the
+year 944, that the Triestine pirates stole the Brides of Venice with
+their dowers, and gave occasion to the Festa delle Marie, already
+described, and to Rogers’s poem, which every body pretends to have read.
+
+This going to San Pietro’s, selecting a wife and marrying her on
+the spot, out of hand, could only have been the contrivance of a
+straightforward, practical race. Among the common people betrothals were
+managed with even greater ease and dispatch, till a very late day in
+history; and in the record of a certain trial which took place in 1443
+there is an account of one of these brief and unceremonious courtships.
+Donna Catarussa, who gives evidence, and whom I take to have been a
+worthless, idle gossip, was one day sitting at her door, when Piero di
+Trento passed, selling brooms, and said to her, “Madonna, find me some
+nice girl.” To which Donna Catarussa replied, “Ugly fool! do you take me
+for a go-between?” “No,” said Piero, “not that; I mean a girl to be my
+wife.” And as Donna Catarussa thought at once of a suitable match, she
+said, “In faith of God, I know one for you. Come again to-morrow.” So
+they both met next day, and the woman chosen by Donna Catarussa being
+asked, “Wouldst thou like to have Piero for thy husband, as God commands
+and holy Church?” she answered, “Yes.” And Peter being asked the like
+question, answered, “Why, yes, certainly.” And they went off and had
+the wedding feast. A number of these betrothals takes place in the last
+scene of Goldoni’s “Baruffe Chiozzotte,” where the belligerent women and
+their lovers take hands in the public streets, and saluting each
+other as man and wife, are affianced, and get married as quickly as
+possible:--
+
+“_Checa_ (to Tofolo). Take my hand.
+
+“_Tofolo_. Wife!
+
+“_Checa_. Husband!
+
+“_Tofolo_. Hurra!”
+
+The betrothals of the Venetian nobles were celebrated with as much
+pomp and ceremony as could possibly distinguish them from those of the
+people, and there was much more polite indifference to the inclinations
+of the parties immediately concerned. The contract was often concluded
+before the betrothed had seen each other, by means of a third person,
+when the amount of the dower was fixed. The bridegroom elect having
+verbally agreed with the parents of the bride, repaired at an early day
+to the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, where the match was published,
+and where he shook hands with his kinsmen and friends. On the day fixed
+for signing the contract the bride’s father invited to his house the
+bridegroom and all his friends, and hither came the high officers of
+state to compliment the future husband. He, with the father of his
+betrothed, met the guests at the door of the palace, and conducted them
+to the grand saloon, which no woman was allowed (_si figuri!_) at this
+time to enter. When the company was seated, the bride, clad in white,
+was led from her rooms and presented. She wore a crown of pearls and
+brilliants on her head, and her hair, mixed with long threads of
+gold, fell loose about her shoulders, as you may see it in Carpaccio’s
+pictures of the Espousals of St. Ursula. Her ear-rings were pendants of
+three pearls set in gold; her neck and throat were bare but for a collar
+of lace and gems, from which slid a fine jeweled chain into her bosom.
+Over her breast she wore a stomacher of cloth of gold, to which were
+attached her sleeves, open from the elbow to the hand. The formal words
+of espousal being pronounced, the bride paced slowly round the hall to
+the music of fifes and trumpets, and made a gentle inclination to each
+of the guests; and then returned to her chamber, from which she issued
+again on the arrival of any tardy friend, and repeated the ceremony.
+After all this, she descended to the courtyard, where she was received
+by gentlewomen, her friends, and placed on a raised seat (which was
+covered with rich stuffs) in an open gondola, and thus, followed by a
+fleet of attendant gondolas, went to visit all the convents in which
+there were kinspeople of herself or her betrothed. The excessive
+publicity of these ceremonies was supposed to strengthen the validity
+of the marriage contract. At an early day after the espousals the
+betrothed, preceded by musicians and followed by relatives and friends,
+went at dawn to be married in the church,--the bridegroom wearing a
+toga, and the bride a dress of white silk or crimson velvet, with
+jewels in her hair, and pearls embroidered on her robes. Visits of
+congratulation followed, and on the same day a public feast was given
+in honor of the wedding, to which at least three hundred persons were
+always invited, and at which the number, quality, and cost of the dishes
+were carefully regulated by the Republic’s laws. On this occasion, one
+or more persons were chosen as governors of the feast, and after the
+tables were removed, a mock-heroic character appeared, and recounted
+with absurd exaggeration the deeds of the ancestors of the bride and
+groom. The next morning _ristorativi_ of sweetmeats and confectionery
+were presented to the happy couple, by whom the presents were returned
+in kind.
+
+A splendor so exceptional, even in the most splendid age of the most
+splendid city, as that which marked the nuptial feasts of the unhappy
+Jacopo Foscari, could not be left unnoticed in this place. He
+espoused Lucrezia, daughter of Lionardo Contarini, a noble as rich
+and magnificent as Jacopo’s own father, the Doge; and, on the 29th of
+January 1441, the noble Eustachio Balbi being chosen lord of the feasts,
+the bridegroom, the bride’s brother and eighteen other patrician youths,
+assembled in the Palazzo Balbi, whence they went on horseback to conduct
+Lucrezia to the Ducal Palace. They were all sumptuously dressed in
+crimson velvet and silver brocade of Alexandria, and rode chargers
+superbly caparisoned. Other noble friends attended them; musicians went
+before; a troop of soldiers brought up the rear. They thus proceeded to
+the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, and then, returning, traversed
+the Piazza, and threading the devious little streets to the Campo San
+Samuele, there crossed the Grand Canal upon a bridge of boats, to San
+Barnaba opposite, where the Contarini lived. On their arrival at this
+place the bride, supported by two Procuratori di San Marco, and attended
+by sixty ladies, descended to the church and heard mass, after which
+an oration was delivered in Campo San Barnaba before the Doge, the
+ambassadors, and a multitude of nobles and people, in praise of the
+spouses and their families. The bride then returned to her father’s
+house, and jousts took place in the campos of Santa Maria Formosa and
+San Polo (the largest in the city), and in the Piazza San Marco. The
+Doge gave a great banquet, and at its close one hundred and fifty ladies
+proceeded to the bride’s palace in the Bucintoro, where one hundred
+other ladies joined them, together with Lucrezia, who, seated between
+Francesco Sforza (then General-in-chief of the Republic’s armies) and
+the Florentine ambassador, was conducted, amid the shouts of the people
+and the sound of trumpets, to the Ducal Palace. The Doge received her
+at the riva of the Piazzetta, and, with Sforza and Balbi led her to
+the foot of the palace stairs, where the Dogaressa, with sixty ladies,
+welcomed her. A state supper ended this day’s rejoicings, and on the
+following day a tournament took place in the Piazza, for a prize of
+cloth of gold, which was offered by Sforza. Forty knights contested the
+prize and supped afterward with the Doge. On the next day there were
+processions of boats with music on the Grand Canal; on the fourth and
+last day there were other jousts for prizes offered by the jewelers and
+Florentine merchants; and every night there were dancing and feasting in
+the Ducal Palace. The Doge was himself the giver of the last tournament,
+and with this the festivities came to an end.
+
+I have read an account by an old-fashioned English traveler of a
+Venetian marriage which he saw, sixty or seventy years ago, at the
+church of San Giorgio Maggiore: “After a crowd of nobles,” he says, “in
+their usual black robes, had been some time in attendance, the gondolas
+appearing, exhibited a fine show, though all of them were painted of a
+sable hue, in consequence of a sumptuary law, which is very necessary in
+this place, to prevent an expense which many who could not bear it would
+incur; nevertheless the barcarioli, or boatmen, were dressed in handsome
+liveries; the gondolas followed one another in a line, each carrying two
+ladies, who were likewise dressed in black. As they landed they arranged
+themselves in order, forming a line from the gate to the great altar.
+At length the bride, arrayed in white as the symbol of innocence, led
+by the bridesman, ascended the stairs of the landing-place. There she
+received the compliments of the bridegroom, in his black toga, who
+walked at her right hand to the altar, where they and all the company
+kneeled. I was often afraid the poor young creature would have sunk upon
+the ground before she arrived, for she trembled with great agitation,
+while she made her low courtesies from side to side: however, the
+ceremony was no sooner performed than she seemed to recover her spirits,
+and looked matrimony in the face with a determined smile. Indeed, in
+all appearance she had nothing to fear from her husband, whose age and
+aspect were not at all formidable; accordingly she tripped back to the
+gondola with great activity and resolution, and the procession ended as
+it began. Though there was something attractive in this aquatic parade,
+the black hue of the boats and the company presented to a stranger,
+like me, the idea of a funeral rather than a wedding. My expectation
+was raised too high by the previous description of the Italians, who are
+much given to hyperbole, who gave me to understand that this procession
+would far exceed any thing I had ever seen. When I reflect upon this
+rhodomontade,” disdainfully adds Mr. Drummond, “I cannot help comparing,
+in my memory, the paltry procession of the Venetian marriage with a very
+august occurrence of which I was eyewitness in Sweden,” and which being
+the reception of their Swedish Majesties by the British fleet, I am sure
+the reader will not ask me to quote. With change of government, changes
+of civilization following the revolutions, and the decay of wealth among
+the Venetian nobles, almost all their splendid customs have passed away,
+and the habit of making wedding presents of sweetmeats and confectionery
+is perhaps the only relic which has descended from the picturesque past
+to the present time. These gifts are still exchanged not only by nobles,
+but by all commoners according to their means, and are sometimes a
+source of very profuse outlay. It is the habit to send the candies in
+the elegant and costly paper caskets which the confectioners sell, and
+the sum of a thousand florins scarcely suffices to pass the courtesy
+round a moderately large circle of friends.
+
+With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still
+greatly a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to
+the principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that
+they have not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the
+poorest, who cannot and do not seclude the youth of either sex from each
+other, and with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and subterfuge
+would be superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the _capa y
+espada_ comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried on with
+all the cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and stolen
+interviews.
+
+Let us take our nominal friends, Marco and Todaro, and attend them in
+their solemn promenade under the arcades of the Procuratie, or upon the
+Molo, whither they go every evening to taste the air and to look at
+the ladies, while the Austrians and the other foreigners listen to the
+military music in the Piazza. They are both young, our friends; they
+have both glossy silk hats; they have both light canes and an innocent
+swagger. Inconceivably mild are these youth, and in their talk
+indescribably small and commonplace.
+
+They look at the ladies, and suddenly Todaro feels the consuming ardors
+of love.
+
+_Todaro_ (to Marco). Here, dear! Behold this beautiful blonde here!
+Beautiful as an angel! But what loveliness!
+
+_Marco_. But where?
+
+_Todaro_. It is enough. Let us go. I follow her.
+
+Such is the force of the passion in southern hearts. They follow that
+beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of the gray-moustached
+papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is electrically
+conscious of pursuit. They follow her during the whole evening, and, at
+a distance, softly follow her home, where the burning Todaro photographs
+the number of the house upon the sensitized tablets of his soul.
+
+This is the first great step in love: he has seen his adored one, and he
+knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardor. The next advance
+is to be decided between himself and the faithful Marco, and is to
+be debated over many cups of black coffee, not to name glasses of
+sugar-and-water and the like exciting beverages. The friends may now
+find out the caffè which the Biondina frequents with her parents, and
+to which Todaro may go every evening and feast his eyes upon her
+loveliness, never making his regard known by any word, till some night,
+when he has followed her home, he steals speech with her as he stands in
+the street under her balcony,--and looks sufficiently sheepish as
+people detect him on their late return from the theatre. [Footnote:
+The love-making scenes in Goldoni’s comedy of _Il Bugiarda_ are
+photographically faithful to present usage in Venice.] Or, if the
+friends do not take this course in their courtship (for they are both
+engaged in the wooing), they decide that Todaro, after walking back
+and forth a sufficient number of times in the street where the Biondina
+lives, shall write her a tender letter, to demand if she be disposed to
+correspond his love. This billet must always be conveyed to her by her
+serving-maid, who must be bribed by Marco for the purpose. At every
+juncture Marco must be consulted, and acquainted with every step of
+progress; and no doubt the Biondina has some lively Moretta for her
+friend, to whom she confides her part of the love-affair in all its
+intricacy.
+
+It may likewise happen that Todaro shall go to see the Biondina in
+church, whither, but for her presence, he would hardly go, and that
+there, though he may not have speech with her, he shall still fan
+the ardors of her curiosity and pity by persistent sighs. It must
+be confessed that if the Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his
+devotion must assume the character of an intolerable bore to her; and
+that to see him everywhere at her heels--to behold him leaning against
+the pillar near which she kneels at church, the head of his stick in his
+mouth, and his attitude carefully taken with a view to captivation--to
+be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or,
+turning round at the caffè encounter his pleading gaze--that all
+this must drive the Biondina to a state bordering upon blasphemy and
+finger-nails. _Ma, come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!_ This is the sole
+course open to ingenuous youth in Venice, where confessed and unashamed
+acquaintance between young people is extremely difficult; and so this
+blind pursuit must go on, till the Biondina’s inclinations are at last
+laboriously ascertained.
+
+Suppose the Biondina consents to be loved? Then Todaro has just and
+proper inquiries to make concerning her dower, and if her fortune is
+as pleasing as herself, he has only to demand her in marriage of her
+father, and after that to make her acquaintance.
+
+One day a Venetian friend of mine, who spoke a little English, came to
+me with a joyous air and said:
+
+“I am in lofe.”
+
+The recipient of repeated confidences of this kind from the same person,
+I listened with tempered effusion.
+
+“It is a blonde again?”
+
+“Yes, you have right; blonde again.”
+
+“And pretty?”
+
+“Oh, but beautiful. I lofe her--_come si dice!--immensamente.”_ “And
+where did you see her? Where did you make her acquaintance?”
+
+“I have not make the acquaintance. I see her pass with his fazer every
+night on Rialto Bridge We did not spoke yet--only with the eyes.
+The lady is not of Venice. She has four thousand florins. It is not
+much--no. But!”
+
+Is not this love at first sight almost idyllic? Is it not also a sublime
+prudence to know the lady’s fortune better than herself, before herself?
+These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before
+they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and
+white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After
+that may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of
+friendship, and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating
+the auspicious event. If he be rich, or can write _nobile_ after his
+Christian name, perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and
+alive to grateful consequences, may publish a poem, elegantly printed
+by the matchless printers at Rovigo, and send it to all the bridegroom’s
+friends. It is not the only event which the facile Venetian Muse shall
+sing for him. If his child is brought happily through the measles by
+Dottor Cavasangue, the Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any
+public honor or scholastic degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and
+when he dies the mortuary rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every
+occurrence--a boy’s success at school, an advocate’s triumphal passage
+of the perils of examination at Padua, a priest’s first mass, a nun’s
+novitiate, a birth, an amputation--is the subject of tuneful effusion,
+and no less the occasion of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring
+campo, who assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of voices around
+the victim’s door, and proclaim his skill or good fortune, and break
+into _vivas_ that never end till he bribes their enthusiasm into
+silence. The naïve commonplaceness of feeling in all matrimonial
+transactions, in spite of the gloss which the operatic methods of
+courtship threw about them, was a source of endless amusement, as
+it stole out in different ways. “You know my friend Marco?” asked an
+acquaintance one day. “Well, we are looking out a wife for him. He
+doesn’t want to marry, but his father insists; and he has begged us
+to find somebody. There are three of us on the look-out. But he hates
+women, and is very hard to suit. _Ben! Ci vuol pazienza!”_
+
+It rarely happens now that the religious part of the marriage ceremony
+is not performed in church, though it may be performed at the house of
+the bride. In this case, it usually takes place in the evening, and the
+spouses attend five o’clock mass next morning. But if the marriage takes
+place at church, it must be between five and eleven in the morning, and
+the blessing is commonly pronounced about six o’clock. Civil marriage
+is still unknown among the Venetians. It is entirely the affair of the
+Church, in which the bans are published beforehand, and which exacts
+from the candidates a preliminary visit to their parish priest, for
+examination in their catechism, and for instruction in religion when
+they are defective in knowledge of the kind. There is no longer any
+civil publication of the betrothals, and the hand-shaking in the court
+of the Ducal Palace has long been disused. I cannot help thinking
+that the ceremony must have been a great affliction, and that, in the
+Republican times at Venice, a bridegroom must have fared nearly as hard
+as a President elect in our times at home.
+
+There was a curious display on occasion of births among the nobility
+in former times. The room of the young mother was decorated with a
+profusion of paintings, sculpture, and jewelry; and, while yet in bed,
+she received the congratulations of her friends, and regaled them with
+sweetmeats served in vases of gold and silver.
+
+The child of noble parents had always at least two godfathers, and
+sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty; but in order that the
+relationship of godfather (which is the same according to the canonical
+law as a tie of consanguinity) should not prevent desirable matrimony
+between nobles, no patrician was allowed to be godfather to another’s
+child. Consequently the _compare_ was usually a client of the noble
+parent, and was not expected to make any present to the godchild, whose
+father, on the day following the baptism, sent him a piece of marchpane,
+in acknowledgment of their relationship. No women were present at the
+baptism except those who had charge of the babe. After the fall of
+the Republic the French custom of baptism in the parents’ house was
+introduced, as well as the custom, on the godfather’s part, of giving a
+present,--usually of sugarplums and silver toys. But I think that most
+baptisms still take place in church, if I may judge from the numbers
+of tight little glass cases I have noticed,--half bed and half
+coffin,--containing little eight-day-old Venetians, closely swathed in
+mummy-like bandages, and borne to and from the churches by mysterious
+old women. The ceremony of baptism itself does not apparently differ
+from that in other Catholic countries, and is performed, like all
+religious services in Italy, without a ray of religious feeling or
+solemnity of any kind.
+
+For many centuries funeral services in Venice have been conducted by the
+_Scuole del Sacramento,_ instituted for that purpose. To one of
+these societies the friends of the defunct pay a certain sum, and the
+association engages to inter the dead, and bear all the expenses of the
+ceremony, the dignity of which is regulated by the priest of the parish
+in which the deceased lived. The rite is now most generally undertaken
+by the Scuola di San Rocco. The funeral train is of ten or twenty
+facchini, wearing tunics of white, with caps and capes of red, and
+bearing the society’s long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted
+tapers. Priests follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the
+bier,--with a gilt crown lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to
+indicate the triumph of innocence. Formerly, hired mourners attended,
+and a candle, weighing a pound, was given to any one who chose to carry
+it in the procession.
+
+Anciently there was great show of mourning in Venice for the dead, when,
+according to Mutinelli, the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having
+seen his body deposited in the church, “fell to weeping and howling,
+tore their hair and rent their clothes, and withdrew forever from that
+church, thenceforth become for them a place of abomination.” Decenter
+customs prevailed in after-times, and there was a pathetic dignity in
+the ceremony of condolence among patricians: the mourners, on the day
+following the interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the
+court of the Ducal Palace, and their friends came, one after one, and
+expressed their sympathy by a mute pressure of the hand.
+
+Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible in modern Venice. The
+corpse is hurried from the house of mourning to the parish church, where
+the friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. Then it is
+placed in a boat and carried to the burial-ground, where it is quickly
+interred. I was fortunate, therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral
+at which I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There was a church
+on this island as early as the tenth century, and in the thirteenth
+century it fell into the possession of the Comandulensen Friars. They
+built a monastery on it, which became famous as a seat of learning, and
+gave much erudite scholarship to the world. In later times Pope Gregory
+XVI. carried his profound learning from San Michele to the Vatican. The
+present church is in the Renaissance style, but not very offensively so,
+and has some indifferent paintings. The arcades and the courts around
+which it is built contain funeral monuments as unutterably ugly and
+tasteless as any thing of the kind I ever saw at home; but the dead, for
+the most part, lie in graves marked merely by little iron crosses in
+the narrow and roofless space walled in from the lagoon, which laps
+sluggishly at the foot of the masonry with the impulses of the tide.
+The old monastery was abolished in 1810, and there is now a convent of
+Reformed Benedictines on the island, who perform the last service for
+the dead.
+
+On the day of which I speak, I was taking a friend to see the objects
+of interest at San Michele, which I had seen before, and the funeral
+procession touched at the riva of the church just as we arrived. The
+procession was of one gondola only, and the pallbearers were four
+pleasant ruffians in scarlet robes of cotton, hooded, and girdled at
+the waist. They were accompanied by a priest of a broad and jolly
+countenance, two grinning boys, and finally the corpse itself, severely
+habited in an under-dress of black box, but wearing an outer garment of
+red velvet, bordered and tasseled gayly. The pleasant ruffians (who all
+wore smoking-caps with some other name) placed this holiday corpse upon
+a bier, and after a lively dispute with our gondolier, in which the
+compliments of the day were passed in the usual terms of Venetian chaff,
+lifted the bier on shore and set it down. The priest followed with the
+two boys, whom he rebuked for levity, simultaneously tripping over the
+Latin of a prayer, with his eyes fixed on our harmless little party
+as if we were a funeral, and the dead in the black box an indifferent
+spectator Then he popped down upon his knees, and made us a lively
+little supplication, while a blind beggar scuffled for a lost soldo
+about his feet, and the gondoliers quarreled volubly. After which, he
+threw off his surplice with the air of one who should say his day’s work
+was done, and preceded the coffin into the church.
+
+We had hardly deposited the bier upon the floor in the centre of the
+nave, when two pale young friars appeared, throwing off their hooded
+cloaks of coarse brown, as they passed to the sacristy, and reappearing
+in their rope-girdled gowns. One of them bore a lighted taper in his
+right hand and a book in his left; the other had also a taper, but a pot
+of holy water instead of the book.
+
+They are very handsome young men, these monks, with heavy, sad eyes,
+and graceful, slender figures, which their monastic life will presently
+overload with gross humanity full of coarse appetites. They go and stand
+beside the bier, giving a curious touch of solemnity to a scene composed
+of the four pleasant ruffians in the loaferish postures which they have
+learned as facchini waiting for jobs; of the two boys with inattentive
+grins, and of the priest with wandering eyes, kneeling behind them.
+
+A weak, thin-voiced organ pipes huskily from its damp loft: the monk
+hurries rapidly over the Latin text of the service, while
+
+    “His breath to heaven like vapor goes”
+
+on the chilly, humid air; and the other monk makes the responses,
+giving and taking the sprinkler, which his chief shakes vaguely in the
+direction of the coffin. They both bow their heads--shaven down to the
+temples, to simulate His crown of thorns. Silence. The organ is still,
+the priest has vanished; the tapers are blown out; the pall-bearers lay
+hold of the bier, and raise it to their shoulders; the boys slouch into
+procession behind them; the monks glide softly and dispiritedly away.
+The soul is prepared for eternal life, and the body for the grave.
+
+The ruffians are expansively gay on reaching the open air again. They
+laugh, they call “Ciò!” [Footnote: Literally, _That_ in Italian, and
+meaning in Venetian, _You! Heigh!_ To talk in _Ciò ciappa_ is to assume
+insolent familiarity or unbounded good fellowship with the person
+addressed. A Venetian says _Ciò_ a thousand times in a day, and hails
+every one but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian
+pronoun, but rather a contraction of _Veccio_ (vecchio), _Old fellow!_
+It is common with all classes of the people: parents use it in speaking
+to their children, and brothers and sisters call one mother _Ciò_. It
+is a salutation between friends, who cry out, _Ciò!_ as they pass in the
+street. Acquaintances, men who meet after separation, rush together
+with _“Ah Ciò!”_ Then they kiss on the right cheek _“Ciò!”_ on the left,
+_“Ciò!”_ on the lips, _“Ciò! Bon di Ciò!”_] continually, and banter each
+other as they trot to the grave.
+
+The boys follow them, gamboling among the little iron crosses, and
+trying if here and there one of them may not be overthrown.
+
+We two strangers follow the boys.
+
+But here the pall-bearers become puzzled: on the right is an open
+trench, on the left is an open trench.
+
+“Presence of the Devil! To which grave does this dead belong?” They
+discuss, they dispute, they quarrel.
+
+From the side of the wall, as if he rose from the sea, appears the grave
+digger, with his shovel on his shoulder--slouching toward us.
+
+“Ah heigh! Ciò, the grave-digger! Where does this dead belong?”
+
+“Body of Bacchus, what potatoes! Here, in this trench to the right.”
+
+They set down the bier there, gladly. They strip away the coffin’s gay
+upper garment; they leave but the under-dress of black box, painted to
+that favor with pitch. They shove it into the grave-digger’s arms, where
+he stands in the trench, in the soft earth, rich with bones. He lets it
+slide swiftly to the ground--thump! _Ecco fatto!_
+
+The two boys pick up the empty bier, and dance merrily away with it
+to the riva-gate, feigning a little play after the manner of
+children,--“Oh, what a beautiful dead!”
+
+The eldest of the pleasant ruffians is all the pleasanter for
+_sciampagnin_, and can hardly be persuaded to go out at the right gate.
+
+We strangers stay behind a little, to consult with mother spectator--
+Venetian, this. “Who is the dead man, signore?”
+
+“It is a woman, poor little thing! Dead in child-bed. The baby is in
+there with her.”
+
+It has been a cheerful funeral, and yet we are not in great spirits as
+we go back to the city.
+
+For my part, I do not think the cry of sea-gulls on a gloomy day is
+a joyous sound; and the sight of those theatrical angels, with their
+shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo façade of
+the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with
+despondency and foreboding.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.
+
+
+On a small canal, not far from the railroad station, the gondoliers
+show you a house, by no means notable (except for the noble statue of
+a knight, occupying a niche in one corner), as the house of Othello. It
+was once the palace of the patrician family Moro, a name well known in
+the annals of the Republic, and one which, it has been suggested, misled
+Shakespeare into the invention of a Moor of Venice. Whether this
+is possibly the fact, or whether there is any tradition of a tragic
+incident in the history of the Moro family similar to that upon which
+the play is founded, I do not know; but it is certain that the story
+of Othello, very nearly as Shakespeare tells it, is popularly known in
+Venice; and the gondoliers have fixed upon the Casa Moro in question as
+the edifice best calculated to give satisfaction to strangers in search
+of the True and the Memorable. The statue is happily darkened by time,
+and thus serves admirably to represent Othello’s complexion, and to
+place beyond the shadow of a doubt the fact of his residence in the
+house. Indeed, what can you say to the gondolier, who, in answer to your
+cavils, points to the knight, with the convincing argument, “There is
+his statue!”
+
+One day I was taken to see this house, in company with some friends, and
+when it had been victoriously pointed out, as usual, we asked meekly,
+“Who was Othello?”
+
+“Othello, Signori,” answered the gondolier, “was a general of
+the Republic, in the old times. He was an African, and black; but
+nevertheless the State valued him, and he beat the Turks in many
+battles. Well, Signori, this general Othello had a very young and
+beautiful wife, and his wife’s cousin (_sic!_), Cassio was his
+major-domo, or, as some say, his lieutenant. But after a while happens
+along (_capita_) another soldier of Othello, who wants Cassio’s
+employment, and so accuses him to the general of corrupting his wife.
+Very well, Signori! Without thinking an instant, Othello, being made so,
+flew into a passion (_si riscaldò là tèsta_), and killed his wife; and
+then when her innocence came out, he killed himself and that liar; and
+the State confiscated his goods, he being a very rich man. There has
+been a tragedy written about all this, you know.”
+
+“But how is it called? Who wrote it?”
+
+“Oh! in regard to that, then, I don’t know. Some Englishman.”
+
+“Shakespeare?”
+
+“I don’t know, Signori. But if you doubt what I tell you, go to any
+bookseller, and say, ‘Favor me with the tragedy of “Othello.”’ He will
+give it you, and there you will find it all written out just as I tell
+it.”
+
+This gondolier confirmed the authenticity of his story, by showing us
+the house of Cassio near the Rialto Bridge, and I have no doubt he would
+also have pointed out that of Iago if we had wished it.
+
+But as a general thing, the lore of the gondoliers is not rich nor very
+great. They are a loquacious and a gossiping race, but they love better
+to have a quiet chat at the tops of their voices, as they loaf idly at
+the ferries, or to scream repartees across the Grand Canal, than to tell
+stories. In all history that relates to localities they are sufficiently
+versed to find the notable places for strangers, but beyond this they
+trouble themselves as little with the past as with the future. Three
+tragic legends, however, they know, and will tell with the most amusing
+effect, namely: Biasio, _luganegher_; the Innocent Baker-Boy, and
+Veneranda Porta.
+
+The first of these legends is that of a sausage-maker who flourished
+in Venice some centuries ago, and who improved the quality of the broth
+which the _luganegheri_ make of their scraps and sell to the gondoliers,
+by cutting up into it now and then a child of some neighbor. He was
+finally detected by a gondolier who discovered a little finger in his
+broth, and being brought to justice, was dragged through the city at the
+heels of a wild horse. This most uncomfortable character appears to
+be the first hero in the romance of the gondoliers, and he certainly
+deserves to rank with that long line of imaginary personages who have
+made childhood so wretched and tractable. The second is the Innocent
+Baker-Boy already named, who was put to death on suspicion of having
+murdered a noble, because in the dead man’s heart was found a dagger
+fitting a sheath which the baker had picked up in the street, on
+the morning of the murder, and kept in his possession. Many years
+afterwards, a malefactor who died in Padua confessed the murder, and
+thereupon two lamps were lighted before a shrine in the southern façade
+of St. Mark’s Church,--one for the murdered nobleman’s soul, and the
+other for that of the innocent boy. Such is the gondoliers’ story, and
+the lamps still burn every night before the shrine from dark till
+dawn, in witness of its truth. The fact of the murder and its guiltless
+expiation is an incident of Venetian history, and it is said that the
+Council of the Ten never pronounced a sentence of death thereafter, till
+they had been solemnly warned by one of their number with _“Ricordatevi
+del povero Fornaretto!”_ (Remember the poor Baker-Boy!) The poet Dall
+‘Ongaro has woven the story into a beautiful and touching tragedy; but I
+believe the poet is still to be born who shall take from the gondoliers
+their Veneranda Porta, and place her historic figure in dramatic
+literature. Veneranda Porta was a lady of the days of the Republic,
+between whom and her husband existed an incompatibility. This was
+increased by the course of Signora Porta in taking a lover, and it at
+last led to the assassination of the husband by the paramours. The head
+of the murdered man was found in one of the canals, and being exposed,
+as the old custom was, upon the granite pedestal at the corner of St.
+Mark’s Church, it was recognized by his brother who found among the
+papers on which the long hair was curled fragments of a letter he had
+written to the deceased. The crime was traced to the paramours, and
+being brought before the Ten, they were both condemned to be hanged
+between the columns of the Piazzetta. The gondoliers relate that when
+the sentence was pronounced, Veneranda said to the Chief of the Ten,
+“But as for me this sentence will never be carried out. You cannot hang
+a woman. Consider the impropriety!” The Venetian rulers were wise men
+in their generation, and far from being balked by this question of
+delicacy, the Chief replied, solving it, “My dear, you shall be hanged
+in my breeches.”
+
+It is very coarse salt which keeps one of these stories; another is
+remembered because it concerns one of the people; and another for its
+abomination and horror. The incidents of Venetian history which take the
+fancy and touch the sensibility of the world seem hardly known to the
+gondoliers, the most intelligent and quick-witted of the populace, and
+themselves the very stuff that some romantic dreams of Venice are made
+of. However sad the fact, it is undeniable that the stories of the
+sausage-maker whose broth was flavored with murder, and the baker-boy
+who suffered guiltlessly, and that savage jest at the expense of the
+murderess, interest these people more than the high-well-born sorrows
+of the Foscari, the tragic fate of Carmagnola, or the story of
+Falier,--which last they know partly, however, because of the scandal
+about Falier’s wife. Yet after all, though the gondoliers are not
+the gondoliers of imaginative literature, they have qualities which
+recommended them to my liking, and I look back upon my acquaintance
+with two or three of them in a very friendly spirit. Compared with
+the truculent hackmen, who prey upon the traveling public in all other
+cities of the civilized world, they are eminently intelligent and
+amiable. Rogues they are, of course, for small dishonesties are the
+breath in the nostrils of common carriers by land or water, everywhere;
+but the trickery of the gondoliers is so good-natured and simple that
+it can hardly offend. A very ordinary jocular sagacity defeats their
+profoundest purposes of swindling, and no one enjoys their exposure
+half so much as themselves, while a faint prospect of future employment
+purifies them of every trait of dishonesty. I had only one troublesome
+experience with them, and that was in the case of the old gondolier who
+taught me to row. He, when I had no longer need of his services, plunged
+into drunkenness, and came and dismissed me one day with every mark of
+ignominy. But he afterwards forgave me, and saluted me kindly when we
+met.
+
+The immediate goal of every gondolier’s ambition is to serve, no matter
+for how short a time, an Inglese, by which generic title nearly all
+foreigners except Germans are known to him. The Inglese, whether he
+be English or American, is apt to make the tour of the whole city in
+a gondola, and to give handsome drink money at the end, whereas your
+Tedesco frugally walks to every place accessible by land, or when, in
+a party of six or eight, he takes a gondola, plants himself upon the
+letter of the tariff, and will give no more than the rate fixed by law.
+The gondolier is therefore flowingly polite to the Inglese, and he is
+even civil to the Tedesco; but he is not at all bound in courtesy to
+that provincial Italian who comes from the country to Venice, bargains
+furiously for his boat, and commonly pays under the tariff. The Venetian
+who does not himself keep a gondola seldom hires one, and even on this
+rare occasion makes no lavish demand such as “How much do you want for
+taking me to the rail-way station?” Lest the fervid imagination of the
+gondolier rise to zwanzigers and florins, and a tedious dispute ensue,
+he asks: “How many centissimi do you want?” and the contract is made,
+for a number of soldi.
+
+The number of private gondolas owned in Venice is not very great. The
+custom is rather to hire a gondolier with his boat. The exclusive use of
+the gondola is thus secured, and the gondolier gives his services as a
+domestic when off his special duty. He waits at table, goes marketing,
+takes the children to school, and serves the ladies as footman, for five
+francs a day, himself paying the proprietor of the gondola about a
+franc daily for the boat. In former times, when Venice was rich and
+prosperous, many noble families kept six or seven gondolas; and what
+with this service, and the numerous gala-days of the Republic, when the
+whole city took boat for the Lido, or the Giudecca, or Murano, and
+the gondoliers were allowed to exact any pay they could, they were a
+numerous and prosperous class. But these times have passed from Venice
+forever, and though the gondoliers are still, counting the boatmen of
+the Giudecca and Lido, some thousands in number, there are comparatively
+few young men among them, and their gains are meagre.
+
+In the little city of Venice, where the dialect spoken at Canareggio or
+Castello is a different tongue from that heard under the Procuratie of
+St. Mark’s Place, the boatmen of the several quarters of the city of
+course vary greatly in character and appearance; and the gondolier who
+lounges at the base of the columns of the Piazzetta, and airily invites
+the Inglesi to tours of the Grand Canal, is of quite a different type
+from the weather-beaten _barcaiuolo_, who croaks _“Barca!”_ at the
+promenaders on the Zattere. But all, as I say, are simple and harmless
+enough, and however loudly they quarrel among themselves, they never
+pass from the defamation of their female relatives to blows. As for
+the game of knives, as it is said to be played at Naples, and as About
+describes it at Rome, I doubt if it is much known to the populace of
+Venice. Only the doctors let blood there--though from their lancets it
+flows pretty freely and constantly.
+
+It is true that the gondolier loves best of everything a clamorous
+quarrel, carried on with the canal between him and his antagonist; but
+next to this, he loves to spend his leisure at the ferry in talking
+of eating and of money, and he does not differ from many of his
+fellow-citizens in choice of topics. I have seldom caught a casual
+expression from passers in the streets of Venice which did not relate
+in some way to gold Napoleons, zwanzigers, florins, or soldi, or else
+to wine and polenta. I note this trait in the Venetians, which Goldoni
+observed in the Milanese a hundred years ago, and which I incline to
+believe is common to all Italians. The gondoliers talk a great deal in
+figure and hyperbole, and their jocose chaff is quite inscrutable even
+to some classes of Venetians. With foreigners, to whom the silence and
+easy progress of the gondola gives them the opportunity to talk, they
+are fond of using a word or two of French. They are quick at repartee,
+and have a clever answer ready for most occasions. I was one day
+bargaining for a boat to the Lido, whither I refused to be taken in
+a shabby gondola, or at a rate higher than seventy-five soldi for the
+trip. At last the patience of the gondoliers was exhausted, and one of
+them called out, “Somebody fetch the Bucintoro, and take this
+gentleman to the Lido for seventy-five soldi!” (The Bucintoro being the
+magnificent barge in which the Doge went to wed the Adriatic.)
+
+The skill with which the gondoliers manage their graceful craft is
+always admired by strangers, and is certainly remarkable. The gondola is
+very long and slender, and rises high from the water at either end. Both
+bow and stern are sharp, the former being ornamented with that deeply
+serrated blade of steel, which it is the pride of the gondolier to keep
+bright as silver, and the poop having a small platform, not far behind
+the cabin, on which he stands when he rows. The danger of collision has
+always obliged Venetian boatmen to face the bow, and the stroke with the
+oar (for the gondolier uses only a single oar) is made by pushing, and
+not by pulling. No small degree of art (as I learnt from experience)
+is thus required to keep the gondola’s head straight,--all the strokes
+being made on one side,--and the sculling return of the oar-blade,
+preparatory for each new stroke, is extremely difficult to effect. Under
+the hands of the gondolier, however, the gondola seems a living thing,
+full of grace and winning movement. The wood-work of the little cabin is
+elaborately carved, and it is usually furnished with mirrors and seats
+luxuriously cushioned. The sensation of the gondola’s progress, felt by
+the occupant of the cabin, as he falls back upon these cushions, may be
+described, to the female apprehension at least, as “_too_ divine.” The
+cabin is removable at pleasure, and is generally taken off and replaced
+by awnings in summer. But in the evening, when the fair Venetians go out
+in their gondolas to take the air, even this awning is dispensed with,
+and the long slender boat glides darkly down the Grand Canal, bearing
+its dazzling freight of white _tulle_, pale-faced, black-eyed beauty,
+and flashing jewels, in full view.
+
+As for the singing of the gondoliers, they are the only class of
+Venetians who have not good voices, and I am scarcely inclined to regret
+the silence which long ago fell upon them. I am quite satisfied with the
+peculiar note of warning which they utter as they approach the corner of
+a canal, and which meaning simply, “To the Right,” or “To the Left,” is
+the most pathetic and melancholy sound in the world. If, putting
+aside my own comfort, I have sometimes wished for the sake of a dear,
+sentimental old friend at home, who loves such idle illusions with an
+ardor unbecoming his years, that I might hear the voice
+
+    “of Adria’s gondolier,
+    By distance mellowed, o’er the waters sweep,”
+
+I must still confess that I never did hear it under similar
+circumstances, except in conversation across half a mile of lagoon,
+when, as usual, the burden of the lay was polenta or soldi.
+
+A recent Venetian writer, describing the character of the lower classes
+of Venice, says: “No one can deny that our populace is loquacious
+and quickwitted; but, on the other hand, no one can deny that it
+is regardless of improvement. Venice, a city exceptional in its
+construction, its customs, and its habits, has also an exceptional
+populace. It still feels, although sixty-eight years have passed, the
+influence of the system of the fallen Republic, of that oligarchic
+government, which, affording almost every day some amusement to the
+people, left them no time to think of their offended rights.... Since
+1859 Venice has resembled a sepulchre of the living,--squalor and
+beggary gaining ground with each day, and commerce, with few exceptions,
+converted into monopoly; yet the populace remains attached to its old
+habits, and will have its pleasure. If the earnings are little, what
+then? Must one die of ennui? The caffè is depopulated: not so the
+drinking-house. The last day before the drawing of the lottery, the
+offices are thronged with fathers and mothers of families, who stint
+their children of bread to buy dearly a few hours of golden illusion....
+At the worst, there is the Monte di Pietà, as a last resort.”
+
+It is true, as this writer says, that the pleasure-loving populace still
+looks back fondly to the old Republican times of feasting and holidays;
+but there is certainly no truth any more in the old idea that any part
+of Italy is a place where people may be “idle with impunity,” or make
+amusement the serious business of life. I can remember that the book
+from which I received my first impressions of geography was illuminated
+with a picture professing to represent Italian customs. The spirit of
+inquiry had long before caused me to doubt the exact fidelity of this
+representation; but it cost me a pang to learn that the picture was
+utterly delusive. It has been no part of my experience in Venice to see
+an Italian sitting upon the ground, and strumming the guitar, while two
+gayly dressed peasants danced to the music. Indeed, the indolence
+of Venetians is listless and silent, not playful or joyous; and as I
+learned to know their life more intimately, I came to understand that
+in many cases they are idle from despair of finding work, and that
+indolence is as much their fate as their fault. Any diligence of theirs
+is surprising to us of northern and free lands, because their climate
+subdues and enervates us, and because we can see before them no career
+open to intelligent industry. With the poorest, work is necessarily
+a hand-to-hand struggle against hunger; with those who would not
+absolutely starve without it, work is an inexplicable passion.
+
+Partly because the ways of these people are so childlike and simple in
+many things, and partly from one’s own swindling tendency to take one’s
+self in (a tendency really fatal to all sincerity of judgment, and
+incalculably mischievous to such downfallen peoples as have felt the
+baleful effects of the world’s sentimental, impotent sympathy), there is
+something pathetic in the patient content with which Italians work. They
+have naturally so large a capacity for enjoyment, that the degree of
+selfdenial involved in labor seems exorbitant, and one feels that these
+children, so loved of Nature, and so gifted by her, are harshly dealt
+with by their stepmother Circumstance. No doubt there ought to be
+truth in the silly old picture, if there is none, and I would willingly
+make-believe to credit it, if I could. I am glad that they at least work
+in old-world, awkward, picturesque ways, and not in commonplace, handy,
+modern fashion. Neither the habits nor the implements of labor are
+changed since the progress of the Republic ceased, and her heart
+began to die within her. All sorts of mechanics’ tools are clumsy and
+inconvenient: the turner’s lathe moves by broken impulses; door-hinges
+are made to order, and lift the door from the ground as it opens upon
+them; all nails and tacks are hand-made; window-sashes are contrived to
+be glazed without putty, and the panes are put in from the top, so that
+to repair a broken glass the whole sash is taken apart; cooking-stoves
+are unknown to the native cooks, who work at an open fire, with crane
+and dangling pot-hooks; furniture is put together with wooden pegs
+instead of screws; you do not buy a door-lock at a hardware store,--you
+get a _fabbro_ to make it, and he comes with a leathern satchel full
+of tools to fit and finish it on the door. The wheelbarrow of this
+civilization is peculiarly wonderful in construction, with a prodigious
+wooden wheel, and a ponderous, incapable body. The canals are dredged
+with scoops mounted on long poles, and manned each by three or four
+Chiozzotti. There never was a pile-driving machine known in Venice;
+nor a steam-tug in all the channels of the lagoons, through which the
+largest craft are towed to and from the ports by row-boats. In the model
+of the sea-going vessels there has apparently been little change from
+the first. Yet in spite of all this backwardness in invention, the city
+is full of beautiful workmanship in every branch of artificing, and the
+Venetians are still the best sailors in the Adriatic.
+
+I do not offer the idea as a contribution to statistics, but it seems to
+me that the most active branch of industry in Venice is plucking fowls.
+In summer the people all work on their thresholds, and in their windows,
+and as nearly out of doors as the narrowness of the streets will let
+them,--and it is hard to pass through any part of the city without
+coming to a poulterer’s shop, in the door of which inevitably sits a
+boy, tugging at the plumage of some wretched bird. He is seldom to be
+seen except in that crisis of plucking when he seems to have all but
+finished; yet he seems never to accomplish the fact perfectly. Perhaps
+it is part of his hard fate that the feathers shall grow again under
+his hand as fast as he plucks them away: at the restaurants, I know,
+the quantity of plumage one devours in consuming roast chicken is
+surprising--at first. The birds are always very lean, too, and have but
+a languid and weary look, in spite of the ardent manner in which the boy
+clasps them while at work. It may be that the Venetians do not like
+fat poultry. Their turkeys, especially, are of that emaciation which
+is attributed among ourselves only to the turkey of Job; and as for the
+geese and ducks, they can only interest anatomists. It is as if the long
+ages of incursion and oppression which have impoverished and devastated
+Italy had at last taken effect upon the poultry, and made it as poor as
+the population.
+
+I do not want to give too exclusive an impression of Venetian industry,
+however, for now I remember the Venetian _lasagnoni_, whom I never saw
+doing any thing, and who certainly abound in respectable numbers.
+
+The lasagnone is a loafer, as an Italian can be a loafer, without the
+admixture of ruffianism, which blemishes most loafers of northern race.
+He may be quite worthless, and even impertinent, but he cannot be
+a rowdy,--that pleasing blossom on the nose of our fast, high-fed,
+thick-blooded civilization. In Venice he must not be confounded with
+other loiterers at the caffè; not with the natty people who talk
+politics interminably over little cups of black coffee; not with those
+old habitués, who sit forever under the Procuratie, their hands folded
+upon the tops of their sticks, and staring at the ladies who pass with
+a curious steadfastness and knowing skepticism of gaze, not pleasing in
+the dim eyes of age; certainly, the last persons who bear any likeness
+to the lasagnone are the Germans, with their honest, heavy faces
+comically anglicized by leg-of-mutton whiskers. The truth is, the
+lasagnone does not flourish in the best caffè; he comes to perfection
+in cheaper resorts, for he is commonly not rich. It often happens that a
+glass of water, flavored with a little anisette, is the order over which
+he sits a whole evening. He knows the waiter intimately, and does not
+call him “Shop!” (Bottega,) as less familiar people do, but Gigi, or
+Beppi, as the waiter is pretty sure to be named. “Behold!” he says, when
+the servant places his modest drink before him, “who is that loveliest
+blonde there?” Or to his fellow-lasagnone: “She regards me! I have
+broken her the heart!” This is his sole business and mission, the cruel
+lasagnone--to break ladies the heart. He spares no condition,--neither
+rank nor wealth is any defense against him. I often wonder what is in
+that note he continually shows to his friend. The confession of some
+broken heart, I think. When he has folded it, and put it away, he
+chuckles _“Ah, cara!”_ and sucks at his long, slender Virginia cigar.
+It is unlighted, for fire consumes cigars. I never see him read the
+papers,--neither the Italian papers nor the Parisian journals, though
+if he can get “Galignani” he is glad, and he likes to pretend to a
+knowledge of English, uttering upon occasion, with great relish, such
+distinctively English words as “Yes” and “Not,” and to the waiter,
+“A-little-fire-if-you-please.” He sits very late in the caffè, and he
+touches his hat--his curly French hat--to the company as he goes out
+with a mild swagger, his cane held lightly in his left hand, his coat
+cut snugly to show his hips, and genteelly swaying with the motion of
+his body. He is a dandy, of course,--all Italians are dandies,--but his
+vanity is perfectly harmless, and his heart is not bad. He would go
+half an hour out of his way to put you in the direction of the Piazza. A
+little thing can make him happy,--to stand in the pit at the opera, and
+gaze at the ladies in the lower boxes--to attend the Marionette, or
+the Malibran Theatre, and imperil the peace of pretty seamstresses and
+contadinas--to stand at the church doors and ogle the fair saints as
+they pass out. Go, harmless lasagnone, to thy lodging in some mysterious
+height, and break hearts if thou wilt. They are quickly mended.
+
+Of other vagabonds in Venice, if I had my choice, I think I must select
+a certain ruffian who deals in dog-flesh, as the nearest my ideal of
+what a vagabond should be in all respects. He stands habitually under
+the Old Procuratie, beside a basket of small puppies in that snuffling
+and quivering state which appears to be the favorite condition of very
+young dogs, and occupies himself in conversation with an adjacent dealer
+in grapes and peaches, or sometimes fastidiously engages in trimming the
+hair upon the closely shaven bodies of the dogs; for in Venice it is the
+ambition of every dog to look as much like the Lion of St. Mark as the
+nature of the case will permit. My vagabond at times makes expeditions
+to the groups of travelers always seated in summer before the Caffè
+Florian, appearing at such times with a very small puppy,--neatly poised
+upon the palm of his hand, and winking pensively,--which he advertises
+to the company as a “Beautiful Beast,” or a “Lovely Babe,” according to
+the inspiration of his light and pleasant fancy. I think the latter term
+is used generally as a means of ingratiation with the ladies, to whom my
+vagabond always shows a demeanor of agreeable gallantry. I never saw him
+sell any of these dogs, nor ever in the least cast down by his failure
+to do so. His air is grave, but not severe; there is even, at times, a
+certain playfulness in his manner, possibly attributable to sciampagnin.
+His curling black locks, together with his velveteen jacket and
+pantaloons, are oiled and glossy, and his beard is cut in the
+French-imperial mode. His personal presence is unwholesome, and it is
+chiefly his moral perfection as a vagabond that makes him fascinating.
+One is so confident, however, of his fitness for his position and
+business, and of his entire contentment with it, that it is impossible
+not to exult in him.
+
+He is not without self-respect. I doubt, it would be hard to find any
+Venetian of any vocation, however base, who forgets that he too is a
+man and a brother. There is enough servility in the language,--it is the
+fashion of the Italian tongue, with its _Tu_ for inferiors, _Voi_ for
+intimates and friendly equals, and _Lei_ for superiors,--but in the
+manner there is none, and there is a sense of equality in the ordinary
+intercourse of the Venetians, at once apparent to foreigners.
+
+All ranks are orderly; the spirit of aggression seems not to exist among
+them, and the very boys and dogs in Venice are so well-behaved, that I
+have never seen the slightest disposition in them to quarrel. Of course,
+it is of the street-boy--the _biricchino_, the boy in his natural,
+unreclaimed state--that I speak. This state is here, in winter, marked
+by a clouded countenance, bare head, tatters, and wooden-soled shoes
+open at the heels; in summer by a preternatural purity of person, by
+abandon to the amphibious pleasure of leaping off the bridges into the
+canals, and by an insatiable appetite for polenta, fried minnows, and
+water-melons.
+
+When one of these boys takes to beggary, as a great many of them do, out
+of a spirit of adventure and wish to pass the time, he carries out the
+enterprise with splendid daring. A favorite artifice is to approach
+Charity with a slice of polenta in one hand, and, with the other
+extended, implore a soldo to buy cheese to eat with the polenta. The
+street-boys also often perform the duties of the _gransieri_, who draw
+your gondola to shore, and keep it firm with a hook. To this order
+of beggar I usually gave; but one day at the railway station I had
+no soldi, and as I did not wish to render my friend discontented with
+future alms by giving silver, I deliberately apologized, praying him to
+excuse me, and promising him for another time. I cannot forget the lofty
+courtesy with which he returned,--“_S’accomodi pur, Signor!_” They have
+sometimes a sense of humor, these poor swindlers, and can enjoy the
+exposure of their own enormities. An amiable rogue drew our gondola to
+land one evening when we went too late to see the church of San Giorgio
+Maggiore. The sacristan made us free of a perfectly dark church, and we
+rewarded him as if it had been noonday. On our return to the gondola,
+the same beggar whom we had just feed held out his hat for another
+alms. “But we have just paid you,” we cried in an agony of grief and
+desperation. _“Sì, signori!”_ he admitted with an air of argument, _“è
+vero. Ma, la chiesa!”_ (Yes, gentlemen, it is true. But the church!) he
+added with confidential insinuation, and a patronizing wave of the hand
+toward the edifice, as if he had been San Giorgio himself, and held the
+church as a source of revenue. This was too much, and we laughed him to
+scorn; at which, beholding the amusing abomination of his conduct, he
+himself joined in our laugh with a cheerfulness that won our hearts.
+
+Beggary is attended by no disgrace in Italy, and it therefore comes that
+no mendicant is without a proper degree of the self-respect common to
+all classes. Indeed, the habit of taking gifts of money is so general
+and shameless that the street beggars must be diffident souls indeed if
+they hesitated to ask for it. A perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered
+man will take ten soldi from you for a trifling service, and not
+consider himself in the least abased. The detestable custom of largess,
+instead of wages, still obtains in so great degree in Venice that a
+physician, when asked for his account, replies: “What you please to
+give.” Knowing these customs, I hope I have never acted discourteously
+to the street beggars of Venice even when I gave them nothing, and I
+know that only one of them ever so far forgot himself as to curse me for
+not giving. Him, however, I think to have been out of his right mind at
+the time.
+
+There were two mad beggars in the parish of San Stefano, whom I should
+be sorry to leave unmentioned here. One, who presided chiefly over the
+Campo San Stefano, professed to be also a facchino, but I never saw him
+employed, except in addressing select circles of idlers whom a brawling
+noise always draws together in Venice. He had been a soldier, and he
+sometimes put himself at the head of a file of Croats passing through
+the campo, and gave them the word of command, to the great amusement of
+those swarthy barbarians. He was a good deal in drink, and when in this
+state was proud to go before any ladies who might be passing, and clear
+away the boys and idlers, to make room for them. When not occupied in
+any of these ways, he commonly slept in the arcades of the old convent.
+
+But the mad beggar of Campo Sant’ Angelo seemed to have a finer sense
+of what became him as a madman and a beggar, and never made himself
+obnoxious by his noise. He was, in fact, very fat and amiable, and in
+the summer lay asleep, for the most part, at a certain street corner
+which belonged to him. When awake he was a man of extremely complaisant
+presence, and suffered no lady to go by without a compliment to her
+complexion, her blond hair, or her beautiful eyes, whichever it might
+be. He got money for these attentions, and people paid him for any
+sort of witticism. One day he said to the richest young dandy of the
+city,--“Pah! you stomach me with your perfumes and fine airs;” for which
+he received half a florin. His remarks to gentlemen had usually this
+sarcastic flavor. I am sorry to say that so excellent a madman was often
+drunk and unable to fulfill his duties to society.
+
+There are, of course, laws against mendicancy in Venice, and they are,
+of course, never enforced. Beggars abound everywhere, and nobody molests
+them. There was long a troop of weird sisters in Campo San Stefano,
+who picked up a livelihood from the foreigners passing to and from the
+Academy of Fine Arts. They addressed people with the title of Count,
+and no doubt gained something by this sort of heraldry, though there
+are counts in Venice almost as poor as themselves, and titles are
+not distinctions. The Venetian seldom gives to beggars; he says
+deliberately, “_No go_” (I have nothing), or “_Quando ritornerò_” (when
+I return), and never comes back that way. I noticed that professional
+hunger and cold took this sort of denial very patiently, as they did
+every other; but I confess I had never the heart to practice it. In
+my walks to the Public Gardens there was a venerable old man, with the
+beard and bearing of a patriarch, whom I encountered on the last bridge
+of the Riva, and who there asked alms of me. When I gave him a soldo,
+he returned me a blessing which I would be ashamed to take in the United
+States for half a dollar; and when the soldo was in some inaccessible
+pocket, and I begged him to await my coming back, he said
+sweetly,--“Very well, Signor, I will be here.” And I must say, to his
+credit, that he never broke his promise, nor suffered me, for shame’s
+sake, to break mine. He was quite a treasure to me in this respect, and
+assisted me to form habits of punctuality.
+
+That exuberance of manner which one notes, the first thing, in his
+intercourse with Venetians, characterizes all classes, but is most
+excessive and relishing in the poor. There is a vast deal of ceremony
+with every order, and one hardly knows what to do with the numbers of
+compliments it is necessary to respond to. A Venetian does not come to
+see you, he comes to revere you; he not only asks if you be well when
+he meets you, but he bids you remain well at parting, and desires you to
+salute for him all common friends; he reverences you at leave-taking;
+he will sometimes consent to incommode you with a visit; he will relieve
+you of the disturbance when he rises to go. All spontaneous wishes
+which must, with us, take original forms, for lack of the complimentary
+phrase, are formally expressed by him,--good appetite to you, when you
+go to dinner much; enjoyment, when you go to the theatre; a pleasant
+walk, if you meet in promenade. He is your servant at meeting and
+parting; he begs to be commanded when he has misunderstood you. But
+courtesy takes its highest flights, as I hinted, from the poorest
+company. Acquaintances of this sort, when not on the _Ciò ciappa_
+footing, or that of the familiar thee and thou, always address each
+other in _Lei_ (lordship), or _Elo_, as the Venetians have it; and their
+compliment-making at encounter and separation is endless: I salute you!
+Remain well! Master! Mistress! (_Paron! parona!_) being repeated as long
+as the polite persons are within hearing.
+
+One day, as we passed through the crowded Merceria, an old Venetian
+friend of mine, who trod upon the dress of a young person before us,
+called out, “_Scusate, bella giovane_!” (Pardon, beautiful girl!) She
+was not so fair nor so young as I have seen women; but she half turned
+her face with a forgiving smile, and seemed pleased with the accident
+that had won her the amiable apology. The waiter of the caffè frequented
+by the people, says to the ladies for whom he places seats,--“Take
+this place, beautiful blonde;” or, “Sit here, lovely brunette,” as it
+happens.
+
+A Venetian who enters or leaves any place of public resort touches his
+hat to the company, and one day at the restaurant some ladies, who had
+been dining there, said “_Complimenti!_” on going out, with a grace that
+went near to make the beefsteak tender. It is this uncostly gentleness
+of bearing which gives a winning impression of the whole people,
+whatever selfishness or real discourtesy lie beneath it. At home it
+sometimes seems that we are in such haste to live and be done with it,
+we have no time to be polite. Or is popular politeness merely a vice of
+servile peoples? And is it altogether better to be rude? I wish it were
+not. If you are lost in his city (and you are pretty sure to be lost
+there, continually), a Venetian will go with you wherever you wish.
+And he will do this amiable little service out of what one may say old
+civilization has established in place of goodness of heart, but which is
+perhaps not so different from it.
+
+You hear people in the streets bless each other in the most dramatic
+fashion. I once caught these parting words between an old man and a
+young girl;
+
+_Giovanetta_. Revered sir! (_Patron riverito!_)
+
+_Vecchio_. (With that peculiar backward wave and beneficent wag of the
+hand, only possible to Italians.) Blessed child! (_Benedetta!_)
+
+It was in a crowd, but no one turned round at the utterance of terms
+which Anglo-Saxons would scarcely use in their most emotional moments.
+The old gentleman who sells boxes for the theatre in the Old Procuratie
+always gave me his benediction when I took a box.
+
+There is equal exuberance of invective, and I have heard many fine
+maledictions on the Venetian streets, but I recollect none more
+elaborate than that of a gondolier who, after listening peacefully to
+a quarrel between two other boatmen, suddenly took part against one of
+them, and saluted him with,--“Ah! baptized son of a dog! And if I had
+been present at thy baptism, I would have dashed thy brains out against
+the baptismal font!”
+
+All the theatrical forms of passion were visible in a scene I witnessed
+in a little street near San Samuele, where I found the neighborhood
+assembled at doors and windows in honor of a wordy battle between
+two poor women. One of these had been forced in-doors by her prudent
+husband, and the other upbraided her across the marital barrier. The
+assailant was washing, and twenty times she left her tub to revile the
+besieged, who thrust her long arms out over those of her husband, and
+turned each reproach back upon her who uttered it, thus:--
+
+_Assailant_. Beast!
+
+_Besieged_. Thou!
+
+_A_. Fool!
+
+_B_. Thou!
+
+_A_. Liar!
+
+_B_. Thou!
+
+_E via in seguito!_ At last the assailant, beating her breast with both
+hands, and tempestuously swaying her person back and forth, wreaked her
+scorn in one wild outburst of vituperation, and returned finally to
+her tub, wisely saying, on the purple verge of asphyxiation, “_O, non
+discorre più con gente_.”
+
+I returned half an hour later, and she was laughing and playing sweetly
+with her babe.
+
+It suits the passionate nature of the Italians to have incredible ado
+about buying and selling, and a day’s shopping is a sort of campaign,
+from which the shopper returns plundered and discomfited, or laden with
+the spoil of vanquished shopmen.
+
+The embattled commercial transaction is conducted in this wise:
+
+The shopper enters, and prices a given article. The shopman names a
+sum of which only the fervid imagination of the South could conceive as
+corresponding to the value of the goods.
+
+The purchaser instantly starts back with a wail of horror and
+indignation, and the shopman throws himself forward over the counter
+with a protest that, far from being dear, the article is ruinously cheap
+at the price stated, though they may nevertheless agree for something
+less.
+
+What, then, is the very most ultimate price?
+
+Properly, the very most ultimate price is so much. (Say, the smallest
+trifle under the price first asked.)
+
+The purchaser moves toward the door. He comes back, and offers one third
+of the very most ultimate price.
+
+The shopman, with a gentle desperation, declares that the thing cost
+him as much. He cannot really take the offer. He regrets, but he cannot.
+That the gentleman would say something more! So much--for example. That
+he regard the stuff, its quality, fashion, beauty.
+
+The gentleman laughs him to scorn. Ah, heigh! and, coming forward, he
+picks up the article and reviles it. Out of the mode, old, fragile, ugly
+of its kind. The shopman defends his wares. There is no such quantity
+and quality elsewhere in Venice. But if the gentleman will give even so
+much (still something preposterous), he may have it, though truly its
+sale for that money is utter ruin.
+
+The shopper walks straight to the door. The shopman calls him back from
+the threshold, or sends his boy to call him back from the street.
+
+Let him accommodate himself--which is to say, take the thing at his own
+price.
+
+He takes it.
+
+The shopman says cheerfully, “Servo suo!”
+
+The purchaser responds, “Bon dì! Patron!” (Good day! my Master!)
+
+Thus, as I said, every bargain is a battle, and every purchase a triumph
+or a defeat. The whole thing is understood; the opposing forces know
+perfectly well all that is to be done beforehand, and retire after the
+contest, like the captured knights in “_Morgante Maggiore_” “calm as
+oil,”--however furious and deadly their struggle may have appeared to
+strangers.
+
+Foreigners soon discern, however, that there is no bloodshed in such
+encounters, and enter into them with a zeal as great as that of natives,
+though with less skill. I knew one American who prided himself on such
+matters, and who haughtily closed a certain bargain without words, as he
+called it. The shopman offered several articles, for which he demanded
+prices amounting in all to ninety-three francs. His wary customer
+rapidly computed the total and replied “Without words, now, I’ll give
+you a hundred francs for the lot.” With a pensive elevation of the
+eyebrows, and a reluctant shrug of the shoulders, the shopman suffered
+him to take them.
+
+Your Venetian is _simpatico_, if he is any thing. He is always ready to
+feel and to express the deepest concern, and I rather think he likes to
+have his sensibilities appealed to, as a pleasant and healthful exercise
+for them. His sympathy begins at home, and he generously pities himself
+as the victim of a combination of misfortunes, which leave him citizen
+of a country without liberty, without commerce, without money, without
+hope. He next pities his fellow-citizens, who are as desperately
+situated as himself. Then he pities the degradation, corruption, and
+despair into which the city has fallen. And I think his compassion is
+the most hopeless thing in his character. That alone is touched; that
+alone is moved; and when its impulse ceases he and every thing about him
+remain just as before.
+
+With the poor, this sensibility is amusingly mischievous. They never
+speak of one of their own class without adding some such ejaculation as
+“Poor fellow!” or, “Poor little creature!” They pity all wretchedness,
+no matter from what cause, and the greatest rogue has their compassion
+when under a cloud. It is all but impossible to punish thieves in
+Venice, where they are very bold and numerous for the police are too
+much occupied with political surveillance to give due attention to mere
+cutpurses and housebreakers, and even when they make an arrest, people
+can hardly be got to bear witness against their unhappy prisoner.
+_Povareto anca lu!_ There is no work and no money; people must do
+something; so they steal. _Ci vuol pazienza!_ Bear witness against an
+ill-fated fellow-sufferer? God forbid! Stop a thief? I think a burglar
+might run from Rialto to San Marco, and not one compassionate soul in
+the Merceria would do aught to arrest him--_povareto!_ Thieves came to
+the house of a friend of mine at noonday, when his servant was out. They
+tied their boat to his landing, entered his house, filled their boat
+with plunder from it, and rowed out into the canal. The neighbors on the
+floor above saw them, and cried “Thieves! thieves!” It was in the most
+frequented part of the Grand Canal, where scores of boats passed and
+repassed; but no one molested the thieves, and these _povareti_ escaped
+with their booty. [Footnote: The rogues, it must be confessed, are often
+very polite. This same friend of mine one day found a man in the act
+of getting down into a boat with his favorite singing bird in its cage.
+“What are you doing with that bird?” he thought himself authorized to
+inquire. The thief looked about him a moment, and perceiving himself
+detected, handed back the cage with a cool “_La scusi!_” (“Beg pardon!”)
+as if its removal had been a trifling inadvertance.]
+
+One night, in a little street through which we passed to our ferry,
+there came a wild rush before us, of a woman screaming for help,
+and pursued by her husband with a knife in his hand; their children,
+shrieking piteously, came after them. The street was crowded with
+people and soldiers, but no one put out his hand; and the man presently
+overtook his wife and stabbed her in the back. We only knew of the rush,
+but what it all meant we could not tell, till we saw the woman bleeding
+from the stab, which, happily, was slight. Inquiry of the bystanders
+developed the facts, but, singularly enough, scarcely a word of pity.
+It was entirely a family affair, it seemed; the man, poor little fellow,
+had a mistress, and his wife had maddened him with reproaches. _Come si
+fa_? He had to stab her. The woman’s case was not one that appealed to
+popular compassion, and the only words of pity for her which I heard
+were expressed by the wife of a fruiterer, whom her husband angrily
+silenced.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+SOCIETY.
+
+
+It was natural that the Venetians, whose State lay upon the borders
+of the Greek Empire, and whose greatest commerce was with the Orient,
+should be influenced by the Constantinopolitan civilization. Mutinelli
+records that in the twelfth century they had many religious offices and
+observances in common with the Greeks, especially the homily or sermon,
+which formed a very prominent part of the service of worship. At this
+time, also, when the rupture of the Lombard League had left other
+Italian cities to fall back into incessant local wars, and barbarized
+their customs, the people of Venice dressed richly and delicately, after
+the Greek fashion. They combed and dressed their hair, and wore the
+long, pointed Greek beard; [Footnote: A. Foscarini, in 1687, was the
+last patrician who wore the beard.] and though these Byzantine modes
+fell, for the most part, into disuse, in after-time, there is still a
+peculiarity of dress among the women of the Venetian poor which is said
+to have been inherited from the oriental costumes of Constantinople;
+namely, that high-heeled, sharp-toed slipper, or sandal, which covers
+the front of the foot, and drops from the heel at every step, requiring
+no slight art in the wearer to keep it on at all.
+
+The philosophic vision, accustomed to relate trifling particulars to
+important generalities, may perhaps see another relic of Byzantine
+civilization among the Venetians, in that jealous restraint which they
+put upon all the social movements of young girls, and the great liberty
+which they allow to married women. It is true that their damsels are now
+no longer imprisoned under the parental roof, as they were in times when
+they never left its shelter but to go, closely veiled, to communion in
+the church, on Christmas and Easter; but it is still quite impossible
+that any young lady should go out alone. Indeed, she would scarcely be
+secure from insult in broad day if she did so. She goes out with her
+governess, and, even with this protection, she cannot be too guarded and
+circumspect in her bearing; for in Venice a woman has to encounter upon
+the public street a rude license of glance, from men of all ages and
+conditions, which falls little short of outrage. They stare at her as
+she approaches; and I have seen them turn and contemplate ladies as they
+passed them, keeping a few paces in advance, with a leisurely sidelong
+gait. Something of this insolence might be forgiven to thoughtless,
+hot-blooded youth; but the gross and knowing leer that the elders of
+the Piazza and the caffè put on at the approach of a pretty girl is an
+ordeal which few women, not as thoroughly inured to it as the Venetians,
+would care to encounter. However, as I never heard the trial complained
+of by any but foreigners, I suppose it is not regarded by Italians as
+intolerable; and it is certain that an audible compliment, upon the
+street, to a pretty girl of the poor, is by no means an affront.
+
+The arts of pleasing and of coquetry come by nature to the gentler sex;
+and if in Italy they add to them a habit of intrigue, I wonder how much
+they are to blame, never being in anywise trusted? They do not differ
+from persons of any age or sex in that country, if the world has been as
+justly, as it has always been firmly, persuaded that the people of Italy
+are effete in point of good faith. I have seen much to justify this
+opinion, and something also to confute it; and as long as Garibaldi
+lives, I shall not let myself believe that a race which could produce
+a man so signally truthful and single-hearted is a race of liars and
+cheats. I think the student of their character should also be slow to
+upbraid Italians for their duplicity, without admitting, in palliation
+of the fault, facts of long ages of alien and domestic oppression, in
+politics and religion, which must account for a vast deal of every kind
+of evil in Italy. Yet after exception and palliation has been duly
+made, it must be confessed that in Italy it does not seem to be thought
+shameful to tell lies, and that there the standard of sincerity,
+compared with that of the English or American, is low, as the Italian
+standard of morality in other respects is also comparatively low.
+
+With the women, bred in idleness and ignorance, the imputed national
+untruthfulness takes the form naturally to be expected, and contributes
+to a state of things which must be examined with the greatest caution
+and reservation by every one but the Italians themselves. Goethe says
+that there is no society so corrupt that a man may not live virtuously
+in it; and I think the immorality of any people will not be directly
+and wholly seen by the stranger who does not seek it. Certainly, the
+experience and acquaintance of a foreigner in Italy must have been
+most unfortunate, if they confirm all the stories of corruption told by
+Italians themselves. A little generous distrust is best in matters of
+this kind; but while I strengthen my incredulity concerning the utter
+depravation of Venetian society in one respect, I am not disposed to
+deal so leniently with it in others. The state of things is bad in
+Venice, not because all women in society are impure, but because the
+Italian theory of morals does not admit the existence of opportunity
+without sin. It is by rare chance that a young girl makes acquaintance
+with young men in society; she seldom talks with them at the parties to
+which she is sometimes taken by her mother, and they do not call upon
+her at her home; while for her to walk alone with a young man would be
+vastly more scandalous than much worse things, and is, consequently,
+unheard of. The Italians say freely they cannot trust their women as
+northern women are trusted; and some Italian women frankly confess that
+their sex would be worse if it were trusted more. But the truth does not
+appear in this shallow suspicion and this shallow self-conviction; and
+one who cares to have a just estimate of this matter must by no means
+believe all the evil he hears. There may be much corruption in society,
+but there is infinitely more wrong in the habits of idle gossip and
+guilty scandal, which eat all sense of shame and pity out of the heart
+of Venice. There is no parallel to the prying, tattling, backbiting
+littleness of the place elsewhere in the world. A small country village
+in America or England has its meddlesomeness, but not its worldly,
+wicked sharpness. Figure the meanness of a chimney-corner gossip, added
+to the bitter shrewdness and witty penetration of a gifted roué, and you
+have some idea of Venetian scandal. In that city, where all the nobler
+organs of expression are closed by political conditions, the viler
+channels run continual filth and poison, and the people, shut out from
+public and free discussion of religious and political themes, occupy
+themselves with private slander, and rend each other in their abject
+desperation. As it is part of the existing political demonstration
+to avoid the opera and theatre, the Venetians are deprived of these
+harmless distractions; balls and evening parties, at which people,
+in other countries, do nothing worse than bore each other, are almost
+unknown, for the same reason; and when persons meet in society, it
+is too often to retail personalities, or Italian politics made as
+unintelligible and as like local gossip as possible. The talk which is
+small and noxious in private circles is the same thing at the caffè,
+when the dread of spies does not reduce the talkers to a dreary silence.
+Not permitted to feel the currents of literature and the great world’s
+thought in religion freshly and directly, they seldom speak of these
+things, except in that tone of obsolete superiority which Italians are
+still prone to affect, as the monopolists of culture. As to Art, the
+Venetians are insensible to it and ignorant of it, here in the very
+atmosphere of Art, to a degree absolutely amusing. I would as soon think
+of asking a fish’s opinion of water as of asking a Venetian’s notion of
+architecture or painting, unless he were himself a professed artist or
+critic.
+
+Admitting, however, that a great part of the corruption of society is
+imputed, there still remains, no doubt, a great deal of real immorality
+to be accounted for. This, I think, is often to be attributed to the bad
+system of female education, and the habits of idleness in which women
+are bred. Indeed, to Americans, the whole system of Italian education
+seems calculated to reduce women to a state of imbecile captivity before
+marriage; and I have no fault to find with the Italians that they are
+jealous in guarding those whom they have unfitted to protect themselves,
+but have rather to blame them that, after marriage, their women are
+thrown at once upon society, when worse than helpless against its
+temptations. Except with those people who attempt to maintain a certain
+appearance in public upon insufficient means (and there are too many of
+these in Venice as everywhere else), and who spare in every other way
+that they may spend on dress, it does not often happen that Venetian
+ladies are housekeepers. Servants are cheap and numerous, as they are
+uncleanly and untrustworthy, and the Venetians prefer to keep them
+[Footnote: A clerk or employé with a salary of fifty cents a day keeps a
+maid-servant, that his wife may fulfill to society the important duty of
+doing nothing.] rather than take part in housewifely duties; and, since
+they must lavish upon dress and show, to suffer from cold and hunger in
+their fireless houses and at their meagre boards. In this way the young
+girls, kept imprisoned from the world, instead of learning cookery and
+other domestic arts, have the grievous burden of idleness added to that
+of their solitary confinement, not only among the rich and noble, but
+among that large class which is neither and wishes to appear both.
+[Footnote: The poet Gray, genteelly making the grand tour in 1740, wrote
+to his father from Florence: “The only thing the Italians shine in is
+their reception of strangers. At such times every thing is magnificence:
+the more remarkable as in their ordinary course of life they are
+parsimonious to a degree of nastiness. I saw in one of the vastest
+palaces of Rome (that of the Prince Pamfilio), the apartment which he
+himself inhabited, a bed that most servants in England would disdain to
+lie in, and furniture much like that of a soph at Cambridge. This man
+is worth 30,000_l_. a year.” Italian nature has changed so little in a
+century, that all this would hold admirably true of Italian life at this
+time. The goodly outside in religion, in morals, in every thing is too
+much the ambition of Italy; this achieved, she is content to endure
+any pang of self-denial, and sell what little comfort she knows--it is
+mostly imported, like the word, from England--to strangers at fabulous
+prices. In Italy the luxuries of life are cheap, and the conveniences
+unknown or excessively dear.] Their idle thoughts, not drilled by study
+nor occupied with work, run upon the freedom which marriage shall bring
+them, and form a distorted image of the world, of which they know
+as little as of their own undisciplined selves. Denied the just and
+wholesome amusements of society during their girlhood, it is scarcely a
+matter of surprise that they should throw themselves into the giddiest
+whirl of its excitement when marriage sets them free to do so.
+
+I have said I do not think Venetians who give each other bad names are
+always to be credited, and I have no doubt that many a reputation in
+Venice is stained while the victim remains without guilt. A questioned
+reputation is, however, no great social calamity. It forms no bar to
+society, and few people are so cruel as to blame it, though all discuss
+it. And it is here that the harshness of American and English society
+toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but
+half-justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad
+naïveté and lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl
+is accustomed to hear of things and speak of things which, with us,
+parents strive in every way to keep from their daughters’ knowledge;
+and while her sense of delicacy is thus early blunted, while she is thus
+used to know good and evil, she hears her father and mother comment on
+the sinful errors of a friend or neighbor, who visits them and meets
+them every day in society. How can the impunity of the guilt which she
+believes to exist around her but sometimes have its effect, and ripen,
+with opportunity, into wrong? Nay, if the girl reveres her parents at
+all, how can she think the sin, which they caress in the sinner, is
+so very bad? If, however, she escape all these early influences of
+depravation; if her idleness, and solitude and precocious knowledge
+leave her unvitiated, if, when she goes into society, it is by marriage
+with a man who is neither a dotard nor a fortune-seeker, and who remains
+constant and does not tempt her, by neglect, to forbode offense and to
+inflict anticipative reprisals--yet her purity goes uncredited, as her
+guilt would go unpunished; scandal makes haste to blacken her name to
+the prevailing hue; and whether she has sin or not, those with sin will
+cast, not the stone that breaks and kills, but the filth that sticks and
+stinks. The wife must continue the long social exile of her girlhood if
+she would not be the prey of scandal. The _cavaliere servente_ no longer
+exists, but gossip now attributes often more than one lover in his
+place, and society has the cruel clemency to wink at the license.
+Nothing is in worse taste than jealousy, and, consequently, though
+intrigue sometimes causes stabbing, and the like, among low people, it
+is rarely noticed by persons of good breeding. It seems to me that in
+Venetian society the reform must begin, not with dissolute life, but
+with the social toleration of the impure, and with the wanton habits of
+scandal, which make all other life incredible, and deny to virtue the
+triumph of fair fame.
+
+I confess that what I saw of the innocent amusements of this society was
+not enough to convince me of their brilliancy and attractiveness; but
+I doubt if a foreigner can be a trustworthy judge of these things, and
+perhaps a sketch drawn by an alien hand, in the best faith, might have
+an air of caricature. I would not, therefore, like to trust my own
+impression of social diversions. They were, very probably, much more
+lively and brilliant than I thought them. But Italians assembled
+anywhere, except at the theatre or the caffè, have a certain stiffness,
+all the more surprising, because tradition has always led one to expect
+exactly the reverse of them. I have seen nothing equal to the formality
+of this people, who deride colder nations for inflexible manners; and I
+have certainly never seen society in any small town in America so ill
+at ease as I have seen society in Venice, writhing under self-imposed
+restraints. At a musical soirée, attended by the class of people who at
+home would have been chatty and sociable, given to making acquaintance
+and to keeping up acquaintance,--the young men harmlessly talking and
+walking with the young ladies, and the old people listening together,
+while constant movement and intercourse kept life in the assembly, and
+there was some real pleasure felt amidst a good deal of unavoidable
+suffering,--I say, I found such a soirée in Venice to be a spectacle of
+ladies planted in formal rows of low-necks and white dresses around
+the four sides of one room, and of gentlemen restively imprisoned in
+dress-coats and white gloves in another. During the music all these
+devoted people listened attentively, and at the end, the ladies lapsed
+back into their chairs and fanned themselves, while the gentlemen walked
+up and down the floor of their cell, and stopped, two by two, at the
+door of the ladies’ room, glanced mournfully athwart the moral barrier
+which divided them, and sadly and dejectedly turned away. Amazed at
+this singular species of social enjoyment, I inquired afterward, of a
+Venetian lady, if evening parties in Venice were usually such ordeals,
+and was discouraged to learn that what I had seen was scarcely an
+exaggeration of prevailing torments. Commonly people do not know each
+other, and it is difficult for the younger to procure introductions;
+and when there is previous acquaintance, the presence of some commanding
+spirit is necessary to break the ice of propriety, and substitute
+enjoyment for correctness of behavior. Even at dancing parties, where
+it would seem that the poetry of motion might do something to soften the
+rigid bosom of Venetian deportment, the poor young people separate
+after each dance, and take each sex its appointed prison, till the next
+quadrille offers them a temporary liberation. For my own part, I cannot
+wonder that young men fly these virtuous scenes, and throng the rooms of
+those pleasant women of the _demi-monde_, who only exact from them that
+they shall be natural and agreeable; I cannot wonder that their
+fair partners in wretchedness seize the first opportunity to revenge
+themselves upon the propriety which has so cruelly used them. It is
+said that the assemblies of the Jews, while quite as unexceptionable
+in character, are far more sociable and lively than those of the
+Christians. The young Hebrews are frequently intelligent, well-bred, and
+witty, with a _savoir faire_ which their Christian brethren lack. But,
+indeed, the young Venetian is, at that age when all men are owlish,
+ignorant, and vapid, the most owlish, ignorant, and vapid man in the
+world. He talks, not milk-and-water, but warm water alone, a little
+sweetened; and, until he has grown wicked, has very little good in him.
+
+Most ladies of fashion receive calls on a certain day of each week, when
+it is made a matter of pride to receive as many calls as possible. The
+number sometimes reaches three hundred, when nobody sits down, and few
+exchange more than a word with the hostess. In winter, the stove is
+heated on these reception days, and little cups of black coffee are
+passed round to the company; in summer lemonade is substituted for the
+coffee; but in all seasons a thin, waferish slice of toasted rusk
+(the Venetian _baicolo_) is offered to each guest with the drink. At
+receptions where the sparsity of the company permits the lady of the
+house to be seen, she is commonly visible on a sofa, surrounded by
+visitors in a half-circle. Nobody stays more than ten or fifteen
+minutes, and I have sometimes found even this brief time of much greater
+apparent length, and apt to produce a low state of nerves, from which
+one seldom recovers before dinner. Gentlemen, however, do not much
+frequent these receptions; and I assert again the diffidence I should
+feel in offering this glance at Venetian social enjoyment as conveying
+a just and full idea of it. There is no doubt that the Venetians find
+delight in their assemblies, where a stranger seeks it in vain. I dare
+say they would not think our own reunions brilliant, and that, looking
+obliquely (as a foreigner must) on the most sensible faces at one of
+our evening parties, they might mistake the look of pathetic dejection,
+visible in them, as the expression of people rather bored by their
+pleasure than otherwise.
+
+The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the conversazioni of the rigid
+proprietarians, where people sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at
+a soldo the point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the
+_demi-monde_ where they say any thing. There are persons in Venice, as
+well as everywhere else, of new-fashioned modes of thinking, and
+these strive to give a greater life and ease to their assemblies,
+by attracting as many young men as possible; and in their families,
+gentlemen are welcome to visit, and to talk with the young ladies in the
+presence of their mothers. But though such people are no more accused
+of impropriety than the straitest of the old-fashioned, they are not
+regarded with the greatest esteem, and their daughters do not so readily
+find husbands. The Italians are fickle, the women say; they get soon
+tired of their wives after marriage, and when they see much of ladies
+before marriage, they get tired of them then, and never make them their
+wives. So it is much better to see nothing of a possible husband till
+you actually have him. I do not think conversazioni of any kind are
+popular with young men, however; they like better to go to the caffè,
+and the people you meet at private houses are none the less interesting
+for being old, or middle-aged. A great many of the best families, at
+present, receive no company at all, and see their friends only in the
+most private manner; though there are still cultivated circles to
+which proper introduction gives the stranger (who has no Austrian
+acquaintance) access. But unless he have thorough knowledge of Italian
+politics localized to apply to Venice, an interest in the affairs,
+fortunes, and misfortunes of his neighbors, and an acquaintance with
+the Venetian dialect, I doubt if he will be able to enjoy himself in the
+places so cautiously opened to him. Even in the most cultivated society,
+the dialect is habitually spoken; and if Italian is used, it is only in
+compliment to some foreigner present, for whose sake, also, topics of
+general interest are sometimes chosen.
+
+The best society is now composed of the families of professional men,
+such as the advocates, the physicians, and the richer sort of merchants.
+The shopkeepers, master-artisans, and others, whom industry and thrift
+distinguish from the populace, seem not to have any social life, in
+the American sense. They are wholly devoted to affairs, and partly from
+choice, and partly from necessity, are sordid and grasping. It is their
+class which has to fight hardest for life in Europe, and they give no
+quarter to those above or below them. The shop is their sole thought and
+interest, and they never, never sink it. But, since they have habits of
+diligence, and, as far as they are permitted, of enterprise, they seem
+to be in great part the stuff from which a prosperous State is to be
+rebuilt in Venice, if ever the fallen edifice rise again. They have
+sometimes a certain independence of character, which a better condition
+of things, and further education, would perhaps lift into honesty;
+though as yet they seem not to scruple to take any unfair advantage,
+and not to know that commercial success can never rest permanently on a
+system of bad faith. Below this class is the populace, between which and
+the patrician order a relation something like Roman clientage existed,
+contributing greatly to the maintenance of exclusively aristocratic
+power in the State. The greatest conspiracy (that of Marin Falier) which
+the commons ever moved against the oligarchy was revealed to one of
+the nobility by his plebeian creature, or client; and the government
+rewarded by every species of indulgence a class in which it had
+extinguished even the desire of popular liberty. The heirs of the
+servile baseness which such a system as this must create are not yet
+extinct. There is still a helplessness in many of the servant class, and
+a disposition to look for largess as well as wages, which are the traits
+naturally resulting from a state of voluntary submission to others. The
+nobles, as the government, enervated and debauched the character of the
+poor by public shows and countless holidays; as individuals, they taught
+them to depend upon patrician favor, and not upon their own plebeian
+industry, for support. The lesson was an evil one, hard to be unlearned,
+and it is yet to be forgotten in Venice. Certain traits of soft
+and familiar dependence give great charm to the populace; but their
+existence makes the student doubtful of a future to which the plebeians
+themselves look forward with perfect hope and confidence. It may be that
+they are right, and will really rise to the dignity of men, when free
+government shall have taught them that the laborer is worthy of his
+hire--after he has earned it. This has been the result, to some degree,
+in the kingdom of Italy, where the people have found that freedom, like
+happiness, means work.
+
+Undoubtedly the best people in the best society of Venice are the
+advocates, an order of consequence even in the times of the Republic,
+though then shut out from participation in public affairs by a native
+government, as now by a foreign one. Acquaintance with several members
+of this profession impressed me with a sense of its liberality of
+thought and feeling, where all liberal thinking and feeling must be done
+by stealth, and where the common intelligence of the world sheds its
+light through multiplied barriers. Daniele Manin, the President of the
+Republic of 1848, was of this class, which, by virtue of its learning,
+enlightenment, and talent, occupies a place in the esteem and regard of
+the Venetian people far above that held by the effete aristocracy.
+The better part of the nobility, indeed, is merged in the professional
+class, and some of the most historic names are now preceded by the
+learned titles of Doctor and Advocate, rather than the cheap dignity
+of Count, offered by the Austrian government to all the patricians who
+chose to ask for it, when Austrian rule was extended over their country.
+
+The physicians rank next to the advocates, and are usually men learned
+in their profession, however erroneous and old-fashioned some of their
+theories of practice may be. Like the advocates, they are often men of
+letters: they write for the journals, and publish little pamphlets on
+those topics of local history which it is so much the fashion to treat
+in Venice. No one makes a profession of authorship. The returns of an
+author’s work would be too uncertain, and its restrictions and penalties
+would be too vexatious and serious; and so literary topics are only
+occasionally treated by those whose main energies are bent in another
+direction.
+
+The doctors are very numerous, and a considerable number of them are
+Hebrews, who, even in the old jealous times, exercised the noble art
+of medicine, and who now rank very highly among their professional
+brethren. These physicians haunt the neat and tasteful apothecary shops,
+where they sit upon the benching that passes round the interior, read
+the newspapers, and discuss the politics of Europe, Asia, Africa, and
+America, with all the zest that you may observe to characterize their
+discussions in Goldoni’s plays. There they spend their evenings, and
+many hours of every day, and thither the sick send to call them,--each
+physician resorting to a particular apothecary’s, and keeping his name
+inscribed on a brass plate against the wall, above the head of the
+druggist, who presides over the reunions of the doctors, while his
+apprentice pestles away at their prescriptions.
+
+In 1786 there were, what with priests, monks, and nuns, a multitude of
+persons of ecclesiastical profession in Venice; and though many convents
+and monasteries were abolished by Napoleon, the priests are still very
+numerous, and some monastic establishments have been revived under
+Austrian rule. The high officers of the Church are, of course, well
+paid, but most of the priesthood live miserably enough. They receive
+from the government a daily stipend of about thirty-five soldi, and they
+celebrate mass when they can get something to do in that way, for forty
+soldi. Unless, then, they have private income from their own family, or
+have pay for the education of some rich man’s son or daughter, they must
+fare slenderly.
+
+There is much said, in and out of Venice, about their influence in
+society; but this is greatly modified, and I think is chiefly exercised
+upon the women of the old-fashioned families. [Footnote: It is no longer
+usual for girls to be educated in convents, and most young ladies of
+the better classes, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen years, receive
+their schooling in secular establishments, whither they go every day
+for study, or where they sometimes live as in our boarding-schools, and
+where they are taught the usual accomplishments, greater attention being
+paid to French and music than to other things.] I need hardly repeat
+the wellknown fact that all the moral power of the Roman Church over the
+younger men is gone; these seldom attend mass, and almost never go to
+confession, and the priests are their scorn and by-word. Their example,
+in some degree, must be much followed also by women; and though women
+must everywhere make more public professions of religion than men, in
+order to retain social standing, I doubt if the priests have a very firm
+hold upon the fears or reverence of the sisters and wives of liberal
+Venetians.
+
+If, however, they contribute in anywise to keep down the people, they
+are themselves enslaved to their superiors and to each other. No priest
+can leave the city of Venice without permission of the Patriarch. He is
+cut off as much as possible from his own kinspeople, and subjected
+to the constant surveillance of his class. Obliged to maintain a
+respectable appearance on twenty cents a day,--hampered and hindered
+from all personal liberty and private friendship, and hated by the great
+mass of the people,--I hardly think the Venetian priest is to be envied
+in his life. For my own part, knowing these things, I was not able to
+cherish toward the priests those feelings of scornful severity which
+swell many Protestant bosoms; and so far as I made their acquaintance, I
+found them kind and amiable. One ecclesiastic, at least, I may describe
+as one of the most agreeable and cultivated gentlemen I ever met.
+
+Those who fare best among the priests are the Jesuits, who returned from
+repeated banishment with the Austrians in this century. Their influence
+is very extended, and the confessional is their forte. Venetians say
+that with the old and the old-fashioned these crafty priests suggest
+remorse and impose penances; that with the young men and the latter-day
+thinkers they are men of the world, and pass off pleasant sins as
+trifles. All the students of the government schools are obliged by
+law to confess twice a month, and are given printed certificates of
+confession, in blank, which the confessor fills up and stamps with the
+seal of the Church. Most of them go to confess at the church of the
+Jesuits, who are glad to hear the cock-and-bull story invented by
+the student, and to cultivate his friendship by an easy penance and
+a liberal tone. This ingenuous young man of course despises the
+confessional. He goes to confess because the law obliges him to do so;
+but the law cannot dictate what he must confess. Therefore, he ventures
+as near downright burlesque as he dares, and (if the account he gives of
+the matter be true) puts off his confessor with some well-known fact, as
+that he has blasphemed. Of course he has blasphemed, blasphemy being as
+common as the forms of salutation in Venice. So the priest, who wishes
+him to come again, and to found some sort of influence over him,
+says,--“Oh dear, dear! This is very bad. Blasphemy is deadly sin. If you
+_must_ swear, swear by the heathen gods: say Body of Diana, instead of
+Body of God; Presence of the Devil, instead of Blood of Mary. Then
+there is no harm done.” The students laugh over the pleasant absurdity
+together, and usually agree upon the matter of their semimonthly
+confessions beforehand.
+
+As I have hinted, the young men do not love the government or the
+Church, and though I account for the loss of much high hope and generous
+sympathy in growth from youth to middle age, I cannot see how, when
+they have replaced their fathers, the present religious and political
+discontent is to be modified. Nay, I believe it must become worse. The
+middle-aged men of Venice grew up in times of comparative quiet, when
+she did not so much care who ruled over her, and negatively, at least,
+they honored the Church. They may now hate the foreign rule, but there
+are many considerations of timidity, and many effects of education, to
+temper their hate. They may dislike the priests, but they revere the
+Church. The young men of to-day are bred in a different school, and all
+their thoughts are of opposition to the government and of war upon the
+Church, which they detest and ridicule. The fact that their education is
+still in the hands of the priests in some measure, does not render them
+more tractable. They have no fears to be wrought upon by their clerical
+professors, who seldom have sought to act upon their nobler qualities.
+The influence of the priesthood is again limited by the fact that the
+teachers in the free schools of the city, to which the poor send their
+children, are generally not priests; and ecclesiastics are no longer so
+commonly the private tutors of the children of the rich, as they
+once were when they lived with the family, and exercised a direct and
+important influence on it. Express permission from the pope is now
+necessary to the maintenance of a family chaplain, and the office is
+nearly disused. [Footnote: In early days every noble Venetian family
+had its chaplain, who, on the occasion of great dinners and suppers,
+remained in the kitchen, and received as one of his perquisites the
+fragments that came back from the table.]
+
+The Republic was extremely jealous of the political power of the
+priests, who could not hold secular office in its time. A curious
+punishment was inflicted upon the priest who proved false to his own
+vows of chastity, and there is a most amusing old ballad--by no means
+cleanly in its language--purporting to be the lament of a priest
+suspended in the iron cage, appointed for the purpose, from the belfry
+of the Campanile San Marco, and enduring the jeers and insults of the
+mob below. We may suppose that with advancing corruption (if corruption
+has indeed advanced from remote to later times) this punishment was
+disused for want of room to hang out the delinquents. In the last
+century, especially, the nuns and monks led a pleasant life. You may
+see in the old pictures of Pietro Longhi and his school, how at the
+aristocratic and fashionable convent of San Zaccaria, the lady nuns
+received their friends and acquaintances of this world in the anteroom,
+where the dames and their cavaliers flirted and drank coffee, and the
+gentlemen coquetted with the brides of heaven through their grated
+windows.
+
+Among other privileges of the Church, abolished in Venice long ago, was
+that ancient right of the monks of St. Anthony, Abbot, by which
+their herds of swine were made free of the whole city. These animals,
+enveloped in an odor of sanctity, wandered here and there, and were
+piously fed by devout people, until the year 1409, when, being found
+dangerous to children and inconvenient to every body, they were made
+the subject of a special decree, which deprived them of their freedom of
+movement. The Republic was always limiting the privileges of the
+Church! It is known how when the holy inquisition was established in its
+dominions in 1249, the State stipulated that great part of the process
+against heresy should be conducted by secular functionaries, and that
+the sentence should rest with the Doge and his councillors,--a kind of
+inquisition with claws clipped and teeth filed, as one may say, and
+the only sort ever permitted in Venice. At present there is no absolute
+disfavor shown to the clergy; but, as we have seen, many a pleasant
+island, which the monks of old reclaimed from the salty marshes, and
+planted with gardens and vineyards, now bears only the ruins of their
+convents, or else, converted into a fortress or government dépôt, is
+all thistly with bayonets. Anciently, moreover, there were many little
+groves in different parts of the city, where the pleasant clergy, of
+what Mr. Ruskin would have us believe the pure and religious days of
+Venice, met and made merry so riotously together by night that the
+higher officers of the Church were forced to prohibit their little
+soirées.
+
+An old custom of rejoicing over the installation of a new parish priest
+is still to be seen in almost primitive quaintness. The people of each
+parish--nobles, citizens, and plebeians alike--formerly elected their
+own priest, and, till the year 1576, they used to perambulate the city
+to the sound of drums, with banners flying, after an election, and
+proclaim the name of their favorite. On the day of the _parroco_’s
+induction his portrait was placed over the church door and after the
+celebration of the morning mass, a breakfast was given, which grew to be
+so splendid in time, that in the fifteenth century a statute limited
+its profusion. In the afternoon the new parroco, preceded by a band of
+military music, visited all the streets and courts of his parish,
+and then, as now, all the windows of the parish were decorated with
+brilliant tapestries, and other gay-colored cloths and pictures. In
+those times as in these, there was an illumination at night, throngs of
+people in the campo of the church, and booths for traffic in cakes of
+flour and raisins,--fried in lard upon the spot, and sold smoking hot,
+with immense uproar on the part of the merchant; and for three days
+afterward the parish bells were sounded in concert.
+
+The difficulty of ascertaining any thing with certainty in Venice
+attends in a degree peculiarly great the effort to learn exactly the
+present influence and standing of the nobility as a class. One is
+tempted, on observing the free and unembarrassed bearing of all ranks
+of people toward each other, to say that no sense of difference
+exists,--and I do not think there is ever shown, among Italians, either
+the aggressive pride or the abject meanness which marks the intercourse
+of people and nobles elsewhere in Europe, and I have not seen the
+distinction of rich and poor made so brutally in Italy as sometimes in
+our own _soi-disant_ democratic society at home. There is, indeed, that
+equality in Italian fibre which I believe fits the nation for democratic
+institutions better than any other, and which is perhaps partly the
+result of their ancient civilization. At any rate, it fascinates a
+stranger to see people so mutually gentle and deferential; and must
+often be a matter of surprise to the Anglo-Saxon, in whose race,
+reclaimed from barbarism more recently, the native wild-beast is still
+so strong as to sometimes inform the manner. The uneducated Anglo-Saxon
+is a savage; the Italian, though born to utter ignorance, poverty, and
+depravity, is a civilized man. I do not say that his civilization is of
+a high order, or that the civilization of the most cultivated Italian is
+at all comparable to that of a gentleman among ourselves. The Italian’s
+education, however profound, has left his passions undisciplined, while
+it has carefully polished his manner; he yields lightly to temptation,
+he loses his self-control, he blasphemes habitually; his gentleness is
+conventional, his civilization not individual. With us the education of
+a gentleman (I do not mean a person born to wealth or station, but any
+man who has trained himself in morals or religion, in letters, and in
+the world) disciplines the impulses, and leaves the good manner to
+grow naturally out of habits of self-command and consequent habitual
+self-respect.
+
+The natural equality of the Italians is visible in their community of
+good looks as well as good manners. They have never, perhaps, that
+high beauty of sensitive expression which is found among Englishmen and
+Americans (preferably among the latter), but it very rarely happens that
+they are brutally ugly; and the man of low rank and mean vocation has
+often a beauty of as fine sort as the man of education and refinement.
+If they changed clothes, and the poor man could be persuaded to wash
+himself, they might successfully masquerade, one for another. The
+plebeian Italian, inspired by the national vanity, bears himself as
+proudly as the noble, without at all aggressing in his manner. His
+beauty, like that of the women of his class, is world-old,--the beauty
+of the pictures and the statues: the ideal types of loveliness are
+realized in Italy; the saints and heroes, the madonnas and nymphs, come
+true to the stranger at every encounter with living faces. In Venice,
+particularly, the carriage of the women, of whatever rank, is very free
+and noble, and the servant is sometimes to be distinguished from the
+mistress only by her dress and by her labor-coarsened hands; certainly
+not always by her dirty finger-nails and foul teeth, for though the
+clean shirt is now generally in Italy, some lesser virtues are still
+unknown: the nail-brush and tooth-brush are of but infrequent use; the
+four-pronged fork is still imperfectly understood, and as a nation the
+Italians may be said to eat with their knives.
+
+The Venetian, then, seeing so little difference between himself and
+others, whatever his rank may be, has, as I said, little temptation to
+arrogance or servility. The effects of the old relationship of patron
+and client are amusingly noticeable in the superior as well as the
+inferior; a rich man’s dependents are perfectly free with advice and
+comment, and it sometimes happens that he likes to hear their lively
+talk, and at home secretly consorts with his servants. The former social
+differences between commoners and patricians (which, I think, judging
+from the natural temper of the race, must have been greatly modified
+at all times by concession and exception) may be said to have quite
+disappeared in point of fact; the nobility is now almost as effete
+socially as it is politically. There is still a number of historic
+families, which are in a certain degree exclusive; but rich _parvenus_
+have admission to their friendship, and commoners in good circumstances
+are permitted their acquaintance; the ladies of this patrician society
+visit ladies of less rank, and receive them at their great parties,
+though not at more sacred assemblies, where they see only each other.
+
+The Venetians have a habit of saying their best families are in exile,
+but this is not meant to be taken literally. Many of the best families
+are yet in the city, living in perfect retirement, or very often merged
+in the middle class, and become men of professions, and active, useful
+lives. Of these nobles (they usually belong to the families which
+did not care to ask nobility of Austria, and are therefore untitled)
+[Footnote: The only title conferred on any patrician of Venice during
+the Republic was Cavaliere, and this was conferred by a legislative
+act in reward of distinguished service. The names of the nobility were
+written in the Golden Book of the Republic, and they were addressed
+as Illustrissimo or Eccellenza. They also signed themselves _nobile_,
+between the Christian name and surname, as it is still the habit of the
+untitled nobility to do.] the citizens are affectionately proud, while I
+have heard from them nothing but contempt and ridicule of the patricians
+who, upon a wretched pension or meagre government office, attempt to
+maintain patrician distinction. Such nobles are usually Austriacanti in
+their politics, and behind the age in every thing; while there are
+other descendants of patrician families mingled at last with the very
+populace, sharing their ignorance and degradation, and feeling with
+them. These sometimes exercise the most menial employments: I knew one
+noble lord who had been a facchino, and I heard of another who was a
+street-sweeper. _Conte che non conta, non conta niente_, [Footnote: A
+count who doesn’t count (money) counts for nothing.] says the sneering
+Italian proverb; and it would be little less than miraculous if a
+nobility like that of modern Venice maintained superior state and regard
+in the eyes of the quick-witted, intelligent, sarcastic commonalty.
+
+The few opulent patricians are by no means the most violent of
+Italianissimi. They own lands and houses, and as property is unsafe when
+revolutionary feeling is rife, their patriotism is tempered. The wealth
+amassed in early times by the vast and enterprising commerce of the
+country was, when not dissipated in riotous splendor, invested in real
+estate upon the main-land as the Republic grew in territory, and the
+income of the nobles is now from the rents of these lands. They reside
+upon their estates during the season of the _villeggiatura_, which
+includes the months of September and October, when every one who can
+possibly leave the city goes into the country. Then the patricians
+betake themselves to their villas near Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and
+Treviso, and people the sad-colored, weather-worn stucco hermitages,
+where the mutilated statues, swaggering above the gates, forlornly
+commemorate days when it was a far finer thing to be a noble than it is
+now. I say the villas look dreary and lonesome as places can be made to
+look in Italy, what with their high garden walls, their long, low piles
+of stabling, and the _passée_ indecency of their nymphs and fauns,
+foolishly strutting in the attitudes of the silly and sinful old Past;
+and it must be but a dull life that the noble proprietors lead there.
+
+It is better, no doubt, on the banks of the Brenta, where there are
+still so many villas as to form a street of these seats of luxury,
+almost the whole length of the canal, from Fusina to Padua. I am
+not certain that they have a right to the place which they hold in
+literature and sentiment, and yet there is something very charming about
+them, with their gardens, and chapels, and statues, and shaded walks.
+We went to see them one day early in October, and found them every one,
+when habitable, inhabited, and wearing a cheerful look, that made their
+proximity to Venice incredible. As we returned home after dark, we saw
+the ladies from the villas walking unattended along the road, and giving
+the scene an air of homelike peace and trustfulness which I had not
+found before in Italy; while the windows of the houses were brilliantly
+lighted, as if people lived in them; whereas, you seldom see a light in
+Venetian palaces. I am not sure that I did not like better, however, the
+villas that were empty and ruinous, and the gardens that had run wild,
+and the statues that had lost legs and arms. Some of the ingenious
+proprietors had enterprisingly whitewashed their statues, and there
+was a horrible primness about certain of the well-kept gardens which
+offended me. Most of the houses were not large, but there was here and
+there a palace as grand as any in the city. Such was the great villa
+of the Contarini of the Lions, which was in every way superb, with
+two great lions of stone guarding its portals, and a gravel walk,
+over-arched with stately trees, stretching a quarter of a mile before
+it. At the moment I was walking down this aisle I met a cleanshaven old
+canonico, with red legs and red-tasseled hat, and with a book under his
+arm, and a meditative look, whom I here thank for being so venerably
+picturesque. The palace itself was shut up, and I wish I had known, when
+I saw it, that it had a ghostly underground passage from its cellar to
+the chapel,--wherein, when you get half way, your light goes out, and
+you consequently never reach the chapel.
+
+This is at Mira; but the greatest of all the villas is the magnificent
+country-seat of the family Pisani at Stra, which now, with scarcely
+any addition to its splendor, serves for the residence of the abdicated
+Emperor of Austria. There is such pride in the vastness of this edifice
+and its gardens as impresses you with the material greatness which found
+expression in it, and never raises a regret that it has utterly passed
+away. You wander around through the aisles of trim-cut lime-trees,
+bullied and overborne by the insolent statues, and expect at every turn
+to come upon intriguing spectres in bag-wigs, immense hoops and
+patches. How can you feel sympathy for those dull and wicked ghosts of
+eighteenth-century corruption? There is rottenness enough in the world
+without digging up old putridity and sentimentalizing on it; and I doubt
+if you will care to know much of the way in which the noble owner of
+such a villa ascended the Brenta at the season of the _villeggiatura_ in
+his great gilded barge, all carven outside with the dumpling loves and
+loose nymphs of the period, with fruits, and flowers, and what not;
+and within, luxuriously cushioned and furnished, and stocked with
+good things for pleasure making in the gross old fashion. [Footnote:
+Mutinelli, _Gli Ultimi Cinquant’ Anni della Repubblica di Veneza_.]
+King Cole was not a merrier old soul than Illustrissimo of that day; he
+outspent princes; and his agent, while he harried the tenants to supply
+his master’s demands, plundered Illustrissimo frightfully. Illustrissimo
+never looked at accounts. He said to his steward, “_Caro veccio, fè vu.
+Mi remeto a quel che fè vu._” (Old fellow, you attend to it. I shall be
+satisfied with what you do.) So the poor agent had no other course but
+to swindle him, which he did; and Illustrissimo, when he died, died
+poor, and left his lordly debts and vices to his sons.
+
+In Venice, the noble still lives sometimes in his ancestral palace,
+dimly occupying the halls where his forefathers flourished in so much
+splendor. I can conceive, indeed, of no state of things more flattering
+to human pride than that which surrounded the patrician of the old
+aristocratic Republic. The house in which he dwelt was the palace of
+a king, in luxury of appointment and magnificence of size. Troops of
+servants that ministered to his state peopled its vast extent; and the
+gondolas that carried his grandeur abroad were moored in little fleets
+to the piles that rose before his palace, painted with the family arms
+and colors. The palace itself stood usually on the Grand Canal, and
+rose sheer from the water, giving the noble that haughty inaccessibility
+which the lord of the main-land achieved only by building lofty walls
+and multiplying gates. The architecture was as costly in its ornament
+as wild Gothic fancy, or Renaissance luxury of bad taste, could make it;
+and when the palace front was not of sculptured marble, the painter’s
+pencil filled it with the delight of color. The main-land noble’s house
+was half a fortress, and formed his stronghold in times of popular
+tumult or family fray; but at Venice the strong arm of St. Mark
+suppressed all turbulence in a city secure from foreign war; and the
+peaceful arts rejoiced in undisturbed possession of the palaces, which
+rose in the most delicate and fantastic beauty, and mirrored in the
+brine a dream of sea-deep strangeness and richness. You see much of the
+beauty yet, but the pride and opulence which called it into being are
+gone forever.
+
+Most palaces, whether of the Gothic or classicistic period, have the
+same internal arrangement of halls and chambers, and are commonly built
+of two lofty and two low stories. On the ground floor, or water level,
+is a hall running back from the gate to a bit of garden at the other
+side of the palace; and on either side of this hall, which in old times
+was hung with the family trophies of the chase and war, are the porter’s
+lodge and gondoliers’ rooms. On the first and second stories are the
+family apartments, opening on either side from great halls, of the same
+extent as that below, but with loftier roofs, of heavy rafters gilded
+or painted. The fourth floor is of the same arrangement, but has a
+lower roof, and was devoted to the better class of servants. Of the two
+stories used by the family, the third is the loftier and airier, and was
+occupied in summer; the second was the winter apartment. On either hand
+the rooms open in suites.
+
+We have seen something of the ceremonies, public and private, which gave
+peculiar gayety and brilliance to the life of the Venetians of
+former days; but in his political character the noble had yet greater
+consequence. He was part of the proudest, strongest, and securest system
+of his time. He was a king with the fellowship of kings, flattered with
+the equality of an aristocracy which was master of itself, and of its
+nominal head. During the earlier times it was his office to go daily to
+Rialto and instruct the people in their political rights and duties for
+four hours; and even when the duties became every thing and the rights
+nothing (after the Serrar del Consiglio), the friendly habit of daily
+intercourse between patricians and citizens was still kept up at the
+same place. Once each week, and on every holiday, the noble took his
+seat in the Grand Council (the most august assembly in the world,
+without doubt), or the Ten, or the Three, according to his office in the
+State,--holding his place in the Council by right of birth, and in the
+other bodies by election of his peers.
+
+Although the patricians were kept as one family apart from the people,
+and jealously guarded in their aristocratic purity by the State, they
+were only equals of the poorest before the laws of their own creation,
+and their condescension to the people was frequent and great. Indeed,
+the Venetians of all classes are social creatures, loving talk and
+gossip, and these constant habits of intercourse must have done much to
+produce that equality of manner now observable in them. Their amusements
+were for a long time the same, the nobles taking part in the public
+holidays, and in the popular exercises of rowing and swimming. In the
+earlier times, hunting in the lagoons was a favorite diversion; but as
+the decay of the Republic advanced, and the patrician blossomed into
+the fine gentleman of the last century, these hearty sports were
+relinquished, and every thing was voted vulgar but masking in carnival,
+dancing and gaming at Ridotto, and intriguing everywhere.
+
+The accounts which Venetian writers give of Republican society in the
+eighteenth century form a _chronique scandaleuse_ which need not be
+minutely copied here. Much may be learned of Venetian manners of this
+time from the comedies of Goldoni; and the faithlessness of society
+may be argued from the fact that in these plays, which contain nothing
+salacious or indecent, there is scarcely a character of any rank
+who scruples to tell lies; and the truth is not to be found in works
+intended to school the public to virtue. The ingenious old playwright’s
+memoirs are full of gossip concerning that poor old Venice, which is
+now no more; and the worthy autobiographer, Casanova, also gives much
+information about things that had best not be known.
+
+As the Republic drew near its fall, in 1797, there was little left in
+its dominant class worth saving, if we may believe the testimony of
+Venetians which Mutinelli brings to bear upon the point in his “Annali
+Urbani,” and his “History of the Last Fifty Years of the Republic.”
+ Long prosperity and prodigious opulence had done their worst, and the
+patricians, and the lowest orders of the people, their creatures and
+dependants, were thoroughly corrupt; while the men of professions began
+to assume that station which they now hold. The days of a fashionable
+patrician of those times began at a little before sunset, and ended with
+the following dawn. Rising from his bed, he dressed himself in dainty
+linen, and placed himself in the hands of the hairdresser to be combed,
+oiled, perfumed, and powdered; and then sallied forth for a stroll
+through the Merceria, where this excellent husband and father made
+tasteful purchases to be carried to the lady he served. At dinner,
+which he took about seven or eight, his board was covered with the most
+tempting viands, and surrounded by needy parasites, who detailed the
+spicy scandals of the day in payment of their dinner, while the children
+of the host were confided to the care of the corrupt and negligent
+servants. After dinner, the father went to the theatre, or to the
+_casino_, and spent the night over cards and wine, in the society of
+dissolute women; and renewed on the morrow the routine of his useful
+existence. The education of the children of the man of fashion was
+confided to a priest, who lived in his family, and called himself an
+abbate, after the mode of the _abbés_ of French society; he had winning
+manners with the ladies, indulgent habits with his pupils, and dressed
+his elegant person in silks of Lyons and English broadcloths. In the
+pleasant old days he flitted from palace to villa, dining and supping,
+and flattering the ladies, and tapping the lid of his jeweled snuffbox
+in all fashionable companies. He was the cadet of a patrician family
+(when not the ambitious son of a low family), with a polite taste for
+idleness and intrigue, for whom no secular sinecure could be found in
+the State, and who obliged the Church by accepting orders. Whether in
+the palace on the Grand Canal, or the villa on the Brenta, this gentle
+and engaging priest was surely the most agreeable person to be met, and
+the most dangerous to ladies’ hearts,--with his rich suit of black,
+and his smug, clean-shaven face, and his jeweled hands, and his sweet,
+seducing manners. Alas! the world is changed! The priests whom you see
+playing _tre-sette_ now at the conversazioni are altogether different
+men, and the delightful abbate is as much out of fashion as the bag-wig
+or the queue. When in fashion he loved the theatre, and often showed
+himself there at the side of his noble patron’s wife. Nay, in that time
+the theatre was so prized by the Church that a popular preacher thought
+it becoming to declare from his pulpit that to compose well his
+hearers should study the comedies of Goldoni,--and his hearers were the
+posterity of that devout old aristocracy which never undertook a journey
+without first receiving the holy sacrament; which had built the churches
+and endowed them from private wealth!
+
+Ignorance, as well as vice, was the mode in those elegant days, and it
+is related that a charming lady of good society once addressed a foreign
+_savant_ at her conversazione, and begged him to favor the company with
+a little music, because, having heard that he was _virtuous_, she had
+no other association with the word than its technical use in Italy to
+indicate a professional singer as a _virtuoso_. A father of a family who
+kept no abbate for the education of his children ingeniously taught them
+himself. “Father,” asked one of his children, “what are the stars?” “The
+stars are stars, and little things that shine as thou seest.” “Then they
+are candles, perhaps?” “Make thy account that they are candles exactly.”
+ “Of wax or tallow?” pursues the boy. “What! tallow-candles in heaven?
+No, certainly--wax, wax!”
+
+These, and many other scandalous stories, the Venetian writers recount
+of the last days of their Republic, and the picture they produce is one
+of the most shameless ignorance, the most polite corruption, the
+most unblushing baseness. I have no doubt that the picture is full of
+national exaggeration. Indeed, the method of Mutinelli (who I believe
+intends to tell the truth) in writing social history is altogether too
+credulous and incautious. It is well enough to study contemporary comedy
+for light upon past society, but satirical ballads and lampoons, and
+scurrilous letters, cannot be accepted as historical authority. Still
+there is no question but Venice was very corrupt. As you read of her
+people in the last century, one by one the ideas of family faith and
+domestic purity fade away; one by one the beliefs in public virtue
+are dissipated; until at last you are glad to fly the study, close the
+filthy pages, and take refuge in doubt of the writers, who declare
+that they must needs disgrace Venice with facts since her children have
+dishonored her in their lives. “Such as we see them,” they say, “were
+the patricians, such the people of Venice, after the middle of the
+eighteenth century. The Venetians might be considered as extinguished;
+the marvelous city, the pomp only of the Venetians, existed.”
+
+Shall we believe this? Let each choose for himself. At that very time
+the taste and wealth of a Venetian noble fostered the genius of Canova
+and then, when their captains starved the ragged soldiers of the
+Republic to feed their own idleness and vice,--when the soldiers
+dismantled her forts to sell the guns to the Turk,--when her sailors
+rioted on shore and her ships rotted in her ports, she had still
+military virtue enough to produce that Emo, who beat back the Algerine
+corsairs from the commerce of Christendom, and attacked them in their
+stronghold, as of old her galleys beat back the Turks. Alas! there was
+not the virtue in her statesmen to respond to this greatness in the
+hero. One of their last public acts was to break his heart with insult,
+and to crave peace of the pirates whom he had cowed. It remained for the
+helpless Doge and the abject patricians, terrified at a threat of war,
+to declare the Republic at an end, and San Marco was no more.
+
+I love Republics too well to lament the fall of Venice. And yet, _Pax
+tibi, Marce!_ If I have been slow to praise, I shall not hasten to
+condemn, a whole nation. Indeed, so much occurs to me to qualify with
+contrary sense what I have written concerning Venice, that I wonder if,
+after all, I have not been treating throughout less of the rule than of
+the exception. It is a doubt which must force itself upon every fair
+and temperate man who attempts to describe another people’s life and
+character; and I confess that it troubles me so sorely now, at the end
+of my work, that I would fain pray the gentle reader to believe much
+more good and much less evil of the Venetians than I have said. I am
+glad that it remains for me to express a faith and hope in them for the
+future, founded upon their present political feeling, which, however
+tainted with self-interest in the case of many, is no doubt with
+the great majority a high and true feeling of patriotism. And it is
+impossible to believe that a people which can maintain the stern and
+unyielding attitude now maintained by the Venetians toward an alien
+government disposed to make them any concession short of freedom, in
+order to win them into voluntary submission, can be wanting in the great
+qualities which distinguish living peoples from those passed hopelessly
+into history and sentiment. In truth, glancing back over the whole
+career of the nation, I can discern in it nothing so admirable, so
+dignified, so steadfastly brave, as its present sacrifice of all that
+makes life easy and joyous, to the attainment of a good which shall make
+life noble.
+
+The Venetians desire now, and first of all things, Liberty, knowing
+that in slavery men can learn no virtues; and I think them fit, with all
+their errors and defects, to be free now, because men are never fit to
+be slaves.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+OUR LAST YEAR IN VENICE.
+
+_(As it seems Seven Years after.)_
+
+
+The last of four years which it was our fortune to live in the city
+of Venice was passed under the roof of one of her most beautiful and
+memorable palaces, namely, the Palazzo Giustiniani, whither we went,
+as has been told in an earlier chapter of this book, to escape the
+encroaching nepotism of Giovanna, the flower of serving-women. The
+experience now, in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to consort with ordinary
+remembrances, and has such a fantastic preference for the company of
+rather vivid and circumstantial dreams, that it is with no very strong
+hope of making it seem real that I shall venture to speak of it.
+
+The Giustiniani were a family of patricians very famous during the times
+of a Republic that gave so many splendid names to history, and the race
+was preserved to the honor and service of Saint Mark by one of the most
+romantic facts of his annals. During a war with the Greek Emperor in the
+twelfth century every known Giustiniani was slain, and the heroic strain
+seemed lost forever. But the state that mourned them bethought itself
+of a half forgotten monk of their house, who was wasting his life in the
+Convent of San Nicolò; he was drawn forth from this seclusion, and,
+the permission of Rome being won, he was married to the daughter of the
+reigning doge. From them descended the Giustiniani of aftertimes, who
+still exist; in deed, in the year 1865 there came one day a gentleman of
+the family, and tried to buy from our landlord that part of the palace
+which we so humbly and insufficiently inhabited. It is said that as the
+unfrocked friar and his wife declined in life they separated, and, as if
+in doubt of what had been done for the state through them, retired each
+into a convent, Giustiniani going back to San Nicolò, and dying at last
+to the murmur of the Adriatic waves along the Lido’s sands.
+
+Next after this Giustiniani I like best to think of that latest hero of
+the family, who had the sad fortune to live when the ancient Republic
+fell at a threat of Napoleon, and who alone among her nobles had
+the courage to meet with a manly spirit the insolent menaces of the
+conqueror. The Giustiniani governed Treviso for the Senate; he refused,
+when Napoleon ordered him from his presence, to quit Treviso without the
+command of the Senate; he flung back the taunts of bad faith cast upon
+the Venetians; and when Napoleon changed his tone from that of disdain
+to one of compliment, and promised that in the general disaster he
+was preparing for Venice, Giustiniani should be spared, the latter
+generously replied that he had been a friend of the French only because
+the Senate was so; as to the immunity offered, all was lost to him
+in the loss of his country, and he should blush for his wealth if it
+remained intact amidst the ruin of his countrymen.
+
+The family grew in riches and renown from age to age, and, some
+four centuries after the marriage of the monk, they reared the three
+beautiful Gothic palaces, in the noblest site on the Grand Canal, whence
+on one hand you can look down to the Rialto Bridge, and on the other far
+up towards the church of the Salute, and the Basin of Saint Mark. The
+architects were those Buoni, father and son, who did some of the
+most beautiful work on the Ducal Palace, and who wrought in an equal
+inspiration upon these homes of the Giustiniani, building the delicate
+Gothic arches of the windows, with their slender columns and their
+graceful balconies, and crowning all with the airy battlements.
+
+The largest of the three palaces became later the property of the
+Foscari family, and here dwelt with his father that unhappy Jacopo
+Foscari, who after thrice suffering torture by the state for a murder he
+never did, at last died in exile; hither came the old Doge Foscari, who
+had consented to this cruel error of the state, and who after a life
+spent in its service was deposed and disgraced before his death; and
+whither when he lay dead, came remorseful Venice, and claimed for
+sumptuous obsequies the dust which his widow yielded with bitter
+reproaches. Here the family faded away generation by generation, till,
+(according to the tale told us) early in this century, when the ultimate
+male survivor of the line had died, under a false name, in London, where
+he had been some sort of obscure actor, there were but two old maiden
+sisters left, who, lapsing into imbecility, were shown to strangers by
+the rascal servants as the last of the Foscari; and here in our time was
+quartered a regiment of Austrian troops, whose neatly pipe-clayed belts
+decorated the balconies on which the princely ladies of the house had
+rested their jewelled arms in other days.
+
+The Foscari added a story to the palace to distinguish it from the two
+other palaces Giustiniani, but these remain to the present day as they
+were originally planned. That in which we lived was called Palazzo
+Giustiniani of the Bishops, because one of the family was the first
+patriarch of Venice. After his death he was made a saint by the Pope;
+and it is related that he was not only a very pious, but a very good
+man. In his last hours he admitted his beloved people to his chamber,
+where he meekly lay upon a pallet of straw, and at the moment he
+expired, two monks in the solitude of their cloister, heard an angelical
+harmony in the air: the clergy performed his obsequies not in black,
+funereal robes, but in white garments, and crowned with laurel, and
+bearing gilded torches, and although the patriarch had died of a
+malignant fever, his body was miraculously preserved incorrupt during
+the sixty-five days that the obsequies lasted. The other branch of the
+family was called the Giustiniani of the Jewels, from the splendor of
+their dress; but neither palace now shelters any of their magnificent
+race. The edifice on our right was exclusively occupied by a noble
+Viennese lady, who as we heard,--vaguely, in the right Venetian
+fashion,--had been a ballet-dancer in her youth, and who now in her
+matronly days dwelt apart from her husband, the Russian count, and had
+gondoliers in blue silk, and the finest gondola on the Grand Canal, but
+was a plump, florid lady, looking long past beauty, even as we saw her
+from our balcony.
+
+Our own palace--as we absurdly grew to call it--was owned and inhabited
+in a manner much more proper to modern Venice, the proprietorship being
+about equally divided between our own landlord and a very well known
+Venetian painter, son of a painter still more famous. This artist was
+a very courteous old gentleman, who went with Italian and clock-like
+regularity every evening in summer to a certain caffè, where he seemed
+to make it a point of conscience to sip one sherbet, and to read the
+“Journal des Débats.” In his coming and going we met him so often that
+we became friends, and he asked us many times to visit him, and see his
+father’s pictures, and some famous frescos with which his part of the
+palace was adorned. It was a characteristic trait of our life, that
+though we constantly meant to avail ourselves of this kindness, we never
+did so. But we continued in the enjoyment of the beautiful garden, which
+this gentleman owned at the rear of the palace and on which our chamber
+windows looked. It was full of oleanders and roses, and other bright
+and odorous blooms, which we could enjoy perfectly well without knowing
+their names; and I could hardly say whether the garden was more charming
+when it was in its summer glory, or when, on some rare winter day, a
+breath from the mountains had clothed its tender boughs and sprays with
+a light and evanescent flowering of snow. At any season the lofty palace
+walls rose over it, and shut it in a pensive seclusion which was loved
+by the old mother of the painter and by his elderly maiden sister. These
+often walked on its moss-grown paths, silent as the roses and oleanders
+to which one could have fancied the blossom of their youth had
+flown; and sometimes there came to them there, grave, black-gowned
+priests,--for the painter’s was a devout family,--and talked with them
+in tones almost as tranquil as the silence was, save when one of the
+ecclesiastics placidly took snuff,--it is a dogma of the Church for
+priests to take snuff in Italy,--and thereafter, upon a prolonged search
+for his handkerchief, blew a resounding nose. So far as we knew, the
+garden walls circumscribed the whole life of these ladies; and I am
+afraid that such topics of this world as they touched upon with their
+priests must have been deplorably small.
+
+Their kinsman owned part of the story under us, and both of the stories
+above us; he had the advantage of the garden over our landlord; but
+he had not so grand a gondola-gate as we, and in some other respects
+I incline to think that our part of the edifice was the finer. It
+is certain that no mention is made of any such beautiful hall in the
+property of the painter as is noted in that of our landlord, by
+the historian of a “Hundred Palaces of Venice,”--a work for which
+I subscribed, and then for my merit was honored by a visit from the
+author, who read aloud to me in a deep and sonorous voice the annals
+of our temporary home. This hall occupied half the space of the whole
+floor; but it was altogether surrounded by rooms of various shapes and
+sizes, except upon one side of its length, where it gave through Gothic
+windows of vari-colored glass, upon a small court below,--a green-mouldy
+little court, further dampened by a cistern, which had the usual curb
+of a single carven block of marble. The roof of this stately _sala_ was
+traversed by a long series of painted rafters, which in the halls of
+nearly all Venetian palaces are left exposed, and painted or carved and
+gilded. A suite of stately rooms closed the hall from the Grand Canal,
+and one of these formed our parlor; on the side opposite the Gothic
+windows was a vast aristocratic kitchen, which, with its rows of shining
+coppers, its great chimney-place well advanced toward the middle of the
+floor, and its tall gloomy windows, still affects my imagination as one
+of the most patrician rooms which I ever saw; at the back of the hall
+were those chambers of ours overlooking the garden of which I have
+already spoken, and another kitchen, less noble than the first, but
+still sufficiently grandiose to make most New World kitchens seem very
+meekly minute and unimpressive. Between the two kitchens was another
+court, with another cistern, from which the painter’s family drew water
+with a bucket on a long rope, which, when let down from the fourth
+story, appeared to be dropped from the clouds, and descended with a
+noise little less alarming than thunder.
+
+Altogether the most surprising object in the great _sala_ was a
+sewing-machine, and we should have been inconsolably outraged by its
+presence there, amid so much that was merely venerable and beautiful,
+but for the fact that it was in a state of harmonious and hopeless
+disrepair, and, from its general contrivance, gave us the idea that it
+had never been of any use. It was, in fact, kept as a sort of curiosity
+by the landlord, who exhibited it to the admiration of his Venetian
+friends.
+
+The reader will doubtless have imagined, from what I have been saying,
+that the Palazzo Giustiniani had not all that machinery which we know in
+our houses here as modern improvements. It had nothing of the kind, and
+life there was, as in most houses in Italy, a kind of permanent camping
+out. When I remember the small amount of carpeting, of furniture, and of
+upholstery we enjoyed, it appears to me pathetic; and yet, I am not sure
+that it was not the wisest way to live. I know that we had compensation
+in things not purchasable here for money. If the furniture of the
+principal bedroom was somewhat scanty, its dimensions were unstinted
+the ceiling was fifteen feet high, and was divided into rich and heavy
+panels, adorned each with a mighty rosette of carved and gilded wood,
+two feet across. The parlor had not its original decorations in our
+time, but it had once had so noble a carved ceiling that it was found
+worth while to take it down and sell it into England; and it still had
+two grand Venetian mirrors, a vast and very good painting of a miracle
+of St. Anthony, and imitation-antique tables and arm-chairs. The last
+were frolicked all over with carven nymphs and cupids; but they were of
+such frail construction that they were not meant to be sat in, much less
+to be removed from the wall against which they stood; and more than one
+of our American visitors was dismayed at having these proud articles of
+furniture go to pieces upon his attempt to use them like mere arm-chairs
+of ordinary life. Scarcely less impressive or useless than these was a
+monumental plaster-stove, surmounted by a bust of Æsculapius; when this
+was broken by accident, we cheaply repaired the loss with a bust of
+Homer (the dealer in the next campo being out of Æsculapiuses) which no
+one could have told from the bust it replaced; and this and the other
+artistic glories of the room made us quite forget all possible
+blemishes and defects. And will the reader mention any house with modern
+improvements in America which has also windows, with pointed arches of
+marble, opening upon balconies that overhang the Grand Canal?
+
+For our new apartment, which consisted of six rooms, furnished with
+every article necessary for Venetian housekeeping, we paid one dollar a
+day which, in the innocence of our hearts we thought rather dear, though
+we were somewhat consoled by reflecting that this extravagant outlay
+secured us the finest position on the Grand Canal. We did not mean to
+keep house as we had in Casa Falier, and perhaps a sketch of our easier
+_ménage_ may not be out of place. Breakfast was prepared in the house,
+for in that blessed climate all you care for in the morning is a cup of
+coffee, with a little bread and butter, a musk-melon, and some clusters
+of white grapes, more or less. Then we had our dinners sent in warm from
+a cook’s who had learned his noble art in France; he furnished a dinner
+of five courses for three persons at a cost of about eighty cents; and
+they were dinners so happily conceived and so justly executed, that I
+cannot accuse myself of an excess of sentiment when I confess that I
+sigh for them to this day. Then as for our immaterial tea, we always
+took that at the Caffè Florian in the Piazza of Saint Mark, where
+we drank a cup of black coffee and ate an ice, while all the world
+promenaded by, and the Austrian bands made heavenly music.
+
+Those bands no longer play in Venice, and I believe that they are not
+the only charm which she has lost in exchanging Austrian servitude for
+Italian freedom; though I should be sorry to think that freedom was not
+worth all other charms. The poor Venetians used to be very rigorous
+(as I have elsewhere related), about the music of their oppressors,
+and would not come into the Piazza until it had ceased and the Austrian
+promenaders had disappeared, when they sat down at Florian’s, and
+listened to such bands of strolling singers and minstrels as chose to
+give them a concord of sweet sounds, without foreign admixture. We, in
+our neutrality, were wont to sit out both entertainments, and then go
+home well toward midnight, through the sleepy little streets, and over
+the bridges that spanned the narrow canals, dreaming in the shadows of
+the palaces.
+
+We moved with half-conscious steps till we came to the silver expanse
+of the Grand Canal, where, at the ferry, darkled a little brood of black
+gondolas, into one of which we got, and were rowed noiselessly to the
+thither side, where we took our way toward the land-gate of our palace
+through the narrow streets of the parish of San Barnabà, and the campo
+before the ugly façade of the church; or else we were rowed directly to
+the water-gate, where we got out on the steps worn by the feet of the
+Giustiniani of old, and wandered upward through the darkness of the
+stairway, which gave them a far different welcome of servants and lights
+when they returned from an evening’s pleasure in the Piazza. It seemed
+scarcely just; but then, those Giustiniani were dead, and we were alive,
+and that was one advantage; and, besides, the loneliness and desolation
+of the palace had a peculiar charm, and were at any rate cheaper than
+its former splendor could have been. I am afraid that people who live
+abroad in the palaces of extinct nobles do not keep this important fact
+sufficiently in mind; and as the Palazzo Giustiniani is still let in
+furnished lodgings, and it is quite possible that some of my readers may
+be going to spend next summer in it, I venture to remind them that if
+they have to draw somewhat upon their fancy for patrician accommodations
+there, it will cost them far less in money than it did the original
+proprietors, who contributed to our selfish pleasure by the very thought
+of their romantic absence and picturesque decay. In fact, the Past is
+everywhere like the cake of proverb: you cannot enjoy it and have it.
+
+And here I am reminded of another pleasure of modern dwellers in
+Venetian palaces, which could hardly have been indulged by the
+patricians of old, and which is hardly imaginable by people of this day,
+whose front doors open upon dry land: I mean to say the privilege of
+sea-bathing from one’s own threshold. From the beginning of June
+till far into September all the canals of Venice are populated by the
+amphibious boys, who clamor about in the brine, or poise themselves for
+a leap from the tops of bridges, or show their fine, statuesque figures,
+bronzed by the ardent sun, against the façades of empty palaces, where
+they hover among the marble sculptures, and meditate a headlong plunge.
+It is only the Venetian ladies, in fact, who do not share this healthful
+amusement. Fathers of families, like so many plump, domestic drakes,
+lead forth their aquatic broods, teaching the little ones to swim by
+the aid of various floats, and delighting in the gambols of the larger
+ducklings. When the tide comes in fresh and strong from the sea the
+water in the Grand Canal is pure and refreshing; and at these times
+it is a singular pleasure to leap from one’s door-step into the swift
+current, and spend a half-hour, very informally, among one’s neighbors
+there. The Venetian bathing-dress is a mere sketch of the pantaloons of
+ordinary life; and when I used to stand upon our balcony, and see some
+bearded head ducking me a polite salutation from a pair of broad,
+brown shoulders that showed above the water, I was not always able
+to recognize my acquaintance, deprived of his factitious identity of
+clothes. But I always knew a certain stately consul-general by a vast
+expanse of baldness upon the top of his head; and it must be owned,
+I think, that this form of social assembly was, with all its
+disadvantages, a novel and vivacious spectacle. The Venetian ladies,
+when they bathed, went to the Lido, or else to the bath-houses in front
+of the Ducal Palace, where they saturated themselves a good part of the
+day, and drank coffee, and, possibly, gossiped.
+
+I think that our balconies at Palazzo Giustiniani were even better
+places to see the life of the Grand Canal from than the balcony of Casa
+Falier, which we had just left. Here at least we had a greater stretch
+of the Canal, looking, as we could, up either side of its angle. Here,
+too, we had more gondola stations in sight, and as we were nearer the
+Rialto, there was more picturesque passing of the market-boats. But if
+we saw more of this life, we did not see it in greater variety, for
+I think we had already exhausted this. There was a movement all night
+long. If I woke at three or four o’clock, and offered myself the novel
+spectacle of the Canal at that hour, I saw the heavy-laden barges go
+by to the Rialto, with now and then also a good-sized coasting schooner
+making lazily for the lagoons, with its ruddy fire already kindled for
+cooking the morning’s meal, and looking very enviably cosey. After our
+own breakfast we began to watch for the gondolas of the tourists of
+different nations, whom we came to distinguish at a glance. Then the
+boats of the various artisans went by, the carpenter’s, the mason’s, the
+plasterer’s, with those that sold fuel, and vegetables, and fruit, and
+fish, to any household that arrested them. From noon till three or four
+o’clock the Canal was comparatively deserted; but before twilight it was
+thronged again by people riding out in their open gondolas to take the
+air after the day’s fervor. After nightfall they ceased, till only at
+long intervals a solitary lamp, stealing over the dark surface, gave
+token of the movement of some gondola bent upon an errand that could not
+fail to seem mysterious or fail to be matter of fact. We never wearied
+of this oft-repeated variety, nor of our balcony in any way; and when
+the moon shone in through the lovely arched window and sketched its
+exquisite outline on the floor, we were as happy as moonshine could make
+us.
+
+Were we otherwise content? As concerns Venice, it is very hard to say,
+and I do not know that I shall ever be able to say with certainty. For
+all the entertainment it afforded us, it was a very lonely life, and we
+felt the sadness of the city in many fine and not instantly recognizable
+ways. Englishmen who lived there bade us beware of spending the whole
+year in Venice, which they declared apt to result in a morbid depression
+of the spirits. I believe they attributed this to the air of the
+place, but I think it was more than half owing to her mood, to her old,
+ghostly, aimless life. She was, indeed, a phantom of the past, haunting
+our modern world,--serene, inexpressibly beautiful, yet inscrutably and
+unspeakably sad. Remembering the charm that was in her, we often sigh
+for the renewal of our own vague life there,--a shadow within the
+shadow; but remembering also her deep melancholy, an involuntary shiver
+creeps over us, and we are glad not to be there. Perhaps some of you who
+have spent a summer day or a summer week in Venice do not recognize this
+feeling; but if you will remain there, not four years as we did, but a
+year or six months even, it will ever afterwards be only too plain. All
+changes, all events, were affected by the inevitable local melancholy;
+the day was as pensive amidst that populous silence as the night; the
+winter not more pathetic than the long, tranquil, lovely summer. We
+rarely sentimentalized consciously, and still more seldom openly, about
+the present state of Venice as contrasted with her past glory.
+
+I am glad to say that we despised the conventional poetastery about her;
+but I believe that we had so far lived into sympathy with her, that,
+whether we realized it or not, we took the tone of her dispiritedness,
+and assumed a part of the common experience of loss and of hopelessness.
+History, if you live where it was created, is a far subtler influence
+than you suspect; and I would not say how much Venetian history, amidst
+the monuments of her glory and the witnesses of her fall, had to do in
+secret and tacit ways with the prevailing sentiment of existence, which
+I now distinctly recognize to have been a melancholy one. No doubt this
+sentiment was deepened by every freshly added association with memorable
+places; and each fact, each great name and career, each strange
+tradition as it rose out of the past for us and shed its pale lustre
+upon the present, touched us with a pathos which we could neither trace
+nor analyze.
+
+I do not know how much the modern Venetians had to do with this
+impression, but something I have no question. They were then under
+Austrian rule; and in spite of much that was puerile and theatrical in
+it, there was something very affecting in their attitude of what may
+best be described as passive defiance. This alone made them heroic, but
+it also made them tedious. They rarely talked of anything but politics;
+and as I have elsewhere said, they were very jealous to have every one
+declare himself of their opinion. Hemmed in by this jealousy on one
+side, and by a heavy and rebellious sense of the wrongful presence of
+the Austrian troops and the Austrian spies on the other, we forever felt
+dimly constrained by something, we could not say precisely what, and we
+only knew what, when we went sometimes on a journey into free Italy, and
+threw off the irksome caution we had maintained both as to patriotic and
+alien tyrants. This political misery circumscribed our acquaintance
+very much, and reduced the circle of our friendship to three or four
+families, who were content to know our sympathies without exacting
+constant expression of them. So we learned to depend mainly upon passing
+Americans for our society; we hailed with rapture the arrival of a
+gondola distinguished by the easy hats of our countrymen and the pretty
+faces and pretty dresses of our countrywomen. It was in the days of our
+war; and talking together over its events, we felt a brotherhood with
+every other American.
+
+Of course, in these circumstances, we made thorough acquaintance with
+the people about us in the palace. The landlord had come somehow into
+a profitable knowledge of Anglo-Saxon foibles and susceptibilities; but
+his lodgings were charming, and I recognize the principle that it is not
+for literature to make its prey of any possibly conscious object. For
+this reason, I am likewise mostly silent concerning a certain _attaché_
+of the palace, the right-hand man and intimate associate of the
+landlord. He was the descendant of one of the most ancient and noble
+families of Italy,--a family of popes and cardinals, of princes and
+ministers, which in him was diminished and tarnished in an almost
+inexplicable degree. He was not at all worldly-wise, but he was a man
+of great learning, and of a capacity for acquiring knowledge that I have
+never seen surpassed. He possessed, I think, not many shirts on earth;
+but he spoke three or four languages, and wrote very pretty sonnets in
+Italian and German. He was one of the friendliest and willingest souls
+living, and as generous as utter destitution can make a man; yet he had
+a proper spirit, and valued himself upon his name. Sometimes he brought
+his great-grandfather to the palace; a brisk old gentleman in his
+nineties, who had seen the fall of the Republic and three other
+revolutions in Venice, but had contrived to keep a government pension
+through all, and now smiled with unabated cheerfulness upon a world
+which he seemed likely never to leave.
+
+The palace-servants were two, the gondolier and a sort of
+housekeeper,--a handsome, swarthy woman, with beautiful white teeth and
+liquid black eyes. She was the mother of a pretty little boy, who was
+going to bring himself up for a priest, and whose chief amusement was
+saying mimic masses to an imaginary congregation. She was perfectly
+statuesque and obliging, and we had no right, as lovers of the beautiful
+or as lodgers, to complain of her, whatever her faults might have been.
+As to the gondolier, who was a very important personage in our palatial
+household, he was a handsome, bashful, well-mannered fellow, with a
+good-natured blue eye and a neatly waxed mustache. He had been ten years
+a soldier in the Austrian army, and was, from his own account and from
+all I saw of him, one of the least courageous men in the world; but
+then no part of the Austrian system tends to make men brave, and I
+could easily imagine that before it had done with one it might give him
+reasons enough to be timid all the rest of his life. Piero had not very
+much to do, and he spent the greater part of his leisure in a sort
+of lazy flirtation with the women about the kitchen-fire, or in the
+gondola, in which he sometimes gave them the air. We always liked him;
+I should have trusted him in any sort of way, except one that involved
+danger. It once happened that burglars attempted to enter our rooms,
+and Piero declared to us that he knew the men; but before the police, he
+swore that he knew nothing about them. Afterwards he returned privately
+to his first assertion, and accounted for his conduct by saying that
+if he had borne witness against the burglars, he was afraid that their
+friends would jump on his back (_saltarmi adosso_), as he phrased it,
+in the dark; for by this sort of terrorism the poor and the wicked have
+long been bound together in Italy. Piero was a humorist in his dry way,
+and made a jest of his own caution; but his favorite joke was, when
+he dressed himself with particular care, to tell the women that he was
+going to pay a visit to the Princess Clary, then the star of
+Austrian society. This mild pleasantry was repeated indefinitely with
+never-failing effect.
+
+More interesting to us than all the rest was our own servant, Bettina,
+who came to us from a village on the mainland. She was very dark, so
+dark and so Southern in appearance as almost to verge upon the negro
+type; yet she bore the English-sounding name of Scarbro, and how she
+ever came by it remains a puzzle to this day, for she was one of the
+most pure and entire of Italians. I mean this was her maiden name; she
+was married to a trumpeter in the Austrian service, whose Bohemian name
+she was unable to pronounce, and consequently never gave us. She was a
+woman of very few ideas indeed, but perfectly honest and good-hearted.
+She was pious, in her peasant fashion, and in her walks about the city
+did not fail to bless the baby before every picture of the Madonna.
+She provided it with an engraved portrait of that Holy Nail which was
+venerated in the neighboring church of San Pantaleon; and she apparently
+aimed to supply it with playthings of a religious and saving character
+like that piece of ivory, which resembled a small torso, and which
+Bettina described as “A bit of the Lord, Signor,”--and it was, in fact,
+a fragment of an ivory crucifix, which she had somewhere picked up.
+To Bettina’s mind, mankind broadly divided themselves into two races,
+Italians and Germans, to which latter she held that we Americans in some
+sort belonged. She believed that America lay a little to the south of
+Vienna and in her heart I think she was persuaded that the real national
+complexion was black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw
+at our house were merely a multitude of exceptions. But with all her
+ignorance, she had no superstitions of a gloomy kind: the only ghost she
+seemed ever to have heard of was the spectre of an American ship captain
+which a friend of Piero’s had seen at the Lido. She was perfectly kind
+and obedient, and was deeply attached in an inarticulate way to the
+baby, which was indeed the pet of the whole palace. This young lady
+ruled arbitrarily over them all, and was forever being kissed and
+adored. When Piero went out to the wine-shop for a little temperate
+dissipation, he took her with him on his shoulder, and exhibited her to
+the admiring gondoliers of his acquaintance; there was no puppetshow, no
+church festival, in that region to which she was not carried; and
+when Bettina, and Giulia, and all the idle women of the neighborhood
+assembled on a Saturday afternoon in the narrow alley behind the palace
+(where they dressed one another’s thick black hair in fine braids soaked
+in milk, and built it up to last the whole of the next week), the baby
+was the cynosure of all hearts and eyes. But her supremacy was yet more
+distinguished when, late at night, the household gave itself a feast of
+snails stewed in oil and garlic, in the vast kitchen. There her anxious
+parents have found her seated in the middle of the table with the bowl
+of snails before her, and armed with a great spoon, while her vassals
+sat round, and grinned their fondness and delight in her small
+tyrannies; and the immense room, dimly lit, with the mystical implements
+of cookery glimmering from the wall, showed like some witch’s cavern,
+where a particularly small sorceress was presiding over the concoction
+of an evil potion or the weaving of a powerful spell.
+
+From time to time we had fellow-lodgers, who were always more or less
+interesting and mysterious. Among the rest there was once a French lady,
+who languished, during her stay, under the disfavor of the police, and
+for whose sake there was a sentinel with a fixed bayonet stationed
+day and night at the palace gate. At last, one night, this French lady
+escaped by a rope-ladder from her chamber window, and thus no doubt
+satisfied alike the female instinct for intrigue and elopement and
+the political agitator’s love of a mysterious disappearance. It
+was understood dimly that she was an author, and had written a book
+displeasing to the police.
+
+Then there was the German baroness and her son and daughter, the last
+very beautiful and much courted by handsome Austrian officers; the son
+rather weak-minded, and a great care to his sister and mother, from his
+propensity to fall in love and marry below his station; the mother very
+red-faced and fat, a good-natured old creature who gambled the summer
+months away at Hombourg and Baden and in the winter resorted to Venice
+to make a match for her pretty daughter. Then, moreover, there was that
+English family, between whom and ourselves there was the reluctance and
+antipathy, personal and national, which exists between all right-minded
+Englishmen and Americans. No Italian can understand this just and
+natural condition, and it was the constant aim of our landlord to
+make us acquainted. So one day when he found a member of each of these
+unfriendly families on the neutral ground of the grand _sala_, he
+introduced them. They had, happily, the piano-forte between them, and I
+flatter myself that the insulting coldness and indifference with which
+they received each other’s names carried to our landlord’s bosom a
+dismay never before felt by a good-natured and well-meaning man.
+
+The piano-forte which I have mentioned belonged to the landlord, who was
+fond of music and of all fine and beautiful things; and now and then
+he gave a musical _soirée_, which was attended, more or less
+surreptitiously, by the young people of his acquaintance. I do not
+think he was always quite candid in giving his invitations, for on one
+occasion a certain count, who had taken refuge from the glare of the
+_sala_ in our parlor for the purpose of concealing the very loud-plaided
+pantaloons he wore, explained pathetically that he had no idea it was
+a party, and that he had been so long out of society, for patriotic
+reasons, that he had no longer a dress suit. But to us they were very
+delightful entertainments, no less from the great variety of character
+they afforded than from the really charming and excellent music which
+the different amateurs made; for we had airs from all the famous operas,
+and the instrumentation was by a gifted young composer. Besides, the
+gayety seemed to recall in some degree the old, brilliant life of
+the palace, and at least showed us how well it was adapted to social
+magnificence and display.
+
+We enjoyed our whole year in Palazzo Giustiniani, though some of the
+days were too long and some too short, as everywhere. From heat we
+hardly suffered at all, so perfectly did the vast and lofty rooms answer
+to the purpose of their builders in this respect. A current of sea air
+drew through to the painter’s garden by day; and by night there was
+scarcely a mosquito of the myriads that infested some parts of Venice.
+In winter it was not so well. Then we shuffled about in wadded gowns and
+boots lined with sheep-skin,--the woolly side in, as in the song. The
+passage of the _sala_, was something to be dreaded, and we shivered
+as fleetly through it as we could, and were all the colder for the
+deceitful warmth of the colors which the sun cast upon the stone floor
+from the window opening on the court.
+
+I do not remember any one event of our life more exciting than that
+attempted burglary of which I have spoken. In a city where the police
+gave their best attention to political offenders, there were naturally a
+great many rogues, and the Venetian rogues, if not distinguished for the
+more heroic crimes, were very skillful in what I may call the _genre_
+branch of robbing rooms through open windows, and committing all kinds
+of safe domestic depredations. It was judged best to acquaint Justice
+(as they call law in Latin countries) with the attempt upon our
+property, and I found her officers housed in a small room of the Doge’s
+Palace, clerkly men in velvet skull-caps, driving loath quills over the
+rough official paper of those regions. After an exchange of diplomatic
+courtesies, the commissary took my statement of the affair down in
+writing, pertinent to which were my father’s name, place, and business,
+with a full and satisfactory personal history of myself down to the
+period of the attempted burglary. This, I said, occurred one morning
+about daylight, when I saw the head of the burglar peering above the
+window-sill, and the hand of the burglar extended to prey upon my
+wardrobe.
+
+“Excuse me, Signor Console,” interrupted the commissary, “how could you
+see him?”
+
+“Why, there was nothing in the world to prevent me. The window was
+open.”
+
+“The window was open!” gasped the commissary. “Do you mean that you
+sleep with your windows open?”
+
+“Most certainly!”
+
+“Pardon!” said the commissary, suspiciously. “Do _all_ Americans sleep
+with their windows open?”
+
+“I may venture to say that they all do, in summer,” I answered; “at
+least, it’s the general custom.”
+
+Such a thing as this indulgence in fresh air seemed altogether foreign
+to the commissary’s experience; and but for my official dignity, I am
+sure that I should have been effectually browbeaten by him. As it was,
+he threw himself back in his armchair and stared at me fixedly for some
+moments. Then he recovered himself with another “Per-doni!” and,
+turning to his clerk, said, “Write down that, _according to the American
+custom_, they were sleeping with their windows open.” But I know that
+the commissary, for all his politeness, considered this habit a relic
+of the times when we Americans all abode in wigwams; and I suppose it
+paralyzed his energies in the effort to bring the burglars to justice,
+for I have never heard anything of them from that day to this.
+
+The truth is, it was a very uneventful year; and I am the better
+satisfied with it as an average Venetian year on that account. We
+sometimes varied the pensive monotony by a short visit to the cities of
+the mainland; but we always came back to it willingly, and I think
+we unconsciously abhorred any interruption of it. The days, as they
+followed each other, were wonderfully alike, in every respect. For eight
+months of summer they were alike in their clear-skied, sweet-breathed
+loveliness; in the autumn, there where the melancholy of the falling
+leaf could not spread its contagion to the sculptured foliage of Gothic
+art, the days were alike in their sentiment of tranquil oblivion and
+resignation which was as autumnal as any aspect of woods or fields
+could have been; in the winter they were alike in their dreariness and
+discomfort. As I remember, we spent by far the greater part of our time
+in going to the Piazza, and we were devoted Florianisti, as the Italians
+call those that lounge habitually at the Caffè Florian. We went every
+evening to the Piazza as a matter of course; if the morning was long, we
+went to the Piazza; if we did not know what to do with the afternoon, we
+went to the Piazza; if we had friends with us, we went to the Piazza;
+if we were alone, we went to the Piazza; and there was no mood or
+circumstances in which it did not seem a natural and fitting thing to
+go to the Piazza. There were all the prettiest shops; there were all the
+finest caffès; there was the incomparable Church of St. Mark; there was
+the whole world of Venice.
+
+Of course, we had other devices besides going to the Piazza; and
+sometimes we spent entire weeks in visiting the churches, one after
+another, and studying their artistic treasures, down to the smallest
+scrap of an old master in their darkest chapel; their history, their
+storied tombs, their fictitious associations. Very few churches escaped,
+I believe, except such as had been turned into barracks, and were
+guarded by an incorruptible Austrian sentinel. For such churches as did
+escape, we have a kind of envious longing to this day, and should find
+it hard to like anybody who had succeeded better in visiting them. There
+is, for example, the church of San Giobbe, the doors of which we haunted
+with more patience than that of the titulary saint: now the sacristan
+was out; now the church was shut up for repairs; now it was Holy Week
+and the pictures were veiled; we had to leave Venice at last without a
+sight of San Giobbe’s three Saints by Bordone, and Madonna by Bellini,
+which, unseen, outvalue all the other Saints and Madonnas that we looked
+at; and I am sure that life can never become so aimless, but we shall
+still have the desire of some day going to see the church of San Giobbe.
+If we read some famous episode of Venetian history, we made it the
+immediate care of our lives to visit the scene of its occurrence; if
+Ruskin told us of some recondite beauty of sculpture hid away in
+some unthought-of palace court, we invaded that palace at once; if in
+entirely purposeless strolls through the city, we came upon anything
+that touched the fancy or piqued curiosity, there was no gate or
+bar proof against our bribes. What strange old nests of ruin, what
+marvellous homes of solitude and dilapidation, did we not wander into!
+What boarded-up windows peer through, what gloomy recesses penetrate!
+I have lumber enough in my memory stored from such rambles to load the
+nightmares of a generation, and stuff for the dreams of a whole people.
+Does any gentleman or lady wish to write a romance? Sir or madam, I know
+just the mouldy and sunless alley for your villain to stalk his victim
+in, the canal in which to plunge his body, the staircase and the hall
+for the subsequent wanderings of his ghost; and all these scenes and
+localities I will sell at half the cost price; as also, balconies for
+flirtation, gondolas for intrigue and elopement, confessionals for the
+betrayal of guilty secrets. I have an assortment of bad and beautiful
+faces and picturesque attitudes and effective tones of voice; and a
+large stock of sympathetic sculptures and furniture and dresses, with
+other articles too numerous to mention, all warranted Venetian, and
+suitable to every style of romance. Who bids? Nay, I cannot sell, nor
+you buy. Each memory, as I hold it up for inspection, loses its subtle
+beauty and value, and turns common and poor in my hawker’s fingers.
+
+Yet I must needs try to fix here the remembrance of two or three
+palaces, of which our fancy took the fondest hold, and to which it yet
+most fondly clings. It cannot locate them all, and least of all can it
+place that vast old palace, somewhere near Cannaregio, which faced upon
+a campo, with lofty windows blinded by rough boards, and empty from top
+to bottom. It was of the later Renaissance in style, and we imagined
+it built in the Republic’s declining years by some ruinous noble,
+whose extravagance forbade his posterity to live in it, for it had that
+peculiarly forlorn air which belongs to a thing decayed without being
+worn out. We entered its coolness and dampness, and wandered up the wide
+marble staircase, past the vacant niches of departed statuary, and came
+on the third floor to a grand portal which was closed against us by a
+barrier of lumber. But this could not hinder us from looking within, and
+we were aware that we stood upon the threshold of our ruinous noble’s
+great banqueting-hall, where he used to give his magnificent _feste da
+ballo_. Lustrissimo was long gone with all his guests; but there in the
+roof were the amazing frescos of Tiepolo’s school, which had smiled down
+on them, as now they smiled on us, great piles of architecture, airy
+tops of palaces, swimming in summer sky, and wantoned over by a joyous
+populace of divinities of the lovelier sex that had nothing but their
+loveliness to clothe them and keep them afloat; the whole grandiose and
+superb beyond the effect of words, and luminous with delicious color.
+How it all rioted there with its inextinguishable beauty in the solitude
+and silence, from day to day, from year to year, while men died, and
+systems passed, and nothing remained unchanged but the instincts of
+youth and love that inspired it! It was music and wine and wit; it was
+so warm and glowing that it made the sunlight cold; and it seemed
+ever after a secret of gladness and beauty that the sad old palace was
+keeping in its heart against the time to which Venice looks forward when
+her splendor and opulence shall be indestructibly renewed.
+
+There is a ball-room in the Palazzo Pisani, which some of my readers
+may have passed through on their way to the studio of the charming
+old Prussian painter, Nerlÿ; the frescos of this are dim and faded and
+dusty, and impress you with a sense of irreparable decay, but the noble
+proportions and the princely air of the place are inalienable, while
+the palace stands. Here might have danced that Contarini who, when his
+wife’s necklace of pearls fell upon the floor in the way of her partner,
+the King of Denmark, advanced and ground it into powder with his foot
+that the king might not be troubled to avoid treading on it; and here,
+doubtless, many a gorgeous masquerade had been in the long Venetian
+carnival; and what passion and intrigue and jealousy, who knows? Now the
+palace was let in apartments, and was otherwise a barrack, and in the
+great court, steadfast as any of the marble statues, stood the Austrian
+sentinel. One of the statues was a figure veiled from head to foot, at
+the base of which it was hard not to imagine lovers, masked and hooded,
+and forever hurriedly whispering their secrets in the shadow cast in
+perpetual moonlight.
+
+Yet another ball-room in yet another palace opens to memory, but this
+is all bright and fresh with recent decoration. In the blue vaulted roof
+shine stars of gold; the walls are gay with dainty frescos; a gallery
+encircles the whole, and from this drops a light stairway, slim-railed,
+and guarded at the foot by torch-bearing statues of swarthy Eastern
+girls; through the glass doors at the other side glimmers the green and
+red of a garden. It was a place to be young in, to dance in, dream in,
+make love in; but it was no more a surprise than the whole palace to
+which it belonged, and which there in that tattered and poverty-stricken
+old Venice was a vision of untarnished splendor and prosperous fortune.
+It was richly furnished throughout all its vast extent, adorned with
+every caprice and delight of art, and appointed with every modern
+comfort The foot was hushed by costly carpets, the eye was flattered by
+a thousand beauties and prettinesses. In the grates the fires were
+laid and ready to be lighted; the candles stood upon the mantles; the
+toilet-linen was arranged for instant use in the luxurious chambers; but
+from basement to roof the palace was a solitude; no guest came there,
+no one dwelt there save the custodian; the eccentric lady of whose
+possessions it formed a part abode in a little house behind the palace,
+and on her door-plate had written her _vanitas vanitatum_ in the
+sarcastic inscription, “John Humdrum, Esquire.”
+
+Of course she was Inglese; and that other lady, who was selling off the
+furniture of her palace, and was so amiable a guide to its wonders in
+her curious broken English, was Hungarian. Her great pride and joy,
+amidst the objects of _vertu_ and the works of art, was a set of
+“Punch,” which she made us admire, and which she prized the more because
+she had always been allowed to receive it when the government prohibited
+it to everybody else. But we were Americans, she said; and had we ever
+seen this book? She held up the “The Potiphar Papers,” a volume which
+must have been inexpressibly amused and bewildered to find itself there,
+in that curious little old lady’s hand.
+
+Shall I go on and tell of the palace in which our strange friend Padre
+L------ dwelt, and the rooms of which he had filled up with the fruits
+of his passion for the arts and sciences; the anteroom he had frescoed
+to represent a grape-arbor with a multitude of clusters overhead; the
+parlor with his oil-paintings on the walls, and the piano and melodeon
+arranged so that Padre L------ could play upon them both at once; the
+oratory turned forge, and harboring the most alchemic-looking apparatus
+of all kinds; the other rooms in which he had stored his inventions
+in portable furniture, steam-propulsion, rifled cannon, and perpetual
+motion; the attic with the camera by which one could photograh one’s
+self,--shall I tell of this, and yet other palaces? I think there is
+enough already; and I have begun to doubt somewhat the truth of my
+reminiscences, as I advise the reader to do.
+
+Besides, I feel that the words fail to give all the truth that is in
+them; and if I cannot make them serve my purpose as to the palaces,
+how should I hope to impart through them my sense of the glory and
+loveliness of Venetian art? I could not give the imagination and the
+power of Tintoretto as we felt it, nor the serene beauty, the gracious
+luxury of Titian, nor the opulence, the worldly magnificence of Paolo
+Veronese. There hang their mighty works forever, high above the reach
+of any palaverer; they smile their stately welcome from the altars and
+palace-walls, upon whoever approaches them in the sincerity and love
+of beauty that produced them; and thither you must thus go if you would
+know them. Like fragments of dreams, like the fleeting
+
+
+     “Images of glimmering dawn,”
+
+I am from time to time aware, amid the work-day world, of some happiness
+from them, some face or form, some drift of a princely robe or ethereal
+drapery, some august shape of painted architecture, some un-namable
+delight of color; but to describe them more strictly and explicitly, how
+should I undertake?
+
+There was the exhaustion following every form of intense pleasure, in
+their contemplation, such a wear of vision and thought, that I could not
+call the life we led in looking at them an idle one, even if it had
+no result in after times; so I will not say that it was to severer
+occupation our minds turned more and more in our growing desire to
+return home. For my own part personally I felt keenly the fictitious and
+transitory character of official life. I knew that if I had become fit
+to serve the government by four years’ residence in Venice, that was
+a good reason why the government, according to our admirable system,
+should dismiss me, and send some perfectly unqualified person to take my
+place; and in my heart also I knew that there was almost nothing for me
+to do where I was, and I dreaded the easily formed habit of receiving a
+salary for no service performed. I reminded myself that, soon or late, I
+must go back to the old fashion of earning money, and that it had better
+be sooner than later. Therefore, though for some reasons it was the
+saddest and strangest thing in the world to do, I was on the whole
+rejoiced when a leave of absence came, and we prepared to quit Venice.
+
+Never had the city seemed so dream-like and unreal as in this light of
+farewell,--this tearful glimmer which our love and regret cast upon it.
+As in a maze, we haunted once more and for the last time the scenes
+we had known so long, and spent our final, phantasmal evening in the
+Piazza; looked, through the moonlight, our mute adieu to islands and
+lagoons, to church and tower; and then returned to our own palace, and
+stood long upon the balconies that overhung the Grand Canal. There the
+future became as incredible and improbable as the past; and if we had
+often felt the incongruity of our coming to live in such a place, now,
+with tenfold force, we felt the cruel absurdity of proposing to live
+anywhere else. We had become part of Venice; and how could such atoms of
+her fantastic personality ever mingle with the alien and unsympathetic
+world?
+
+The next morning the whole palace household bestirred itself to
+accompany us to the station: the landlord in his best hat and coat, our
+noble friend in phenomenal linen, Giulia and her little boy, Bettina
+shedding bitter tears over the baby, and Piero, sad but firm, bending
+over the oar and driving us swiftly forward. The first turn of the Canal
+shut the Palazzo Giustiniani from our lingering gaze, a few more curves
+and windings brought us to the station. The tickets were bought, the
+baggage was registered; the little oddly assorted company drew itself
+up in a line, and received with tears our husky adieux. I feared there
+might be a remote purpose in the hearts of the landlord and his retainer
+to embrace and kiss me, after the Italian manner, but if there was, by
+a final inspiration they spared me the ordeal. Piero turned away to
+his gondola; the two other men moved aside; Bettina gave one long,
+hungering, devouring hug to the baby; and as we hurried into the
+waiting-room, we saw her, as upon a stage, standing without the barrier,
+supported and sobbing in the arms of Giulia.
+
+It was well to be gone, but I cannot say we were glad to be going.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VENETIAN LIFE ***
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Venetian Life, by William Dean Howells</title>
+
+<style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Venetian Life, by William Dean Howells</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Venetian Life</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: William Dean Howells</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: March 8, 2003 [eBook #7083]<br />
+[Most recently updated: August 8, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, David Widger and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VENETIAN LIFE ***</div>
+
+    <h1>
+      VENETIAN LIFE
+    </h1>
+    <h2 class="no-break">
+      By William Dean Howells
+    </h2>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0011}.jpg" alt="{0011}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0011}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"></a>
+      ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In correcting this book for a second edition, I have sought to complete it
+      without altering its original plan: I have given a new chapter sketching
+      the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the present trade and
+      industry of Venice; I have amplified somewhat the chapter on the national
+      holidays, and have affixed an index to the chief historical persons,
+      incidents, and places mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Believing that such value as my book may have is in fidelity to what I
+      actually saw and knew of Venice, I have not attempted to follow
+      speculatively the grand and happy events of last summer in their effects
+      upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that in the traits at which I loved most to
+      look, the life of Venice is not so much changed as her fortunes; but at
+      any rate I am content to remain true to what was fact one year ago.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      W. D. H.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Cambridge, January 1, 1867.
+    </p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. Venice in Venice</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. Arrival and first Days in Venice</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. The Winter in Venice</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. Comincia far Caldo</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. Opera and Theatres</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. Venetian Dinners and Diners</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. Housekeeping in Venice</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. The Balcony on the Grand Canal</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. A Day-Break Ramble</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X. The Mouse</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI. Churches and Pictures</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII. Some Islands of the Lagoons</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII. The Armenians</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV. The Ghetto and the Jews of Venice</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV. Some Memorable Places</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI. Commerce</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII. Venetian Holidays</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII. Christmas Holidays</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX. Love-making and Marrying; Baptisms and Burials</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX. Venetian Traits and Characters</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI. Society</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII. Our Last Year in Venice</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"></a>
+      CHAPTER I.<br/>
+      VENICE IN VENICE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the
+      stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and the
+      byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief part
+      in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian theatre),
+      and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters. We could not help
+      seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the villain of the piece,
+      pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all tears and desperation, upon
+      the stage; and we were dismayed to behold the injured husband and his
+      abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the scenes. All the shabbiness of
+      the theatre was perfectly apparent to us; we saw the grossness of the
+      painting and the unreality of the properties. And yet I cannot say that
+      the play lost one whit of its charm for me, or that the working of the
+      machinery and its inevitable clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the
+      least. There was so much truth and beauty in the playing, that I did not
+      care for the sham of the ropes and gilding, and presently ceased to take
+      any note of them. The illusion which I had thought an essential in the
+      dramatic spectacle, turned out to be a condition of small importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at
+      another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE,
+      which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to
+      every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in
+      Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without
+      learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it
+      in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help seeing from my
+      point of observation the sham and cheapness with which Venice is usually
+      brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the same time, it has
+      never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise and regard, nor the
+      fascination of its excellent beauty, its peerless picturesqueness, its
+      sole and wondrous grandeur. It is true that the streets in Venice are
+      canals; and yet you can walk to any part of the city, and need not take
+      boat whenever you go out of doors, as I once fondly thought you must. But
+      after all, though I find dry land enough in it, I do not find the place
+      less unique, less a mystery, or less a charm. By day, the canals are still
+      the main thoroughfares; and if these avenues are not so full of light and
+      color as some would have us believe, they, at least, do not smell so
+      offensively as others pretend. And by night, they are still as dark and
+      silent as when the secret vengeance of the Republic plunged its victims
+      into the ungossiping depths of the Canalazzo!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did the vengeance of the Republic ever do any such thing?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to question that reputation for
+      vindictive and gloomy cruelty alien historians have given to a government
+      which endured so many centuries in the willing obedience of its subjects;
+      but to think that the careful student of the old Republican system will
+      condemn it for faults far different from those for which it is chiefly
+      blamed. At all events, I find it hard to understand why, if the Republic
+      was an oligarchy utterly selfish and despotic, it has left to all classes
+      of Venetians so much regret and sorrow for its fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will
+      hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams&mdash;the
+      Venice of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his
+      prejudices&mdash;the merciless Venice of Darù, and of the historians who
+      follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he
+      sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion
+      removed; and&mdash;to take leave of our theatrical metaphor&mdash;I
+      promise to fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to
+      them may go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer
+      no annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often
+      get from travelers&rsquo; beds into their books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors
+      concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves hereafter,
+      but which no doubt form a large part of every one&rsquo;s associations with the
+      name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that pathetic swindle, the
+      Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will hear it mentioned
+      without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the taciturn justice of
+      the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the Serenest Republic&rsquo;s
+      policy. When I entered it the first time I was at the pains to call about
+      me the sad company of those who had passed its corridors from imprisonment
+      to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent tourists have done the same. I
+      was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward that I had, on this occasion, been
+      in very low society, and that the melancholy assemblage which I then
+      conjured up was composed entirely of honest rogues, who might indeed have
+      given as graceful and ingenious excuses for being in misfortune as the
+      galley-slaves rescued by Don Quixote,&mdash;who might even have been very
+      picturesque,&mdash;but who were not at all the material with which a
+      well-regulated imagination would deal. The Bridge of Sighs was not built
+      till the end of the sixteenth century, and no romantic episode of
+      political imprisonment and punishment (except that of Antonio Foscarini)
+      occurs in Venetian history later than that period. But the Bridge of Sighs
+      could have nowise a savor of sentiment from any such episode, being, as it
+      was, merely a means of communication between the Criminal Courts sitting
+      in the Ducal Palace, and the Criminal Prison across the little canal.
+      Housebreakers, cut-purse knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a
+      poetic interest to places which have known them; and yet these are the
+      only sufferers on whose Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has
+      looked with pathetic sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The
+      name of the bridge was given by the people from that opulence of
+      compassion which enables the Italians to pity even rascality in
+      difficulties.<a href="#fn1" name="fnref1" id="fnref1"><sup>[1]</sup></a>
+    </p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="fn1" id="fn1"></a> <a href="#fnref1">[1]</a>
+The reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said
+      in a few words, much better than I have said in many, the same thing of
+      sentimental errors about Venice:&mdash;<br/>
+    &ldquo;The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere
+      efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of daylight
+      must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth remembering, or
+      whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs, which
+      is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice
+      ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with breathless
+      interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as one of his great
+      ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years
+      after Faliero&rsquo;s death.&rdquo;&mdash;<i>Stories of Venice</i>.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Political offenders were not confined in the &ldquo;prison on each hand&rdquo; of the
+      poet, but in the famous <i>pozzi</i> (literally, wells) or dungeons under
+      the Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been
+      uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for their
+      exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom some
+      foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to be
+      afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say now
+      that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with
+      prison-life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped. They
+      are not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants could
+      have suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden casing
+      of the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the state to
+      inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But on whose account had I to be interested in the <i>pozzi</i>? It was
+      difficult to learn, unless I took the word of sentimental hearsay. I began
+      with Marin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to languish in
+      these dungeons for a moment. He was imprisoned in the apartments of state,
+      and during one night only. His fellow-conspirators were hanged nearly as
+      fast as taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several other political prisoners
+      of sad and famous memory with scarcely better effect. To a man, they
+      struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and escaped
+      from the <i>pozzi</i> by every artifice of fact and figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their
+      story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history. But it was
+      not the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed their cruel
+      taking-off: they were strangled in the prison formerly existing at the top
+      of the palace, called the Torresella. [Footnote: Galliciolli, <i>Memorie
+      Venete</i>.] It is possible, however, that Jacopo Foscari may have been
+      confined in the <i>pozzi</i> at different times about the middle of the
+      fifteenth century. With his fate alone, then, can the horror of these
+      cells be satisfactorily associated by those who relish the dark romance of
+      Venetian annals; for it is not to be expected that the less tragic
+      fortunes of Carlo Zeno and Vittore Pisani, who may also have been
+      imprisoned in the <i>pozzi</i>, can move the true sentimentalizer.
+      Certainly, there has been anguish enough in the prisons of the Ducal
+      Palace, but we know little of it by name, and cannot confidently relate it
+      to any great historic presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Touching the Giant&rsquo;s Stairs in the court of the palace, the inexorable
+      dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin
+      Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground&mdash;at
+      the end of Lord Byron&rsquo;s tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of
+      the Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed
+      the traitor&rsquo;s death to the people from between the two red columns in the
+      southern gallery of the palace;&mdash;that façade was not built till
+      nearly a century later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose,&mdash;always judging by my own average experience,&mdash;that
+      besides these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up
+      scenes of brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the
+      brightest picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight,
+      romantic adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old
+      merry-making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this way,
+      the conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is become as gross
+      a fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of which I have but
+      spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social dullness and
+      sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the whole
+      world&rsquo;s civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the city, doomed
+      four hundred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly (the Venetians
+      would be apt to tell you wholly) in the implacable anger, the inconsolable
+      discontent, with which the people regard their present political
+      condition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If there be more than one opinion among men elsewhere concerning the means
+      by which Austria acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she holds the
+      province, there would certainly seem to be no division on the question in
+      Venice. To the stranger first inquiring into public feeling, there is
+      something almost sublime in the unanimity with which the Venetians appear
+      to believe that these means were iniquitous, and that this tenure is
+      abominable; and though shrewder study and carefuler observation will
+      develop some interested attachment to the present government, and some
+      interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge will discover, in the
+      hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness, and selfish ignorance to
+      take off its sublimity, the hatred is still found marvelously unanimous
+      and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no disposition to discuss the
+      question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising at Venice official functions
+      by permission and trust of the Austrian government, I cannot regard the
+      cessation of those functions as release from obligations both to that
+      government and my own, which render it improper for me, so long as the
+      Austrians remain in Venice, to criticize their rule, or contribute, by
+      comment on existing things, to embitter the feeling against them
+      elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, speak dispassionately of facts of the
+      abnormal social and political state of the place; and I can certainly do
+      this, for the present situation is so disagreeable in many ways to the
+      stranger forced to live there,&mdash;the inappeasable hatred of the
+      Austrians by the Italians is so illiberal in application to those in any
+      wise consorting with them, and so stupid and puerile in many respects,
+      that I think the annoyance which it gives the foreigner might well damp
+      any passion with which he was disposed to speak of its cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity from the defeat of
+      patriotic hopes of union with Italy in 1859, when Napoleon found the
+      Adriatic at Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was concluded. But it
+      is not to be supposed that a feeling so general, and so thoroughly
+      interwoven with Venetian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to the
+      Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the subjection into which she fell
+      a second time after Napoleon&rsquo;s ruin, by the treaties of the Holy Alliance,
+      defeated in several attempts to throw off her yoke, and loaded with
+      heavier servitude after the fall of the short-lived Republic of 1849,&mdash;Venice
+      has always hated her masters with an exasperation deepened by each remove
+      from the hope of independence, and she now detests them with a rancor
+      which no concession short of absolute relinquishment of dominion would
+      appease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead, therefore, of finding that public gayety and private hospitality
+      in Venice for which the city was once famous, the stranger finds himself
+      planted between two hostile camps, with merely the choice of sides open to
+      him. Neutrality is solitude and friendship with neither party; society is
+      exclusive association with the Austrians or with the Italians. The latter
+      do not spare one of their own number if he consorts with their masters,
+      and though a foreigner might expect greater allowance, it is seldom shown
+      to him. To be seen in the company of officers is enmity to Venetian
+      freedom, and in the case of Italians it is treason to country and to race.
+      Of course, in a city where there is a large garrison and a great many
+      officers who have nothing else to do, there is inevitably some
+      international love-making, although the Austrian officers are rigidly
+      excluded from association with the citizens. But the Italian who marries
+      an Austrian severs the dearest ties that bind her to life, and remains an
+      exile in the heart of her country. Her friends mercilessly cast her off,
+      as they cast off every body who associates with the dominant race. In rare
+      cases I have known Italians to receive foreigners who had Austrian
+      friends, but this with the explicit understanding that there was to be no
+      sign of recognition if they met them in the company of these detested
+      acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are all degrees of intensity in Venetian hatred, and after hearing
+      certain persons pour out the gall of bitterness upon the Austrians, you
+      may chance to hear these persons spoken of as tepid in their patriotism by
+      yet more fiery haters. Yet it must not be supposed that the Italians hate
+      the Austrians as individuals. On the contrary, they have rather a liking
+      for them&mdash;rather a contemptuous liking, for they think them somewhat
+      slow and dull-witted&mdash;and individually the Austrians are amiable
+      people, and try not to give offence. The government is also very strict in
+      its control of the military. I have never seen the slightest affront
+      offered by a soldier to a citizen; and there is evidently no personal
+      ill-will engendered. The Austrians are simply hated as the means by which
+      an alien and despotic government is imposed upon a people believing
+      themselves born for freedom and independence. This hatred, then, is a
+      feeling purely political, and there is political machinery by which it is
+      kept in a state of perpetual tension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Comitato Veneto is a body of Venetians residing within the province
+      and abroad, who have charge of the Italian interests, and who work in
+      every way to promote union with the dominions of Victor Emanuel. They live
+      for the most part in Venice, where they have a secret press for the
+      publication of their addresses and proclamations, and where they remain
+      unknown to the police, upon whose spies they maintain an espionage. On
+      every occasion of interest, the Committee is sure to make its presence
+      felt; and from time to time persons find themselves in the possession of
+      its printed circulars, stamped with the Committee&rsquo;s seal; but no one knows
+      how or whence they came. Constant arrests of suspected persons are made,
+      but no member of the Committee has yet been identified; and it is said
+      that the mysterious body has its agents in every department of the
+      government, who keep it informed of inimical action. The functions of the
+      Committee are multiplied and various. It takes care that on all patriotic
+      anniversaries (such as that of the establishment of the Republic in 1848,
+      and that of the union of the Italian States under Victor Emanuel in 1860)
+      salutes shall be fired in Venice, and a proper number of red, white, and
+      green lights displayed. It inscribes revolutionary sentiments on the
+      walls; and all attempts on the part of the Austrians to revive popular
+      festivities are frustrated by the Committee, which causes petards to be
+      exploded in the Place of St. Mark, and on the different promenades. Even
+      the churches are not exempt from these demonstrations: I was present at
+      the Te Deum performed on the Emperor&rsquo;s birthday, in St. Mark&rsquo;s, when the
+      moment of elevating the host was signalized by the bursting of a petard in
+      the centre of the cathedral. All this, which seems of questionable
+      utility, and worse than questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of
+      the Italianissimi, and though possibly the strictness of the patriotic
+      discipline in which the members of the Committee keep their
+      fellow-citizens may gall some of them, yet any public demonstration of
+      content, such as going to the opera, or to the Piazza while the Austrian
+      band plays, is promptly discontinued at a warning from the Committee. It
+      is, of course, the Committee&rsquo;s business to keep the world informed of
+      public feeling in Venice, and of each new act of Austrian severity. Its
+      members are inflexible men, whose ability has been as frequently
+      manifested as their patriotism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians are now, therefore, a nation in mourning, and have, as I
+      said, disused all their former pleasures and merry-makings. Every class,
+      except a small part of the resident <i>titled</i> nobility (a great part
+      of the nobility is in either forced or voluntary exile), seems to be
+      comprehended by this feeling of despondency and suspense. The poor of the
+      city formerly found their respite and diversion in the numerous holidays
+      which fell in different parts of the year, and which, though religious in
+      their general character, were still inseparably bound up in their origin
+      with ideas of patriotism and national glory. Such of these holidays as
+      related to the victories and pride of the Republic naturally ended with
+      her fall. Many others, however, survived this event in all their splendor,
+      but there is not one celebrated now as in other days. It is true that the
+      churches still parade their pomps in the Piazza on the day of Corpus
+      Christi; it is true that the bridges of boats are still built across the
+      Canalazzo to the church of Our Lady of Salvation, and across the Canal of
+      the Giudecca to the temple of the Redeemer, on the respective festivals of
+      these churches; but the concourse is always meagre, and the mirth is
+      forced and ghastly. The Italianissimi have so far imbued the people with
+      their own ideas and feelings, that the recurrence of the famous holidays
+      now merely awakens them to lamentations over the past and vague longings
+      for the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the carnival, which once lasted six months of the year, charming
+      hither all the idlers of the world by its peculiar splendor and variety of
+      pleasure, it does not, as I said, any longer exist. It is dead, and its
+      shabby, wretched ghost is a party of beggars, hideously dressed out with
+      masks and horns and women&rsquo;s habits, who go from shop to shop droning forth
+      a stupid song, and levying tribute upon the shopkeepers. The crowd through
+      which these melancholy jesters pass, regards them with a pensive scorn,
+      and goes about its business untempted by the delights of carnival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All other social amusements have shared in greater or less degree the fate
+      of the carnival. At some houses conversazioni are still held, and it is
+      impossible that balls and parties should not now and then be given. But
+      the greater number of the nobles and the richer of the professional
+      classes lead for the most part a life of listless seclusion, and attempts
+      to lighten the general gloom and heaviness in any way are not looked upon
+      with favor. By no sort of chance are Austrians, or Austriacanti ever
+      invited to participate in the pleasures of Venetian society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the social life of Italy, and especially of Venice, was in great part
+      to be once enjoyed at the theatres, at the caffè, and at the other places
+      of public resort, so is its absence now to be chiefly noted in those
+      places. No lady of perfect standing among her people goes to the opera,
+      and the men never go in the boxes, but if they frequent the theatre at
+      all, they take places in the pit, in order that the house may wear as
+      empty and dispirited a look as possible. Occasionally a bomb is exploded
+      in the theatre, as a note of reminder, and as means of keeping away such
+      of the nobles as are not enemies of the government. As it is less easy for
+      the Austrians to participate in the diversion of comedy, it is a less
+      offence to attend the comedy, though even this is not good
+      Italianissimism. In regard to the caffè there is a perfectly understood
+      system by which the Austrians go to one, and the Italians to another; and
+      Florian&rsquo;s, in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground in the city
+      on which the hostile forces consent to meet. This is because it is
+      thronged with foreigners of all nations, and to go there is not thought a
+      demonstration of any kind. But the other caffè in the Piazza do not enjoy
+      Florian&rsquo;s cosmopolitan immunity, and nothing would create more wonder in
+      Venice than to see an Austrian officer at the Specchi, unless, indeed, it
+      were the presence of a good Italian at the Quadri.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is in the Piazza that the tacit demonstration of hatred and discontent
+      chiefly takes place. Here, thrice a week, in winter and summer, the
+      military band plays that exquisite music for which the Austrians are
+      famous. The selections are usually from Italian operas, and the attraction
+      is the hardest of all others for the music-loving Italian to resist. But
+      he does resist it. There are some noble ladies who have not entered the
+      Piazza while the band was playing there, since the fall of the Republic of
+      1849; and none of good standing for patriotism has attended the concerts
+      since the treaty of Villafranca in &lsquo;59. Until very lately, the promenaders
+      in the Piazza were exclusively foreigners, or else the families of such
+      government officials as were obliged to show themselves there. Last
+      summer, however, before the Franco-Italian convention for the evacuation
+      of Rome revived the drooping hopes of the Venetians, they had begun
+      visibly to falter in their long endurance. But this was, after all, only a
+      slight and transient weakness. As a general thing, now, they pass from the
+      Piazza when the music begins, and walk upon the long quay at the sea-side
+      of the Ducal Palace; or if they remain in the Piazza they pace up and down
+      under the arcades on either side; for Venetian patriotism makes a delicate
+      distinction between listening to the Austrian band in the Piazza and
+      hearing it under the Procuratie, forbidding the first and permitting the
+      last. As soon as the music ceases the Austrians disappear, and the
+      Italians return to the Piazza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But since the catalogue of demonstrations cannot be made full, it need not
+      be made any longer. The political feeling in Venice affects her prosperity
+      in a far greater degree than may appear to those who do not understand how
+      large an income the city formerly derived from making merry. The poor have
+      to lament not merely the loss of their holidays, but also of the fat
+      employments and bountiful largess which these occasions threw into their
+      hands. With the exile or the seclusion of the richer families, and the
+      reluctance of foreigners to make a residence of the gloomy and dejected
+      city, the trade of the shopkeepers has fallen off; the larger commerce of
+      the place has also languished and dwindled year by year; while the cost of
+      living has constantly increased, and heavier burdens of taxation have been
+      laid upon the impoverished and despondent people. And in all this, Venice
+      is but a type of the whole province of Venetia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely worth noting. The
+      Austrians have a <i>casino</i>, and they give balls and parties, and now
+      and then make some public manifestation of gayety. But they detest Venice
+      as a place of residence, being naturally averse to living in the midst of
+      a people who shun them like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are
+      obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, and it is amusing
+      enough to find the few English residents divided into Austriacanti and
+      Italianissimi. [Footnote: Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics,
+      though not of Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union with
+      Italy at any cost.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in every way bound to
+      neutrality and indifference, are popularly reputed to be of one party or
+      the other, and my predecessor, whose unhappy knowledge of German threw him
+      on his arrival among people of that race, was always regarded as the enemy
+      of Venetian freedom, though I believe his principles were of the most
+      vivid republican tint in the United States.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The present situation has now endured five years, with only slight
+      modifications by time, and only faint murmurs from some of the more
+      impatient, that <i>bisogna, una volta o l&rsquo;altra, romper il chiodo</i>,
+      (sooner or later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are a people
+      of indomitable perseverance, long schooled to obstinacy by oppression, I
+      suppose they will hold out till their union with the kingdom of Italy.
+      They can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content to wait forever
+      in their present gloom. How deeply their attitude affects their national
+      character I shall inquire hereafter, when I come to look somewhat more
+      closely at the spirit of their demonstration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the present, it is certain that the discontent of the people has its
+      peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a
+      glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving
+      it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing
+      that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be
+      faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"></a>
+      CHAPTER II.<br/>
+      ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday and
+      to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five o&rsquo;clock,
+      and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer weather. Yet I
+      was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the large, many-seated
+      boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for myself and my luggage.
+      The porter who seized my valise in the station, inferred from some very
+      polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of my wish, and ran out and threw
+      that slender piece of luggage into a gondola. I followed, lighted to my
+      seat by a beggar in picturesque and desultory costume. He was one of a
+      class of mendicants whom I came, for my sins, to know better in Venice,
+      and whom I dare say every traveler recollects,&mdash;the merciless tribe
+      who hold your gondola to shore, and affect to do you a service and not a
+      displeasure, and pretend not to be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call
+      them <i>gransieri</i>, or crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the
+      name or the purpose of this <i>poverino</i> [Footnote: <i>Poverino</i> is
+      the compassionate generic for all unhappy persons who work for a living in
+      Venice, as well as many who decline to do so.] at the station, but merely
+      saw that he had the Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and
+      arrangement of his fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous
+      effects of red, and he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend
+      of brigands would like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab
+      me and sink my body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I
+      felt that he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly
+      know now whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and
+      left him empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings
+      which he had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard
+      nothing, for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my
+      nether-spirit, so to speak, was dulled and jaded by the long, cold,
+      railway journey from Vienna, while every surface-sense was taken and
+      tangled in the bewildering brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think
+      there can be nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite
+      surprise, as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches as he
+      issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon her peerless
+      strangeness. There is something in the blessed breath of Italy (how
+      quickly, coming south, you know it, and how bland it is, after the harsh,
+      transalpine air!) which prepares you for your nocturnal advent into the
+      place; and O you! whoever you are, that journey toward this enchanted city
+      for the first time, let me tell you how happy I count you! There lies
+      before you for your pleasure, the spectacle of such singular beauty as no
+      picture can ever show you nor book tell you,&mdash;beauty which you shall
+      feel perfectly but once, and regret forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze and bustle of
+      the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot that I
+      had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment very cold
+      and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that beautiful
+      silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars. Then on either
+      hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the dark waters,
+      holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which brought
+      balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief, and threw
+      long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that uncertain
+      glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so, unhaunted by
+      any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the forlorn beauty
+      of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper time to think all
+      the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them; but they passed
+      vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the sensations of
+      sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there, and the moral
+      and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty and surprise.
+      The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and unlooked-for events
+      gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and safely around sharp
+      corners of life. And all the while I knew that this was a progress through
+      narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles of palaces. But I did
+      not know then that this fine confusion of sense and spirit was the first
+      faint impression of the charm of life in Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had
+      warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the
+      lines of balconied palaces had never ended;&mdash;here and there at their
+      doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving uncertainly
+      about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the Grand Canal into
+      one of the smaller channels, and from comparative light into a darkness
+      only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner lamp. But always the
+      pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven with its trembling stars
+      above, and the dark water with its trembling stars below; but now
+      innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness, and ceaseless sudden turns
+      and windings. One could not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these
+      strait and solitary passages, which was part of the strange enjoyment of
+      the time, and which was referable to the novelty, the hush, the darkness,
+      and the piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers.
+      Was not this Venice, and is not Venice forever associated with bravoes and
+      unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise of mine might represent fabulous
+      wealth to the uncultivated imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could
+      understand the Facts of the Situation&mdash;(as we say in the journals)?
+      To move on was relief; to pause was regret for past transgressions mingled
+      with good resolutions for the future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of
+      all these emotions, when, slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola
+      suddenly rested at the foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door.
+      The gondoliers rang and rang again, while their passenger
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;Divided the swift mind,&rdquo;
+ </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could
+      possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles and
+      service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest
+      swindling countenance of a hotel <i>portier</i>, he felt secure against
+      every thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and
+      conjecture at once faded from his thought, when the <i>portier</i>
+      suffered the gondoliers to make him pay a florin too much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that complex
+      spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most alluring
+      glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any fragment of
+      her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had been
+      penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had been
+      touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
+      presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
+      occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my arrival
+      need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I would not
+      wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and alien to the
+      place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the first. I believe it
+      was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the beautiful that I here
+      found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full of society and friendship,
+      speaking a language which, even in its unfamiliar forms, I could partly
+      understand, and at once making me citizen of that Venice from which I
+      shall never be exiled. It was not in the presence of the great and famous
+      monuments of art alone that I felt at home&mdash;indeed, I could as yet
+      understand their excellence and grandeur only very imperfectly&mdash;but
+      wherever I wandered through the quaint and marvelous city, I found the
+      good company of
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;The fair, the old;&rdquo;
+ </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and I
+      learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of
+      relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
+      locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or
+      destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest,
+      crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left me
+      cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible from
+      the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for my
+      blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to surrender
+      by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden brinks of
+      canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable churches of the
+      city were equally victorious, and continually took me prisoner. But all
+      places had something rare and worthy to be seen: if not loveliness of
+      sculpture or architecture, at least interesting squalor and picturesque
+      wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight in proper Objects of
+      Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that reeked with unwholesome
+      winter damps below, and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and
+      beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered casements above. Every court
+      had its carven well to show me, in the noisy keeping of the water-carriers
+      and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of the place. The remote and
+      noisome canals were pathetic with empty old palaces peopled by herds of
+      poor, that decorated the sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene
+      linen, and patched the lofty windows with obsolete hats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
+      the brilliancy of St. Mark&rsquo;s and the glittering streets of shops that
+      branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
+      courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little
+      oil-lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines of
+      the Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole means
+      of street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and
+      deepening the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches. I
+      remember distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft
+      night of late winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from
+      the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli
+      Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I
+      turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a
+      solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its
+      moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the
+      vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the
+      Piazzetta to the Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and
+      casting deep into the water under them a crimson glory that sank also down
+      and down in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty and
+      delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and palace;
+      the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the gondola drifted away to
+      the northward; the islands of the lagoons seemed to rise and sink with the
+      light palpitations of the waves like pictures on the undulating fields of
+      banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black against the sky, the
+      Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore had composed itself to
+      sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music of the surge that gently
+      beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of the trees above me stirred
+      themselves together, and out of one of those trembling towers in the
+      lagoons, one rich, full sob burst from the heart of a bell, too deeply
+      stricken with the glory of the scene, and suffused the languid night with
+      the murmur of luxurious, ineffable sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful, and
+      whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how low
+      its origin or humble its composition; and the magnificence of that
+      moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I won from the fine spectacle
+      of an old man whom I saw burning coffee one night in the little court
+      behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as one of the most
+      interesting people I saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the air
+      of that neighbourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant berry, and
+      all day long this patient old man&mdash;sage, let me call him&mdash;had
+      turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over an open fire
+      after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. Now that the
+      night had fallen, and the stars shone down upon him, and the red of the
+      flame luridly illumined him, he showed more grand and venerable than ever.
+      Simple, abstract humanity, has its own grandeur in Italy; and it is not
+      hard here for the artist to find the primitive types with which genius
+      loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had the beard of a saint, and
+      the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the squalor of a beggar,
+      superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious grandeur of humanity. A
+      vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to do with burning coffee,
+      dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had been some dread
+      supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and doing men, instead
+      of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly and weirdly
+      impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and lifted the
+      cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after it, and he
+      shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and glorified him&mdash;then
+      I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond art, and turned sadly from
+      the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless magnificence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the
+      aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked
+      Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and
+      whom I often noted from the windows of the little caffè there, where you
+      get an excellent <i>caffè bianco</i> (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and
+      one to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly
+      with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of the
+      sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than olive;
+      and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of lustrous
+      black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket and
+      pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity of his
+      spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes. Habitually came a
+      barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;Took the soul<br/>
+    Of that waste place with joy;&rdquo;
+ </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw his
+      whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved
+      ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus
+      embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of figures, in which there
+      was something grotesquely rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric
+      magnificence, spiritualized into a grace of movement superior to the
+      energy of the North and the extravagant fervor of the East. It was coffee
+      and not wine that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw reflected
+      in this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of dancing in
+      that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that combated and
+      vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea-washed sands in marble
+      structures of airy and stately splendor, and gave to architecture new
+      glories full of eternal surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with Venice, and
+      being newly from a land where every thing, morally and materially, was in
+      good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the pleasant
+      discomfort and hopelessness of every thing about me here. It was not yet
+      the season to behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door life of the
+      place; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that great part of the
+      people, both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do, and that nobody
+      seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse. When, however, I
+      ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a spectator of this idleness, and
+      learned that I too must assume my share of the common indolence, I found
+      it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old habits of hope, made my
+      endless leisure irksome to me, and almost intolerable when I ascertained
+      fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill long-cherished, but, after
+      all, merely general designs of literary study, I had forsaken wholesome
+      struggle in the currents where I felt the motion of the age, only to drift
+      into a lifeless eddy of the world, remote from incentive and sensation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For such is Venice, and the will must be strong and the faith indomitable
+      in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her stagnant quiet, a
+      practical belief in God&rsquo;s purpose of a great moving, anxious, toiling,
+      aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as after a while I yielded,
+      to these influences, a gentle incredulity possesses you, and if you
+      consent that such a thing is as earnest and useful life, you cannot help
+      wondering why it need be. The charm of the place sweetens your temper, but
+      corrupts you; and I found it a sad condition of my perception of the
+      beauty of Venice and friendship with it, that I came in some unconscious
+      way to regard her fate as my own; and when I began to write the sketches
+      which go to form this book, it was as hard to speak of any ugliness in
+      her, or of the doom written against her in the hieroglyphic seams and
+      fissures of her crumbling masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine.
+      I do not so greatly blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so
+      many sins of omission concerning her, and made her all light, color,
+      canals, and palaces. One&rsquo;s conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant
+      elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is more
+      virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the city,
+      and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there might
+      have been some incentive to keep one&rsquo;s thoughts and words from lapsing
+      into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the whole
+      hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But now,
+      what matter?
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"></a>
+      CHAPTER III.<br/>
+      THE WINTER IN VENICE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my experiences
+      of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was, indeed, an every-day
+      roughness and discomfort in the weather, which travelers passing their
+      first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile with the habitual ideas of
+      the season&rsquo;s clemency in the South. But winter is apt to be very severe in
+      mild climates. People do not acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense
+      that it is summer only a little out of humor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much
+      favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure a
+      degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the
+      winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd
+      prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer equally
+      with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the cold,
+      objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the effort
+      to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It is not a
+      pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the affliction among
+      people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh you out sugar, by no
+      means reconciles the Northern stomach to its prevalence. I have observed
+      that priests, and those who have much to do in the frigid churches, are
+      the worst sufferers in this way; and I think no one can help noting in the
+      harsh, raw winter-complexion (for in summer the tone is quite different)
+      of the women of all classes, the protest of systems cruelly starved of the
+      warmth which health demands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight
+      months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in summer,
+      and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very large, lofty,
+      and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of apartments&mdash;the
+      smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the winter, and the
+      grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for defence against the
+      insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most part, people must occupy
+      the same room summer and winter, the sole change being in the strip of
+      carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during the latter season. In the
+      comparatively few houses where carpets are the rule and not the exception,
+      they are always removed during the summer&mdash;for the triple purpose of
+      sparing them some months&rsquo; wear, banishing fleas and other domestic
+      insects, and showing off the beauty of the oiled and shining pavement,
+      which in the meanest houses is tasteful, and in many of the better sort is
+      often in-wrought with figures and designs of mosaic work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the floors in Venice are of stone, and whether of marble flags, or of
+      that species of composition formed of dark cement, with fragments of
+      colored marble imbedded and smoothed and polished to the most glassy and
+      even surface, and the general effect and complexion of petrified
+      plum-pudding, all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with
+      their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded
+      gowns. When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too
+      heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian
+      sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the only
+      legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous prices to
+      such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the utmost
+      rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as possible in
+      the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm afternoon sun in
+      its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders of every class,
+      condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines in the Piazza,
+      shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men crowd the close
+      little caffè, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration, and animal heat,
+      and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and beguile the time with
+      solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself, throughout this book, the use
+      of the expressive American words <i>loaf</i> and <i>loafer</i>, as the
+      only terms adequate to the description of professional idling in Venice]
+      and the perusal of dingy little journals, drinking small cups of black
+      coffee, and playing long games of chess,&mdash;an evening that seemed to
+      me as torpid and lifeless as a Lap&rsquo;s, and intolerable when I remembered
+      the bright, social winter evenings of another and happier land and
+      civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes you find a heated stove&mdash;that is to say, one in which there
+      has been a fire during the day&mdash;in a Venetian house; but the stove
+      seems usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged
+      only in diffusing a very acrid smoke,&mdash;as if the Venetian preferred
+      to take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove itself
+      is a curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and plastering,&mdash;whitewashed
+      and painted outside. It is a great consumer of fuel, and radiates but
+      little heat. By dint of constant wooding I contrived to warm mine; but my
+      Italian friends always avoided its vicinity when they came to see me, and
+      most amusingly regarded my determination to be comfortable as part of the
+      eccentricity inseparable from the Anglo-Saxon character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in his
+      northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his
+      severity is the <i>scaldino</i>, and this is made chiefly by the yielding
+      sex, who are denied the warmth of the caffè. The use of the scaldino is
+      known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are most
+      addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware, having
+      an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and the pot
+      full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana&rsquo;s defense against cold is
+      complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room to
+      room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been my
+      fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting over
+      the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while she
+      sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with religion,
+      baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino. In one of the
+      public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the walls, intended
+      to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea of the four seasons.
+      There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization of Spring, Summer, and
+      Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by a fine lady dressed in
+      furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned foot-stool, and a scaldino in
+      her lap! When we talk of being invaded in the north, we poetize the idea
+      of defense by the figure of defending our hearthstones. Alas! <i>could</i>
+      we fight for our sacred <i>scaldini</i>?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell hot pumpkins and pears, for
+      they can unite pleasure and profit. There are some degrees of poverty
+      below the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars and the wretcheder
+      poor keep themselves warm, I think, by sultry recollections of summer, as
+      Don Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remembrances, during one of
+      his periods of fast. One mendicant whom I know, and who always sits upon
+      the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe, as the season
+      advances, in heating the marble beneath him by firm and unswerving
+      adhesion, and establishes a reciprocity of warmth with it. I have no
+      reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a moment during the
+      whole winter; and indeed, it would be a vicious waste of comfort to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the winter, the whole city <i>sniffs</i>, and if the Pipchin theory of
+      the effect of sniffing upon the eternal interests of the soul be true, few
+      people go to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly wondered if Desdemona,
+      in <i>her</i> time, sniffed, and found little comfort in the reflection
+      that Shylock must have had a cold in his head. There is comparative warmth
+      in the broad squares before the churches, but the narrow streets are
+      bitter thorough-draughts, and fell influenza lies in wait for its prey in
+      all those picturesque, seducing little courts of which I have spoken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twilight and airy height one
+      finds so grateful in summer, that the sharpest malice of the winter is
+      felt; and having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, I deferred
+      the remaining seventy-five or eighty, together with the gallery of the
+      Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have mitigated the
+      severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination affected me, I
+      thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the temples of
+      Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge marbles, and
+      their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their frescoed roofs and
+      broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of Palladio&rsquo;s architecture
+      was especially grievous to the sense in cold weather; and I warn the
+      traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of Bellini to beware how he
+      trusts himself in winter to the gusty, arctic magnificence of the church
+      of the Redentore. But by all means the coldest church in the city is that
+      of the Jesuits, which those who have seen it will remember for its famous
+      marble drapery. This base, mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not
+      art) is effected by inlaying the white marble of columns and pulpits and
+      altars with a certain pattern of verd-antique. The workmanship is
+      marvelously skillful, and the material costly, but it only gives the
+      church the effect of being draped in damask linen; and even where the
+      marble is carven in vast and heavy folds over a pulpit to simulate a
+      curtain, or wrought in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent
+      a carpet, it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a coldness, a
+      harshness indescribably table-clothy. I think all this has tended to chill
+      the soul of the sacristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan
+      conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his temples quite incapable of
+      thawing. In this dreary sanctuary is one of Titian&rsquo;s great paintings, The
+      Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly disposed as
+      to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once) you turn
+      involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on his
+      gridiron amid all that frigidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much severer
+      than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less support in
+      fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to claim that such weather
+      as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen before. In fine,
+      the winter climate of north Italy is really very harsh, and though the
+      season is not so severe in Venice as in Milan, or even Florence, it is
+      still so sharp as to make foreigners regret the generous fires and
+      warmly-built houses of the north. There was snow but once during my first
+      Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none at all; but the third,
+      which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to considerable depth, and lay
+      unmelted for many weeks in the shade. The lagoons were frozen for miles in
+      every direction; and under our windows on the Grand Canal, great sheets of
+      ice went up and down with the rising and the falling tide for nearly a
+      whole month. The visible misery throughout the fireless city was great;
+      and it was a problem I never could solve, whether people in-doors were
+      greater sufferers from the cold than those who weathered the cruel winds
+      sweeping the squares and the canals, and whistling through the streets of
+      stone and brine. The boys had an unwonted season of sliding on the frozen
+      lagoons, though a good deal persecuted by the police, who must have looked
+      upon such a tremendous innovation as little better than revolution; and it
+      was said that there were card-parties on the ice; but the only creatures
+      which seemed really to enjoy the weather were the seagulls. These birds,
+      which flock into the city in vast numbers at the first approach of cold,
+      and, sailing up and down the canals between the palaces, bring to the
+      dwellers in the city a full sense of mid-ocean forlornness and desolation,
+      now rioted on the savage winds, with harsh cries, and danced upon the
+      waves of the bitter brine, with a clamorous joy that had something
+      eldritch and unearthly in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A place so much given to gossip as Venice did not fail to produce many
+      memorable incidents of the cold; but the most singular adventure was that
+      of the old man employed at the Armenian Convent to bring milk from the
+      island of San Lazzaro to the city. One night, shortly after the coldest
+      weather set in, he lost his oar as he was returning to the island. The
+      wind, which is particularly furious in that part of the lagoon, blew his
+      boat away into the night, and the good brothers at the convent naturally
+      gave up their milkman for lost. The winds and waters drifted him eight
+      miles from the city into the northern lagoon, and there lodged his boat in
+      the marshes, where it froze fast in the stiffening mud. The luckless
+      occupant had nothing to eat or drink in his boat, where he remained five
+      days and nights, exposed to the inclemency of cold many degrees below
+      friendship in severity. He made continual signs of distress, but no boat
+      came near enough to discover him. At last, when the whole marsh was frozen
+      solid, he was taken off by some fishermen, and carried to the convent,
+      where he remains in perfectly recovered health, and where no doubt he will
+      be preserved alive many years in an atmosphere which renders dying at San
+      Lazzaro a matter of no small difficulty. During the whole time of his
+      imprisonment, he sustained life against hunger and cold by smoking. I
+      suppose no one will be surprised to learn that he was rescued by the
+      fishermen through the miraculous interposition of the Madonna&mdash;as any
+      one might have seen by the votive picture hung up at her shrine on a
+      bridge of the Riva degli Schiavoni, wherein the Virgin was represented
+      breaking through the clouds in one corner of the sky, and unmistakably
+      directing the operations of the fishermen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is said that no such winter as that of 1863-4 has been known in Venice
+      since the famous <i>Anno del Ghiaccio</i> (Year of the Ice), which fell
+      about the beginning of the last century. This year is celebrated in the
+      local literature; the play which commemorates it always draws full houses
+      at the people&rsquo;s theatre, Malibran; and the often-copied picture, by a
+      painter of the time, representing Lustrissime and Lustrissimi in hoops and
+      bag-wigs on the ice, never fails to block up the street before the
+      shop-window in which it is exposed. The King of Denmark was then the guest
+      of the Republic, and as the unprecedented cold defeated all the plans
+      arranged for his diversion, the pleasure-loving government turned the cold
+      itself to account, and made the ice occasion of novel brilliancy in its
+      festivities. The duties on commerce between the city and the mainland were
+      suspended for as long time as the lagoon should remain frozen, and the ice
+      became a scene of the liveliest traffic, and was everywhere covered with
+      sledges, bringing the produce of the country to the capital, and carrying
+      away its stuffs in return. The Venetians of every class amused themselves
+      in visiting this free mart, and the gentler and more delicate sex pressed
+      eagerly forward to traverse with their feet a space hitherto passable only
+      in gondolas. [Footnote: <i>Origine delle Feste Veneziane</i>, di Giustina
+      Renier-Michiel] The lagoon remained frozen, and these pleasures lasted
+      eighteen days, a period of cold unequaled till last winter. A popular song
+      now declares that the present generation has known a winter quite as
+      marvelous as that of the Year of the Ice, and celebrates the wonder of
+      walking on the water:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    Che bell&rsquo; affar!<br/>
+    Che patetico affar!<br/>
+    Che immenso affar!<br/>
+    Sora l&rsquo;acqua camminar!
+</p>
+    <p>
+      But after all the disagreeable winter, which hardly commences before
+      Christmas, and which ends about the middle of March, is but a small part
+      of the glorious Venetian year; and even this ungracious season has a
+      loveliness, at times, which it can have nowhere but in Venice. What
+      summer-delight of other lands could match the beauty of the first Venetian
+      snow-fall which I saw? It had snowed overnight, and in the morning when I
+      woke it was still snowing. The flakes fell softly and vertically through
+      the motionless air, and all the senses were full of languor and repose. It
+      was rapture to lie still, and after a faint glimpse of the golden-winged
+      angel on the bell-tower of St. Mark&rsquo;s, to give indolent eye solely to the
+      contemplation of the roof opposite, where the snow lay half an inch deep
+      upon the brown tiles. The little scene&mdash;a few square yards of roof, a
+      chimney-pot, and a dormer-window&mdash;was all that the most covetous
+      spirit could demand; and I lazily lorded it over that domain of pleasure,
+      while the lingering mists of a dream of new-world events blent themselves
+      with the luxurious humor of the moment and the calm of the snow-fall, and
+      made my reverie one of the perfectest things in the world. When I was lost
+      the deepest in it, I was inexpressibly touched and gratified by the
+      appearance of a black cat at the dormer-window. In Venice, roofs
+      commanding pleasant exposures seem to be chiefly devoted to the
+      cultivation of this animal, and there are many cats in Venice. My black
+      cat looked wonderingly upon the snow for a moment, and then ran across the
+      roof. Nothing could have been better. Any creature less silent, or in
+      point of movement less soothing to the eye than a cat, would have been
+      torture of the spirit. As it was, this little piece of action contented me
+      so well, that I left every thing else out of my reverie, and could only
+      think how deliciously the cat harmonized with the snow-covered tiles, the
+      chimney-pot, and the dormer-window. I began to long for her reappearance,
+      but when she did come forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased to have the
+      slightest interest in the matter, and experienced only the disgust of
+      satiety. I had felt <i>ennui</i>&mdash;nothing remained but to get up and
+      change my relations with the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once
+      shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked <i>facchini</i>;
+      [Footnote: The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve
+      long seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters and
+      day-laborers.] and now in St. Mark&rsquo;s Place the music of innumerable
+      shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it
+      engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But
+      the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the descending
+      flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary kind of effort
+      in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only to renew the task.
+      The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow,
+      and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at
+      across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark&rsquo;s Church was
+      perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snow-fall
+      were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around a structure that
+      always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be any
+      thing but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the
+      beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and
+      ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder&mdash;or,
+      better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous
+      freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the façade,
+      and all that gracious harmony into which the temple rises, of marble
+      scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints,
+      was a hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the
+      drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble
+      like peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest
+      white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work, as
+      if exulting in its beauty&mdash;beauty which filled me with subtle,
+      selfish yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the
+      little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair to think that even
+      the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture
+      or poem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the granite
+      pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is, and the
+      winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so mild and gentle
+      he looked by the tender light of the storm. [Footnote: St. Theodore was
+      the first patron of Venice, but he was deposed and St. Mark adopted, when
+      the bones of the latter were brought from Alexandria. The Venetians seem
+      to have felt some compunctions for this desertion of an early friend, and
+      they have given St. Theodore a place on one of the granite pillars, while
+      the other is surmounted by the Lion, representing St. Mark. <i>Fra Marco e
+      Todaro</i>, is a Venetian proverb expressing the state of perplexity which
+      we indicate by the figure of an ass between two bundles of hay.] The
+      towers of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness;
+      the sailors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like
+      phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque
+      distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost
+      palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"></a>
+      CHAPTER IV.<br/>
+      COMINCIA FAR CALDO.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and from this beats her life
+      in every direction through an intricate system of streets and canals that
+      bring it back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest uneasiness
+      had attended the frequency with which I lost my way in the city at first,
+      there would always have been this comfort: that the place was very small
+      in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I must reach the Piazza
+      sooner or later. There is a crowd constantly tending to and from it, and
+      you have but to take this tide, and be drifted to St. Mark&rsquo;s&mdash;or to
+      the Rialto Bridge, whence it is directly accessible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the open spaces in the city, that before the Church of St. Mark
+      alone bears the name of Piazza, and the rest are called merely <i>campi</i>,
+      or fields. But if the company of the noblest architecture can give honor,
+      the Piazza San Marco merits its distinction, not in Venice only, but in
+      the whole world; for I fancy that no other place in the world is set in
+      such goodly bounds. Its westward length is terminated by the Imperial
+      Palace; its lateral borders are formed by lines of palace called the New
+      Procuratie on the right, and the Old Procuratie on the left; [Footnote: In
+      Republican days the palaces of the <i>Procuratori di San Marco</i>.] and
+      the Church of St. Mark fills up almost its whole width upon the east,
+      leaving space enough, however, for a glimpse of the Gothic perfection of
+      the Ducal Palace. The place then opens southward with the name of
+      Piazzetta, between the eastern façade of the Ducal Palace and the classic
+      front of the Libreria Vecchia, and expands and ends at last on the mole,
+      where stand the pillars of St. Mark and St. Theodore; and then this mole,
+      passing the southern façade of the Doge&rsquo;s Palace, stretches away to the
+      Public Gardens at the eastern extremity of the city, over half a score of
+      bridges, between lines of houses and shipping&mdash;stone and wooden walls&mdash;in
+      the long, crescent-shaped quay called Riva degli Schiavoni. Looking
+      northward up the Piazzetta from the Molo, the vision traverses the eastern
+      breadth of the Piazza, and rests upon the Clock Tower, gleaming with blue
+      and gold, on which the bronze Giants beat the hours; or it climbs the
+      great mass of the Campanile San Marco, standing apart from the church at
+      the corner of the New Procuratie, and rising four hundred feet toward the
+      sky&mdash;the sky where the Venetian might well place his heaven, as the
+      Moors bounded Paradise in the celestial expanse that roofed Granada.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My first lodging was but a step out of the Piazza, and this vicinity
+      brought me early into familiar acquaintance with its beauty. But I never,
+      during three years, passed through it in my daily walks, without feeling
+      as freshly as at first the greatness of this beauty. The church, which the
+      mighty bell-tower and the lofty height of the palace-lines make to look
+      low, is in nowise humbled by the contrast, but is like a queen enthroned
+      amid upright reverence. The religious sentiment is deeply appealed to, I
+      think, in the interior of St. Mark&rsquo;s; but if its interior is heaven&rsquo;s, its
+      exterior, like a good man&rsquo;s daily life, is earth&rsquo;s; and it is this winning
+      loveliness of earth that first attracts you to it, and when you emerge
+      from its portals, you enter upon spaces of such sunny length and breadth,
+      set round with such exquisite architecture, that it makes you glad to be
+      living in this world. Before you expands the great Piazza, peopled with
+      its various life; on your left, between the Pillars of the Piazzetta,
+      swims the blue lagoon, and overhead climb the arches, one above another,
+      in excesses of fantastic grace.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0084}.jpg" alt="{0084}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0084}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to have brought hither and made
+      part of his Piazza, that it might remain forever the city&rsquo;s supreme grace;
+      and so, though there are public gardens and several pleasant walks in the
+      city, the great resort in summer and winter, by day and by night, is the
+      Piazza San Marco. Its ground-level, under the Procuratie, is belted with a
+      glittering line of shops and caffè, the most tasteful and brilliant in the
+      world, and the arcades that pass round three of its sides are filled with
+      loungers and shoppers, even when there is music by the Austrian bands;
+      for, as we have seen, the purest patriot may then walk under the
+      Procuratie, without stain to the principles which would be hopelessly
+      blackened if he set foot in the Piazza. The absence of dust and noisy
+      hoofs and wheels tempts social life out of doors in Venice more than in
+      any other Italian city, though the tendency to this sort of expansion is
+      common throughout Italy. Beginning with the warm days of early May, and
+      continuing till the <i>villeggiatura</i> (the period spent at the country
+      seat) interrupts it late in September, all Venice goes by a single impulse
+      of <i>dolce far niente</i>, and sits gossiping at the doors of the
+      innumerable caffè on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the Piazza San Marco,
+      and in the different squares in every part of the city. But, of course,
+      the most brilliant scene of this kind is in St. Mark&rsquo;s Place, which has a
+      night-time glory indescribable, won from the light of uncounted lamps upon
+      its architectural groups. The superb Imperial Palace&mdash;the sculptured,
+      arcaded, and pillared Procuratie&mdash;the Byzantine magic and splendor of
+      the church&mdash;will it all be there when you come again to-morrow night?
+      The unfathomable heaven above seems part of the place, for I think it is
+      never so tenderly blue over any other spot of earth. And when the sky is
+      blurred with clouds, shall not the Piazza vanish with the azure?&mdash;People,
+      I say, come to drink coffee, and eat ices here in the summer evenings, and
+      then, what with the promenades in the arcades and in the Piazza, the
+      music, the sound of feet, and the hum of voices, unbroken by the ruder
+      uproar of cities where there are horses and wheels&mdash;the effect is
+      that of a large evening party, and in this aspect the Piazza, is like a
+      vast drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I liked well to see that strange life, which even the stout,
+      dead-in-earnest little Bohemian musicians, piping in the centre of the
+      Piazza, could not altogether substantialize, and which constantly took
+      immateriality from the loveliness of its environment. In the winter the
+      scene was the most purely Venetian, and in my first winter, when I had
+      abandoned all thought of churches till spring, I settled down to steady
+      habits of idleness and coffee, and contemplated the life of the Piazza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By all odds, the loungers at Florian&rsquo;s were the most interesting, because
+      they were the most various. People of all shades of politics met in the
+      dainty little saloons, though there were shades of division even there,
+      and they did not mingle. The Italians carefully assorted themselves in a
+      room furnished with green velvet, and the Austrians and the Austriacanti
+      frequented a red-velvet room. They were curious to look at, those
+      tranquil, indolent, Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon relish for
+      them. They seldom spoke together, and when they did speak, they burst from
+      silence into tumultuous controversy, and then lapsed again into perfect
+      silence. The elder among them sat with their hands carefully folded on the
+      heads of their sticks, gazing upon the ground, or else buried themselves
+      in the perusal of the French journals. The younger stood a good deal about
+      the doorways, and now and then passed a gentle, gentle jest with the
+      elegant waiters in black coats and white cravats, who hurried to and fro
+      with the orders, and called them out in strident tones to the accountant
+      at his little table; or sometimes these young idlers make a journey to the
+      room devoted to ladies and forbidden to smokers, looked long and
+      deliberately in upon its loveliness, and then returned to the bosom of
+      their taciturn companions. By chance I found them playing chess, but very
+      rarely. They were all well-dressed, handsome men, with beards carefully
+      cut, brilliant hats and boots, and conspicuously clean linen. I used to
+      wonder who they were, to what order of society they belonged, and whether
+      they, like my worthless self, had never any thing else but lounging at
+      Florian&rsquo;s to do; but I really know none of these things to this day. Some
+      men in Venice spend their noble, useful lives in this way, and it was the
+      proud reply of a Venetian father, when asked of what profession his son
+      was, &ldquo;<i>È in Piazza!</i>&rdquo; That was, he bore a cane, wore light gloves,
+      and stared from Florian&rsquo;s windows at the ladies who went by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the Caffè Quadri, immediately across the Piazza, there was a scene of
+      equal hopefulness. But there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and the
+      idling was carried on with a great noise of conversation in
+      Austrian-German. Heaven knows what it was all about, but I presume the
+      talk was upon topics of mutual improvement, calculated to advance the
+      interests of self-government and mankind. These officers were very comely,
+      intelligent-looking people with the most good-natured faces. They came and
+      went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel scabbards against
+      the tables, or rising and straddling off with their long swords kicking
+      against their legs. They are the most stylish soldiers in the world, and
+      one has no notion how ill they can dress when left to themselves, till one
+      sees them in civil clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the Imperial Palace is called),
+      under the Procuratie Vecchie, is the Caffè Specchi, frequented only by
+      young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those who go to Florian&rsquo;s.
+      Across from this caffè is that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to
+      chiefly by non-commissioned officers, and civilian officials of lower
+      grade. You know the latter, at a glance, by their beard, which in Venice
+      is an index to every man&rsquo;s politics: no Austriacante wears the imperial,
+      no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caffè Suttil, rather Austrian, and
+      frequented by Italian <i>codini</i>, or old fogies, in politics: gray old
+      fellows, who caress their sticks with more constant zeal than even the
+      elders at Florian&rsquo;s. Quite at the other end of the Procuratie Nuove is the
+      Caffè of the Greeks, a nation which I have commonly seen represented there
+      by two or three Albanians with an Albanian boy, who, being dressed exactly
+      like his father, curiously impressed me, as if he were the young of some
+      Oriental animal&mdash;say a boy-elephant or infant camel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hope that the reader adds to this sketch, even in the winter time,
+      occasional tourists under the Procuratie, at the caffè, and in the shops,
+      where the shop-keepers are devouring them with the keenness of an appetite
+      unsated by the hordes of summer visitors. I hope that the reader also
+      groups me fishermen, gondoliers, beggars, and loutish boys about the base
+      of St. Mark&rsquo;s, and at the feet of the three flag-staffs before the church;
+      that he passes me a slatternly woman and a frowzy girl or two through the
+      Piazza occasionally; and that he calls down the flocks of pigeons hovering
+      near. I fancy the latter half ashamed to show themselves, as being aware
+      that they are a great humbug, and unrightfully in the guide-books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, while I sit at Florian&rsquo;s, sharing and studying the universal
+      worthlessness about me, the brief winter passes, and the spring of the
+      south&mdash;so unlike the ardent season of the north, where it burns full
+      summer before the snows are dried upon the fields&mdash;descends upon the
+      city and the sea. But except in the little gardens of the palaces, and
+      where here and there a fig-tree lifts its head to peer over a lofty stone
+      wall, the spring finds no response of swelling bud and unfolding leaf, and
+      it is human nature alone which welcomes it. Perhaps it is for this reason
+      that the welcome is more visible in Venice than elsewhere, and that here,
+      where the effect of the season is narrowed and limited to men&rsquo;s hearts,
+      the joy it brings is all the keener and deeper. It is certain at least
+      that the rapture is more demonstrative. The city at all times voiceful,
+      seems to burst into song with the advent of these golden days and silver
+      nights. Bands of young men go singing through the moonlit streets, and the
+      Grand Canal reëchoes the music of the parties of young girls as they drift
+      along in the scarcely moving boats, and sing the glories of the lagoons
+      and the loves of fishermen and gondoliers. In the Public Gardens they walk
+      and sing; and wandering minstrels come forth before the caffè, and it is
+      hard to get beyond the tinkling of guitars and the scraping of fiddles. It
+      is as if the city had put off its winter humor with its winter dress; and
+      as Venice in winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the world, so
+      in spring it is the fullest of joy and light. There is a pleasant bustle
+      in the streets, a ceaseless clatter of feet over the stones of the
+      squares, and a constant movement of boats upon the canals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We say, in a cheap and careless way, that the southern peoples have no <i>homes</i>.
+      But this is true only in a restricted sense, for the Italian, and the
+      Venetian especially, makes the whole city his home in pleasant weather. No
+      one remains under a roof who can help it; and now, as I said before, the
+      fascinating out-door life begins. All day long the people sit and drink
+      coffee and eat ices and gossip together before the caffè, and the soft
+      midnight sees the same diligent idlers in their places. The promenade is
+      at all seasons the favorite Italian amusement; it has its rigidly fixed
+      hours, and its limits are also fixed: but now, in spring, even the
+      promenade is a little lawless, and the crowds upon the Riva sometimes walk
+      as far as the Public Gardens, and throng all the wider avenues and the
+      Piazza; while young Venice comes to take the sun at St. Mark&rsquo;s in the arms
+      of its high-breasted nurses,&mdash;mighty country-women, who, in their
+      bright costumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses of gold and
+      silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high, free-stepping
+      movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some elder race of
+      barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had passed away from our
+      puny, dull-clad times.
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;È la stagion che ognuno s&rsquo;innamora;&rdquo;
+ </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      and now young girls steal to their balconies, and linger there for hours,
+      subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and looking up at
+      them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the Venetian
+      housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their heads and
+      gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers, filling
+      their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their work. Every
+      street down which you look is likewise vocal with gossip; and if the
+      picturesque projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys, of which the
+      vista is full, hide the heads of the gossipers, be sure there is a face
+      looking out of every window for all that, and the social, expansive
+      presence of the season is felt there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish the spring upon
+      themselves unsparingly. They come forth from their dark dens in crumbling
+      palaces and damp basements, and live in the sunlight and the welcome air.
+      They work, they eat, they sleep out of doors. Mothers of families sit
+      about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down with other
+      slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while their
+      raven-haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the covert
+      insects that haunt the tangles of the children&rsquo;s locks. Within doors
+      shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases talking for
+      an instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near the
+      Piazza, to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the busiest
+      street in Venice passes, from St. Mark&rsquo;s to the Rialto Bridge. It is one
+      of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the
+      spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March,
+      when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and
+      made company for me; but when the winter broke, and the windows were
+      opened, I found that I had too much society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.
+      Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the
+      burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary&rsquo;s shop,
+      a mercer&rsquo;s and draper&rsquo;s shop, a blacksmith&rsquo;s and shoemaker&rsquo;s shop, a caffè
+      more or less brilliant, a green-grocer&rsquo;s and fruiterer&rsquo;s, a family grocery&mdash;nay,
+      there is also a second-hand merchant&rsquo;s shop where you buy and sell every
+      kind of worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there is a
+      coppersmith&rsquo;s and a watchmaker&rsquo;s, and pretty certainly a wood-carver&rsquo;s and
+      gilder&rsquo;s, while without a barber&rsquo;s shop no campo could preserve its
+      integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day. In
+      addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolomeo
+      swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto market.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamor for the absence of
+      quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost
+      imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper of hair-pins,
+      is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils. Fishermen, with
+      baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays of housewife wares;
+      louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back and forth by long
+      cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who advertised cement
+      for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of toothache; jugglers
+      who spread their carpets and arranged their temples of magic upon the
+      ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets of the people who
+      brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the crowd;&mdash;these
+      were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and friendly air
+      woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolomeo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and I spent much time in
+      the study of the vociferous life under my windows, trying to make out the
+      meaning of the different cries, and to trace them back to their sources.
+      There was one which puzzled me for a long time&mdash;a sharp, pealing cry
+      that ended in a wail of angry despair, and, rising high above all other
+      sounds, impressed the spirit like the cry of that bird in the tropic
+      forests which the terrified Spaniards called the <i>alma perdida</i>.
+      After many days of listening and trembling, I found that it proceeded from
+      a wretched, sun-burnt girl, who carried about some dozens of knotty pears,
+      and whose hair hung disheveled round her eyes, bloodshot with the strain
+      of her incessant shrieks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In San Bartolomeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above
+      and shops below. The ground-floor is devoted to the small commerce of
+      various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied by
+      tradesmen&rsquo;s families; and on the third or fourth floor is the <i>appartamento
+      signorile</i>. From the balconies of these stories hung the cages of
+      innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots, which sang
+      and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the crowd. All the
+      human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the casements was
+      perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite was used as a
+      hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By all odds the most
+      interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant serving-girl, dressed
+      in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief, and a bright-colored
+      gown, and wearing long dangling ear-rings of yellowest gold. For hours
+      this idle maiden balanced herself half over the balcony-rail in perusal of
+      the people under her, and I suspect made love at that distance, and in
+      that constrained position, to some one in the crowd. On another balcony, a
+      lady sat and knitted with crimson yarn; and at the window of still another
+      house, a damsel now looked out upon the square, and now gave a glance into
+      the room, in the evident direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbors have
+      the amiable custom of studying one another&rsquo;s features through
+      opera-glasses; but I could not persuade myself to use this means of
+      learning the mirror&rsquo;s response to the damsel&rsquo;s constant &ldquo;Fair or not?&rdquo;
+       being a believer in every woman&rsquo;s right to look well a little way off. I
+      shunned whatever trifling temptation there was in the case, and turned
+      again to the campo beneath&mdash;to the placid dandies about the door of
+      the caffè; to the tide of passers from the Merceria; the smooth-shaven
+      Venetians of other days, and the bearded Venetians of these; the
+      dark-eyed, white-faced Venetian girls, hooped in cruel disproportion to
+      the narrow streets, but richly clad, and moving with southern grace; the
+      files of heavily burdened soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily
+      about with their swords at their sides, and in their spotless Austrian
+      uniforms.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0100}.jpg" alt="{0100}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0100}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat increases, the expansive
+      delight with which the city hails its coming passes into a tranquiler
+      humor, as if the joy of the beautiful season had sunk too deeply into the
+      city&rsquo;s heart for utterance. I, too, felt this longing for quiet, and as
+      San Bartolomeo continued untouched by it, and all day roared and thundered
+      under my windows, and all night long gave itself up to sleepless youths
+      who there melodiously bayed the moon in chorus, I was obliged to abandon
+      San Bartolomeo, and seek calmer quarters where I might enjoy the last
+      luxurious sensations of the spring-time in peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, with the city&rsquo;s lapse into this tranquiler humor, the promenades
+      cease. The facchino gives all his leisure to sleeping in the sun; and in
+      the mellow afternoons there is scarcely a space of six feet square on the
+      Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its brown-cloaked peasant,
+      basking face-downward in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are by
+      right the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in
+      their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated by
+      the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamors at
+      the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard of <i>valets
+      de place</i>. Even the play of the children ceases, except in the Public
+      Gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games, and sport as
+      noiselessly as the lizards that slide from shadow to shadow and glitter in
+      the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses you,&mdash;the
+      stranger in it,&mdash;not with sadness, not with melancholy, but with a
+      deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference to all
+      purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on men&rsquo;s
+      tongues, behold! that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise would
+      strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a wild and
+      frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her inmost
+      heart, and you learn her secrets&mdash;arcana unintelligible to you in the
+      new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win new
+      color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once charmed
+      away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your motion.
+      Now, at last, you know <i>why</i>
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;It was an Abyssinian maid&rdquo;
+</p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu? It is the land in which you were
+      born!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail
+      faints into the white distance; the gondola slides athwart the sheeted
+      silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes
+      at his post.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"></a>
+      CHAPTER V.<br/>
+      OPERA AND THEATRES.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the
+      existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The
+      Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private
+      persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were
+      intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor
+      Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly not
+      so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and tasteful
+      theatre. The best opera was formerly given in it, and now that it is
+      closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. The Italians seldom go to
+      it, and as there is not a sufficient number of foreign residents to
+      support it in good style, the opera commonly conforms to the character of
+      the theatre San Benedetto, in which it is given, and is second-rate. It is
+      nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of several thousand
+      florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this account, of
+      supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in the little
+      German cities. A box does not cost a great deal; but as the theatre is
+      carried on in Italy by two different managements,&mdash;one of which
+      receives the money for the boxes and seats, and the other the fee of
+      admission to the theatre,&mdash;there is always the demand of the latter
+      to be satisfied with nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before
+      you can reach your place. The pit is fitted up with seats, of course, but
+      you do not sit down there without paying. So, most Italians (who if they
+      go at all go without ladies) and the poorer sort of government officials
+      stand; the orchestra seats are reserved for the officers of the garrison.
+      The first row of boxes, which is on a level with the heads of people in
+      the pit, is well enough, but rank and fashion take a loftier flight, and
+      sit in the second tier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You look about in vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which
+      once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety,&mdash;the visits from box
+      to box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations.
+      The people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the beauty
+      is the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter being
+      the fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the opera,
+      some of the Venetian ladies yielded to it, but went plainly dressed, and
+      sat far back in boxes of the third tier, and when they issued forth after
+      the opera were veiled beyond recognition. The audience usually takes its
+      enjoyment quietly; hissing now and then for silence in the house, and
+      clapping hands for applause, without calling <i>bravo</i>,&mdash;an
+      Italian custom which I have noted to be chiefly habitual with foreigners:
+      with Germans, for instance; who spell it with a <i>p</i> and <i>f</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must seek it somewhere out of
+      Italy,&mdash;at London, or Paris, or New York,&mdash;though possibly it
+      might be chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in Naples. The
+      cause of the decay of the musical art in Venice must be looked for among
+      the events which seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing;
+      certainly it cannot be discerned in any indifference of the people to
+      music. The <i>dimostrazione</i> keeps the better class of citizens from
+      the opera, but the passion for it still exists in every order; and God&rsquo;s
+      gift of beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race by any Situation.
+      You hear the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as
+      our own colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has an
+      inborn sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the
+      cultivated tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth&mdash;
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole.&rdquo;
+ </p>
+    <p>
+      In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that
+      theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now an
+      imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her stages,
+      and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so famous,
+      have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular in Venice
+      as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the care of the
+      state for the drama existed from the first. The government, which always
+      piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as the theatre
+      advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the Old or New
+      Testament, began about the close of the century to protect and encourage
+      the instruction of music in the different foundling hospitals and public
+      refuges in the city. The young girls in these institutions were taught to
+      play on instruments, and to sing,&mdash;at first for the alleviation of
+      their own dull and solitary life, and afterward for the delight of the
+      public. In the merry days that passed just before the fall of the
+      Republic, the Latin oratorios which they performed in the churches
+      attached to the hospitals were among the most fashionable diversions in
+      Venice. The singers were instructed by the best masters of the time; and
+      at the close of the last century, the conservatories of the Incurables,
+      the Foundlings, and the Mendicants were famous throughout Europe for their
+      dramatic concerts, and for those pupils who found the transition from
+      sacred to profane opera natural and easy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With increasing knowledge of the language, I learned to enjoy best the
+      unmusical theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It is
+      hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen excellent
+      acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian comedy, which
+      is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of Goldoni&mdash;compositions
+      deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where alone their admirable fidelity
+      of drawing and coloring can be perfectly appreciated. The best comedy is
+      usually given to the educated classes at the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a
+      bloodier and louder drama is offered to the populace at Teatro Malibran,
+      where on a Sunday night you may see the plebeian life of the city in one
+      of its most entertaining and characteristic phases. The sparings of the
+      whole week which have not been laid out for chances in the lottery, are
+      spent for this evening&rsquo;s amusement; and in the vast pit you see, besides
+      the families of comfortable artisans who can evidently afford it, a
+      multitude of the ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low rate of
+      eight or ten soldi [Footnote: The soldo is the hundredth part of the
+      Austrian florin, which is worth about forty-nine cents of American money.]
+      apiece, it is hard to account for. It is very peremptory, this audience,
+      in its likes and dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great vehemence.
+      It likes best the sanguinary local spectacular drama; it cheers and cheers
+      again every allusion to Venice; and when the curtain rises on some
+      well-known Venetian scene, it has out the scene-painter by name three
+      times&mdash;which is all the police permits. The auditors wear their hats
+      in the pit, but deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, and raise
+      stormy and wrathful cries of <i>cappello!</i> till these uncover. Between
+      acts, they indulge in excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go
+      to the extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are hawked about the
+      theatre, and sold for two soldi the stick,&mdash;with the tooth-pick on
+      which they are spitted thrown into the bargain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday night, but the one
+      entertainment which never fails of drawing and delighting full houses is
+      the theatre of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like best to
+      go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of
+      these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a
+      frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude
+      delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and
+      traditionary tricks of the stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street
+      opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and
+      simplest appointments. There are no boxes&mdash;the whole theatre is
+      scarcely larger than a stage-box&mdash;and you pay ten soldi to go into
+      the pit, where you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have
+      paid fifteen for places in the dress-circle above. The stage is very
+      small, and the scenery a kind of coarse miniature painting. But it is very
+      complete, and every thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and
+      to produce an illusion of magnitude in their figures. They are very
+      artlessly introduced, and are maneuvered, according to the exigencies of
+      the scene, by means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs to
+      the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all the
+      vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to mention
+      a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated and ambitious tone than
+      that of the Burattini, which exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse
+      assassinations in little punch-shows on the Riva, and in the larger
+      squares; but the standard characters are nearly the same with both, and
+      are all descended from the <i>commedia a braccio</i> [Footnote: Comedy by
+      the yard.] which flourished on the Italian stage before the time of
+      Goldoni. And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have
+      great and peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing
+      the most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the
+      Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have
+      such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only
+      remember to have made out one of their comedies,&mdash;a play in which an
+      ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested for
+      lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other was raging
+      in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic audiences; but
+      for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini appears to be a
+      sardonic farce, in which the chief character&mdash;a puppet ten inches
+      high, with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean good-nature
+      and wickedness&mdash;deludes other and weak-minded puppets into trusting
+      him, and then beats them with a club upon the back of the head until they
+      die. The murders of this infamous creature, which are always executed in a
+      spirit of jocose <i>sang-froid</i>, and accompanied by humorous remarks,
+      are received with the keenest relish by the spectators and, indeed, the
+      action is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit of the Italian
+      race seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they perform their
+      parts with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is wonderful. I
+      have witnessed death agonies on these little stages which the great
+      American tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could not surpass
+      in degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the greater credit
+      because they are agitated by the legs from below the scene, and not
+      managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette Theatre. Their
+      audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and comprise: first, boys
+      ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size; then weak little girls,
+      supporting immense weight of babies; then Austrian soldiers, with long
+      coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat sailors; a transient Greek or
+      Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced, statuesque, with the drapery of their
+      cloaks thrown over their shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick
+      black hair; old women, all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with
+      hooded cloaks of coarse brown; then boys&mdash;and boys. They all enjoy
+      the spectacle with approval, and take the drama <i>au grand sérieux</i>,
+      uttering none of the gibes which sometimes attend efforts to please in our
+      own country. Even when the hat, or other instrument of extortion, is
+      passed round, and they give nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of
+      fury and disappointment, calls out, &ldquo;Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to
+      you!&rdquo; and closes the theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse.
+      Though, indeed, <i>fioi de cani</i> means no great reproach in Venetian
+      parlance; and parents of the lower classes caressingly address their
+      children in these terms. Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak
+      upon him the deadliest insult which can be put into words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the <i>commedia a braccio</i>, before mentioned as the inheritance of
+      the Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline
+      of the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any
+      people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must have
+      been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till the
+      middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris he
+      furnished his Italian players with the <i>commedia a braccio</i>. I have
+      heard some very passable <i>gags</i> at the Marionette, but the real <i>commedia
+      a braccio</i> no longer exists, and its familiar and invariable characters
+      perform written plays.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of <i>dramatis personae</i>,
+      and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice. He is always,
+      like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always a merchant,
+      Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands. He is a
+      dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of black
+      knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black coat,
+      and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in all his
+      characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a glutton and
+      avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins the heart. To
+      tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he has no part and I
+      have learned to think a certain trick of his&mdash;lifting his leg rigidly
+      to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying, &ldquo;Capisse la?&rdquo; or &ldquo;Sa
+      la?&rdquo; (You understand? You know?)&mdash;one of the finest things in the
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In nearly all of Goldoni&rsquo;s Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote
+      in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa,&mdash;Arlecchino,
+      il Dottore, Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first
+      puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni&rsquo;s witty
+      management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete <i>commedia
+      a braccio</i>, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by
+      immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and
+      commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son,
+      figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The
+      second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the
+      University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a
+      sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and
+      foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley&mdash;a gibe at the
+      poverty of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity
+      and cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion in
+      Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are much
+      shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace,
+      however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce, as
+      you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes for
+      any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed to have
+      been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the Sleeping
+      King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna, with
+      Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated several
+      nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can fancy
+      people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying it with
+      the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward realizing to
+      yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will also suppose
+      great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own part, I find few
+      things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never tired of their
+      bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their irresistible touches
+      of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the relenting parent
+      (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while Arlecchino, as the
+      large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of the erring son when
+      the prodigal was about to be cast into the street, looked on and rubbed
+      his hands with amiable satisfaction and the conventional delight in
+      benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed the base terrors of
+      Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the keen spiritual agonies of
+      the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of Sebastopol. Not many
+      passages of real life have affected me as deeply as the atrocious behavior
+      of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when he responds to the
+      expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,&mdash;a puppet of shaky
+      and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she is
+      thy brother&rsquo;s wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the sacred name of
+      virtue.&rdquo; (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and gesticulations
+      toward the pit.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh, &ldquo;Honor?&mdash;I
+      know it not! Virtue?&mdash;I detest it!&rdquo; and attempting to pass the
+      knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his sister-in-law, he
+      yields to the natural infirmities of rags and pasteboard, and topples
+      against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous. You
+      discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and reading
+      his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets when they
+      cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly noises in
+      the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the dark corners of
+      the room, and to look under the bed. When at last the spectral head
+      appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a miserable cry under
+      the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically the scene is not
+      much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a spirit, a drollery
+      wholly irresistible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is
+      extremely funny. The <i>prima ballerina</i> has all the difficult grace
+      and far-fetched arts of the <i>prima ballerina</i> of flesh and blood; and
+      when the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is
+      humanly delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike <i>empressement</i>.
+      I have no doubt the <i>corps de ballet</i> have their private jealousies
+      and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all
+      positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and
+      legs. The puppets are great in <i>pirouette</i> and <i>pas seul</i>; but I
+      think the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall
+      of Carthage, is their strong point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The people who witness their performances are of all ages and conditions&mdash;I
+      remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some German countesses
+      in the pit&mdash;but the greater number of spectators are young men of the
+      middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and their wives and
+      children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place for lovers in
+      humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama going on between
+      the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of the Venetian populace
+      take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and Facanapa of the stage. I
+      one day discovered a letter at the bottom of the Canal of the Giudecca, to
+      which watery resting-place some recreant, addressed as &ldquo;Caro Antonio,&rdquo; had
+      consigned it; and from this letter I came to know certainly of at least
+      one love affair at the Marionette. &ldquo;Caro Antonio&rdquo; was humbly besought, &ldquo;if
+      his heart still felt the force of love,&rdquo; to meet the writer (who softly
+      reproached him with neglect) at the Marionette the night of date, at six
+      o&rsquo;clock; and I would not like to believe he could resist so tender a
+      prayer, though perhaps it fell out so. I fished up through the lucent
+      water this despairing little epistle,&mdash;it was full of womanly
+      sweetness and bad spelling,&mdash;and dried away its briny tears on the
+      blade of my oar. If ever I thought to keep it, with some vague purpose of
+      offering it to any particularly anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as
+      to the probable writer&mdash;its unaccountable loss spared me the delicate
+      office. Still, however, when I go to see the puppets, it is with an
+      interest divided between the drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence
+      of expectation somewhere among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who
+      wear such immense hoops under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at
+      one side, and call each other &ldquo;Ciò!&rdquo; Where art thou, O fickle and cruel,
+      yet ever dear Antonio? All unconscious, I think,&mdash;gallantly posed
+      against the wall, thy slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long
+      cigar, the arms of thy velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy
+      ear-rings softly twinkling in the light.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"></a>
+      CHAPTER VI.<br/>
+      VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men on
+      the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the
+      restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to
+      conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while the
+      restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy, for every
+      bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the restaurants
+      are very dirty&mdash;if you wipe your plate and glass carefully before
+      using them, they need not stomach you; it is not because the rooms are
+      cold&mdash;if you sit near the great vase of smoldering embers in the
+      centre of each room you may suffocate in comparative comfort; it is not
+      because the prices are great&mdash;they are really very reasonable; it is
+      not for any very tangible fault that I object to life at the restaurants,
+      and yet I cannot think of its hopeless homelessness without rebellion
+      against the whole system it implies, as something unnatural and
+      insufferable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before we come to look closely at this aspect of Italian civilization,
+      it is better to look first at a very noticeable trait of Italian
+      character,&mdash;temperance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer
+      classes, one observes without great surprise how slenderly they fare, and
+      how with a great habit of talking of meat and drink, the verb <i>mangiare</i>
+      remains in fact for the most part inactive with them. But it is only just
+      to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be not wholly the result of
+      necessity, for it prevails with other classes which could well afford the
+      opposite vice. Meat and drink do not form the substance of conviviality
+      with Venetians, as with the Germans and the English, and in degree with
+      ourselves; and I have often noticed on the Mondays-at-the-Gardens, and
+      other social festivals of the people, how the crowd amused itself with any
+      thing&mdash;music, dancing, walking, talking&mdash;any thing but the great
+      northern pastime of gluttony. Knowing the life of the place, I make quite
+      sure that Venetian gayety is on few occasions connected with repletion;
+      and I am ashamed to confess that I have not always been able to repress a
+      feeling of stupid scorn for the empty stomachs everywhere, which do not
+      even ask to be filled, or, at least, do not insist upon it. The truth is,
+      the North has a gloomy pride in gastronomic excess, which unfits her
+      children to appreciate the cheerful prudence of the South.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. They breakfast on a
+      piece of bread with coffee and milk; supper is a little cup of black
+      coffee, or an ice, taken at a caffè. The coffee, however, is repeated
+      frequently throughout the day, and in the summertime fruit is eaten, but
+      eaten sparingly, like everything else. As to the nature of the dinner, it
+      of course varies somewhat according to the nature of the diner; but in
+      most families of the middle class a dinner at home consists of a piece of
+      boiled beef, a <i>minestra</i> (a soup thickened with vegetables, tripe,
+      and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the wine of the country. The
+      failings of the repast among all classes lean to the side of simplicity,
+      and the abstemious character of the Venetian finds sufficient comment in
+      his familiar invitation to dinner: &ldquo;<i>Venga a mangiar quattro risi con me</i>.&rdquo;
+       (Come eat four grains of rice with me.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But invitations to dinner have never formed a prime element of hospitality
+      in Venice. Goldoni notices this fact in his memoirs, and speaking of the
+      city in the early half of the last century, he says that the number and
+      excellence of the eating-houses in the city made invitations to dinner at
+      private houses rare, and superfluous among the courtesies offered to
+      strangers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place his house at your
+      disposition, and, having extended this splendid invitation, consider the
+      duties of hospitality fulfilled; he does not appear to think you want to
+      make use of his house for social purposes, preferring himself the caffè,
+      and finding home and comfort there, rather than under his own roof. &ldquo;What
+      caffè do you frequent? Ah! so do I. We shall meet often there.&rdquo; This is
+      frequently your new acquaintance&rsquo;s promise of friendship. And one may even
+      learn to like the social footing on which people meet at the caffè, as
+      well as that of the parlor or drawing-room. I could not help thinking one
+      evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some pleasant Paduans in one
+      of the magnificent saloons of the Caffè Pedrocchi, that I should like to
+      go there for society, if I could always find it there, much better than to
+      private houses. There is far greater ease and freedom, more elegance and
+      luxury, and not the slightest weight of obligation laid upon you for the
+      gratification your friend&rsquo;s company has given you. One has not to be a
+      debtor in the sum of a friend&rsquo;s outlay for house, servants, refreshments,
+      and the like. Nowhere in Europe is the senseless and wasteful American
+      custom of <i>treating</i> known; and nothing could be more especially
+      foreign to the frugal instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a
+      party of friends at a caffè eat or drink, each one pays for what he takes,
+      and pecuniarily, the enjoyment of the evening is uncostly or not,
+      according as each prefers. Of course no one sits down in such a place
+      without calling for something; but I have frequently seen people respond
+      to this demand of custom by ordering a glass of water with anise, at the
+      expense of two soldi. A cup of black coffee, for five soldi, secures a
+      chair, a table, and as many journals as you like, for as long time as you
+      like.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I say, a stranger may learn to like the life of the caffè,&mdash;that of
+      the restaurant never; though the habit of frequenting the restaurants, to
+      which Goldoni somewhat vaingloriously refers, seems to have grown upon the
+      Venetians with the lapse of time. The eating-houses are almost without
+      number, and are of every degree, from the shop of the sausage-maker, who
+      supplies gondoliers and facchini with bowls of <i>sguassetto</i>, to the
+      Caffè Florian. They all have names which are not strange to European ears,
+      but which ape sufficiently amusing to people who come from a land where
+      nearly every public thing is named from some inspiration of patriotism or
+      local pride. In Venice the principal restaurants are called The Steamboat,
+      The Savage, The Little Horse, The Black Hat, and The Pictures; and I do
+      not know that any one of them is more uncomfortable, uncleanly, or noisy
+      than another, or that any one of them suffers from the fact that all are
+      bad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You do not get breakfast at the restaurant for the reason, before stated,
+      of the breakfast&rsquo;s unsubstantiality. The dining commences about three
+      o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, and continues till nine o&rsquo;clock, most people
+      dining at five or six. As a rule the attendance is insufficient, and no
+      guest is served until he has made a savage clapping on the tables, or
+      clinking on his glass or plate. Then a hard-pushed waiter appears, and
+      calls out, dramatically, &ldquo;Behold me!&rdquo; takes the order, shrieks it to the
+      cook, and returning with the dinner, cries out again, more dramatically
+      than ever, &ldquo;Behold it ready!&rdquo; and arrays it with a great flourish on the
+      table. I have dined in an hotel at Niagara, to the music of a brass band;
+      but I did not find that so utterly bewildering, so destructive of the
+      individual savor of the dishes, and so conducive to absent-minded
+      gluttony, as I at first found the constant rush and clamor of the waiters
+      in the Venetian restaurants. The guests are, for the most part, patient
+      and quiet enough, eating their minestra and boiled beef in such peace as
+      the surrounding uproar permits them, and seldom making acquaintance with
+      each other. It is a mistake, I think, to expect much talk from any people
+      at dinner. The ingenious English tourists who visit the United States from
+      time to time, find us silent over our meat, and I have noticed the like
+      trait among people of divers races in Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have said, the greater part of the diners at the restaurants are
+      single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill of
+      the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals, is
+      rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a
+      drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,&mdash;no, not at
+      evening parties,&mdash;and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the
+      caffè and the restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the
+      higher privileges of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once
+      the most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the
+      world. Our boarding-house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as it
+      often is, seems to me infinitely better than the restaurant life of young
+      Italy. It is creditable to Latin Europe that, with all this homelessness
+      and domestic outlawry, its young men still preserve the gentleness of
+      civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The families that share the exile of the eating-houses sometimes make
+      together a feeble buzz of conversation, but the unfriendly spirit of the
+      place seems soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent the restaurant
+      for economy&rsquo;s sake. Fuel is costly, and the restaurant is cheap, and its
+      cooking better than they could perhaps otherwise afford to have. Indeed,
+      so cheap is the restaurant that actual experience proved the cost of a
+      dinner there to be little more than the cost of the raw material in the
+      market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the custom, which is common,
+      of sending home to purchasers meals from the eating-houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, the difference is not so
+      noticeable in the prices of the same dishes, as in the substitution of
+      cheaper varieties of food. At the best eating-houses, the Gallic
+      traditions bear sway more or less, but in the poorer sort the cooking is
+      done entirely by native artists, deriving their inspirations from the
+      unsophisticated tastes of exclusively native diners. It is perhaps
+      needless to say that they grow characteristic and picturesque as they grow
+      dirty and cheap, until at last the cook-shop perfects the descent with a
+      triumph of raciness and local coloring. The cook-shop in Venice opens upon
+      you at almost every turn,&mdash;everywhere, in fact, but in the Piazza and
+      the Merceria,&mdash;and looking in, you see its vast heaps of frying fish,
+      and its huge caldrons of ever-boiling broth which smell to heaven with
+      garlic and onions. In the seducing windows smoke golden mountains of <i>polenta</i>
+      (a thicker kind of mush or hasty-pudding, made of Indian meal, and
+      universally eaten in North Italy), platters of crisp minnows, bowls of
+      rice, roast poultry, dishes of snails and liver; and around the
+      fascinating walls hang huge plates of bronzed earthenware for a lavish and
+      a hospitable show, and for the representation of those scenes of Venetian
+      story which are modeled upon them in bass-relief. Here I like to take my
+      unknown friend&mdash;my scoundrel facchino or rascal gondolier&mdash;as he
+      comes to buy his dinner, and bargains eloquently with the cook, who stands
+      with a huge ladle in his hand capable of skimming mysterious things from
+      vasty depths. I am spell-bound by the drama which ensues, and in which all
+      the chords of the human heart are touched, from those that tremble at high
+      tragedy, to those that are shaken by broad farce. When the diner has
+      bought his dinner, and issues forth with his polenta in one hand, and his
+      fried minnows or stewed snails in the other, my fancy fondly follows him
+      to his gondola-station, where he eats it, and quarrels volubly with other
+      gondoliers across the Grand Canal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A simpler and less ambitious sort of cook-shop abounds in the region of
+      Rialto, where on market mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious
+      business with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more limited
+      resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, polenta, and <i>sguassetto</i>.
+      The latter is a true <i>roba veneziana</i>, and is a loud-flavored broth,
+      made of those desperate scraps of meat which are found impracticable even
+      by the sausage-makers. Another, but more delicate dish, peculiar to the
+      place, is the clotted blood of poultry, fried in slices with onions. A
+      great number of the families of the poor breakfast at these shops very
+      abundantly, for three soldi each person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Venice every holiday has its appropriate viand. During carnival all the
+      butter and cheese shop-windows are whitened with the snow of beaten cream&mdash;<i>panamontata</i>.
+      At San Martino the bakers parade troops of gingerbread warriors. Later,
+      for Christmas, comes <i>mandorlato</i>, which is a candy made of honey and
+      enriched with almonds. In its season only can any of these devotional
+      delicacies be had; but there is a species of cruller, fried in oil, which
+      has all seasons for its own. On the occasion of every <i>festa</i>, and of
+      every <i>sagra</i> (which is the holiday of one parish only), stalls are
+      erected in the squares for the cooking and sale of these crullers, between
+      which and the religious sentiment proper to the whole year there seems to
+      be some occult relation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the winter, the whole city appears to abandon herself to cooking for
+      the public, till she threatens to hopelessly disorder the law of demand
+      and supply. There are, to begin with, the caffè and restaurants of every
+      class. Then there are the cook-shops, and the poulterers&rsquo;, and the
+      sausage-makers&rsquo;. Then, also, every fruit-stall is misty and odorous with
+      roast apples, boiled beans, cabbage, and potatoes. The chestnut-roasters
+      infest every corner, and men, women, and children cry roast pumpkin at
+      every turn&mdash;till, at last, hunger seems an absurd and foolish vice,
+      and the ubiquitous beggars, no less than the habitual abstemiousness of
+      every class of the population, become the most perplexing and maddening of
+      anomalies.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"></a>
+      CHAPTER VII.<br/>
+      HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I hope that it is by a not unnatural progress I pass from speaking of
+      dinners and diners to the kindred subject of the present chapter, and I
+      trust the reader will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this
+      mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I had
+      found most books of travel very slow to tell,&mdash;as much as possible of
+      the everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our own;
+      endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not only from the
+      show-traits which strangers are most likely to see, but also from
+      experience of such things as strangers are most likely to miss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The absolute want of society of my own nation in Venice would have thrown
+      me upon study of the people for my amusement, even if I had cared to learn
+      nothing of them; and the necessity of economical housekeeping would have
+      caused me to live in the frugal Venetian fashion, even if I had been
+      disposed to remain a foreigner in every thing. Of bachelor lodgings I had
+      sufficient experience during my first year; but as most prudent travelers
+      who visit the city for a week take lodgings, I need not describe my own
+      particularly. You can tell the houses in which there are rooms to let, by
+      the squares of white paper fastened to the window-shutters; and a casual
+      glance as you pass through the streets, gives you the idea that the chief
+      income of the place is derived from letting lodgings. Carpetless, dreary
+      barracks the rooms usually are, with an uncompromising squareness of
+      prints upon the wall, an appalling breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of
+      wash-bowl, and an obduracy of sofa, never, never to be dissociated in
+      their victim&rsquo;s mind from the idea of the villanous hard bread of Venice on
+      which the gloomy landlady sustains her life with its immutable purposes of
+      plunder. Flabbiness without softness is the tone of these discouraging
+      chambers, which are dear or not according to the season and the situation.
+      On the sunlit Riva during winter, and on the Grand Canal in summer, they
+      are costly enough, but they are to be found on nearly all the squares at
+      reasonable rates. On the narrow streets, where most native bachelors have
+      them, they are absurdly cheap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As in nearly all places on the Continent, a house in Venice means a number
+      of rooms, including a whole story in a building, or part of it only, but
+      always completely separated from the story above and below, or from the
+      other rooms on the same floor. Every house has its own entrance from the
+      street, or by a common hall and stairway from the ground-floor, where are
+      the cellars or store-rooms, while each kitchen is usually on a level with
+      the other rooms of the house to which it belongs. The isolation of the
+      different families is secured (as perfectly as where a building is solely
+      appropriated to each), either by the exclusive possession of a streetdoor,
+      [Footnote: Where the street entrance is in common, every floor has its
+      bell, which being sounded, summons a servant to some upper window with the
+      demand, most formidable to strangers, &ldquo;<i>Chi xe?</i>&rdquo; (Who is it?) But
+      you do not answer with your name. You reply, &ldquo;<i>Amici!</i>&rdquo; (Friends!) on
+      which comforting reassurance, the servant draws the latch of the door by a
+      wire running upward to her hand, and permits you to enter and wander about
+      at your leisure till you reach her secret height. This is, supposing the
+      master or mistress of the house to be at home. If they are not in, she
+      answers your &ldquo;<i>Amici!</i>&rdquo; with &ldquo;<i>No ghe ne xe!</i>&rdquo; (Nobody here!)
+      and lets down a basket by a string outside the window, and fishes up your
+      card.] or by the unsocial domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give
+      good-day to the people whom you meet in the common hall and on the common
+      stairway, but you rarely know more of them than their names, and you
+      certainly care nothing about them. The sociability of Europe, and more
+      especially of Southern Europe, is shown abroad; under the domestic roof it
+      dwindles and disappears. And indeed it is no wonder, considering how
+      dispiriting and comfortless most of the houses are. The lower windows are
+      heavily barred with iron; the wood-work is rude, even in many palaces in
+      Venice; the rest is stone and stucco; the walls are not often papered,
+      though they are sometimes painted: the most pleasing and inviting feature
+      of the interior is the frescoed ceiling of the better rooms. The windows
+      shut imperfectly, the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth while
+      to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?); the doors lift
+      slantingly from the floor, in which their lower hinges are imbedded; the
+      stoves are of plaster, and consume fuel without just return of heat; the
+      balconies alone are always charming, whether they hang high over the
+      streets, or look out upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted
+      ceilings, go far to make the houses habitable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly every thing else in
+      Italy, that you pay about the same price for half the comfort that you get
+      in America. In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on the Grand
+      Canal; but here the rents are something absurdly high, when taken in
+      consideration with the fact that the city is not made a place of residence
+      by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial activity to
+      enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these circumstances,
+      becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment to the stranger.
+      You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a tumble-down old palace,
+      where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with coarse paper, crumble at your
+      touch; where the floor rises and falls like the sea, and the door-frames
+      and window-cases have long lost all recollection of the plumb. Madama la
+      Baronessa is at present occupying these pleasant apartments, and you only
+      gain admission to them after an embassy to procure her permission. Madama
+      la Baronessa receives you courteously, and you pass through her rooms,
+      which are a little in disorder, the Baronessa being on the point of
+      removal. Madama la Baronessa&rsquo;s hoop-skirts prevail upon the floors; and at
+      the side of the couch which her form lately pressed in slumber, you
+      observe a French novel and a wasted candle in the society of a half-bottle
+      of the wine of the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the whole suite, and
+      through the open window comes a curious stench explained as the odor of
+      Madama la Baronessa&rsquo;s guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that she has
+      had their sty placed immediately under her window in the garden. It is
+      this garden which has first taken your heart, with a glimpse caught
+      through the great open door of the palace. It is disordered and wild, but
+      so much the better; its firs are very thick and dark, and there are
+      certain statues, fauns and nymphs, which weather stains and mosses have
+      made much decenter than the sculptor intended. You think that for this
+      garden&rsquo;s sake you could put up with the house, which must be very cheap.
+      What is the price of the rooms? you ask of the smiling landlord. He
+      answers, without winking, &ldquo;If taken for several years, a thousand florins
+      a year.&rdquo; At which you suppress the whistle of disdainful surprise, and say
+      you think it will not suit. He calls your attention to the sun, which
+      comes in at every side, which will roast you in summer, and will not (as
+      he would have you think) warm you in winter. &ldquo;But there is another
+      apartment,&rdquo;&mdash;through which you drag languidly. It is empty now, being
+      last inhabited by an English Ledi,&mdash;and her stove-pipes went out of
+      the windows, and blackened the shabby stucco front of the villanous old
+      palace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the curiously
+      frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which has a lady and
+      gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony to balcony, on
+      the façade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of leaping from the
+      second to the third story, promises something. Promises something, but
+      does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh, clean, and new, and
+      cold and dark as a cellar. This house&mdash;that is to say, a floor of the
+      house&mdash;you may have for four hundred florins a year; and then
+      farewell the world and the light of the sun! for neither will ever find
+      you in that back court, and you will never see any body but the
+      neighboring laundresses and their children, who cannot enough admire the
+      front of your house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>E via in seguito!</i> This is of house keeping, not house-hunting.
+      There are pleasant and habitable houses in Venice&mdash;but they are not
+      cheap, as many of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, discomfort
+      and ruin have their price, and the tumble-down is patched up and sold at
+      rates astonishing to innocent strangers who come from countries in good
+      repair, where the tumble-down is worth nothing. If I were not ashamed of
+      the idle and foolish old superstitions in which I once believed concerning
+      life in Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect very little for
+      a great deal; and how a knowledge of many houses to let, made me more and
+      more contented with the house we had taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in one corner of an old palace on the Grand Canal, and the window
+      of the little parlor looked down upon the water, which had made friends
+      with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, golden smiles upon it
+      when the sun shone. The dining-room was not so much favored by the water,
+      but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling tree-tops, that rose to it
+      from a tiny garden-ground, no bigger than a pocket handkerchief. Through
+      this window, also, we could see the quaint, picturesque life of the canal;
+      and from another room we could reach a little terrace above the water. We
+      were not in the <i>appartamento signorile</i>, [Footnote: The noble floor&mdash;as
+      the second or third story of the palace is called.]&mdash;that was above,&mdash;but
+      we were more snugly quartered on the first story from the ground-floor,
+      commonly used as a winter apartment in the old times. But it had been cut
+      up, and suites of rooms had been broken according to the caprice of
+      successive landlords, till it was not at all palatial any more. The upper
+      stories still retained something of former grandeur, and had acquired with
+      time more than former discomfort. We were not envious of them, for they
+      were humbly let at a price less than we paid; though we could not quite
+      repress a covetous yearning for their arched and carven windows, which we
+      saw sometimes from the canal, above the tops of the garden trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gondoliers used always to point out our palace (which was called Casa
+      Falier) as the house in which Marino Faliero was born; and for a long time
+      we clung to the hope that it might be so. But however pleasant it was, we
+      were forced, on reading up the subject a little, to relinquish our
+      illusion, and accredit an old palace at Santi Apostoli with the
+      distinction we would fain have claimed for ours. I am rather at a loss to
+      explain how it made our lives in Casa Falier any pleasanter to think that
+      a beheaded traitor had been born in it, but we relished the superstition
+      amazingly as long as we could possibly believe in it. What went far to
+      confirm us at first in our credulity was the residence, in another part of
+      the palace, of the Canonico Falier, a lineal descendant of the unhappy
+      doge. He was a very mild-faced old priest, with a white head, which he
+      carried downcast, and crimson legs, on which he moved but feebly. He owned
+      the rooms in which he lived, and the apartment in the front of the palace
+      just above our own. The rest of the house belonged to another, for in
+      Venice many of the palaces are divided up and sold among different
+      purchasers, floor by floor, and sometimes even room by room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the tenantry of Casa Falier was far more various than its
+      proprietorship. Over our heads dwelt a Dalmatian family; below our feet a
+      Frenchwoman; at our right, upon the same floor, an English gentleman;
+      under him a French family; and over him the family of a marquis in exile
+      from Modena. Except with Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, the Englishman, who was at
+      once our friend and landlord (impossible as this may appear to those who
+      know any thing of landlords in Italy), we had no acquaintance, beyond that
+      of salutation, with the many nations represented in our house. We could
+      not help holding the French people in some sort responsible for the
+      invasion of Mexico; and, though opportunity offered for cultivating the
+      acquaintance of the Modenese, we did not improve it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and bowed to them a great deal,
+      and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving noise as
+      of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal on their
+      balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed seeing them
+      admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling. The father of
+      this family was a little man of a solemn and impressive demeanor, who had
+      no other occupation but to walk up and down the city and view its
+      monuments, for which purpose he one day informed us he had left his native
+      place in Dalmatia, after forty years&rsquo; study of Venetian history. He
+      further told us that this was by no means worth the time given it; that
+      whereas the streets of Venice were sepulchres in point of narrowness and
+      obscurity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows of which you might see
+      for miles uninterruptedly! This little gentleman wore a black hat, in the
+      last vivid polish of respectability, and I think fortune was not his
+      friend. The hat was too large for him, as the hats of Italians always are;
+      it came down to his eyes, and he carried a cane. Every evening he marched
+      solemnly at the head of a procession of his handsome young children, who
+      went to hear the military music in St. Mark&rsquo;s Square.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians&mdash;we never knew their
+      names&mdash;gave access also to a house in the story above them, which
+      belonged to some mysterious person described on his door-plate as &ldquo;Co.
+      Prata.&rdquo; I think we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance some
+      members of his family when they came back from their summer in the country
+      to spend the winter in the city. Prata&rsquo;s &ldquo;Co.,&rdquo; we gradually learnt, meant
+      &ldquo;Conte,&rdquo; and the little counts and countesses, his children, immediately
+      on their arrival took an active part in the exercises of the Dalmatian
+      cavalry. Later in the fall, certain of the count&rsquo;s vassals came to the <i>riva</i>
+      [Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs which descend to the water before
+      palace-doors and at the ends of streets.] in one of the great boats of the
+      Po, with a load of brush and corncobs for fuel&mdash;and this is all we
+      ever knew of our neighbors on the fourth floor. As long as he remained
+      &ldquo;Co.&rdquo; we yearned to know who and what he was; being interpreted as Conte
+      Prata, he ceased to interest us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little
+      people, just married, came to live in Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence, tempering
+      the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with
+      it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and &ldquo;This is my wife, the new
+      mistress,&rdquo; said the young <i>Paron</i> [Footnote: <i>Padrone</i> in
+      Italian. A salutation with Venetian friends, and the title by which
+      Venetian servants always designate their employers.] with the bashful
+      pride proper to the time and place. Giovanna glowed welcome, and said,
+      with adventurous politeness, she was very glad of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Serva sua!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Parona</i>, not knowing Italian, laughed in English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting upon the great truth that
+      handsome is that handsome does, began at once to make herself a thing of
+      beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a measure of convenience and of deference to her feelings, we
+      immediately resolved to call her G., merely, when speaking of her in
+      English, instead of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with
+      conjecture concerning what was said of her. And as G. thus became the
+      centre around which our domestic life revolved, she must be somewhat
+      particularly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. I suppose
+      that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances, this would
+      have been much like keeping play-house anywhere; in Venice it had, but for
+      the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious property of unreality and
+      impermanency. It is sufficiently bad to live in a rented house; in a house
+      which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till your life takes
+      root, and Home blossoms up in the alien place. For a great while we
+      regarded our house merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were slow to
+      form any relations which could take from our residence its temporary
+      character. Had we but thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker,
+      and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish ourselves at once; but
+      we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us to
+      our fellow-creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by housekeepers on a
+      scale surprisingly small to one accustomed to wholesale American ways, and
+      G., having the purse, made our little purchases in cash, never buying more
+      than enough for one meal at a time. Every morning, the fruits and
+      vegetables are distributed from the great market at the Rialto among a
+      hundred greengrocers&rsquo; stalls in all parts of the city; bread (which is
+      never made at home) is found fresh at the baker&rsquo;s; there is a butcher&rsquo;s
+      stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are therefore resorted to
+      for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay in provisions there in
+      portions graduated to a soldo of their ready means. A great Bostonian whom
+      I remember to have heard speculate on the superiority of a state of
+      civilization in which you could buy two cents&rsquo; worth of beef to that in
+      which so small a quantity was unpurchasable, would find the system
+      perfected here, where you can buy half a cent&rsquo;s worth. It is a system
+      friendly to poverty, and the small retail prices approximate very closely
+      the real value of the stuff sold, as we sometimes proved by offering to
+      purchase in quantity. Usually no reduction would be made from the retail
+      rate, and it was sufficiently amusing to have the dealer figure up the
+      cost of the quantity we proposed to buy, and then exhibit an exact
+      multiplication of his retail rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is
+      worth a soldo: you get no more than a hundred for a florin, though the
+      dealer will cheerfully go under that number if he can cheat you in the
+      count. So in most things we found it better to let G. do the marketing in
+      her own small Venetian fashion, and &ldquo;guard our strangeness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0138}.jpg" alt="{0138}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0138}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      But there were some things which must be brought to the house by the
+      dealers, such as water for drinking and cooking, which is drawn from
+      public cisterns in the squares, and carried by stout young girls to all
+      the houses. These <i>bigolanti</i> all come from the mountains of Friuli;
+      they all have rosy cheeks, white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists
+      whatever (in the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The cisterns
+      are opened about eight o&rsquo;clock in the morning, and then their day&rsquo;s work
+      begins with chatter, and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the wells;
+      and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots off under a burden of two
+      buckets,&mdash;one appended from either end of a bow resting upon the
+      right shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain which falls on
+      the shelving surface of the campo, and soaks through a bed of sea-sand
+      around the cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante comes every
+      morning and empties her brazen buckets into the great picturesque jars of
+      porous earthenware which ornament Venetian kitchens; and the daily supply
+      of water costs a moderate family about a florin a month.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this arrives in boats. It is
+      cut upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small
+      coasting vessels, each of which has a plump captain in command, whose red
+      face is so cunningly blended with his cap of scarlet flannel that it is
+      hard on a breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other ends.
+      These vessels anchor off the Custom House in the Guidecca Canal in the
+      fall, and lie there all winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a
+      great part of the time under the charge solely of a small yellow dog of
+      the irascible breed common to the boats of the Po. Thither the smaller
+      dealers in firewood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all parts
+      of the city, melodiously crying their wares up and down the canals, and
+      penetrating the land on foot with specimen bundles of fagots in their
+      arms. They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think&mdash;their fancy
+      seldom rising beyond the invention that their fagots are beautiful and
+      sound and dry. But our particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted man.
+      Long before I had dealings with him, I knew him by the superb song, or
+      rather incantation, with which he announced his coming on the Grand Canal.
+      The purport of this was merely that his bark was called the Beautiful
+      Caroline, and that his fagots were fine; but he so dwelt upon the hidden
+      beauties of this idea, and so prolonged their effect upon the mind by
+      artful repetition, and the full, round, and resonant roar with which he
+      closed his triumphal hymn, that the spirit was taken with the charm, and
+      held in breathless admiration. By all odds, this woodman&rsquo;s cry was the
+      most impressive of all the street cries of Venice. There may have been an
+      exquisite sadness and sweetness in the wail of the chimney-sweep; a
+      winning pathos in the voice of the vender of roast pumpkin; an oriental
+      fancy and splendor in the fruiterers who cried &ldquo;Melons with hearts of
+      fire!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Juicy pears that bathe your beard!&rdquo;&mdash;there may have been
+      something peculiarly effective in the song of the chestnut-man who shouted
+      &ldquo;Fat chestnuts,&rdquo; and added, after a lapse in which you got almost beyond
+      hearing, &ldquo;and well cooked!&rdquo;&mdash;I do not deny that there was a seductive
+      sincerity in the proclamation of one whose peaches could <i>not</i> be
+      called beautiful to look upon, and were consequently advertised as &ldquo;Ugly,
+      but good!&rdquo;&mdash;I say nothing to detract from the merits of harmonious
+      chair-menders;&mdash;to my ears the shout of the melodious fisherman was
+      delectable music, and all the birds of summer sang in the voices of the
+      countrymen who sold finches and larks in cages, and roses and pinks in
+      pots;&mdash;but I say, after all, none of these people combined the vocal
+      power, the sonorous movement, the delicate grace, and the vast compass of
+      our woodman. Yet this man, as far as virtue went, was <i>vox et praeterea
+      nihil</i>. He was a vagabond of the most abandoned; he was habitually in
+      drink, and I think his sins had gone near to make him mad&mdash;at any
+      rate he was of a most lunatical deportment. In other lands, the man of
+      whom you are a regular purchaser, serves you well; in Italy he conceives
+      that his long service gives him the right to plunder you if possible. I
+      felt in every fibre that this woodman invariably cheated me in
+      measurement, and, indeed, he scarcely denied it on accusation. But my
+      single experience of the more magnificent scoundrels of whom <i>he</i>
+      bought the wood originally, contented me with the swindle with which I had
+      become familiarized. On this occasion I took a boat and went to the Custom
+      House, to get my fuel at first hand. The captain of the ship which I
+      boarded wished me to pay more than I gave for fuel delivered at my door,
+      and thereupon ensued the tragic scene of bargaining, as these things are
+      conducted in Italy. We stood up and bargained, we sat down and bargained;
+      the captain turned his back upon me in indignation; I parted from him and
+      took to my boat in scorn; he called me back and displayed the wood&mdash;good,
+      sound, dryer than bones; he pointed to the threatening heavens, and
+      declared that it would snow that night, and on the morrow I could not get
+      wood for twice the present price; but I laughed incredulously. Then my
+      captain took another tack, and tried to make the contract in obsolete
+      currencies, in Austrian pounds, in Venetian pounds, but as I inexorably
+      reduced these into familiar money, he paused desperately, and made me an
+      offer which I accepted with mistaken exultation. For my captain was
+      shrewder than I, and held arts of measurement in reserve against me. He
+      agreed that the measurement and transportation should not cost me the
+      value of his tooth-pick&mdash;quite an old and worthless one&mdash;which
+      he showed me. Yet I was surprised into the payment of a youth whom this
+      man called to assist at the measurement, and I had to give the boatman
+      drink-money at the end. He promised that the measure should be just: yet
+      if I lifted my eye from the work he placed the logs slantingly on the
+      measure, and threw in knotty chunks that crowded wholesome fuel out, and
+      let the daylight through and through the pile. I protested, and he
+      admitted the wrong when I pointed it out: &ldquo;<i>Ga razon, lu!</i>&rdquo; (He&rsquo;s
+      right!) he said to his fellows in infamy, and throwing aside the
+      objectionable pieces, proceeded to evade justice by new artifices. When I
+      had this memorable load of wood housed at home, I found that it had cost
+      just what I paid my woodman, and that I had additionally lost my
+      self-respect in being plundered before my face, and I resolved thereafter
+      to be cheated in quiet dignity behind my back. The woodman exulted in his
+      restored sovereignty, and I lost nothing in penalty for my revolt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice, are those
+      ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed in
+      baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares by
+      the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their general
+      stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to their own
+      comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling ear-rings of
+      yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning streets of
+      Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of the country&rsquo;s
+      clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great cream-colored
+      cows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fishermen, also, come down the little <i>calli</i>&mdash;with shallow
+      baskets of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles
+      and mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to
+      bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling drama
+      proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser&rsquo;s own price.
+      &ldquo;Beautiful and all alive!&rdquo; is the engaging cry with which they hawk their
+      fish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come to
+      exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely, but
+      glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all, chair-menders,&mdash;who
+      bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a sign, with pieces of white
+      wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a hammer, and a sheaf of
+      rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait the rush bottoms of your
+      kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant whittlings with their
+      knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the mean time our own serving-woman Giovanna, the great central
+      principle of our housekeeping, is waiting to be personally presented to
+      the company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, that it is hard
+      not to believe them created just as crooked, and foul, and full of fluff
+      and years as you behold them, and you cannot understand how so much
+      frowziness and so little hair, so great show of fangs and so few teeth,
+      are growths from any ordinary human birth. G. is no longer young, but she
+      is not after the likeness of these old women. It is of a middle age,
+      unbeginning, interminable, of which she gives you the impression. She has
+      brown apple-cheeks, just touched with frost; her nose is of a strawberry
+      formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly shrunken
+      effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned. A tough,
+      pleasant, indestructible woman&mdash;for use, we thought, not ornament&mdash;the
+      mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower of serving-women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a class, given to pilfering;
+      but knowing ourselves subject by nature to pillage, we cannot repress a
+      feeling of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. She strictly
+      accounts for all money given her at the close of each week, and to this
+      end keeps a kind of account-book, which I cannot help regarding as in some
+      sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, confirmed by her own
+      confession, that G. is not good for reading and writing. On settling with
+      her I have been permitted to look into this book, which is all in capital
+      letters,&mdash;each the evident result of serious labor,&mdash;with
+      figures representing combinations of the pot-hook according to bold and
+      original conceptions. The spelling is also a remarkable effort of creative
+      genius. The only difficulty under which the author labors in regard to the
+      book is the confusion naturally resulting from the effort to get
+      literature right side up when it has got upside down. The writing is a
+      kind of pugilism&mdash;the strokes being made straight out from the
+      shoulder. The account-book is always carried about with her in a
+      fathomless pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a housekeeper who
+      can throw nothing away, to wit: matchboxes, now appointed to hold buttons
+      and hooks-and-eyes; beeswax in the lump; the door-key (which in Venice
+      takes a formidable size, and impresses you at first sight as ordnance); a
+      patch-bag; a porte-monnaie; many lead-pencils in the stump; scissors,
+      pincushions, and the Beata Vergine in a frame. Indeed, this incapability
+      of throwing things away is made to bear rather severely upon us in some
+      things, such as the continual reappearance of familiar dishes at table&mdash;particularly
+      veteran <i>bifsteca</i>. But we fancy that the same frugal instinct is
+      exercised to our advantage and comfort in other things, for G. makes a
+      great show and merit of denying our charity to those bold and adventurous
+      children of sorrow, who do not scruple to ring your door-bell, and demand
+      alms. It is true that with G., as with every Italian, almsgiving enters
+      into the theory and practice of Christian life, but she will not suffer
+      misery to abuse its privileges. She has no hesitation, however, in
+      bringing certain objects of compassion to our notice, and she procures
+      small services to be done for us by many lame and halt of her
+      acquaintance. Having bought my boat (I come, in time, to be willing to
+      sell it again for half its cost to me), I require a menial to clean it now
+      and then, and Giovanna first calls me a youthful Gobbo for the work,&mdash;a
+      festive hunchback, a bright-hearted whistler of comic opera. Whether this
+      blithe humor is not considered decent, I do not know, but though the Gobbo
+      serves me faithfully, I find him one day replaced by a venerable old man,
+      whom&mdash;from his personal resemblance to Time&mdash;I should think much
+      better occupied with an hourglass, or engaged with a scythe in mowing me
+      and other mortals down, than in cleaning my boat. But all day long he sits
+      on my riva in the sun, when it shines, gazing fixedly at my boat; and when
+      the day is dark, he lurks about the street, accessible to my slightest
+      boating impulse. He salutes my going out and coming in with grave
+      reverence, and I think he has no work to do but that which G.&lsquo;s wise
+      compassion has given him from me. Suddenly, like the Gobbo, the Veccio
+      also disappears, and I hear vaguely&mdash;for in Venice you never know any
+      thing with precision&mdash;that he has found a regular employment in
+      Padua, and again that he is dead. While he lasts, G. has a pleasant, even
+      a sportive manner with this poor old man, calculated to cheer his
+      declining years; but, as I say, cases of insolent and aggressive misery
+      fail to touch her. The kind of wretchedness that comes breathing woe and
+      <i>sciampagnin</i> [Footnote: Little champagne,&mdash;the name which the
+      Venetian populace gave to a fierce and deadly kind of brandy drunk during
+      the scarcity of wine. After the introduction of coal-oil this liquor came
+      to be jocosely known as <i>petrolio</i>.] under our window, and there
+      spends a leisure hour in the rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim
+      either upon her pity or her weakness. She is deaf to the voice of that
+      sorrow, and the monotonous whine of that dolor cannot move her to the
+      purchase of a guilty tranquillity. I imagine, however, that she is afraid
+      to deny charity to the fat Capuchin friar in spectacles and bare feet, who
+      comes twice a month to levy contributions of bread and fuel for his
+      convent, for we hear her declare from the window that the master is not at
+      home, whenever the good brother rings; and at last, as this excuse gives
+      out, she ceases to respond to his ring at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes, during the summer weather, comes down our street a certain
+      tremulous old troubadour with an aged cithern, on which he strums feebly
+      with bones which remain to him from former fingers, and in a thin
+      quivering voice pipes worn-out ditties of youth and love. Sadder music I
+      have never heard, but though it has at times drawn from me the sigh of
+      sensibility without referring sympathy to my pocket, I always hear the
+      compassionate soldo of Giovanna clink reproof to me upon the pavement.
+      Perhaps that slender note touches something finer than habitual charity in
+      her middle-aged bosom, for these were songs she says that they used to
+      sing when she was a girl, and Venice was gay and glad, and different from
+      now&mdash;<i>veramente, tutt&rsquo; altro, signor!</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is through Giovanna&rsquo;s charitable disposition that we make the
+      acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle
+      Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures&mdash;<i>creatura</i>
+      being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being
+      somewhat more pitiable than a <i>poveretta</i>. Our Creatures are both
+      well stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which
+      frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with the
+      invalid&rsquo;s husband,&mdash;a mild, pleasant-faced man, a tailor by trade,
+      and of batlike habits, who hovers about their dusky doorway in the summer
+      twilight. These people have but one room, and a little nook of kitchen at
+      the side; and not only does the sun never find his way into their
+      habitation, but even the daylight cannot penetrate it. They pay about four
+      florins a month for the place, and I hope their landlord is as happy as
+      his tenants. For though one is sick, and all are wretchedly poor, they are
+      far from being discontented. They are opulent in the possession of a small
+      dog, which they have raised from the cradle, as it were, and adopted into
+      the family. They are never tired of playing with their dog,&mdash;the poor
+      old children,&mdash;and every slight display of intelligence on his part
+      delights them. They think it fine in him to follow us as we go by, but
+      pretend to beat him; and then they excuse him, and call him ill names, and
+      catch him up, and hug him and kiss him. He feeds upon their slender means
+      and the pickings that G. carefully carries him from our kitchen, and gives
+      to him on our doorstep in spite of us, while she gossips with his
+      mistresses, who chorus our appearance at such times with &ldquo;<i>I miei
+      rispetti, signori!</i>&rdquo; We often see them in the street, and at a distance
+      from home, carrying mysterious bundles of clothes; and at last we learn
+      their vocation, which is one not known out of Italian cities, I think.
+      There the state is Uncle to the hard-pressed, and instead of many
+      pawnbrokers&rsquo; shops there is one large municipal spout, which is called the
+      Monte di Pietà, where the needy pawn their goods. The system is centuries
+      old in Italy, but there are people who to this day cannot summon courage
+      to repair in person to the Mount of Pity, and, to meet their wants, there
+      has grown up a class of frowzy old women who transact the business for
+      them, and receive a small percentage for their trouble. Our poor old
+      Creatures were of this class, and as there were many persons in
+      impoverished, decaying Venice who had need of the succor they procured,
+      they made out to earn a living when both were well, and to eke out
+      existence by charity when one was ill. They were harmless neighbors, and I
+      believe they regretted our removal, when this took place, for they used to
+      sit down under an arcade opposite our new house, and spend the duller
+      intervals of trade in the contemplation of our windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The alarming spirit of nepotism which Giovanna developed at a later day
+      was, I fear, a growth from the encouragement we gave her charitable
+      disposition. But for several months it was merely from the fact of a boy
+      who came and whistled at the door until Giovanna opened it and reproved
+      him in the name of all the saints and powers of darkness, that we knew her
+      to be a mother; and we merely had her word for the existence of a husband,
+      who dealt in poultry. Without seeing Giovanna&rsquo;s husband, I nevertheless
+      knew him to be a man of downy exterior, wearing a canvas apron, thickly
+      crusted with the gore of fowls, who sat at the door of his shop and
+      plucked chickens forever, as with the tireless hand of Fate. I divined
+      that he lived in an atmosphere of scalded pullet; that three earthen cups
+      of clotted chickens&rsquo; blood, placed upon his window-shelf, formed his idea
+      of an attractive display, and that he shadowed forth his conceptions of
+      the beautiful in symmetrical rows of plucked chickens, presenting to the
+      public eye rear views embellished with a single feather erect in the tail
+      of each bird; that he must be, through the ethics of competition, the
+      sworn foe of those illogical peasants who bring dead poultry to town in
+      cages, like singing birds, and equally the friend of those restaurateurs
+      who furnish you a meal of victuals and a feather-bed in the same <i>mezzo-polio
+      arrosto</i>. He turned out on actual appearance to be all I had prefigured
+      him, with the additional merit of having a large red nose, a sidelong,
+      fugitive gait, and a hangdog countenance. He furnished us poultry at rates
+      slightly advanced, I think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the boy, he turned up after a while as a constant guest, and took
+      possession of the kitchen. He came near banishment at one time for
+      catching a large number of sea-crabs in the canal, and confining them in a
+      basket in the kitchen, which they left at the dead hour of night, to
+      wander all over our house,&mdash;making a mysterious and alarming sound of
+      snapping, like an army of death-watches, and eluding the cunningest
+      efforts at capture. On another occasion, he fell into the canal before our
+      house, and terrified us by going under twice before the arrival of the old
+      gondolier, who called out to him &ldquo;<i>Petta! petta!</i>&rdquo; (Wait! wait!) as
+      he placidly pushed his boat to the spot. Developing other disagreeable
+      traits, Beppi was finally driven into exile, from which he nevertheless
+      furtively returned on holidays.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The family of Giovanna thus gradually encroaching upon us, we came also to
+      know her mother,&mdash;a dread and loathly old lady, whom we would
+      willingly have seen burned at the stake for a witch. She was commonly
+      encountered at nightfall in our street, where she lay in wait, as it were,
+      to prey upon the fragrance of dinner drifting from the kitchen windows of
+      our neighbor, the Duchess of Parma. Here was heard the voice of cooks and
+      of scullions, and the ecstasies of helpless voracity in which we sometimes
+      beheld this old lady were fearful to witness. Nor did we find her more
+      comfortable in our own kitchen, where we often saw her. The place itself
+      is weird and terrible&mdash;low ceiled, with the stone hearth built far
+      out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of Venetian cookery
+      dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day cheerfulness of
+      cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the bristling embers,
+      and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it. When Giovanna&rsquo;s
+      mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to do us reverence from
+      the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her good wishes for our
+      long life, continued health, and endless happiness, it has the effect upon
+      our spirits of the darkest malediction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not more pleasing, though altogether lighter and cheerfuler, was
+      Giovanna&rsquo;s sister-in-law, whom we knew only as the Cognata. Making her
+      appearance first upon the occasion of Giovanna&rsquo;s sickness, she slowly but
+      surely established herself as an habitual presence, and threatened at one
+      time, as we fancied, to become our paid servant. But a happy calamity
+      which one night carried off a carpet and the window curtains of an
+      unoccupied room, cast an evil suspicion upon the Cognata, and she never
+      appeared after the discovery of the theft. We suspected her of having
+      invented some dishes of which we were very fond, and we hated her for
+      oppressing us with a sense of many surreptitious favors. Objectively, she
+      was a slim, hoopless little woman, with a tendency to be always at the
+      street-door when we opened it. She had a narrow, narrow face, with eyes of
+      terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a demeanor of slavish
+      patronage. Our kitchen, after her addition to the household, became the
+      banqueting-hall of Giovanna&rsquo;s family, who dined there every day upon
+      dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the house the general savor of a low
+      cook-shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural tendency of excellent people
+      to place others in subjection. Our servitude at first was not hard, and
+      consisted chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to extraordinary efforts
+      when G. had attempted to please us with some novelty in cooking. She held
+      us to a strict account in this respect; but indeed our applause was for
+      the most part willing enough. Her culinary execution, first revealing
+      itself in a noble rendering of our ideas of roast potatoes,&mdash;a
+      delicacy foreign to the Venetian kitchen,&mdash;culminated at last in the
+      same style of <i>polpetti</i> [Footnote: I confess a tenderness for this
+      dish, which is a delicater kind of hash skillfully flavored and baked in
+      rolls of a mellow complexion and fascinating appearance.] which furnished
+      forth the table of our neighbor, the Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph
+      with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But G.&lsquo;s spirit was not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in her
+      the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a great
+      babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things, when
+      there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions of bad
+      weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The
+      crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as
+      springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian abuse
+      is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of opprobrium
+      with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ends with the attribution
+      of doggishness.) The conscription was held in the campo near us, and G.
+      declared the place to have become unendurable&mdash;&ldquo;<i>proprio un campo
+      di sospiri!</i>&rdquo; (Really a field of sighs.) &ldquo;<i>Staga comodo!</i>&rdquo; she
+      said to a guest of ours who would have moved his chair to let her pass
+      between him and the wall. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t move; the way to Paradise is not wider
+      than this.&rdquo; We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did not sleep in the
+      house, should come to us so late in the morning, but we could not deal
+      harshly with her on that account, met, as we always were, with plentiful
+      and admirable excuses. Who were we, indeed, to place our wishes in the
+      balance against the welfare of the sick neighbor with whom Giovanna passed
+      so many nights of vigil? Should we reproach her with tardiness when she
+      had not closed the eye all night for a headache properly of the devil? If
+      she came late in the morning, she stayed late at night; and it sometimes
+      happened that when the Paron and Parona, supposing her gone, made a
+      stealthy expedition to the kitchen for cold chicken, they found her there
+      at midnight in the fell company of the Cognata, bibbing the wine of the
+      country and holding a mild Italian revel with that vinegar and the stony
+      bread of Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have said G. was the flower of serving-women; and so at first she
+      seemed, and it was long till we doubted her perfection. We knew ourselves
+      to be very young, and weak, and unworthy. The Parona had the rare gift of
+      learning to speak less and less Italian every day, and fell inevitably
+      into subjection. The Paron in a domestic point of view was naturally
+      nothing. It had been strange indeed if Giovanna, beholding the great
+      contrast we presented to herself in many respects, had forborne to abuse
+      her advantage over us. But we trusted her implicitly, and I hardly know
+      how or when it was that we began to waver in our confidence. It is certain
+      that with the lapse of time we came gradually to have breakfast at twelve
+      o&rsquo;clock, instead of nine, as we had originally appointed it, and that G.
+      grew to consume the greater part of the day in making our small purchases,
+      and to give us our belated dinners at seven o&rsquo;clock. We protested, and
+      temporary reforms ensued, only to be succeeded by more hopeless lapses;
+      but it was not till all entreaties and threats failed that we began to
+      think seriously it would be well to have done with Giovanna, as an
+      unprofitable servant. I give the result, not all the nice causes from
+      which it came. But the question was, How to get rid of a poor woman and a
+      civil, and the mother of a family dependent in great part upon her labor?
+      We solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss G., and we shrink a hundred
+      times from inflicting the blow. At last, somewhat in the spirit of Charles
+      Lamb&rsquo;s Chinaman who invented roast pig, and discovered that the sole
+      method of roasting it was to burn down a house in order to consume the
+      adjacent pig-sty, and thus cook the roaster in the flames,&mdash;we hit
+      upon an artifice by which we could dispense with Giovanna, and keep an
+      easy conscience. We had long ceased to dine at home, in despair; and now
+      we resolved to take another house, in which there were other servants. But
+      even then, it was a sore struggle to part with the flower of
+      serving-women, who was set over the vacated house to put it in order after
+      our flitting, and with whom the imprudent Paron settled the last account
+      in the familiar little dining-room, surrounded by the depressing
+      influences of the empty chambers. The place was peopled after all, though
+      we had left it, and I think the tenants who come after us will be haunted
+      by our spectres, crowding them on the pleasant little balcony, and sitting
+      down with them at table. G. stood there, the genius of the place, and wept
+      six regretful tears, each one of which drew a florin from the purse of the
+      Paron. She had hoped to remain with us always while we lived in Venice;
+      but now that she could no longer look to us for support, the Lord must
+      take care of her. The gush of grief was transient: it relieved her, and
+      she came out sunnily a moment after. The Paron went his way more
+      sorrowfully, taking leave at last with the fine burst of Christian
+      philosophy: &ldquo;We are none of us masters of ourselves in this world, and
+      cannot do what we wish. <i>Ma! Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!</i>&rdquo; Yet he
+      was undeniably lightened in heart. He had cut adrift from old moorings,
+      and had crossed the Grand Canal. G. did not follow him, nor any of the
+      long line of pensioners who used to come on certain feast-days to levy
+      tribute of eggs at the old house. (The postman was among these, on
+      Christmas and New Year&rsquo;s, and as he received eggs at every house, it was a
+      problem with us, unsolved to this hour, how he carried them all, and what
+      he did with them.) Not the least among the Paron&rsquo;s causes for
+      self-gratulation was the non-appearance at his new abode of two local
+      newspapers, for which in an evil hour he subscribed, which were delivered
+      with unsparing regularity, and which, being never read, formed the keenest
+      reproach of his imprudent outlay and his idle neglect of their contents.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"></a>
+      CHAPTER VIII.<br/>
+      THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic
+      vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some morning,
+      and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that there never
+      was any such city. There our race seems to be in earnest in nothing.
+      People sometimes work, but as if without any aim; they suffer, and you
+      fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark, standing so
+      solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pillars,
+      is not in the least gray with time&mdash;no grayer than a Greek lyric.
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;All has suffered a sea-change<br/>
+    Into something rich and strange,&rdquo;
+ </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its
+      baptism in the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes for a little while
+      forget how marvelous she is, at any moment you may be startled into vivid
+      remembrance. The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and step by
+      step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads high up
+      to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine green and
+      purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching their heads
+      to look into the lofty windows,&mdash;blind long ago to their leafy
+      tenderness,&mdash;while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well,
+      with the beauty of the sculptor&rsquo;s soul wrought forever into the stone. Or
+      Venice lures you in a gondola into one of her remote canals, where you
+      glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under our
+      work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates of the
+      palaces stare at you in austere surprise, where the innumerable balconies
+      are full of the Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames, gossiping and
+      making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if the city&rsquo;s mood
+      is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very places where you
+      think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of your forgetfulness,
+      dares a wilder beauty, and enthralls with a yet more unearthly and
+      incredible enchantment. It is in the Piazza, and the Austrian band is
+      playing, and the promenaders pace solemnly up and down to the music, and
+      the gentle Italian loafers at Florian&rsquo;s brood vacantly over their little
+      cups of coffee, and nothing can be more stupid; when suddenly every thing
+      is changed, and a memorable tournament flashes up in many-glittering
+      action upon the scene, and there upon the gallery of the church, before
+      the horses of bronze, sit the Senators, bright-robed, and in the midst the
+      bonneted Doge with his guest Petrarch at his side. Or the old Carnival,
+      which had six months of every year to riot in, comes back and throngs the
+      place with motley company,&mdash;dominoes, harlequins, pantaloni,
+      illustrissimi and illustrissime, and perhaps even the Doge himself, who
+      has the right of incognito when he wears a little mask of wax at his
+      button-hole. Or may be the grander day revisits Venice when Doria has sent
+      word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia that he will listen to the
+      Senate when he has bridled the horses of Saint Mark,&mdash;and the whole
+      Republic of rich and poor crowds the square, demanding the release of
+      Pisani, who comes forth from his prison to create victory from the dust of
+      the crumbling commonwealth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for
+      your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay, what
+      potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she will,
+      than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal? Launched upon this great S
+      have I not seen hardened travelers grow sentimental, and has not this
+      prodigious sybillant, in my hearing, inspired white-haired Puritan
+      ministers of the gospel to attempt to quote out of the guide-book &ldquo;that
+      line from Byron&rdquo;? Upon my word, I have sat beside wandering editors in
+      their gondolas, and witnessed the expulsion of the newspaper from their
+      nature, while, lulled by the fascination of the place, they were powerless
+      to take their own journals from their pockets, and instead of politics
+      talked some bewildered nonsense about coming back with their families next
+      summer. For myself, I must count as half-lost the year spent in Venice
+      before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There alone can existence have
+      the perfect local flavor. But by what witchery touched one&rsquo;s being suffers
+      the common sea-change, till life at last seems to ebb and flow with the
+      tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it would be idle to attempt to
+      tell. I can only take you to our dear little balcony at Casa Falier, and
+      comment not very coherently on the scene upon the water under us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I am sure (since it is either in the spring or the fall) you will not
+      be surprised to see, the first thing, a boat-load of those English, who go
+      by from the station to their hotels, every day, in well-freighted
+      gondolas. These parties of traveling Englishry are all singularly alike,
+      from the &ldquo;Pa&rsquo;ty&rdquo; traveling alone with his opera-glass and satchel, to the
+      party which fills a gondola with well-cushioned English middle age, ruddy
+      English youth, and substantial English baggage. We have learnt to know
+      them all very well: the father and the mother sit upon the back seat, and
+      their comely girls at the sides and front. These girls all have the honest
+      cabbage-roses of English health upon their cheeks; they all wear little
+      rowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls of hair tumble upon their
+      broad English backs. They are coming from Switzerland and Germany, and
+      they are going south to Rome and to Naples, and they always pause at
+      Venice a few days. To-morrow we shall see them in the Piazza, and at
+      Florian&rsquo;s, and St. Mark&rsquo;s, and the Ducal Palace; and the young ladies will
+      cross the Bridge of Sighs, and will sentimentally feed the vagabond
+      pigeons of St. Mark which loaf about the Piazza and defile the sculptures.
+      But now our travelers are themselves very hungry, and are more anxious
+      than Americans can understand about the table-d&rsquo;hôte of their hotel. It is
+      perfectly certain that if they fall into talk there with any of our
+      nation, the respectable English father will remark that this war in
+      America is a very sad war, and will ask to know when it will all end. The
+      truth is, Americans do not like these people, and I believe there is no
+      love lost on the other side. But, in many things, they are travelers to be
+      honored, if not liked: they voyage through all countries, and without
+      awaking fervent affection in any land through which they pass; but their
+      sterling honesty and truth have made the English tongue a draft upon the
+      unlimited confidence of the continental peoples, and French, Germans, and
+      Italians trust and respect private English faith as cordially as they hate
+      public English perfidy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They come to Venice chiefly in the autumn, and October is the month of the
+      Sunsets and the English. The former are best seen from the Public Gardens,
+      whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind the domes and
+      towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the Redentore. Sometimes,
+      when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon is a fine thing; for then
+      the sun goes down into the water with a broad trail of bloody red behind
+      him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had dragged himself landward across
+      the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and died as he reached the land. But
+      we (upon whom the idleness of Venice grows daily, and from whom the
+      Gardens, therefore, grow farther and farther) are commonly content to take
+      our bit of sunset as we get it from our balcony, through the avenue opened
+      by the narrow canal opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a
+      little rainy, when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate
+      beauty&mdash;all tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little
+      palace on the corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the
+      Canalazzo, and from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an
+      airy balcony. When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that
+      pathetic and angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves
+      rich in the neighborhood of that part of the &ldquo;Palace of Art,&rdquo; whereon
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;The light aerial gallery, golden railed,<br/>
+    Burnt like a fringe of fire.&rdquo;
+</p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in not
+      seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists are always
+      painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is splendid over
+      and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon the
+      Grand Canal during the day. But in the hours just before the summer
+      twilight the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then you may see
+      whatever is left of Venetian gayety and looking down upon the groups in
+      the open gondolas may witness something of the home-life of the Italians,
+      who live out-of-doors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The groups do not vary a great deal one from another: inevitably the
+      pale-faced papa, the fat mamma, the over-dressed handsome young girls. We
+      learned to look for certain gondolas, and grew to feel a fond interest in
+      a very mild young man who took the air in company and contrast with a
+      ferocious bull-dog&mdash;boule-dogue he called him, I suppose. He was
+      always smoking languidly, that mild young man, and I fancied I could read
+      in his countenance a gentle, gentle antagonism to life&mdash;the
+      proportionate Byronic misanthropy, which might arise from sugar and water
+      taken instead of gin. But we really knew nothing about him, and our
+      conjecture was conjecture. Officers went by in their brilliant uniforms,
+      and gave the scene an alien splendor. Among these we enjoyed best the
+      spectacle of an old major, or perhaps general, in whom the arrogance of
+      youth had stiffened into a chill hauteur, and who frowned above his gray
+      overwhelming moustache upon the passers, like a citadel grim with battle
+      and age. We used to fancy, with a certain luxurious sense of our own
+      safety, that one broadside from those fortressed eyes could blow from the
+      water the slight pleasure-boats in which the young Venetian idlers were
+      innocently disporting. But again this was merely conjecture. The general&rsquo;s
+      glance may have had no such power. Indeed, the furniture of our apartment
+      sustained no damage from it, even when concentrated through an
+      opera-glass, by which means the brave officer at times perused our humble
+      lodging from the balcony of his own over against us. He may have been no
+      more dangerous in his way than two aged sisters (whom we saw every
+      evening) were in theirs. They represented Beauty in its most implacable
+      and persevering form, and perhaps they had one day been belles and could
+      not forget it. They were very old indeed, but their dresses were new and
+      their paint fresh, and as they glided by in the good-natured twilight, one
+      had no heart to smile at them. We gave our smiles, and now and then our
+      soldi, to the swarthy beggar, who, being short of legs, rowed up and down
+      the canal in a boat, and overhauled Charity in the gondolas. He was a
+      singular compromise, in his vocation and his equipment, between the
+      mendicant and corsair: I fear he would not have hesitated to assume the
+      pirate altogether in lonelier waters; and had I been a heavily laden
+      oyster-boat returning by night through some remote and dark canal, I would
+      have steered clear of that truculent-looking craft, of which the crew must
+      have fought with a desperation proportioned to the lack of legs and the
+      difficulty of running away, in case of defeat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market,
+      bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the main-land; and far into the
+      night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the boats was
+      company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out again, we
+      found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily happy in
+      haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved Venice,
+      kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet seemed to
+      rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At night sometimes we saw from our balcony one of those <i>freschi</i>,
+      which once formed the chief splendor of festive occasions in Venice, and
+      are peculiar to the city, where alone their fine effects are possible. The
+      fresco is a procession of boats with music and lights. Two immense barges,
+      illumined with hundreds of paper lanterns, carry the military bands; the
+      boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, and then the gondolas
+      of such citizens as choose to take part in the display,&mdash;though since
+      1859 no Italian, unless a government official, has been seen in the
+      procession. No gondola has less than two lanterns, and many have eight or
+      ten, shedding mellow lights of blue, and red, and purple, over uniforms
+      and silken robes. The soldiers of the bands breathe from their instruments
+      music the most perfect and exquisite of its kind in the world; and as the
+      procession takes the width of the Grand Canal in its magnificent course,
+      soft crimson flushes play upon the old, weather-darkened palaces, and die
+      tenderly away, giving to light and then to shadow the opulent sculptures
+      of pillar, and arch, and spandrel, and weirdly illuminating the grim and
+      bearded visages of stone that peer down from doorway and window. It is a
+      sight more gracious and fairy than ever poet dreamed; and I feel that the
+      lights and the music have only got into my description by name, and that
+      you would not know them when you saw and heard them, from any thing I say.
+      In other days, people tell you, the fresco was much more impressive than
+      now. At intervals, rockets used to be sent up, and the Bengal lights,
+      burned during the progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers&rsquo; spectral
+      shadows, giant-huge, on the palace-walls. But, for my part, I do not care
+      to have the fresco other than I know it: indeed, for my own selfish
+      pleasure, I should be sorry to have Venice in any way less fallen and
+      forlorn than she is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever seen on the Grand Canal are
+      the great boats of the river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from
+      Chioggia, come up to the city with the swelling sea. They are built with a
+      pointed stern and bow rising with the sweep of a short curve from the
+      water high above the cabin roof, which is always covered with a straw
+      matting. Black is not the color of the gondolas alone, but of all boats in
+      Venetia; and these of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any one
+      of them might be sent to take King Arthur and bear him to Avilon, whither
+      I think most of them are bound. A path runs along either gunwale, on which
+      the men pace as they pole the boat up the canal,&mdash;her great sail
+      folded and lying with the prostrate mast upon the deck. The rudder is a
+      prodigious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly kind enough to wear
+      a red cap with a blue tassel, and to smoke. The other persons on board are
+      no less obliging and picturesque, from the dark-eyed young mother who sits
+      with her child in her arms at the cabin-door, to the bronze boy who
+      figures in play at her feet with a small yellow dog of the race already
+      noticed in charge of the fuel-boats from Dalmatia. The father of the
+      family, whom we take to be the commander of the vessel, occupies himself
+      gracefully in sitting down and gazing at the babe and its mother. It is an
+      old habit of mine, formed in childhood from looking at rafts upon the
+      Ohio, to attribute, with a kind of heart-ache, supreme earthly happiness
+      to the navigators of lazy river craft; and as we glance down upon these
+      people from our balcony, I choose to think them immensely contented, and
+      try, in a feeble, tacit way, to make friends with so much bliss. But I am
+      always repelled in these advances by the small yellow dog, who is rendered
+      extremely irascible by my contemplation of the boat under his care, and
+      who, ruffling his hair as a hen ruffles her feathers, never fails to bark
+      furious resentment of my longing.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0170}.jpg" alt="{0170}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0170}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Far different from the picture presented by this boat&rsquo;s progress&mdash;the
+      peacefulness of which even the bad temper of the small yellow dog could
+      not mar&mdash;was another scene which we witnessed upon the Grand Canal,
+      when one morning we were roused from our breakfast by a wild and
+      lamentable outcry. Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal
+      opposite at the same time, had struck together with a violence that shook
+      the boatmen to their inmost souls. One barge was laden with lime, and
+      belonged to a plasterer of the city; the other was full of fuel, and
+      commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival captains advanced toward the
+      bows of their boats, with murderous looks,
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;Con la test&rsquo;alta e con rabbiosa fame,<br/>
+    Sì che parea che l&rsquo;aer ne temesse,&rdquo;
+ </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with hands of deathful
+      challenge, while I looked on with that noble interest which the
+      enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other&rsquo;s heads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the storm burst in words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Figure of a pig!&rdquo; shrieked the Venetian, &ldquo;you have ruined my boat
+      forever!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog!&rdquo; returned the countryman, &ldquo;and it was
+      my right to enter the canal first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They then, after this exchange of insult, abandoned the main subject of
+      dispute, and took up the quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally
+      questioning the reputation of all their female relatives to the third and
+      fourth cousins, they defied each other as the offspring of assassins and
+      prostitutes. As the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats
+      asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and forth and hurled
+      opprobrium with a foamy volubility that quite left my powers of
+      comprehension behind. At last the townsman, executing a <i>pas seul</i> of
+      uncommon violence, stooped and picked up a bit of lime, while the
+      countryman, taking shelter at the stern of his boat, there attended the
+      shot. To my infinite disappointment it was not fired. The Venetian seemed
+      to have touched the climax of his passion in the mere demonstration of
+      hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the countryman the right
+      of way. The courage of the latter rose as the danger passed, and as far as
+      he could be heard, he continued to exult in the wildest excesses of
+      insult: &ldquo;Ah-heigh! brutal executioner! Ah, hideous headsman!&rdquo; <i>Da capo.</i>
+      I now know that these people never intended to do more than quarrel, and
+      no doubt they parted as well pleased as if they had actually carried
+      broken heads from the encounter. But at the time I felt affronted and
+      trifled with by the result, for my disappointments arising out of the
+      dramatic manner of the Italians had not yet been frequent enough to teach
+      me to expect nothing from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was some compensation for me&mdash;coming, like all compensation, a
+      long while after the loss&mdash;in the spectacle of a funeral procession
+      on the Grand Canal, which had a singular and imposing solemnity only
+      possible to the place. It was the funeral of an Austrian general, whose
+      coffin, mounted on a sable catafalco, was borne upon the middle boat of
+      three that moved abreast. The barges on either side bristled with the
+      bayonets of soldiery, but the dead man was alone in his boat, except for
+      one strange figure that stood at the head of the coffin, and rested its
+      glittering hand upon the black fall of the drapery. This was a man clad
+      cap-a-pie in a perfect suit of gleaming mail, with his visor down, and his
+      shoulders swept by the heavy raven plumes of his helm. As at times he
+      moved from side to side, and glanced upward at the old palaces, sad in the
+      yellow morning light, he put out of sight, for me, every thing else upon
+      the Canal, and seemed the ghost of some crusader come back to Venice, in
+      wonder if this city, lying dead under the hoofs of the Croat, were indeed
+      that same haughty Lady of the Sea who had once sent her blind old Doge to
+      beat down the pride of an empire and disdain its crown.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"></a>
+      CHAPTER IX.<br/>
+      A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One summer morning the mosquitoes played for me with sleep, and won. It
+      was half-past four, and as it had often been my humor to see Venice at
+      that hour, I got up and sallied forth for a stroll through the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This morning walk did not lay the foundation of a habit of early rising in
+      me, but I nevertheless advise people always to get up at half-past four,
+      if they wish to receive the most vivid impressions, and to take the most
+      absorbing interest in every thing in the world. It was with a feeling
+      absolutely novel that I looked about me that morning, and there was a
+      breezy freshness and clearness in my perceptions altogether delightful,
+      and I fraternized so cordially with Nature that I do not think, if I had
+      sat down immediately after to write out the experience, I should have at
+      all patronized her, as I am afraid scribbling people have sometimes the
+      custom to do. I know that my feeling of brotherhood in the case of two
+      sparrows, which obliged me by hopping down from a garden wall at the end
+      of Calle Falier and promenading on the pavement, was quite humble and
+      sincere; and that I resented the ill-nature of a cat,
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;Whom love kept wakeful and the muse,&rdquo;
+ </p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      and who at that hour was spitefully reviling the morn from a window
+      grating. As I went by the gate of the Canonico&rsquo;s little garden, the
+      flowers saluted me with a breath of perfume,&mdash;I think the white
+      honey-suckle was first to offer me this politeness,&mdash;and the dumpy
+      little statues looked far more engaging than usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After passing the bridge, the first thing to do was to drink a cup of
+      coffee at the Caffè Ponte di Ferro, where the eyebrows of the waiter
+      expressed a mild surprise at my early presence. There was no one else in
+      the place but an old gentleman talking thoughtfully to himself on the
+      subject of two florins, while he poured his coffee into a glass of water,
+      before drinking it. As I lingered a moment over my cup, I was reinforced
+      by the appearance of a company of soldiers, marching to parade in the
+      Campo di Marte. Their officers went at their head, laughing and chatting,
+      and one of the lieutenants smoking a long pipe, gave me a feeling of
+      satisfaction only comparable to that which I experienced shortly afterward
+      in beholding a stoutly built small dog on the Ponte di San Moisè. The
+      creature was only a few inches high, and it must have been through some
+      mist of dreams yet hanging about me that he impressed me as having
+      something elephantine in his manner. When I stooped down and patted him on
+      the head, I felt colossal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On my way to the Piazza, I stopped in the church of Saint Mary of the
+      Lily, where, in company with one other sinner, I found a relish in the
+      early sacristan&rsquo;s deliberate manner of lighting the candles on the altar.
+      Saint Mary of the Lily has a façade in the taste of the declining
+      Renaissance. The interior is in perfect keeping, and all is hideous,
+      abominable, and abandoned. My fellow-sinner was kneeling, and repeating
+      his prayers. He now and then tapped himself absent-mindedly on the breast
+      and forehead, and gave a good deal of his attention to me as I stood at
+      the door, hat in hand. The hour and the place invested him with so much
+      interest, that I parted from him with emotion. My feelings were next
+      involved by an abrupt separation from a young English East-Indian, whom I
+      overheard asking the keeper of a caffè his way to the Campo di Marte. He
+      was a claret-colored young fellow, tall, and wearing folds of white muslin
+      around his hat. In another world I trust to know how he liked the parade
+      that morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I discovered that Piazza San Marco is every morning swept by troops of
+      ragged facchini, who gossip noisily and quarrelsomely together over their
+      work. Boot-blacks, also, were in attendance, and several followed my
+      progress through the square, in the vague hope that I would relent and
+      have my boots blacked. One peerless waiter stood alone amid the desert
+      elegance of Caffè Florian, which is never shut, day or night, from year to
+      year. At the Caffè of the Greeks, two individuals of the Greek nation were
+      drinking coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went upon the Molo, passing between the pillars of the Lion and the
+      Saint, and walked freely back and forth, taking in the glory of that
+      prospect of water and of vague islands breaking the silver of the lagoons,
+      like those scenes cunningly wrought in apparent relief on old Venetian
+      mirrors. I walked there freely, for though there were already many
+      gondoliers at the station, not one took me for a foreigner or offered me a
+      boat. At that hour, I was in myself so improbable, that if they saw me at
+      all, I must have appeared to them as a dream. My sense of security was
+      sweet, but it was false, for on going into the church of St. Mark, the
+      keener eye of the sacristan detected me. He instantly offered to show me
+      the Zeno Chapel; but I declined, preferring the church, where I found the
+      space before the high altar filled with market-people come to hear the
+      early mass. As I passed out of the church, I witnessed the partial awaking
+      of a Venetian gentleman who had spent the night in a sitting posture,
+      between the columns of the main entrance. He looked puffy, scornful, and
+      uncomfortable, and at the moment of falling back to slumber, tried to
+      smoke an unlighted cigarette, which he held between his lips. I found none
+      of the shops open as I passed through the Merceria, and but for myself,
+      and here and there a laborer going to work, the busy thoroughfare seemed
+      deserted. In the mere wantonness of power, and the security of solitude, I
+      indulged myself in snapping several door-latches, which gave me a pleasure
+      as keen as that enjoyed in boyhood from passing a stick along the pickets
+      of a fence. I was in nowise abashed to be discovered in this amusement by
+      an old peasant-woman, bearing at either end of a yoke the usual basket
+      with bottles of milk packed in straw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Entering Campo San Bartolomeo, I found trade already astir in that noisy
+      place; the voice of cheap bargains, which by noonday swells into an
+      intolerable uproar, was beginning to be heard. Having lived in Campo San
+      Bartolomeo, I recognized several familiar faces there, and particularly
+      noted among them that of a certain fruit-vender, who frequently swindled
+      me in my small dealings with him. He now sat before his stand, and for a
+      man of a fat and greasy presence, looked very fresh and brisk, and as if
+      he had passed a pleasant night.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0182}.jpg" alt="{0182}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0182}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      On the other side of the Rialto Bridge, the market was preparing for the
+      purchasers. Butchers were arranging their shops; fruit-stands, and stands
+      for the sale of crockery, and&mdash;as I must say for want of a better
+      word, if there is any&mdash;notions, were in a state of tasteful
+      readiness. The person on the steps of the bridge who had exposed his stock
+      of cheap clothing and coarse felt hats on the parapet, had so far
+      completed his preparations as to have leisure to be talking himself hot
+      and hoarse with the neighboring barber. He was in a perfectly good humor,
+      and was merely giving a dramatic flavor to some question of six soldi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the landings of the market-place squadrons of boats loaded with
+      vegetables were arriving and unloading. Peasants were building cabbages
+      into pyramids; collective squashes and cucumbers were taking a picturesque
+      shape; wreaths of garlic and garlands of onions graced the scene. All the
+      people were clamoring at the tops of their voices; and in the midst of the
+      tumult and confusion, resting on heaps of cabbage-leaves and garbage, men
+      lay on their bellies sweetly sleeping. Numbers of eating-houses were
+      sending forth a savory smell, and everywhere were breakfasters with bowls
+      of sguassetto. In one of the shops, somewhat prouder than the rest, a
+      heated brunette was turning sections of eel on a gridiron, and hurriedly
+      coqueting with the purchasers. Singularly calm amid all this bustle was
+      the countenance of the statue called the Gobbo, as I looked at it in the
+      centre of the market-place. The Gobbo (who is not a hunchback, either) was
+      patiently supporting his burden, and looking with a quiet, thoughtful
+      frown upon the ground, as if pondering some dream of change that had come
+      to him since the statutes of the haughty Republic were read aloud to the
+      people from the stone tribune on his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, it was a morning for thoughtful meditation; and as I sat at the
+      feet of the four granite kings shortly after, waiting for the gate of the
+      ducal palace to be opened, that I might see the girls drawing the water, I
+      studied the group of the Judgment of Solomon, on the corner of the palace,
+      and arrived at an entirely new interpretation of that Bible story, which I
+      have now wholly forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gate remained closed too long for my patience, and I turned away from
+      a scene momently losing its interest. The brilliant little shops opened
+      like hollyhocks as I went home; the swelling tide of life filled the
+      streets, and brought Venice back to my day-time remembrance, robbing her
+      of that keen, delightful charm with which she greeted my early morning
+      sense.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"></a>
+      CHAPTER X.<br/>
+      THE MOUSE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Wishing to tell the story of our Mouse, because I think it illustrates
+      some amusing traits of character in a certain class of Italians, I explain
+      at once that he was not a mouse, but a man so called from his wretched,
+      trembling little manner, his fugitive expression, and peaked visage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He first appeared to us on the driver&rsquo;s seat of that carriage in which we
+      posted so splendidly one spring-time from Padua to Ponte Lagoscuro. But
+      though he mounted to his place just outside the city gate, we did not
+      regard him much, nor, indeed, observe what a mouse he was, until the
+      driver stopped to water his horses near Battaglia, and the Mouse got down
+      to stretch his forlorn little legs. Then I got down too, and bade him
+      good-day, and told him it was a very hot day&mdash;for he was a mouse
+      apparently so plunged in wretchedness that I doubted if he knew what kind
+      of day it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I had spoken, he began to praise (in the wary manner of the Venetians
+      when they find themselves in the company of a foreigner who does not look
+      like an Englishman) the Castle of the Obiza near by, which is now the
+      country-seat of the ex-Duke of Modena; and he presently said something to
+      imply that he thought me a German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am not a German,&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As many excuses,&rdquo; said the Mouse sadly, but with evident relief; and then
+      began to talk more freely, and of the evil times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going all the way with us to Florence?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, signor, to Bologna; from there to Ancona.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you ever been in Venice? We are just coming from there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a beautiful place. Do you like it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sufficiently. But one does not enjoy himself very well there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I thought Venice interesting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sufficiently, signor. <i>Ma!</i>&rdquo; said the Mouse, shrugging his
+      shoulders, and putting on the air of being luxuriously fastidious in his
+      choice of cities, &ldquo;the water is so bad in Venice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter overcoat, and has no garment to
+      form a compromise with his shirt-sleeves, if he should wish to render the
+      weather more endurable by throwing off the surtout. In spite of his
+      momentary assumption of consequence, I suspect that his coat is in the
+      Monte di Pietà. It comes out directly that he is a ship-carpenter who has
+      worked in the Arsenal of Venice, and at the ship-yards in Trieste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there is no work any more. He went to Trieste lately to get a job on
+      the three frigates which the Sultan had ordered to be built there. <i>Ma!</i>
+      After all, the frigates are to be built in Marseilles instead. There is
+      nothing. And every thing is so dear. In Venetia you spend much and gain
+      little. Perhaps there is work at Ancona.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time the horses are watered; the Mouse regains his seat, and we
+      almost forget him, till he jumps from his place, just before we reach the
+      hotel in Rovigo, and disappears&mdash;down the first hole in the side of a
+      house, perhaps. He might have done much worse, and spent the night at the
+      hotel, as we did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning at four o&rsquo;clock, when we start, he is on the box again,
+      nibbling bread and cheese, and glancing furtively back at us to say good
+      morning. He has little twinkling black eyes, just like a mouse, and a
+      sharp moustache, and sharp tuft on his chin&mdash;as like Victor Emanuel&rsquo;s
+      as a mouse&rsquo;s tuft can be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cold morning air seems to shrivel him, and he crouches into a little
+      gelid ball on the seat beside the driver, while we wind along the Po on
+      the smooth gray road; while the twilight lifts slowly from the distances
+      of field and vineyard; while the black boats of the Po, with their gaunt
+      white sails, show spectrally through the mists; while the trees and the
+      bushes break into innumerable voice, and the birds are glad of another day
+      in Italy; while the peasant drives his mellow-eyed, dun oxen afield; while
+      his wife comes in her scarlet bodice to the door, and the children&rsquo;s faces
+      peer out from behind her skirts; while the air freshens, the east flushes,
+      and the great miracle is wrought anew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once again, before we reach the ferry of the Po, the Mouse leaps down and
+      disappears as mysteriously as at Rovigo. We see him no more till we meet
+      in the station on the other side of the river, where we hear him
+      bargaining long and earnestly with the ticket-seller for a third-class
+      passage to Bologna. He fails to get it, I think, at less than the usual
+      rate, for he retires from the contest more shrunken and forlorn than ever,
+      and walks up and down the station, startled at a word, shocked at any
+      sudden noise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For curiosity, I ask how much he paid for crossing the river, mentioning
+      the fabulous sum it had cost us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It appears that he paid sixteen soldi only. &ldquo;What could they do when a man
+      was in misery? I had nothing else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even while thus betraying his poverty, the Mouse did not beg, and we began
+      to respect his poverty. In a little while we pitied it, witnessing the
+      manner in which he sat down on the edge of a chair, with a smile of meek
+      desperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a more serious case when an artisan is out of work in the Old World
+      than one can understand in the New. There the struggle for bread is so
+      fierce and the competition so great; and, then, a man bred to one trade
+      cannot turn his hand to another as in America. Even the rudest and least
+      skilled labor has more to do it than are wanted. The Italians are very
+      good to the poor, but the tradesman out of work must become a beggar
+      before charity can help him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We, who are poor enough to be wise, consult foolishly together concerning
+      the Mouse. It blesses him that gives, and him that takes&mdash;this
+      business of charity. And then, there is something irresistibly relishing
+      and splendid in the consciousness of being the instrument of a special
+      providence! Have I all my life admired those beneficent characters in
+      novels and comedies who rescue innocence, succor distress, and go about
+      pressing gold into the palm of poverty, and telling it to take it and be
+      happy; and now shall I reject an occasion, made to my hand, for emulating
+      them in real life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I will give the Mouse five francs,&rdquo; I say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I will be prudent,&rdquo; I continue. &ldquo;I will not give him this money. I
+      will tell him it is a loan which he may pay me back again whenever he can.
+      In this way I shall relieve him now, and furnish him an incentive to
+      economy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I call to the Mouse, and he runs tremulously toward me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you friends in Ancona?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, signor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How much money have you left?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shows me three soldi. &ldquo;Enough for a coffee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So I give him the five francs, and explain my little scheme of making it a
+      loan, and not a gift; and then I give him my address.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He does not appear to understand the scheme of the loan; but he takes the
+      money, and is quite stunned by his good fortune. He thanks me absently,
+      and goes and shows the piece to the guards, with a smile that illumines
+      and transfigures his whole person. At Bologna, he has come to his senses;
+      he loads me with blessings, he is ready to weep; he reverences me, he
+      wishes me a good voyage, endless prosperity, and innumerable days; and
+      takes the train for Ancona.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, ah!&rdquo; I congratulate myself,&mdash;&ldquo;is it not a fine thing to be the
+      instrument of a special providence?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is pleasant to think of the Mouse during all that journey, and if we
+      are never so tired, it rests us to say, &ldquo;I wonder where the Mouse is by
+      this time?&rdquo; When we get home, and coldly count up our expenses, we rejoice
+      in the five francs lent to the Mouse. &ldquo;And I know he will pay it back if
+      ever he can,&rdquo; I say. &ldquo;That was a Mouse of integrity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Two weeks later comes a comely young woman, with a young child&mdash;a
+      child strong on its legs, a child which tries to open every thing in the
+      room, which wants to pull the cloth off the table, to throw itself out of
+      the open window&mdash;a child of which I have never seen the peer for
+      restlessness and curiosity. This young woman has been directed to call on
+      me as a person likely to pay her way to Ferrara. &ldquo;But who sent you? But,
+      in fine, why should I pay your way to Ferrara? I have never seen you
+      before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My husband, whom you benefited on his way to Ancona, sent me. Here is his
+      letter and the card you gave him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I call out to my fellow-victim,&mdash;&ldquo;My dear, here is news of the
+      Mouse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t <i>tell</i> me he&rsquo;s sent you that money already!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. He has sent me his wife and child, that I may forward them to
+      him at Ferrara, out of my goodness, and the boundless prosperity which has
+      followed his good wishes&mdash;I, who am a great signor in his eyes, and
+      an insatiable giver of five-franc pieces&mdash;the instrument of a
+      perpetual special providence. The Mouse has found work at Ferrara, and his
+      wife comes here from Trieste. As for the rest, I am to send her to him, as
+      I said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are deceived,&rdquo; I say solemnly to the Mouse&rsquo;s wife. &ldquo;I am not a rich
+      man. I lent your husband five francs because he had nothing. I am sorry
+      but I cannot spare twenty florins to send you to Ferrara. If <i>one</i>
+      will help you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks the same,&rdquo; said the young woman, who was well dressed enough; and
+      blessed me, and gathered up her child, and went her way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But her blessing did not lighten my heart, depressed and troubled by so
+      strange an end to my little scheme of a beneficent loan. After all,
+      perhaps the Mouse may have been as keenly disappointed as myself. With the
+      ineradicable idea of the Italians, that persons who speak English are
+      wealthy by nature, and <i>tutti originali</i>, it was not such an absurd
+      conception of the case to suppose that if I had lent him five francs once,
+      I should like to do it continually. Perhaps he may yet pay back the loan
+      with usury. But I doubt it. In the mean time, I am far from blaming the
+      Mouse. I merely feel that there is a misunderstanding, which I can pardon
+      if he can.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"></a>
+      CHAPTER XI.<br/>
+      CHURCHES AND PICTURES.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One day in the gallery of the Venetian Academy a family party of the
+      English, whom we had often seen from our balcony in their gondolas, were
+      kind enough to pause before Titian&rsquo;s John the Baptist. It was attention
+      that the picture could scarcely demand in strict justice, for it hangs at
+      the end of a suite of smaller rooms through which visitors usually return
+      from the great halls, spent with looking at much larger paintings. As
+      these people stood gazing at the sublime figure of the Baptist,&mdash;one
+      of the most impressive, if not the most religious, that the master has
+      painted,&mdash;and the wild and singular beauty of the landscape made
+      itself felt through the infinite depths of their respectability, the
+      father of the family and the head of the group uttered approval of the
+      painter&rsquo;s conception: &ldquo;Quite my idea of the party&rsquo;s character,&rdquo; he said;
+      and then silently and awfully led his domestic train away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am so far from deriding the criticism of this honest gentleman that I
+      would wish to have equal sincerity and boldness in saying what I thought&mdash;if
+      I really thought any thing at all&mdash;concerning the art which I spent
+      so great a share of my time at Venice in looking at. But I fear I should
+      fall short of the terseness as well as the candor I applaud, and should
+      presently find myself tediously rehearsing criticisms which I neither
+      respect for their honesty, nor regard for their justice. It is the sad
+      fortune of him who desires to arrive at full perception of the true and
+      beautiful in art, to find that critics have no agreement except upon a few
+      loose general principles; and that among the artists, to whom he turns in
+      his despair, no two think alike concerning the same master, while his own
+      little learning has made him distrust his natural likings and mislikings.
+      Ruskin is undoubtedly the best guide you can have in your study of the
+      Venetian painters; and after reading him, and suffering confusion and
+      ignominy from his theories and egotisms, the exercises by which you are
+      chastised into admission that he has taught you any thing cannot fail to
+      end in a humility very favorable to your future as a Christian. But even
+      in this subdued state you must distrust the methods by which he pretends
+      to relate the aesthetic truths you perceive to certain civil and religious
+      conditions: you scarcely understand how Tintoretto, who genteelly disdains
+      (on one page) to paint well any person baser than a saint or senator, and
+      with whom &ldquo;exactly in proportion to the dignity of the character is the
+      beauty of the painting,&rdquo;&mdash;comes (on the next page) to paint a very
+      &ldquo;weak, mean, and painful&rdquo; figure of Christ; and knowing a little the loose
+      lives of the great Venetian painters, you must reject, with several other
+      humorous postulates, the idea that good colorists are better men than bad
+      colorists. Without any guide, I think, these painters may be studied and
+      understood, up to a certain point, by one who lives in the atmosphere of
+      their art at Venice, and who, insensibly breathing in its influence,
+      acquires a feeling for it which all the critics in the world could not
+      impart where the works themselves are not to be seen. I am sure that no
+      one strange to the profession of artist ever received a just notion of any
+      picture by reading the most accurate and faithful description of it:
+      stated dimensions fail to convey ideas of size; adjectives are not
+      adequate to the ideas of movement; and the names of the colors, however
+      artfully and vividly introduced and repeated, cannot tell the reader of a
+      painter&rsquo;s coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian&rsquo;s &ldquo;Assumption&rdquo; is
+      like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any one who has seen
+      it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning critic describe
+      intelligibly the difference between the styles of Titian, of Tintoretto,
+      and of Paolo Veronese,&mdash;that difference which no one with the
+      slightest feeling for art can fail to discern after looking thrice at
+      their works? It results from all this that I must believe special
+      criticisms on art to have their small use only in the presence of the
+      works they discuss. This is my sincere belief, and I could not, in any
+      honesty, lumber my pages with descriptions or speculations which would be
+      idle to most readers, even if I were a far wiser judge of art than I
+      affect to be. As it is, doubting if I be gifted in that way at all, I
+      think I may better devote myself to discussion of such things in Venice as
+      can be understood by comparison with things elsewhere, and so rest happy
+      in the thought that I have thrown no additional darkness on any of the
+      pictures half obscured now by the religious dimness of the Venetian
+      churches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubt, analogous to that expressed, has already made me hesitate to spend
+      the reader&rsquo;s patience upon many well-known wonders of Venice; and, looking
+      back over the preceding chapters, I find that some of the principal
+      edifices of the city have scarcely got into my book even by name. It is
+      possible that the reader, after all, loses nothing by this; but I should
+      regret it, if it seemed ingratitude to that expression of the beautiful
+      which beguiled many dull hours for me, and kept me company in many
+      lonesome ones. For kindnesses of this sort, indeed, I am under obligations
+      to edifices in every part of the city; and there is hardly a bit of
+      sculptured stone in the Ducal Palace to which I do not owe some pleasant
+      thought or harmless fancy. Yet I am shy of endeavoring in my gratitude to
+      transmute the substance of the Ducal Palace into some substance that shall
+      be sensible to the eyes that look on this print; and I forgive myself the
+      reluctance the more readily when I remember how, just after reading Mr.
+      Ruskin&rsquo;s description of St. Mark&rsquo;s Church, I, who had seen it every day
+      for three years, began to have dreadful doubts of its existence.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0200}.jpg" alt="{0200}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0200}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      To be sure, this was only for a moment, and I do not think all the
+      descriptive talent in the world could make me again doubt St. Mark&rsquo;s,
+      which I remember with no less love than veneration. This church indeed has
+      a beauty which touches and wins all hearts, while it appeals profoundly to
+      the religious sentiment. It is as if there were a sheltering friendliness
+      in its low-hovering domes and arches, which lures and caresses while it
+      awes; as if here, where the meekest soul feels welcome and protection, the
+      spirit oppressed with the heaviest load of sin might creep nearest to
+      forgiveness, hiding the anguish of its repentance in the temple&rsquo;s dim
+      cavernous recesses, faintly starred with mosaic, and twilighted by
+      twinkling altar-lamps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though the temple is enriched with incalculable value of stone and
+      sculpture, I cannot remember at any time to have been struck by its mere
+      opulence. Preciousness of material has been sanctified to the highest
+      uses, and there is such unity and justness in the solemn splendor, that
+      wonder is scarcely appealed to. Even the priceless and rarely seen
+      treasures of the church&mdash;such as the famous golden altarpiece, whose
+      costly blaze of gems and gold was lighted in Constantinople six hundred
+      years ago&mdash;failed to impress me with their pecuniary worth, though I
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;Value the giddy pleasure of the eyes,&rdquo;
+</p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      and like to marvel at precious things. The jewels of other churches are
+      conspicuous and silly heaps of treasure; but St. Mark&rsquo;s, where every line
+      of space shows delicate labor in rich material, subdues the jewels to
+      their place of subordinate adornment. So, too, the magnificence of the
+      Romish service seems less vainly ostentatious there. In other churches the
+      ceremonies may sometimes impress you with a sense of their grandeur, and
+      even spirituality, but they all need the effect of twilight upon them. You
+      want a foreground of kneeling figures, and faces half visible through
+      heavy bars of shadow; little lamps must tremble before the shrines; and in
+      the background must rise the high altar, all ablaze with candles from
+      vault to pavement, while a hidden choir pours music from behind, and the
+      organ shakes the heart with its heavy tones. But with the daylight on its
+      splendors even the grand function of the <i>Te Deum</i> fails to awe, and
+      wearies by its length, except in St. Mark&rsquo;s alone, which is given grace to
+      spiritualize what elsewhere would be mere theatric pomp. [Footnote: The
+      cardinal-patriarch officiates in the Basilica San Marco with some
+      ceremonies which I believe are peculiar to the patriarchate of Venice, and
+      which consist of an unusual number of robings and disrobings, and putting
+      on and off of shoes. All this is performed with great gravity, and has, I
+      suppose, some peculiar spiritual significance. The shoes are brought by a
+      priest to the foot of the patriarchal throne, when a canon removes the
+      profane, out-of-door <i>chaussure</i>, and places the sacred shoes on the
+      patriarch&rsquo;s feet. A like ceremony replaces the patriarch&rsquo;s every-day
+      gaiters, and the pious rite ends.] The basilica, however, is not in every
+      thing the edifice best adapted to the Romish worship; for the incense,
+      which is a main element of the function, is gathered and held there in
+      choking clouds under the low wagon-roofs of the cross-naves.&mdash;Yet I
+      do not know if I would banish incense from the formula of worship even in
+      St. Mark&rsquo;s. There is certainly a poetic if not a religious grace in the
+      swinging censer and its curling fumes; and I think the perfume, as it
+      steals mitigated to your nostrils, out of the open church door, is the
+      reverendest smell in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The music in Venetian churches is not commonly very good: the best is to
+      be heard at St. Mark&rsquo;s, though the director of the choir always contrives
+      to make so odious a slapping with his <i>bâton</i> as nearly to spoil your
+      enjoyment. The great musical event of the year is the performance
+      (immediately after the <i>Festa del Redentore</i>) of the Soldini Masses.
+      These are offered for the repose of one Guiseppe Soldini of Verona, who,
+      dying possessed of about a million francs, bequeathed a part (some six
+      thousand francs) annually to the church of St. Mark, on conditions named
+      in his will. The terms are, that during three successive days, every year,
+      there shall be said for the peace of his soul a certain number of masses,&mdash;all
+      to be done in the richest and costliest manner. In case of delinquency,
+      the bequest passes to the Philharmonic Society of Milan; but the
+      priesthood of the basilica so strictly regard the wishes of the deceased
+      that they never say less than four masses over and above the prescribed
+      number. [Footnote: After hearing these masses, curiosity led me to visit
+      the <i>Casa di Ricovero</i>, in order to look at Soldini&rsquo;s will, and there
+      I had the pleasure of recognizing the constantly recurring fact, that
+      beneficent humanity is of all countries and religions. The Casa di
+      Ricovero is an immense edifice dedicated to the shelter and support of the
+      decrepit and helpless of either sex, who are collected there to the number
+      of five hundred. The more modern quarter was erected from a bequest by
+      Soldini; and eternal provision is also made by his will for ninety of the
+      inmates. The Secretary of the Casa went through all the wards and
+      infirmaries with me, and everywhere I saw cleanliness and comfort (and
+      such content as is possible to sickness and old age), without surprise;
+      for I had before seen the Civil Hospital of Venice, and knew something of
+      the perfection of Venetian charities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last we came to the wardrobe, where the clothes of the pensioners are
+      made and kept. Here we were attended by a little, slender, pallid young
+      nun, who exhibited the dresses with a simple pride altogether pathetic.
+      She was a woman still, poor thing, though a nun, and she could not help
+      loving new clothes. They called her Madre, who would never be it except in
+      name and motherly tenderness. When we had seen all, she stood a moment
+      before us, and as one of the coarse woolen lappets of her cape had hidden
+      it, she drew out a heavy crucifix of gold, and placed it in sight, with a
+      heavenly little ostentation, over her heart. Sweet and beautiful vanity!
+      An angel could have done it without harm, but she blushed repentance, and
+      glided away with downcast eyes. Poor little mother!]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As there is so little in St. Mark&rsquo;s of the paltry or revolting character
+      of modern Romanism, one would form too exalted an idea of the dignity of
+      Catholic worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the sincerity and
+      nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown to the Romish faith of these times,
+      are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell upon the
+      present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith honors the
+      superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition in all its
+      proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the Renaissance
+      churches,&mdash;fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming spirit which
+      has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of religion; which has
+      made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has rendered the
+      population ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its friendship to
+      tyranny and its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life of the Church
+      that it may sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of this superstition
+      are the foolish and hideous dolls which people bow to in most of the
+      Venetian temples, and of which the most abominable is in the church of the
+      Carmelites. It represents the Madonna with the Child, elevated breast-high
+      to the worshipers. She is crowned with tinsel and garlanded with paper
+      flowers; she has a blue ribbon about her tightly corseted waist; and she
+      wears an immense spreading hoop. On her painted, silly face of wood, with
+      its staring eyes shadowed by a wig, is figured a pert smile; and people
+      come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs by a chain from her girdle,
+      and utter their prayers to her; while the column near which she sits is
+      hung over with pictures celebrating the miracles she has performed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on most altars of the
+      Virgin, and are no less interesting as works of art than as expressions of
+      hopeless superstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is dressed
+      in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited, is the
+      Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and hopeless
+      sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her interference.
+      You behold a carriage overturned and dragged along the ground by frantic
+      horses, and the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman in the carriage
+      about to be dashed into millions of pieces, when the havoc is instantly
+      arrested by this Madonna who breaks the clouds, leaving them with jagged
+      and shattered edges, like broken panes of glass, and visibly holds back
+      the fashionable lady and gentleman from destruction. It is the fashionable
+      lady and gentleman who have thus recorded their obligation; and it is the
+      mother, doubtless, of the little boy miraculously preserved from death in
+      his fall from the second-floor balcony, who has gratefully caused the
+      miracle to be painted and hung at the Madonna&rsquo;s shrine. Now and then you
+      also find offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in acknowledgment
+      of good crops which the Madonna has made to grow; and again you find rows
+      of silver hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her intercession has
+      caused to be purged. The greatest number of these, at any one shrine, is
+      to be seen in the church of San Nicolò dei Tolentini, where I should think
+      there were three hundred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna della Salute in pestilent
+      times, I do not take it to be very great when the health of the city is
+      good, if I may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in the church of
+      her name: it is true that on the annual holiday commemorative of her
+      interposition to save Venice from the plague, there is an immense
+      concourse of people there; but at other times I found the masses and
+      vespers slenderly attended, and I did not observe a great number of votive
+      offerings in the temple,&mdash;though the great silver lamp placed there
+      by the city, in memory of the Madonna&rsquo;s goodness during the visitation of
+      the cholera in 1849, may be counted, perhaps, as representative of much
+      collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb church, lording it over the
+      noblest breadth of the Grand Canal; and I do not know what it is saves it
+      from being as hateful to the eye as other temples of the Renaissance
+      architecture. But it has certainly a fine effect, with its twin belltowers
+      and single massive dome, its majestic breadth of steps rising from the
+      water&rsquo;s edge, and the many-statued sculpture of its façade. Strangers go
+      there to see the splendor of its high altar (where the melodramatic
+      Madonna, as the centre of a marble group, responds to the prayer of the
+      operatic Venezia, and drives away the haggard, theatrical Pest), and the
+      excellent Titians and the grand Tintoretto in the sacristy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Salute is one of the great show-churches, like that of San Giovanni e
+      Paolo, which the common poverty of imagination has decided to call the
+      Venetian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many famous tombs and
+      monuments. But there is only one Westminster Abbey; and I am so far a
+      believer in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose that vergers
+      are nowhere possible but in England. There would be nothing to say, after
+      Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San Giovanni e
+      Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them; I only wonder that, in speaking of
+      the bad art which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he failed to mention
+      the successful approach to its depraved feeling, made by the single figure
+      sitting on the case of a slender shaft, at the side of the first altar on
+      the right of the main entrance. I suppose this figure typifies Grief, but
+      it really represents a drunken woman, whose drapery has fallen, as if in
+      some vile debauch, to her waist, and who broods, with a horrible, heavy
+      stupor and chopfallen vacancy, on something which she supports with her
+      left hand upon her knee. It is a round of marble, and if you have the
+      daring to peer under the arm of the debauchee, and look at it as she does,
+      you find that it contains the bass-relief of a skull in bronze. Nothing
+      more ghastly and abominable than the whole thing can be conceived, and it
+      seemed to me the fit type of the abandoned Venice which produced it; for
+      one even less Ruskinian than I might have fancied that in the sculptured
+      countenance could be seen the dismay of the pleasure-wasted harlot of the
+      sea when, from time to time, death confronted her amid her revels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People go into the Chapel of the Rosary here to see the painting of
+      Titian, representing The Death of Peter Martyr. Behind it stands a
+      painting of equal size by John Bellini,&mdash;the Madonna, Child, and
+      Saints, of course,&mdash;and it is curious to study in the two pictures
+      those points in which Titian excelled and fell short of his master. The
+      treatment of the sky in the landscape is singularly alike in both, but
+      where the greater painter has gained in breadth and freedom, he has lost
+      in that indefinable charm which belonged chiefly to Bellini, and only to
+      that brief age of transition, of which his genius was the fairest flower
+      and ripest fruit. I have looked again and again at nearly every painting
+      of note in Venice, having a foolish shame to miss a single one, and having
+      also a better wish to learn something of the beautiful from them; but at
+      last I must say, that, while I wondered at the greatness of some, and
+      tried to wonder at the greatness of others, the only paintings which gave
+      me genuine and hearty pleasure were those of Bellini, Carpaccio, and a few
+      others of that school and time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every day we used to pass through the court of the old Augustinian convent
+      adjoining the church of San Stefano. It is a long time since the monks
+      were driven out of their snug hold; and the convent is now the
+      headquarters of the Austrian engineer corps, and the colonnade surrounding
+      the court is become a public thoroughfare. On one wall of this court are
+      remains&mdash;very shadowy remains indeed&mdash;of frescos painted by
+      Pordenone at the period of his fiercest rivalry with Titian; and it is
+      said that Pordenone, while he wrought upon the scenes of scriptural story
+      here represented, wore his sword and buckler, in readiness to repel an
+      attack which he feared from his competitor. The story is very vague, and I
+      hunted it down in divers authorities only to find it grow more and more
+      intangible and uncertain. But it gave a singular relish to our daily walk
+      through the old cloister, and I added, for my own pleasure (and chiefly
+      out of my own fancy, I am afraid, for I can nowhere localize the fable on
+      which I built), that the rivalry between the painters was partly a
+      love-jealousy, and that the disputed object of their passion was that fair
+      Violante, daughter of the elder Palma, who is to be seen in so many
+      pictures painted by her father, and by her lover, Titian. No doubt there
+      are readers will care less for this idleness of mine than for the fact
+      that the hard-headed German monk, Martin Luther, once said mass in the
+      adjoining church of San Stefano, and lodged in the convent, on his way to
+      Rome. The unhappy Francesco Carrara, last Lord of Padua, is buried in this
+      church; but Venetians are chiefly interested there now by the homilies of
+      those fervent preacher-monks, who deliver powerful sermons during Lent.
+      The monks are gifted men, with a most earnest and graceful eloquence, and
+      they attract immense audiences, like popular and eccentric ministers among
+      ourselves. It is a fashion to hear them, and although the atmosphere of
+      the churches in the season of Lent is raw, damp, and most uncomfortable,
+      the Venetians then throng the churches where they preach. After Lent the
+      sermons and church-going cease, and the sanctuaries are once more
+      abandoned to the possession of the priests, droning from the altars to the
+      scattered kneelers on the floor,&mdash;the foul old women and the young
+      girls of the poor, the old-fashioned old gentlemen and devout ladies of
+      the better class, and that singular race of poverty-stricken old men
+      proper to Italian churches, who, having dabbled themselves with holy
+      water, wander forlornly and aimlessly about, and seem to consort with the
+      foreigners looking at the objects of interest. Lounging young fellows of
+      low degree appear with their caps in their hands, long enough to tap
+      themselves upon the breast and nod recognition to the high-altar; and
+      lounging young fellows of high degree step in to glance at the faces of
+      the pretty girls, and then vanish. The droning ends, presently, and the
+      devotees disappear, the last to go being that thin old woman, kneeling
+      before a shrine, with a grease-gray shawl falling from her head to the
+      ground. The sacristan, in his perennial enthusiasm about the great picture
+      of the church, almost treads upon her as he brings the strangers to see
+      it, and she gets meekly up and begs of them in a whispering whimper. The
+      sacristan gradually expels her with the visitors, and at one o&rsquo;clock locks
+      the door and goes home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By chance I have got a fine effect in churches at the five o&rsquo;clock mass in
+      the morning, when the worshipers are nearly all peasants who have come to
+      market, and who are pretty sure, each one, to have a bundle or basket. At
+      this hour the sacristan is heavy with sleep; he dodges uncertainly at the
+      tapers as he lights and extinguishes them; and his manner to the
+      congregation, as he passes through it to the altar, is altogether rasped
+      and nervous. I think it is best to be one&rsquo;s self a little sleepy,&mdash;when
+      the barefooted friar at the altar (if it is in the church of the Scalzi,
+      say) has a habit of getting several centuries back from you, and of saying
+      mass to the patrician ghosts from the tombs under your feet and there is
+      nothing at all impossible in the Renaissance angels and cherubs in marble,
+      floating and fatly tumbling about on the broken arches of the altars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have sometimes been puzzled in Venice to know why churches should keep
+      cats, church-mice being proverbially so poor, and so little capable of
+      sustaining a cat in good condition; yet I have repeatedly found sleek and
+      portly cats in the churches, where they seem to be on terms of perfect
+      understanding with the priests, and to have no quarrel even with the
+      little boys who assist at mass. There is, for instance, a cat in the
+      sacristy of the Frari, which I have often seen in familiar association
+      with the ecclesiastics there, when they came into his room to robe or
+      disrobe, or warm their hands, numb with supplication, at the great brazier
+      in the middle of the floor. I do not think this cat has the slightest
+      interest in the lovely Madonna of Bellini which hangs in the sacristy; but
+      I suspect him of dreadful knowledge concerning the tombs in the church. I
+      have no doubt he has passed through the open door of Canova&rsquo;s monument,
+      and that he sees some coherence and meaning in Titian&rsquo;s; he has been all
+      over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro, and he knows whether the
+      griffins descend from their perches at the midnight hour to bite the naked
+      knees of the ragged black caryatides. This profound and awful animal I
+      take to be a blood relation of the cat in the church of San Giovanni e
+      Paolo, who sleeps like a Christian during divine service, and loves a
+      certain glorious bed on the top of a bench, where the sun strikes upon him
+      through the great painted window, and dapples his tawny coat with lovely
+      purples and crimsons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The church cats are apparently the friends of the sacristans, with whom
+      their amity is maintained probably by entire cession of the spoils of
+      visitors. In these, therefore, they seldom take any interest, merely
+      opening a lazy eye now and then to wink at the sacristans as they drag the
+      deluded strangers from altar to altar, with intense enjoyment of the
+      absurdity, and a wicked satisfaction in the incredible stories rehearsed.
+      I fancy, being Italian cats, they feel something like a national antipathy
+      toward those troops of German tourists, who always seek the
+      Sehenswürdigkeiten in companies of ten or twenty,&mdash;the men wearing
+      their beards, and the women their hoops and hats, to look as much like
+      English people as possible; while their valet marshals them forward with a
+      stream of guttural information, unbroken by a single punctuation point.
+      These wise cats know the real English by their &ldquo;Murrays;&rdquo; and I think they
+      make a shrewd guess at the nationality of us Americans by the speed with
+      which we pass from one thing to another, and by our national ignorance of
+      all languages but English. They must also hear us vaunt the superiority of
+      our own land in unpleasant comparisons, and I do not think they believe
+      us, or like us, for our boastings. I am sure they would say to us, if they
+      could, &ldquo;<i>Quando finirà mai quella guerra? Che sangue! che orrore</i>!&rdquo;
+       [Footnote: &ldquo;When will this war ever be ended? what blood! what horror!&rdquo; I
+      have often heard the question and the comment from many Italians who were
+      not cats.] The French tourist they distinguish by his evident skepticism
+      concerning his own wisdom in quitting Paris for the present purpose; and
+      the traveling Italian, by his attention to his badly dressed, handsome
+      wife, with whom he is now making his wedding trip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have found churches undergoing repairs (as most of them always are in
+      Venice) rather interesting. Under these circumstances, the sacristan is
+      obliged to take you into all sorts of secret places and odd corners, to
+      show you the objects of interest; and you may often get glimpses of
+      pictures which, if not removed from their proper places, it would be
+      impossible to see. The carpenters and masons work most deliberately, as if
+      in a place so set against progress that speedy workmanship would be a kind
+      of impiety. Besides the mechanics, there are always idle priests standing
+      about, and vagabond boys clambering over the scaffolding. In San Giovanni
+      e Paolo I remember we one day saw a small boy appear through an opening in
+      the roof, and descend by means of some hundred feet of dangling rope. The
+      spectacle, which made us ache with fear, delighted his companions so much
+      that their applause was scarcely subdued by the sacred character of the
+      place. As soon as he reached the ground in safety, a gentle, good-natured
+      looking priest took him by the arm and cuffed his ears. It was a scene for
+      a painter.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"></a>
+      CHAPTER XII.<br/>
+      SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Nothing can be fairer to the eye than these &ldquo;summer isles of Eden&rdquo; lying
+      all about Venice, far and near. The water forever trembles and changes,
+      with every change of light, from one rainbow glory to another, as with the
+      restless hues of an opal; and even when the splendid tides recede, and go
+      down with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the empurpled mud of
+      the shallows, all strewn with green, disheveled sea-weed. The lagoons have
+      almost as wide a bound as your vision. On the east and west you can see
+      their borders of sea-shore and main-land; but looking north and south,
+      there seems no end to the charm of their vast, smooth, all-but melancholy
+      expanses. Beyond their southern limit rise the blue Euganean Hills, where
+      Petrarch died; on the north loom the Alps, white with snow. Dotting the
+      stretches of lagoon in every direction lie the islands&mdash;now piles of
+      airy architecture that the water seems to float under and bear upon its
+      breast, now
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;Sunny spots of greenery,&rdquo;
+</p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      with the bell-towers of demolished cloisters shadowily showing above their
+      trees;&mdash;for in the days of the Republic nearly every one of the
+      islands had its monastery and its church. At present the greater number
+      have been fortified by the Austrians, whose sentinel paces the
+      once-peaceful shores, and challenges all passers with his sharp &ldquo;<i>Halt!
+      Wer da</i>!&rdquo; and warns them not to approach too closely. Other islands
+      have been devoted to different utilitarian purposes, and few are able to
+      keep their distant promises of loveliness. One of the more faithful is the
+      island of San Clemente, on which the old convent church is yet standing,
+      empty and forlorn within, but without all draped in glossy ivy. After I
+      had learned to row in the gondolier fashion, I voyaged much in the lagoon
+      with my boat, and often stopped at this church. It has a curious feature
+      in the chapel of the Madonna di Loreto, which is built in the middle of
+      the nave, faced with marble, roofed, and isolated from the walls of the
+      main edifice on all sides. On the back of this there is a bass-relief in
+      bronze, representing the Nativity&mdash;a work much in the spirit of the
+      bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo; and one of the chapels has an
+      exquisite little altar, with gleaming columns of porphyry. There has been
+      no service in the church for many years; and this altar had a strangely
+      pathetic effect, won from the black four-cornered cap of a priest that lay
+      before it, like an offering. I wondered who the priest was that wore it,
+      and why he had left it there, as if he had fled away in haste. I might
+      have thought it looked like the signal of the abdication of a system; the
+      gondolier who was with me took it up and reviled it as representative of
+      <i>birbanti matricolati</i>, who fed upon the poor, and in whose expulsion
+      from that island he rejoiced. But he had little reason to do so, since the
+      last use of the place was for the imprisonment of refractory
+      ecclesiastics. Some of the tombs of the Morosini are in San Clemente&mdash;villanous
+      monuments, with bronze Deaths popping out of apertures, and holding marble
+      scrolls inscribed with undying deeds. Indeed, nearly all the decorations
+      of the poor old church are horrible, and there is one statue in it meant
+      for an angel, with absolutely the most lascivious face I ever saw in
+      marble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The islands near Venice are all small, except the Giudecca (which is
+      properly a part of the city), the Lido, and Murano. The Giudecca, from
+      being anciently the bounds in which certain factious nobles were confined,
+      was later laid out in pleasure-gardens, and built up with summer-palaces.
+      The gardens still remain to some extent; but they are now chiefly turned
+      to practical account in raising vegetables and fruits for the Venetian
+      market, and the palaces have been converted into warehouses and factories.
+      This island produces a variety of beggar, the most truculent and tenacious
+      in all Venice, and it has a convent of lazy Capuchin friars, who are
+      likewise beggars. To them belongs the church of the Redentore, which only
+      the Madonnas of Bellini in the sacristy make worthy to be seen,&mdash;though
+      the island is hardly less famed for this church than for the difficult
+      etymology of its name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the eastern extremity of the Giudecca lies the Island of San Giorgio
+      Maggiore, with Palladio&rsquo;s church of that name. There are some great
+      Tintorettos in the church, and I like the beautiful wood-carvings in the
+      choir. The island has a sad interest from the political prison into which
+      part of the old convent has been perverted; and the next island eastward
+      is the scarcely sadder abode of the mad. Then comes the fair and happy
+      seat of Armenian learning and piety, San Lazzaro, and then the Lido.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Lido is the sea-shore, and thither in more cheerful days the Venetians
+      used to resort in great numbers on certain holidays, called the Mondays of
+      the Lido, to enjoy the sea-breeze and the country scenery, and to lunch
+      upon the flat tombs of the Hebrews, buried there in exile from the
+      consecrated Christian ground. On a summer&rsquo;s day there the sun glares down
+      upon the sand and flat gravestones, and it seems the most desolate place
+      where one&rsquo;s bones might be laid. The Protestants were once also interred
+      on the Lido, but now they rest (apart from the Catholics, however) in the
+      cemetery of San Michele.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The island is long and narrow: it stretches between the lagoons and the
+      sea, with a village at either end, and with bath-houses on the beach,
+      which is everywhere faced with forts. There are some poor little trees
+      there, and grass,&mdash;things which we were thrice a week grateful for,
+      when we went thither to bathe. I do not know whether it will give the
+      place further interest to say, that it was among the tombs of the Hebrews
+      Cooper&rsquo;s ingenious Bravo had the incredible good luck to hide himself from
+      the <i>sbirri</i> of the Republic; or to relate that it was the habit of
+      Lord Byron to gallop up and down the Lido in search of that conspicuous
+      solitude of which the sincere bard was fond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day of the first summer I spent in Venice (three years of Venetian
+      life afterward removed it back into times of the remotest antiquity), a
+      friend and I had the now-incredible enterprise to walk from one end of the
+      Lido to the other,&mdash;from the port of San Nicolò (through which the
+      Bucintoro passed when the Doges went to espouse the Adriatic) to the port
+      of Malamocco, at the southern extremity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We began with that delicious bath which you may have in the Adriatic,
+      where the light surf breaks with a pensive cadence on the soft sand, all
+      strewn with brilliant shells. The Adriatic is the bluest water I have ever
+      seen; and it is an ineffable, lazy delight to lie and watch the fishing
+      sails of purple and yellow dotting its surface, and the greater ships
+      dipping down its utmost rim. It was particularly good to do this after
+      coming out of the water; but our American blood could not brook much
+      repose, and we got up presently, and started on our walk to the little
+      village of Malamocco, some three miles away. The double-headed eagle keeps
+      watch and ward from a continuous line of forts along the shore, and the
+      white-coated sentinels never cease to pace the bastions, night or day.
+      Their vision of the sea must not be interrupted by even so much as the
+      form of a stray passer; and as we went by the forts, we had to descend
+      from the sea-wall, and walk under it, until we got beyond the sentry&rsquo;s
+      beat. The crimson poppies grow everywhere on this sandy little isle, and
+      they fringe the edges of the bastions with their bloom, as if the
+      &ldquo;blood-red blossoms of war&rdquo; had there sprung from the seeds of battle sown
+      in old forgotten fights. But otherwise the forts were not very engaging in
+      appearance. A sentry-box of yellow and black, a sentry, a row of seaward
+      frowning cannon&mdash;there was not much in all this to interest us; and
+      so we walked idly along, and looked either to the city rising from the
+      lagoons on one hand, or the ships going down the sea on the other. In the
+      fields, along the road, were vines and Indian corn; but instead of those
+      effigies of humanity, doubly fearful from their wide unlikeness to any
+      thing human, which we contrive to scare away the birds, the devout
+      peasant-folks had here displayed on poles the instruments of the Passion
+      of the Lord&mdash;the hammer, the cords, the nails&mdash;which at once
+      protected and blessed the fields. But I doubt if even these would save
+      them from the New-World pigs, and certainly the fences here would not turn
+      pork, for they are made of a matting of reeds, woven together, and feebly
+      secured to tremulous posts. The fields were well cultivated, and the vines
+      and garden vegetables looked flourishing; but the corn was spindling, and
+      had, I thought, a homesick look, as if it dreamed vainly of wide ancestral
+      bottom-lands, on the mighty streams that run through the heart of the
+      Great West. The Italians call our corn <i>gran turco</i>, but I knew that
+      it was for the West that it yearned, and not for the East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt there were once finer dwellings than the peasants&rsquo; houses which
+      are now the only habitations on the Lido; and I suspect that a genteel
+      villa must formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we found
+      surmounted by broken statues of Venus and Diana. The poor goddesses were
+      both headless, and some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and they
+      looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering attitudes of the absurd period
+      of art to which they belonged: they extended their mutilated arms toward
+      the sea for pity, but it regarded them not; and we passed before them
+      scoffing at their bad taste, for we were hungry, and it was yet some
+      distance to Malamocco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This dirty little village was the capital of the Venetian islands before
+      King Pepin and his Franks burned it, and the shifting sands of empire
+      gathered solidly about the Rialto in Venice. It is a thousand years since
+      that time, and Malamocco has long been given over to fishermen&rsquo;s families
+      and the soldiers of the forts. We found the latter lounging about the
+      unwholesome streets; and the former seated at their thresholds, engaged in
+      those pursuits of the chase which the use of a fine-tooth comb would
+      undignify to mere slaughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a church at Malamocco, but it was closed, and we could not find
+      the sacristan; so we went to the little restaurant, as the next best
+      place, and demanded something to eat. What had the padrone? He answered
+      pretty much to the same effect as the innkeeper in &ldquo;Don Quixote,&rdquo; who told
+      his guests that they could have any thing that walked on the earth, or
+      swam in the sea, or flew in the air. We would take, then, some fish, or a
+      bit of veal, or some mutton chops. The padrone sweetly shrugged the
+      shoulders of apology. There was nothing of all this, but what would we say
+      to some liver or gizzards of chickens, fried upon the instant and ready
+      the next breath? No, we did not want them; so we compromised on some ham
+      fried in a batter of eggs, and reeking with its own fatness. The truth is,
+      it was a very bad little lunch we made, and nothing redeemed it but the
+      amiability of the smiling padrone and the bustling padrona, who served us
+      as kings and princes. It was a clean hostelry, though, and that was a
+      merit in Malamocco, of which the chief modern virtue is that it cannot
+      hold you long. No doubt it was more interesting in other times. In the
+      days when the Venetians chose it for their capital, it was a walled town,
+      and fortified with towers. It has been more than once inundated by the
+      sea, and it might again be washed out with advantage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the spring, two years after my visit to Malamocco, we people in Casa
+      Falier made a long-intended expedition to the island of Torcello, which is
+      perhaps the most interesting of the islands of the lagoons. We had talked
+      of it all winter, and had acquired enough property there to put up some
+      light Spanish castles on the desolate site of the ancient city, that, so
+      many years ago, sickened of the swamp air and died. A Count from Torcello
+      is the title which Venetian persiflage gives to improbable noblemen; and
+      thus even the pride of the dead Republic of Torcello has passed into
+      matter of scornful jest, as that of the dead Republic of Venice may
+      likewise in its day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we leave the riva of Casa Falier, we pass down the Grand Canal, cross
+      the Basin of St. Mark, and enter one of the narrow canals that intersect
+      the Riva degli Schiavoni, whence we wind and deviate southwestward till we
+      emerge near the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the Fondamenta Nuove.
+      On our way we notice that a tree, hanging over the water from a little
+      garden, is in full leaf, and at Murano we see the tender bloom of peaches
+      and the drifted blossom of cherry-trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we go by the Cemetery of San Michele, Piero the gondolier and Giovanna
+      improve us with a little solemn pleasantry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a small place,&rdquo; says Piero, &ldquo;but there is room enough for all
+      Venice in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is true,&rdquo; assents Giovanna, &ldquo;and here we poor folks become landholders
+      at last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At Murano we stop a moment to look at the old Duomo, and to enjoy its
+      quaint mosaics within, and the fine and graceful spirit of the <i>apsis</i>
+      without. It is very old, this architecture; but the eternal youth of the
+      beautiful belongs to it, and there is scarce a stone fallen from it that I
+      would replace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The manufacture of glass at Murano, of which the origin is so remote, may
+      be said to form the only branch of industry which still flourishes in the
+      lagoons. Muranese beads are exported to all quarters in vast quantities,
+      and the process of making them is one of the things that strangers feel
+      they must see when visiting Venice. The famous mirrors are no longer made,
+      and the glass has deteriorated in quality, as well as in the beauty of the
+      thousand curious forms it took. The test of the old glass, which is now
+      imitated a great deal, is its extreme lightness. I suppose the charming
+      notion that glass was once wrought at Murano of such fineness that it
+      burst into fragments if poison were poured into it, must be fabulous. And
+      yet it would have been an excellent thing in the good old toxicological
+      days of Italy; and people of noble family would have found a sensitive
+      goblet of this sort as sovereign against the arts of venomers as an
+      exclusive diet of boiled eggs. The city of Murano has dwindled from thirty
+      to five thousand in population. It is intersected by a system of canals
+      like Venice, and has a Grand Canal of its own, of as stately breadth as
+      that of the capital. The finer houses are built on this canal; but the
+      beautiful palaces, once occupied in <i>villeggiatura</i> by the noble
+      Venetians, are now inhabited by herds of poor, or converted into
+      glass-works. The famous Cardinal Bembo and other literati made the island
+      their retreat, and beautified it with gardens and fountains. Casa Priuli
+      in that day was, according to Venetian ideas, &ldquo;a terrestrial Paradise,&rdquo;
+       and a proper haunt of &ldquo;nymphs and demi-gods.&rdquo; But the wealth, the
+      learning, and the elegance of former times, which planted &ldquo;groves of
+      Academe&rdquo; at Murano, have passed away, and the fair pleasure-gardens are
+      now weed-grown wastes, or turned into honest cabbage and potato patches.
+      It is a poor, dreary little town, with an inexplicable charm in its decay.
+      The city arms are still displayed upon the public buildings (for Murano
+      was ruled, independently of Venice, by its own council); and the heraldic
+      cock, with a snake in its beak, has yet a lusty and haughty air amid the
+      ruin of the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The way in which the spring made itself felt upon the lagoon was full of
+      curious delight. It was not so early in the season that we should know the
+      spring by the first raw warmth in the air, and there was as yet no
+      assurance of her presence in the growth&mdash;later so luxuriant&mdash;of
+      the coarse grasses of the shallows. But somehow the spring was there,
+      giving us new life with every breath. There were fewer gulls than usual,
+      and those we saw sailed far overhead, debating departure. There was deeper
+      languor in the laziness of the soldiers of finance, as they lounged and
+      slept upon their floating custom houses in every channel of the lagoons;
+      and the hollow voices of the boatmen, yelling to each other as their wont
+      is, had an uncommon tendency to diffuse themselves in echo. Over all, the
+      heavens had put on their summer blue, in promise of that delicious weather
+      which in the lagoons lasts half the year, and which makes every other
+      climate seem niggard of sunshine and azure skies. I know we have beautiful
+      days at home&mdash;days of which the sumptuous splendor used to take my
+      memory with unspeakable longing and regret even in Italy;&mdash;but we do
+      not have, week after week, month after month, that
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;Blue, unclouded weather,&rdquo;
+</p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      which, at Venice, contents all your senses, and makes you exult to be
+      alive with the inarticulate gladness of children, or of the swallows that
+      there all day wheel and dart through the air, and shriek out a delight too
+      intense and precipitate for song.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The island of Torcello is some five miles away from Venice, in the
+      northern lagoon. The city was founded far back in the troubled morning of
+      Christian civilization, by refugees from barbarian invasion, and built
+      with stones quarried from the ruins of old Altinum, over which Attila had
+      passed desolating. During the first ages of its existence Torcello enjoyed
+      the doubtful advantage of protection from the Greek emperors, but fell
+      afterward under the domination of Venice. In the thirteenth century the <i>debris</i>
+      of the river that emptied into the lagoon there began to choke up the
+      wholesome salt canals, and to poison the air with swampy malaria; and in
+      the seventeenth century the city had so dwindled that the Venetian <i>podestà</i>
+      removed his residence from the depopulated island to Burano,&mdash;though
+      the bishopric established immediately after the settlement of the refugees
+      at Torcello continued there till 1814, to the satisfaction, no doubt, of
+      the frogs and mosquitoes that had long inherited the former citizens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that I know little more of the history of Torcello than I found
+      in my guide-book. There I read that the city had once stately civic and
+      religious edifices, and that in the tenth century the Emperor
+      Porphorygenitus called it &ldquo;<i>magnum emporium Torcellanorum</i>.&rdquo; The
+      much-restored cathedral of the seventh century, a little church, a
+      building supposed to have been the public palace, and other edifices so
+      ruinous and so old that their exact use in other days is not now known,
+      are all that remain of the <i>magnum emporium</i>, except some lines of
+      moldering wall that wander along the canals, and through pastures and
+      vineyards, in the last imbecile stages of dilapidation and decay. There is
+      a lofty bell-tower, also, from which, no doubt, the Torcellani used to
+      descry afar off the devouring hordes of the barbarians on the main-land,
+      and prepare for defense. As their city was never actually invaded, I am at
+      a loss to account for the so-called Throne of Attila, which stands in the
+      grass-grown piazza before the cathedral; and I fear that it may really
+      have been after all only the seat which the ancient Tribunes of Torcello
+      occupied on public occasions. It is a stone arm-chair, of a rude
+      stateliness, and though I questioned its authenticity, I went and sat down
+      in it a little while, to give myself the benefit of a doubt in case Attila
+      had really pressed the same seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as our gondola touched the grassy shores at Torcello, Giovanna&rsquo;s
+      children, Beppi and Nina, whom we had brought with us to give a first
+      experience of trees and flowers and mother earth, leaped from the boat and
+      took possession of land and water. By a curious fatality the little girl,
+      who was bred safely amid the hundred canals of Venice, signalized her
+      absence from their perils by presently falling into the only canal in
+      Torcello, whence she was taken dripping, to be confined at a farm-house
+      during the rest of our stay. The children were wild with pleasure, being
+      absolutely new to the country, and ran over the island, plucking bouquets
+      of weeds and flowers by armsful. A rake, borne afield upon the shoulder of
+      a peasant, afterwhile fascinated the Venetian Beppi, and drew him away to
+      study its strange and wonderful uses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The simple inhabitants of Torcello came forth with gifts, or rather
+      bargains, of flowers, to meet their discoverers, and, in a little while,
+      exhausted our soldi. They also attended us in full force when we sat down
+      to lunch,&mdash;the old, the young men and maidens, and the little
+      children, all alike sallow, tattered, and dirty. Under these
+      circumstances, a sense of the idyllic and the patriarchal gave zest to our
+      collation, and moved us to bestow, in a splendid manner, fragments of the
+      feast among the poor Torcellani. Knowing the abstemiousness of Italians
+      everywhere, and seeing the hungry fashion in which the islanders clutched
+      our gifts and devoured them, it was our doubt whether any one of them had
+      ever experienced perfect repletion. I incline to think that a chronic
+      famine gnawed their entrails, and that they never filled their bellies but
+      with draughts of the east wind disdained of Job. The smaller among them
+      even scrambled with the dog for the bones, until a little girl was bitten,
+      when a terrific tumult arose, and the dog was driven home by the whole
+      multitude. The children presently returned. They all had that gift of
+      beauty which Nature seldom denies to the children of their race; but
+      being, as I said, so dirty, their beauty shone forth chiefly from their
+      large soft eyes. They had a very graceful, bashful archness of manner, and
+      they insinuated beggary so winningly, that it would have been impossible
+      for hungry people to deny them. As for us, having lunched, we gave them
+      every thing that remained, and went off to feast our enthusiasm for art
+      and antiquity in the cathedral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, I have not the least intention of describing it. I remember
+      best among its wonders the bearing of certain impenitents in one of the
+      mosaics on the walls, whom the earnest early artist had meant to represent
+      as suffering in the flames of torment. I think, however, I have never seen
+      complacence equal to that of these sinners, unless it was in the
+      countenances of the seven fat kine, which, as represented in the vestibule
+      of St. Mark&rsquo;s, wear an air of the sleepiest and laziest enjoyment, while
+      the seven lean kine, having just come up from the river, devour steaks
+      from their bleeding haunches. There are other mosaics in the Torcello
+      cathedral, especially those in the <i>apsis</i> and in one of the side
+      chapels, which are in a beautiful spirit of art, and form the widest
+      possible contrast to the eighteenth-century high altar, with its insane
+      and ribald angels flying off at the sides, and poising themselves in the
+      rope-dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly persons in the
+      decline of the Renaissance. The choir is peculiarly built, in the form of
+      a half-circle, with seats rising one above another, as in an amphitheatre,
+      and a flight of steps ascending to the bishop&rsquo;s seat above all,&mdash;after
+      the manner of the earliest Christian churches. The partition parapet
+      before the high altar is of almost transparent marble, delicately and
+      quaintly sculptured with peacocks and lions, as the Byzantines loved to
+      carve them; and the capitals of the columns dividing the naves are of
+      infinite richness. Part of the marble pulpit has a curious bass-relief,
+      said to be representative of the worship of Mercury; and indeed the
+      Torcellani owe much of the beauty of their Duomo to unrequited antiquity.
+      (They came to be robbed in their turn: for the opulence of their churches
+      was so great that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the severest
+      penalties had to be enacted against those who stole from them. No one will
+      be surprised to learn that the clergy themselves participated in these
+      spoliations; but I believe no ecclesiastic was ever lashed in the piazza,
+      or deprived of an eye or a hand for his offense.) The Duomo has the
+      peculiar Catholic interest, and the horrible fascination, of a dead
+      saint&rsquo;s mortal part in a glass case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An arcade runs along the facade of the cathedral, and around the side and
+      front of the adjoining church of Santa Fosca, which is likewise very old.
+      But we found nothing in it but a dusty, cadaverous stench, and so we came
+      away and ascended the campanile. From the top of this you have a view of
+      the lagoon, in all its iridescent hues, and of the heaven-blue sea. Here,
+      looking toward the main-land, I would have been glad to experience the
+      feelings of the Torcellani of old, as they descried the smoking advance of
+      Huns or Vandals. But the finer emotions are like gifted children, and are
+      seldom equal to occasions. I am ashamed to say that mine got no further
+      than Castle Bluebeard, with Lady Bluebeard&rsquo;s sister looking out for her
+      brothers, and tearfully responding to Lady B.&lsquo;s repeated and agonized
+      entreaty, &ldquo;O sister, do you see them yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old woman who had opened the door of the campanile was surprised into
+      hospitality by the sum of money we gave her, and took us through her house
+      (which was certainly very neat and clean) into her garden, where she
+      explained the nature of many familiar trees and shrubs to us poor
+      Venetians.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went back home over the twilight lagoon, and Giovanna expressed the
+      general feeling when she said: &ldquo;<i>Torsello xe beo&mdash;no si pol negar&mdash;la
+      campagna xe bea; ma, benedetta la mia Venezia!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (The country is beautiful&mdash;it can&rsquo;t be denied&mdash;Torcello is
+      beautiful; but blessed be my Venice!)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The panorama of the southern lagoon is best seen in a voyage to Chioggia,
+      or Ciozza, the quaint and historic little city that lies twenty miles away
+      from Venice, at one of the ports of the harbor. The Giant Sea-wall, built
+      there by the Republic in her decline, is a work of Roman grandeur, which
+      impresses you more deeply than any other monument of the past with a sense
+      of her former industrial and commercial greatness. Strips of village
+      border the narrow Littorale all the way to Chioggia, and on the right lie
+      the islands of the lagoon. Chioggia itself is hardly more than a village,&mdash;a
+      Venice in miniature, like Murano, with canals and boats and bridges. But
+      here the character of life is more amphibious than in brine-bound Venice;
+      and though there is no horse to be seen in the central streets of
+      Chioggia, peasants&rsquo; teams penetrate her borders by means of a long bridge
+      from the main-land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course Chioggia has passed through the customary vicissitudes of
+      Italian towns, and has been depopulated at divers times by pestilence,
+      famine, and war. It suffered cruelly in the war with the Genoese in 1380,
+      when it was taken by those enemies of St. Mark; and its people were so
+      wasted by the struggle that the Venetians, on regaining it, were obliged
+      to invite immigration to repopulate its emptiness. I do not know how great
+      comfort the Chiozzotti of that unhappy day took in the fact that some of
+      the earliest experiments with cannon were made in the contest that
+      destroyed them, but I can hardly offer them less tribute than to mention
+      it here. At present the place is peopled almost entirely by sailors and
+      fishermen, whose wives are more famous for their beauty than their
+      amiability. Goldoni&rsquo;s &ldquo;Baruffe Chiozzotte&rdquo; is an amusing and vivid picture
+      of the daily battles which the high-spirited ladies of the city fought in
+      the dramatist&rsquo;s [Footnote: Goldoni&rsquo;s family went from Venice to Chioggia
+      when the dramatist was very young. The description of his life there form
+      some of the most interesting chapters of his Memoirs.] time, and which are
+      said to be of frequent occurrence at this day. The Chiozzotte are the only
+      women of this part of Italy who still preserve a semblance of national
+      costume; and this remnant of more picturesque times consists merely of a
+      skirt of white, which, being open in front, is drawn from the waist over
+      the head and gathered in the hand under the chin, giving to the flashing
+      black eyes and swarthy features of the youthful wearer a look of very
+      dangerous slyness and cunning. The dialect of the Chiozzotti is said to be
+      that of the early Venetians, with an admixture of Greek, and it is
+      infinitely more sweet and musical than the dialect now spoken in Venice.
+      &ldquo;Whether derived,&rdquo; says the author of the &ldquo;Fiore di Venezia,&rdquo; alluding to
+      the speech of these peculiar people, &ldquo;from those who first settled these
+      shores, or resulting from other physical and moral causes, it is certain
+      that the tone of the voice is here more varied and powerful: the mouth is
+      thrown wide open in speaking; a passion, a lament mingles with laughter
+      itself, and there is a continual <i>ritornello</i> of words previously
+      spoken. But this speech is full of energy; whoever would study brief and
+      strong modes of expression should come here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chioggia was once the residence of noble and distinguished persons, among
+      whom was the painter Rosalba Carrera, famed throughout Europe for her
+      crayon miniatures; and the place produced in the sixteenth century the
+      great maestro Giuseppe Zarlino, &ldquo;who passes,&rdquo; says Cantù, &ldquo;for the
+      restorer of modern music,&rdquo; and &ldquo;whose &lsquo;Orfeo&rsquo; heralded the invention of
+      the musical drama.&rdquo; This composer claimed for his birthplace the doubtful
+      honor of the institution of the order of the Capuchins, which he declared
+      to have been founded by Fra Paolo (Giovanni Sambi) of Chioggia. There is
+      not much now to see in poor little Chioggia except its common people, who,
+      after a few minutes&rsquo; contemplation, can hardly interest any one but the
+      artist. There are no dwellings in the town which approach palatial
+      grandeur, and nothing in the Renaissance churches to claim attention,
+      unless it be an attributive Bellini in one of them. Yet if you have the
+      courage to climb the bell-tower of the cathedral, you get from its summit
+      the loveliest imaginable view of many-purpled lagoon and silver-flashing
+      sea; and if you are sufficiently acquainted with Italy and Italians to
+      observe a curious fact, and care to study the subject, you may note the
+      great difference between the inhabitants of Chioggia and those of
+      Palestrina,&mdash;an island divided from Chioggia by a half mile of
+      lagoon, and by quite different costume, type of face, and accent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just between Chioggia and the sea lies the lazy town of Sottomarina, and I
+      should say that the population of Sottomarina chiefly spent its time in
+      lounging up and down the Sea-wall; while that of Chioggia, when not
+      professionally engaged with the net, gave its leisure to playing <i>mora</i>
+      [Footnote: Mora is the game which the Italians play with their fingers,
+      one throwing out two, three, or four fingers, as the case may be, and
+      calling the number at the same instant. If (so I understood the game) the
+      player mistakes the number of fingers he throws out, he loses; if he hits
+      the number with both voice and fingers he wins. It is played with
+      tempestuous interest, and is altogether fiendish in appearance.] in the
+      shade, or pitilessly pursuing strangers, and offering them boats. For my
+      own part, I refused the subtlest advances of this kind which were made me
+      in Chiozzotto, but fell a helpless prey to a boatman who addressed me in
+      some words of wonderful English, and then rowed me to the Sea-wall at
+      about thrice the usual fare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These primitive people are bent, in their out-of-the-world, remote way,
+      upon fleecing the passing stranger quite as earnestly as other Italians,
+      and they naïvely improve every occasion for plunder. As we passed up the
+      shady side of their wide street, we came upon a plump little blond boy,
+      lying asleep on the stones, with his head upon his arm; and as no one was
+      near, the artist of our party stopped to sketch the sleeper. Atmospheric
+      knowledge of the fact spread rapidly, and in a few minutes we were the
+      centre of a general assembly of the people of Chioggia, who discussed us,
+      and the artist&rsquo;s treatment of her subject, in open congress. They handed
+      round the airy chaff as usual, but were very orderly and respectful,
+      nevertheless,&mdash;one father of the place quelling every tendency to
+      tumult by kicking his next neighbor, who passed on the penalty till, by
+      this simple and ingenious process, the guilty cause of the trouble was
+      infallibly reached and kicked at last. I placed a number of soldi in the
+      boy&rsquo;s hand, to the visible sensation of the crowd, and then we moved away
+      and left him, heading, as we went, a procession of Chiozzotti, who could
+      not make up their minds to relinquish us till we took refuge in a church.
+      When we came out the procession had disappeared, but all round the church
+      door, and picturesquely scattered upon the pavement in every direction,
+      lay boys asleep, with their heads upon their arms. As we passed laughing
+      through the midst of these slumberers, they rose and followed us with
+      cries of &ldquo;<i>Mi tiri zu! Mi tiri zu!</i>&rdquo; (Take me down! Take me down!)
+      They ran ahead, and fell asleep again in our path, and round every corner
+      we came upon a sleeping boy; and, indeed, we never got out of that
+      atmosphere of slumber till we returned to the steamer for Venice, when
+      Chioggia shook off her drowsy stupor, and began to tempt us to throw soldi
+      into the water, to be dived for by her awakened children.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIII.<br/>
+      THE ARMENIANS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Among the pleasantest friends we made in Venice were the monks of the
+      Armenian Convent, whose cloistral buildings rise from the glassy lagoon,
+      upon the south of the city, near a mile away. This bulk
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;Of mellow brick-work on an isle of bowers&rdquo;
+</p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      is walled in with solid masonry from the sea, and encloses a garden-court,
+      filled with all beautiful flowers, and with the memorable trees of the
+      East; while another garden encompasses the monastery itself, and yields
+      those honest fruits and vegetables which supply the wants of the
+      well-cared-for mortal part of the good brothers. The island is called San
+      Lazzaro, and the convent was established in 1717 by a learned and devoted
+      Armenian priest named Mechithar, from whom the present order of monks is
+      called Mechitharist. He was the first who formed the idea of educating a
+      class of priests to act as missionaries among the Armenian nation in the
+      East, and infuse into its civil and religious decay the life of European
+      piety and learning. He founded at Sebaste, therefore, a religious order of
+      which the seat was presently removed to Constantinople, where the friars
+      met with so much persecution from Armenian heterodoxy that it was again
+      transferred, and fixed at Modone in Morea. That territory falling into the
+      hands of the Turks, the Mechitharists fled with their leader to Venice,
+      where the Republic bestowed upon them a waste and desolate island, which
+      had formerly been used as a place of refuge for lepers; and the monks made
+      it the loveliest spot in all the lagoons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little island has such a celebrity in travel and romance, that I feel
+      my pen catching in the tatters of a threadbare theme. And yet I love the
+      place and its people so well, that I could scarcely pass it without
+      mention. Every tourist who spends a week in Venice goes to see the
+      convent, and every one is charmed with it and the courteous welcome of the
+      fathers. Its best interest is the intrinsic interest attaching to it as a
+      seat of Armenian culture; but persons who relish the cheap sentimentalism
+      of Byron&rsquo;s life, find the convent all the more entertaining from the fact
+      that he did the Armenian language the favor to study it there, a little.
+      The monks show his autograph, together with those of other distinguished
+      persons, and the Armenian Bible which he used to read. I understood from
+      one of the friars, Padre Giacomo Issaverdanz, that the brothers knew
+      little or nothing of Byron&rsquo;s celebrity as a poet while he studied with
+      them, and that his proficiency as an Armenian scholar was not such as to
+      win high regard from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think most readers who have visited the convent will recall the pleasant
+      face and manners of the young father mentioned, who shows the place to
+      English-speaking travelers, and will care to know that Padre Giacomo was
+      born at Smyrna, and dwelt there in the family of an English lady, till he
+      came to Venice, and entered on his monastic life at San Lazzaro.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came one morning to breakfast with us, bringing with him Padre Alessio,
+      a teacher in the Armenian College in the city. As for the latter, it was
+      not without a certain shock that I heard Mesopotamia mentioned as his
+      birthplace, having somehow in childhood learned to regard that formidable
+      name as little better than a kind of profane swearing. But I soon came to
+      know Padre Alessio apart from his birthplace, and to find him very
+      interesting as a scholar and an artist. He threw a little grace of poetry
+      around our simple feast, by repeating some Armenian verses,&mdash;grace
+      all the more ethereal from our entire ignorance of what the verses meant.
+      Our breakfast-table talk wrought to friendship the acquaintance made some
+      time before, and the next morning we received the photograph of Padre
+      Giacomo, and the compliments of the Orient, in a heaped basket of ripe and
+      luscious figs from the garden of the Convent San Lazzaro. When, in turn,
+      we went to visit him at the convent, we had experience of a more curious
+      oriental hospitality. Refreshments were offered to us as to friends, and
+      we lunched fairily upon little dishes of rose leaves, delicately
+      preserved, with all their fragrance, in a &ldquo;lucent sirup.&rdquo; It seemed that
+      this was a common conserve in the East; but we could hardly divest
+      ourselves of the notion of sacrilege, as we thus fed upon the very most
+      luxurious sweetness and perfume of the soul of summer. Pleasant talk
+      accompanied the dainty repast,&mdash;Padre Giacomo recounting for us some
+      of his adventures with the people whom he had to show about the convent,
+      and of whom many were disappointed at not finding a gallery or museum, and
+      went away in extreme disgust; and relating with a sly, sarcastic relish
+      that blent curiously with his sweetness and gentleness of spirit, how some
+      English people once came with the notion that Lord Byron was an Armenian;
+      how an unhappy French gentleman, who had been robbed in Southern Italy,
+      would not be parted a moment from a huge bludgeon which he carried in his
+      hand, and (probably disordered by his troubles) could hardly be persuaded
+      from attacking the mummy which is in one of the halls; how a sharp,
+      bustling, go-ahead Yankee rushed in one morning, rubbing his hands, and
+      demanding, &ldquo;Show me all you can in five minutes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As a seat of learning, San Lazzaro is famed throughout the Armenian world,
+      and gathers under its roof the best scholars and poets of that nation. In
+      the printing-office of the convent books are printed in some thirty
+      different languages; and a number of the fathers employ themselves
+      constantly in works of translation. The most distinguished of the Armenian
+      literati now living at San Lazzaro is the Reverend Father Gomidas
+      Pakraduni, who has published an Armenian version of &ldquo;Paradise Lost,&rdquo; and
+      whose great labor the translation of Homer, has been recently issued from
+      the convent press. He was born at Constantinople of an ancient and
+      illustrious family, and took religious orders at San Lazzaro, where he was
+      educated, and where for twenty-five years after his consecration he held
+      the professorship of his native tongue. He devoted himself especially to
+      the culture of the ancient Armenian, and developed it for the expression
+      of modern ideas, he made exhaustive study of the vast collection of old
+      manuscripts at San Lazzaro, and then went to Paris in pursuance of his
+      purpose, and acquainted himself with all the treasures of Armenian
+      learning in the Bibliothèque Royale. He became the first scholar of the
+      age in his national language, and acquired at the same time a profound
+      knowledge of Latin and Greek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to Constantinople, Father Pakraduni, whose fame had preceded
+      him, took up his residence in the family of a noble Armenian, high in the
+      service of the Turkish government; and while assuming the care of
+      educating his friend&rsquo;s children, began those labors of translation which
+      have since so largely employed him. He made an Armenian version of Pindar,
+      and wrote a work on Rhetoric, both of which were destroyed by fire while
+      yet in the manuscript. He labored, meanwhile, on his translation of the
+      Iliad,&mdash;a youthful purpose which he did not see fulfilled till the
+      year 1860, when he had already touched the Psalmist&rsquo;s limit of life. In
+      this translation he revived with admirable success an ancient species of
+      Armenian verse, which bears, in flexibility and strength, comparison with
+      the original Greek. Another of his great labors was the production of an
+      Armenian Grammar, in which he reduced to rule and order the numerous forms
+      of his native tongue, never before presented by one work in all its
+      eastern variety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Padre Giacomo, to whose great kindness I am indebted for a biographic and
+      critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by
+      that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises,
+      profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem
+      perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and the
+      Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began his work anew, and after eight
+      years gave his epic of twenty books and twenty-two thousand verses to the
+      press. The hero of the poem is Haïk, the first Armenian patriarch after
+      the flood, and the founder of a kingly dynasty. Nimrod, the great hunter,
+      drunk with his victories, declares himself a god, and ordains his own
+      worship throughout the Orient. Haïk refuses to obey the commands of the
+      tyrant, takes up arms against him, and finally kills him in battle. &ldquo;In
+      the style of this poem,&rdquo; writes Padre Giacomo, &ldquo;it is hard to tell whether
+      to admire most its richness, its energy, its sweetness, its melancholy,
+      its freedom, its dignity, or its harmony, for it has all these virtues in
+      turn. The descriptive parts are depicted with the faithfulest pencil: the
+      battle scenes can only be matched in the Iliad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Pakraduni returned, after twenty-five years&rsquo; sojourn at
+      Constantinople, to publish his epic at San Lazzaro, where he still lives,
+      a tranquil, gentle old man, with a patriarchal beauty and goodness of
+      face. In 1861 he printed his translation of Milton, with a dedication to
+      Queen Victoria. His other works bear witness to the genuineness of his
+      inspiration and piety, and the diligence of his study: they are poems,
+      poetic translations from the Italian, religious essays, and grammatical
+      treatises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, the existence of all the friars at San Lazzaro is one of close and
+      earnest study; and life grows so fond of these quiet monks that it will
+      hardly part with them at last. One of them is ninety-five years old, and,
+      until 1863, there was a lay-brother among them whose years numbered a
+      hundred and eight, and who died of old age, on the 17th of September,
+      after passing fifty-eight years at San Lazzaro. From biographic memoranda
+      furnished me by Padre Giacomo, I learn that the name of this patriarch was
+      George Karabagiak, and that he was a native of Kutaieh in Asia Minor. He
+      was for a long time the disciple of Dèdè Vartabied, a renowned preacher of
+      the Armenian faith, and he afterward taught the doctrines of his master in
+      the Armenian schools. Failing in his desire to enter upon the sacerdotal
+      life at Constantinople, he procured his admission as lay-brother at San
+      Lazzaro, where all his remaining days were spent. He was but little
+      learned; but he had great passion for poetry, and he was the author of
+      some thirty small works on different subjects. During the course of his
+      long and diligent life, which was chiefly spent in learning and teaching,
+      he may be said to have hardly known a day&rsquo;s sickness. And at last he died
+      of no perceptible disorder. The years tired him to death. He had a
+      trifling illness in August, and as he convalesced, he grew impatient of
+      the tenacious life which held him to earth. Slowly pacing up and down the
+      corridors of the convent, he used to crave the prayers of the brothers
+      whom he met, beseeching them to intercede with Heaven that he might be
+      suffered to die. One day he said to the archbishop, &ldquo;I fear that God has
+      abandoned me, and I shall live.&rdquo; Only a little while before his death he
+      wrote some verses, as Padre Giacomo&rsquo;s memorandum witnesses, &ldquo;with a firm
+      and steady hand,&rdquo; and the manner of his death was this,&mdash;as recorded
+      in the grave and simple words of my friend&rsquo;s note:&mdash;&ldquo;Finally, on the
+      17th of September, very early in the morning, a brother entering his
+      chamber, asked him how he was. &lsquo;Well,&rsquo; he replied, turning his face to the
+      wall, and spoke no more. He had passed to a better life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems to me there is a pathos in the close of this old man&rsquo;s life,&mdash;which
+      I hope has not been lost by my way of describing it,&mdash;and there is
+      certainly a moral. I have read of an unlucky sage who discovered the
+      Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renewing his existence, at last
+      voluntarily resigned himself to death, because he had exhausted all that
+      life had to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew all its vicissitudes
+      but the very last. Brother Karabagiak seems to have had no humor to take
+      even a second ease of life. It is perhaps as well that most men die before
+      reaching the over-ripeness of a hundred and eight years; and, doubtless,
+      with all our human willfulness and ignorance, we would readily consent, if
+      we could fix the time, to go sooner&mdash;say, at a hundred and seven
+      years, friends?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the Convent of San Lazzaro, where Armenian boys from all parts of
+      the East are educated for the priesthood, the nation has a college in the
+      city in which boys intended for secular careers receive their schooling.
+      The Palazzo Zenobia is devoted to the use of this college, where, besides
+      room for study, the boys have abundant space and apparatus for gymnastics,
+      and ample grounds for gardening. We once passed a pleasant summer evening
+      there, strolling through the fragrant alleys of the garden, in talk with
+      the father-professors, and looking on at the gymnastic feats of the boys;
+      and when the annual exhibition of the school took place in the fall, we
+      were invited to be present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room appointed for the exhibition was the great hall of the palace,
+      which in other days had evidently been a ball-room. The ceiling was
+      frescoed in the manner of the last century, with Cupids and Venuses, Vices
+      and Virtues, fruits and fiddles, dwarfs and blackamoors; and the painted
+      faces looked down on a scene of as curious interest as ever the
+      extravagant loves and graces of Tiepolo might hope to see, when the boys
+      of the college, after assisting at <i>Te Deum</i> in the chapel, entered
+      the room, and took their places.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the head of the hall sat the archbishop in his dark robes, with his
+      heavy gold chain about his neck&mdash;a figure and a countenance in all
+      things spiritual, gracious, and reverend. There is small difference, I
+      believe, between the creeds of the Armenians and the Roman Catholics, but
+      a very great disparity in the looks of the two priesthoods, which is all
+      in favor of the former. The Armenian wears his beard, and the Latin shaves&mdash;which
+      may have a great deal to do with the holiness of appearance. Perhaps,
+      also, the gentle and mild nature of the oriental yields more sweetly and
+      entirely to the self-denials of the ecclesiastical vocation, and thus wins
+      a fairer grace from them. At any rate, I have not seen any thing but
+      content and calm in the visages of the Armenian fathers, among whom the
+      priest-face, as a type, does not exist, though it would mark the Romish
+      ecclesiastic in whatever dress he wore. There is, moreover, a look of such
+      entire confidence and unworldly sincerity in their eyes, that I could not
+      help thinking, as I turned from the portly young fathers to the
+      dark-faced, grave, old-fashioned school-boys, that an exchange of beard
+      only was needed to effect an exchange of character between those youthful
+      elders and their pupils. The gray-haired archbishop is a tall and slender
+      man; but nearly all the fathers take kindly to curves and circles, and
+      glancing down a row of these amiable priests I could scarcely repress a
+      smile at the constant recurrence of the line of beauty in their
+      well-rounded persons.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0246}.jpg" alt="{0246}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0246}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      On the right and left of the archbishop were the few invited guests, and
+      at the other end of the saloon sat one of the fathers, the plump key-stone
+      of an arch of comfortable young students expanding toward us. Most of the
+      boys are from Turkey (the Armenians of Venice, though acknowledging the
+      Pope as their spiritual head, are the subjects of the Sultan), others are
+      of Asiatic birth, and two are Egyptians.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the last, I think the Sphinx and the Pyramid could hardly have
+      impressed me more than their dark faces, that seemed to look vaguely on
+      our modern world from the remote twilights of old, and in their very
+      infancy to be reverend through the antiquity of their race. The mother of
+      these boys&mdash;a black-eyed, olive-cheeked lady, very handsome and
+      stylish&mdash;was present with their younger brother. I hardly know
+      whether to be ashamed of having been awed by hearing of the little
+      Egyptian that his native tongue was Arabic, and that he spoke nothing more
+      occidental than Turkish. But, indeed, was it wholly absurd to offer a
+      tacit homage to this favored boy, who must know the &ldquo;Arabian Nights&rdquo; in
+      the original?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The exercises began with a theme in Armenian&mdash;a language which, but
+      for its English abundance of sibilants, and a certain German rhythm, was
+      wholly outlandish to our ears. Themes in Italian, German, and French
+      succeeded, and then came one in English. We afterward had speech with the
+      author of this essay, who expressed the liveliest passion for English, in
+      the philosophy and poetry of which it seemed he particularly delighted. He
+      told us that he was a Constantinopolitan, and that in six months more he
+      would complete his collegiate course, when he would return to his native
+      city, and take employment in the service of the Turkish Government. Many
+      others of the Armenian students here also find this career open to them in
+      the East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The literary exercises closed with another essay in Armenian; and then the
+      archbishop delivered, very gracefully and impressively, an address to the
+      boys. After this, the distribution of the premiums&mdash;medals of silver
+      and bronze, and books&mdash;took place at the desk of the archbishop. Each
+      boy, as he advanced to receive his premium, knelt and touched the hand of
+      the priest with his lips and forehead,&mdash;a quaint and pleasing
+      ceremony which had preceded and followed the reading of all the themes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The social greetings and congratulations that now took place ended an
+      entertainment throughout which every body was pleased, and the goodnatured
+      fathers seemed to be moved with a delight no less hearty than that of the
+      boys themselves. Indeed, the ground of affection and confidence on which
+      the lads and their teachers seemed to meet, was something very novel and
+      attractive. We shook hands with our smiling friends among the padri, took
+      leave of the archbishop, and then visited the studio of Padre Alessio, who
+      had just finished a faithful and spirited portrait of monsignore. Adieux
+      to the artist and to Padre Giacomo brought our visit to an end; and so,
+      from that scene of oriental learning, simplicity, and kindliness, we
+      walked into our western life once more, and resumed our citizenship and
+      burden in the Venetian world&mdash;out of the waters of which, like a
+      hydra or other water beast, a bathing boy instantly issued and begged of
+      us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few days later our good Armenians went to pass a month on the main-land
+      near Padua, where they have comfortable possessions. Peace followed them,
+      and they came back as plump as they went.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIV.<br/>
+      THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As I think it extremely questionable whether I could get through a chapter
+      on this subject without some feeble pleasantry about Shylock, and whether,
+      if I did, the reader would be at all satisfied that I had treated the
+      matter fully and fairly, I say at the beginning that Shylock is dead; that
+      if he lived, Antonio would hardly spit upon his gorgeous pantaloons or his
+      Parisian coat, as he met him on the Rialto; that he would far rather call
+      out to him, &ldquo;<i>Ció Shylock! Bon dí! Go piaser vederla;</i>&rdquo; [Footnote:
+      &ldquo;Shylock, old fellow, good-day. Glad to see you.&rdquo;] that if Shylock by any
+      chance entrapped Antonio into a foolish promise to pay him a pound of his
+      flesh on certain conditions, the honest commissary of police before whom
+      they brought their affair would dismiss them both to the madhouse at San
+      Servolo. In a word, the present social relations of Jew and Christian in
+      this city render the &ldquo;Merchant of Venice&rdquo; quite impossible; and the
+      reader, though he will find the Ghetto sufficiently noisome and dirty,
+      will not find an oppressed people there, nor be edified by any of those
+      insults or beatings which it was once a large share of Christian duty to
+      inflict upon the enemies of our faith. The Catholic Venetian certainly
+      understands that his Jewish fellow-citizen is destined to some very
+      unpleasant experiences in the next world, but <i>Corpo di Bacco</i>! that
+      is no reason why he should not be friends with him in this. He meets him
+      daily on exchange and at the Casino, and he partakes of the hospitality of
+      his conversazioni. If he still despises him&mdash;and I think he does, a
+      little&mdash;he keeps his contempt to himself, for the Jew is gathering
+      into his own hands great part of the trade of the city, and has the power
+      that belongs to wealth. He is educated, liberal, and enlightened, and the
+      last great name in Venetian literature is that of the Jewish historian of
+      the Republic, Romanin. The Jew&rsquo;s political sympathies are invariably
+      patriotic, and he calls himself, not Ebreo, but Veneziano. He lives, when
+      rich, in a palace or a fine house on the Grand Canal, and he furnishes and
+      lets many others (I must say at rates which savor of the loan secured by
+      the pound of flesh) in which he does not live. The famous and beautiful
+      Ca&rsquo; Doro now belongs to a Jewish family; and an Israelite, the most
+      distinguished physician in Venice, occupies the <i>appartamento signorile</i>
+      in the palace of the famous Cardinal Bembo. The Jew is a physician, a
+      banker, a manufacturer, a merchant; and he makes himself respected for his
+      intelligence and his probity,&mdash;which perhaps does not infringe more
+      than that of Italian Catholics. He dresses well,&mdash;with that
+      indefinable difference, however, which distinguishes him in every thing
+      from a Christian,&mdash;and his wife and daughter are fashionable and
+      stylish, They are sometimes, also, very pretty; and I have seen one Jewish
+      lady who might have stepped out of the sacred page, down from the
+      patriarchal age, and been known for Rebecca, with her oriental grace, and
+      delicate, sensitive, high-bred look and bearing&mdash;no more western and
+      modern than a lily of Palestine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is to the Ghetto I want to take you now (by the way we went one
+      sunny day late last fall), that I may show you something of the Jewish
+      past, which has survived to the nineteenth century in much of the
+      discomfort and rank savor of the dark ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the fifteenth century all the riches of the Orient had been poured into
+      the lap of Venice, and a spirit of reckless profusion took possession of
+      her citizens. The money, hastily and easily amassed, went as rapidly as it
+      came. It went chiefly for dress, in which the Venetian still indulges very
+      often to the stint of his stomach; and the ladies of that bright-colored,
+      showy day bore fortunes on their delicate persons in the shape of costly
+      vestments of scarlet, black, green, white, maroon, or violet, covered with
+      gems, glittering with silver buttons, and ringing with silver bells. The
+      fine gentlemen of the period were not behind them in extravagance; and the
+      priests were peculiarly luxurious in dress, wearing gay silken robes, with
+      cowls of fur, and girdles of gold and silver. Sumptuary laws were vainly
+      passed to repress the general license, and fortunes were wasted, and
+      wealthy families reduced to beggary. [Footnote: Galliciolli, <i>Memorie
+      Venete</i>.] At this time, when so many worthy gentlemen and ladies had
+      need of the Uncle to whom hard-pressed nephews fly to pledge the wrecks of
+      prosperity, there was yet no Monte di Pietà, and the demand for
+      pawnbrokers becoming imperative, the Republic was obliged to recall the
+      Hebrews from the exile into which they had been driven some time before,
+      that they might set up pawnshops and succor necessity. They came back,
+      however, only for a limited time, and were obliged to wear a badge of
+      yellow color upon the breast, to distinguish them from the Christians, and
+      later a yellow cap, then a red hat, and then a hat of oil-cloth. They
+      could not acquire houses or lands in Venice, nor practice any trade, nor
+      exercise any noble art but medicine. They were assigned a dwelling-place
+      in the vilest and unhealthiest part of the city, and their quarter was
+      called Ghetto, from the Hebrew <i>nghedah</i>, a congregation. [Footnote:
+      Mutinelli.] They were obliged to pay their landlords a third more rent
+      than Christians paid; the Ghetto was walled in, and its gates were kept by
+      Christian guards, who every day opened them at dawn and closed them at
+      dark, and who were paid by the Jews. They were not allowed to issue at all
+      from the Ghetto on holidays; and two barges, with armed men, watched over
+      them night and day, while a special magistracy had charge of their
+      affairs. Their synagogues were built at Mestre, on the main-land; and
+      their dead were buried in the sand upon the seashore, whither, on the
+      Mondays of September, the baser sort of Venetians went to make merry, and
+      drunken men and women danced above their desecrated tombs. These unhappy
+      people were forced also to pay tribute to the state at first every third
+      year, then every fifth year, and then every tenth year, the privilege of
+      residence being ingeniously renewed to them at these periods for a round
+      sum; but, in spite of all, they flourished upon the waste and wickedness
+      of their oppressors, waxed rich as these waxed poor, and were not again
+      expelled from the city. [Footnote: <i>Del Commercia del Veneziani</i>.
+      Mutinelli.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There never was any attempt to disturb the Hebrews by violence, except on
+      one occasion, about the close of the fifteenth century, when a tumult was
+      raised against them for child-murder. This, however, was promptly quelled
+      by the Republic before any harm was done them; and they dwelt peacefully
+      in their Ghetto till the lofty gates of their prison caught the sunlight
+      of modern civilization, and crumbled beneath it. Then many of the Jews
+      came forth and fixed their habitations in different parts of the city, but
+      many others clung to the spot where their temples still remain, and which
+      was hallowed by long suffering, and soaked with the blood of innumerable
+      generations of geese. So, although you find Jews everywhere in Venice, you
+      never find a Christian in the Ghetto, which is held to this day by a large
+      Hebrew population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had not started purposely to see the Ghetto, and for this reason it had
+      that purely incidental relish, which is the keenest possible savor of the
+      object of interest. We were on an expedition to find Sior Antonio Rioba,
+      who has been, from time immemorial, the means of ponderous practical jokes
+      in Venice. Sior Antonio is a rough-hewn statue set in the corner of an
+      ordinary grocery, near the Ghetto. He has a pack on his back and a staff
+      in his hand; his face is painted, and is habitually dishonored with dirt
+      thrown upon it by boys. On the wall near him is painted a bell-pull, with
+      the legend, <i>Sior Antonio Rioba</i>. Rustics, raw apprentices, and
+      honest Germans new to the city, are furnished with packages to be carried
+      to Sior Antonio Rioba, who is very hard to find, and not able to receive
+      the messages when found, though there is always a crowd of loafers near to
+      receive the unlucky simpleton who brings them. <i>&ldquo;E poi, che commedia
+      vederli arrabiarsi! Che ridere</i>!&rdquo; That is the Venetian notion of fun,
+      and no doubt the scene is amusing. I was curious to see Sior Antonio,
+      because a comic journal bearing his name had been published during the
+      time of the Republic of 1848, and from the fact that he was then a sort of
+      Venetian Pasquino. But I question now if he was worth seeing, except as
+      something that brought me into the neighborhood of the Ghetto, and
+      suggested to me the idea of visiting that quarter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we left him and passed up the canal in our gondola, we came unawares
+      upon the church of Santa Maria dell&rsquo; Orto, one of the most graceful Gothic
+      churches in the city. The façade is exquisite, and has two Gothic windows
+      of that religious and heavenly beauty which pains the heart with its
+      inexhaustible richness. One longed to fall down on the space of green turf
+      before the church, now bathed in the soft golden October sunshine, and
+      recant these happy, commonplace centuries of heresy, and have back again
+      the good old believing days of bigotry, and superstition, and roasting,
+      and racking, if only to have once more the men who dreamed those windows
+      out of their faith and piety (if they did, which I doubt), and made them
+      with their patient, reverent hands (if their hands <i>were</i> reverent,
+      which I doubt). The church is called Santa Maria dell&rsquo; Orto, from the
+      miraculous image of Our Lady which was found in an orchard where the
+      temple now stands. We saw this miraculous sculpture, and thought it
+      reflected little credit upon the supernatural artist. The church is
+      properly that of Saint Christopher, but the saint has been titularly
+      vanquished by the Madonna, though he comes out gigantically triumphant in
+      a fresco above the high altar, and leads to confused and puzzling
+      reminiscences of Bluebeard and Morgante Maggiore, to both of which
+      characters he bears a bewildering personal resemblance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were once many fine paintings by Tintoretto and Bellini in this
+      church; but as the interior is now in course of restoration, the paintings
+      have been removed to the Academy, and we only saw one, which was by the
+      former master, and had all his striking imagination in the conception, all
+      his strength in the drawing and all his lampblack in the faded coloring.
+      In the centre of the church, the sacristan scraped the carpenter&rsquo;s rubbish
+      away from a flat tablet in the floor, and said that it was Tintoretto&rsquo;s
+      tomb. It is a sad thing to doubt even a sacristan, but I pointed out that
+      the tomb bore any name in the world rather than Robusti. &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said the
+      sacristan, &ldquo;it is just that which makes it so very curious,&mdash;that
+      Tintoretto should wish to be buried under another name!&rdquo; [Footnote:
+      Members of the family of Tintoretto are actually buried in this church;
+      and no sacristan of right feeling could do less than point out some tomb
+      as that of the great painter himself.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a warm, sunny day in the fall, as I said; yet as we drew near the
+      Ghetto, we noticed in the air many white, floating particles, like lazy,
+      straggling flakes of snow. These we afterward found to be the down of
+      multitudes of geese, which are forever plucked by the whole apparent force
+      of the populace,&mdash;the fat of the devoted birds being substituted for
+      lard in the kitchens of the Ghetto, and their flesh for pork. As we
+      approached the obscene little riva at which we landed, a blond young
+      Israelite, lavishly adorned with feathers, came running to know if we
+      wished to see the church&mdash;by which name he put the synagogue to the
+      Gentile comprehension. The street through which we passed had shops on
+      either hand, and at the doors groups of jocular Hebrew youth sat plucking
+      geese; while within, long files of all that was mortal of geese hung from
+      the rafters and the walls. The ground was webbed with the feet of geese,
+      and certain loutish boys, who paused to look at us, had each a goose
+      dragging at his heels, in the forlorn and elongated manner peculiar to
+      dead poultry. The ground was stained with the blood of geese, and the
+      smell of roasting geese came out of the windows of the grim and lofty
+      houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our guide was picturesque, but the most helpless and inconclusive cicerone
+      I ever knew; and while his long, hooked Hebrew nose caught my idle fancy,
+      and his soft blue eyes excused a great deal of inefficiency, the aimless
+      fashion in which he mounted dirty staircases for the keys of the
+      synagogue, and came down without them, and the manner in which he shouted
+      to the heads of unctuous Jessicas thrust out of windows, and never gained
+      the slightest information by his efforts, were imbecilities that we
+      presently found insupportable, and we gladly cast him off for a dark-faced
+      Hebrew boy who brought us at once to the door of the Spanish synagogue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of seven synagogues in the Ghetto, the principal was built in 1655, by the
+      Spanish Jews who had fled to Venice from the terrors of the Holy Office.
+      Its exterior has nothing to distinguish it as a place of worship, and we
+      reached the interior of the temple by means of some dark and narrow
+      stairs. In the floor and on the walls of the passage-way were set tablets
+      to the memory of rich and pious Israelites who had bequeathed their
+      substance for the behoof of the sanctuary; and the sacristan informed us
+      that the synagogue was also endowed with a fund by rich descendants of
+      Spanish Jews in Amsterdam. These moneys are kept to furnish indigent
+      Israelitish couples with the means of marrying, and who claim the benefit
+      of the fund are entitled to it. The sacristan&mdash;a little wiry man,
+      with bead-black eyes, and of a shoemakerish presence&mdash;told us with
+      evident pride that he was himself a descendant of the Spanish Jews.
+      Howbeit, he was now many centuries from speaking the Castilian, which, I
+      had read, was still used in the families of the Jewish fugitives from
+      Spain to the Levant. He spoke, instead, the abominable Venetian of
+      Cannaregio, with that Jewish thickness which distinguishes the race&rsquo;s
+      utterance, no matter what language its children are born to. It is a
+      curious philological fact, which I have heard repeatedly alleged by
+      Venetians, and which is perhaps worth noting here, that Jews speaking
+      their dialect, have not only this thickness of accent, but also a
+      peculiarity of construction which marks them at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We found the contracted interior of the synagogue hardly worth looking at.
+      Instead of having any thing oriental or peculiar in its architecture, it
+      was in a bad spirit of Renaissance art. A gallery encircled the inside,
+      and here the women, during worship, sat apart from the men, who had seats
+      below, running back from either side of the altar. I had no right, coming
+      from a Protestant land of pews, to indulge in that sentimentality; but I
+      could not help being offended to see that each of these seats might be
+      lifted up and locked into the upright back and thus placed beyond question
+      at the disposal of the owner: I like the freedom and equality in the
+      Catholic churches much better. The sacristan brought a ponderous silver
+      key, and unlocking the door behind the pulpit, showed us the Hebrew
+      Scriptures used during the service by the Rabbi. They formed an immense
+      parchment volume, and were rolled in silk upon a wooden staff. This was
+      the sole object of interest in the synagogue, and its inspection concluded
+      our visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We descended the narrow stairs and emerged upon the piazza which we had
+      left. It was only partly paved with brick, and was very dirty. The houses
+      which surrounded it were on the outside old and shabby, and, even in this
+      Venice of lofty edifices, remarkably high. A wooden bridge crossed a vile
+      canal to another open space, where once congregated the merchants who sell
+      antique furniture, old pictures, and objects of vertu. They are now,
+      however, found everywhere in the city, and most of them are on the Grand
+      Canal, where they heap together marvelous collections, and establish
+      authenticities beyond cavil. &ldquo;Is it an original?&rdquo; asked a young lady who
+      was visiting one of their shops, as she paused before an attributive
+      Veronese, or&mdash;what know I?&mdash;perhaps a Titian. &ldquo;<i>Si, signora,
+      originalissimo</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not understand why any class of Jews should still remain in the
+      Ghetto, but it is certain, as I said, that they do remain there in great
+      numbers. It may be that the impurity of the place and the atmosphere is
+      conducive to purity of race; but I question if the Jews buried on the
+      sandy slope of the Lido, and blown over by the sweet sea wind&mdash;it
+      must needs blow many centuries to cleanse them of the Ghetto&mdash;are not
+      rather to be envied by the inhabitants of those high dirty houses and low
+      dirty lanes. There was not a touch of any thing wholesome, or pleasant, or
+      attractive, to relieve the noisomeness of the Ghetto to its visitors; and
+      they applauded, with a common voice, the neatness which had prompted
+      Andrea the gondolier to roll up the carpet from the floor of his gondola,
+      and not to spread it again within the limits of that quarter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the good old times, when pestilence avenged the poor and oppressed upon
+      their oppressors, what grim and dismal plagues may not have stalked by
+      night and noonday out of those hideous streets, and passed the marble
+      bounds of patrician palaces, and brought to the bedsides of the rich and
+      proud the filthy misery of the Ghetto turned to poison! Thank God that the
+      good old times are gone and going. One learns in these aged lands to hate
+      and execrate the past.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"></a>
+      CHAPTER XV.<br/>
+      SOME MEMORABLE PLACES.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We came away from the Ghetto, as we had arrived, in a gentle fall of
+      goose-down, and winding crookedly through a dirty canal, glided into purer
+      air and cleaner waters. I cannot well say how it was we came upon the old
+      Servite Convent, which I had often looked for in vain, and which,
+      associated with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of the most
+      memorable places in Venice. We reached it, after passing by that old, old
+      palace, which was appointed in the early ages of Venetian commerce for the
+      reception of oriental traffic and traffickers, and where it is said the
+      Moorish merchants resided till the later time of the Fondaco dei Turchi on
+      the Grand Canal. The façade of the palace is richly sculptured; and near
+      one corner is the bass-relief of a camel and his turbaned driver,&mdash;in
+      token, perhaps, that man and beast (as orientals would understand them)
+      were here entertained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had lived long enough in Venice to know that it was by no means worth
+      while to explore the interior of this old palace because the outside was
+      attractive, and so we left it; and turning a corner, found ourselves in a
+      shallow canal, with houses on one side, and a grassy bank on the other.
+      The bank sloped gently from the water up to the walls of some edifice, on
+      which ruin seemed to have fastened soon after the architect had begun his
+      work. The vast walls, embracing several acres in their close, rose only
+      some thirty or forty feet from the ground&mdash;only high enough, indeed,
+      to join over the top of the great Gothic gates, which pierced them on two
+      façades. There must have been barracks near; for on the sward, under the
+      walls, muskets were stacked, and Austrian soldiers were practicing the
+      bayonet-exercise with long poles padded at the point. &ldquo;<i>Ein, zwei, drei,&mdash;vorwärts!
+      Ein, zwei, drei,&mdash;ruckwärts</i>!&rdquo; snarled the drill-sergeant, and the
+      dark-faced Hungarian soldiers&mdash;who may have soon afterward prodded
+      their Danish fellow-beings all the more effectively for that day&rsquo;s
+      training&mdash;stooped, writhed, and leaped obedient. I, who had already
+      caught sight of a little tablet in the wall bearing the name of Paolo
+      Sarpi, could not feel the propriety of the military performance on that
+      scene; yet I was very glad, dismounting from the gondola, to get by the
+      soldiers without being forced back at the padded point of a pole, and
+      offered no audible objection to their presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So passing to the other side, I found entrance through a disused chapel to
+      the interior of the convent. The gates on the outside were richly
+      sculptured, and were reverend and clean; tufts of harsh grass grew from
+      their arches, and hung down like the &ldquo;overwhelming brows&rdquo; of age. Within,
+      at first light, I saw nothing but heaps of rubbish, piles of stone, and
+      here and there a mutilated statue. I remember two pathetic caryatides,
+      that seemed to have broken and sunk under too heavy a weight for their
+      gentle beauty&mdash;and everywhere the unnamable filth with which ruin is
+      always dishonored in Italy, and which makes the most picturesque and
+      historic places inaccessible to the foot, and intolerable to the senses
+      and the soul. I was thinking with a savage indignation on this incurable
+      <i>porcheria</i>, of the Italian poor (who are guilty of such
+      desecrations), when my eye fell upon an enclosed space in one corner,
+      where some odd-looking boulders were heaped together. It was a space about
+      six feet in depth, and twenty feet square; and the boulders, on closer
+      inspection, turned out to be human skulls, nestling on piles of human
+      bones. In any other land than Italy I think I should have turned from the
+      grisly sight with a cowardly sickness and shuddering; but here!&mdash;Why,
+      heaven and earth seem to take the loss of men so good-naturedly,&mdash;so
+      many men have died and passed away with their difficult, ambitious, and
+      troublesome little schemes,&mdash;and the great mass of mankind is taken
+      so small account of in the course of destiny, that the idea of death does
+      not appear so alien and repulsive as elsewhere, and the presence of such
+      evidences of our poor mortality can scarcely offend sensibility. These
+      were doubtless the bones of the good Servite friars who had been buried in
+      their convent, and had been digged up to make way for certain improvements
+      now taking place within its walls. I have no doubt that their deaths were
+      a rest to their bodies, to say nothing of their souls. If they were at all
+      in their lives like those who have come after them, the sun baked their
+      bald brows in Summer, and their naked feet&mdash;poor feet! clapping round
+      in wooden-soled sandals over the frozen stones of Venice&mdash;were
+      swollen and gnawed with chilblains in winter; and no doubt some fat friar
+      of their number, looking all the droller in his bare feet for the
+      spectacles on his nose, came down Calle Falier then, as now, to collect
+      the charity of bread and fuel, far oftener than the dwellers in that
+      aristocratic precinct wished to see him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The friars&rsquo; skulls looked contented enough, and smiled after the hearty
+      manner of skulls; and some of the leg-bones were thrust through the
+      enclosing fence, and hung rakishly over the top. As to their spirits, I
+      suppose they must have found out by this time that these confused and
+      shattered tabernacles which they left behind them are not nearly so
+      corrupt and dead as the monastic system which still cumbers the earth.
+      People are building on the site of the old convent a hospital for indigent
+      and decrepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have care of the
+      inmates. It is a good end enough, but I think it would be the true
+      compensation if all the rubbish of the old cloister were cleared from the
+      area of those walls, and a great garden planted in the space, where lovers
+      might whisper their wise nonsense, and children might romp and frolic,
+      till the crumbling masonry forgot its old office of imprisonment and the
+      memory of its prisoners. For here, one could only think of the moping and
+      mumming herd of monks, who were certainly not worth remembering, while the
+      fame of Paolo Sarpi, and the good which he did, refused to be localized.
+      That good is an inheritance which has enriched the world; but the share of
+      Venice has been comparatively small in it, and that of this old convent
+      ground still less. I rather wondered, indeed, that I should have taken the
+      trouble to look up the place; but it is a harmless, if even a very
+      foolish, pastime to go seeking for the sublime secret of the glory of the
+      palm in the earth where it struck root and flourished. So far as the
+      lifelong presence and the death of a man of clear brain and true heart
+      could hallow any scene, this ground was holy; for here Sarpi lived, and
+      here in his cell he died, a simple Servite friar&mdash;he who had caught
+      the bolts of excommunication launched against the Republic from Rome, and
+      broken them in his hand,&mdash;who had breathed upon the mighty arm of the
+      temporal power, and withered it to the juiceless stock it now remains. And
+      yet I could not feel that the ground <i>was</i> holy, and it did not make
+      me think of Sarpi; and I believe that only those travelers who invent in
+      cold blood their impressions of memorable places ever have remarkable
+      impressions to record.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, before the time of Sarpi, an excommunication was pronounced against
+      the Republic with a result as terrible as that of the later interdict was
+      absurd. Venice took possession, early in the fourteenth century, of
+      Ferrara, by virtue of a bargain which the high contracting parties&mdash;the
+      Republic and an exiled claimant to the ducal crown of Ferrara&mdash;had no
+      right to make. The father of the banished prince had displeased him by
+      marrying late in life, when the thoughts of a good man should be turned on
+      other things, and the son compassed the sire&rsquo;s death. For this the
+      Ferrarese drove him away, and as they would not take him back to reign
+      over them at the suggestion of Venice, he resigned his rights in favor of
+      the Republic, and the Republic at once annexed the city to its
+      territories. The Ferrarese appealed to the pope for his protection, and
+      Clement V., supporting an ancient but long quiescent claim to Ferrara on
+      the part of the Church, called upon the Venetians to surrender the city,
+      and, on their refusal, excommunicated them. All Christian peoples were
+      commanded &ldquo;to arm against the Venetians, to spoil them of their goods, as
+      separated from the union of Christians, and as enemies of the Roman
+      Church.&rdquo; They were driven out of Ferrara, but their troubles did not end
+      with their loss of the city. Giustina Renier-Michiel says the nations,
+      under the shelter of the pope&rsquo;s permission and command, &ldquo;exercised against
+      them every species of cruelty; there was no wrong or violence of which
+      they were not victims. All the rich merchandise which they had in France,
+      in Flanders, and in other places, was confiscated; their merchants were
+      arrested, maltreated, and some of them killed. Woe to us, if the Saracens
+      had been baptized Christians! our nation would have been utterly
+      destroyed.&rdquo; Such was the ruin brought upon us by this excommunication that
+      to this day it is a popular saying, concerning a man of gloomy aspect, &ldquo;<i>He
+      looks as if he were bringing the excommunication of Ferrara</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No proverb, sprung from the popular terror, commemorates the interdict of
+      the Republic which took place in 1606, and which, I believe, does not
+      survive in popular recollection at Venice. It was at first a collision of
+      the Venetian and Papal authorities at Ferrara, and then an interference of
+      the pope to prevent the execution of secular justice upon certain
+      ecclesiastical offenders in Venetia, which resulted in the excommunication
+      of the Republic, and finally in the defeat of St. Peter and the triumph of
+      St. Mark. Chief among the ecclesiastical offenders mentioned were the
+      worthy Abbate Brandolino of Narvesa, who was accused, among other things,
+      of poisoning his own father; and the good Canonico Saraceni of Vicenza,
+      who was repulsed in overtures made to his beautiful cousin, and who
+      revenged himself by defaming her character, and &ldquo;filthily defacing&rdquo; the
+      doors of her palace. The abbate was arrested, and the canon, on this
+      lady&rsquo;s complaint to the Ten at Venice, was thrown into prison, and the
+      weak and furious Pope Paul V., being refused their release by the Ten,
+      excommunicated the whole Republic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the same year, that is to say 1552, the bane and antidote, Paul the
+      Pope and Paul Sarpi the friar, were sent into the world. The latter grew
+      in piety, fame, and learning, and at the time the former began his quarrel
+      with the Republic, there was none in Venice so fit and prompt as Sarpi to
+      stand forth in her defense. He was at once taken into the service of St.
+      Mark, and his clear, acute mind fashioned the spiritual weapons of the
+      Republic, and helped to shape the secular measures taken to annul the
+      interdict. As soon as the bull of excommunication was issued, the Republic
+      instructed her officers to stop every copy of it at the frontier, and it
+      was never read in any church in the Venetian dominions. The Senate refused
+      to receive it from the Papal Nuncio. All priests, monks, and other
+      servants of the Church, as well as all secular persons, were commanded to
+      disregard it; and refractory ecclesiastics were forced to open their
+      churches on pain of death. The Jesuits and Capuchins were banished; and
+      clerical intriguers, whom Rome sent in swarms to corrupt social and family
+      relations, by declaring an end of civil government in Venice, and
+      preaching among women disobedience to patriotic husbands and fathers, were
+      severely punished. With internal safety thus provided for, the Republic
+      intrusted her moral, religious, and political defense entirely to Sarpi,
+      who devoted himself to his trust with fidelity, zeal, and power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It might have been expected that the friend of Galileo, and the most
+      learned and enlightened man of his country, would have taken the short and
+      decisive method of discarding all allegiance to Rome as the most logical
+      resistance to the unjust interdict. But the Venetians have ever been
+      faithful Catholics, [Footnote: It is convenient here to attest the truth
+      of certain views of religious sentiment in Italy, which Mr. Trollope, in
+      his <i>Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar</i>, quotes from an &ldquo;Italian
+      author, by no means friendly to Catholicism, and very well qualified to
+      speak of the progress of opinions and tendencies among his
+      fellow-countrymen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This author is Bianchi Giovini, who, speaking of modern Catholicism as the
+      heir of the old materialistic paganism, says: &ldquo;The Italians have
+      identified themselves with this mode of religion. Cultivated men find in
+      it the truth there is in it, and the people find what is agreeable to
+      them. But both the former and the latter approve it as conformable to the
+      national character. And whatever may be the religious system which shall
+      govern our descendants twenty centuries hence, I venture to affirm that
+      the exterior forms of it will be pretty nearly the same as those which
+      prevail at present, and which did prevail twenty centuries ago.&rdquo; Mr.
+      Trollope generously dissents from the &ldquo;<i>pessimism</i>&rdquo; of these views.
+      The views are discouraging for some reasons; but, with considerable
+      disposition and fair opportunity to observe Italian character in this
+      respect, I had arrived at precisely these conclusions. I wish here to
+      state that in my slight sketch of Sarpi and his times I have availed
+      myself freely of Mr. Trollope&rsquo;s delightful book&mdash;it is near being too
+      much of a good thing&mdash;named above.] and Sarpi was (or, according to
+      the papal writers, seemed to be) a sincere and obedient Servite friar,
+      believing in the spiritual supremacy of the pope, and revering the
+      religion of Rome. He therefore fought Paul inside of the Church, and his
+      writings on the interdict remain the monument of his polemical success. He
+      was the heart and brain of the Republic&rsquo;s whole resistance,&mdash;he
+      supplied her with inexhaustible reasons and answers,&mdash;and, though
+      tempted, accused, and threatened, he never swerved from his fidelity to
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he was the means of her triumph, [Footnote: The triumph was such only
+      so far as the successful resistance to the interdict was concerned; for at
+      the intercession of the Catholic powers the Republic gave up the
+      ecclesiastical prisoners, and he allowed all the banished priests except
+      the Jesuits to return. The Venetians utterly refused to perform any act of
+      humiliation or penance. The interdict had been defied, and it remained
+      despised.] remained the object of her love. He could never be persuaded to
+      desert his cell in the Minorite Convent for the apartments appointed him
+      by the State; and even when his busy days were spent in council at the
+      Ducal Palace, he returned each night to sleep in the cloister. After the
+      harmless interdict had been removed by Paul, and the unyielding Republic
+      forgiven, the wrath of Rome remained kindled against the friar whose logic
+      had been too keen for the last reason of popes. He had been tried for
+      heresy in his youth at Milan, and acquitted; again, during the progress of
+      St. Mark&rsquo;s quarrel with Rome, his orthodoxy had been questioned; and now
+      that all was over, and Rome could turn her attention to one particular
+      offender, he was entreated, coaxed, commanded to come to her, and put her
+      heart at rest concerning these old accusations. But Sarpi was very well in
+      Venice. He had been appointed Consultor in Theology to the Republic, and
+      had received free admission to the secret archives of the State,&mdash;a
+      favor, till then, never bestowed on any. So he would not go to Rome, and
+      Rome sent assassins to take his life. One evening, as he was returning
+      from the Ducal Palace in company with a lay-brother of the convent, and an
+      old patrician, very infirm and helpless, he was attacked by these <i>nuncios</i>
+      of the papal court: one of them seized the lay-brother, and another the
+      patrician, while a third dealt Sarpi innumerable dagger thrusts. He fell
+      as if dead, and the ruffians made off in the confusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarpi had been fearfully wounded, but he recovered. The action of the
+      Republic in this affair is a comforting refutation of the saying that
+      Republics are ungrateful, and the common belief that Venice was
+      particularly so. The most strenuous and unprecedented efforts were made to
+      take the assassins, and the most terrific penalties were denounced against
+      them. What was much better, new honors were showered upon Sarpi, and
+      extraordinary and affectionate measures were taken to provide for his
+      safety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, in fine, he lived in the service of the Republic, revered and
+      beloved, till his seventieth year, when he died with zeal for her good
+      shaping his last utterance: &ldquo;I must go to St. Mark, for it is late, and I
+      have much to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brave Sarpi, and brave Republic! Men cannot honor them enough. For though
+      the terrors of the interdict were doubted to be harmless even at that
+      time, it had remained for them to prove the interdict, then and forever,
+      an instrument as obsolete as the catapult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was so curious as to make some inquiry among the workmen on the old
+      convent ground, whether any stone or other record commemorative of Sarpi
+      had been found in the demolished cells. I hoped, not very confidently, to
+      gather some trace of his presence there&mdash;to have, perhaps, the spot
+      on which he died shown me. To a man, they were utterly ignorant of Sarpi,
+      while affecting, in the Italian manner, to be perfectly informed on the
+      subject. I was passed, with my curiosity, from one to another, till I fell
+      into the hands of a kind of foreman, to whom I put my questions anew. He
+      was a man of Napoleonic beard, and such fair red-and-white complexion that
+      he impressed me as having escaped from a show of wax-works, and I was not
+      at all surprised to find him a wax figure in point of intelligence. He
+      seemed to think my questions the greatest misfortunes which had ever
+      befallen him, and to regard each suggestion of Sarpi&mdash;<i>tempo della
+      Repubblica&mdash;scomunica di Paolo Quinto</i>&mdash;as an intolerable
+      oppression. He could only tell me that on a certain spot (which he pointed
+      out with his foot) in the demolished church, there had been found a stone
+      with Sarpi&rsquo;s name upon it. The padrone, who had the contract for building
+      the new convent, had said,&mdash;&ldquo;Truly, I have heard speak of this
+      Sarpi;&rdquo; but the stone had been broken, and he did not know what had become
+      of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, in fact, the only thing that remembered Sarpi, on the site of the
+      convent where he spent his life, died, and was buried, was the little
+      tablet on the outside of the wall, of which the abbreviated Latin
+      announced that he had been Theologue to the Republic, and that his dust
+      was now removed to the island of San Michele. After this failure, I had no
+      humor to make researches for the bridge on which the friar was attacked by
+      his assassins. But, indeed, why should I look for it? Finding it, could I
+      have kept in my mind the fine dramatic picture I now have, of Sarpi
+      returning to his convent on a mild October evening, weary with his long
+      walk from St. Mark&rsquo;s, and pacing with downcast eyes,&mdash;the old
+      patrician and the lay-brother at his side, and the masked and stealthy
+      assassins, with uplifted daggers, behind him? Nay, I fear I should have
+      found the bridge with some scene of modern life upon it, and brought away
+      in my remembrance an old woman with an oil-bottle, or a straggling boy
+      with a tumbler, and a very little wine in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On our way home from the Servite Convent, we stopped again near the corner
+      and bridge of Sior Antonio Rioba,&mdash;this time to go into the house of
+      Tintoretto, which stands close at the right hand, on the same quay. The
+      house, indeed, might make some pretensions to be called a palace: it is
+      large, and has a carved and balconied front, in which are set a now
+      illegible tablet describing it as the painter&rsquo;s dwelling, and a medallion
+      portrait of Robusti. It would have been well if I had contented myself
+      with this goodly outside; for penetrating, by a long narrow passage and
+      complicated stairway, to the interior of the house, I found that it had
+      nothing to offer me but the usual number of commonplace rooms in the usual
+      blighting state of restoration. I must say that the people of the house,
+      considering they had nothing in the world to show me, were kind and
+      patient under the intrusion, and answered with very polite affirmation my
+      discouraged inquiry if this were really Tintoretto&rsquo;s house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their conduct was different from that of the present inmates of Titian&rsquo;s
+      house, near the Fondamenta Nuove, in a little court at the left of the
+      church of the Jesuits. These unreasonable persons think it an intolerable
+      bore that the enlightened traveling public should break in upon their
+      privacy. They put their heads out of the upper windows, and assure the
+      strangers that the house is as utterly restored within as they behold it
+      without (and it <i>is</i> extremely restored), that it merely occupies the
+      site of the painter&rsquo;s dwelling, and that there is nothing whatever to see
+      in it. I never myself had the heart to force an entrance after these
+      protests; but an acquaintance of the more obdurate sex, whom I had the
+      honor to accompany thither, once did so, and came out with a story of
+      rafters of the original Titianic kitchen being still visible in the new
+      one. After a lapse of two years I revisited the house, and found that so
+      far from having learned patience by frequent trial, the inmates had been
+      apparently goaded into madness during the interval. They seemed to know of
+      our approach by instinct, and thrust their heads out, ready for protest,
+      before we were near enough to speak. The lazy, frowzy women, the worthless
+      men, and idle, loafing boys of the neighborhood, gathered round to witness
+      the encounter; but though repeatedly commanded to ring (I was again in
+      company with ladies), and try to force the place, I refused decidedly to
+      do so. The garrison were strengthening their position by plastering and
+      renewed renovation, and I doubt that by this time the original rafters are
+      no longer to be seen. A plasterer&rsquo;s boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood
+      clapping his trowel on his board, inside the house, while we debated
+      retreat, and derisively invited us to enter: <i>&ldquo;Suoni pure, O signore!
+      Questa e la famosa casa del gran pittore, l&rsquo;immortale Tiziano,&mdash;suoni,
+      signore!</i>&rdquo; (Ring, by all means, sir. This is the famous house of the
+      great painter, the immortal Titian. Ring!) <i>Da capo</i>. We retired amid
+      the scorn of the populace. But indeed I could not blame the inhabitants of
+      Titian&rsquo;s house; and were I condemned to live in a place so famous as to
+      attract idle curiosity, flushed and insolent with travel, I should go to
+      the verge of man-traps and shot-guns to protect myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This house, which is now hemmed in by larger buildings of later date, had
+      in the painter&rsquo;s time an incomparably &ldquo;lovely and delightful situation.&rdquo;
+       Standing near the northern boundary of the city, it looked out over the
+      lagoon,&mdash;across the quiet isle of sepulchres, San Michele,&mdash;across
+      the smoking chimneys of the Murano glass-works, and the bell-towers of her
+      churches,&mdash;to the long line of the sea-shore on the right and to the
+      mainland on the left; and beyond the nearer lagoon islands and the faintly
+      penciled outlines of Torcello and Burano in front, to the sublime distance
+      of the Alps, shining in silver and purple, and resting their snowy heads
+      against the clouds. It had a pleasant garden of flowers and trees, into
+      which the painter descended by an open stairway, and in which he is said
+      to have studied the famous tree in The Death of Peter Martyr. Here he
+      entertained the great and noble of his day, and here he feasted and made
+      merry with the gentle sculptor Sansovino, and with their common friend,
+      the rascal-poet Aretino. The painter&rsquo;s and the sculptor&rsquo;s wives knew each
+      other, and Sansovino&rsquo;s Paola was often in the house of Cecilia Vecellio;
+      [Footnote: The wife of Titian&rsquo;s youth was, according to Ticozzi, named
+      Lucia. It is in Mutinelli that I find allusion to Cecilia. The author of
+      the <i>Annali Urbani</i>, speaking of the friendship and frequent meetings
+      of Titian and Sansovino, says,&mdash;&ldquo;Vivevano ... allora ambedue di un
+      amore fatto sacro dalle leggi divine, essendo moglie di Tiziano una
+      Cecilia.&rdquo; I would not advise the reader to place too fond a trust in any
+      thing concerning the house of Titian. Mutinelli refers to but one house of
+      the painter, while Ticozzi makes him proprietor of two.] and any one who
+      is wise enough not to visit the place, can easily think of those ladies
+      there, talking at an open window that gives upon the pleasant garden,
+      where their husbands walk up and down together in the purple evening
+      light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the palace where Goldoni was born a servant showed me an entirely new
+      room near the roof, in which he said the great dramatist had composed his
+      immortal comedies. As I knew, however, that Goldoni had left the house
+      when a child, I could scarcely believe what the cicerone said, though I
+      was glad he said it, and that he knew any thing at all of Goldoni. It is a
+      fine old Gothic palace on a small canal near the Frari, and on the Calle
+      del Nomboli, just across from a shop of indigestible pastry. It is known
+      by an inscription, and by the medallion of the dramatist above the
+      land-door; and there is no harm in looking in at the court on the
+      ground-floor, where you may be pleased with the picturesque old stairway,
+      wandering upward I hardly know how high, and adorned with many little
+      heads of lions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several palaces dispute the honor of being Bianca Cappello&rsquo;s birthplace,
+      but Mutinelli awards the distinction to the palace at Sant&rsquo; Appollinare
+      near the Ponte Storto. One day a gondolier vaingloriously rowed us to the
+      water-gate of the edifice through a very narrow, damp, and uncleanly
+      canal, pretending that there was a beautiful staircase in its court. At
+      the moment of our arrival, however, Bianca happened to be hanging out
+      clothes from a window, and shrilly disclaimed the staircase, attributing
+      this merit to another Palazzo Cappello. We were less pleased with her
+      appearance here, than with that portrait of her which we saw on another
+      occasion in the palace of a lady of her name and blood. This lady has
+      since been married, and the name of Cappello is now extinct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Palazzo Mocenigo, in which Byron lived, is galvanized into ghastly
+      newness by recent repairs, and as it is one of the ugliest palaces on the
+      Grand Canal, it has less claim than ever upon one&rsquo;s interest. The
+      custodian shows people the rooms where the poet wrote, dined, and slept,
+      and I suppose it was from the hideous basket-balcony over the main door
+      that one of his mistresses threw herself into the canal. Another of these
+      interesting relicts is pointed out in the small butter-and-cheese shop
+      which she keeps in the street leading from Campo Sant&rsquo; Angelo to San
+      Paterinan: she is a fat sinner, long past beauty, bald, and somewhat
+      melancholy to behold. Indeed, Byron&rsquo;s memory is not a presence which I
+      approach with pleasure, and I had most enjoyment in his palace when I
+      thought of good-natured little Thomas Moore, who once visited his lordship
+      there. Byron himself hated the recollection of his life in Venice, and I
+      am sure no one else need like it. But he is become a <i>cosa di Venezia</i>,
+      and you cannot pass his palace without having it pointed out to you by the
+      gondoliers. Early after my arrival in the city I made the acquaintance of
+      an old smooth-shaven, smooth-mannered Venetian, who said he had known
+      Byron, and who told me that he once swam with him from the Port of San
+      Nicolò to his palace-door. The distance is something over three miles, but
+      if the swimmers came in with the sea the feat was not so great as it
+      seems, for the tide is as swift and strong as a mill-race. I think it
+      would be impossible to make the distance against the tide.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVI.<br/>
+      COMMERCE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To make an annual report in September upon the Commercial Transactions of
+      the port, was an official duty to which I looked forward at Venice with a
+      vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted
+      tranquillity. It was not because the preparation of the report was an
+      affair of so great labor that I shrank from it; but because the material
+      was wanting with which to make a respectable show among my consular peers
+      in the large and handsomely misprinted volume of Commercial Relations
+      annually issued by the enterprising Congressional publishers. It grieved
+      me that upstart ports like Marseilles, Liverpool, and Bremen, should
+      occupy so much larger space in this important volume than my beloved
+      Venice; and it was with a feeling of profound mortification that I used to
+      post my meagre account of a commerce that once was greater than all the
+      rest of the world&rsquo;s together. I sometimes desperately eked out the
+      material furnished me in the statistics of the Venetian Chamber of
+      Commerce by an agricultural essay on the disease of the grapes and its
+      cure, or by a few wretched figures representative of a very slender mining
+      interest in the province. But at last I determined to end these
+      displeasures, and to make such researches into the history of her Commerce
+      as should furnish me forth material for a report worthy of the high place
+      Venice held in my reverence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, it seemed to be by a sort of anachronism that I had ever mentioned
+      contemporary Venetian Commerce; and I turned with exultation from the
+      phantom transactions of the present to that solid and magnificent
+      prosperity of the past, of which the long-enduring foundations were laid
+      in the earliest Christian times. For the new cities formed by the
+      fugitives from barbarian invasion of the main-land, during the fifth
+      century, had hardly settled around a common democratic government on the
+      islands of the lagoons, when they began to develop maritime energies and
+      resources; and long before this government was finally established at
+      Rialto, (the ancient sea-port of Padua,) or Venice had become the capital
+      of the young Republic, the Veneti had thriftily begun to turn the wild
+      invaders of the main-land to account, to traffic with them, and to make
+      treaties of commerce with their rulers. Theodoric, the king of the Goths,
+      had fixed his capital at Ravenna, in the sixth century, and would have
+      been glad to introduce Italian civilization among his people; but this
+      warlike race were not prepared to practice the useful arts, and although
+      they inhabited one of the most fruitful parts of Italy, with ample borders
+      of sea, they were neither sailors nor tillers of the ground. The Venetians
+      supplied them (at a fine profit, no doubt,) with the salt made in the
+      lagoons, and with wines brought from Istria. The Goths viewed with
+      especial amazement their skill in the management of their river-craft, by
+      means of which the dauntless traders ascended the shallowest streams to
+      penetrate the main-land, &ldquo;running on the grass of the meadows, and between
+      the stalks of the harvest field,&rdquo;&mdash;just as in this day our own
+      western steamers are known to run in a heavy dew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians continued to extend and confirm their commerce with those
+      helpless and hungry warriors, and were ready also to open a lucrative
+      trade with the Longobards when they descended into Italy about the year
+      570. They had, in fact, abetted the Longobards in their war with the Greek
+      Emperor Justinian, (who had opposed their incursion,) and in return the
+      barbarians gave them the right to hold great free marts or fairs on the
+      shores of the lagoons, whither the people resorted from every part of the
+      Longobard kingdom to buy the salt of the lagoons, grain from Istria and
+      Dalmatia, and slaves from every country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The slave-trade, indeed, formed then one of the most lucrative branches of
+      Venetian commerce, as now it forms the greatest stain upon the annals of
+      that commerce. The islanders, however, were not alone guilty of this
+      infamous trade in men; other Italian states made profit of it, and it may
+      be said to have been all but universal. But the Venetians were the most
+      deeply involved in it, they pursued it the most unscrupulously, and they
+      relinquished it the last. The pope forbade and execrated their commerce,
+      and they sailed from the papal ports with cargoes of slaves for the
+      infidels in Africa. In spite of the prohibitions of their own government,
+      they bought Christians of kidnappers throughout Europe, and purchased the
+      captives of the pirates on the seas, to sell them again to the Saracens.
+      Nay, being an ingenious people, they turned their honest penny over and
+      over again: they sold the Christians to the Saracens, and then for certain
+      sums ransomed them and restored them to their countries; they sold
+      Saracens to the Christians, and plundered the infidels in similar
+      transactions of ransom and restoration. It is not easy to fix the dates of
+      the rise or fall of this slave-trade; but slavery continued in Venice as
+      late as the fifteenth century, and in earlier ages was so common that
+      every prosperous person had two or three slaves. [Footnote: Mutinelli, <i>Del
+      Costume Veneziano</i>. The present sketch of the history of Venetian
+      commerce is based upon facts chiefly drawn from Mutinelli&rsquo;s delightful
+      treatise, <i>Del Commercio dei Veneziani</i>.] The corruption of the
+      citizens at this time is properly attributed in part to the existence of
+      slavery among them; and Mutinelli goes so far as to declare that the
+      institution impressed permanent traits on the populace, rendering them
+      idle and indisposed to honest labor, by degrading labor and making it the
+      office of bondmen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While this hateful and enormous traffic in man was growing up, the
+      Venetians enriched themselves by many other more blameless and legitimate
+      forms of commerce, and gradually gathered into their grasp that whole
+      trade of the East with Europe which passed through their hands for so many
+      ages. After the dominion of the Franks was established in Italy in the
+      eighth century, they began to supply that people, more luxurious than the
+      Lombards, with the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry, and the perfumes of
+      Byzantium; and held a great annual fair at the imperial city of Pavia,
+      where they sold the Franks the manufactures of the polished and effeminate
+      Greeks, and whence in return they carried back to the East the grain,
+      wine, wool, iron, lumber, and excellent armor of Lombardy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the time when they had assisted the Longobards against the Greeks,
+      the Venetians found it to their interest to cultivate the friendship of
+      the latter, until, in the twelfth century, they mastered the people so
+      long caressed, and took their capital, under Enrico Dandolo. The
+      privileges conceded to the wily and thrifty republican traders by the
+      Greek Emperors, were extraordinary in their extent and value. Otho, the
+      western Caesar, having succeeded the Franks in the dominion of Italy, had
+      already absolved the Venetians from the annual tribute paid the Italian
+      kings for the liberty of traffic, and had declared their commerce free
+      throughout the Peninsula. In the mean time they had attacked and beaten
+      the pirates of Dalmatia, and the Greeks now recognized their rule all over
+      Dalmatia, thus securing to the Republic every port on the eastern shores
+      of the Adriatic. Then, as they aided the Greeks to repel the aggressions
+      of the Saracens and Normans, their commerce was declared free in all the
+      ports of the empire, and they were allowed to trade without restriction in
+      all the cities, and to build warehouses and dépôts throughout the
+      dominions of the Greeks, wherever they chose. The harvest they reaped from
+      the vast field thus opened to their enterprise, must have more than
+      compensated them for their losses in the barbarization of the Italian
+      continent by the incessant civil wars which followed the disruption of the
+      Lombard League, when trade and industry languished throughout Italy. When
+      the Crusaders had taken the Holy Land, the king of Jerusalem bestowed upon
+      the Venetians, in return for important services against the infidel, the
+      same privileges conceded them by the Greek Emperor; and when, finally,
+      Constantinople fell into the hands of the Crusaders, (whom they had
+      skillfully diverted from the reconquest of Palestine to the siege of the
+      Greek metropolis,) nearly all the Greek islands fell to the share of
+      Venice; and the Latin emperors, who succeeded the Greeks in dominion, gave
+      her such privileges as made her complete mistress of the commerce of the
+      Levant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this opulent traffic the insatiable enterprise of the Republic
+      turned, without relinquishing the old, to new gains in the farthest
+      Orient. Against her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the Egyptian
+      ports, but she did not scruple to coax the barbarous prince of the
+      Scythian Tartars, newly descended upon the shores of the Black Sea; and
+      having secured his friendship, she proceeded, without imparting her design
+      to her Latin allies at Constantinople, to plant a commercial colony at the
+      mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands. Through this entrepôt,
+      thenceforward, Venetian energy, with Tartar favor, directed the entire
+      commerce of Asia with Europe, and incredibly enriched the Republic. The
+      vastness and importance of such a trade, even at that day, when the wants
+      of men were far simpler and fewer than now, could hardly be over-stated;
+      and one nation then monopolized the traffic which is now free to the whole
+      world. The Venetians bought their wares at the great marts of Samarcand,
+      and crossed the country of Tartary in caravans to the shores of the
+      Caspian Sea, where they set sail and voyaged to the River Volga, which
+      they ascended to the point of its closest proximity to the Don. Their
+      goods were then transported overland to the Don, and were again carried by
+      water down to their mercantile colony at its mouth. Their ships, having
+      free access to the Black Sea, could, after receiving their cargoes, return
+      direct to Venice. The products of every country of Asia were carried into
+      Europe by these dauntless traffickers, who, enlightened and animated by
+      the travels and discoveries of Matteo, Nicolò, and Marco Polo, penetrated
+      the remotest regions, and brought away the treasures which the prevalent
+      fears and superstitions of other nations would have deterred them from
+      seeking, even if they had possessed the means of access to them.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0288}.jpg" alt="{0288}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0288}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      The partial civilization of the age of chivalry had now reached its
+      climax, and the class which had felt its refining effects was that best
+      able to gratify the tastes still unknown to the great mass of the ignorant
+      and impoverished people. It was a splendid time, and the robber counts and
+      barons of the continent, newly tamed and Christianized into knights, spent
+      splendidly, as became magnificent cavaliers serving noble ladies. The
+      Venetians, who seldom did merely heroic things, who turned the Crusades to
+      their own account and made money out of the Holy Land, and whom one always
+      fancies as having a half scorn of the noisy grandeur of chivalry, were
+      very glad to supply the knights and ladies with the gorgeous stuffs,
+      precious stones, and costly perfumes of the East; and they now also began
+      to establish manufactories, and to practice the industrial arts at home.
+      Their jewelers and workers in precious metals soon became famous
+      throughout Europe; the glass-works of Murano rose into celebrity and
+      importance which they have never since lost (for they still supply the
+      world with beads); and they began to weave stuffs of gold tissue at
+      Venice, and silks so exquisitely dyed that no cavalier or dame of perfect
+      fashion was content with any other. Besides this they gilded leather for
+      lining walls, wove carpets, and wrought miracles of ornament in wax,&mdash;a
+      material that modern taste is apt to disdain,&mdash;while Venetian candles
+      in chandeliers of Venetian glass lighted up the palaces of the whole
+      civilized world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The private enterprise of citizens was in every way protected and
+      encouraged by the State, which did not, however, fail to make due and just
+      profit out of it. The ships of the merchants always sailed to and from
+      Venice in fleets, at stated seasons, seven fleets departing annually,&mdash;one
+      for the Greek dominions, a second for Azof, a third for Trebizond, a
+      fourth for Cyprus, a fifth for Armenia, a sixth for Spain, France, the Low
+      Countries, and England, and a seventh for Africa. Each squadron of traders
+      was accompanied and guarded from attacks of corsairs and other enemies, by
+      a certain number of the state galleys, let severally to the highest
+      bidders for the voyage, at a price never less than about five hundred
+      dollars of our money. The galleys were all manned and armed by the State,
+      and the crew of each amounted to three hundred persons; including a
+      captain, four supercargoes, eight pilots, two carpenters, two calkers, a
+      master of the oars, fifty cross-bowmen, three drummers, and two hundred
+      rowers. The State also appointed a commandant of the whole squadron, with
+      absolute authority to hear complaints, decide controversies, and punish
+      offences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the Republic was thus careful in the protection and discipline of
+      its citizens in their commerce upon the seas, it was no less zealous for
+      their security and its own dignity in their traffic with the continent of
+      Europe. In that rude day, neither the life nor the property of the
+      merchant who visited the ultramontane countries was safe; for the sorry
+      device which he practiced, of taking with him a train of apes, buffoons,
+      dancers, and singers, in order to divert his ferocious patrons from
+      robbery and murder, was not always successful. The Venetians, therefore,
+      were forbidden by the State to trade in those parts; and the Bohemians,
+      Germans, and Hungarians, who wished to buy their wares, were obliged to
+      come to the lagoons and buy them at the great marts which were held in
+      different parts of the city, and on the neighboring main-land. A triple
+      purpose was thus served,&mdash;the Venetian merchants were protected in
+      their lives and goods, the national honor was saved from insult, and many
+      an honest zecchino was turned by the innkeepers and others who lodged and
+      entertained the customers of the merchants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Five of these great fairs were held every week, the chief market being at
+      Rialto; and the transactions in trade were carefully supervised by the
+      servants of the State. Among the magistracies especially appointed for the
+      orderly conduct of the foreign and domestic commerce were the so-called
+      Mercantile Consuls (<i>Ufficio dei Consoli dei Mercanti</i>), whose
+      special duty it was to see that the traffic of the nation received no hurt
+      from the schemes of any citizen or foreigner, and to punish offenses of
+      this kind with banishment and even graver penalties. They measured every
+      ship about to depart, to learn if her cargo exceeded the lawful amount;
+      they guarded creditors against debtors and protected poor debtors against
+      the rapacity of creditors, and they punished thefts sustained by the
+      merchants. It is curious to find contemporary with this beneficent
+      magistracy, a charge of equal dignity exercised by the College of
+      Reprisals. A citizen offended in his person or property abroad, demanded
+      justice of the government of the country in which the offense was
+      committed. If the demand was refused, it was repeated by the Republic; if
+      still refused, then the Republic, although at peace with the nation from
+      which the offense came, seized any citizen of that country whom it could
+      find, and, through its College of Reprisals, spoiled him of sufficient
+      property to pay the damage done to its citizen. Finally, besides several
+      other magistracies resident in Venice, the Republic appointed Consuls in
+      its colonies and some foreign ports, to superintend the traffic of its
+      citizens, and to compose their controversies. The Consuls were paid out of
+      duties levied on the merchandise; they were usually nobles, and acted with
+      the advice and consent of twelve other Venetian nobles or merchants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this time, and, indeed, throughout its existence, the great lucrative
+      monopoly of the Republic was the salt manufactured in the lagoons, and
+      forced into every market, at rates that no other salt could compete with.
+      Wherever alien enterprise attempted rivalry, it was instantly discouraged
+      by Venice. There were troublesome salt mines, for example, in Croatia; and
+      in 1381 the Republic caused them to be closed by paying the King of
+      Hungary an annual pension of seven thousand crowns of gold. The exact
+      income of the State, however, from the monopoly of salt, or from the
+      various imposts and duties levied upon merchandise, it is now difficult to
+      know, and it is impossible to compute accurately the value or extent of
+      Venetian commerce at any one time. It reached the acme of its prosperity
+      under Tommaso Mocenigo, who was Doge from 1414 to 1423. There were then
+      three thousand and three hundred vessels of the mercantile marine, giving
+      employment to thirty-three thousand seamen, and netting to their owners a
+      profit of forty per cent, on the capital invested. How great has been the
+      decline of this trade may be understood from the fact that in 1863 it
+      amounted, according to the careful statistics of the Chamber of Commerce,
+      to only $60,229,740, and that the number of vessels now owned in Venice is
+      one hundred and fifty. As the total tonnage of these is but 26,000, it may
+      be inferred that they are small craft, and in fact they are nearly all
+      coasting vessels. They no longer bring to Venice the drugs and spices and
+      silks of Samarcand, or carry her own rare manufactures to the ports of
+      western Europe; but they sail to and from her canals with humble freights
+      of grain, lumber, and hemp. Almost as many Greek as Venetian ships now
+      visit the old queen, who once levied a tax upon every foreign vessel in
+      her Adriatic; and the shipping from the cities of the kingdom of Italy
+      exceeds hers by ninety sail, while the tonnage of Great Britain is vastly
+      greater. Her commerce has not only wasted to the shadow of its former
+      magnitude, but it has also almost entirely lost its distinctive character.
+      Glass of Murano is still exported to a value of about two millions of
+      dollars annually; but in this industry, as in nearly all others of the
+      lagoons, there is an annual decline. The trade of the port falls off from
+      one to three millions of dollars yearly, and the manufacturing interests
+      of the province have dwindled in the same proportion. So far as silk is
+      concerned, there has been an immediate cause for the decrease in the
+      disease which has afflicted the cocoons for several years past. Wine and
+      oil are at present articles of import solely,&mdash;the former because of
+      a malady of the grape, the latter because of negligent cultivation of the
+      olive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A considerable number of persons are still employed in the manufacture of
+      objects of taste and ornament; and in the Ruga Vecchia at Rialto they yet
+      make the famous Venetian gold chain, which few visitors to the city can
+      have failed to notice hanging in strands and wound upon spools, in the
+      shop windows of the Old Procuratie and the Bridge of Rialto. It is wrought
+      of all degrees of fineness, and is always so flexile that it may be folded
+      and wound in any shape. It is now no longer made in great quantity, and is
+      chiefly worn by contadine (as a safe investment of their ready money),
+      [Footnote: Certain foreigners living in Venice were one day astonished to
+      find their maid-servant in possession of a mass of this chain, and thought
+      it their business to reprove her extravagance. &ldquo;Signori,&rdquo; she explained
+      paradoxically, &ldquo;if I keep my money, I spend it; if I buy this chain, it is
+      always money (<i>è sempre soldi</i>).&rdquo;] and old-fashioned people of the
+      city, who display the finer sort in skeins or strands. At Chioggia, I
+      remember to have seen a babe at its christening in church literally
+      manacled and shackled with Venetian chain; and the little girl who came to
+      us one day, to show us the splendors in which she had appeared at a <i>disputa</i>
+      (examination of children in doctrine), was loaded with it. Formerly, in
+      the luxurious days of the Republic, it is said the chain was made as fine
+      as sewing-silk, and worn embroidered on Genoa velvet by the patrician
+      dames. It had then a cruel interest from the fact that its manufacture,
+      after a time, cost the artisans their eyesight, so nice and subtle was the
+      work. I could not help noticing that the workmen at the shops in the Ruga
+      Vecchia still suffer in their eyes, even though the work is much coarser.
+      I do not hope to describe the chain, except by saying that the links are
+      horseshoe and oval shaped, and are connected by twos,&mdash;an oval being
+      welded crosswise into a horseshoe, and so on, each two being linked
+      loosely into the next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An infinitely more important art, in which Venice was distinguished a
+      thousand years ago, has recently been revived there by Signor Salviati, an
+      enthusiast in mosaic painting. His establishment is on the Grand Canal,
+      not far from the Academy, and you might go by the old palace quite
+      unsuspicious of the ancient art stirring with new life in its breast. &ldquo;A.
+      Salviati, Avvocato,&rdquo; is the legend of the bell-pull, and you do not by any
+      means take this legal style for that of the restorer of a neglected art,
+      and a possessor of forgotten secrets in gilded glass and &ldquo;smalts,&rdquo; as they
+      term the small delicate rods of vitreous substance, with which the wonders
+      of the art are achieved. But inside of the palace are some two hundred
+      artisans at work,&mdash;cutting the smalts and glass into the minute
+      fragments of which the mosaics are made, grinding and smoothing these
+      fragments, polishing the completed works, and reproducing, with incredible
+      patience and skill, the lights and shadows of the pictures to be copied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You first enter the rooms of those whose talent distinguishes them as
+      artists, and in whose work all the wonderful neatness and finish and
+      long-suffering toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original
+      life and inspiration alike impossible and profane to the elder mosaicists.
+      Each artist has at hand a great variety of the slender stems of smalts
+      already mentioned, and breaking these into minute fragments as he
+      proceeds, he inserts them in the bed of cement prepared to receive his
+      picture, and thus counterfeits in enduring mineral the perishable work of
+      the painter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other rooms artisans are at work upon various tasks of <i>marqueterie</i>,&mdash;table-tops,
+      album-covers, paper-weights, brooches, pins and the like,&mdash;and in
+      others they are sawing the smalts and glass into strips, and grinding the
+      edges. Passing through yet another room, where the finished mosaic-works&mdash;of
+      course not the pictorial mosaics&mdash;are polished by machinery, we enter
+      the store-room, where the crowded shelves display blocks of smalts and
+      glass of endless variety of color. By far the greater number of these
+      colors are discoveries or improvements of the venerable mosaicist Lorenzo
+      Radi, who has found again the Byzantine secrets of counterfeiting, in
+      vitreous paste, aventurine (gold stone), onyx, chalcedony, malachite, and
+      other natural stones, and who has been praised by the Academy of Fine Arts
+      in Venice for producing mosaics even more durable in tint and workmanship
+      than those of the Byzantine artists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart for the exhibition of
+      the many beautiful and costly things which the art of the establishment
+      produces. Here, besides pictures in mosaic, there are cunningly inlaid
+      tables and cabinets, caskets, rich vases of chalcedony mounted in silver,
+      and delicately wrought jewelry, while the floor is covered with a mosaic
+      pavement ordered for the Viceroy of Egypt. There are here, moreover, to be
+      seen the designs furnished by the Crown Princess of Prussia for the
+      mosaics of the Queen&rsquo;s Chapel at Windsor. These, like all other pictures
+      and decorations in mosaic, are completed in the establishment on the Grand
+      Canal, and are afterward put up as wholes in the places intended for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Venice nothing in decay is strange. But it is startling to find her in
+      her old age nourishing into fresh life an art that, after feebly
+      preserving the memory of painting for so many centuries, had decorated her
+      prime only with the glories of its decline;&mdash;for Kugler ascribes the
+      completion of the mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to the
+      year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark&rsquo;s to the tenth or eleventh
+      centuries, when the Greek Church had already laid her ascetic hand on
+      Byzantine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed its motives,
+      and forbidden its inspirations. I think, however, one would look about him
+      in vain for other evidences of a returning prosperity in the lagoons. The
+      old prosperity of Venice, was based upon her monopoly of the most
+      lucrative traffic in the world, as we have already seen,&mdash;upon her
+      exclusive privileges in foreign countries, upon the enlightened zeal of
+      her government, and upon men&rsquo;s imperfect knowledge of geography, and the
+      barbarism of the rest of Europe, as well as upon the indefatigable
+      industry and intelligent enterprise of her citizens. America was still
+      undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only one known; the
+      people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty serfs, ruled and
+      ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world&rsquo;s ignorance, pride, and sloth
+      were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions of the day, which,
+      gross as they were, embodied perhaps its noblest and most hopeful
+      sentiment, were a source of incalculable profit to the sharp-witted
+      mistress of the Adriatic. It was the age of penances, pilgrimages, and
+      relic-hunting, and the wealth which she wrung from the devotion of others
+      was exceedingly great. Her ships carried the pilgrims to and from the Holy
+      Land; her adventurers ransacked Palestine and the whole Orient for the
+      bones and memorials of the saints; and her merchants sold the precious
+      relics throughout Europe at an immense advance upon first cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the foundations of this prosperity were at last tapped by the tide of
+      wealth which poured into Venice from every quarter of the world. Her
+      citizens brought back the vices as well as the luxuries of the debauched
+      Orient, and the city became that seat of splendid idleness and proud
+      corruption which it continued till the Republic fell. It is needless here
+      to rehearse the story of her magnificence and decay. At the time when the
+      hardy, hungry people of other nations were opening paths to prosperity by
+      land and sea, the Venetians, gorged with the spoils of ages, relinquished
+      their old habits of daring enterprise, and dropped back into luxury and
+      indolence. Their incessant wars with the Genoese began, and though they
+      signally defeated the rival Republic in battle, Genoa finally excelled in
+      commerce. A Greek prince had arisen to dispute the sovereignty of the
+      Latin Emperors, whom the Venetians had helped to place upon the Byzantine
+      throne; the Genoese, seeing the favorable fortunes of the Greek, threw the
+      influence of their arms and intrigues in his favor, and the Latins were
+      expelled from Constantinople in 1271. The new Greek Emperor had promised
+      to give the sole navigation of the Black Sea to his allies, together with
+      the church and palaces possessed by the Venetians in his capital, and he
+      bestowed also upon the Genoese the city of Smyrna. It does not seem that
+      he fulfilled literally all his promises, for the Venetians still continued
+      to sail to and from their colony of Tana, at the head of the Sea of Azof,
+      though it is certain that they had no longer the sovereignty of those
+      waters; and the Genoese now planted on the shores of the Black Sea three
+      large and important colonies to serve as entrepôts for the trade taken
+      from their rivals. The oriental traffic of the latter was maintained
+      through Tana, however, for nearly two centuries later, when, in 1410, the
+      Mongol Tartars, under Tamerlane, fell upon the devoted colony, took,
+      sacked, burnt, and utterly destroyed it. This was the first terrible blow
+      to the most magnificent commerce which the world had ever seen, and which
+      had endured for ages. No wonder that, on the day of Tana&rsquo;s fall, terrible
+      portents of woe were seen at Venice,&mdash;that meteors appeared, that
+      demons rode the air, that the winds and waters rose and blew down houses
+      and swallowed ships! A thousand persons are said to have perished in the
+      calamities which commemorated a stroke so mortally disastrous to the
+      national grandeur. After that the Venetians humbly divided with their
+      ancient foes the possession and maintenance of the Genoese colony of
+      Caffa, and continued, with greatly diminished glory, their traffic in the
+      Black Sea; till the Turks having taken Constantinople, and the Greeks
+      having acquired under their alien masters a zeal for commerce unknown to
+      them during the times of their native princes, the Venetians were finally,
+      on the first pretext of war, expelled from those waters in which they had
+      latterly maintained themselves only by payment of heavy tribute to the
+      Turks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the mean time the industrial arts, in which Venice had heretofore
+      excelled, began to be practiced elsewhere, and the Florentines and the
+      English took that lead in the manufactures of the world, which the latter
+      still retain. The league of the Hanseatic cities was established and rose
+      daily in importance. At London, at Bruges, at Bergen, and Novogorod banks
+      were opened under the protection and special favor of the Hanseatic
+      League; its ships were preferred to any other, and the tide of commerce
+      setting northward, the cities of the League persecuted the foreigners who
+      would have traded in their ports. On the west, Barcelona began to dispute
+      the preëminence of Venice in the Mediterranean, and Spanish salt was
+      brought to Italy itself and sold by the enterprising Catalonians. Their
+      corsairs vexed Venetian commerce everywhere; and in that day, as in our
+      own, private English enterprise was employed in piratical depredations on
+      the traffic of a friendly power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portuguese also began to extend their commerce, once so important, and
+      catching the rage for discovery then prevalent, infested every sea in
+      search of unknown land. One of their navigators, sailing by a chart which
+      a monk named Fra Mauro, in his convent on the island of San Michele, had
+      put together from the stories of travelers, and his own guesses at
+      geography, discovered the Cape of Good Hope, and the trade of India with
+      Europe was turned in that direction, and the old over-land traffic
+      perished. The Venetian monopoly of this traffic had long been gone; had
+      its recovery been possible, it would now have been useless to the
+      declining prosperity of the Republic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remained for Christopher Columbus, born of that Genoese nation which
+      had hated the Venetians so long and so bitterly, to make the discovery of
+      America, and thus to give the death-blow to the supremacy of Venice. While
+      all these discoveries were taking place, the old queen of the seas had
+      been weighed down with many and unequal wars. Her naval power had been
+      everywhere crippled; her revenues had been reduced; her possessions, one
+      after one, had been lopped away; and at the time Columbus was on his way
+      to America half Europe, united in the League of Cambray, was attempting to
+      crush the Republic of Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole world was now changed. Commerce sought new channels; fortune
+      smiled on other nations. How Venice dragged onward from the end of her
+      commercial greatness, and tottered with a delusive splendor to her
+      political death, is surely one of the saddest of stories if not the
+      sternest of lessons.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVII.<br/>
+      VENETIAN HOLIDAYS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The national character of the Venetians was so largely influenced by the
+      display and dissipation of the frequent festivals of the Republic, that it
+      cannot be fairly estimated without taking them into consideration, nor can
+      the disuse of these holidays (of which I have heretofore spoken) be
+      appreciated in all its import, without particular allusion to their number
+      and nature. They formed part of the aristocratic polity of the old
+      commonwealth, which substituted popular indulgence for popular liberty,
+      and gave the people costly pleasures in return for the priceless rights of
+      which they had been robbed, set up national pride in the place of
+      patriotism, and was as well satisfied with a drunken joy in its subjects
+      as if they had possessed a true content.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0307}.jpg" alt="{0307}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0307}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Full notice of these holidays would be history [Footnote: &ldquo;Siccome,&rdquo; says
+      the editor of Giustina Renier-Michiel&rsquo;s <i>Origine delle Feste Veneziane</i>,&mdash;&ldquo;Siccome
+      l&rsquo;illustre Autrice ha voluto applicare al suo lavoro il modesto titolo di
+      <i>Origins delle Feste Veneziane</i>, e siccome questo potrebbe porgere
+      un&rsquo; idea assai diversa dell&rsquo; opera a chi non ne ha alcuna cognizione, da
+      quello che è sostanzialmente, si espone questo Epitome, perchè ognun regga
+      almeno in parte, che quest&rsquo; opera sarebbe del titolo di <i>storia</i>
+      condegna, giacchè essa non è che una costante descrizione degli
+      avvenimenti più importanti e luminosi della Repubblica di Venezia.&rdquo; The
+      work in question is one of much research and small philosophy, like most
+      books which Venetians have written upon Venice; but it has admirably
+      served my purpose, and I am indebted to it for most of the information
+      contained in this chapter.] of Venice, for each one had its origin in some
+      great event of her existence, and they were so numerous as to commemorate
+      nearly every notable incident in her annals. Though, as has been before
+      observed, they had nearly all a general religious character, the Church,
+      as usual in Venice, only seemed to direct the ceremonies in its own honor,
+      while it really ministered to the political glory of the oligarchy, which
+      knew how to manage its priests as well as its prince and people. Nay, it
+      happened in one case, at least, that a religious anniversary was selected
+      by the Republic as the day on which to put to shame before the populace
+      certain of the highest and reverendest dignitaries of the Church. In 1162,
+      Ulrich, the Patriarch of Aquileja, seized, by a treacherous stratagem, the
+      city of Grado, then subject to Venice. The Venetians immediately besieged
+      and took the city, with the patriarch and twelve of his canons in it, and
+      carried them prisoners to the lagoons. The turbulent patriarchs of
+      Aquileja had long been disturbers of the Republic&rsquo;s dominion, and the
+      people now determined to make an end of these displeasures. They refused,
+      therefore, to release the patriarch, except on condition that he should
+      bind himself to send them annually a bull and twelve fat hogs. It is not
+      known what meaning the patriarch attached to this singular ceremony; but
+      with the Venetians the bull was typical of himself, and the swine of his
+      canons, and they yearly suffered death in these animals, which were
+      slaughtered during Shrovetide in the Piazza San Marco amid a great
+      concourse of the people, in the presence of the Doge and Signory. The
+      locksmiths, and other workers in iron, had distinguished themselves in the
+      recapture of Grado, and to their guild was allotted the honor of putting
+      to death the bull and swine. Great art was shown in striking off the
+      bull&rsquo;s head at one blow, without suffering the sword to touch the ground
+      after passing through the animal&rsquo;s neck; the swine were slain with lances.
+      Athletic games among the people succeeded, and the Doge and his Senators
+      attacked and destroyed, with staves, several lightly built wooden castles,
+      to symbolize the abasement of the feudal power before the Republic. As the
+      centuries advanced this part of the ceremony, together with the slaughter
+      of the swine, was disused; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of a
+      corrupt disdain of simple and healthy allegory on the part of the proud
+      doges, but in which I think most people will discern only a natural wish
+      to discontinue in more civilized times a puerile barbarity. Mr. Ruskin
+      himself finds no evidence of &ldquo;state pride&rdquo; in the abolition of the
+      slaughter of the swine. The festival was very popular, and continued a
+      long time, though I believe not till the fall of the Republic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another tribute, equally humiliating to those who paid it, was imposed
+      upon the Paduans for an insult offered to St. Mark, and gave occasion for
+      a national holiday, some fifty years after the Patriarch of Aquileja began
+      atonement for his outrage. In the year 1214, the citizens of Treviso made
+      an entertainment to which they invited the noble youth of the surrounding
+      cities. In the chief piazza of the town a castle of wood exquisitely
+      decorated was held against all comers by a garrison of the fairest
+      Trevisan damsels. The weapons of defense were flowers, fruits, bonbons,
+      and the bright eyes of the besieged; while the missiles of attack were
+      much the same, with whatever added virtue might lie in tender prayers and
+      sugared supplications. Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and Venice sent their
+      gallantest youths, under their municipal banners, to take part in this
+      famous enterprise; and the attack was carried on by the leagued forces
+      with great vigor, but with no effect on the Castle of Love, as it was
+      called, till the Venetians made a breach at a weak point. These young men
+      were better skilled in the arts of war than their allies; they were
+      richer, and had come to Treviso decked in the spoils of the recent sack of
+      Constantinople, and at the moment they neared the castle it is reported
+      that they corrupted the besieged by throwing handfuls of gold into the
+      tower. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that the conduct of the
+      Venetians in some manner roused the Paduans to insult, and that the hot
+      youths came to blows. In an instant the standard of St. Mark was thrown
+      down and trampled under the feet of the furious Paduans; blood flowed, and
+      the indignant Trevisans drove the combatants out of their city. The spark
+      of war spreading to the rival cities, the Paduans were soon worsted, and
+      three hundred of their number were made prisoners. These they would
+      willingly have ransomed at any price, but their enemies would not release
+      them except on the payment of two white pullets for each warrior. The
+      shameful ransom was paid in the Piazza, to the inextinguishable delight of
+      the Venetians, who, never wanting in sharp and biting wit, abandoned
+      themselves to sarcastic exultation. They demanded that the Paduans should,
+      like the patriarch, repeat the tribute annually; but the prudent Doge
+      Ziani judged the single humiliation sufficient, and refused to establish a
+      yearly celebration of the feast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the most famous occasional festivals of Venice is described by
+      Petrarch in a Latin letter to his friend Pietro Bolognese. It was in
+      celebration of the reduction of the Greeks of Candia, an island which in
+      1361 had recently been ceded to the Republic. The Candiotes rose in
+      general rebellion, but were so promptly subdued that the news of the
+      outbreak scarcely anticipated the announcement of its suppression in
+      Venice. Petrarch was at this time the guest of the Republic, and from his
+      seat at the right of the Doge on the gallery of St. Mark&rsquo;s Church, in
+      front of the bronze horses, he witnessed the chivalric shows given in the
+      Piazza below, which was then unpaved, and admirably adapted for equestrian
+      feats of arms. It is curious to read the poet&rsquo;s account of these in a city
+      where there is now no four-footed beast larger than a dog. But in the age
+      of chivalry even the Venetians were mounted, and rode up and down their
+      narrow streets, and jousted in their great campos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Speaking of twenty-four noble and handsome youths, whose feats formed a
+      chief part of a show of which he &ldquo;does not know if in the whole world
+      there has been seen the equal,&rdquo; Petrarch says: &ldquo;It was a gentle sight to
+      see so many youths decked in purple and gold, as they ruled with the rein
+      and urged with the spur their coursers, moving in glittering harness, with
+      iron-shod feet which scarcely seemed to touch the ground.&rdquo; And it must
+      have been a noble sight, indeed, to behold all this before the &ldquo;golden
+      façade of the temple,&rdquo; in a place so packed with spectators &ldquo;that a grain
+      of barley could not have fallen to the ground. The great piazza, the
+      church itself, the towers, the roofs, the arcades, the windows, all were&mdash;I
+      will not say full, but running over, walled and paved with people.&rdquo; At the
+      right of the church was built a great platform, on which sat &ldquo;four hundred
+      honestest gentlewomen, chosen from the flower of the nobility, and
+      distinguished in their dress and bearing, who, amid the continual homage
+      offered them morning, noon, and night, presented the image of a celestial
+      congress.&rdquo; Some noblemen, come hither by chance, &ldquo;from the part of
+      Britain, comrades and kinsmen of their King, were present,&rdquo; and attracted
+      the notice of the poet. The feasts lasted many days, but on the third day
+      Petrarch excused himself to the Doge, pleading, he says, his &ldquo;ordinary
+      occupations, already known to all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Among remoter feasts in honor of national triumphs, was one on the Day of
+      the Annunciation, commemorative of the removal of the capital of the
+      Venetian isles to Rialto from Malamocco, after King Pepin had burnt the
+      latter city, and when, advancing on Venice, he was met in the lagoons and
+      beaten by the islanders and the tides: these by their recession stranding
+      his boats in the mud, and those falling upon his helpless host with the
+      fury of an insulted and imperiled people. The Doge annually assisted at
+      mass in St. Mark&rsquo;s in honor of the victory, but not long afterward the
+      celebration of it ceased, as did that of a precisely similar defeat of the
+      Hungarians, who had just descended from Asia into Europe. In 1339 there
+      were great rejoicings in the Piazza for the peace with Mastino della
+      Scala, who, beaten by the Republic, ceded his city of Treviso to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubtless the most splendid of all the occasional festivals was that held
+      for the Venetian share of the great Christian victory at Lepanto over the
+      Turks. All orders of the State took part in it; but the most remarkable
+      feature of the celebration was the roofing of the Merceria, all the way
+      from St. Mark&rsquo;s to Rialto, with fine blue cloth, studded with golden stars
+      to represent the firmament, as the shopkeepers imagined it. The pictures
+      of the famous painters of that day, Titian, Tintoretto, Palma, and the
+      rest, were exposed under this canopy, at the end near Rialto. Later, the
+      Venetian victories over the Turks at the Dardanelles were celebrated by a
+      regatta, in 1658; and Morosini&rsquo;s brilliant reconquest of the Morea, in
+      1688, was the occasion of other magnificent shows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole world has now adopted, with various modifications, the
+      picturesque and exciting pastime of the regatta, which, according to
+      Mutinelli, [Footnote: <i>Annali Urbani di Venezia</i>.] originated among
+      the lagoons at a very early period, from a peculiar feature in the
+      military discipline of the Republic. A target for practice with the bow
+      and cross-bow was set up every week on the beach at the Lido, and nobles
+      and plebeians rowed thither in barges of thirty oars, vying with each
+      other in the speed and skill with which the boats were driven. To divert
+      the popular discontent that followed the Serrar del Consiglio and the
+      suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo&rsquo;s conspiracy early in the fourteenth
+      century, the proficiency arising from this rivalry was turned to account,
+      and the spectacle of the regatta was instituted. Agreeably, however, to
+      the aristocratic spirit of the newly established oligarchy, the patricians
+      withdrew from the lists, and the regatta became the affair exclusively of
+      the gondoliers. In other Italian cities, where horse and donkey races were
+      the favorite amusement, the riders were of both sexes; and now at Venice
+      women also entered into the rivalry of the regatta. But in gallant
+      deference to their weakness, they were permitted to begin the course at
+      the mouth of the Grand Canal before the Doganna di Mare, while the men
+      were obliged to start from the Public Gardens. They followed the Grand
+      Canal to its opposite extremity, beyond the present railway station, and
+      there doubling a pole planted in the water near the Ponte della Croce,
+      returned to the common goal before the Palazzo Foscari. Here was erected
+      an ornate scaffolding to which the different prizes were attached. The
+      first boat carried off a red banner; the next received a green flag; the
+      third, a blue; and the fourth, a yellow one. With each of these was given
+      a purse, and with the last was added, by way of gibe, a live pig, a
+      picture of which was painted on the yellow banner. Every regatta included
+      five courses, in which single and double oared boats, and single and
+      double oared gondolas successively competed,&mdash;the fifth contest being
+      that in which the women participated with two-oared boats. Four prizes
+      like those described were awarded to the winners in each course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The regatta was celebrated with all the pomp which the superb city could
+      assume. As soon as the government announced that it was to take place, the
+      preparations of the champions began. &ldquo;From that time the gondolier ceased
+      to be a servant; he became almost an adoptive son;&rdquo; [Footnote: <i>Feste
+      Veneziane</i>.] his master giving him every possible assistance and
+      encouragement in the daily exercises by which he trained himself for the
+      contest, and his parish priest visiting him in his own house, to bless his
+      person, his boat, and the image of the Madonna or other saint attached to
+      the gondola. When the great day arrived the Canalazzo swarmed with boats
+      of every kind. &ldquo;All the trades and callings,&rdquo; says Giustina
+      Renier-Michiel, [Footnote: <i>Feste Veneziane</i>] with that pride in the
+      Venetian past which does not always pass from verbosity to eloquence, &ldquo;had
+      each its boats appropriately mounted and adorned; and private societies
+      filled an hundred more. The chief families among the nobility appeared in
+      their boats, on which they had lavished their taste and wealth.&rdquo; The
+      rowers were dressed with the most profuse and elaborate luxury, and the
+      barges were made to represent historical and mythological conceptions. &ldquo;To
+      this end the builders employed carving and sculpture, together with all
+      manner of costly stuffs of silk and velvet, gorgeous fringes and tassels
+      of silver and gold, flowers, fruits, shrubs, mirrors, furs, and plumage of
+      rare birds.... Young patricians, in fleet and narrow craft, propelled by
+      swift rowers, preceded the champions and cleared the way for them,
+      obliging the spectators to withdraw on either side.... They knelt on
+      sumptuous cushions in the prows of their gondolas, cross-bow in hand, and
+      launched little pellets of plaster at the directors of such obstinate
+      boats as failed to obey their orders to retire....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To augment the brilliancy of the regatta the nature of the place
+      concurred. Let us imagine that superb canal, flanked on either side by a
+      long line of edifices of every sort; with great numbers of marble palaces,&mdash;nearly
+      all of noble and majestic structure, some admirable for an antique and
+      Gothic taste, some for the richest Greek and Roman architecture,&mdash;their
+      windows and balconies decked with damasks, stuffs of the Levant,
+      tapestries, and velvets, the vivid colors of which were animated still
+      more by borders and fringes of gold, and on which leaned beautiful women
+      richly dressed and wearing tremulous and glittering jewels in their hair.
+      Wherever the eye turned, it beheld a vast multitude at doorways, on the
+      rivas, and even on the roofs. Some of the spectators occupied scaffoldings
+      erected at favorable points along the sides of the canal; and the
+      patrician ladies did not disdain to leave their palaces, and, entering
+      their gondolas, lose themselves among the infinite number of the boats....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The cannons give the signal of departure. The boats dart over the water
+      with the rapidity of lightning.... They advance and fall behind
+      alternately. One champion who seems to yield the way to a rival suddenly
+      leaves him in the rear. The shouts of his friends and kinsmen hail his
+      advantage, while others already passing him, force him to redouble his
+      efforts. Some weaker ones succumb midway, exhausted.... They withdraw, and
+      the kindly Venetian populace will not aggravate their shame with jeers;
+      the spectators glance at them compassionately, and turn again to those
+      still in the lists. Here and there they encourage them by waving
+      handkerchiefs, and the women toss their shawls in the air. Each patrician
+      following close upon his gondolier&rsquo;s boat, incites him with his voice,
+      salutes him by name, and flatters his pride and spirit.... The water foams
+      under the repeated strokes of the oars; it leaps up in spray and falls in
+      showers on the backs of the rowers already dripping with their own
+      sweat.... At last behold the dauntless mortal who seizes the red banner!
+      His rival had almost clutched it, but one mighty stroke of the oar gave
+      him the victory.... The air reverberates with a clapping of hands so loud
+      that at the remotest point on the canal the moment of triumph is known.
+      The victors plant on their agile boat the conquered flag, and instead of
+      thinking to rest their weary arms, take up the oars again and retrace
+      their course to receive congratulations and applause.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The regattas were by no means of frequent occurrence, for only forty-one
+      took place during some five centuries. The first was given in 1315, and
+      the last in 1857, in honor of the luckless Archduke Maximilian&rsquo;s marriage
+      with Princess Charlotte of Belgium. The most sumptuous and magnificent
+      regatta of all was that given to the city in the year 1686, by Duke Ernest
+      of Brunswick. This excellent prince having sold a great part of his
+      subjects to the Republic for use in its wars against the Turk, generously
+      spent their price in the costly and edifying entertainments of which
+      Venice had already become the scene. The Judgment of Paris, and the
+      Triumph of the Marine Goddesses had been represented at his expense on the
+      Grand Canal, with great acceptance. And now the Triumph of Neptune formed
+      a principal feature in the gayeties of his regatta. Nearly the whole of
+      the salt-water mythology was employed in the ceremony. An immense wooden
+      whale supporting a structure of dolphins and Tritons, surmounted by a
+      statue of Neptune, and drawn by sea-horses, moved from the Piazzetta to
+      the Palazzo Foscari, where numbers of Sirens sported about in every
+      direction till the Regatta began. The whole company of the deities, very
+      splendidly arrayed, then joined them as spectators, and behaved in the
+      manner affected by gods and goddesses on these occasions. Mutinelli
+      [Footnote: <i>Annali Urbani.</i>] recounts the story with many sighs and
+      sneers and great exactness; but it is not interesting. The miraculous
+      recovery of the body of St. Mark, in 1094, after it had been lost for
+      nearly two centuries, created a festive anniversary which was celebrated
+      for a while with great religious pomp; but the rejoicings were not
+      separately continued in after years. The festival was consolidated (if one
+      may so speak) with two others in honor of the same saint, and the triple
+      occasions were commemorated by a single holiday. The holidays annually
+      distinguished by civil or ecclesiastical displays were twenty-five in
+      number, of which only eleven were of religious origin, though all were of
+      partly religious observance. One of the most curious and interesting of
+      the former was of the earliest date, and was continued till the last years
+      of the Republic. In 596 Narses, the general of the Greek Emperor, was
+      furnished by the Venetians with means of transport by sea from Aquileja to
+      Ravenna for the army which he was leading against the Ostrogoths; and he
+      made a vow that if successful in his campaign, he would requite their
+      generosity by erecting two churches in Venice. Accordingly, when he had
+      beaten the Ostrogoths, he caused two votive churches to be built,&mdash;one
+      to St. Theodore, on the site of the present St. Mark&rsquo;s Church, and another
+      to San Geminiano, on the opposite bank of the canal which then flowed
+      there. In lapse of time the citizens, desiring to enlarge their Piazza,
+      removed the church of San Geminiano back as far as the present Fabbrica
+      Nuova, which Napoleon built on the site of the demolished temple, between
+      the western ends of the New and Old Procuratie. The removal was effected
+      without the pope&rsquo;s leave, which had been asked, but was refused in these
+      words,&mdash;&ldquo;The Holy Father cannot sanction the commission of a
+      sacrilege, though he can pardon it afterwards.&rdquo; The pontiff, therefore,
+      imposed on the Venetians for penance that the Doge should pay an annual
+      visit forever to the church. On the occasion of this visit the parish
+      priest met him at the door, and offered the holy water to him; and then
+      the Doge, having assisted at mass, marched with his Signory and the clergy
+      of the church to its original site, where the clergy demanded that it
+      should be rebuilt, and the Doge replied with the promise,&mdash;&ldquo;Next
+      year.&rdquo; A red stone was set in the pavement to mark the spot where the Doge
+      renewed this never-fulfilled promise. [Footnote: As the author of the <i>Feste
+      Veneziane</i> tells this story it is less dramatic and characteristic. The
+      clergy, she says, reminded the Doge of the occasion of his visit, and his
+      obligation to renew it the following year, which he promised to do. I
+      cling to the version in the text, for it seems to me that the Doge&rsquo;s
+      perpetual promise to rebuild the church was a return in kind for the
+      pope&rsquo;s astute answer to the petition asking him to allow its removal. So
+      good a thing ought to be history.] The old church was destroyed by fire,
+      and Sansovino built, in 1506, the temple thrown down by Napoleon to make
+      room for his palace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The 31st of January, on which day in 828 the body of St. Mark was brought
+      from Alexandria to Venice, is still observed, though the festival has lost
+      all the splendor which it received from civil intervention. For a thousand
+      years the day was hallowed by a solemn mass in St. Mark&rsquo;s, at which the
+      Doge and his Signory assisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief of the State annually paid a number of festive visits, which
+      were made the occasion of as many holidays. To the convent of San Zaccaria
+      he went in commemoration of the visit paid to that retreat by Pope
+      Benedict III., in 855, when the pontiff was so charmed by the piety and
+      goodness of the fair nuns, that, after his return to Rome, he sent them
+      great store of relics and indulgences. It thus became one of the most
+      popular of the holidays, and the people repaired in great multitude with
+      their Doge to the convent, on each recurrence of the day, that they might
+      see the relics and buy the indulgences. The nuns were of the richest and
+      noblest families of the city, and on the Doge&rsquo;s first visit, they
+      presented him with that bonnet which became the symbol of his sovereignty.
+      It was wrought of pure gold, and set with precious stones of marvelous
+      great beauty and value; and in order that the State might never seem
+      forgetful of the munificence which bestowed the gift, the bonnet was
+      annually taken from the treasury and shown by the Doge himself to the
+      Sisters of San Zaccaria. The Doge Pietro Tradonico, to whom the bonnet was
+      given, was killed in a popular tumult on this holiday, while going to the
+      convent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was likewise a vast concourse of people and traffic in indulgences
+      at the church of Santa Maria della Carita (now the Academy of Fine Arts),
+      on the anniversary of the day when Pope Alexander III., in 1177, flying
+      from the Emperor Barbarossa, found refuge in that monastery. [Footnote:
+      Selvatico and Lazari in their admirable <i>Guida Artistica e Storica di
+      Veneza</i>, say that the pope merely lodged in the monastery on the day
+      when he signed the treaty of peace with Barbarossa.] He bestowed great
+      privileges upon it, and the Venetians honored the event to the end of
+      their national existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the rare occasions during the year when the Doge appeared
+      officially in public after nightfall, was on St. Stephen&rsquo;s Day. He then
+      repaired at dusk in his gilded barge, with splendid attendance of nobles
+      and citizens, to the island church of San Giorgio Maggiore, whither, in
+      1009, the body of St. Stephen was brought from Constantinople. On the
+      first of May the Doge visited the Convent of the Virgins, (the convent
+      building now forms part of the Arsenal,) where the abbess presented him
+      with a bouquet, and graceful and pleasing ceremonies took place in
+      commemoration of the erection and endowment of the church. The head of the
+      State also annually assisted at mass in St. Mark&rsquo;s, to celebrate the
+      arrival in Venice of St. Isidore&rsquo;s body, which the Doge Domenico Michiel
+      brought with him from the East, at the end of twenty-six years&rsquo; war
+      against the infidels; and, finally, after the year 1485, when the
+      Venetians stole the bones of San Rocco from the Milanese, and deposited
+      them in the newly finished Scuola di San Rocco, a ducal visit was annually
+      paid to that edifice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two only of the national religious festivals yet survive the Republic,&mdash;that
+      of the church of the Redentore on the Giudecca, and that of the church of
+      the Salute on the Grand Canal,&mdash;both votive churches, built in
+      commemoration of the city&rsquo;s deliverances from the pest in 1578 and 1630.
+      In their general features the celebrations of the two holidays are much
+      alike; but that of the Salute is the less important of the two, and is
+      more entirely religious in its character. A bridge of boats is annually
+      thrown across the Canalazzo, and on the day of the Purification, the
+      people throng to the Virgin&rsquo;s shrine to express their gratitude for her
+      favor. This gratitude was so strong immediately after the cessation of the
+      pest in 1630, that the Senate, while the architects were preparing their
+      designs for the present church, caused a wooden one to be built on its
+      site, and consecrated with ceremonies of singular splendor. On the Festa
+      del Redentore (the third Sunday of July) a bridge of boats crosses the
+      great canal of the Giudecca, and vast throngs constantly pass it, day and
+      night. But though the small tradesmen who deal in fried cakes, and in
+      apples, peaches, pears, and other fruits, make intolerable uproar behind
+      their booths on the long quay before the church; though the venders of
+      mulberries (for which the gardens of the Giudecca are famous) fill the air
+      with their sweet jargoning (for their cries are like the shrill notes of
+      so many singing-birds); though thousands of people pace up and down, and
+      come and go upon the bridge, yet the Festa del Redentore has now none of
+      the old-time gayety it wore when the Venetians thronged the gardens, and
+      feasted, sang, danced, and flirted the night away, and at dawn went in
+      their fleets of many-lanterned boats, covering the lagoon with fairy
+      light, to behold the sunrise on the Adriatic Sea.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0328}.jpg" alt="{0328}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0328}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Besides the religious festivals mentioned, there were five banquets
+      annually given by the State on the several days of St. Mark, St. Vitus,
+      St. Jerome, and St. Stephen, and the Day of the Ascension, all of which
+      were attended with religious observances. Good Friday was especially
+      hallowed by church processions in each of the campos; and St. Martha&rsquo;s Day
+      was occasion for junketings on the Giudecca Canal, when a favorite fish,
+      being in season, was devotionally eaten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The civil and political holidays which lasted till the fall of the
+      Republic were eleven. One of the earliest was the anniversary of the
+      recapture of the Venetian Brides, who were snatched from their
+      bridegrooms, at the altar of San Pietro di Castello, by Triestine pirates.
+      The class of citizens most distinguished in the punishment of the
+      abductors was the trade of carpenters, who lived chiefly in the parish of
+      Santa Maria Formosa; and when the Doge in his gratitude bade them demand
+      any reasonable grace, the trade asked that he should pay their quarter an
+      annual visit. &ldquo;But if it rains?&rdquo; said the Doge. &ldquo;We will give you a hat to
+      cover you,&rdquo; answered the carpenters. &ldquo;And if I am hungry?&rdquo; &ldquo;We will give
+      you to eat and drink.&rdquo; So when the Doge made his visit on the day of the
+      Virgin&rsquo;s Purification, he was given a hat of gilded straw, a bottle of
+      wine, and loaves of bread. On this occasion the State bestowed dowers upon
+      twelve young girls among the fairest and best of Venice (chosen two from
+      each of the six sections of the city), who marched in procession to the
+      church of Santa Maria Formosa. But as time passed, the custom lost its
+      simplicity and purity: pretty girls were said to make eyes at handsome
+      youths in the crowd, and scandals occurred in public. Twelve wooden
+      figures were then substituted, but the procession in which they were
+      carried was followed by a disgusted and hooting populace, and assailed
+      with a shower of turnips. The festivities, which used to last eight days,
+      with incredible magnificence, fell into discredit, and were finally
+      abolished during the war when the Genoese took Chioggia and threatened
+      Venice, under Doria. This was the famous Festa delle Marie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 997 the Venetians beat the Narentines at sea, and annexed all Istria,
+      as far as Dalmatia, to the Republic. On the day of the Ascension, of the
+      same year, the Doge, for the first time, celebrated the dominion of Venice
+      over the Adriatic, though it was not till some two hundred years later
+      that the Pope Alexander III. blessed the famous espousals, and confirmed
+      the Republic in the possession of the sea forever. &ldquo;What,&rdquo; cries Giustina
+      Renier-Michiel, turning to speak of the holiday thus established, and
+      destined to be the proudest in the Venetian calendar,&mdash;&ldquo;what shall I
+      say of the greatest of all our solemnities, that of the Ascension? Alas! I
+      myself saw Frenchmen and Venetians, full of derision and insult, combine
+      to dismantle the Bucintoro and burn it for the gold upon it!&rdquo; [Footnote:
+      That which follows is a translation of the report given by Cesare Cantù,
+      in his <i>Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto</i>, of a conversation
+      with the author of <i>Feste Veneziane</i>. It is not necessary to remind
+      readers of Venetian history that Renier and Michiel were of the foremost
+      names in the Golden Book. She who bore them both was born before the fall
+      of the Republic which she so much loved and lamented, and no doubt felt
+      more than the grief she expresses for the fate of the last Bucintoro. It
+      was destroyed, as she describes, in 1796, by the French Republicans and
+      Venetian Democrats after the abdication of the oligarchy; but a fragment
+      of its mast yet remains, and is to be seen in the museum of the
+      Arsenal.].... (This was the nuptial-ship in which the Doge went to wed the
+      sea, and the patriotic lady tells us concerning the Bucintoro of her day):
+      &ldquo;It was in the form of a galley, and two hundred feet long, with two
+      decks. The first of these was occupied by an hundred and sixty rowers, the
+      handsomest and strongest of the fleet, who sat four men to each oar, and
+      there awaited their orders; forty other sailors completed the crew. The
+      upper deck was divided lengthwise by a partition, pierced with arched
+      doorways, ornamented with gilded figures, and covered with a roof
+      supported by caryatides&mdash;the whole surmounted by a canopy of crimson
+      velvet embroidered with gold. Under this were ninety seats, and at the
+      stern a still richer chamber for the Doge&rsquo;s throne, over which drooped the
+      banner of St. Mark. The prow was double-beaked, and the sides of the
+      vessel were enriched with figures of Justice, Peace, Sea, Land, and other
+      allegories and ornaments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me imagine those times&mdash;it is the habit of the old. At midday,
+      having heard mass in the chapel of the Collegio, the Doge descends the
+      Giant&rsquo;s Stairs, issues from the Porta della Carta, [Footnote: The gate of
+      the Ducal Palace which opens upon the Piazzetta next St. Mark&rsquo;s.] and
+      passes the booths of the mercers and glass-venders erected for the fair
+      beginning that evening. He is preceded by eight standard-bearers with the
+      flags of the Republic,&mdash;red, blue, white, and purple,&mdash;given by
+      Alexander III. to the Doge Ziani. Six trumpets of silver, borne by as many
+      boys, mix their notes with the clangor of the bells of the city. Behind
+      come the retinues of the ambassadors in sumptuous liveries, and the fifty
+      Comandadori in their flowing blue robes and red caps; then follow
+      musicians, and the squires of the Doge in black velvet; then the guards of
+      the Doge, two chancellors, the secretary of the Pregadi, a deacon clad in
+      purple and bearing a wax taper, six canons, three parish priests in their
+      sacerdotal robes, and the Doge&rsquo;s chaplain dressed in crimson. The grand
+      chancellor is known by his crimson vesture. Two squires bear the Doge&rsquo;s
+      chair and the cushion of cloth of gold. And the Doge&mdash;the
+      representative, and not the master of his country; the executor, and not
+      the maker of the laws; citizen and prince, revered and guarded, sovereign
+      of individuals, servant of the State&mdash;comes clad in a long mantle of
+      ermine, cassock of blue, and vest and hose of <i>tocca d&rsquo;oro</i>
+      [Footnote: A gauze of gold and silk.] with the golden bonnet on his head,
+      under the umbrella borne by a squire, and surrounded by the foreign
+      ambassadors and the papal nuncio, while his drawn sword is carried by a
+      patrician recently destined for some government of land or sea, and soon
+      to depart upon his mission. In the rear comes a throng of personages,&mdash;the
+      grand captain of the city, the judges, the three chiefs of the Forty, the
+      Avogodori, the three chiefs of the Council of Ten, the three censors, and
+      the sixty of the Senate with the sixty of the Aggiunta, all in robes of
+      crimson silk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the Bucintoro, each takes the post assigned him, and the prince
+      ascends the throne. The Admiral of the Arsenal and the Lido stands in
+      front as pilot; at the helm is the Admiral of Malamacco, and around him
+      the ship-carpenters of the Arsenal. The Bucintoro, amid redoubled clamor
+      of bells and roar of cannon, quits the riva and majestically plows the
+      lagoon, surrounded by innumerable boats of every form and size.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Patriarch, who had already sent several vases of flowers to do
+      courtesy to the company in the Bucintoro, joins them at the island of
+      Sant&rsquo; Elena, and sprinkles their course with holy water. So they reach the
+      port of Lido, whence they formerly issued out upon the open sea; but in my
+      time they paused there, turning the stern of the vessel to the sea. Then
+      the Doge, amid the thunders of the artillery of the fort, took the ring
+      blessed by the Patriarch,&mdash;who now emptied a cup of holy water into
+      the sea,&mdash;and, advancing into a little gallery behind his throne,
+      threw the ring into the waves, pronouncing the words, <i>Desponsamus te,
+      mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii</i>. Proceeding then to the
+      church of San Nicoletto, they listened to a solemn mass, and returned to
+      Venice, where the dignitaries were entertained at a banquet, while the
+      multitude peacefully dispersed among the labyrinths of the booths erected
+      for the fair.&rdquo; [Footnote: One of the sops thrown to the populace on this
+      occasion, as we learn from Mutinelli, was the admission to the train of
+      gilded barges following the Bucintoro of a boat bearing the chief of the
+      Nicolotti, one of the factions into which from time immemorial the lower
+      classes of Venice had been divided. The distinction between the two
+      parties seems to have been purely geographical; for there is no apparent
+      reason why a man should have belonged to the Castellani except that he
+      lived in the eastern quarter of the city, or to the Nicolotti, except that
+      he lived in the western quarter. The government encouraged a rivalry not
+      dangerous to itself, and for a long time the champions of the two sections
+      met annually and beat each other with rods. The form of contest was
+      afterwards modified, and became a struggle for the possession of certain
+      bridges, in which the defeated were merely thrown into the canals. I often
+      passed the scene of the fiercest of these curious battles at San Barnaba,
+      where the Ponte de Pugni is adorned with four feet of stone let into the
+      pavement, and defying each other from the four corners of the bridge.
+      Finally, even these contests were given up and the Castellani and
+      Nicolotti spent their rivalry in marvelous acrobatic feats.] This fair,
+      which was established as early as 1180, was an industrial exhibition of
+      the arts and trades peculiar to Venice, and was repeated annually, with
+      increasing ostentation, till the end, in 1796. Indeed, the feasts of the
+      Republic at last grew so numerous that it became necessary, as we have
+      seen before, to make a single holiday pay a double or triple debt of
+      rejoicing. When the Venetians recovered Chioggia after the terrible war of
+      1380, the Senate refused to yield them another <i>festa</i>, and merely
+      ordered that St. Mark&rsquo;s Day should be thereafter observed with some added
+      ceremony: there was already one festival commemorative of a triumph over
+      the Genoese (that of San Giovanni Decollate, on whose day, in 1358, the
+      Venetians beat the Genoese at Negroponte), and the Senate declared that
+      this was sufficient. A curious custom, however, on the Sunday after
+      Ascension, celebrated a remoter victory over the same enemies, to which it
+      is hard to attach any historic probability. It is not known exactly when
+      the Genoese in immense force penetrated to Poveglia (one of the small
+      islands of the lagoons), nor why being there they stopped to ask the
+      islanders the best way of getting to Venice. But tradition says that the
+      sly Povegliesi persuaded these silly Genoese that the best method of
+      navigating the lagoons was by means of rafts, which they constructed for
+      them, and on which they sent them afloat. About the time the Venetians
+      came out to meet the armada, the withes binding the members of the rafts
+      gave way, and the Genoese who were not drowned in the tides stuck in the
+      mud, and were cut in pieces like so many melons. No one will be surprised
+      to learn that not a soul of them escaped, and that only the Povegliesi
+      lived to tell the tale. Special and considerable privileges were conferred
+      on them for their part in this exploit, and were annually confirmed by the
+      Doge, when a deputation of the islanders called on him in his palace, and
+      hugged and kissed the devoted prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People who <i>will</i> sentimentalize over the pigeons of St. Mark&rsquo;s, may
+      like to know that they have been settled in the city ever since 877. After
+      the religious services on Palm Sunday, it was anciently the custom of the
+      sacristans of St. Mark&rsquo;s to release doves fettered with fragments of
+      paper, and thus partly disabled from flight, for the people to scramble
+      for in the Piazza. The people fatted such of the birds as they caught, and
+      ate them at Easter, but those pigeons which escaped took refuge in the
+      roof of the church, where they gradually assumed a certain sacredness of
+      character, and increased to enormous numbers. They were fed by provision
+      of the Republic, and being neglected at the time of its fall, many of them
+      were starved. But they now flourish on a bequest left by a pious lady for
+      their maintenance, and on the largess of grain and polenta constantly
+      bestowed by strangers. Besides the holidays mentioned, the 6th of December
+      was religiously observed in honor of the taking of Constantinople, the
+      Doge assisting at mass in the ducal chapel of St. Nicholas. He also
+      annually visited, with his Signory in the state barges, and with great
+      concourse of people, the church of San Vito on the 15th of June, in memory
+      of the change of the government from a democracy to an oligarchy, and of
+      the suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo&rsquo;s conspiracy. On St. Isidore&rsquo;s Day he
+      went with his Signory, and the religious confraternities, in torchlight
+      procession, to hear mass at St. Mark&rsquo;s in celebration of the failure of
+      Marin Falier&rsquo;s plot. On the 17th of January he visited by water the
+      hospital erected for invalid soldiers and sailors, and thus commemorated
+      the famous defence of Scutari against the Turks, in 1413. For the peace of
+      1516, concluded after the dissolution of the League of Cambray, he went in
+      his barge to the church of Santa Marina, who had potently exerted her
+      influence for the preservation of the Republic against allied France,
+      Austria, Spain, and Rome. On St. Jerome&rsquo;s Day, when the newly-elected
+      members of the Council of Ten took their seats, the Doge entertained them
+      with a banquet, and there were great popular rejoicings over an affair in
+      which the people had no interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is by a singular caprice of fortune that, while not only all the
+      Venetian holidays in anywise connected with the glory of the Republic, but
+      also those which peculiarly signalized her piety and gratitude, have
+      ceased to be, a festival common to the whole Catholic world should still
+      be observed in Venice with extraordinary display. On the day of Corpus
+      Christi there is a superb ecclesiastical procession in the Piazza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great splendor of the solemnization is said to date from the times
+      when Enrico Dandolo and his fellow-Crusaders so far forgot their purpose
+      of taking Palestine from the infidels as to take Constantinople from the
+      schismatics. Up to that period the day of Corpus Christi was honored by a
+      procession from what was then the Cathedral of San Pietro di Castello; but
+      now all the thirty parishes of the city, with their hundred churches, have
+      part in the procession, which is of such great length as to take some two
+      hours in its progress round the Piazza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several days before the holiday workmen begin to build, within the Place
+      of St. Mark, the colonnade through which the procession is to pass; they
+      roof it with blue cotton cloth, and adorn it with rolls of pasteboard
+      representing garlands of palm. At last, on the festive morning, the
+      dwellers on the Grand Canal are drawn to their balconies by the apparition
+      of boat-loads of facchini, gorgeous in scarlet robes, and bearing banners,
+      painted candles, and other movable elements of devotion, with which they
+      pass to the Piazzetta, and thence into St. Mark&rsquo;s. They re-appear
+      presently, and, with a guard of Austrian troops to clear the way before
+      them, begin their march under the canopy of the colonnade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When you have seen the Place of St. Mark by night your eye has tasted its
+      most delicate delight, but then it is the delight given by a memory only,
+      and it touches you with sadness. You must see the Piazza to-day,&mdash;every
+      window fluttering with rich stuffs and vivid colors; the three great flag
+      staffs [Footnote: Once bearing the standards of Cyprus, Candia, and
+      Venice.] hanging their heavy flags; the brilliant square alive with a
+      holiday population, with resplendent uniforms, with Italian gesture and
+      movement, and that long glittering procession, bearing slowly on the
+      august paraphernalia of the Church&mdash;you must see all this before you
+      can enter into the old heart of Venetian magnificence, and feel its life
+      about you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To-day, the ancient church of San Pietro di Castello comes first in the
+      procession, and, with a proud humility, the Basilica San Marco last.
+      Before each parochial division goes a banner displaying the picture or
+      distinctive device of its titular saint, under the shadow of which chants
+      a priest; there are the hosts of the different churches, and the gorgeous
+      canopies under which they are elevated; then come facchini dressed in
+      scarlet and bearing the painted candles, or the long carved and gilded
+      candlesticks; and again facchini delicately robed in vestments of the
+      purest white linen, with caps of azure, green, and purple, and shod with
+      sandals or white shoes, carrying other apparatus of worship. Each banner
+      and candlestick has a fluttering leaf of tinsel paper attached to it, and
+      the procession makes a soft rustling as it passes. The matter-of-fact
+      character of the external Church walks between those symbolists, the
+      candle-bearers,&mdash;in the form of persons who gather the dropping
+      fatness of the candles, and deposit it in a vase carried for that purpose.
+      Citizens march in the procession with candles; and there are
+      charity-schools which also take part, and sing in the harsh, shrill
+      manner, of which I think only little boys who have their heads closely
+      shorn are capable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On all this we looked down from a window of the Old Procuratie&mdash;of
+      course with that calm sense of superiority which people are apt to have in
+      regarding the solemnities of a religion different from their own. But that
+      did not altogether prevent us from enjoying what was really beautiful and
+      charming in the scene. I thought most of the priests, very good and gentle
+      looking,&mdash;and in all respects they were much pleasanter to the eye
+      than the monks of the Carmelite order, who, in shaving their heads to
+      simulate the Saviour&rsquo;s crown of thorns, produce a hideous burlesque of the
+      divine humiliation. Yet many even of these had earnest and sincere faces,
+      and I could not think so much as I ought, perhaps, of their idle life, and
+      the fleas in their coarse brown cloaks. I confess, indeed, I felt rather a
+      sadness than an indignation at all that self-sacrifice to an end of which
+      I could but dimly see the usefulness. With some things in this grand
+      spectacle we were wholly charmed, and doubtless had most delight in the
+      little child who personated John the Baptist, and who was quite naked, but
+      for a fleece folded about him: he bore the cross-headed staff in one small
+      hand, and led with the other a lamb much tied up with blue ribbon. Here
+      and there in the procession little girls, exquisitely dressed, and gifted
+      by fond mothers with wings and aureoles, walked, scattering flowers. I
+      likewise greatly relished the lively holiday air of a company of airy old
+      men, the pensioners of some charity, who, in their white linen trousers
+      and blue coats, formed a prominent feature of the display. Far from being
+      puffed up with their consequence, they gossiped cheerfully with the
+      spectators in the pauses of the march, and made jests to each other in
+      that light-hearted, careless way observable in old men taken care of, and
+      with nothing before them to do worth speaking of but to die. I must own
+      that the honest facchini who bore the candles were equally affable, and
+      even freer with their jokes. But in this they formed a fine contrast to
+      here and there a closely hooded devotee, who, with hidden face and silent
+      lips, was carrying a taper for religion, and not, like them, for money. I
+      liked the great good-natured crowd, so orderly and amiable; and I enjoyed
+      even that old citizen in the procession who, when the Patriarch gave his
+      blessing, found it inconvenient to kneel, and compromised by stretching
+      one leg a great way out behind him. These things, indeed, quite took my
+      mind off of the splendors; and I let the canopy of the Scuola di San Rocco
+      (worth 40,000 ducats) go by with scarce a glance, and did not bestow much
+      more attention upon the brilliant liveries of the Patriarch&rsquo;s servants,&mdash;though
+      the appearance of these ecclesiastical flunkies is far more impressive
+      than that of any of their secular brethren. They went gorgeously before
+      the Patriarch, who was surrounded by the richly dressed clergy of St.
+      Mark&rsquo;s, and by clouds of incense rising from the smoking censers. He
+      walked under the canopy in his cardinal&rsquo;s robes, and with his eye fixed
+      upon the Host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once the procession halted, and the Patriarch blessed the crowd,
+      which knelt in a profound silence. Then the military band before him
+      struck up an air from &ldquo;Un Ballo in Maschera;&rdquo; the procession moved on to
+      the cathedral, and the crowd melted away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The once-magnificent day of the Ascension the Venetians now honor by
+      closing all shop-doors behind them and putting all thought of labor out of
+      their minds, and going forth to enjoy themselves in the mild, inexplosive
+      fashion which seems to satisfy Italian nature. It is the same on all the
+      feast-days: then the city sinks into profounder quiet; only bells are
+      noisy, and where their clangor is so common as in Venice, it seems at last
+      to make friends with the general stillness, and disturbs none but people
+      of untranquil minds. We always go to the Piazza San Marco when we seek
+      pleasure, and now, for eight days only of all the year, we have there the
+      great spectacle of the Adoration of the Magi, performed every hour by
+      automata within the little golden-railed gallery on the facade of the
+      Giant&rsquo;s Clock Tower. There the Virgin sits above the azure circle of the
+      zodiac, all heavily gilded, and holding the Child, equally splendid.
+      Through the doors on either side, usually occupied by the illuminated
+      figures of the hours, appears the procession and disappears. The stately
+      giant on the summit of the tower, at the hither side of the great bell,
+      solemnly strikes the hour&mdash;as a giant should who has struck it for
+      centuries&mdash;with a grand, whole-arm movement, and a slow, muscular
+      pride. We look up&mdash;we tourists of the red-backed books; we
+      peasant-girls radiant with converging darts of silver piercing the masses
+      of our thick black hair; we Austrian soldiers in white coats and blue
+      tights; we voiceful sellers of the cherries of Padua, and we calm loafers
+      about the many-pillared base of the church&mdash;we look up and see the
+      Adoration. First, the trumpeter, blowing the world news of the act; then
+      the first king, turning softly to the Virgin, and bowing; then the second,
+      that enthusiastic devotee,&mdash;the second who lifts his crown quite from
+      his head; last the Ethiopian prince, gorgeous in green and gold, who, I am
+      sorry to say, burlesques the whole solemnity. His devotion may be equally
+      heart-felt, but it is more jerky than that of the others. He bows well and
+      adequately, but recovers his balance with a prodigious start, altogether
+      too suggestive of springs and wheels. Perhaps there is a touch of the
+      pathetic in this grotesque fatality of the black king, whose suffering
+      race has always held mankind between laughter and tears, and has seldom
+      done a fine thing without leaving somewhere the neutralizing absurdity;
+      but if there is, the sentimental may find it, not I. When the procession
+      has disappeared, we wait till the other giant has struck the hour, and
+      then we disperse.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0346}.jpg" alt="{0346}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0346}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      If it is six o&rsquo;clock, and the sea has begun to breathe cool across the
+      Basin of St. Mark, we find our account in strolling upon the long Riva
+      degli Schiavoni towards the Public Gardens. One would suppose, at first
+      thought, that here, on this magnificent quay, with its glorious lookout
+      over the lagoons, the patricians would have built their finest palaces;
+      whereas there is hardly any thing but architectural shabbiness from the
+      Ponte della Paglia at one end, to the Ponte Santa Marina at the other. But
+      there need be nothing surprising in the fact, after all. The feudal wealth
+      and nobility of other cities kept the base at a respectful distance by
+      means of lofty stone walls, and so shut in their palaces and gardens. Here
+      equal seclusion could only be achieved by building flush upon the water,
+      and therefore all the finest palaces rise sheer from the canals; and
+      caffè, shops, barracks, and puppet-shows occupy the Riva degli Schiavoni.
+      Nevertheless, it is the favorite promenade of the Venetians for the winter
+      sunshine, and at such times in the summer as when the sun&rsquo;s rage is
+      tempered. There is always variety in the throng on the Riva, but the
+      fashionable part of it is the least interesting: here and there a
+      magnificent Greek flashes through the crowd, in dazzling white petticoats
+      and gold-embroidered leggings and jacket; now and then a tall Dalmat or a
+      solemn Turk; even the fishermen and the peasants, and the lower orders of
+      the people, are picturesque; but polite Venice is hopelessly given to the
+      pride of the eyes, and commits all the excesses of the French modes. The
+      Venetian dandy, when dressed to his own satisfaction, is the worst-dressed
+      man in the world. His hat curls outrageously in brim and sides; his
+      coatsleeves are extremely full, and the garment pinches him at the waist;
+      his pantaloons flow forth from the hips, and contract narrowly at the
+      boot, which is square-toed and made too long. The whole effect is
+      something not to be seen elsewhere, and is well calculated to move the
+      beholder to desperation. [Footnote: These exaggerations of the fashions of
+      1862 have been succeeded by equal travesties of the present modes.] The
+      Venetian fine lady, also, is prone to be superfine. Her dress is as full
+      of color as a Paolo Veronese; in these narrow streets, where it is hard to
+      expand an umbrella, she exaggerates hoops to the utmost; and she fatally
+      hides her ankles in pantalets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the wide thoroughfare leading from the last bridge of the Riva to the
+      gate of the gardens there is always a clapping of wooden shoes on the
+      stones, a braying of hand-organs, a shrieking of people who sell fish and
+      fruit, at once insufferable and indescribable. The street is a <i>rio
+      terrà</i>,&mdash;a filled-up canal,&mdash;and, as always happens with <i>rii
+      terrai</i>, is abandoned to the poorest classes who manifest themselves,
+      as the poorest classes are apt to do always, in groups of frowzy women,
+      small girls carrying large babies, beggars, of course, and soldiers. I
+      spoke of fruit-sellers; but in this quarter the traffic in pumpkin-seeds
+      is the most popular,&mdash;the people finding these an inexpensive and
+      pleasant excess, when taken with a glass of water flavored with anise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Gardens were made by Napoleon, who demolished to that end some
+      monasteries once cumbering the ground. They are pleasant enough, and are
+      not gardens at all, but a park of formally-planted trees&mdash;sycamores,
+      chiefly. I do not remember to have seen here any Venetians of the better
+      class, except on the Mondays-of-the-Garden, in September. Usually the
+      promenaders are fishermen, Austrian corporals, loutish youth of low
+      degree, and women too old and too poor to have any thing to do. Strangers
+      go there, and the German visitors even drink the exceptionable beer which
+      is sold in the wooden cottage on the little hillock at the end of the
+      Gardens. There is also a stable&mdash;where are the only horses in Venice.
+      They are let at a florin an hour, and I do not know why the riders are
+      always persons of the Hebrew faith. In a word, nothing can be drearier
+      than the company in the Gardens, and nothing lovelier than the view they
+      command,&mdash;from the sunset on the dome of the church of the Salute,
+      all round the broad sweep of lagoon, to the tower at the port of San
+      Nicolò, where you catch a glimpse of the Adriatic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The company is commonly stupid, but one evening, as we strolled idly
+      through the walks, we came upon an interesting group&mdash;forty or fifty
+      sailors, soldiers, youth of the people, gray-haired fishermen and
+      contadini&mdash;sitting and lying on the grass, and listening with rapt
+      attention to an old man reclining against a tree. I never saw a manner of
+      sweeter or easier dignity than the speaker&rsquo;s. Nature is so lavish of her
+      grace to these people that grow near her heart&mdash;the sun! Infinite
+      study could not have taught one northern-born the charm of oratory as this
+      old man displayed it. I listened, and heard that he was speaking Tuscan.
+      Do you guess with what he was enchanting his simple auditors? Nothing less
+      than &ldquo;Orlando Furioso.&rdquo; They listened with the hungriest delight, and when
+      Ariosto&rsquo;s interpreter raised his finger and said, &ldquo;Disse l&rsquo;imperatore,&rdquo;
+       or, &ldquo;Orlando disse, Carlomano mio,&rdquo; they hardly breathed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the <i>Lunedì dei Giardini</i>, already mentioned, all orders of the
+      people flock thither, and promenade, and banquet on the grass. The trees
+      get back the voices of their dryads, and the children fill the aisles with
+      glancing movement and graceful sport.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, the hand-organ seeks here its proper element, the populace,&mdash;but
+      here it brays to a peculiarly beautiful purpose. For no sooner does it
+      sound than the young girls of the people wreathe themselves into dances,
+      and improvise the poetry of motion. Over the grass they whirl, and up and
+      down the broad avenues, and no one of all the gentle and peaceable crowd
+      molests or makes them afraid. It is a scene to make you believe in Miriam
+      dancing with Donatello there in that old garden at Rome, and reveals a
+      simple beauty in the nature of the Italian poor, which shall one day, I
+      hope, be counted in their favor when they are called to answer for lying
+      and swindling.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"></a>
+      CHAPTER XVIII.<br/>
+      CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It often happens, even after the cold has announced itself in Venice, that
+      the hesitating winter lingers in the Tyrol, and a mellow Indian-summer
+      weather has possession of the first weeks of December. There was nothing
+      in the December weather of 1863 to remind us Northerners that Christmas
+      was coming. The skies were as blue as those of June, the sun was warm, and
+      the air was bland, with only now and then a trenchant breath from the
+      Alps, coming like a delicate sarcasm from loveliness unwilling to be
+      thought insipidly amiable. But if there was no warning in the weather,
+      there were other signs of Christmas-time not to be mistaken: a certain
+      foolish leaping of the heart in one&rsquo;s own breast, as if the dead raptures
+      of childhood were stirred in their graves by the return of the happy
+      season; and in Venice, in weary, forlorn Venice, there was the
+      half-unconscious tumult, the expectant bustle which cities feel at the
+      approach of holidays. The little shops put on their gayest airs; there was
+      a great clapping and hammering on the stalls and booths which were
+      building in the campos; the street-cries were more shrill and resonant
+      than ever, and the air was shaken with the continual clangor of the church
+      bells. All this note of preparation is rather bewildering to strangers,
+      and is apt to disorder the best-disciplined intentions of seeing Christmas
+      as the Venetians keep it. The public observance of the holiday in the
+      churches and on the streets is evident and accessible to the most
+      transient sojourner; but it is curious proof of the difficulty of
+      knowledge concerning the in-door life and usages of the Italians, that I
+      had already spent two Christmases in Venice without learning any thing of
+      their home celebration of the day. Perhaps a degree of like difficulty
+      attends like inquiry everywhere, for the happiness of Christmas contracts
+      the family circle more exclusively than ever around the home hearth, or
+      the domestic scaldino, as the case may be. But, at any rate, I was quite
+      ready to say that the observance of Christmas in Venice was altogether
+      public, when I thought it a measure of far-sighted prudence to consult my
+      barber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all Latin countries the barber is a source of information, which,
+      skillfully tapped, pours forth in a stream of endless gossip and local
+      intelligence. Every man talks with his barber; and perhaps a lingering
+      dignity clings to this artist from his former profession of surgeon: it is
+      certain the barber here prattles on with a freedom and importance
+      perfectly admitted and respected by the interlocutory count under his
+      razor. Those who care to know how things passed in an Italian barber shop
+      three hundred years ago, may read it in Miss Evans&rsquo;s &ldquo;Romola;&rdquo; those who
+      are willing to see Nello alive and carrying on his art in Venice at this
+      day, must go to be shaved at his shop in the Frezzaria. Here there is a
+      continual exchange of gossip, and I have often listened with profit to the
+      sage and piquant remarks of the head barber and chief <i>ciarlone</i>, on
+      the different events of human life brought to his notice. His shop is well
+      known as a centre of scandal, and I have heard a fair Venetian declare
+      that she had cut from her list all acquaintance who go there, as persons
+      likely to become infected with the worst habits of gossip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this Nello, however, I used to go only when in the most brilliant humor
+      for listening, and my authority on Christmas observances is another and
+      humbler barber, but not less a babbler, than the first. By birth, I
+      believe, he is a Mantuan, and he prides himself on speaking Italian
+      instead of Venetian. He has a defective eye, which obliges him to tack
+      before bringing his razor to bear, but which is all the more favorable to
+      conversation. On the whole, he is flattered to be asked about Christmas in
+      Venice, and he first tells me that it is one of the chief holidays of the
+      year:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is then, Signore, that the Venetians have the custom to make three
+      sorts of peculiar presents: Mustard, Fish, and Mandorlato. You must have
+      seen the mustard in the shop windows: it is a thick conserve of fruits,
+      flavored with mustard; and the mandorlato is a candy made of honey, and
+      filled with almonds. Well, they buy fish, as many as they will, and a vase
+      of mustard, and a box of mandorlato, and make presents of them, one family
+      to another, the day before Christmas. It is not too much for a rich family
+      to present a hundred boxes of mandorlato and as many pots of mustard.
+      These are exchanged between friends in the city, and Venetians also send
+      them to acquaintance in the country, whence the gift is returned in cakes
+      and eggs at Easter. Christmas Eve people invite each other to great
+      dinners, and eat and drink, and make merry; but there are only fish and
+      vegetables, for it is a meagre day, and meats are forbidden. This dinner
+      lasts so long that, when it is over, it is almost time to so to midnight
+      mass, which all must attend, or else hear three masses on the morrow; and
+      no doubt it was some delinquent who made our saying,&mdash;&lsquo;Long as a
+      Christmas mass.&rsquo; On Christmas Day people dine at home, keeping the day
+      with family reunions. But the day after! Ah-heigh! That is the first of
+      Carnival, and all the theatres are opened, and there is no end to the
+      amusements&mdash;or was not, in the old time. Now, they never begin. A
+      week later comes the day of the Lord&rsquo;s Circumcision, and then the next
+      holiday is Easter. The Nativity, the Circumcision, and the Resurrection&mdash;behold!
+      these are the three mysteries of the Christian faith. Of what religion are
+      the Americans, Signore?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I think I was justified in answering that we were Christians. My barber
+      was politely surprised. &ldquo;But there are so many different religions,&rdquo; he
+      said, in excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the afternoon before Christmas I walked through the thronged Merceria
+      to the Rialto Bridge, where the tumultuous mart which opens at Piazza San
+      Marco culminates in a deafening uproar of bargains. At this time the
+      Merceria, or street of the shops, presents the aspect of a fair, and is
+      arranged with a tastefulness and a cunning ability to make the most of
+      every thing, which are seldom applied to the abundance of our fairs at
+      home. The shops in Venice are all very small, and the streets of lofty
+      houses are so narrow and dark, that whatever goods are not exposed in the
+      shop-windows are brought to the door to be clamored over by purchasers; so
+      that the Merceria is roused by unusual effort to produce a more pronounced
+      effect of traffic and noise than it always wears; but now the effort had
+      been made and the effect produced. The street was choked with the throngs,
+      through which all sorts of peddlers battled their way and cried their
+      wares. In Campo San Bartolomeo, into which the Merceria expands, at the
+      foot of Rialto Bridge, holiday traffic had built enormous barricades of
+      stalls, and entrenched itself behind booths, whence purchasers were
+      assailed with challenges to buy bargains. More than half the campo was
+      paved with crockery from Rovigo and glass-ware from Murano; clothing of
+      every sort, and all kinds of small household wares, were offered for sale;
+      and among the other booths, in the proportion of two to one, were stalls
+      of the inevitable Christmas mustard and mandorlato.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I cared rather for the crowd than what the crowd cared for. I had been
+      long ago obliged to throw aside my preconceived notions of the Italian
+      character, though they were not, I believe, more absurd than the
+      impressions of others who have never studied Italian character in Italy. I
+      hardly know what of bacchantic joyousness I had not attributed to them on
+      their holidays: a people living in a mild climate under such a lovely sky,
+      with wine cheap and abundant, might not unreasonably have been expected to
+      put on a show of the greatest jollity when enjoying themselves. Venetian
+      crowds are always perfectly gentle and kindly, but they are also as a
+      whole usually serious; and this Christmas procession, moving up and down
+      the Merceria, and to and fro between the markets of Rialto, was in the
+      fullest sense a solemnity. It is true that the scene was dramatic, but the
+      drama was not consciously comic. Whether these people bought or sold, or
+      talked together, or walked up and down in silence, they were all equally
+      in earnest. The crowd, in spite of its noisy bustle and passionate uproar,
+      did not seem to me a blithe or light-hearted crowd. Its sole activity was
+      that of traffic, for, far more dearly than any Yankee, a Venetian loves a
+      bargain, and puts his whole heart into upholding and beating down demands.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0360}.jpg" alt="{0360}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0360}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Across the Bridge began the vegetable and fruit market, where whole
+      Hollands of cabbage and Spains of onions opened on the view, with every
+      other succulent and toothsome growth; and beyond this we entered the glory
+      of Rialto, the fish-market, which is now more lavishly supplied than at
+      any other season. It was picturesque and full of gorgeous color for the
+      fish of Venice seem all to catch the rainbow hues of the lagoon. There is
+      a certain kind of red mullet, called <i>triglia</i>, which is as rich and
+      tender in its dyes as if it had never swam in water less glorious than
+      that which crimsons under October sunsets. But a fish-market, even at
+      Rialto, with fishermen in scarlet caps and <i>triglie</i> in sunset
+      splendors, is only a fish-market after all: it is wet and slimy under
+      foot, and the innumerable gigantic eels, writhing everywhere, set the soul
+      asquirm, and soon-sated curiosity slides willingly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had an appointment with a young Venetian lady to attend midnight mass
+      at the church of San Moisè, and thither about half-past eleven we went to
+      welcome in Christmas. The church of San Moisè is in the highest style of
+      the Renaissance art, which is, I believe, the lowest style of any other.
+      The richly sculptured façade is divided into stories; the fluted columns
+      are stilted upon pedestals, and their lines are broken by the bands which
+      encircle them like broad barrel-hoops. At every possible point theatrical
+      saints and angels, only sustained from falling to the ground by iron bars
+      let into their backs, start from the niches and cling to the sculpture.
+      The outside of the church is in every way detestable, and the inside is
+      consistently bad. All the side-altars have broken arches, and the high
+      altar is built of rough blocks of marble to represent Mount Sinai, on
+      which a melodramatic statue of Moses receives the tables of the law from
+      God the Father, with frescoed seraphim in the background. For the same
+      reason, I suppose, that the devout prefer a hideous Bambino and a Madonna
+      in crinoline to the most graceful artistic conception of those sacred
+      personages, San Moisè is the most popular church for the midnight mass in
+      Venice, and there is no mass at all in St. Mark&rsquo;s, where its magnificence
+      would be so peculiarly impressive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Christmas Eve, then, this church was crowded, and the door-ways were
+      constantly thronged with people passing in and out. I was puzzled to see
+      so many young men present, for Young Italy is not usually in great number
+      at church; but a friend explained the anomaly: &ldquo;After the guests at our
+      Christmas Eve dinners have well eaten and drunken, they all go to mass in
+      at least one church, and the younger offer a multiplied devotion by going
+      to all. It is a good thing in some ways, for by this means they manage to
+      see every pretty face in the city, which that night has specially prepared
+      itself to be seen;&rdquo; and from this slender text my friend began to
+      discourse at large about these Christmas Eve dinners, and chiefly how
+      jollily the priests fared, ending with the devout wish, &ldquo;Would God had
+      made me nephew of a canonico!&rdquo; The great dinners of the priests are a
+      favorite theme with Italian talkers; but I doubt it is after all only a
+      habit of speech. The priests are too numerous to feed sumptuously in most
+      cases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had a good place to see and hear, sitting in the middle of the main
+      aisle, directly over the dust of John Law, who alighted in Venice when his
+      great Mississippi bubble burst, and died here, and now sleeps peacefully
+      under a marble tablet in the ugly church of San Moisè. The thought of that
+      busy, ambitious life, come to this unscheming repose under our feet,&mdash;so
+      far from the scene of its hopes, successes, and defeats,&mdash;gave its
+      own touch of solemnity to the time and place, and helped the offended
+      sense of propriety through the bursts of operatic music, which
+      interspersed the mass. But on the whole, the music was good and the
+      function sufficiently impressive,&mdash;what with the gloom of the temple
+      everywhere starred with tapers, and the grand altar lighted to the
+      mountain-top. The singing of the priests also was here much better than I
+      had found it elsewhere in Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The equality of all classes in church is a noticeable thing always in
+      Italy, but on this Christmas Eve it was unusually evident. The rags of the
+      beggar brushed the silks of luxury, as the wearers knelt side by side on
+      the marble floor; and on the night when God was born to poverty on earth,
+      the rich seemed to feel that they drew nearer Him in the neighborhood of
+      the poor. In these costly temples of the eldest Christianity, the poor
+      seem to enter upon their inheritance of the future, for it is they who
+      frequent them most and possess them with the deepest sense of ownership.
+      The withered old woman, who creeps into St Mark&rsquo;s with her scaldino in her
+      hand, takes visible possession of its magnificence as God&rsquo;s and hers, and
+      Catholic wealth and rank would hardly, if challenged, dispute her claim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the longest mass comes to an end at last, and those of our party who
+      could credit themselves with no gain of masses against the morrow,
+      received the benediction at San Moisè with peculiar unction. We all issued
+      forth, and passing through the lines of young men who draw themselves up
+      on either side of the doors of public places in Venice, to look at the
+      young ladies as they come out, we entered the Place of St. Mark. The
+      Piazza was more gloriously beautiful than ever I saw it before, and the
+      church had a saintly loveliness. The moon was full, and snowed down the
+      mellowest light on the gray domes, which in their soft, elusive outlines,
+      and strange effect of far-withdrawal, rhymed like faint-heard refrains to
+      the bright and vivid arches of the façade. And if the bronze horses had
+      been minded to quit their station before the great window over the central
+      arch, they might have paced around the night&rsquo;s whole half-world, and found
+      no fairer resting-place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Christmas Day in Venice, it amounted to very little; every thing
+      was closed, and whatever merry-making went on was all within doors.
+      Although the shops and the places of amusement were opened the day
+      following, the city entered very sparingly on the pleasures of Carnival,
+      and Christmas week passed off in every-day fashion. It will be remembered
+      that on St. Stephen&rsquo;s Day&mdash;the first of Carnival&mdash;one of the
+      five annual banquets took place at the Ducal Palace in the time of the
+      Republic. A certain number of patricians received invitations to the
+      dinner, and those for whom there was no room were presented with fish and
+      poultry by the Doge. The populace were admitted to look on during the
+      first course, and then, having sated their appetites with this savory
+      observance, were invited to withdraw. The patriotic Giustina
+      Renier-Michiel of course makes much of the courtesy thus extended to the
+      people by the State, but I cannot help thinking it must have been hard to
+      bear. The banquet, however, has passed away with the Republic which gave
+      it, and the only savor of dinner which Venetian poverty now inhales on St.
+      Stephen&rsquo;s Day, is that which arises from its own proper pot of broth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      New Year&rsquo;s is the carnival of the beggars in Venice. Their business is
+      carried on briskly throughout the year, but on this day it is pursued with
+      an unusual degree of perseverance, and an enterprise worthy of all
+      disinterested admiration. At every corner, on every bridge, under every
+      door-way, hideous shapes of poverty, mutilation, and deformity stand
+      waiting, and thrust out palms, plates, and pans, and advance good wishes
+      and blessings to all who pass. It is an immemorial custom, and it is one
+      in which all but the quite comfortable classes participate. The facchini
+      in every square take up their collections; the gondoliers have their
+      plates prepared for contribution at every ferry; at every caffè and
+      restaurant begging-boxes appeal to charity. Whoever has lifted hand in
+      your service in any way during the past year expects a reward on New
+      Year&rsquo;s for the complaisance, and in some cases the shop-keepers send to
+      wish you a <i>bel capo d&rsquo;anno</i>, with the same practical end in view. On
+      New Year&rsquo;s Eve and morning bands of facchini and gondoliers go about
+      howling <i>vivas</i> under charitable windows till they open and drop
+      alms. The Piazza is invaded by the legions of beggary, and held in
+      overpowering numbers against all comers; and to traverse it is like a
+      progress through a lazar-house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond encouraging so gross an abuse as this, I do not know that Venice
+      celebrates New Year&rsquo;s in a peculiar manner. It is a <i>festa</i>, and
+      there are masses, of course. Presents are exchanged, which consist chiefly
+      of books&mdash;printed for the season, and brilliant outside and dull
+      within, like all annuals.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"></a>
+      CHAPTER XIX.<br/>
+      LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING; BAPTISMS AND BURIALS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians have had a practical and strictly business-like way of
+      arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has
+      always been made for the dower and for the good of the State; private and
+      public interest being consulted, the small matters of affections have been
+      left to the chances of association; and it does not seem that Venetian
+      society has ever dealt severely with husbands or wives whom
+      incompatibilities forced to seek consolation outside of matrimony.
+      Herodotus relates that the Illyrian Veneti sold their daughters at auction
+      to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably placed in life,
+      the hard-favored were given to whomsoever would take them, with such dower
+      as might be considered a reasonable compensation. The auction was
+      discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts still partook of
+      the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction. At a comparatively
+      late period Venetian fathers went with their daughters to a great annual
+      matrimonial fair at San Pietro di Castello Olivolo, and the youth of the
+      lagoons repaired thither to choose wives from the number of the maidens.
+      These were all dressed in white, with hair loose about the neck, and each
+      bore her dower in a little box, slung over her shoulder by a ribbon. It is
+      to be supposed that there was commonly a previous understanding between
+      each damsel and some youth in the crowd: as soon as all had paired off,
+      the bishop gave them a sermon and his benediction, and the young men
+      gathered up their brides and boxes, and went away wedded. It was on one of
+      these occasions, in the year 944, that the Triestine pirates stole the
+      Brides of Venice with their dowers, and gave occasion to the Festa delle
+      Marie, already described, and to Rogers&rsquo;s poem, which every body pretends
+      to have read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This going to San Pietro&rsquo;s, selecting a wife and marrying her on the spot,
+      out of hand, could only have been the contrivance of a straightforward,
+      practical race. Among the common people betrothals were managed with even
+      greater ease and dispatch, till a very late day in history; and in the
+      record of a certain trial which took place in 1443 there is an account of
+      one of these brief and unceremonious courtships. Donna Catarussa, who
+      gives evidence, and whom I take to have been a worthless, idle gossip, was
+      one day sitting at her door, when Piero di Trento passed, selling brooms,
+      and said to her, &ldquo;Madonna, find me some nice girl.&rdquo; To which Donna
+      Catarussa replied, &ldquo;Ugly fool! do you take me for a go-between?&rdquo; &ldquo;No,&rdquo;
+       said Piero, &ldquo;not that; I mean a girl to be my wife.&rdquo; And as Donna
+      Catarussa thought at once of a suitable match, she said, &ldquo;In faith of God,
+      I know one for you. Come again to-morrow.&rdquo; So they both met next day, and
+      the woman chosen by Donna Catarussa being asked, &ldquo;Wouldst thou like to
+      have Piero for thy husband, as God commands and holy Church?&rdquo; she
+      answered, &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; And Peter being asked the like question, answered, &ldquo;Why,
+      yes, certainly.&rdquo; And they went off and had the wedding feast. A number of
+      these betrothals takes place in the last scene of Goldoni&rsquo;s &ldquo;Baruffe
+      Chiozzotte,&rdquo; where the belligerent women and their lovers take hands in
+      the public streets, and saluting each other as man and wife, are
+      affianced, and get married as quickly as possible:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Checa</i> (to Tofolo). Take my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Tofolo</i>. Wife!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Checa</i>. Husband!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Tofolo</i>. Hurra!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The betrothals of the Venetian nobles were celebrated with as much pomp
+      and ceremony as could possibly distinguish them from those of the people,
+      and there was much more polite indifference to the inclinations of the
+      parties immediately concerned. The contract was often concluded before the
+      betrothed had seen each other, by means of a third person, when the amount
+      of the dower was fixed. The bridegroom elect having verbally agreed with
+      the parents of the bride, repaired at an early day to the court-yard of
+      the Ducal Palace, where the match was published, and where he shook hands
+      with his kinsmen and friends. On the day fixed for signing the contract
+      the bride&rsquo;s father invited to his house the bridegroom and all his
+      friends, and hither came the high officers of state to compliment the
+      future husband. He, with the father of his betrothed, met the guests at
+      the door of the palace, and conducted them to the grand saloon, which no
+      woman was allowed (<i>si figuri!</i>) at this time to enter. When the
+      company was seated, the bride, clad in white, was led from her rooms and
+      presented. She wore a crown of pearls and brilliants on her head, and her
+      hair, mixed with long threads of gold, fell loose about her shoulders, as
+      you may see it in Carpaccio&rsquo;s pictures of the Espousals of St. Ursula. Her
+      ear-rings were pendants of three pearls set in gold; her neck and throat
+      were bare but for a collar of lace and gems, from which slid a fine
+      jeweled chain into her bosom. Over her breast she wore a stomacher of
+      cloth of gold, to which were attached her sleeves, open from the elbow to
+      the hand. The formal words of espousal being pronounced, the bride paced
+      slowly round the hall to the music of fifes and trumpets, and made a
+      gentle inclination to each of the guests; and then returned to her
+      chamber, from which she issued again on the arrival of any tardy friend,
+      and repeated the ceremony. After all this, she descended to the courtyard,
+      where she was received by gentlewomen, her friends, and placed on a raised
+      seat (which was covered with rich stuffs) in an open gondola, and thus,
+      followed by a fleet of attendant gondolas, went to visit all the convents
+      in which there were kinspeople of herself or her betrothed. The excessive
+      publicity of these ceremonies was supposed to strengthen the validity of
+      the marriage contract. At an early day after the espousals the betrothed,
+      preceded by musicians and followed by relatives and friends, went at dawn
+      to be married in the church,&mdash;the bridegroom wearing a toga, and the
+      bride a dress of white silk or crimson velvet, with jewels in her hair,
+      and pearls embroidered on her robes. Visits of congratulation followed,
+      and on the same day a public feast was given in honor of the wedding, to
+      which at least three hundred persons were always invited, and at which the
+      number, quality, and cost of the dishes were carefully regulated by the
+      Republic&rsquo;s laws. On this occasion, one or more persons were chosen as
+      governors of the feast, and after the tables were removed, a mock-heroic
+      character appeared, and recounted with absurd exaggeration the deeds of
+      the ancestors of the bride and groom. The next morning <i>ristorativi</i>
+      of sweetmeats and confectionery were presented to the happy couple, by
+      whom the presents were returned in kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A splendor so exceptional, even in the most splendid age of the most
+      splendid city, as that which marked the nuptial feasts of the unhappy
+      Jacopo Foscari, could not be left unnoticed in this place. He espoused
+      Lucrezia, daughter of Lionardo Contarini, a noble as rich and magnificent
+      as Jacopo&rsquo;s own father, the Doge; and, on the 29th of January 1441, the
+      noble Eustachio Balbi being chosen lord of the feasts, the bridegroom, the
+      bride&rsquo;s brother and eighteen other patrician youths, assembled in the
+      Palazzo Balbi, whence they went on horseback to conduct Lucrezia to the
+      Ducal Palace. They were all sumptuously dressed in crimson velvet and
+      silver brocade of Alexandria, and rode chargers superbly caparisoned.
+      Other noble friends attended them; musicians went before; a troop of
+      soldiers brought up the rear. They thus proceeded to the court-yard of the
+      Ducal Palace, and then, returning, traversed the Piazza, and threading the
+      devious little streets to the Campo San Samuele, there crossed the Grand
+      Canal upon a bridge of boats, to San Barnaba opposite, where the Contarini
+      lived. On their arrival at this place the bride, supported by two
+      Procuratori di San Marco, and attended by sixty ladies, descended to the
+      church and heard mass, after which an oration was delivered in Campo San
+      Barnaba before the Doge, the ambassadors, and a multitude of nobles and
+      people, in praise of the spouses and their families. The bride then
+      returned to her father&rsquo;s house, and jousts took place in the campos of
+      Santa Maria Formosa and San Polo (the largest in the city), and in the
+      Piazza San Marco. The Doge gave a great banquet, and at its close one
+      hundred and fifty ladies proceeded to the bride&rsquo;s palace in the Bucintoro,
+      where one hundred other ladies joined them, together with Lucrezia, who,
+      seated between Francesco Sforza (then General-in-chief of the Republic&rsquo;s
+      armies) and the Florentine ambassador, was conducted, amid the shouts of
+      the people and the sound of trumpets, to the Ducal Palace. The Doge
+      received her at the riva of the Piazzetta, and, with Sforza and Balbi led
+      her to the foot of the palace stairs, where the Dogaressa, with sixty
+      ladies, welcomed her. A state supper ended this day&rsquo;s rejoicings, and on
+      the following day a tournament took place in the Piazza, for a prize of
+      cloth of gold, which was offered by Sforza. Forty knights contested the
+      prize and supped afterward with the Doge. On the next day there were
+      processions of boats with music on the Grand Canal; on the fourth and last
+      day there were other jousts for prizes offered by the jewelers and
+      Florentine merchants; and every night there were dancing and feasting in
+      the Ducal Palace. The Doge was himself the giver of the last tournament,
+      and with this the festivities came to an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have read an account by an old-fashioned English traveler of a Venetian
+      marriage which he saw, sixty or seventy years ago, at the church of San
+      Giorgio Maggiore: &ldquo;After a crowd of nobles,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;in their usual
+      black robes, had been some time in attendance, the gondolas appearing,
+      exhibited a fine show, though all of them were painted of a sable hue, in
+      consequence of a sumptuary law, which is very necessary in this place, to
+      prevent an expense which many who could not bear it would incur;
+      nevertheless the barcarioli, or boatmen, were dressed in handsome
+      liveries; the gondolas followed one another in a line, each carrying two
+      ladies, who were likewise dressed in black. As they landed they arranged
+      themselves in order, forming a line from the gate to the great altar. At
+      length the bride, arrayed in white as the symbol of innocence, led by the
+      bridesman, ascended the stairs of the landing-place. There she received
+      the compliments of the bridegroom, in his black toga, who walked at her
+      right hand to the altar, where they and all the company kneeled. I was
+      often afraid the poor young creature would have sunk upon the ground
+      before she arrived, for she trembled with great agitation, while she made
+      her low courtesies from side to side: however, the ceremony was no sooner
+      performed than she seemed to recover her spirits, and looked matrimony in
+      the face with a determined smile. Indeed, in all appearance she had
+      nothing to fear from her husband, whose age and aspect were not at all
+      formidable; accordingly she tripped back to the gondola with great
+      activity and resolution, and the procession ended as it began. Though
+      there was something attractive in this aquatic parade, the black hue of
+      the boats and the company presented to a stranger, like me, the idea of a
+      funeral rather than a wedding. My expectation was raised too high by the
+      previous description of the Italians, who are much given to hyperbole, who
+      gave me to understand that this procession would far exceed any thing I
+      had ever seen. When I reflect upon this rhodomontade,&rdquo; disdainfully adds
+      Mr. Drummond, &ldquo;I cannot help comparing, in my memory, the paltry
+      procession of the Venetian marriage with a very august occurrence of which
+      I was eyewitness in Sweden,&rdquo; and which being the reception of their
+      Swedish Majesties by the British fleet, I am sure the reader will not ask
+      me to quote. With change of government, changes of civilization following
+      the revolutions, and the decay of wealth among the Venetian nobles, almost
+      all their splendid customs have passed away, and the habit of making
+      wedding presents of sweetmeats and confectionery is perhaps the only relic
+      which has descended from the picturesque past to the present time. These
+      gifts are still exchanged not only by nobles, but by all commoners
+      according to their means, and are sometimes a source of very profuse
+      outlay. It is the habit to send the candies in the elegant and costly
+      paper caskets which the confectioners sell, and the sum of a thousand
+      florins scarcely suffices to pass the courtesy round a moderately large
+      circle of friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still greatly
+      a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to the
+      principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that they have
+      not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the poorest, who
+      cannot and do not seclude the youth of either sex from each other, and
+      with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and subterfuge would be
+      superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the <i>capa y espada</i>
+      comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried on with all the
+      cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and stolen interviews.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us take our nominal friends, Marco and Todaro, and attend them in
+      their solemn promenade under the arcades of the Procuratie, or upon the
+      Molo, whither they go every evening to taste the air and to look at the
+      ladies, while the Austrians and the other foreigners listen to the
+      military music in the Piazza. They are both young, our friends; they have
+      both glossy silk hats; they have both light canes and an innocent swagger.
+      Inconceivably mild are these youth, and in their talk indescribably small
+      and commonplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They look at the ladies, and suddenly Todaro feels the consuming ardors of
+      love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Todaro</i> (to Marco). Here, dear! Behold this beautiful blonde here!
+      Beautiful as an angel! But what loveliness!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Marco</i>. But where?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Todaro</i>. It is enough. Let us go. I follow her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the force of the passion in southern hearts. They follow that
+      beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of the gray-moustached
+      papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is electrically
+      conscious of pursuit. They follow her during the whole evening, and, at a
+      distance, softly follow her home, where the burning Todaro photographs the
+      number of the house upon the sensitized tablets of his soul.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0380}.jpg" alt="{0380}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0380}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      This is the first great step in love: he has seen his adored one, and he
+      knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardor. The next advance
+      is to be decided between himself and the faithful Marco, and is to be
+      debated over many cups of black coffee, not to name glasses of
+      sugar-and-water and the like exciting beverages. The friends may now find
+      out the caffè which the Biondina frequents with her parents, and to which
+      Todaro may go every evening and feast his eyes upon her loveliness, never
+      making his regard known by any word, till some night, when he has followed
+      her home, he steals speech with her as he stands in the street under her
+      balcony,&mdash;and looks sufficiently sheepish as people detect him on
+      their late return from the theatre. [Footnote: The love-making scenes in
+      Goldoni&rsquo;s comedy of <i>Il Bugiarda</i> are photographically faithful to
+      present usage in Venice.] Or, if the friends do not take this course in
+      their courtship (for they are both engaged in the wooing), they decide
+      that Todaro, after walking back and forth a sufficient number of times in
+      the street where the Biondina lives, shall write her a tender letter, to
+      demand if she be disposed to correspond his love. This billet must always
+      be conveyed to her by her serving-maid, who must be bribed by Marco for
+      the purpose. At every juncture Marco must be consulted, and acquainted
+      with every step of progress; and no doubt the Biondina has some lively
+      Moretta for her friend, to whom she confides her part of the love-affair
+      in all its intricacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may likewise happen that Todaro shall go to see the Biondina in church,
+      whither, but for her presence, he would hardly go, and that there, though
+      he may not have speech with her, he shall still fan the ardors of her
+      curiosity and pity by persistent sighs. It must be confessed that if the
+      Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his devotion must assume the
+      character of an intolerable bore to her; and that to see him everywhere at
+      her heels&mdash;to behold him leaning against the pillar near which she
+      kneels at church, the head of his stick in his mouth, and his attitude
+      carefully taken with a view to captivation&mdash;to be always in deadly
+      fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or, turning round at the caffè
+      encounter his pleading gaze&mdash;that all this must drive the Biondina to
+      a state bordering upon blasphemy and finger-nails. <i>Ma, come si fa? Ci
+      vuol pazienza!</i> This is the sole course open to ingenuous youth in
+      Venice, where confessed and unashamed acquaintance between young people is
+      extremely difficult; and so this blind pursuit must go on, till the
+      Biondina&rsquo;s inclinations are at last laboriously ascertained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose the Biondina consents to be loved? Then Todaro has just and proper
+      inquiries to make concerning her dower, and if her fortune is as pleasing
+      as herself, he has only to demand her in marriage of her father, and after
+      that to make her acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day a Venetian friend of mine, who spoke a little English, came to me
+      with a joyous air and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am in lofe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The recipient of repeated confidences of this kind from the same person, I
+      listened with tempered effusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a blonde again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you have right; blonde again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And pretty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but beautiful. I lofe her&mdash;<i>come si dice!&mdash;immensamente.&rdquo;</i>
+      &ldquo;And where did you see her? Where did you make her acquaintance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not make the acquaintance. I see her pass with his fazer every
+      night on Rialto Bridge We did not spoke yet&mdash;only with the eyes. The
+      lady is not of Venice. She has four thousand florins. It is not much&mdash;no.
+      But!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Is not this love at first sight almost idyllic? Is it not also a sublime
+      prudence to know the lady&rsquo;s fortune better than herself, before herself?
+      These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before
+      they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and
+      white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After that
+      may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of friendship,
+      and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating the auspicious
+      event. If he be rich, or can write <i>nobile</i> after his Christian name,
+      perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and alive to grateful
+      consequences, may publish a poem, elegantly printed by the matchless
+      printers at Rovigo, and send it to all the bridegroom&rsquo;s friends. It is not
+      the only event which the facile Venetian Muse shall sing for him. If his
+      child is brought happily through the measles by Dottor Cavasangue, the
+      Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any public honor or scholastic
+      degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and when he dies the mortuary
+      rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every occurrence&mdash;a boy&rsquo;s
+      success at school, an advocate&rsquo;s triumphal passage of the perils of
+      examination at Padua, a priest&rsquo;s first mass, a nun&rsquo;s novitiate, a birth,
+      an amputation&mdash;is the subject of tuneful effusion, and no less the
+      occasion of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring campo, who
+      assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of voices around the victim&rsquo;s
+      door, and proclaim his skill or good fortune, and break into <i>vivas</i>
+      that never end till he bribes their enthusiasm into silence. The naïve
+      commonplaceness of feeling in all matrimonial transactions, in spite of
+      the gloss which the operatic methods of courtship threw about them, was a
+      source of endless amusement, as it stole out in different ways. &ldquo;You know
+      my friend Marco?&rdquo; asked an acquaintance one day. &ldquo;Well, we are looking out
+      a wife for him. He doesn&rsquo;t want to marry, but his father insists; and he
+      has begged us to find somebody. There are three of us on the look-out. But
+      he hates women, and is very hard to suit. <i>Ben! Ci vuol pazienza!&rdquo;</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It rarely happens now that the religious part of the marriage ceremony is
+      not performed in church, though it may be performed at the house of the
+      bride. In this case, it usually takes place in the evening, and the
+      spouses attend five o&rsquo;clock mass next morning. But if the marriage takes
+      place at church, it must be between five and eleven in the morning, and
+      the blessing is commonly pronounced about six o&rsquo;clock. Civil marriage is
+      still unknown among the Venetians. It is entirely the affair of the
+      Church, in which the bans are published beforehand, and which exacts from
+      the candidates a preliminary visit to their parish priest, for examination
+      in their catechism, and for instruction in religion when they are
+      defective in knowledge of the kind. There is no longer any civil
+      publication of the betrothals, and the hand-shaking in the court of the
+      Ducal Palace has long been disused. I cannot help thinking that the
+      ceremony must have been a great affliction, and that, in the Republican
+      times at Venice, a bridegroom must have fared nearly as hard as a
+      President elect in our times at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a curious display on occasion of births among the nobility in
+      former times. The room of the young mother was decorated with a profusion
+      of paintings, sculpture, and jewelry; and, while yet in bed, she received
+      the congratulations of her friends, and regaled them with sweetmeats
+      served in vases of gold and silver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The child of noble parents had always at least two godfathers, and
+      sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty; but in order that the
+      relationship of godfather (which is the same according to the canonical
+      law as a tie of consanguinity) should not prevent desirable matrimony
+      between nobles, no patrician was allowed to be godfather to another&rsquo;s
+      child. Consequently the <i>compare</i> was usually a client of the noble
+      parent, and was not expected to make any present to the godchild, whose
+      father, on the day following the baptism, sent him a piece of marchpane,
+      in acknowledgment of their relationship. No women were present at the
+      baptism except those who had charge of the babe. After the fall of the
+      Republic the French custom of baptism in the parents&rsquo; house was
+      introduced, as well as the custom, on the godfather&rsquo;s part, of giving a
+      present,&mdash;usually of sugarplums and silver toys. But I think that
+      most baptisms still take place in church, if I may judge from the numbers
+      of tight little glass cases I have noticed,&mdash;half bed and half
+      coffin,&mdash;containing little eight-day-old Venetians, closely swathed
+      in mummy-like bandages, and borne to and from the churches by mysterious
+      old women. The ceremony of baptism itself does not apparently differ from
+      that in other Catholic countries, and is performed, like all religious
+      services in Italy, without a ray of religious feeling or solemnity of any
+      kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For many centuries funeral services in Venice have been conducted by the
+      <i>Scuole del Sacramento,</i> instituted for that purpose. To one of these
+      societies the friends of the defunct pay a certain sum, and the
+      association engages to inter the dead, and bear all the expenses of the
+      ceremony, the dignity of which is regulated by the priest of the parish in
+      which the deceased lived. The rite is now most generally undertaken by the
+      Scuola di San Rocco. The funeral train is of ten or twenty facchini,
+      wearing tunics of white, with caps and capes of red, and bearing the
+      society&rsquo;s long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted tapers. Priests
+      follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the bier,&mdash;with a gilt
+      crown lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to indicate the triumph
+      of innocence. Formerly, hired mourners attended, and a candle, weighing a
+      pound, was given to any one who chose to carry it in the procession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anciently there was great show of mourning in Venice for the dead, when,
+      according to Mutinelli, the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having
+      seen his body deposited in the church, &ldquo;fell to weeping and howling, tore
+      their hair and rent their clothes, and withdrew forever from that church,
+      thenceforth become for them a place of abomination.&rdquo; Decenter customs
+      prevailed in after-times, and there was a pathetic dignity in the ceremony
+      of condolence among patricians: the mourners, on the day following the
+      interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the court of the Ducal
+      Palace, and their friends came, one after one, and expressed their
+      sympathy by a mute pressure of the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible in modern Venice. The
+      corpse is hurried from the house of mourning to the parish church, where
+      the friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. Then it is
+      placed in a boat and carried to the burial-ground, where it is quickly
+      interred. I was fortunate, therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral at
+      which I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There was a church on
+      this island as early as the tenth century, and in the thirteenth century
+      it fell into the possession of the Comandulensen Friars. They built a
+      monastery on it, which became famous as a seat of learning, and gave much
+      erudite scholarship to the world. In later times Pope Gregory XVI. carried
+      his profound learning from San Michele to the Vatican. The present church
+      is in the Renaissance style, but not very offensively so, and has some
+      indifferent paintings. The arcades and the courts around which it is built
+      contain funeral monuments as unutterably ugly and tasteless as any thing
+      of the kind I ever saw at home; but the dead, for the most part, lie in
+      graves marked merely by little iron crosses in the narrow and roofless
+      space walled in from the lagoon, which laps sluggishly at the foot of the
+      masonry with the impulses of the tide. The old monastery was abolished in
+      1810, and there is now a convent of Reformed Benedictines on the island,
+      who perform the last service for the dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day of which I speak, I was taking a friend to see the objects of
+      interest at San Michele, which I had seen before, and the funeral
+      procession touched at the riva of the church just as we arrived. The
+      procession was of one gondola only, and the pallbearers were four pleasant
+      ruffians in scarlet robes of cotton, hooded, and girdled at the waist.
+      They were accompanied by a priest of a broad and jolly countenance, two
+      grinning boys, and finally the corpse itself, severely habited in an
+      under-dress of black box, but wearing an outer garment of red velvet,
+      bordered and tasseled gayly. The pleasant ruffians (who all wore
+      smoking-caps with some other name) placed this holiday corpse upon a bier,
+      and after a lively dispute with our gondolier, in which the compliments of
+      the day were passed in the usual terms of Venetian chaff, lifted the bier
+      on shore and set it down. The priest followed with the two boys, whom he
+      rebuked for levity, simultaneously tripping over the Latin of a prayer,
+      with his eyes fixed on our harmless little party as if we were a funeral,
+      and the dead in the black box an indifferent spectator Then he popped down
+      upon his knees, and made us a lively little supplication, while a blind
+      beggar scuffled for a lost soldo about his feet, and the gondoliers
+      quarreled volubly. After which, he threw off his surplice with the air of
+      one who should say his day&rsquo;s work was done, and preceded the coffin into
+      the church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had hardly deposited the bier upon the floor in the centre of the nave,
+      when two pale young friars appeared, throwing off their hooded cloaks of
+      coarse brown, as they passed to the sacristy, and reappearing in their
+      rope-girdled gowns. One of them bore a lighted taper in his right hand and
+      a book in his left; the other had also a taper, but a pot of holy water
+      instead of the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They are very handsome young men, these monks, with heavy, sad eyes, and
+      graceful, slender figures, which their monastic life will presently
+      overload with gross humanity full of coarse appetites. They go and stand
+      beside the bier, giving a curious touch of solemnity to a scene composed
+      of the four pleasant ruffians in the loaferish postures which they have
+      learned as facchini waiting for jobs; of the two boys with inattentive
+      grins, and of the priest with wandering eyes, kneeling behind them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A weak, thin-voiced organ pipes huskily from its damp loft: the monk
+      hurries rapidly over the Latin text of the service, while
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;His breath to heaven like vapor goes&rdquo;
+</p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      on the chilly, humid air; and the other monk makes the responses, giving
+      and taking the sprinkler, which his chief shakes vaguely in the direction
+      of the coffin. They both bow their heads&mdash;shaven down to the temples,
+      to simulate His crown of thorns. Silence. The organ is still, the priest
+      has vanished; the tapers are blown out; the pall-bearers lay hold of the
+      bier, and raise it to their shoulders; the boys slouch into procession
+      behind them; the monks glide softly and dispiritedly away. The soul is
+      prepared for eternal life, and the body for the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ruffians are expansively gay on reaching the open air again. They
+      laugh, they call &ldquo;Ciò!&rdquo; [Footnote: Literally, <i>That</i> in Italian, and
+      meaning in Venetian, <i>You! Heigh!</i> To talk in <i>Ciò ciappa</i> is to
+      assume insolent familiarity or unbounded good fellowship with the person
+      addressed. A Venetian says <i>Ciò</i> a thousand times in a day, and hails
+      every one but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian
+      pronoun, but rather a contraction of <i>Veccio</i> (vecchio), <i>Old
+      fellow!</i> It is common with all classes of the people: parents use it in
+      speaking to their children, and brothers and sisters call one mother <i>Ciò</i>.
+      It is a salutation between friends, who cry out, <i>Ciò!</i> as they pass
+      in the street. Acquaintances, men who meet after separation, rush together
+      with <i>&ldquo;Ah Ciò!&rdquo;</i> Then they kiss on the right cheek <i>&ldquo;Ciò!&rdquo;</i> on
+      the left, <i>&ldquo;Ciò!&rdquo;</i> on the lips, <i>&ldquo;Ciò! Bon di Ciò!&rdquo;</i>]
+      continually, and banter each other as they trot to the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boys follow them, gamboling among the little iron crosses, and trying
+      if here and there one of them may not be overthrown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We two strangers follow the boys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here the pall-bearers become puzzled: on the right is an open trench,
+      on the left is an open trench.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Presence of the Devil! To which grave does this dead belong?&rdquo; They
+      discuss, they dispute, they quarrel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the side of the wall, as if he rose from the sea, appears the grave
+      digger, with his shovel on his shoulder&mdash;slouching toward us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah heigh! Ciò, the grave-digger! Where does this dead belong?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Body of Bacchus, what potatoes! Here, in this trench to the right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They set down the bier there, gladly. They strip away the coffin&rsquo;s gay
+      upper garment; they leave but the under-dress of black box, painted to
+      that favor with pitch. They shove it into the grave-digger&rsquo;s arms, where
+      he stands in the trench, in the soft earth, rich with bones. He lets it
+      slide swiftly to the ground&mdash;thump! <i>Ecco fatto!</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two boys pick up the empty bier, and dance merrily away with it to the
+      riva-gate, feigning a little play after the manner of children,&mdash;&ldquo;Oh,
+      what a beautiful dead!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The eldest of the pleasant ruffians is all the pleasanter for <i>sciampagnin</i>,
+      and can hardly be persuaded to go out at the right gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We strangers stay behind a little, to consult with mother spectator&mdash;
+      Venetian, this. &ldquo;Who is the dead man, signore?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a woman, poor little thing! Dead in child-bed. The baby is in there
+      with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been a cheerful funeral, and yet we are not in great spirits as we
+      go back to the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my part, I do not think the cry of sea-gulls on a gloomy day is a
+      joyous sound; and the sight of those theatrical angels, with their
+      shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo façade of
+      the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with
+      despondency and foreboding.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"></a>
+      CHAPTER XX.<br/>
+      VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On a small canal, not far from the railroad station, the gondoliers show
+      you a house, by no means notable (except for the noble statue of a knight,
+      occupying a niche in one corner), as the house of Othello. It was once the
+      palace of the patrician family Moro, a name well known in the annals of
+      the Republic, and one which, it has been suggested, misled Shakespeare
+      into the invention of a Moor of Venice. Whether this is possibly the fact,
+      or whether there is any tradition of a tragic incident in the history of
+      the Moro family similar to that upon which the play is founded, I do not
+      know; but it is certain that the story of Othello, very nearly as
+      Shakespeare tells it, is popularly known in Venice; and the gondoliers
+      have fixed upon the Casa Moro in question as the edifice best calculated
+      to give satisfaction to strangers in search of the True and the Memorable.
+      The statue is happily darkened by time, and thus serves admirably to
+      represent Othello&rsquo;s complexion, and to place beyond the shadow of a doubt
+      the fact of his residence in the house. Indeed, what can you say to the
+      gondolier, who, in answer to your cavils, points to the knight, with the
+      convincing argument, &ldquo;There is his statue!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One day I was taken to see this house, in company with some friends, and
+      when it had been victoriously pointed out, as usual, we asked meekly, &ldquo;Who
+      was Othello?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Othello, Signori,&rdquo; answered the gondolier, &ldquo;was a general of the
+      Republic, in the old times. He was an African, and black; but nevertheless
+      the State valued him, and he beat the Turks in many battles. Well,
+      Signori, this general Othello had a very young and beautiful wife, and his
+      wife&rsquo;s cousin (<i>sic!</i>), Cassio was his major-domo, or, as some say,
+      his lieutenant. But after a while happens along (<i>capita</i>) another
+      soldier of Othello, who wants Cassio&rsquo;s employment, and so accuses him to
+      the general of corrupting his wife. Very well, Signori! Without thinking
+      an instant, Othello, being made so, flew into a passion (<i>si riscaldò là
+      tèsta</i>), and killed his wife; and then when her innocence came out, he
+      killed himself and that liar; and the State confiscated his goods, he
+      being a very rich man. There has been a tragedy written about all this,
+      you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how is it called? Who wrote it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! in regard to that, then, I don&rsquo;t know. Some Englishman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shakespeare?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, Signori. But if you doubt what I tell you, go to any
+      bookseller, and say, &lsquo;Favor me with the tragedy of &ldquo;Othello.&rdquo;&rsquo; He will
+      give it you, and there you will find it all written out just as I tell
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This gondolier confirmed the authenticity of his story, by showing us the
+      house of Cassio near the Rialto Bridge, and I have no doubt he would also
+      have pointed out that of Iago if we had wished it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as a general thing, the lore of the gondoliers is not rich nor very
+      great. They are a loquacious and a gossiping race, but they love better to
+      have a quiet chat at the tops of their voices, as they loaf idly at the
+      ferries, or to scream repartees across the Grand Canal, than to tell
+      stories. In all history that relates to localities they are sufficiently
+      versed to find the notable places for strangers, but beyond this they
+      trouble themselves as little with the past as with the future. Three
+      tragic legends, however, they know, and will tell with the most amusing
+      effect, namely: Biasio, <i>luganegher</i>; the Innocent Baker-Boy, and
+      Veneranda Porta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first of these legends is that of a sausage-maker who flourished in
+      Venice some centuries ago, and who improved the quality of the broth which
+      the <i>luganegheri</i> make of their scraps and sell to the gondoliers, by
+      cutting up into it now and then a child of some neighbor. He was finally
+      detected by a gondolier who discovered a little finger in his broth, and
+      being brought to justice, was dragged through the city at the heels of a
+      wild horse. This most uncomfortable character appears to be the first hero
+      in the romance of the gondoliers, and he certainly deserves to rank with
+      that long line of imaginary personages who have made childhood so wretched
+      and tractable. The second is the Innocent Baker-Boy already named, who was
+      put to death on suspicion of having murdered a noble, because in the dead
+      man&rsquo;s heart was found a dagger fitting a sheath which the baker had picked
+      up in the street, on the morning of the murder, and kept in his
+      possession. Many years afterwards, a malefactor who died in Padua
+      confessed the murder, and thereupon two lamps were lighted before a shrine
+      in the southern façade of St. Mark&rsquo;s Church,&mdash;one for the murdered
+      nobleman&rsquo;s soul, and the other for that of the innocent boy. Such is the
+      gondoliers&rsquo; story, and the lamps still burn every night before the shrine
+      from dark till dawn, in witness of its truth. The fact of the murder and
+      its guiltless expiation is an incident of Venetian history, and it is said
+      that the Council of the Ten never pronounced a sentence of death
+      thereafter, till they had been solemnly warned by one of their number with
+      <i>&ldquo;Ricordatevi del povero Fornaretto!&rdquo;</i> (Remember the poor Baker-Boy!)
+      The poet Dall &lsquo;Ongaro has woven the story into a beautiful and touching
+      tragedy; but I believe the poet is still to be born who shall take from
+      the gondoliers their Veneranda Porta, and place her historic figure in
+      dramatic literature. Veneranda Porta was a lady of the days of the
+      Republic, between whom and her husband existed an incompatibility. This
+      was increased by the course of Signora Porta in taking a lover, and it at
+      last led to the assassination of the husband by the paramours. The head of
+      the murdered man was found in one of the canals, and being exposed, as the
+      old custom was, upon the granite pedestal at the corner of St. Mark&rsquo;s
+      Church, it was recognized by his brother who found among the papers on
+      which the long hair was curled fragments of a letter he had written to the
+      deceased. The crime was traced to the paramours, and being brought before
+      the Ten, they were both condemned to be hanged between the columns of the
+      Piazzetta. The gondoliers relate that when the sentence was pronounced,
+      Veneranda said to the Chief of the Ten, &ldquo;But as for me this sentence will
+      never be carried out. You cannot hang a woman. Consider the impropriety!&rdquo;
+       The Venetian rulers were wise men in their generation, and far from being
+      balked by this question of delicacy, the Chief replied, solving it, &ldquo;My
+      dear, you shall be hanged in my breeches.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very coarse salt which keeps one of these stories; another is
+      remembered because it concerns one of the people; and another for its
+      abomination and horror. The incidents of Venetian history which take the
+      fancy and touch the sensibility of the world seem hardly known to the
+      gondoliers, the most intelligent and quick-witted of the populace, and
+      themselves the very stuff that some romantic dreams of Venice are made of.
+      However sad the fact, it is undeniable that the stories of the
+      sausage-maker whose broth was flavored with murder, and the baker-boy who
+      suffered guiltlessly, and that savage jest at the expense of the
+      murderess, interest these people more than the high-well-born sorrows of
+      the Foscari, the tragic fate of Carmagnola, or the story of Falier,&mdash;which
+      last they know partly, however, because of the scandal about Falier&rsquo;s
+      wife. Yet after all, though the gondoliers are not the gondoliers of
+      imaginative literature, they have qualities which recommended them to my
+      liking, and I look back upon my acquaintance with two or three of them in
+      a very friendly spirit. Compared with the truculent hackmen, who prey upon
+      the traveling public in all other cities of the civilized world, they are
+      eminently intelligent and amiable. Rogues they are, of course, for small
+      dishonesties are the breath in the nostrils of common carriers by land or
+      water, everywhere; but the trickery of the gondoliers is so good-natured
+      and simple that it can hardly offend. A very ordinary jocular sagacity
+      defeats their profoundest purposes of swindling, and no one enjoys their
+      exposure half so much as themselves, while a faint prospect of future
+      employment purifies them of every trait of dishonesty. I had only one
+      troublesome experience with them, and that was in the case of the old
+      gondolier who taught me to row. He, when I had no longer need of his
+      services, plunged into drunkenness, and came and dismissed me one day with
+      every mark of ignominy. But he afterwards forgave me, and saluted me
+      kindly when we met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate goal of every gondolier&rsquo;s ambition is to serve, no matter
+      for how short a time, an Inglese, by which generic title nearly all
+      foreigners except Germans are known to him. The Inglese, whether he be
+      English or American, is apt to make the tour of the whole city in a
+      gondola, and to give handsome drink money at the end, whereas your Tedesco
+      frugally walks to every place accessible by land, or when, in a party of
+      six or eight, he takes a gondola, plants himself upon the letter of the
+      tariff, and will give no more than the rate fixed by law. The gondolier is
+      therefore flowingly polite to the Inglese, and he is even civil to the
+      Tedesco; but he is not at all bound in courtesy to that provincial Italian
+      who comes from the country to Venice, bargains furiously for his boat, and
+      commonly pays under the tariff. The Venetian who does not himself keep a
+      gondola seldom hires one, and even on this rare occasion makes no lavish
+      demand such as &ldquo;How much do you want for taking me to the rail-way
+      station?&rdquo; Lest the fervid imagination of the gondolier rise to zwanzigers
+      and florins, and a tedious dispute ensue, he asks: &ldquo;How many centissimi do
+      you want?&rdquo; and the contract is made, for a number of soldi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The number of private gondolas owned in Venice is not very great. The
+      custom is rather to hire a gondolier with his boat. The exclusive use of
+      the gondola is thus secured, and the gondolier gives his services as a
+      domestic when off his special duty. He waits at table, goes marketing,
+      takes the children to school, and serves the ladies as footman, for five
+      francs a day, himself paying the proprietor of the gondola about a franc
+      daily for the boat. In former times, when Venice was rich and prosperous,
+      many noble families kept six or seven gondolas; and what with this
+      service, and the numerous gala-days of the Republic, when the whole city
+      took boat for the Lido, or the Giudecca, or Murano, and the gondoliers
+      were allowed to exact any pay they could, they were a numerous and
+      prosperous class. But these times have passed from Venice forever, and
+      though the gondoliers are still, counting the boatmen of the Giudecca and
+      Lido, some thousands in number, there are comparatively few young men
+      among them, and their gains are meagre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the little city of Venice, where the dialect spoken at Canareggio or
+      Castello is a different tongue from that heard under the Procuratie of St.
+      Mark&rsquo;s Place, the boatmen of the several quarters of the city of course
+      vary greatly in character and appearance; and the gondolier who lounges at
+      the base of the columns of the Piazzetta, and airily invites the Inglesi
+      to tours of the Grand Canal, is of quite a different type from the
+      weather-beaten <i>barcaiuolo</i>, who croaks <i>&ldquo;Barca!&rdquo;</i> at the
+      promenaders on the Zattere. But all, as I say, are simple and harmless
+      enough, and however loudly they quarrel among themselves, they never pass
+      from the defamation of their female relatives to blows. As for the game of
+      knives, as it is said to be played at Naples, and as About describes it at
+      Rome, I doubt if it is much known to the populace of Venice. Only the
+      doctors let blood there&mdash;though from their lancets it flows pretty
+      freely and constantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true that the gondolier loves best of everything a clamorous
+      quarrel, carried on with the canal between him and his antagonist; but
+      next to this, he loves to spend his leisure at the ferry in talking of
+      eating and of money, and he does not differ from many of his
+      fellow-citizens in choice of topics. I have seldom caught a casual
+      expression from passers in the streets of Venice which did not relate in
+      some way to gold Napoleons, zwanzigers, florins, or soldi, or else to wine
+      and polenta. I note this trait in the Venetians, which Goldoni observed in
+      the Milanese a hundred years ago, and which I incline to believe is common
+      to all Italians. The gondoliers talk a great deal in figure and hyperbole,
+      and their jocose chaff is quite inscrutable even to some classes of
+      Venetians. With foreigners, to whom the silence and easy progress of the
+      gondola gives them the opportunity to talk, they are fond of using a word
+      or two of French. They are quick at repartee, and have a clever answer
+      ready for most occasions. I was one day bargaining for a boat to the Lido,
+      whither I refused to be taken in a shabby gondola, or at a rate higher
+      than seventy-five soldi for the trip. At last the patience of the
+      gondoliers was exhausted, and one of them called out, &ldquo;Somebody fetch the
+      Bucintoro, and take this gentleman to the Lido for seventy-five soldi!&rdquo;
+       (The Bucintoro being the magnificent barge in which the Doge went to wed
+      the Adriatic.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The skill with which the gondoliers manage their graceful craft is always
+      admired by strangers, and is certainly remarkable. The gondola is very
+      long and slender, and rises high from the water at either end. Both bow
+      and stern are sharp, the former being ornamented with that deeply serrated
+      blade of steel, which it is the pride of the gondolier to keep bright as
+      silver, and the poop having a small platform, not far behind the cabin, on
+      which he stands when he rows. The danger of collision has always obliged
+      Venetian boatmen to face the bow, and the stroke with the oar (for the
+      gondolier uses only a single oar) is made by pushing, and not by pulling.
+      No small degree of art (as I learnt from experience) is thus required to
+      keep the gondola&rsquo;s head straight,&mdash;all the strokes being made on one
+      side,&mdash;and the sculling return of the oar-blade, preparatory for each
+      new stroke, is extremely difficult to effect. Under the hands of the
+      gondolier, however, the gondola seems a living thing, full of grace and
+      winning movement. The wood-work of the little cabin is elaborately carved,
+      and it is usually furnished with mirrors and seats luxuriously cushioned.
+      The sensation of the gondola&rsquo;s progress, felt by the occupant of the
+      cabin, as he falls back upon these cushions, may be described, to the
+      female apprehension at least, as &ldquo;<i>too</i> divine.&rdquo; The cabin is
+      removable at pleasure, and is generally taken off and replaced by awnings
+      in summer. But in the evening, when the fair Venetians go out in their
+      gondolas to take the air, even this awning is dispensed with, and the long
+      slender boat glides darkly down the Grand Canal, bearing its dazzling
+      freight of white <i>tulle</i>, pale-faced, black-eyed beauty, and flashing
+      jewels, in full view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the singing of the gondoliers, they are the only class of Venetians
+      who have not good voices, and I am scarcely inclined to regret the silence
+      which long ago fell upon them. I am quite satisfied with the peculiar note
+      of warning which they utter as they approach the corner of a canal, and
+      which meaning simply, &ldquo;To the Right,&rdquo; or &ldquo;To the Left,&rdquo; is the most
+      pathetic and melancholy sound in the world. If, putting aside my own
+      comfort, I have sometimes wished for the sake of a dear, sentimental old
+      friend at home, who loves such idle illusions with an ardor unbecoming his
+      years, that I might hear the voice
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+    &ldquo;of Adria&rsquo;s gondolier,<br/>
+    By distance mellowed, o&rsquo;er the waters sweep,&rdquo;
+</p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      I must still confess that I never did hear it under similar circumstances,
+      except in conversation across half a mile of lagoon, when, as usual, the
+      burden of the lay was polenta or soldi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A recent Venetian writer, describing the character of the lower classes of
+      Venice, says: &ldquo;No one can deny that our populace is loquacious and
+      quickwitted; but, on the other hand, no one can deny that it is regardless
+      of improvement. Venice, a city exceptional in its construction, its
+      customs, and its habits, has also an exceptional populace. It still feels,
+      although sixty-eight years have passed, the influence of the system of the
+      fallen Republic, of that oligarchic government, which, affording almost
+      every day some amusement to the people, left them no time to think of
+      their offended rights.... Since 1859 Venice has resembled a sepulchre of
+      the living,&mdash;squalor and beggary gaining ground with each day, and
+      commerce, with few exceptions, converted into monopoly; yet the populace
+      remains attached to its old habits, and will have its pleasure. If the
+      earnings are little, what then? Must one die of ennui? The caffè is
+      depopulated: not so the drinking-house. The last day before the drawing of
+      the lottery, the offices are thronged with fathers and mothers of
+      families, who stint their children of bread to buy dearly a few hours of
+      golden illusion.... At the worst, there is the Monte di Pietà, as a last
+      resort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true, as this writer says, that the pleasure-loving populace still
+      looks back fondly to the old Republican times of feasting and holidays;
+      but there is certainly no truth any more in the old idea that any part of
+      Italy is a place where people may be &ldquo;idle with impunity,&rdquo; or make
+      amusement the serious business of life. I can remember that the book from
+      which I received my first impressions of geography was illuminated with a
+      picture professing to represent Italian customs. The spirit of inquiry had
+      long before caused me to doubt the exact fidelity of this representation;
+      but it cost me a pang to learn that the picture was utterly delusive. It
+      has been no part of my experience in Venice to see an Italian sitting upon
+      the ground, and strumming the guitar, while two gayly dressed peasants
+      danced to the music. Indeed, the indolence of Venetians is listless and
+      silent, not playful or joyous; and as I learned to know their life more
+      intimately, I came to understand that in many cases they are idle from
+      despair of finding work, and that indolence is as much their fate as their
+      fault. Any diligence of theirs is surprising to us of northern and free
+      lands, because their climate subdues and enervates us, and because we can
+      see before them no career open to intelligent industry. With the poorest,
+      work is necessarily a hand-to-hand struggle against hunger; with those who
+      would not absolutely starve without it, work is an inexplicable passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Partly because the ways of these people are so childlike and simple in
+      many things, and partly from one&rsquo;s own swindling tendency to take one&rsquo;s
+      self in (a tendency really fatal to all sincerity of judgment, and
+      incalculably mischievous to such downfallen peoples as have felt the
+      baleful effects of the world&rsquo;s sentimental, impotent sympathy), there is
+      something pathetic in the patient content with which Italians work. They
+      have naturally so large a capacity for enjoyment, that the degree of
+      selfdenial involved in labor seems exorbitant, and one feels that these
+      children, so loved of Nature, and so gifted by her, are harshly dealt with
+      by their stepmother Circumstance. No doubt there ought to be truth in the
+      silly old picture, if there is none, and I would willingly make-believe to
+      credit it, if I could. I am glad that they at least work in old-world,
+      awkward, picturesque ways, and not in commonplace, handy, modern fashion.
+      Neither the habits nor the implements of labor are changed since the
+      progress of the Republic ceased, and her heart began to die within her.
+      All sorts of mechanics&rsquo; tools are clumsy and inconvenient: the turner&rsquo;s
+      lathe moves by broken impulses; door-hinges are made to order, and lift
+      the door from the ground as it opens upon them; all nails and tacks are
+      hand-made; window-sashes are contrived to be glazed without putty, and the
+      panes are put in from the top, so that to repair a broken glass the whole
+      sash is taken apart; cooking-stoves are unknown to the native cooks, who
+      work at an open fire, with crane and dangling pot-hooks; furniture is put
+      together with wooden pegs instead of screws; you do not buy a door-lock at
+      a hardware store,&mdash;you get a <i>fabbro</i> to make it, and he comes
+      with a leathern satchel full of tools to fit and finish it on the door.
+      The wheelbarrow of this civilization is peculiarly wonderful in
+      construction, with a prodigious wooden wheel, and a ponderous, incapable
+      body. The canals are dredged with scoops mounted on long poles, and manned
+      each by three or four Chiozzotti. There never was a pile-driving machine
+      known in Venice; nor a steam-tug in all the channels of the lagoons,
+      through which the largest craft are towed to and from the ports by
+      row-boats. In the model of the sea-going vessels there has apparently been
+      little change from the first. Yet in spite of all this backwardness in
+      invention, the city is full of beautiful workmanship in every branch of
+      artificing, and the Venetians are still the best sailors in the Adriatic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not offer the idea as a contribution to statistics, but it seems to
+      me that the most active branch of industry in Venice is plucking fowls. In
+      summer the people all work on their thresholds, and in their windows, and
+      as nearly out of doors as the narrowness of the streets will let them,&mdash;and
+      it is hard to pass through any part of the city without coming to a
+      poulterer&rsquo;s shop, in the door of which inevitably sits a boy, tugging at
+      the plumage of some wretched bird. He is seldom to be seen except in that
+      crisis of plucking when he seems to have all but finished; yet he seems
+      never to accomplish the fact perfectly. Perhaps it is part of his hard
+      fate that the feathers shall grow again under his hand as fast as he
+      plucks them away: at the restaurants, I know, the quantity of plumage one
+      devours in consuming roast chicken is surprising&mdash;at first. The birds
+      are always very lean, too, and have but a languid and weary look, in spite
+      of the ardent manner in which the boy clasps them while at work. It may be
+      that the Venetians do not like fat poultry. Their turkeys, especially, are
+      of that emaciation which is attributed among ourselves only to the turkey
+      of Job; and as for the geese and ducks, they can only interest anatomists.
+      It is as if the long ages of incursion and oppression which have
+      impoverished and devastated Italy had at last taken effect upon the
+      poultry, and made it as poor as the population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not want to give too exclusive an impression of Venetian industry,
+      however, for now I remember the Venetian <i>lasagnoni</i>, whom I never
+      saw doing any thing, and who certainly abound in respectable numbers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lasagnone is a loafer, as an Italian can be a loafer, without the
+      admixture of ruffianism, which blemishes most loafers of northern race. He
+      may be quite worthless, and even impertinent, but he cannot be a rowdy,&mdash;that
+      pleasing blossom on the nose of our fast, high-fed, thick-blooded
+      civilization. In Venice he must not be confounded with other loiterers at
+      the caffè; not with the natty people who talk politics interminably over
+      little cups of black coffee; not with those old habitués, who sit forever
+      under the Procuratie, their hands folded upon the tops of their sticks,
+      and staring at the ladies who pass with a curious steadfastness and
+      knowing skepticism of gaze, not pleasing in the dim eyes of age;
+      certainly, the last persons who bear any likeness to the lasagnone are the
+      Germans, with their honest, heavy faces comically anglicized by
+      leg-of-mutton whiskers. The truth is, the lasagnone does not flourish in
+      the best caffè; he comes to perfection in cheaper resorts, for he is
+      commonly not rich. It often happens that a glass of water, flavored with a
+      little anisette, is the order over which he sits a whole evening. He knows
+      the waiter intimately, and does not call him &ldquo;Shop!&rdquo; (Bottega,) as less
+      familiar people do, but Gigi, or Beppi, as the waiter is pretty sure to be
+      named. &ldquo;Behold!&rdquo; he says, when the servant places his modest drink before
+      him, &ldquo;who is that loveliest blonde there?&rdquo; Or to his fellow-lasagnone:
+      &ldquo;She regards me! I have broken her the heart!&rdquo; This is his sole business
+      and mission, the cruel lasagnone&mdash;to break ladies the heart. He
+      spares no condition,&mdash;neither rank nor wealth is any defense against
+      him. I often wonder what is in that note he continually shows to his
+      friend. The confession of some broken heart, I think. When he has folded
+      it, and put it away, he chuckles <i>&ldquo;Ah, cara!&rdquo;</i> and sucks at his long,
+      slender Virginia cigar. It is unlighted, for fire consumes cigars. I never
+      see him read the papers,&mdash;neither the Italian papers nor the Parisian
+      journals, though if he can get &ldquo;Galignani&rdquo; he is glad, and he likes to
+      pretend to a knowledge of English, uttering upon occasion, with great
+      relish, such distinctively English words as &ldquo;Yes&rdquo; and &ldquo;Not,&rdquo; and to the
+      waiter, &ldquo;A-little-fire-if-you-please.&rdquo; He sits very late in the caffè, and
+      he touches his hat&mdash;his curly French hat&mdash;to the company as he
+      goes out with a mild swagger, his cane held lightly in his left hand, his
+      coat cut snugly to show his hips, and genteelly swaying with the motion of
+      his body. He is a dandy, of course,&mdash;all Italians are dandies,&mdash;but
+      his vanity is perfectly harmless, and his heart is not bad. He would go
+      half an hour out of his way to put you in the direction of the Piazza. A
+      little thing can make him happy,&mdash;to stand in the pit at the opera,
+      and gaze at the ladies in the lower boxes&mdash;to attend the Marionette,
+      or the Malibran Theatre, and imperil the peace of pretty seamstresses and
+      contadinas&mdash;to stand at the church doors and ogle the fair saints as
+      they pass out. Go, harmless lasagnone, to thy lodging in some mysterious
+      height, and break hearts if thou wilt. They are quickly mended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of other vagabonds in Venice, if I had my choice, I think I must select a
+      certain ruffian who deals in dog-flesh, as the nearest my ideal of what a
+      vagabond should be in all respects. He stands habitually under the Old
+      Procuratie, beside a basket of small puppies in that snuffling and
+      quivering state which appears to be the favorite condition of very young
+      dogs, and occupies himself in conversation with an adjacent dealer in
+      grapes and peaches, or sometimes fastidiously engages in trimming the hair
+      upon the closely shaven bodies of the dogs; for in Venice it is the
+      ambition of every dog to look as much like the Lion of St. Mark as the
+      nature of the case will permit. My vagabond at times makes expeditions to
+      the groups of travelers always seated in summer before the Caffè Florian,
+      appearing at such times with a very small puppy,&mdash;neatly poised upon
+      the palm of his hand, and winking pensively,&mdash;which he advertises to
+      the company as a &ldquo;Beautiful Beast,&rdquo; or a &ldquo;Lovely Babe,&rdquo; according to the
+      inspiration of his light and pleasant fancy. I think the latter term is
+      used generally as a means of ingratiation with the ladies, to whom my
+      vagabond always shows a demeanor of agreeable gallantry. I never saw him
+      sell any of these dogs, nor ever in the least cast down by his failure to
+      do so. His air is grave, but not severe; there is even, at times, a
+      certain playfulness in his manner, possibly attributable to sciampagnin.
+      His curling black locks, together with his velveteen jacket and
+      pantaloons, are oiled and glossy, and his beard is cut in the
+      French-imperial mode. His personal presence is unwholesome, and it is
+      chiefly his moral perfection as a vagabond that makes him fascinating. One
+      is so confident, however, of his fitness for his position and business,
+      and of his entire contentment with it, that it is impossible not to exult
+      in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is not without self-respect. I doubt, it would be hard to find any
+      Venetian of any vocation, however base, who forgets that he too is a man
+      and a brother. There is enough servility in the language,&mdash;it is the
+      fashion of the Italian tongue, with its <i>Tu</i> for inferiors, <i>Voi</i>
+      for intimates and friendly equals, and <i>Lei</i> for superiors,&mdash;but
+      in the manner there is none, and there is a sense of equality in the
+      ordinary intercourse of the Venetians, at once apparent to foreigners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All ranks are orderly; the spirit of aggression seems not to exist among
+      them, and the very boys and dogs in Venice are so well-behaved, that I
+      have never seen the slightest disposition in them to quarrel. Of course,
+      it is of the street-boy&mdash;the <i>biricchino</i>, the boy in his
+      natural, unreclaimed state&mdash;that I speak. This state is here, in
+      winter, marked by a clouded countenance, bare head, tatters, and
+      wooden-soled shoes open at the heels; in summer by a preternatural purity
+      of person, by abandon to the amphibious pleasure of leaping off the
+      bridges into the canals, and by an insatiable appetite for polenta, fried
+      minnows, and water-melons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When one of these boys takes to beggary, as a great many of them do, out
+      of a spirit of adventure and wish to pass the time, he carries out the
+      enterprise with splendid daring. A favorite artifice is to approach
+      Charity with a slice of polenta in one hand, and, with the other extended,
+      implore a soldo to buy cheese to eat with the polenta. The street-boys
+      also often perform the duties of the <i>gransieri</i>, who draw your
+      gondola to shore, and keep it firm with a hook. To this order of beggar I
+      usually gave; but one day at the railway station I had no soldi, and as I
+      did not wish to render my friend discontented with future alms by giving
+      silver, I deliberately apologized, praying him to excuse me, and promising
+      him for another time. I cannot forget the lofty courtesy with which he
+      returned,&mdash;&ldquo;<i>S&rsquo;accomodi pur, Signor!</i>&rdquo; They have sometimes a
+      sense of humor, these poor swindlers, and can enjoy the exposure of their
+      own enormities. An amiable rogue drew our gondola to land one evening when
+      we went too late to see the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. The sacristan
+      made us free of a perfectly dark church, and we rewarded him as if it had
+      been noonday. On our return to the gondola, the same beggar whom we had
+      just feed held out his hat for another alms. &ldquo;But we have just paid you,&rdquo;
+       we cried in an agony of grief and desperation. <i>&ldquo;Sì, signori!&rdquo;</i> he
+      admitted with an air of argument, <i>&ldquo;è vero. Ma, la chiesa!&rdquo;</i> (Yes,
+      gentlemen, it is true. But the church!) he added with confidential
+      insinuation, and a patronizing wave of the hand toward the edifice, as if
+      he had been San Giorgio himself, and held the church as a source of
+      revenue. This was too much, and we laughed him to scorn; at which,
+      beholding the amusing abomination of his conduct, he himself joined in our
+      laugh with a cheerfulness that won our hearts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beggary is attended by no disgrace in Italy, and it therefore comes that
+      no mendicant is without a proper degree of the self-respect common to all
+      classes. Indeed, the habit of taking gifts of money is so general and
+      shameless that the street beggars must be diffident souls indeed if they
+      hesitated to ask for it. A perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered man
+      will take ten soldi from you for a trifling service, and not consider
+      himself in the least abased. The detestable custom of largess, instead of
+      wages, still obtains in so great degree in Venice that a physician, when
+      asked for his account, replies: &ldquo;What you please to give.&rdquo; Knowing these
+      customs, I hope I have never acted discourteously to the street beggars of
+      Venice even when I gave them nothing, and I know that only one of them
+      ever so far forgot himself as to curse me for not giving. Him, however, I
+      think to have been out of his right mind at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were two mad beggars in the parish of San Stefano, whom I should be
+      sorry to leave unmentioned here. One, who presided chiefly over the Campo
+      San Stefano, professed to be also a facchino, but I never saw him
+      employed, except in addressing select circles of idlers whom a brawling
+      noise always draws together in Venice. He had been a soldier, and he
+      sometimes put himself at the head of a file of Croats passing through the
+      campo, and gave them the word of command, to the great amusement of those
+      swarthy barbarians. He was a good deal in drink, and when in this state
+      was proud to go before any ladies who might be passing, and clear away the
+      boys and idlers, to make room for them. When not occupied in any of these
+      ways, he commonly slept in the arcades of the old convent.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0414}.jpg" alt="{0414}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0414}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      But the mad beggar of Campo Sant&rsquo; Angelo seemed to have a finer sense of
+      what became him as a madman and a beggar, and never made himself obnoxious
+      by his noise. He was, in fact, very fat and amiable, and in the summer lay
+      asleep, for the most part, at a certain street corner which belonged to
+      him. When awake he was a man of extremely complaisant presence, and
+      suffered no lady to go by without a compliment to her complexion, her
+      blond hair, or her beautiful eyes, whichever it might be. He got money for
+      these attentions, and people paid him for any sort of witticism. One day
+      he said to the richest young dandy of the city,&mdash;&ldquo;Pah! you stomach me
+      with your perfumes and fine airs;&rdquo; for which he received half a florin.
+      His remarks to gentlemen had usually this sarcastic flavor. I am sorry to
+      say that so excellent a madman was often drunk and unable to fulfill his
+      duties to society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are, of course, laws against mendicancy in Venice, and they are, of
+      course, never enforced. Beggars abound everywhere, and nobody molests
+      them. There was long a troop of weird sisters in Campo San Stefano, who
+      picked up a livelihood from the foreigners passing to and from the Academy
+      of Fine Arts. They addressed people with the title of Count, and no doubt
+      gained something by this sort of heraldry, though there are counts in
+      Venice almost as poor as themselves, and titles are not distinctions. The
+      Venetian seldom gives to beggars; he says deliberately, &ldquo;<i>No go</i>&rdquo; (I
+      have nothing), or &ldquo;<i>Quando ritornerò</i>&rdquo; (when I return), and never
+      comes back that way. I noticed that professional hunger and cold took this
+      sort of denial very patiently, as they did every other; but I confess I
+      had never the heart to practice it. In my walks to the Public Gardens
+      there was a venerable old man, with the beard and bearing of a patriarch,
+      whom I encountered on the last bridge of the Riva, and who there asked
+      alms of me. When I gave him a soldo, he returned me a blessing which I
+      would be ashamed to take in the United States for half a dollar; and when
+      the soldo was in some inaccessible pocket, and I begged him to await my
+      coming back, he said sweetly,&mdash;&ldquo;Very well, Signor, I will be here.&rdquo;
+       And I must say, to his credit, that he never broke his promise, nor
+      suffered me, for shame&rsquo;s sake, to break mine. He was quite a treasure to
+      me in this respect, and assisted me to form habits of punctuality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That exuberance of manner which one notes, the first thing, in his
+      intercourse with Venetians, characterizes all classes, but is most
+      excessive and relishing in the poor. There is a vast deal of ceremony with
+      every order, and one hardly knows what to do with the numbers of
+      compliments it is necessary to respond to. A Venetian does not come to see
+      you, he comes to revere you; he not only asks if you be well when he meets
+      you, but he bids you remain well at parting, and desires you to salute for
+      him all common friends; he reverences you at leave-taking; he will
+      sometimes consent to incommode you with a visit; he will relieve you of
+      the disturbance when he rises to go. All spontaneous wishes which must,
+      with us, take original forms, for lack of the complimentary phrase, are
+      formally expressed by him,&mdash;good appetite to you, when you go to
+      dinner; much enjoyment, when you go to the theatre; a pleasant walk, if you
+      meet in promenade. He is your servant at meeting and parting; he begs to
+      be commanded when he has misunderstood you. But courtesy takes its highest
+      flights, as I hinted, from the poorest company. Acquaintances of this
+      sort, when not on the <i>Ciò ciappa</i> footing, or that of the familiar
+      thee and thou, always address each other in <i>Lei</i> (lordship), or <i>Elo</i>,
+      as the Venetians have it; and their compliment-making at encounter and
+      separation is endless: I salute you! Remain well! Master! Mistress! (<i>Paron!
+      parona!</i>) being repeated as long as the polite persons are within
+      hearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, as we passed through the crowded Merceria, an old Venetian friend
+      of mine, who trod upon the dress of a young person before us, called out,
+      &ldquo;<i>Scusate, bella giovane</i>!&rdquo; (Pardon, beautiful girl!) She was not so
+      fair nor so young as I have seen women; but she half turned her face with
+      a forgiving smile, and seemed pleased with the accident that had won her
+      the amiable apology. The waiter of the caffè frequented by the people,
+      says to the ladies for whom he places seats,&mdash;&ldquo;Take this place,
+      beautiful blonde;&rdquo; or, &ldquo;Sit here, lovely brunette,&rdquo; as it happens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Venetian who enters or leaves any place of public resort touches his hat
+      to the company, and one day at the restaurant some ladies, who had been
+      dining there, said &ldquo;<i>Complimenti!</i>&rdquo; on going out, with a grace that
+      went near to make the beefsteak tender. It is this uncostly gentleness of
+      bearing which gives a winning impression of the whole people, whatever
+      selfishness or real discourtesy lie beneath it. At home it sometimes seems
+      that we are in such haste to live and be done with it, we have no time to
+      be polite. Or is popular politeness merely a vice of servile peoples? And
+      is it altogether better to be rude? I wish it were not. If you are lost in
+      his city (and you are pretty sure to be lost there, continually), a
+      Venetian will go with you wherever you wish. And he will do this amiable
+      little service out of what one may say old civilization has established in
+      place of goodness of heart, but which is perhaps not so different from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You hear people in the streets bless each other in the most dramatic
+      fashion. I once caught these parting words between an old man and a young
+      girl;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Giovanetta</i>. Revered sir! (<i>Patron riverito!</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Vecchio</i>. (With that peculiar backward wave and beneficent wag of
+      the hand, only possible to Italians.) Blessed child! (<i>Benedetta!</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in a crowd, but no one turned round at the utterance of terms which
+      Anglo-Saxons would scarcely use in their most emotional moments. The old
+      gentleman who sells boxes for the theatre in the Old Procuratie always
+      gave me his benediction when I took a box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is equal exuberance of invective, and I have heard many fine
+      maledictions on the Venetian streets, but I recollect none more elaborate
+      than that of a gondolier who, after listening peacefully to a quarrel
+      between two other boatmen, suddenly took part against one of them, and
+      saluted him with,&mdash;&ldquo;Ah! baptized son of a dog! And if I had been
+      present at thy baptism, I would have dashed thy brains out against the
+      baptismal font!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the theatrical forms of passion were visible in a scene I witnessed in
+      a little street near San Samuele, where I found the neighborhood assembled
+      at doors and windows in honor of a wordy battle between two poor women.
+      One of these had been forced in-doors by her prudent husband, and the
+      other upbraided her across the marital barrier. The assailant was washing,
+      and twenty times she left her tub to revile the besieged, who thrust her
+      long arms out over those of her husband, and turned each reproach back
+      upon her who uttered it, thus:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Assailant</i>. Beast!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Besieged</i>. Thou!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>A</i>. Fool!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>B</i>. Thou!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>A</i>. Liar!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>B</i>. Thou!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>E via in seguito!</i> At last the assailant, beating her breast with
+      both hands, and tempestuously swaying her person back and forth, wreaked
+      her scorn in one wild outburst of vituperation, and returned finally to
+      her tub, wisely saying, on the purple verge of asphyxiation, &ldquo;<i>O, non
+      discorre più con gente</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I returned half an hour later, and she was laughing and playing sweetly
+      with her babe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It suits the passionate nature of the Italians to have incredible ado
+      about buying and selling, and a day&rsquo;s shopping is a sort of campaign, from
+      which the shopper returns plundered and discomfited, or laden with the
+      spoil of vanquished shopmen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The embattled commercial transaction is conducted in this wise:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopper enters, and prices a given article. The shopman names a sum of
+      which only the fervid imagination of the South could conceive as
+      corresponding to the value of the goods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The purchaser instantly starts back with a wail of horror and indignation,
+      and the shopman throws himself forward over the counter with a protest
+      that, far from being dear, the article is ruinously cheap at the price
+      stated, though they may nevertheless agree for something less.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What, then, is the very most ultimate price?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Properly, the very most ultimate price is so much. (Say, the smallest
+      trifle under the price first asked.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The purchaser moves toward the door. He comes back, and offers one third
+      of the very most ultimate price.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopman, with a gentle desperation, declares that the thing cost him
+      as much. He cannot really take the offer. He regrets, but he cannot. That
+      the gentleman would say something more! So much&mdash;for example. That he
+      regard the stuff, its quality, fashion, beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentleman laughs him to scorn. Ah, heigh! and, coming forward, he
+      picks up the article and reviles it. Out of the mode, old, fragile, ugly
+      of its kind. The shopman defends his wares. There is no such quantity and
+      quality elsewhere in Venice. But if the gentleman will give even so much
+      (still something preposterous), he may have it, though truly its sale for
+      that money is utter ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopper walks straight to the door. The shopman calls him back from
+      the threshold, or sends his boy to call him back from the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let him accommodate himself&mdash;which is to say, take the thing at his
+      own price.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He takes it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopman says cheerfully, &ldquo;Servo suo!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The purchaser responds, &ldquo;Bon dì! Patron!&rdquo; (Good day! my Master!)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus, as I said, every bargain is a battle, and every purchase a triumph
+      or a defeat. The whole thing is understood; the opposing forces know
+      perfectly well all that is to be done beforehand, and retire after the
+      contest, like the captured knights in &ldquo;<i>Morgante Maggiore</i>&rdquo; &ldquo;calm as
+      oil,&rdquo;&mdash;however furious and deadly their struggle may have appeared to
+      strangers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Foreigners soon discern, however, that there is no bloodshed in such
+      encounters, and enter into them with a zeal as great as that of natives,
+      though with less skill. I knew one American who prided himself on such
+      matters, and who haughtily closed a certain bargain without words, as he
+      called it. The shopman offered several articles, for which he demanded
+      prices amounting in all to ninety-three francs. His wary customer rapidly
+      computed the total and replied &ldquo;Without words, now, I&rsquo;ll give you a
+      hundred francs for the lot.&rdquo; With a pensive elevation of the eyebrows, and
+      a reluctant shrug of the shoulders, the shopman suffered him to take them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Your Venetian is <i>simpatico</i>, if he is any thing. He is always ready
+      to feel and to express the deepest concern, and I rather think he likes to
+      have his sensibilities appealed to, as a pleasant and healthful exercise
+      for them. His sympathy begins at home, and he generously pities himself as
+      the victim of a combination of misfortunes, which leave him citizen of a
+      country without liberty, without commerce, without money, without hope. He
+      next pities his fellow-citizens, who are as desperately situated as
+      himself. Then he pities the degradation, corruption, and despair into
+      which the city has fallen. And I think his compassion is the most hopeless
+      thing in his character. That alone is touched; that alone is moved; and
+      when its impulse ceases he and every thing about him remain just as
+      before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the poor, this sensibility is amusingly mischievous. They never speak
+      of one of their own class without adding some such ejaculation as &ldquo;Poor
+      fellow!&rdquo; or, &ldquo;Poor little creature!&rdquo; They pity all wretchedness, no matter
+      from what cause, and the greatest rogue has their compassion when under a
+      cloud. It is all but impossible to punish thieves in Venice, where they
+      are very bold and numerous for the police are too much occupied with
+      political surveillance to give due attention to mere cutpurses and
+      housebreakers, and even when they make an arrest, people can hardly be got
+      to bear witness against their unhappy prisoner. <i>Povareto anca lu!</i>
+      There is no work and no money; people must do something; so they steal. <i>Ci
+      vuol pazienza!</i> Bear witness against an ill-fated fellow-sufferer? God
+      forbid! Stop a thief? I think a burglar might run from Rialto to San
+      Marco, and not one compassionate soul in the Merceria would do aught to
+      arrest him&mdash;<i>povareto!</i> Thieves came to the house of a friend of
+      mine at noonday, when his servant was out. They tied their boat to his
+      landing, entered his house, filled their boat with plunder from it, and
+      rowed out into the canal. The neighbors on the floor above saw them, and
+      cried &ldquo;Thieves! thieves!&rdquo; It was in the most frequented part of the Grand
+      Canal, where scores of boats passed and repassed; but no one molested the
+      thieves, and these <i>povareti</i> escaped with their booty. [Footnote:
+      The rogues, it must be confessed, are often very polite. This same friend
+      of mine one day found a man in the act of getting down into a boat with
+      his favorite singing bird in its cage. &ldquo;What are you doing with that
+      bird?&rdquo; he thought himself authorized to inquire. The thief looked about
+      him a moment, and perceiving himself detected, handed back the cage with a
+      cool &ldquo;<i>La scusi!</i>&rdquo; (&ldquo;Beg pardon!&rdquo;) as if its removal had been a
+      trifling inadvertance.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night, in a little street through which we passed to our ferry, there
+      came a wild rush before us, of a woman screaming for help, and pursued by
+      her husband with a knife in his hand; their children, shrieking piteously,
+      came after them. The street was crowded with people and soldiers, but no
+      one put out his hand; and the man presently overtook his wife and stabbed
+      her in the back. We only knew of the rush, but what it all meant we could
+      not tell, till we saw the woman bleeding from the stab, which, happily,
+      was slight. Inquiry of the bystanders developed the facts, but, singularly
+      enough, scarcely a word of pity. It was entirely a family affair, it
+      seemed; the man, poor little fellow, had a mistress, and his wife had
+      maddened him with reproaches. <i>Come si fa</i>? He had to stab her. The
+      woman&rsquo;s case was not one that appealed to popular compassion, and the only
+      words of pity for her which I heard were expressed by the wife of a
+      fruiterer, whom her husband angrily silenced.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXI.<br/>
+      SOCIETY.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was natural that the Venetians, whose State lay upon the borders of the
+      Greek Empire, and whose greatest commerce was with the Orient, should be
+      influenced by the Constantinopolitan civilization. Mutinelli records that
+      in the twelfth century they had many religious offices and observances in
+      common with the Greeks, especially the homily or sermon, which formed a
+      very prominent part of the service of worship. At this time, also, when
+      the rupture of the Lombard League had left other Italian cities to fall
+      back into incessant local wars, and barbarized their customs, the people
+      of Venice dressed richly and delicately, after the Greek fashion. They
+      combed and dressed their hair, and wore the long, pointed Greek beard;
+      [Footnote: A. Foscarini, in 1687, was the last patrician who wore the
+      beard.] and though these Byzantine modes fell, for the most part, into
+      disuse, in after-time, there is still a peculiarity of dress among the
+      women of the Venetian poor which is said to have been inherited from the
+      oriental costumes of Constantinople; namely, that high-heeled, sharp-toed
+      slipper, or sandal, which covers the front of the foot, and drops from the
+      heel at every step, requiring no slight art in the wearer to keep it on at
+      all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The philosophic vision, accustomed to relate trifling particulars to
+      important generalities, may perhaps see another relic of Byzantine
+      civilization among the Venetians, in that jealous restraint which they put
+      upon all the social movements of young girls, and the great liberty which
+      they allow to married women. It is true that their damsels are now no
+      longer imprisoned under the parental roof, as they were in times when they
+      never left its shelter but to go, closely veiled, to communion in the
+      church, on Christmas and Easter; but it is still quite impossible that any
+      young lady should go out alone. Indeed, she would scarcely be secure from
+      insult in broad day if she did so. She goes out with her governess, and,
+      even with this protection, she cannot be too guarded and circumspect in
+      her bearing; for in Venice a woman has to encounter upon the public street
+      a rude license of glance, from men of all ages and conditions, which falls
+      little short of outrage. They stare at her as she approaches; and I have
+      seen them turn and contemplate ladies as they passed them, keeping a few
+      paces in advance, with a leisurely sidelong gait. Something of this
+      insolence might be forgiven to thoughtless, hot-blooded youth; but the
+      gross and knowing leer that the elders of the Piazza and the caffè put on
+      at the approach of a pretty girl is an ordeal which few women, not as
+      thoroughly inured to it as the Venetians, would care to encounter.
+      However, as I never heard the trial complained of by any but foreigners, I
+      suppose it is not regarded by Italians as intolerable; and it is certain
+      that an audible compliment, upon the street, to a pretty girl of the poor,
+      is by no means an affront.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The arts of pleasing and of coquetry come by nature to the gentler sex;
+      and if in Italy they add to them a habit of intrigue, I wonder how much
+      they are to blame, never being in anywise trusted? They do not differ from
+      persons of any age or sex in that country, if the world has been as
+      justly, as it has always been firmly, persuaded that the people of Italy
+      are effete in point of good faith. I have seen much to justify this
+      opinion, and something also to confute it; and as long as Garibaldi lives,
+      I shall not let myself believe that a race which could produce a man so
+      signally truthful and single-hearted is a race of liars and cheats. I
+      think the student of their character should also be slow to upbraid
+      Italians for their duplicity, without admitting, in palliation of the
+      fault, facts of long ages of alien and domestic oppression, in politics
+      and religion, which must account for a vast deal of every kind of evil in
+      Italy. Yet after exception and palliation has been duly made, it must be
+      confessed that in Italy it does not seem to be thought shameful to tell
+      lies, and that there the standard of sincerity, compared with that of the
+      English or American, is low, as the Italian standard of morality in other
+      respects is also comparatively low.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the women, bred in idleness and ignorance, the imputed national
+      untruthfulness takes the form naturally to be expected, and contributes
+      to a state of things which must be examined with the greatest caution and
+      reservation by every one but the Italians themselves. Goethe says that
+      there is no society so corrupt that a man may not live virtuously in it;
+      and I think the immorality of any people will not be directly and wholly
+      seen by the stranger who does not seek it. Certainly, the experience and
+      acquaintance of a foreigner in Italy must have been most unfortunate, if
+      they confirm all the stories of corruption told by Italians themselves. A
+      little generous distrust is best in matters of this kind; but while I
+      strengthen my incredulity concerning the utter depravation of Venetian
+      society in one respect, I am not disposed to deal so leniently with it in
+      others. The state of things is bad in Venice, not because all women in
+      society are impure, but because the Italian theory of morals does not
+      admit the existence of opportunity without sin. It is by rare chance that
+      a young girl makes acquaintance with young men in society; she seldom
+      talks with them at the parties to which she is sometimes taken by her
+      mother, and they do not call upon her at her home; while for her to walk
+      alone with a young man would be vastly more scandalous than much worse
+      things, and is, consequently, unheard of. The Italians say freely they
+      cannot trust their women as northern women are trusted; and some Italian
+      women frankly confess that their sex would be worse if it were trusted
+      more. But the truth does not appear in this shallow suspicion and this
+      shallow self-conviction; and one who cares to have a just estimate of
+      this matter must by no means believe all the evil he hears. There may be
+      much corruption in society, but there is infinitely more wrong in the
+      habits of idle gossip and guilty scandal, which eat all sense of shame
+      and pity out of the heart of Venice. There is no parallel to the prying,
+      tattling, backbiting littleness of the place elsewhere in the world. A
+      small country village in America or England has its meddlesomeness, but
+      not its worldly, wicked sharpness. Figure the meanness of a
+      chimney-corner gossip, added to the bitter shrewdness and witty
+      penetration of a gifted roué, and you have some idea of Venetian scandal.
+      In that city, where all the nobler organs of expression are closed by
+      political conditions, the viler channels run continual filth and poison,
+      and the people, shut out from public and free discussion of religious and
+      political themes, occupy themselves with private slander, and rend each
+      other in their abject desperation. As it is part of the existing
+      political demonstration to avoid the opera and theatre, the Venetians are
+      deprived of these harmless distractions; balls and evening parties, at
+      which people, in other countries, do nothing worse than bore each other,
+      are almost unknown, for the same reason; and when persons meet in
+      society, it is too often to retail personalities, or Italian politics
+      made as unintelligible and as like local gossip as possible. The talk
+      which is small and noxious in private circles is the same thing at the
+      caffè, when the dread of spies does not reduce the talkers to a dreary
+      silence. Not permitted to feel the currents of literature and the great
+      world&rsquo;s thought in religion freshly and directly, they seldom speak
+      of these things, except in that tone of obsolete superiority which
+      Italians are still prone to affect, as the monopolists of culture. As to
+      Art, the Venetians are insensible to it and ignorant of it, here in the
+      very atmosphere of Art, to a degree absolutely amusing. I would as soon
+      think of asking a fish&rsquo;s opinion of water as of asking a
+      Venetian&rsquo;s notion of architecture or painting, unless he were
+      himself a professed artist or critic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Admitting, however, that a great part of the corruption of society is
+      imputed, there still remains, no doubt, a great deal of real immorality to
+      be accounted for. This, I think, is often to be attributed to the bad
+      system of female education, and the habits of idleness in which women are
+      bred. Indeed, to Americans, the whole system of Italian education seems
+      calculated to reduce women to a state of imbecile captivity before
+      marriage; and I have no fault to find with the Italians that they are
+      jealous in guarding those whom they have unfitted to protect themselves,
+      but have rather to blame them that, after marriage, their women are thrown
+      at once upon society, when worse than helpless against its temptations.
+      Except with those people who attempt to maintain a certain appearance in
+      public upon insufficient means (and there are too many of these in Venice
+      as everywhere else), and who spare in every other way that they may spend
+      on dress, it does not often happen that Venetian ladies are housekeepers.
+      Servants are cheap and numerous, as they are uncleanly and untrustworthy,
+      and the Venetians prefer to keep them [Footnote: A clerk or employé with a
+      salary of fifty cents a day keeps a maid-servant, that his wife may
+      fulfill to society the important duty of doing nothing.] rather than take
+      part in housewifely duties; and, since they must lavish upon dress and
+      show, to suffer from cold and hunger in their fireless houses and at their
+      meagre boards. In this way the young girls, kept imprisoned from the
+      world, instead of learning cookery and other domestic arts, have the
+      grievous burden of idleness added to that of their solitary confinement,
+      not only among the rich and noble, but among that large class which is
+      neither and wishes to appear both. [Footnote: The poet Gray, genteelly
+      making the grand tour in 1740, wrote to his father from Florence: &ldquo;The
+      only thing the Italians shine in is their reception of strangers. At such
+      times every thing is magnificence: the more remarkable as in their
+      ordinary course of life they are parsimonious to a degree of nastiness. I
+      saw in one of the vastest palaces of Rome (that of the Prince Pamfilio),
+      the apartment which he himself inhabited, a bed that most servants in
+      England would disdain to lie in, and furniture much like that of a soph at
+      Cambridge. This man is worth 30,000<i>l</i>. a year.&rdquo; Italian nature has
+      changed so little in a century, that all this would hold admirably true of
+      Italian life at this time. The goodly outside in religion, in morals, in
+      every thing is too much the ambition of Italy; this achieved, she is
+      content to endure any pang of self-denial, and sell what little comfort
+      she knows&mdash;it is mostly imported, like the word, from England&mdash;to
+      strangers at fabulous prices. In Italy the luxuries of life are cheap, and
+      the conveniences unknown or excessively dear.] Their idle thoughts, not
+      drilled by study nor occupied with work, run upon the freedom which
+      marriage shall bring them, and form a distorted image of the world, of
+      which they know as little as of their own undisciplined selves. Denied the
+      just and wholesome amusements of society during their girlhood, it is
+      scarcely a matter of surprise that they should throw themselves into the
+      giddiest whirl of its excitement when marriage sets them free to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have said I do not think Venetians who give each other bad names are
+      always to be credited, and I have no doubt that many a reputation in
+      Venice is stained while the victim remains without guilt. A questioned
+      reputation is, however, no great social calamity. It forms no bar to
+      society, and few people are so cruel as to blame it, though all discuss
+      it. And it is here that the harshness of American and English society
+      toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but
+      half-justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad naïveté
+      and lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl is
+      accustomed to hear of things and speak of things which, with us, parents
+      strive in every way to keep from their daughters&rsquo; knowledge; and while her
+      sense of delicacy is thus early blunted, while she is thus used to know
+      good and evil, she hears her father and mother comment on the sinful
+      errors of a friend or neighbor, who visits them and meets them every day
+      in society. How can the impunity of the guilt which she believes to exist
+      around her but sometimes have its effect, and ripen, with opportunity,
+      into wrong? Nay, if the girl reveres her parents at all, how can she think
+      the sin, which they caress in the sinner, is so very bad? If, however, she
+      escape all these early influences of depravation; if her idleness, and
+      solitude and precocious knowledge leave her unvitiated, if, when she goes
+      into society, it is by marriage with a man who is neither a dotard nor a
+      fortune-seeker, and who remains constant and does not tempt her, by
+      neglect, to forbode offense and to inflict anticipative reprisals&mdash;yet
+      her purity goes uncredited, as her guilt would go unpunished; scandal
+      makes haste to blacken her name to the prevailing hue; and whether she has
+      sin or not, those with sin will cast, not the stone that breaks and kills,
+      but the filth that sticks and stinks. The wife must continue the long
+      social exile of her girlhood if she would not be the prey of scandal. The
+      <i>cavaliere servente</i> no longer exists, but gossip now attributes
+      often more than one lover in his place, and society has the cruel clemency
+      to wink at the license. Nothing is in worse taste than jealousy, and,
+      consequently, though intrigue sometimes causes stabbing, and the like,
+      among low people, it is rarely noticed by persons of good breeding. It
+      seems to me that in Venetian society the reform must begin, not with
+      dissolute life, but with the social toleration of the impure, and with the
+      wanton habits of scandal, which make all other life incredible, and deny
+      to virtue the triumph of fair fame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that what I saw of the innocent amusements of this society was
+      not enough to convince me of their brilliancy and attractiveness; but I
+      doubt if a foreigner can be a trustworthy judge of these things, and
+      perhaps a sketch drawn by an alien hand, in the best faith, might have an
+      air of caricature. I would not, therefore, like to trust my own impression
+      of social diversions. They were, very probably, much more lively and
+      brilliant than I thought them. But Italians assembled anywhere, except at
+      the theatre or the caffè, have a certain stiffness, all the more
+      surprising, because tradition has always led one to expect exactly the
+      reverse of them. I have seen nothing equal to the formality of this
+      people, who deride colder nations for inflexible manners; and I have
+      certainly never seen society in any small town in America so ill at ease
+      as I have seen society in Venice, writhing under self-imposed restraints.
+      At a musical soirée, attended by the class of people who at home would
+      have been chatty and sociable, given to making acquaintance and to keeping
+      up acquaintance,&mdash;the young men harmlessly talking and walking with
+      the young ladies, and the old people listening together, while constant
+      movement and intercourse kept life in the assembly, and there was some
+      real pleasure felt amidst a good deal of unavoidable suffering,&mdash;I
+      say, I found such a soirée in Venice to be a spectacle of ladies planted
+      in formal rows of low-necks and white dresses around the four sides of one
+      room, and of gentlemen restively imprisoned in dress-coats and white
+      gloves in another. During the music all these devoted people listened
+      attentively, and at the end, the ladies lapsed back into their chairs and
+      fanned themselves, while the gentlemen walked up and down the floor of
+      their cell, and stopped, two by two, at the door of the ladies&rsquo; room,
+      glanced mournfully athwart the moral barrier which divided them, and sadly
+      and dejectedly turned away. Amazed at this singular species of social
+      enjoyment, I inquired afterward, of a Venetian lady, if evening parties in
+      Venice were usually such ordeals, and was discouraged to learn that what I
+      had seen was scarcely an exaggeration of prevailing torments. Commonly
+      people do not know each other, and it is difficult for the younger to
+      procure introductions; and when there is previous acquaintance, the
+      presence of some commanding spirit is necessary to break the ice of
+      propriety, and substitute enjoyment for correctness of behavior. Even at
+      dancing parties, where it would seem that the poetry of motion might do
+      something to soften the rigid bosom of Venetian deportment, the poor young
+      people separate after each dance, and take each sex its appointed prison,
+      till the next quadrille offers them a temporary liberation. For my own
+      part, I cannot wonder that young men fly these virtuous scenes, and throng
+      the rooms of those pleasant women of the <i>demi-monde</i>, who only exact
+      from them that they shall be natural and agreeable; I cannot wonder that
+      their fair partners in wretchedness seize the first opportunity to revenge
+      themselves upon the propriety which has so cruelly used them. It is said
+      that the assemblies of the Jews, while quite as unexceptionable in
+      character, are far more sociable and lively than those of the Christians.
+      The young Hebrews are frequently intelligent, well-bred, and witty, with a
+      <i>savoir faire</i> which their Christian brethren lack. But, indeed, the
+      young Venetian is, at that age when all men are owlish, ignorant, and
+      vapid, the most owlish, ignorant, and vapid man in the world. He talks,
+      not milk-and-water, but warm water alone, a little sweetened; and, until
+      he has grown wicked, has very little good in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most ladies of fashion receive calls on a certain day of each week, when
+      it is made a matter of pride to receive as many calls as possible. The
+      number sometimes reaches three hundred, when nobody sits down, and few
+      exchange more than a word with the hostess. In winter, the stove is heated
+      on these reception days, and little cups of black coffee are passed round
+      to the company; in summer lemonade is substituted for the coffee; but in
+      all seasons a thin, waferish slice of toasted rusk (the Venetian <i>baicolo</i>)
+      is offered to each guest with the drink. At receptions where the sparsity
+      of the company permits the lady of the house to be seen, she is commonly
+      visible on a sofa, surrounded by visitors in a half-circle. Nobody stays
+      more than ten or fifteen minutes, and I have sometimes found even this
+      brief time of much greater apparent length, and apt to produce a low state
+      of nerves, from which one seldom recovers before dinner. Gentlemen,
+      however, do not much frequent these receptions; and I assert again the
+      diffidence I should feel in offering this glance at Venetian social
+      enjoyment as conveying a just and full idea of it. There is no doubt that
+      the Venetians find delight in their assemblies, where a stranger seeks it
+      in vain. I dare say they would not think our own reunions brilliant, and
+      that, looking obliquely (as a foreigner must) on the most sensible faces
+      at one of our evening parties, they might mistake the look of pathetic
+      dejection, visible in them, as the expression of people rather bored by
+      their pleasure than otherwise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the conversazioni of the rigid
+      proprietarians, where people sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at a
+      soldo the point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the <i>demi-monde</i>
+      where they say any thing. There are persons in Venice, as well as
+      everywhere else, of new-fashioned modes of thinking, and these strive to
+      give a greater life and ease to their assemblies, by attracting as many
+      young men as possible; and in their families, gentlemen are welcome to
+      visit, and to talk with the young ladies in the presence of their mothers.
+      But though such people are no more accused of impropriety than the
+      straitest of the old-fashioned, they are not regarded with the greatest
+      esteem, and their daughters do not so readily find husbands. The Italians
+      are fickle, the women say; they get soon tired of their wives after
+      marriage, and when they see much of ladies before marriage, they get tired
+      of them then, and never make them their wives. So it is much better to see
+      nothing of a possible husband till you actually have him. I do not think
+      conversazioni of any kind are popular with young men, however; they like
+      better to go to the caffè, and the people you meet at private houses are
+      none the less interesting for being old, or middle-aged. A great many of
+      the best families, at present, receive no company at all, and see their
+      friends only in the most private manner; though there are still cultivated
+      circles to which proper introduction gives the stranger (who has no
+      Austrian acquaintance) access. But unless he have thorough knowledge of
+      Italian politics localized to apply to Venice, an interest in the affairs,
+      fortunes, and misfortunes of his neighbors, and an acquaintance with the
+      Venetian dialect, I doubt if he will be able to enjoy himself in the
+      places so cautiously opened to him. Even in the most cultivated society,
+      the dialect is habitually spoken; and if Italian is used, it is only in
+      compliment to some foreigner present, for whose sake, also, topics of
+      general interest are sometimes chosen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The best society is now composed of the families of professional men, such
+      as the advocates, the physicians, and the richer sort of merchants. The
+      shopkeepers, master-artisans, and others, whom industry and thrift
+      distinguish from the populace, seem not to have any social life, in the
+      American sense. They are wholly devoted to affairs, and partly from
+      choice, and partly from necessity, are sordid and grasping. It is their
+      class which has to fight hardest for life in Europe, and they give no
+      quarter to those above or below them. The shop is their sole thought and
+      interest, and they never, never sink it. But, since they have habits of
+      diligence, and, as far as they are permitted, of enterprise, they seem to
+      be in great part the stuff from which a prosperous State is to be rebuilt
+      in Venice, if ever the fallen edifice rise again. They have sometimes a
+      certain independence of character, which a better condition of things, and
+      further education, would perhaps lift into honesty; though as yet they
+      seem not to scruple to take any unfair advantage, and not to know that
+      commercial success can never rest permanently on a system of bad faith.
+      Below this class is the populace, between which and the patrician order a
+      relation something like Roman clientage existed, contributing greatly to
+      the maintenance of exclusively aristocratic power in the State. The
+      greatest conspiracy (that of Marin Falier) which the commons ever moved
+      against the oligarchy was revealed to one of the nobility by his plebeian
+      creature, or client; and the government rewarded by every species of
+      indulgence a class in which it had extinguished even the desire of popular
+      liberty. The heirs of the servile baseness which such a system as this
+      must create are not yet extinct. There is still a helplessness in many of
+      the servant class, and a disposition to look for largess as well as wages,
+      which are the traits naturally resulting from a state of voluntary
+      submission to others. The nobles, as the government, enervated and
+      debauched the character of the poor by public shows and countless
+      holidays; as individuals, they taught them to depend upon patrician favor,
+      and not upon their own plebeian industry, for support. The lesson was an
+      evil one, hard to be unlearned, and it is yet to be forgotten in Venice.
+      Certain traits of soft and familiar dependence give great charm to the
+      populace; but their existence makes the student doubtful of a future to
+      which the plebeians themselves look forward with perfect hope and
+      confidence. It may be that they are right, and will really rise to the
+      dignity of men, when free government shall have taught them that the
+      laborer is worthy of his hire&mdash;after he has earned it. This has been
+      the result, to some degree, in the kingdom of Italy, where the people have
+      found that freedom, like happiness, means work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Undoubtedly the best people in the best society of Venice are the
+      advocates, an order of consequence even in the times of the Republic,
+      though then shut out from participation in public affairs by a native
+      government, as now by a foreign one. Acquaintance with several members of
+      this profession impressed me with a sense of its liberality of thought and
+      feeling, where all liberal thinking and feeling must be done by stealth,
+      and where the common intelligence of the world sheds its light through
+      multiplied barriers. Daniele Manin, the President of the Republic of 1848,
+      was of this class, which, by virtue of its learning, enlightenment, and
+      talent, occupies a place in the esteem and regard of the Venetian people
+      far above that held by the effete aristocracy. The better part of the
+      nobility, indeed, is merged in the professional class, and some of the
+      most historic names are now preceded by the learned titles of Doctor and
+      Advocate, rather than the cheap dignity of Count, offered by the Austrian
+      government to all the patricians who chose to ask for it, when Austrian
+      rule was extended over their country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physicians rank next to the advocates, and are usually men learned in
+      their profession, however erroneous and old-fashioned some of their
+      theories of practice may be. Like the advocates, they are often men of
+      letters: they write for the journals, and publish little pamphlets on
+      those topics of local history which it is so much the fashion to treat in
+      Venice. No one makes a profession of authorship. The returns of an
+      author&rsquo;s work would be too uncertain, and its restrictions and penalties
+      would be too vexatious and serious; and so literary topics are only
+      occasionally treated by those whose main energies are bent in another
+      direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctors are very numerous, and a considerable number of them are
+      Hebrews, who, even in the old jealous times, exercised the noble art of
+      medicine, and who now rank very highly among their professional brethren.
+      These physicians haunt the neat and tasteful apothecary shops, where they
+      sit upon the benching that passes round the interior, read the newspapers,
+      and discuss the politics of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, with all
+      the zest that you may observe to characterize their discussions in
+      Goldoni&rsquo;s plays. There they spend their evenings, and many hours of every
+      day, and thither the sick send to call them,&mdash;each physician
+      resorting to a particular apothecary&rsquo;s, and keeping his name inscribed on
+      a brass plate against the wall, above the head of the druggist, who
+      presides over the reunions of the doctors, while his apprentice pestles
+      away at their prescriptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1786 there were, what with priests, monks, and nuns, a multitude of
+      persons of ecclesiastical profession in Venice; and though many convents
+      and monasteries were abolished by Napoleon, the priests are still very
+      numerous, and some monastic establishments have been revived under
+      Austrian rule. The high officers of the Church are, of course, well paid,
+      but most of the priesthood live miserably enough. They receive from the
+      government a daily stipend of about thirty-five soldi, and they celebrate
+      mass when they can get something to do in that way, for forty soldi.
+      Unless, then, they have private income from their own family, or have pay
+      for the education of some rich man&rsquo;s son or daughter, they must fare
+      slenderly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is much said, in and out of Venice, about their influence in
+      society; but this is greatly modified, and I think is chiefly exercised
+      upon the women of the old-fashioned families. [Footnote: It is no longer
+      usual for girls to be educated in convents, and most young ladies of the
+      better classes, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen years, receive their
+      schooling in secular establishments, whither they go every day for study,
+      or where they sometimes live as in our boarding-schools, and where they
+      are taught the usual accomplishments, greater attention being paid to
+      French and music than to other things.] I need hardly repeat the wellknown
+      fact that all the moral power of the Roman Church over the younger men is
+      gone; these seldom attend mass, and almost never go to confession, and the
+      priests are their scorn and by-word. Their example, in some degree, must
+      be much followed also by women; and though women must everywhere make more
+      public professions of religion than men, in order to retain social
+      standing, I doubt if the priests have a very firm hold upon the fears or
+      reverence of the sisters and wives of liberal Venetians.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If, however, they contribute in anywise to keep down the people, they are
+      themselves enslaved to their superiors and to each other. No priest can
+      leave the city of Venice without permission of the Patriarch. He is cut
+      off as much as possible from his own kinspeople, and subjected to the
+      constant surveillance of his class. Obliged to maintain a respectable
+      appearance on twenty cents a day,&mdash;hampered and hindered from all
+      personal liberty and private friendship, and hated by the great mass of
+      the people,&mdash;I hardly think the Venetian priest is to be envied in
+      his life. For my own part, knowing these things, I was not able to cherish
+      toward the priests those feelings of scornful severity which swell many
+      Protestant bosoms; and so far as I made their acquaintance, I found them
+      kind and amiable. One ecclesiastic, at least, I may describe as one of the
+      most agreeable and cultivated gentlemen I ever met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those who fare best among the priests are the Jesuits, who returned from
+      repeated banishment with the Austrians in this century. Their influence is
+      very extended, and the confessional is their forte. Venetians say that
+      with the old and the old-fashioned these crafty priests suggest remorse
+      and impose penances; that with the young men and the latter-day thinkers
+      they are men of the world, and pass off pleasant sins as trifles. All the
+      students of the government schools are obliged by law to confess twice a
+      month, and are given printed certificates of confession, in blank, which
+      the confessor fills up and stamps with the seal of the Church. Most of
+      them go to confess at the church of the Jesuits, who are glad to hear the
+      cock-and-bull story invented by the student, and to cultivate his
+      friendship by an easy penance and a liberal tone. This ingenuous young man
+      of course despises the confessional. He goes to confess because the law
+      obliges him to do so; but the law cannot dictate what he must confess.
+      Therefore, he ventures as near downright burlesque as he dares, and (if
+      the account he gives of the matter be true) puts off his confessor with
+      some well-known fact, as that he has blasphemed. Of course he has
+      blasphemed, blasphemy being as common as the forms of salutation in
+      Venice. So the priest, who wishes him to come again, and to found some
+      sort of influence over him, says,&mdash;&ldquo;Oh dear, dear! This is very bad.
+      Blasphemy is deadly sin. If you <i>must</i> swear, swear by the heathen
+      gods: say Body of Diana, instead of Body of God; Presence of the Devil,
+      instead of Blood of Mary. Then there is no harm done.&rdquo; The students laugh
+      over the pleasant absurdity together, and usually agree upon the matter of
+      their semimonthly confessions beforehand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have hinted, the young men do not love the government or the Church,
+      and though I account for the loss of much high hope and generous sympathy
+      in growth from youth to middle age, I cannot see how, when they have
+      replaced their fathers, the present religious and political discontent is
+      to be modified. Nay, I believe it must become worse. The middle-aged men
+      of Venice grew up in times of comparative quiet, when she did not so much
+      care who ruled over her, and negatively, at least, they honored the
+      Church. They may now hate the foreign rule, but there are many
+      considerations of timidity, and many effects of education, to temper their
+      hate. They may dislike the priests, but they revere the Church. The young
+      men of to-day are bred in a different school, and all their thoughts are
+      of opposition to the government and of war upon the Church, which they
+      detest and ridicule. The fact that their education is still in the hands
+      of the priests in some measure, does not render them more tractable. They
+      have no fears to be wrought upon by their clerical professors, who seldom
+      have sought to act upon their nobler qualities. The influence of the
+      priesthood is again limited by the fact that the teachers in the free
+      schools of the city, to which the poor send their children, are generally
+      not priests; and ecclesiastics are no longer so commonly the private
+      tutors of the children of the rich, as they once were when they lived with
+      the family, and exercised a direct and important influence on it. Express
+      permission from the pope is now necessary to the maintenance of a family
+      chaplain, and the office is nearly disused. [Footnote: In early days every
+      noble Venetian family had its chaplain, who, on the occasion of great
+      dinners and suppers, remained in the kitchen, and received as one of his
+      perquisites the fragments that came back from the table.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Republic was extremely jealous of the political power of the priests,
+      who could not hold secular office in its time. A curious punishment was
+      inflicted upon the priest who proved false to his own vows of chastity,
+      and there is a most amusing old ballad&mdash;by no means cleanly in its
+      language&mdash;purporting to be the lament of a priest suspended in the
+      iron cage, appointed for the purpose, from the belfry of the Campanile San
+      Marco, and enduring the jeers and insults of the mob below. We may suppose
+      that with advancing corruption (if corruption has indeed advanced from
+      remote to later times) this punishment was disused for want of room to
+      hang out the delinquents. In the last century, especially, the nuns and
+      monks led a pleasant life. You may see in the old pictures of Pietro
+      Longhi and his school, how at the aristocratic and fashionable convent of
+      San Zaccaria, the lady nuns received their friends and acquaintances of
+      this world in the anteroom, where the dames and their cavaliers flirted
+      and drank coffee, and the gentlemen coquetted with the brides of heaven
+      through their grated windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among other privileges of the Church, abolished in Venice long ago, was
+      that ancient right of the monks of St. Anthony, Abbot, by which their
+      herds of swine were made free of the whole city. These animals, enveloped
+      in an odor of sanctity, wandered here and there, and were piously fed by
+      devout people, until the year 1409, when, being found dangerous to
+      children and inconvenient to every body, they were made the subject of a
+      special decree, which deprived them of their freedom of movement. The
+      Republic was always limiting the privileges of the Church! It is known how
+      when the holy inquisition was established in its dominions in 1249, the
+      State stipulated that great part of the process against heresy should be
+      conducted by secular functionaries, and that the sentence should rest with
+      the Doge and his councillors,&mdash;a kind of inquisition with claws
+      clipped and teeth filed, as one may say, and the only sort ever permitted
+      in Venice. At present there is no absolute disfavor shown to the clergy;
+      but, as we have seen, many a pleasant island, which the monks of old
+      reclaimed from the salty marshes, and planted with gardens and vineyards,
+      now bears only the ruins of their convents, or else, converted into a
+      fortress or government dépôt, is all thistly with bayonets. Anciently,
+      moreover, there were many little groves in different parts of the city,
+      where the pleasant clergy, of what Mr. Ruskin would have us believe the
+      pure and religious days of Venice, met and made merry so riotously
+      together by night that the higher officers of the Church were forced to
+      prohibit their little soirées.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An old custom of rejoicing over the installation of a new parish priest is
+      still to be seen in almost primitive quaintness. The people of each parish&mdash;nobles,
+      citizens, and plebeians alike&mdash;formerly elected their own priest,
+      and, till the year 1576, they used to perambulate the city to the sound of
+      drums, with banners flying, after an election, and proclaim the name of
+      their favorite. On the day of the <i>parroco</i>&rsquo;s induction his portrait
+      was placed over the church door and after the celebration of the morning
+      mass, a breakfast was given, which grew to be so splendid in time, that in
+      the fifteenth century a statute limited its profusion. In the afternoon
+      the new parroco, preceded by a band of military music, visited all the
+      streets and courts of his parish, and then, as now, all the windows of the
+      parish were decorated with brilliant tapestries, and other gay-colored
+      cloths and pictures. In those times as in these, there was an illumination
+      at night, throngs of people in the campo of the church, and booths for
+      traffic in cakes of flour and raisins,&mdash;fried in lard upon the spot,
+      and sold smoking hot, with immense uproar on the part of the merchant; and
+      for three days afterward the parish bells were sounded in concert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The difficulty of ascertaining any thing with certainty in Venice attends
+      in a degree peculiarly great the effort to learn exactly the present
+      influence and standing of the nobility as a class. One is tempted, on
+      observing the free and unembarrassed bearing of all ranks of people toward
+      each other, to say that no sense of difference exists,&mdash;and I do not
+      think there is ever shown, among Italians, either the aggressive pride or
+      the abject meanness which marks the intercourse of people and nobles
+      elsewhere in Europe, and I have not seen the distinction of rich and poor
+      made so brutally in Italy as sometimes in our own <i>soi-disant</i>
+      democratic society at home. There is, indeed, that equality in Italian
+      fibre which I believe fits the nation for democratic institutions better
+      than any other, and which is perhaps partly the result of their ancient
+      civilization. At any rate, it fascinates a stranger to see people so
+      mutually gentle and deferential; and must often be a matter of surprise to
+      the Anglo-Saxon, in whose race, reclaimed from barbarism more recently,
+      the native wild-beast is still so strong as to sometimes inform the
+      manner. The uneducated Anglo-Saxon is a savage; the Italian, though born
+      to utter ignorance, poverty, and depravity, is a civilized man. I do not
+      say that his civilization is of a high order, or that the civilization of
+      the most cultivated Italian is at all comparable to that of a gentleman
+      among ourselves. The Italian&rsquo;s education, however profound, has left his
+      passions undisciplined, while it has carefully polished his manner; he
+      yields lightly to temptation, he loses his self-control, he blasphemes
+      habitually; his gentleness is conventional, his civilization not
+      individual. With us the education of a gentleman (I do not mean a person
+      born to wealth or station, but any man who has trained himself in morals
+      or religion, in letters, and in the world) disciplines the impulses, and
+      leaves the good manner to grow naturally out of habits of self-command and
+      consequent habitual self-respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The natural equality of the Italians is visible in their community of good
+      looks as well as good manners. They have never, perhaps, that high beauty
+      of sensitive expression which is found among Englishmen and Americans
+      (preferably among the latter), but it very rarely happens that they are
+      brutally ugly; and the man of low rank and mean vocation has often a
+      beauty of as fine sort as the man of education and refinement. If they
+      changed clothes, and the poor man could be persuaded to wash himself, they
+      might successfully masquerade, one for another. The plebeian Italian,
+      inspired by the national vanity, bears himself as proudly as the noble,
+      without at all aggressing in his manner. His beauty, like that of the
+      women of his class, is world-old,&mdash;the beauty of the pictures and the
+      statues: the ideal types of loveliness are realized in Italy; the saints
+      and heroes, the madonnas and nymphs, come true to the stranger at every
+      encounter with living faces. In Venice, particularly, the carriage of the
+      women, of whatever rank, is very free and noble, and the servant is
+      sometimes to be distinguished from the mistress only by her dress and by
+      her labor-coarsened hands; certainly not always by her dirty finger-nails
+      and foul teeth, for though the clean shirt is now generally in Italy, some
+      lesser virtues are still unknown: the nail-brush and tooth-brush are of
+      but infrequent use; the four-pronged fork is still imperfectly understood,
+      and as a nation the Italians may be said to eat with their knives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetian, then, seeing so little difference between himself and
+      others, whatever his rank may be, has, as I said, little temptation to
+      arrogance or servility. The effects of the old relationship of patron and
+      client are amusingly noticeable in the superior as well as the inferior; a
+      rich man&rsquo;s dependents are perfectly free with advice and comment, and it
+      sometimes happens that he likes to hear their lively talk, and at home
+      secretly consorts with his servants. The former social differences between
+      commoners and patricians (which, I think, judging from the natural temper
+      of the race, must have been greatly modified at all times by concession
+      and exception) may be said to have quite disappeared in point of fact; the
+      nobility is now almost as effete socially as it is politically. There is
+      still a number of historic families, which are in a certain degree
+      exclusive; but rich <i>parvenus</i> have admission to their friendship,
+      and commoners in good circumstances are permitted their acquaintance; the
+      ladies of this patrician society visit ladies of less rank, and receive
+      them at their great parties, though not at more sacred assemblies, where
+      they see only each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians have a habit of saying their best families are in exile, but
+      this is not meant to be taken literally. Many of the best families are yet
+      in the city, living in perfect retirement, or very often merged in the
+      middle class, and become men of professions, and active, useful lives. Of
+      these nobles (they usually belong to the families which did not care to
+      ask nobility of Austria, and are therefore untitled) [Footnote: The only
+      title conferred on any patrician of Venice during the Republic was
+      Cavaliere, and this was conferred by a legislative act in reward of
+      distinguished service. The names of the nobility were written in the
+      Golden Book of the Republic, and they were addressed as Illustrissimo or
+      Eccellenza. They also signed themselves <i>nobile</i>, between the
+      Christian name and surname, as it is still the habit of the untitled
+      nobility to do.] the citizens are affectionately proud, while I have heard
+      from them nothing but contempt and ridicule of the patricians who, upon a
+      wretched pension or meagre government office, attempt to maintain
+      patrician distinction. Such nobles are usually Austriacanti in their
+      politics, and behind the age in every thing; while there are other
+      descendants of patrician families mingled at last with the very populace,
+      sharing their ignorance and degradation, and feeling with them. These
+      sometimes exercise the most menial employments: I knew one noble lord who
+      had been a facchino, and I heard of another who was a street-sweeper. <i>Conte
+      che non conta, non conta niente</i>, [Footnote: A count who doesn&rsquo;t count
+      (money) counts for nothing.] says the sneering Italian proverb; and it
+      would be little less than miraculous if a nobility like that of modern
+      Venice maintained superior state and regard in the eyes of the
+      quick-witted, intelligent, sarcastic commonalty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The few opulent patricians are by no means the most violent of
+      Italianissimi. They own lands and houses, and as property is unsafe when
+      revolutionary feeling is rife, their patriotism is tempered. The wealth
+      amassed in early times by the vast and enterprising commerce of the
+      country was, when not dissipated in riotous splendor, invested in real
+      estate upon the main-land as the Republic grew in territory, and the
+      income of the nobles is now from the rents of these lands. They reside
+      upon their estates during the season of the <i>villeggiatura</i>, which
+      includes the months of September and October, when every one who can
+      possibly leave the city goes into the country. Then the patricians betake
+      themselves to their villas near Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and Treviso, and
+      people the sad-colored, weather-worn stucco hermitages, where the
+      mutilated statues, swaggering above the gates, forlornly commemorate days
+      when it was a far finer thing to be a noble than it is now. I say the
+      villas look dreary and lonesome as places can be made to look in Italy,
+      what with their high garden walls, their long, low piles of stabling, and
+      the <i>passée</i> indecency of their nymphs and fauns, foolishly strutting
+      in the attitudes of the silly and sinful old Past; and it must be but a
+      dull life that the noble proprietors lead there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is better, no doubt, on the banks of the Brenta, where there are still
+      so many villas as to form a street of these seats of luxury, almost the
+      whole length of the canal, from Fusina to Padua. I am not certain that
+      they have a right to the place which they hold in literature and
+      sentiment, and yet there is something very charming about them, with their
+      gardens, and chapels, and statues, and shaded walks. We went to see them
+      one day early in October, and found them every one, when habitable,
+      inhabited, and wearing a cheerful look, that made their proximity to
+      Venice incredible. As we returned home after dark, we saw the ladies from
+      the villas walking unattended along the road, and giving the scene an air
+      of homelike peace and trustfulness which I had not found before in Italy;
+      while the windows of the houses were brilliantly lighted, as if people
+      lived in them; whereas, you seldom see a light in Venetian palaces. I am
+      not sure that I did not like better, however, the villas that were empty
+      and ruinous, and the gardens that had run wild, and the statues that had
+      lost legs and arms. Some of the ingenious proprietors had enterprisingly
+      whitewashed their statues, and there was a horrible primness about certain
+      of the well-kept gardens which offended me. Most of the houses were not
+      large, but there was here and there a palace as grand as any in the city.
+      Such was the great villa of the Contarini of the Lions, which was in every
+      way superb, with two great lions of stone guarding its portals, and a
+      gravel walk, over-arched with stately trees, stretching a quarter of a
+      mile before it. At the moment I was walking down this aisle I met a
+      cleanshaven old canonico, with red legs and red-tasseled hat, and with a
+      book under his arm, and a meditative look, whom I here thank for being so
+      venerably picturesque. The palace itself was shut up, and I wish I had
+      known, when I saw it, that it had a ghostly underground passage from its
+      cellar to the chapel,&mdash;wherein, when you get half way, your light
+      goes out, and you consequently never reach the chapel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is at Mira; but the greatest of all the villas is the magnificent
+      country-seat of the family Pisani at Stra, which now, with scarcely any
+      addition to its splendor, serves for the residence of the abdicated
+      Emperor of Austria. There is such pride in the vastness of this edifice
+      and its gardens as impresses you with the material greatness which found
+      expression in it, and never raises a regret that it has utterly passed
+      away. You wander around through the aisles of trim-cut lime-trees, bullied
+      and overborne by the insolent statues, and expect at every turn to come
+      upon intriguing spectres in bag-wigs, immense hoops and patches. How can
+      you feel sympathy for those dull and wicked ghosts of eighteenth-century
+      corruption? There is rottenness enough in the world without digging up old
+      putridity and sentimentalizing on it; and I doubt if you will care to know
+      much of the way in which the noble owner of such a villa ascended the
+      Brenta at the season of the <i>villeggiatura</i> in his great gilded
+      barge, all carven outside with the dumpling loves and loose nymphs of the
+      period, with fruits, and flowers, and what not; and within, luxuriously
+      cushioned and furnished, and stocked with good things for pleasure making
+      in the gross old fashion. [Footnote: Mutinelli, <i>Gli Ultimi Cinquant&rsquo;
+      Anni della Repubblica di Veneza</i>.] King Cole was not a merrier old soul
+      than Illustrissimo of that day; he outspent princes; and his agent, while
+      he harried the tenants to supply his master&rsquo;s demands, plundered
+      Illustrissimo frightfully. Illustrissimo never looked at accounts. He said
+      to his steward, &ldquo;<i>Caro veccio, fè vu. Mi remeto a quel che fè vu.</i>&rdquo;
+       (Old fellow, you attend to it. I shall be satisfied with what you do.) So
+      the poor agent had no other course but to swindle him, which he did; and
+      Illustrissimo, when he died, died poor, and left his lordly debts and
+      vices to his sons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Venice, the noble still lives sometimes in his ancestral palace, dimly
+      occupying the halls where his forefathers flourished in so much splendor.
+      I can conceive, indeed, of no state of things more flattering to human
+      pride than that which surrounded the patrician of the old aristocratic
+      Republic. The house in which he dwelt was the palace of a king, in luxury
+      of appointment and magnificence of size. Troops of servants that
+      ministered to his state peopled its vast extent; and the gondolas that
+      carried his grandeur abroad were moored in little fleets to the piles that
+      rose before his palace, painted with the family arms and colors. The
+      palace itself stood usually on the Grand Canal, and rose sheer from the
+      water, giving the noble that haughty inaccessibility which the lord of the
+      main-land achieved only by building lofty walls and multiplying gates. The
+      architecture was as costly in its ornament as wild Gothic fancy, or
+      Renaissance luxury of bad taste, could make it; and when the palace front
+      was not of sculptured marble, the painter&rsquo;s pencil filled it with the
+      delight of color. The main-land noble&rsquo;s house was half a fortress, and
+      formed his stronghold in times of popular tumult or family fray; but at
+      Venice the strong arm of St. Mark suppressed all turbulence in a city
+      secure from foreign war; and the peaceful arts rejoiced in undisturbed
+      possession of the palaces, which rose in the most delicate and fantastic
+      beauty, and mirrored in the brine a dream of sea-deep strangeness and
+      richness. You see much of the beauty yet, but the pride and opulence which
+      called it into being are gone forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most palaces, whether of the Gothic or classicistic period, have the same
+      internal arrangement of halls and chambers, and are commonly built of two
+      lofty and two low stories. On the ground floor, or water level, is a hall
+      running back from the gate to a bit of garden at the other side of the
+      palace; and on either side of this hall, which in old times was hung with
+      the family trophies of the chase and war, are the porter&rsquo;s lodge and
+      gondoliers&rsquo; rooms. On the first and second stories are the family
+      apartments, opening on either side from great halls, of the same extent as
+      that below, but with loftier roofs, of heavy rafters gilded or painted.
+      The fourth floor is of the same arrangement, but has a lower roof, and was
+      devoted to the better class of servants. Of the two stories used by the
+      family, the third is the loftier and airier, and was occupied in summer;
+      the second was the winter apartment. On either hand the rooms open in
+      suites.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0456}.jpg" alt="{0456}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0456}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      We have seen something of the ceremonies, public and private, which gave
+      peculiar gayety and brilliance to the life of the Venetians of former
+      days; but in his political character the noble had yet greater
+      consequence. He was part of the proudest, strongest, and securest system
+      of his time. He was a king with the fellowship of kings, flattered with
+      the equality of an aristocracy which was master of itself, and of its
+      nominal head. During the earlier times it was his office to go daily to
+      Rialto and instruct the people in their political rights and duties for
+      four hours; and even when the duties became every thing and the rights
+      nothing (after the Serrar del Consiglio), the friendly habit of daily
+      intercourse between patricians and citizens was still kept up at the same
+      place. Once each week, and on every holiday, the noble took his seat in
+      the Grand Council (the most august assembly in the world, without doubt),
+      or the Ten, or the Three, according to his office in the State,&mdash;holding
+      his place in the Council by right of birth, and in the other bodies by
+      election of his peers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although the patricians were kept as one family apart from the people, and
+      jealously guarded in their aristocratic purity by the State, they were
+      only equals of the poorest before the laws of their own creation, and
+      their condescension to the people was frequent and great. Indeed, the
+      Venetians of all classes are social creatures, loving talk and gossip, and
+      these constant habits of intercourse must have done much to produce that
+      equality of manner now observable in them. Their amusements were for a
+      long time the same, the nobles taking part in the public holidays, and in
+      the popular exercises of rowing and swimming. In the earlier times,
+      hunting in the lagoons was a favorite diversion; but as the decay of the
+      Republic advanced, and the patrician blossomed into the fine gentleman of
+      the last century, these hearty sports were relinquished, and every thing
+      was voted vulgar but masking in carnival, dancing and gaming at Ridotto,
+      and intriguing everywhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The accounts which Venetian writers give of Republican society in the
+      eighteenth century form a <i>chronique scandaleuse</i> which need not be
+      minutely copied here. Much may be learned of Venetian manners of this time
+      from the comedies of Goldoni; and the faithlessness of society may be
+      argued from the fact that in these plays, which contain nothing salacious
+      or indecent, there is scarcely a character of any rank who scruples to
+      tell lies; and the truth is not to be found in works intended to school
+      the public to virtue. The ingenious old playwright&rsquo;s memoirs are full of
+      gossip concerning that poor old Venice, which is now no more; and the
+      worthy autobiographer, Casanova, also gives much information about things
+      that had best not be known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the Republic drew near its fall, in 1797, there was little left in its
+      dominant class worth saving, if we may believe the testimony of Venetians
+      which Mutinelli brings to bear upon the point in his &ldquo;Annali Urbani,&rdquo; and
+      his &ldquo;History of the Last Fifty Years of the Republic.&rdquo; Long prosperity and
+      prodigious opulence had done their worst, and the patricians, and the
+      lowest orders of the people, their creatures and dependants, were
+      thoroughly corrupt; while the men of professions began to assume that
+      station which they now hold. The days of a fashionable patrician of those
+      times began at a little before sunset, and ended with the following dawn.
+      Rising from his bed, he dressed himself in dainty linen, and placed
+      himself in the hands of the hairdresser to be combed, oiled, perfumed, and
+      powdered; and then sallied forth for a stroll through the Merceria, where
+      this excellent husband and father made tasteful purchases to be carried to
+      the lady he served. At dinner, which he took about seven or eight, his
+      board was covered with the most tempting viands, and surrounded by needy
+      parasites, who detailed the spicy scandals of the day in payment of their
+      dinner, while the children of the host were confided to the care of the
+      corrupt and negligent servants. After dinner, the father went to the
+      theatre, or to the <i>casino</i>, and spent the night over cards and wine,
+      in the society of dissolute women; and renewed on the morrow the routine
+      of his useful existence. The education of the children of the man of
+      fashion was confided to a priest, who lived in his family, and called
+      himself an abbate, after the mode of the <i>abbés</i> of French society;
+      he had winning manners with the ladies, indulgent habits with his pupils,
+      and dressed his elegant person in silks of Lyons and English broadcloths.
+      In the pleasant old days he flitted from palace to villa, dining and
+      supping, and flattering the ladies, and tapping the lid of his jeweled
+      snuffbox in all fashionable companies. He was the cadet of a patrician
+      family (when not the ambitious son of a low family), with a polite taste
+      for idleness and intrigue, for whom no secular sinecure could be found in
+      the State, and who obliged the Church by accepting orders. Whether in the
+      palace on the Grand Canal, or the villa on the Brenta, this gentle and
+      engaging priest was surely the most agreeable person to be met, and the
+      most dangerous to ladies&rsquo; hearts,&mdash;with his rich suit of black, and
+      his smug, clean-shaven face, and his jeweled hands, and his sweet,
+      seducing manners. Alas! the world is changed! The priests whom you see
+      playing <i>tre-sette</i> now at the conversazioni are altogether different
+      men, and the delightful abbate is as much out of fashion as the bag-wig or
+      the queue. When in fashion he loved the theatre, and often showed himself
+      there at the side of his noble patron&rsquo;s wife. Nay, in that time the
+      theatre was so prized by the Church that a popular preacher thought it
+      becoming to declare from his pulpit that to compose well his hearers
+      should study the comedies of Goldoni,&mdash;and his hearers were the
+      posterity of that devout old aristocracy which never undertook a journey
+      without first receiving the holy sacrament; which had built the churches
+      and endowed them from private wealth!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ignorance, as well as vice, was the mode in those elegant days, and it is
+      related that a charming lady of good society once addressed a foreign <i>savant</i>
+      at her conversazione, and begged him to favor the company with a little
+      music, because, having heard that he was <i>virtuous</i>, she had no other
+      association with the word than its technical use in Italy to indicate a
+      professional singer as a <i>virtuoso</i>. A father of a family who kept no
+      abbate for the education of his children ingeniously taught them himself.
+      &ldquo;Father,&rdquo; asked one of his children, &ldquo;what are the stars?&rdquo; &ldquo;The stars are
+      stars, and little things that shine as thou seest.&rdquo; &ldquo;Then they are
+      candles, perhaps?&rdquo; &ldquo;Make thy account that they are candles exactly.&rdquo; &ldquo;Of
+      wax or tallow?&rdquo; pursues the boy. &ldquo;What! tallow-candles in heaven? No,
+      certainly&mdash;wax, wax!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These, and many other scandalous stories, the Venetian writers recount of
+      the last days of their Republic, and the picture they produce is one of
+      the most shameless ignorance, the most polite corruption, the most
+      unblushing baseness. I have no doubt that the picture is full of national
+      exaggeration. Indeed, the method of Mutinelli (who I believe intends to
+      tell the truth) in writing social history is altogether too credulous and
+      incautious. It is well enough to study contemporary comedy for light upon
+      past society, but satirical ballads and lampoons, and scurrilous letters,
+      cannot be accepted as historical authority. Still there is no question but
+      Venice was very corrupt. As you read of her people in the last century,
+      one by one the ideas of family faith and domestic purity fade away; one by
+      one the beliefs in public virtue are dissipated; until at last you are
+      glad to fly the study, close the filthy pages, and take refuge in doubt of
+      the writers, who declare that they must needs disgrace Venice with facts
+      since her children have dishonored her in their lives. &ldquo;Such as we see
+      them,&rdquo; they say, &ldquo;were the patricians, such the people of Venice, after
+      the middle of the eighteenth century. The Venetians might be considered as
+      extinguished; the marvelous city, the pomp only of the Venetians,
+      existed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Shall we believe this? Let each choose for himself. At that very time the
+      taste and wealth of a Venetian noble fostered the genius of Canova and
+      then, when their captains starved the ragged soldiers of the Republic to
+      feed their own idleness and vice,&mdash;when the soldiers dismantled her
+      forts to sell the guns to the Turk,&mdash;when her sailors rioted on shore
+      and her ships rotted in her ports, she had still military virtue enough to
+      produce that Emo, who beat back the Algerine corsairs from the commerce of
+      Christendom, and attacked them in their stronghold, as of old her galleys
+      beat back the Turks. Alas! there was not the virtue in her statesmen to
+      respond to this greatness in the hero. One of their last public acts was
+      to break his heart with insult, and to crave peace of the pirates whom he
+      had cowed. It remained for the helpless Doge and the abject patricians,
+      terrified at a threat of war, to declare the Republic at an end, and San
+      Marco was no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I love Republics too well to lament the fall of Venice. And yet, <i>Pax
+      tibi, Marce!</i> If I have been slow to praise, I shall not hasten to
+      condemn, a whole nation. Indeed, so much occurs to me to qualify with
+      contrary sense what I have written concerning Venice, that I wonder if,
+      after all, I have not been treating throughout less of the rule than of
+      the exception. It is a doubt which must force itself upon every fair and
+      temperate man who attempts to describe another people&rsquo;s life and
+      character; and I confess that it troubles me so sorely now, at the end of
+      my work, that I would fain pray the gentle reader to believe much more
+      good and much less evil of the Venetians than I have said. I am glad that
+      it remains for me to express a faith and hope in them for the future,
+      founded upon their present political feeling, which, however tainted with
+      self-interest in the case of many, is no doubt with the great majority a
+      high and true feeling of patriotism. And it is impossible to believe that
+      a people which can maintain the stern and unyielding attitude now
+      maintained by the Venetians toward an alien government disposed to make
+      them any concession short of freedom, in order to win them into voluntary
+      submission, can be wanting in the great qualities which distinguish living
+      peoples from those passed hopelessly into history and sentiment. In truth,
+      glancing back over the whole career of the nation, I can discern in it
+      nothing so admirable, so dignified, so steadfastly brave, as its present
+      sacrifice of all that makes life easy and joyous, to the attainment of a
+      good which shall make life noble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians desire now, and first of all things, Liberty, knowing that
+      in slavery men can learn no virtues; and I think them fit, with all their
+      errors and defects, to be free now, because men are never fit to be
+      slaves.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+    <h2><a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"></a>
+      CHAPTER XXII.<br/>
+      OUR LAST YEAR IN VENICE.
+    </h2>
+    <p class="center">
+      <i>(As it seems Seven Years after.)</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last of four years which it was our fortune to live in the city of
+      Venice was passed under the roof of one of her most beautiful and
+      memorable palaces, namely, the Palazzo Giustiniani, whither we went, as
+      has been told in an earlier chapter of this book, to escape the
+      encroaching nepotism of Giovanna, the flower of serving-women. The
+      experience now, in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to consort with ordinary
+      remembrances, and has such a fantastic preference for the company of
+      rather vivid and circumstantial dreams, that it is with no very strong
+      hope of making it seem real that I shall venture to speak of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Giustiniani were a family of patricians very famous during the times
+      of a Republic that gave so many splendid names to history, and the race
+      was preserved to the honor and service of Saint Mark by one of the most
+      romantic facts of his annals. During a war with the Greek Emperor in the
+      twelfth century every known Giustiniani was slain, and the heroic strain
+      seemed lost forever. But the state that mourned them bethought itself of a
+      half forgotten monk of their house, who was wasting his life in the
+      Convent of San Nicolò; he was drawn forth from this seclusion, and, the
+      permission of Rome being won, he was married to the daughter of the
+      reigning doge. From them descended the Giustiniani of aftertimes, who
+      still exist; in deed, in the year 1865 there came one day a gentleman of
+      the family, and tried to buy from our landlord that part of the palace
+      which we so humbly and insufficiently inhabited. It is said that as the
+      unfrocked friar and his wife declined in life they separated, and, as if
+      in doubt of what had been done for the state through them, retired each
+      into a convent, Giustiniani going back to San Nicolò, and dying at last to
+      the murmur of the Adriatic waves along the Lido&rsquo;s sands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next after this Giustiniani I like best to think of that latest hero of
+      the family, who had the sad fortune to live when the ancient Republic fell
+      at a threat of Napoleon, and who alone among her nobles had the courage to
+      meet with a manly spirit the insolent menaces of the conqueror. The
+      Giustiniani governed Treviso for the Senate; he refused, when Napoleon
+      ordered him from his presence, to quit Treviso without the command of the
+      Senate; he flung back the taunts of bad faith cast upon the Venetians; and
+      when Napoleon changed his tone from that of disdain to one of compliment,
+      and promised that in the general disaster he was preparing for Venice,
+      Giustiniani should be spared, the latter generously replied that he had
+      been a friend of the French only because the Senate was so; as to the
+      immunity offered, all was lost to him in the loss of his country, and he
+      should blush for his wealth if it remained intact amidst the ruin of his
+      countrymen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The family grew in riches and renown from age to age, and, some four
+      centuries after the marriage of the monk, they reared the three beautiful
+      Gothic palaces, in the noblest site on the Grand Canal, whence on one hand
+      you can look down to the Rialto Bridge, and on the other far up towards
+      the church of the Salute, and the Basin of Saint Mark. The architects were
+      those Buoni, father and son, who did some of the most beautiful work on
+      the Ducal Palace, and who wrought in an equal inspiration upon these homes
+      of the Giustiniani, building the delicate Gothic arches of the windows,
+      with their slender columns and their graceful balconies, and crowning all
+      with the airy battlements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The largest of the three palaces became later the property of the Foscari
+      family, and here dwelt with his father that unhappy Jacopo Foscari, who
+      after thrice suffering torture by the state for a murder he never did, at
+      last died in exile; hither came the old Doge Foscari, who had consented to
+      this cruel error of the state, and who after a life spent in its service
+      was deposed and disgraced before his death; and whither when he lay dead,
+      came remorseful Venice, and claimed for sumptuous obsequies the dust which
+      his widow yielded with bitter reproaches. Here the family faded away
+      generation by generation, till, (according to the tale told us) early in
+      this century, when the ultimate male survivor of the line had died, under
+      a false name, in London, where he had been some sort of obscure actor,
+      there were but two old maiden sisters left, who, lapsing into imbecility,
+      were shown to strangers by the rascal servants as the last of the Foscari;
+      and here in our time was quartered a regiment of Austrian troops, whose
+      neatly pipe-clayed belts decorated the balconies on which the princely
+      ladies of the house had rested their jewelled arms in other days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Foscari added a story to the palace to distinguish it from the two
+      other palaces Giustiniani, but these remain to the present day as they
+      were originally planned. That in which we lived was called Palazzo
+      Giustiniani of the Bishops, because one of the family was the first
+      patriarch of Venice. After his death he was made a saint by the Pope; and
+      it is related that he was not only a very pious, but a very good man. In
+      his last hours he admitted his beloved people to his chamber, where he
+      meekly lay upon a pallet of straw, and at the moment he expired, two monks
+      in the solitude of their cloister, heard an angelical harmony in the air:
+      the clergy performed his obsequies not in black, funereal robes, but in
+      white garments, and crowned with laurel, and bearing gilded torches, and
+      although the patriarch had died of a malignant fever, his body was
+      miraculously preserved incorrupt during the sixty-five days that the
+      obsequies lasted. The other branch of the family was called the
+      Giustiniani of the Jewels, from the splendor of their dress; but neither
+      palace now shelters any of their magnificent race. The edifice on our
+      right was exclusively occupied by a noble Viennese lady, who as we heard,&mdash;vaguely,
+      in the right Venetian fashion,&mdash;had been a ballet-dancer in her
+      youth, and who now in her matronly days dwelt apart from her husband, the
+      Russian count, and had gondoliers in blue silk, and the finest gondola on
+      the Grand Canal, but was a plump, florid lady, looking long past beauty,
+      even as we saw her from our balcony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our own palace&mdash;as we absurdly grew to call it&mdash;was owned and
+      inhabited in a manner much more proper to modern Venice, the
+      proprietorship being about equally divided between our own landlord and a
+      very well known Venetian painter, son of a painter still more famous. This
+      artist was a very courteous old gentleman, who went with Italian and
+      clock-like regularity every evening in summer to a certain caffè, where he
+      seemed to make it a point of conscience to sip one sherbet, and to read
+      the &ldquo;Journal des Débats.&rdquo; In his coming and going we met him so often that
+      we became friends, and he asked us many times to visit him, and see his
+      father&rsquo;s pictures, and some famous frescos with which his part of the
+      palace was adorned. It was a characteristic trait of our life, that though
+      we constantly meant to avail ourselves of this kindness, we never did so.
+      But we continued in the enjoyment of the beautiful garden, which this
+      gentleman owned at the rear of the palace and on which our chamber windows
+      looked. It was full of oleanders and roses, and other bright and odorous
+      blooms, which we could enjoy perfectly well without knowing their names;
+      and I could hardly say whether the garden was more charming when it was in
+      its summer glory, or when, on some rare winter day, a breath from the
+      mountains had clothed its tender boughs and sprays with a light and
+      evanescent flowering of snow. At any season the lofty palace walls rose
+      over it, and shut it in a pensive seclusion which was loved by the old
+      mother of the painter and by his elderly maiden sister. These often walked
+      on its moss-grown paths, silent as the roses and oleanders to which one
+      could have fancied the blossom of their youth had flown; and sometimes
+      there came to them there, grave, black-gowned priests,&mdash;for the
+      painter&rsquo;s was a devout family,&mdash;and talked with them in tones almost
+      as tranquil as the silence was, save when one of the ecclesiastics
+      placidly took snuff,&mdash;it is a dogma of the Church for priests to take
+      snuff in Italy,&mdash;and thereafter, upon a prolonged search for his
+      handkerchief, blew a resounding nose. So far as we knew, the garden walls
+      circumscribed the whole life of these ladies; and I am afraid that such
+      topics of this world as they touched upon with their priests must have
+      been deplorably small.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0472}.jpg" alt="{0472}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0472}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Their kinsman owned part of the story under us, and both of the stories
+      above us; he had the advantage of the garden over our landlord; but he had
+      not so grand a gondola-gate as we, and in some other respects I incline to
+      think that our part of the edifice was the finer. It is certain that no
+      mention is made of any such beautiful hall in the property of the painter
+      as is noted in that of our landlord, by the historian of a &ldquo;Hundred
+      Palaces of Venice,&rdquo;&mdash;a work for which I subscribed, and then for my
+      merit was honored by a visit from the author, who read aloud to me in a
+      deep and sonorous voice the annals of our temporary home. This hall
+      occupied half the space of the whole floor; but it was altogether
+      surrounded by rooms of various shapes and sizes, except upon one side of
+      its length, where it gave through Gothic windows of vari-colored glass,
+      upon a small court below,&mdash;a green-mouldy little court, further
+      dampened by a cistern, which had the usual curb of a single carven block
+      of marble. The roof of this stately <i>sala</i> was traversed by a long
+      series of painted rafters, which in the halls of nearly all Venetian
+      palaces are left exposed, and painted or carved and gilded. A suite of
+      stately rooms closed the hall from the Grand Canal, and one of these
+      formed our parlor; on the side opposite the Gothic windows was a vast
+      aristocratic kitchen, which, with its rows of shining coppers, its great
+      chimney-place well advanced toward the middle of the floor, and its tall
+      gloomy windows, still affects my imagination as one of the most patrician
+      rooms which I ever saw; at the back of the hall were those chambers of
+      ours overlooking the garden of which I have already spoken, and another
+      kitchen, less noble than the first, but still sufficiently grandiose to
+      make most New World kitchens seem very meekly minute and unimpressive.
+      Between the two kitchens was another court, with another cistern, from
+      which the painter&rsquo;s family drew water with a bucket on a long rope, which,
+      when let down from the fourth story, appeared to be dropped from the
+      clouds, and descended with a noise little less alarming than thunder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altogether the most surprising object in the great <i>sala</i> was a
+      sewing-machine, and we should have been inconsolably outraged by its
+      presence there, amid so much that was merely venerable and beautiful, but
+      for the fact that it was in a state of harmonious and hopeless disrepair,
+      and, from its general contrivance, gave us the idea that it had never been
+      of any use. It was, in fact, kept as a sort of curiosity by the landlord,
+      who exhibited it to the admiration of his Venetian friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader will doubtless have imagined, from what I have been saying,
+      that the Palazzo Giustiniani had not all that machinery which we know in
+      our houses here as modern improvements. It had nothing of the kind, and
+      life there was, as in most houses in Italy, a kind of permanent camping
+      out. When I remember the small amount of carpeting, of furniture, and of
+      upholstery we enjoyed, it appears to me pathetic; and yet, I am not sure
+      that it was not the wisest way to live. I know that we had compensation in
+      things not purchasable here for money. If the furniture of the principal
+      bedroom was somewhat scanty, its dimensions were unstinted the ceiling was
+      fifteen feet high, and was divided into rich and heavy panels, adorned
+      each with a mighty rosette of carved and gilded wood, two feet across. The
+      parlor had not its original decorations in our time, but it had once had
+      so noble a carved ceiling that it was found worth while to take it down
+      and sell it into England; and it still had two grand Venetian mirrors, a
+      vast and very good painting of a miracle of St. Anthony, and
+      imitation-antique tables and arm-chairs. The last were frolicked all over
+      with carven nymphs and cupids; but they were of such frail construction
+      that they were not meant to be sat in, much less to be removed from the
+      wall against which they stood; and more than one of our American visitors
+      was dismayed at having these proud articles of furniture go to pieces upon
+      his attempt to use them like mere arm-chairs of ordinary life. Scarcely
+      less impressive or useless than these was a monumental plaster-stove,
+      surmounted by a bust of Æsculapius; when this was broken by accident, we
+      cheaply repaired the loss with a bust of Homer (the dealer in the next
+      campo being out of Æsculapiuses) which no one could have told from the
+      bust it replaced; and this and the other artistic glories of the room made
+      us quite forget all possible blemishes and defects. And will the reader
+      mention any house with modern improvements in America which has also
+      windows, with pointed arches of marble, opening upon balconies that
+      overhang the Grand Canal?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For our new apartment, which consisted of six rooms, furnished with every
+      article necessary for Venetian housekeeping, we paid one dollar a day
+      which, in the innocence of our hearts we thought rather dear, though we
+      were somewhat consoled by reflecting that this extravagant outlay secured
+      us the finest position on the Grand Canal. We did not mean to keep house
+      as we had in Casa Falier, and perhaps a sketch of our easier <i>ménage</i>
+      may not be out of place. Breakfast was prepared in the house, for in that
+      blessed climate all you care for in the morning is a cup of coffee, with a
+      little bread and butter, a musk-melon, and some clusters of white grapes,
+      more or less. Then we had our dinners sent in warm from a cook&rsquo;s who had
+      learned his noble art in France; he furnished a dinner of five courses for
+      three persons at a cost of about eighty cents; and they were dinners so
+      happily conceived and so justly executed, that I cannot accuse myself of
+      an excess of sentiment when I confess that I sigh for them to this day.
+      Then as for our immaterial tea, we always took that at the Caffè Florian
+      in the Piazza of Saint Mark, where we drank a cup of black coffee and ate
+      an ice, while all the world promenaded by, and the Austrian bands made
+      heavenly music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those bands no longer play in Venice, and I believe that they are not the
+      only charm which she has lost in exchanging Austrian servitude for Italian
+      freedom; though I should be sorry to think that freedom was not worth all
+      other charms. The poor Venetians used to be very rigorous (as I have
+      elsewhere related), about the music of their oppressors, and would not
+      come into the Piazza until it had ceased and the Austrian promenaders had
+      disappeared, when they sat down at Florian&rsquo;s, and listened to such bands
+      of strolling singers and minstrels as chose to give them a concord of
+      sweet sounds, without foreign admixture. We, in our neutrality, were wont
+      to sit out both entertainments, and then go home well toward midnight,
+      through the sleepy little streets, and over the bridges that spanned the
+      narrow canals, dreaming in the shadows of the palaces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We moved with half-conscious steps till we came to the silver expanse of
+      the Grand Canal, where, at the ferry, darkled a little brood of black
+      gondolas, into one of which we got, and were rowed noiselessly to the
+      thither side, where we took our way toward the land-gate of our palace
+      through the narrow streets of the parish of San Barnabà, and the campo
+      before the ugly façade of the church; or else we were rowed directly to
+      the water-gate, where we got out on the steps worn by the feet of the
+      Giustiniani of old, and wandered upward through the darkness of the
+      stairway, which gave them a far different welcome of servants and lights
+      when they returned from an evening&rsquo;s pleasure in the Piazza. It seemed
+      scarcely just; but then, those Giustiniani were dead, and we were alive,
+      and that was one advantage; and, besides, the loneliness and desolation of
+      the palace had a peculiar charm, and were at any rate cheaper than its
+      former splendor could have been. I am afraid that people who live abroad
+      in the palaces of extinct nobles do not keep this important fact
+      sufficiently in mind; and as the Palazzo Giustiniani is still let in
+      furnished lodgings, and it is quite possible that some of my readers may
+      be going to spend next summer in it, I venture to remind them that if they
+      have to draw somewhat upon their fancy for patrician accommodations there,
+      it will cost them far less in money than it did the original proprietors,
+      who contributed to our selfish pleasure by the very thought of their
+      romantic absence and picturesque decay. In fact, the Past is everywhere
+      like the cake of proverb: you cannot enjoy it and have it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And here I am reminded of another pleasure of modern dwellers in Venetian
+      palaces, which could hardly have been indulged by the patricians of old,
+      and which is hardly imaginable by people of this day, whose front doors
+      open upon dry land: I mean to say the privilege of sea-bathing from one&rsquo;s
+      own threshold. From the beginning of June till far into September all the
+      canals of Venice are populated by the amphibious boys, who clamor about in
+      the brine, or poise themselves for a leap from the tops of bridges, or
+      show their fine, statuesque figures, bronzed by the ardent sun, against
+      the façades of empty palaces, where they hover among the marble
+      sculptures, and meditate a headlong plunge. It is only the Venetian
+      ladies, in fact, who do not share this healthful amusement. Fathers of
+      families, like so many plump, domestic drakes, lead forth their aquatic
+      broods, teaching the little ones to swim by the aid of various floats, and
+      delighting in the gambols of the larger ducklings. When the tide comes in
+      fresh and strong from the sea the water in the Grand Canal is pure and
+      refreshing; and at these times it is a singular pleasure to leap from
+      one&rsquo;s door-step into the swift current, and spend a half-hour, very
+      informally, among one&rsquo;s neighbors there. The Venetian bathing-dress is a
+      mere sketch of the pantaloons of ordinary life; and when I used to stand
+      upon our balcony, and see some bearded head ducking me a polite salutation
+      from a pair of broad, brown shoulders that showed above the water, I was
+      not always able to recognize my acquaintance, deprived of his factitious
+      identity of clothes. But I always knew a certain stately consul-general by
+      a vast expanse of baldness upon the top of his head; and it must be owned,
+      I think, that this form of social assembly was, with all its
+      disadvantages, a novel and vivacious spectacle. The Venetian ladies, when
+      they bathed, went to the Lido, or else to the bath-houses in front of the
+      Ducal Palace, where they saturated themselves a good part of the day, and
+      drank coffee, and, possibly, gossiped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think that our balconies at Palazzo Giustiniani were even better places
+      to see the life of the Grand Canal from than the balcony of Casa Falier,
+      which we had just left. Here at least we had a greater stretch of the
+      Canal, looking, as we could, up either side of its angle. Here, too, we
+      had more gondola stations in sight, and as we were nearer the Rialto,
+      there was more picturesque passing of the market-boats. But if we saw more
+      of this life, we did not see it in greater variety, for I think we had
+      already exhausted this. There was a movement all night long. If I woke at
+      three or four o&rsquo;clock, and offered myself the novel spectacle of the Canal
+      at that hour, I saw the heavy-laden barges go by to the Rialto, with now
+      and then also a good-sized coasting schooner making lazily for the
+      lagoons, with its ruddy fire already kindled for cooking the morning&rsquo;s
+      meal, and looking very enviably cosey. After our own breakfast we began to
+      watch for the gondolas of the tourists of different nations, whom we came
+      to distinguish at a glance. Then the boats of the various artisans went
+      by, the carpenter&rsquo;s, the mason&rsquo;s, the plasterer&rsquo;s, with those that sold
+      fuel, and vegetables, and fruit, and fish, to any household that arrested
+      them. From noon till three or four o&rsquo;clock the Canal was comparatively
+      deserted; but before twilight it was thronged again by people riding out
+      in their open gondolas to take the air after the day&rsquo;s fervor. After
+      nightfall they ceased, till only at long intervals a solitary lamp,
+      stealing over the dark surface, gave token of the movement of some gondola
+      bent upon an errand that could not fail to seem mysterious or fail to be
+      matter of fact. We never wearied of this oft-repeated variety, nor of our
+      balcony in any way; and when the moon shone in through the lovely arched
+      window and sketched its exquisite outline on the floor, we were as happy
+      as moonshine could make us.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0484}.jpg" alt="{0484}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0484}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Were we otherwise content? As concerns Venice, it is very hard to say, and
+      I do not know that I shall ever be able to say with certainty. For all the
+      entertainment it afforded us, it was a very lonely life, and we felt the
+      sadness of the city in many fine and not instantly recognizable ways.
+      Englishmen who lived there bade us beware of spending the whole year in
+      Venice, which they declared apt to result in a morbid depression of the
+      spirits. I believe they attributed this to the air of the place, but I
+      think it was more than half owing to her mood, to her old, ghostly,
+      aimless life. She was, indeed, a phantom of the past, haunting our modern
+      world,&mdash;serene, inexpressibly beautiful, yet inscrutably and
+      unspeakably sad. Remembering the charm that was in her, we often sigh for
+      the renewal of our own vague life there,&mdash;a shadow within the shadow;
+      but remembering also her deep melancholy, an involuntary shiver creeps
+      over us, and we are glad not to be there. Perhaps some of you who have
+      spent a summer day or a summer week in Venice do not recognize this
+      feeling; but if you will remain there, not four years as we did, but a
+      year or six months even, it will ever afterwards be only too plain. All
+      changes, all events, were affected by the inevitable local melancholy; the
+      day was as pensive amidst that populous silence as the night; the winter
+      not more pathetic than the long, tranquil, lovely summer. We rarely
+      sentimentalized consciously, and still more seldom openly, about the
+      present state of Venice as contrasted with her past glory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am glad to say that we despised the conventional poetastery about her;
+      but I believe that we had so far lived into sympathy with her, that,
+      whether we realized it or not, we took the tone of her dispiritedness, and
+      assumed a part of the common experience of loss and of hopelessness.
+      History, if you live where it was created, is a far subtler influence than
+      you suspect; and I would not say how much Venetian history, amidst the
+      monuments of her glory and the witnesses of her fall, had to do in secret
+      and tacit ways with the prevailing sentiment of existence, which I now
+      distinctly recognize to have been a melancholy one. No doubt this
+      sentiment was deepened by every freshly added association with memorable
+      places; and each fact, each great name and career, each strange tradition
+      as it rose out of the past for us and shed its pale lustre upon the
+      present, touched us with a pathos which we could neither trace nor
+      analyze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know how much the modern Venetians had to do with this
+      impression, but something I have no question. They were then under
+      Austrian rule; and in spite of much that was puerile and theatrical in it,
+      there was something very affecting in their attitude of what may best be
+      described as passive defiance. This alone made them heroic, but it also
+      made them tedious. They rarely talked of anything but politics; and as I
+      have elsewhere said, they were very jealous to have every one declare
+      himself of their opinion. Hemmed in by this jealousy on one side, and by a
+      heavy and rebellious sense of the wrongful presence of the Austrian troops
+      and the Austrian spies on the other, we forever felt dimly constrained by
+      something, we could not say precisely what, and we only knew what, when we
+      went sometimes on a journey into free Italy, and threw off the irksome
+      caution we had maintained both as to patriotic and alien tyrants. This
+      political misery circumscribed our acquaintance very much, and reduced the
+      circle of our friendship to three or four families, who were content to
+      know our sympathies without exacting constant expression of them. So we
+      learned to depend mainly upon passing Americans for our society; we hailed
+      with rapture the arrival of a gondola distinguished by the easy hats of
+      our countrymen and the pretty faces and pretty dresses of our
+      countrywomen. It was in the days of our war; and talking together over its
+      events, we felt a brotherhood with every other American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, in these circumstances, we made thorough acquaintance with the
+      people about us in the palace. The landlord had come somehow into a
+      profitable knowledge of Anglo-Saxon foibles and susceptibilities; but his
+      lodgings were charming, and I recognize the principle that it is not for
+      literature to make its prey of any possibly conscious object. For this
+      reason, I am likewise mostly silent concerning a certain <i>attaché</i> of
+      the palace, the right-hand man and intimate associate of the landlord. He
+      was the descendant of one of the most ancient and noble families of Italy,&mdash;a
+      family of popes and cardinals, of princes and ministers, which in him was
+      diminished and tarnished in an almost inexplicable degree. He was not at
+      all worldly-wise, but he was a man of great learning, and of a capacity
+      for acquiring knowledge that I have never seen surpassed. He possessed, I
+      think, not many shirts on earth; but he spoke three or four languages, and
+      wrote very pretty sonnets in Italian and German. He was one of the
+      friendliest and willingest souls living, and as generous as utter
+      destitution can make a man; yet he had a proper spirit, and valued himself
+      upon his name. Sometimes he brought his great-grandfather to the palace; a
+      brisk old gentleman in his nineties, who had seen the fall of the Republic
+      and three other revolutions in Venice, but had contrived to keep a
+      government pension through all, and now smiled with unabated cheerfulness
+      upon a world which he seemed likely never to leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The palace-servants were two, the gondolier and a sort of housekeeper,&mdash;a
+      handsome, swarthy woman, with beautiful white teeth and liquid black eyes.
+      She was the mother of a pretty little boy, who was going to bring himself
+      up for a priest, and whose chief amusement was saying mimic masses to an
+      imaginary congregation. She was perfectly statuesque and obliging, and we
+      had no right, as lovers of the beautiful or as lodgers, to complain of
+      her, whatever her faults might have been. As to the gondolier, who was a
+      very important personage in our palatial household, he was a handsome,
+      bashful, well-mannered fellow, with a good-natured blue eye and a neatly
+      waxed mustache. He had been ten years a soldier in the Austrian army, and
+      was, from his own account and from all I saw of him, one of the least
+      courageous men in the world; but then no part of the Austrian system tends
+      to make men brave, and I could easily imagine that before it had done with
+      one it might give him reasons enough to be timid all the rest of his life.
+      Piero had not very much to do, and he spent the greater part of his
+      leisure in a sort of lazy flirtation with the women about the
+      kitchen-fire, or in the gondola, in which he sometimes gave them the air.
+      We always liked him; I should have trusted him in any sort of way, except
+      one that involved danger. It once happened that burglars attempted to
+      enter our rooms, and Piero declared to us that he knew the men; but before
+      the police, he swore that he knew nothing about them. Afterwards he
+      returned privately to his first assertion, and accounted for his conduct
+      by saying that if he had borne witness against the burglars, he was afraid
+      that their friends would jump on his back (<i>saltarmi adosso</i>), as he
+      phrased it, in the dark; for by this sort of terrorism the poor and the
+      wicked have long been bound together in Italy. Piero was a humorist in his
+      dry way, and made a jest of his own caution; but his favorite joke was,
+      when he dressed himself with particular care, to tell the women that he
+      was going to pay a visit to the Princess Clary, then the star of Austrian
+      society. This mild pleasantry was repeated indefinitely with never-failing
+      effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More interesting to us than all the rest was our own servant, Bettina, who
+      came to us from a village on the mainland. She was very dark, so dark and
+      so Southern in appearance as almost to verge upon the negro type; yet she
+      bore the English-sounding name of Scarbro, and how she ever came by it
+      remains a puzzle to this day, for she was one of the most pure and entire
+      of Italians. I mean this was her maiden name; she was married to a
+      trumpeter in the Austrian service, whose Bohemian name she was unable to
+      pronounce, and consequently never gave us. She was a woman of very few
+      ideas indeed, but perfectly honest and good-hearted. She was pious, in her
+      peasant fashion, and in her walks about the city did not fail to bless the
+      baby before every picture of the Madonna. She provided it with an engraved
+      portrait of that Holy Nail which was venerated in the neighboring church
+      of San Pantaleon; and she apparently aimed to supply it with playthings of
+      a religious and saving character like that piece of ivory, which resembled
+      a small torso, and which Bettina described as &ldquo;A bit of the Lord, Signor,&rdquo;&mdash;and
+      it was, in fact, a fragment of an ivory crucifix, which she had somewhere
+      picked up. To Bettina&rsquo;s mind, mankind broadly divided themselves into two
+      races, Italians and Germans, to which latter she held that we Americans in
+      some sort belonged. She believed that America lay a little to the south of
+      Vienna and in her heart I think she was persuaded that the real national
+      complexion was black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw at
+      our house were merely a multitude of exceptions. But with all her
+      ignorance, she had no superstitions of a gloomy kind: the only ghost she
+      seemed ever to have heard of was the spectre of an American ship captain
+      which a friend of Piero&rsquo;s had seen at the Lido. She was perfectly kind and
+      obedient, and was deeply attached in an inarticulate way to the baby,
+      which was indeed the pet of the whole palace. This young lady ruled
+      arbitrarily over them all, and was forever being kissed and adored. When
+      Piero went out to the wine-shop for a little temperate dissipation, he
+      took her with him on his shoulder, and exhibited her to the admiring
+      gondoliers of his acquaintance; there was no puppetshow, no church
+      festival, in that region to which she was not carried; and when Bettina,
+      and Giulia, and all the idle women of the neighborhood assembled on a
+      Saturday afternoon in the narrow alley behind the palace (where they
+      dressed one another&rsquo;s thick black hair in fine braids soaked in milk, and
+      built it up to last the whole of the next week), the baby was the cynosure
+      of all hearts and eyes. But her supremacy was yet more distinguished when,
+      late at night, the household gave itself a feast of snails stewed in oil
+      and garlic, in the vast kitchen. There her anxious parents have found her
+      seated in the middle of the table with the bowl of snails before her, and
+      armed with a great spoon, while her vassals sat round, and grinned their
+      fondness and delight in her small tyrannies; and the immense room, dimly
+      lit, with the mystical implements of cookery glimmering from the wall,
+      showed like some witch&rsquo;s cavern, where a particularly small sorceress was
+      presiding over the concoction of an evil potion or the weaving of a
+      powerful spell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From time to time we had fellow-lodgers, who were always more or less
+      interesting and mysterious. Among the rest there was once a French lady,
+      who languished, during her stay, under the disfavor of the police, and for
+      whose sake there was a sentinel with a fixed bayonet stationed day and
+      night at the palace gate. At last, one night, this French lady escaped by
+      a rope-ladder from her chamber window, and thus no doubt satisfied alike
+      the female instinct for intrigue and elopement and the political
+      agitator&rsquo;s love of a mysterious disappearance. It was understood dimly
+      that she was an author, and had written a book displeasing to the police.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there was the German baroness and her son and daughter, the last very
+      beautiful and much courted by handsome Austrian officers; the son rather
+      weak-minded, and a great care to his sister and mother, from his
+      propensity to fall in love and marry below his station; the mother very
+      red-faced and fat, a good-natured old creature who gambled the summer
+      months away at Hombourg and Baden and in the winter resorted to Venice to
+      make a match for her pretty daughter. Then, moreover, there was that
+      English family, between whom and ourselves there was the reluctance and
+      antipathy, personal and national, which exists between all right-minded
+      Englishmen and Americans. No Italian can understand this just and natural
+      condition, and it was the constant aim of our landlord to make us
+      acquainted. So one day when he found a member of each of these unfriendly
+      families on the neutral ground of the grand <i>sala</i>, he introduced
+      them. They had, happily, the piano-forte between them, and I flatter
+      myself that the insulting coldness and indifference with which they
+      received each other&rsquo;s names carried to our landlord&rsquo;s bosom a dismay never
+      before felt by a good-natured and well-meaning man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The piano-forte which I have mentioned belonged to the landlord, who was
+      fond of music and of all fine and beautiful things; and now and then he
+      gave a musical <i>soirée</i>, which was attended, more or less
+      surreptitiously, by the young people of his acquaintance. I do not think
+      he was always quite candid in giving his invitations, for on one occasion
+      a certain count, who had taken refuge from the glare of the <i>sala</i> in
+      our parlor for the purpose of concealing the very loud-plaided pantaloons
+      he wore, explained pathetically that he had no idea it was a party, and
+      that he had been so long out of society, for patriotic reasons, that he
+      had no longer a dress suit. But to us they were very delightful
+      entertainments, no less from the great variety of character they afforded
+      than from the really charming and excellent music which the different
+      amateurs made; for we had airs from all the famous operas, and the
+      instrumentation was by a gifted young composer. Besides, the gayety seemed
+      to recall in some degree the old, brilliant life of the palace, and at
+      least showed us how well it was adapted to social magnificence and
+      display.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We enjoyed our whole year in Palazzo Giustiniani, though some of the days
+      were too long and some too short, as everywhere. From heat we hardly
+      suffered at all, so perfectly did the vast and lofty rooms answer to the
+      purpose of their builders in this respect. A current of sea air drew
+      through to the painter&rsquo;s garden by day; and by night there was scarcely a
+      mosquito of the myriads that infested some parts of Venice. In winter it
+      was not so well. Then we shuffled about in wadded gowns and boots lined
+      with sheep-skin,&mdash;the woolly side in, as in the song. The passage of
+      the <i>sala</i>, was something to be dreaded, and we shivered as fleetly
+      through it as we could, and were all the colder for the deceitful warmth
+      of the colors which the sun cast upon the stone floor from the window
+      opening on the court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not remember any one event of our life more exciting than that
+      attempted burglary of which I have spoken. In a city where the police gave
+      their best attention to political offenders, there were naturally a great
+      many rogues, and the Venetian rogues, if not distinguished for the more
+      heroic crimes, were very skillful in what I may call the <i>genre</i>
+      branch of robbing rooms through open windows, and committing all kinds of
+      safe domestic depredations. It was judged best to acquaint Justice (as
+      they call law in Latin countries) with the attempt upon our property, and
+      I found her officers housed in a small room of the Doge&rsquo;s Palace, clerkly
+      men in velvet skull-caps, driving loath quills over the rough official
+      paper of those regions. After an exchange of diplomatic courtesies, the
+      commissary took my statement of the affair down in writing, pertinent to
+      which were my father&rsquo;s name, place, and business, with a full and
+      satisfactory personal history of myself down to the period of the
+      attempted burglary. This, I said, occurred one morning about daylight,
+      when I saw the head of the burglar peering above the window-sill, and the
+      hand of the burglar extended to prey upon my wardrobe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me, Signor Console,&rdquo; interrupted the commissary, &ldquo;how could you
+      see him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, there was nothing in the world to prevent me. The window was open.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The window was open!&rdquo; gasped the commissary. &ldquo;Do you mean that you sleep
+      with your windows open?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most certainly!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon!&rdquo; said the commissary, suspiciously. &ldquo;Do <i>all</i> Americans
+      sleep with their windows open?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I may venture to say that they all do, in summer,&rdquo; I answered; &ldquo;at least,
+      it&rsquo;s the general custom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a thing as this indulgence in fresh air seemed altogether foreign to
+      the commissary&rsquo;s experience; and but for my official dignity, I am sure
+      that I should have been effectually browbeaten by him. As it was, he threw
+      himself back in his armchair and stared at me fixedly for some moments.
+      Then he recovered himself with another &ldquo;Per-doni!&rdquo; and, turning to his
+      clerk, said, &ldquo;Write down that, <i>according to the American custom</i>,
+      they were sleeping with their windows open.&rdquo; But I know that the
+      commissary, for all his politeness, considered this habit a relic of the
+      times when we Americans all abode in wigwams; and I suppose it paralyzed
+      his energies in the effort to bring the burglars to justice, for I have
+      never heard anything of them from that day to this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth is, it was a very uneventful year; and I am the better satisfied
+      with it as an average Venetian year on that account. We sometimes varied
+      the pensive monotony by a short visit to the cities of the mainland; but
+      we always came back to it willingly, and I think we unconsciously abhorred
+      any interruption of it. The days, as they followed each other, were
+      wonderfully alike, in every respect. For eight months of summer they were
+      alike in their clear-skied, sweet-breathed loveliness; in the autumn,
+      there where the melancholy of the falling leaf could not spread its
+      contagion to the sculptured foliage of Gothic art, the days were alike in
+      their sentiment of tranquil oblivion and resignation which was as autumnal
+      as any aspect of woods or fields could have been; in the winter they were
+      alike in their dreariness and discomfort. As I remember, we spent by far
+      the greater part of our time in going to the Piazza, and we were devoted
+      Florianisti, as the Italians call those that lounge habitually at the
+      Caffè Florian. We went every evening to the Piazza as a matter of course;
+      if the morning was long, we went to the Piazza; if we did not know what to
+      do with the afternoon, we went to the Piazza; if we had friends with us,
+      we went to the Piazza; if we were alone, we went to the Piazza; and there
+      was no mood or circumstances in which it did not seem a natural and
+      fitting thing to go to the Piazza. There were all the prettiest shops;
+      there were all the finest caffès; there was the incomparable Church of St.
+      Mark; there was the whole world of Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, we had other devices besides going to the Piazza; and sometimes
+      we spent entire weeks in visiting the churches, one after another, and
+      studying their artistic treasures, down to the smallest scrap of an old
+      master in their darkest chapel; their history, their storied tombs, their
+      fictitious associations. Very few churches escaped, I believe, except such
+      as had been turned into barracks, and were guarded by an incorruptible
+      Austrian sentinel. For such churches as did escape, we have a kind of
+      envious longing to this day, and should find it hard to like anybody who
+      had succeeded better in visiting them. There is, for example, the church
+      of San Giobbe, the doors of which we haunted with more patience than that
+      of the titulary saint: now the sacristan was out; now the church was shut
+      up for repairs; now it was Holy Week and the pictures were veiled; we had
+      to leave Venice at last without a sight of San Giobbe&rsquo;s three Saints by
+      Bordone, and Madonna by Bellini, which, unseen, outvalue all the other
+      Saints and Madonnas that we looked at; and I am sure that life can never
+      become so aimless, but we shall still have the desire of some day going to
+      see the church of San Giobbe. If we read some famous episode of Venetian
+      history, we made it the immediate care of our lives to visit the scene of
+      its occurrence; if Ruskin told us of some recondite beauty of sculpture
+      hid away in some unthought-of palace court, we invaded that palace at
+      once; if in entirely purposeless strolls through the city, we came upon
+      anything that touched the fancy or piqued curiosity, there was no gate or
+      bar proof against our bribes. What strange old nests of ruin, what
+      marvellous homes of solitude and dilapidation, did we not wander into!
+      What boarded-up windows peer through, what gloomy recesses penetrate! I
+      have lumber enough in my memory stored from such rambles to load the
+      nightmares of a generation, and stuff for the dreams of a whole people.
+      Does any gentleman or lady wish to write a romance? Sir or madam, I know
+      just the mouldy and sunless alley for your villain to stalk his victim in,
+      the canal in which to plunge his body, the staircase and the hall for the
+      subsequent wanderings of his ghost; and all these scenes and localities I
+      will sell at half the cost price; as also, balconies for flirtation,
+      gondolas for intrigue and elopement, confessionals for the betrayal of
+      guilty secrets. I have an assortment of bad and beautiful faces and
+      picturesque attitudes and effective tones of voice; and a large stock of
+      sympathetic sculptures and furniture and dresses, with other articles too
+      numerous to mention, all warranted Venetian, and suitable to every style
+      of romance. Who bids? Nay, I cannot sell, nor you buy. Each memory, as I
+      hold it up for inspection, loses its subtle beauty and value, and turns
+      common and poor in my hawker&rsquo;s fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet I must needs try to fix here the remembrance of two or three palaces,
+      of which our fancy took the fondest hold, and to which it yet most fondly
+      clings. It cannot locate them all, and least of all can it place that vast
+      old palace, somewhere near Cannaregio, which faced upon a campo, with
+      lofty windows blinded by rough boards, and empty from top to bottom. It
+      was of the later Renaissance in style, and we imagined it built in the
+      Republic&rsquo;s declining years by some ruinous noble, whose extravagance
+      forbade his posterity to live in it, for it had that peculiarly forlorn
+      air which belongs to a thing decayed without being worn out. We entered
+      its coolness and dampness, and wandered up the wide marble staircase, past
+      the vacant niches of departed statuary, and came on the third floor to a
+      grand portal which was closed against us by a barrier of lumber. But this
+      could not hinder us from looking within, and we were aware that we stood
+      upon the threshold of our ruinous noble&rsquo;s great banqueting-hall, where he
+      used to give his magnificent <i>feste da ballo</i>. Lustrissimo was long
+      gone with all his guests; but there in the roof were the amazing frescos
+      of Tiepolo&rsquo;s school, which had smiled down on them, as now they smiled on
+      us, great piles of architecture, airy tops of palaces, swimming in summer
+      sky, and wantoned over by a joyous populace of divinities of the lovelier
+      sex that had nothing but their loveliness to clothe them and keep them
+      afloat; the whole grandiose and superb beyond the effect of words, and
+      luminous with delicious color. How it all rioted there with its
+      inextinguishable beauty in the solitude and silence, from day to day, from
+      year to year, while men died, and systems passed, and nothing remained
+      unchanged but the instincts of youth and love that inspired it! It was
+      music and wine and wit; it was so warm and glowing that it made the
+      sunlight cold; and it seemed ever after a secret of gladness and beauty
+      that the sad old palace was keeping in its heart against the time to which
+      Venice looks forward when her splendor and opulence shall be
+      indestructibly renewed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a ball-room in the Palazzo Pisani, which some of my readers may
+      have passed through on their way to the studio of the charming old
+      Prussian painter, Nerlÿ; the frescos of this are dim and faded and dusty,
+      and impress you with a sense of irreparable decay, but the noble
+      proportions and the princely air of the place are inalienable, while the
+      palace stands. Here might have danced that Contarini who, when his wife&rsquo;s
+      necklace of pearls fell upon the floor in the way of her partner, the King
+      of Denmark, advanced and ground it into powder with his foot that the king
+      might not be troubled to avoid treading on it; and here, doubtless, many a
+      gorgeous masquerade had been in the long Venetian carnival; and what
+      passion and intrigue and jealousy, who knows? Now the palace was let in
+      apartments, and was otherwise a barrack, and in the great court, steadfast
+      as any of the marble statues, stood the Austrian sentinel. One of the
+      statues was a figure veiled from head to foot, at the base of which it was
+      hard not to imagine lovers, masked and hooded, and forever hurriedly
+      whispering their secrets in the shadow cast in perpetual moonlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet another ball-room in yet another palace opens to memory, but this is
+      all bright and fresh with recent decoration. In the blue vaulted roof
+      shine stars of gold; the walls are gay with dainty frescos; a gallery
+      encircles the whole, and from this drops a light stairway, slim-railed,
+      and guarded at the foot by torch-bearing statues of swarthy Eastern girls;
+      through the glass doors at the other side glimmers the green and red of a
+      garden. It was a place to be young in, to dance in, dream in, make love
+      in; but it was no more a surprise than the whole palace to which it
+      belonged, and which there in that tattered and poverty-stricken old Venice
+      was a vision of untarnished splendor and prosperous fortune. It was richly
+      furnished throughout all its vast extent, adorned with every caprice and
+      delight of art, and appointed with every modern comfort The foot was
+      hushed by costly carpets, the eye was flattered by a thousand beauties and
+      prettinesses. In the grates the fires were laid and ready to be lighted;
+      the candles stood upon the mantles; the toilet-linen was arranged for
+      instant use in the luxurious chambers; but from basement to roof the
+      palace was a solitude; no guest came there, no one dwelt there save the
+      custodian; the eccentric lady of whose possessions it formed a part abode
+      in a little house behind the palace, and on her door-plate had written her
+      <i>vanitas vanitatum</i> in the sarcastic inscription, &ldquo;John Humdrum,
+      Esquire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course she was Inglese; and that other lady, who was selling off the
+      furniture of her palace, and was so amiable a guide to its wonders in her
+      curious broken English, was Hungarian. Her great pride and joy, amidst the
+      objects of <i>vertu</i> and the works of art, was a set of &ldquo;Punch,&rdquo; which
+      she made us admire, and which she prized the more because she had always
+      been allowed to receive it when the government prohibited it to everybody
+      else. But we were Americans, she said; and had we ever seen this book? She
+      held up the &ldquo;The Potiphar Papers,&rdquo; a volume which must have been
+      inexpressibly amused and bewildered to find itself there, in that curious
+      little old lady&rsquo;s hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shall I go on and tell of the palace in which our strange friend Padre L&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+      dwelt, and the rooms of which he had filled up with the fruits of his
+      passion for the arts and sciences; the anteroom he had frescoed to
+      represent a grape-arbor with a multitude of clusters overhead; the parlor
+      with his oil-paintings on the walls, and the piano and melodeon arranged
+      so that Padre L&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; could play upon them both at once;
+      the oratory turned forge, and harboring the most alchemic-looking
+      apparatus of all kinds; the other rooms in which he had stored his
+      inventions in portable furniture, steam-propulsion, rifled cannon, and
+      perpetual motion; the attic with the camera by which one could photograh
+      one&rsquo;s self,&mdash;shall I tell of this, and yet other palaces? I think
+      there is enough already; and I have begun to doubt somewhat the truth of
+      my reminiscences, as I advise the reader to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, I feel that the words fail to give all the truth that is in them;
+      and if I cannot make them serve my purpose as to the palaces, how should I
+      hope to impart through them my sense of the glory and loveliness of
+      Venetian art? I could not give the imagination and the power of Tintoretto
+      as we felt it, nor the serene beauty, the gracious luxury of Titian, nor
+      the opulence, the worldly magnificence of Paolo Veronese. There hang their
+      mighty works forever, high above the reach of any palaverer; they smile
+      their stately welcome from the altars and palace-walls, upon whoever
+      approaches them in the sincerity and love of beauty that produced them;
+      and thither you must thus go if you would know them. Like fragments of
+      dreams, like the fleeting
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+     &ldquo;Images of glimmering dawn,&rdquo;
+</p>
+    <p class="noindent">
+      I am from time to time aware, amid the work-day world, of some happiness
+      from them, some face or form, some drift of a princely robe or ethereal
+      drapery, some august shape of painted architecture, some un-namable
+      delight of color; but to describe them more strictly and explicitly, how
+      should I undertake?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the exhaustion following every form of intense pleasure, in
+      their contemplation, such a wear of vision and thought, that I could not
+      call the life we led in looking at them an idle one, even if it had no
+      result in after times; so I will not say that it was to severer occupation
+      our minds turned more and more in our growing desire to return home. For
+      my own part personally I felt keenly the fictitious and transitory
+      character of official life. I knew that if I had become fit to serve the
+      government by four years&rsquo; residence in Venice, that was a good reason why
+      the government, according to our admirable system, should dismiss me, and
+      send some perfectly unqualified person to take my place; and in my heart
+      also I knew that there was almost nothing for me to do where I was, and I
+      dreaded the easily formed habit of receiving a salary for no service
+      performed. I reminded myself that, soon or late, I must go back to the old
+      fashion of earning money, and that it had better be sooner than later.
+      Therefore, though for some reasons it was the saddest and strangest thing
+      in the world to do, I was on the whole rejoiced when a leave of absence
+      came, and we prepared to quit Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never had the city seemed so dream-like and unreal as in this light of
+      farewell,&mdash;this tearful glimmer which our love and regret cast upon
+      it. As in a maze, we haunted once more and for the last time the scenes we
+      had known so long, and spent our final, phantasmal evening in the Piazza;
+      looked, through the moonlight, our mute adieu to islands and lagoons, to
+      church and tower; and then returned to our own palace, and stood long upon
+      the balconies that overhung the Grand Canal. There the future became as
+      incredible and improbable as the past; and if we had often felt the
+      incongruity of our coming to live in such a place, now, with tenfold
+      force, we felt the cruel absurdity of proposing to live anywhere else. We
+      had become part of Venice; and how could such atoms of her fantastic
+      personality ever mingle with the alien and unsympathetic world?
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0508}.jpg" alt="{0508}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0508}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      The next morning the whole palace household bestirred itself to accompany
+      us to the station: the landlord in his best hat and coat, our noble friend
+      in phenomenal linen, Giulia and her little boy, Bettina shedding bitter
+      tears over the baby, and Piero, sad but firm, bending over the oar and
+      driving us swiftly forward. The first turn of the Canal shut the Palazzo
+      Giustiniani from our lingering gaze, a few more curves and windings
+      brought us to the station. The tickets were bought, the baggage was
+      registered; the little oddly assorted company drew itself up in a line,
+      and received with tears our husky adieux. I feared there might be a remote
+      purpose in the hearts of the landlord and his retainer to embrace and kiss
+      me, after the Italian manner, but if there was, by a final inspiration
+      they spared me the ordeal. Piero turned away to his gondola; the two other
+      men moved aside; Bettina gave one long, hungering, devouring hug to the
+      baby; and as we hurried into the waiting-room, we saw her, as upon a
+      stage, standing without the barrier, supported and sobbing in the arms of
+      Giulia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was well to be gone, but I cannot say we were glad to be going.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0520}.jpg" alt="{0520}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0520}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VENETIAN LIFE ***</div>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #7083 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7083)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Venetian Life, by William  Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Venetian Life
+
+Author: William  Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7083]
+This file was first posted on March 8, 2003
+Last Updated: April 7, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VENETIAN LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, David Widger and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VENETIAN LIFE
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.
+
+In correcting this book for a second edition, I have sought to complete
+it without altering its original plan: I have given a new chapter
+sketching the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the present
+trade and industry of Venice; I have amplified somewhat the chapter on
+the national holidays, and have affixed an index to the chief historical
+persons, incidents, and places mentioned.
+
+Believing that such value as my book may have is in fidelity to what
+I actually saw and knew of Venice, I have not attempted to follow
+speculatively the grand and happy events of last summer in their effects
+upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that in the traits at which I loved most
+to look, the life of Venice is not so much changed as her fortunes; but
+at any rate I am content to remain true to what was fact one year ago.
+
+W. D. H.
+
+Cambridge, January 1, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+   I. Venice in Venice
+   II. Arrival and first Days in Venice
+   III. The Winter in Venice
+   IV. Comincia far Caldo
+   V. Opera and Theatres
+   VI. Venetian Dinners and Diners
+   VII. Housekeeping in Venice
+   VIII. The Balcony on the Grand Canal
+   IX. A Day-Break Ramble
+   X. The Mouse
+   XI. Churches and Pictures
+   XII. Some Islands of the Lagoons
+   XIII. The Armenians
+   XIV. The Ghetto and the Jews of Venice
+   XV. Some Memorable Places
+   XVI. Commerce
+   XVII. Venetian Holidays
+   XVIII. Christmas Holidays
+   XIX. Love-making and Marrying; Baptisms and Burials
+   XX. Venetian Traits and Characters
+   XXI. Society
+   XXII. Our Last Year in Venice
+   Index
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+VENICE IN VENICE.
+
+
+One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the
+stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and
+the byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief
+part in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian
+theatre), and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters.
+We could not help seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the
+villain of the piece, pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all
+tears and desperation, upon the stage; and we were dismayed to behold
+the injured husband and his abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the
+scenes. All the shabbiness of the theatre was perfectly apparent to
+us; we saw the grossness of the painting and the unreality of the
+properties. And yet I cannot say that the play lost one whit of its
+charm for me, or that the working of the machinery and its inevitable
+clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the least. There was so much truth
+and beauty in the playing, that I did not care for the sham of the ropes
+and gilding, and presently ceased to take any note of them. The illusion
+which I had thought an essential in the dramatic spectacle, turned out
+to be a condition of small importance.
+
+It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box
+at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this
+VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the
+theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that
+melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place
+without learning to know it differently from those writers who have
+described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help
+seeing from my point of observation the sham and cheapness with which
+Venice is usually brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the
+same time, it has never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise
+and regard, nor the fascination of its excellent beauty, its peerless
+picturesqueness, its sole and wondrous grandeur. It is true that the
+streets in Venice are canals; and yet you can walk to any part of the
+city, and need not take boat whenever you go out of doors, as I once
+fondly thought you must. But after all, though I find dry land enough
+in it, I do not find the place less unique, less a mystery, or less a
+charm. By day, the canals are still the main thoroughfares; and if
+these avenues are not so full of light and color as some would have us
+believe, they, at least, do not smell so offensively as others pretend.
+And by night, they are still as dark and silent as when the secret
+vengeance of the Republic plunged its victims into the ungossiping
+depths of the Canalazzo!
+
+Did the vengeance of the Republic ever do any such thing?
+
+Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to question that reputation
+for vindictive and gloomy cruelty alien historians have given to a
+government which endured so many centuries in the willing obedience
+of its subjects; but to think that the careful student of the old
+Republican system will condemn it for faults far different from those
+for which it is chiefly blamed. At all events, I find it hard to
+understand why, if the Republic was an oligarchy utterly selfish and
+despotic, it has left to all classes of Venetians so much regret and
+sorrow for its fall.
+
+So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will
+hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams--the
+Venice of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his
+prejudices--the merciless Venice of Dar�, and of the historians who
+follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he
+sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion
+removed; and--to take leave of our theatrical metaphor--I promise to
+fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to them may
+go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer no
+annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often
+get from travelers' beds into their books.
+
+Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors
+concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves
+hereafter, but which no doubt form a large part of every one's
+associations with the name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that
+pathetic swindle, the Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will
+hear it mentioned without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the
+taciturn justice of the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the
+Serenest Republic's policy. When I entered it the first time I was at
+the pains to call about me the sad company of those who had passed its
+corridors from imprisonment to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent
+tourists have done the same. I was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward
+that I had, on this occasion, been in very low society, and that the
+melancholy assemblage which I then conjured up was composed entirely
+of honest rogues, who might indeed have given as graceful and ingenious
+excuses for being in misfortune as the galley-slaves rescued by Don
+Quixote,--who might even have been very picturesque,--but who were not
+at all the material with which a well-regulated imagination would deal.
+The Bridge of Sighs was not built till the end of the sixteenth century,
+and no romantic episode of political imprisonment and punishment (except
+that of Antonio Foscarini) occurs in Venetian history later than that
+period. But the Bridge of Sighs could have nowise a savor of sentiment
+from any such episode, being, as it was, merely a means of communication
+between the Criminal Courts sitting in the Ducal Palace, and the
+Criminal Prison across the little canal. Housebreakers, cut-purse
+knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a poetic interest to places
+which have known them; and yet these are the only sufferers on whose
+Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has looked with pathetic
+sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The name of the bridge
+was given by the people from that opulence of compassion which enables
+the Italians to pity even rascality in difficulties. [Footnote: The
+reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said in a few words, much
+better than I have said in many, the same thing of sentimental errors
+about Venice:--
+
+"The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere
+efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of daylight
+must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth remembering,
+or whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs,
+which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant
+of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with
+breathless interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address at one
+of his great ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred
+and fifty years after Faliero's death."--_Stories of Venice_.]
+
+Political offenders were not confined in the "prison on each hand" of
+the poet, but in the famous _pozzi_ (literally, wells) or dungeons under
+the Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been
+uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for
+their exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom
+some foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to
+be afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say
+now that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with
+prison-life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped.
+They are not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants
+could have suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden
+casing of the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the
+state to inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.
+
+But on whose account had I to be interested in the _pozzi_? It was
+difficult to learn, unless I took the word of sentimental hearsay.
+I began with Marin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to
+languish in these dungeons for a moment. He was imprisoned in the
+apartments of state, and during one night only. His fellow-conspirators
+were hanged nearly as fast as taken.
+
+Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several other political
+prisoners of sad and famous memory with scarcely better effect. To a
+man, they struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and
+escaped from the _pozzi_ by every artifice of fact and figure.
+
+The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their
+story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history. But it
+was not the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed their cruel
+taking-off: they were strangled in the prison formerly existing at
+the top of the palace, called the Torresella. [Footnote: Galliciolli,
+_Memorie Venete_.] It is possible, however, that Jacopo Foscari may have
+been confined in the _pozzi_ at different times about the middle of the
+fifteenth century. With his fate alone, then, can the horror of these
+cells be satisfactorily associated by those who relish the dark romance
+of Venetian annals; for it is not to be expected that the less tragic
+fortunes of Carlo Zeno and Vittore Pisani, who may also have been
+imprisoned in the _pozzi_, can move the true sentimentalizer. Certainly,
+there has been anguish enough in the prisons of the Ducal Palace, but we
+know little of it by name, and cannot confidently relate it to any great
+historic presence.
+
+Touching the Giant's Stairs in the court of the palace, the inexorable
+dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin
+Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground--at the
+end of Lord Byron's tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of
+the Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed
+the traitor's death to the people from between the two red columns in
+the southern gallery of the palace;--that fa�ade was not built till
+nearly a century later.
+
+I suppose,--always judging by my own average experience,--that besides
+these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up scenes of
+brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the brightest
+picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight, romantic
+adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old
+merry-making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this
+way, the conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is become
+as gross a fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of which
+I have but spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social
+dullness and sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.
+
+The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the
+whole world's civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the
+city, doomed four hundred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly
+(the Venetians would be apt to tell you wholly) in the implacable anger,
+the inconsolable discontent, with which the people regard their present
+political condition.
+
+If there be more than one opinion among men elsewhere concerning the
+means by which Austria acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she
+holds the province, there would certainly seem to be no division on the
+question in Venice. To the stranger first inquiring into public feeling,
+there is something almost sublime in the unanimity with which the
+Venetians appear to believe that these means were iniquitous, and that
+this tenure is abominable; and though shrewder study and carefuler
+observation will develop some interested attachment to the present
+government, and some interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge
+will discover, in the hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness,
+and selfish ignorance to take off its sublimity, the hatred is still
+found marvelously unanimous and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no
+disposition to discuss the question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising
+at Venice official functions by permission and trust of the Austrian
+government, I cannot regard the cessation of those functions as release
+from obligations both to that government and my own, which render it
+improper for me, so long as the Austrians remain in Venice, to criticize
+their rule, or contribute, by comment on existing things, to embitter
+the feeling against them elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, speak
+dispassionately of facts of the abnormal social and political state of
+the place; and I can certainly do this, for the present situation is
+so disagreeable in many ways to the stranger forced to live there,--the
+inappeasable hatred of the Austrians by the Italians is so illiberal in
+application to those in any wise consorting with them, and so stupid and
+puerile in many respects, that I think the annoyance which it gives
+the foreigner might well damp any passion with which he was disposed to
+speak of its cause.
+
+This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity from the defeat of
+patriotic hopes of union with Italy in 1859, when Napoleon found the
+Adriatic at Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was concluded. But
+it is not to be supposed that a feeling so general, and so thoroughly
+interwoven with Venetian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to
+the Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the subjection into which she
+fell a second time after Napoleon's ruin, by the treaties of the Holy
+Alliance, defeated in several attempts to throw off her yoke, and loaded
+with heavier servitude after the fall of the short-lived Republic of
+1849,--Venice has always hated her masters with an exasperation deepened
+by each remove from the hope of independence, and she now detests them
+with a rancor which no concession short of absolute relinquishment of
+dominion would appease.
+
+Instead, therefore, of finding that public gayety and private
+hospitality in Venice for which the city was once famous, the stranger
+finds himself planted between two hostile camps, with merely the choice
+of sides open to him. Neutrality is solitude and friendship with neither
+party; society is exclusive association with the Austrians or with the
+Italians. The latter do not spare one of their own number if he
+consorts with their masters, and though a foreigner might expect greater
+allowance, it is seldom shown to him. To be seen in the company of
+officers is enmity to Venetian freedom, and in the case of Italians it
+is treason to country and to race. Of course, in a city where there is
+a large garrison and a great many officers who have nothing else to
+do, there is inevitably some international love-making, although
+the Austrian officers are rigidly excluded from association with the
+citizens. But the Italian who marries an Austrian severs the dearest
+ties that bind her to life, and remains an exile in the heart of her
+country. Her friends mercilessly cast her off, as they cast off every
+body who associates with the dominant race. In rare cases I have known
+Italians to receive foreigners who had Austrian friends, but this with
+the explicit understanding that there was to be no sign of recognition
+if they met them in the company of these detested acquaintance.
+
+There are all degrees of intensity in Venetian hatred, and after hearing
+certain persons pour out the gall of bitterness upon the Austrians, you
+may chance to hear these persons spoken of as tepid in their patriotism
+by yet more fiery haters. Yet it must not be supposed that the Italians
+hate the Austrians as individuals. On the contrary, they have rather
+a liking for them--rather a contemptuous liking, for they think them
+somewhat slow and dull-witted--and individually the Austrians are
+amiable people, and try not to give offence. The government is also very
+strict in its control of the military. I have never seen the slightest
+affront offered by a soldier to a citizen; and there is evidently no
+personal ill-will engendered. The Austrians are simply hated as the
+means by which an alien and despotic government is imposed upon a people
+believing themselves born for freedom and independence. This hatred,
+then, is a feeling purely political, and there is political machinery by
+which it is kept in a state of perpetual tension.
+
+The Comitato Veneto is a body of Venetians residing within the province
+and abroad, who have charge of the Italian interests, and who work in
+every way to promote union with the dominions of Victor Emanuel. They
+live for the most part in Venice, where they have a secret press for the
+publication of their addresses and proclamations, and where they remain
+unknown to the police, upon whose spies they maintain an espionage. On
+every occasion of interest, the Committee is sure to make its presence
+felt; and from time to time persons find themselves in the possession
+of its printed circulars, stamped with the Committee's seal; but no one
+knows how or whence they came. Constant arrests of suspected persons are
+made, but no member of the Committee has yet been identified; and it is
+said that the mysterious body has its agents in every department of the
+government, who keep it informed of inimical action. The functions of
+the Committee are multiplied and various. It takes care that on all
+patriotic anniversaries (such as that of the establishment of the
+Republic in 1848, and that of the union of the Italian States under
+Victor Emanuel in 1860) salutes shall be fired in Venice, and a
+proper number of red, white, and green lights displayed. It inscribes
+revolutionary sentiments on the walls; and all attempts on the part
+of the Austrians to revive popular festivities are frustrated by the
+Committee, which causes petards to be exploded in the Place of St. Mark,
+and on the different promenades. Even the churches are not exempt from
+these demonstrations: I was present at the Te Deum performed on the
+Emperor's birthday, in St. Mark's, when the moment of elevating the
+host was signalized by the bursting of a petard in the centre of the
+cathedral. All this, which seems of questionable utility, and worse than
+questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of the Italianissimi, and
+though possibly the strictness of the patriotic discipline in which the
+members of the Committee keep their fellow-citizens may gall some of
+them, yet any public demonstration of content, such as going to the
+opera, or to the Piazza while the Austrian band plays, is promptly
+discontinued at a warning from the Committee. It is, of course, the
+Committee's business to keep the world informed of public feeling
+in Venice, and of each new act of Austrian severity. Its members are
+inflexible men, whose ability has been as frequently manifested as their
+patriotism.
+
+The Venetians are now, therefore, a nation in mourning, and have, as I
+said, disused all their former pleasures and merry-makings. Every class,
+except a small part of the resident _titled_ nobility (a great part
+of the nobility is in either forced or voluntary exile), seems to be
+comprehended by this feeling of despondency and suspense. The poor of
+the city formerly found their respite and diversion in the numerous
+holidays which fell in different parts of the year, and which, though
+religious in their general character, were still inseparably bound up in
+their origin with ideas of patriotism and national glory. Such of these
+holidays as related to the victories and pride of the Republic naturally
+ended with her fall. Many others, however, survived this event in all
+their splendor, but there is not one celebrated now as in other days. It
+is true that the churches still parade their pomps in the Piazza on the
+day of Corpus Christi; it is true that the bridges of boats are still
+built across the Canalazzo to the church of Our Lady of Salvation, and
+across the Canal of the Giudecca to the temple of the Redeemer, on the
+respective festivals of these churches; but the concourse is always
+meagre, and the mirth is forced and ghastly. The Italianissimi have
+so far imbued the people with their own ideas and feelings, that
+the recurrence of the famous holidays now merely awakens them to
+lamentations over the past and vague longings for the future.
+
+As for the carnival, which once lasted six months of the year, charming
+hither all the idlers of the world by its peculiar splendor and variety
+of pleasure, it does not, as I said, any longer exist. It is dead, and
+its shabby, wretched ghost is a party of beggars, hideously dressed
+out with masks and horns and women's habits, who go from shop to shop
+droning forth a stupid song, and levying tribute upon the shopkeepers.
+The crowd through which these melancholy jesters pass, regards them with
+a pensive scorn, and goes about its business untempted by the delights
+of carnival.
+
+All other social amusements have shared in greater or less degree the
+fate of the carnival. At some houses conversazioni are still held,
+and it is impossible that balls and parties should not now and then
+be given. But the greater number of the nobles and the richer of
+the professional classes lead for the most part a life of listless
+seclusion, and attempts to lighten the general gloom and heaviness
+in any way are not looked upon with favor. By no sort of chance are
+Austrians, or Austriacanti ever invited to participate in the pleasures
+of Venetian society.
+
+As the social life of Italy, and especially of Venice, was in great
+part to be once enjoyed at the theatres, at the caff�, and at the other
+places of public resort, so is its absence now to be chiefly noted in
+those places. No lady of perfect standing among her people goes to
+the opera, and the men never go in the boxes, but if they frequent the
+theatre at all, they take places in the pit, in order that the house may
+wear as empty and dispirited a look as possible. Occasionally a bomb is
+exploded in the theatre, as a note of reminder, and as means of keeping
+away such of the nobles as are not enemies of the government. As it is
+less easy for the Austrians to participate in the diversion of comedy,
+it is a less offence to attend the comedy, though even this is not good
+Italianissimism. In regard to the caff� there is a perfectly understood
+system by which the Austrians go to one, and the Italians to another;
+and Florian's, in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground in the
+city on which the hostile forces consent to meet. This is because it is
+thronged with foreigners of all nations, and to go there is not thought
+a demonstration of any kind. But the other caff� in the Piazza do not
+enjoy Florian's cosmopolitan immunity, and nothing would create more
+wonder in Venice than to see an Austrian officer at the Specchi, unless,
+indeed, it were the presence of a good Italian at the Quadri.
+
+It is in the Piazza that the tacit demonstration of hatred and
+discontent chiefly takes place. Here, thrice a week, in winter and
+summer, the military band plays that exquisite music for which the
+Austrians are famous. The selections are usually from Italian operas,
+and the attraction is the hardest of all others for the music-loving
+Italian to resist. But he does resist it. There are some noble ladies
+who have not entered the Piazza while the band was playing there,
+since the fall of the Republic of 1849; and none of good standing for
+patriotism has attended the concerts since the treaty of Villafranca in
+'59. Until very lately, the promenaders in the Piazza were exclusively
+foreigners, or else the families of such government officials as were
+obliged to show themselves there. Last summer, however, before the
+Franco-Italian convention for the evacuation of Rome revived the
+drooping hopes of the Venetians, they had begun visibly to falter
+in their long endurance. But this was, after all, only a slight and
+transient weakness. As a general thing, now, they pass from the Piazza
+when the music begins, and walk upon the long quay at the sea-side of
+the Ducal Palace; or if they remain in the Piazza they pace up and
+down under the arcades on either side; for Venetian patriotism makes
+a delicate distinction between listening to the Austrian band in the
+Piazza and hearing it under the Procuratie, forbidding the first
+and permitting the last. As soon as the music ceases the Austrians
+disappear, and the Italians return to the Piazza.
+
+But since the catalogue of demonstrations cannot be made full, it need
+not be made any longer. The political feeling in Venice affects her
+prosperity in a far greater degree than may appear to those who do not
+understand how large an income the city formerly derived from making
+merry. The poor have to lament not merely the loss of their holidays,
+but also of the fat employments and bountiful largess which these
+occasions threw into their hands. With the exile or the seclusion of the
+richer families, and the reluctance of foreigners to make a residence
+of the gloomy and dejected city, the trade of the shopkeepers has fallen
+off; the larger commerce of the place has also languished and dwindled
+year by year; while the cost of living has constantly increased, and
+heavier burdens of taxation have been laid upon the impoverished and
+despondent people. And in all this, Venice is but a type of the whole
+province of Venetia.
+
+The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely worth noting. The
+Austrians have a _casino_, and they give balls and parties, and now and
+then make some public manifestation of gayety. But they detest Venice as
+a place of residence, being naturally averse to living in the midst of a
+people who shun them like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are
+obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, and it is amusing
+enough to find the few English residents divided into Austriacanti and
+Italianissimi. [Footnote: Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics,
+though not of Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union
+with Italy at any cost.]
+
+Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in every way bound to
+neutrality and indifference, are popularly reputed to be of one party or
+the other, and my predecessor, whose unhappy knowledge of German threw
+him on his arrival among people of that race, was always regarded as the
+enemy of Venetian freedom, though I believe his principles were of the
+most vivid republican tint in the United States.
+
+The present situation has now endured five years, with only slight
+modifications by time, and only faint murmurs from some of the more
+impatient, that _bisogna, una volta o l'altra, romper il chiodo_,
+(sooner or later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are a people
+of indomitable perseverance, long schooled to obstinacy by oppression,
+I suppose they will hold out till their union with the kingdom of Italy.
+They can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content to wait forever
+in their present gloom. How deeply their attitude affects their national
+character I shall inquire hereafter, when I come to look somewhat more
+closely at the spirit of their demonstration.
+
+For the present, it is certain that the discontent of the people has its
+peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a
+glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving
+it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing
+that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be
+faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
+
+
+I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday
+and to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five
+o'clock, and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer
+weather. Yet I was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the
+large, many-seated boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for
+myself and my luggage. The porter who seized my valise in the station,
+inferred from some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of
+my wish, and ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into a
+gondola. I followed, lighted to my seat by a beggar in picturesque and
+desultory costume. He was one of a class of mendicants whom I came, for
+my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I dare say every traveler
+recollects,--the merciless tribe who hold your gondola to shore, and
+affect to do you a service and not a displeasure, and pretend not to
+be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call them _gransieri_, or
+crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the name or the purpose of this
+_poverino_ [Footnote: _Poverino_ is the compassionate generic for all
+unhappy persons who work for a living in Venice, as well as many who
+decline to do so.] at the station, but merely saw that he had the
+Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and arrangement of his
+fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous effects of red, and
+he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend of brigands would
+like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab me and sink
+my body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I felt that
+he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly know now
+whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and left him
+empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings which he
+had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard nothing,
+for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my nether-spirit, so
+to speak, was dulled and jaded by the long, cold, railway journey
+from Vienna, while every surface-sense was taken and tangled in the
+bewildering brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think there can be
+nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite surprise,
+as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches as he
+issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon her peerless
+strangeness. There is something in the blessed breath of Italy (how
+quickly, coming south, you know it, and how bland it is, after the
+harsh, transalpine air!) which prepares you for your nocturnal advent
+into the place; and O you! whoever you are, that journey toward this
+enchanted city for the first time, let me tell you how happy I count
+you! There lies before you for your pleasure, the spectacle of
+such singular beauty as no picture can ever show you nor book tell
+you,--beauty which you shall feel perfectly but once, and regret
+forever.
+
+For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze and bustle
+of the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot
+that I had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment
+very cold and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that
+beautiful silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars.
+Then on either hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the
+dark waters, holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which
+brought balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief,
+and threw long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that
+uncertain glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so,
+unhaunted by any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the
+forlorn beauty of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper
+time to think all the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them;
+but they passed vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the
+sensations of sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there,
+and the moral and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty
+and surprise. The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and
+unlooked-for events gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and
+safely around sharp corners of life. And all the while I knew that this
+was a progress through narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles
+of palaces. But I did not know then that this fine confusion of sense
+and spirit was the first faint impression of the charm of life in
+Venice.
+
+Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had
+warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the
+lines of balconied palaces had never ended;--here and there at
+their doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving
+uncertainly about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the
+Grand Canal into one of the smaller channels, and from comparative light
+into a darkness only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner
+lamp. But always the pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven
+with its trembling stars above, and the dark water with its trembling
+stars below; but now innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness,
+and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could not resist a vague
+feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary passages, which was
+part of the strange enjoyment of the time, and which was referable to
+the novelty, the hush, the darkness, and the piratical appearance and
+unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not
+Venice forever associated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts?
+That valise of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the uncultivated
+imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts of the
+Situation--(as we say in the journals)? To move on was relief; to pause
+was regret for past transgressions mingled with good resolutions for the
+future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of all these emotions, when,
+slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola suddenly rested at the
+foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door. The gondoliers rang and
+rang again, while their passenger
+
+    "Divided the swift mind,"
+
+in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could
+possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles
+and service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest
+swindling countenance of a hotel _portier_, he felt secure against every
+thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and conjecture at
+once faded from his thought, when the _portier_ suffered the gondoliers
+to make him pay a florin too much.
+
+So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that
+complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most
+alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any
+fragment of her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had
+been penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had
+been touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
+presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
+occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
+
+I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my
+arrival need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I
+would not wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and
+alien to the place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the
+first. I believe it was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the
+beautiful that I here found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full
+of society and friendship, speaking a language which, even in its
+unfamiliar forms, I could partly understand, and at once making me
+citizen of that Venice from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in
+the presence of the great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt
+at home--indeed, I could as yet understand their excellence and grandeur
+only very imperfectly--but wherever I wandered through the quaint and
+marvelous city, I found the good company of
+
+    "The fair, the old;"
+
+and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and
+I learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of
+relief.
+
+My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
+locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or
+destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest,
+crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left
+me cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible
+from the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for
+my blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to
+surrender by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden
+brinks of canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable
+churches of the city were equally victorious, and continually took me
+prisoner. But all places had something rare and worthy to be seen:
+if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture, at least interesting
+squalor and picturesque wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight
+in proper Objects of Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that
+reeked with unwholesome winter damps below, and peered curiously out
+with frowzy heads and beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered
+casements above. Every court had its carven well to show me, in the
+noisy keeping of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque
+gossips of the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic
+with empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the
+sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched the
+lofty windows with obsolete hats.
+
+I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
+the brilliancy of St. Mark's and the glittering streets of shops that
+branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
+courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little
+oil-lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines
+of the Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole
+means of street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and
+deepening the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches.
+I remember distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft
+night of late winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from
+the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli
+Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I
+turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a
+solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its
+moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the
+vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the
+Piazzetta to the Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and
+casting deep into the water under them a crimson glory that sank also
+down and down in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty
+and delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and
+palace; the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the gondola
+drifted away to the northward; the islands of the lagoons seemed to rise
+and sink with the light palpitations of the waves like pictures on the
+undulating fields of banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black
+against the sky, the Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore
+had composed itself to sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music
+of the surge that gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of
+the trees above me stirred themselves together, and out of one of those
+trembling towers in the lagoons, one rich, full sob burst from the heart
+of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the scene, and suffused
+the languid night with the murmur of luxurious, ineffable sadness.
+
+But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful, and
+whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how
+low its origin or humble its composition; and the magnificence of that
+moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I won from the fine spectacle
+of an old man whom I saw burning coffee one night in the little
+court behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as one of the most
+interesting people I saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the
+air of that neighbourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant
+berry, and all day long this patient old man--sage, let me call him--had
+turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over an open
+fire after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. Now
+that the night had fallen, and the stars shone down upon him, and
+the red of the flame luridly illumined him, he showed more grand and
+venerable than ever. Simple, abstract humanity, has its own grandeur
+in Italy; and it is not hard here for the artist to find the primitive
+types with which genius loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had
+the beard of a saint, and the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the
+squalor of a beggar, superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious
+grandeur of humanity. A vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to
+do with burning coffee, dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had
+been some dread supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and
+doing men, instead of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly
+and weirdly impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and
+lifted the cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after
+it, and he shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and
+glorified him--then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond
+art, and turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless
+magnificence.
+
+At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the
+aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked
+Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and
+whom I often noted from the windows of the little caff� there, where you
+get an excellent _caff� bianco_ (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and one
+to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly
+with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of
+the sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than
+olive; and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of
+lustrous black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket
+and pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity
+of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes.
+Habitually came a barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and
+
+    "Took the soul
+    Of that waste place with joy;"
+
+and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw
+his whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved
+ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus
+embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of figures, in which there
+was something grotesquely rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric
+magnificence, spiritualized into a grace of movement superior to the
+energy of the North and the extravagant fervor of the East. It was
+coffee and not wine that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw
+reflected in this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of
+dancing in that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that
+combated and vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea-washed
+sands in marble structures of airy and stately splendor, and gave to
+architecture new glories full of eternal surprise.
+
+So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with Venice, and
+being newly from a land where every thing, morally and materially, was
+in good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the
+pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of every thing about me here. It
+was not yet the season to behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door
+life of the place; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that great
+part of the people, both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do,
+and that nobody seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse.
+When, however, I ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a spectator of
+this idleness, and learned that I too must assume my share of the common
+indolence, I found it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old habits
+of hope, made my endless leisure irksome to me, and almost intolerable
+when I ascertained fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill
+long-cherished, but, after all, merely general designs of literary
+study, I had forsaken wholesome struggle in the currents where I felt
+the motion of the age, only to drift into a lifeless eddy of the world,
+remote from incentive and sensation.
+
+For such is Venice, and the will must be strong and the faith
+indomitable in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her
+stagnant quiet, a practical belief in God's purpose of a great moving,
+anxious, toiling, aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as
+after a while I yielded, to these influences, a gentle incredulity
+possesses you, and if you consent that such a thing is as earnest and
+useful life, you cannot help wondering why it need be. The charm of
+the place sweetens your temper, but corrupts you; and I found it a sad
+condition of my perception of the beauty of Venice and friendship with
+it, that I came in some unconscious way to regard her fate as my own;
+and when I began to write the sketches which go to form this book, it
+was as hard to speak of any ugliness in her, or of the doom written
+against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of her crumbling
+masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine. I do not so greatly
+blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so many sins of
+omission concerning her, and made her all light, color, canals,
+and palaces. One's conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant
+elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is
+more virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the
+city, and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there
+might have been some incentive to keep one's thoughts and words from
+lapsing into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the
+whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But
+now, what matter?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE WINTER IN VENICE
+
+
+It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my
+experiences of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was,
+indeed, an every-day roughness and discomfort in the weather, which
+travelers passing their first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile
+with the habitual ideas of the season's clemency in the South. But
+winter is apt to be very severe in mild climates. People do not
+acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense that it is summer only a
+little out of humor.
+
+The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much
+favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure
+a degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the
+winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd
+prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer
+equally with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the
+cold, objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the
+effort to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It
+is not a pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the
+affliction among people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh
+you out sugar, by no means reconciles the Northern stomach to its
+prevalence. I have observed that priests, and those who have much to do
+in the frigid churches, are the worst sufferers in this way; and I
+think no one can help noting in the harsh, raw winter-complexion (for
+in summer the tone is quite different) of the women of all classes, the
+protest of systems cruelly starved of the warmth which health demands.
+
+The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight
+months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in
+summer, and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very
+large, lofty, and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of
+apartments--the smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the
+winter, and the grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for
+defence against the insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most
+part, people must occupy the same room summer and winter, the sole
+change being in the strip of carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during
+the latter season. In the comparatively few houses where carpets are
+the rule and not the exception, they are always removed during the
+summer--for the triple purpose of sparing them some months' wear,
+banishing fleas and other domestic insects, and showing off the beauty
+of the oiled and shining pavement, which in the meanest houses is
+tasteful, and in many of the better sort is often in-wrought with
+figures and designs of mosaic work.
+
+All the floors in Venice are of stone, and whether of marble flags, or
+of that species of composition formed of dark cement, with fragments of
+colored marble imbedded and smoothed and polished to the most glassy
+and even surface, and the general effect and complexion of petrified
+plum-pudding, all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with
+their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded
+gowns. When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too
+heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian
+sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the
+only legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous
+prices to such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.
+
+It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the
+utmost rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as
+possible in the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm
+afternoon sun in its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders
+of every class, condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines
+in the Piazza, shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men
+crowd the close little caff�, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration,
+and animal heat, and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and
+beguile the time with solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself,
+throughout this book, the use of the expressive American words
+_loaf_ and _loafer_, as the only terms adequate to the description of
+professional idling in Venice] and the perusal of dingy little
+journals, drinking small cups of black coffee, and playing long games of
+chess,--an evening that seemed to me as torpid and lifeless as a Lap's,
+and intolerable when I remembered the bright, social winter evenings of
+another and happier land and civilization.
+
+Sometimes you find a heated stove--that is to say, one in which there
+has been a fire during the day--in a Venetian house; but the stove seems
+usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged
+only in diffusing a very acrid smoke,--as if the Venetian preferred to
+take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove
+itself is a curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and
+plastering,--whitewashed and painted outside. It is a great consumer
+of fuel, and radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wooding
+I contrived to warm mine; but my Italian friends always avoided its
+vicinity when they came to see me, and most amusingly regarded my
+determination to be comfortable as part of the eccentricity inseparable
+from the Anglo-Saxon character.
+
+I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in
+his northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his
+severity is the _scaldino_, and this is made chiefly by the yielding
+sex, who are denied the warmth of the caff�. The use of the scaldino
+is known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are
+most addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware,
+having an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and
+the pot full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana's defense against cold
+is complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room
+to room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been
+my fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting
+over the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while
+she sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with
+religion, baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino.
+In one of the public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the
+walls, intended to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea
+of the four seasons. There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization
+of Spring, Summer, and Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by
+a fine lady dressed in furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned
+foot-stool, and a scaldino in her lap! When we talk of being invaded in
+the north, we poetize the idea of defense by the figure of defending our
+hearthstones. Alas! _could_ we fight for our sacred _scaldini_?
+
+Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell hot pumpkins and pears,
+for they can unite pleasure and profit. There are some degrees of
+poverty below the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars and the
+wretcheder poor keep themselves warm, I think, by sultry recollections
+of summer, as Don Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remembrances,
+during one of his periods of fast. One mendicant whom I know, and who
+always sits upon the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe,
+as the season advances, in heating the marble beneath him by firm and
+unswerving adhesion, and establishes a reciprocity of warmth with it.
+I have no reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a moment
+during the whole winter; and indeed, it would be a vicious waste of
+comfort to do so.
+
+In the winter, the whole city _sniffs_, and if the Pipchin theory of the
+effect of sniffing upon the eternal interests of the soul be true,
+few people go to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly wondered if
+Desdemona, in _her_ time, sniffed, and found little comfort in the
+reflection that Shylock must have had a cold in his head. There is
+comparative warmth in the broad squares before the churches, but the
+narrow streets are bitter thorough-draughts, and fell influenza lies in
+wait for its prey in all those picturesque, seducing little courts of
+which I have spoken.
+
+It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twilight and airy height one
+finds so grateful in summer, that the sharpest malice of the winter
+is felt; and having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, I
+deferred the remaining seventy-five or eighty, together with the gallery
+of the Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have
+mitigated the severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination
+affected me, I thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the
+temples of Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge
+marbles, and their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their
+frescoed roofs and broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of
+Palladio's architecture was especially grievous to the sense in cold
+weather; and I warn the traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of
+Bellini to beware how he trusts himself in winter to the gusty, arctic
+magnificence of the church of the Redentore. But by all means the
+coldest church in the city is that of the Jesuits, which those who
+have seen it will remember for its famous marble drapery. This base,
+mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not art) is effected by
+inlaying the white marble of columns and pulpits and altars with
+a certain pattern of verd-antique. The workmanship is marvelously
+skillful, and the material costly, but it only gives the church the
+effect of being draped in damask linen; and even where the marble is
+carven in vast and heavy folds over a pulpit to simulate a curtain, or
+wrought in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent a carpet,
+it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a coldness, a harshness
+indescribably table-clothy. I think all this has tended to chill the
+soul of the sacristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan
+conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his temples quite incapable
+of thawing. In this dreary sanctuary is one of Titian's great paintings,
+The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly
+disposed as to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once)
+you turn involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on
+his gridiron amid all that frigidity.
+
+The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much
+severer than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less
+support in fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to claim that
+such weather as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen
+before. In fine, the winter climate of north Italy is really very harsh,
+and though the season is not so severe in Venice as in Milan, or even
+Florence, it is still so sharp as to make foreigners regret the generous
+fires and warmly-built houses of the north. There was snow but once
+during my first Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none
+at all; but the third, which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to
+considerable depth, and lay unmelted for many weeks in the shade. The
+lagoons were frozen for miles in every direction; and under our windows
+on the Grand Canal, great sheets of ice went up and down with the
+rising and the falling tide for nearly a whole month. The visible misery
+throughout the fireless city was great; and it was a problem I never
+could solve, whether people in-doors were greater sufferers from the
+cold than those who weathered the cruel winds sweeping the squares and
+the canals, and whistling through the streets of stone and brine. The
+boys had an unwonted season of sliding on the frozen lagoons, though
+a good deal persecuted by the police, who must have looked upon such a
+tremendous innovation as little better than revolution; and it was said
+that there were card-parties on the ice; but the only creatures which
+seemed really to enjoy the weather were the seagulls. These birds, which
+flock into the city in vast numbers at the first approach of cold,
+and, sailing up and down the canals between the palaces, bring to
+the dwellers in the city a full sense of mid-ocean forlornness and
+desolation, now rioted on the savage winds, with harsh cries, and
+danced upon the waves of the bitter brine, with a clamorous joy that had
+something eldritch and unearthly in it.
+
+A place so much given to gossip as Venice did not fail to produce many
+memorable incidents of the cold; but the most singular adventure was
+that of the old man employed at the Armenian Convent to bring milk from
+the island of San Lazzaro to the city. One night, shortly after the
+coldest weather set in, he lost his oar as he was returning to the
+island. The wind, which is particularly furious in that part of the
+lagoon, blew his boat away into the night, and the good brothers at the
+convent naturally gave up their milkman for lost. The winds and waters
+drifted him eight miles from the city into the northern lagoon, and
+there lodged his boat in the marshes, where it froze fast in the
+stiffening mud. The luckless occupant had nothing to eat or drink in his
+boat, where he remained five days and nights, exposed to the inclemency
+of cold many degrees below friendship in severity. He made continual
+signs of distress, but no boat came near enough to discover him. At
+last, when the whole marsh was frozen solid, he was taken off by some
+fishermen, and carried to the convent, where he remains in perfectly
+recovered health, and where no doubt he will be preserved alive many
+years in an atmosphere which renders dying a San Lazzaro a matter of
+no small difficulty. During the whole time of his imprisonment, he
+sustained life against hunger and cold by smoking. I suppose no one will
+be surprised to learn that he was rescued by the fishermen through the
+miraculous interposition of the Madonna--as any one might have seen by
+the votive picture hung up at her shrine on a bridge of the Riva degli
+Schiavoni, wherein the Virgin was represented breaking through the
+clouds in one corner of the sky, and unmistakably directing the
+operations of the fishermen.
+
+It is said that no such winter as that of 1863-4 has been known in
+Venice since the famous _Anno del Ghiaccio_ (Year of the Ice), which
+fell about the beginning of the last century. This year is celebrated in
+the local literature; the play which commemorates it always draws full
+houses at the people's theatre, Malibran; and the often-copied picture,
+by a painter of the time, representing Lustrissime and Lustrissimi in
+hoops and bag-wigs on the ice, never fails to block up the street before
+the shop-window in which it is exposed. The King of Denmark was then the
+guest of the Republic, and as the unprecedented cold defeated all the
+plans arranged for his diversion, the pleasure-loving government
+turned the cold itself to account, and made the ice occasion of novel
+brilliancy in its festivities. The duties on commerce between the city
+and the mainland were suspended for as long time as the lagoon should
+remain frozen, and the ice became a scene of the liveliest traffic, and
+was everywhere covered with sledges, bringing the produce of the country
+to the capital, and carrying away its stuffs in return. The Venetians
+of every class amused themselves in visiting this free mart, and the
+gentler and more delicate sex pressed eagerly forward to traverse
+with their feet a space hitherto passable only in gondolas. [Footnote:
+_Origine delle Feste Veneziane_, di Giustina Renier-Michiel] The lagoon
+remained frozen, and these pleasures lasted eighteen days, a period of
+cold unequaled till last winter. A popular song now declares that the
+present generation has known a winter quite as marvelous as that of the
+Year of the Ice, and celebrates the wonder of walking on the water:--
+
+    Che bell' affar!
+    Che patetico affar!
+    Che immenso affar!
+    Sora l'acqua camminar!
+
+But after all the disagreeable winter, which hardly commences before
+Christmas, and which ends about the middle of March, is but a small part
+of the glorious Venetian year; and even this ungracious season has a
+loveliness, at times, which it can have nowhere but in Venice. What
+summer-delight of other lands could match the beauty of the first
+Venetian snow-fall which I saw? It had snowed overnight, and in the
+morning when I woke it was still snowing. The flakes fell softly and
+vertically through the motionless air, and all the senses were full
+of languor and repose. It was rapture to lie still, and after a faint
+glimpse of the golden-winged angel on the bell-tower of St. Mark's,
+to give indolent eye solely to the contemplation of the roof opposite,
+where the snow lay half an inch deep upon the brown tiles. The
+little scene--a few square yards of roof, a chimney-pot, and a
+dormer-window--was all that the most covetous spirit could demand; and I
+lazily lorded it over that domain of pleasure, while the lingering mists
+of a dream of new-world events blent themselves with the luxurious humor
+of the moment and the calm of the snow-fall, and made my reverie one of
+the perfectest things in the world. When I was lost the deepest in it, I
+was inexpressibly touched and gratified by the appearance of a black
+cat at the dormer-window. In Venice, roofs commanding pleasant exposures
+seem to be chiefly devoted to the cultivation of this animal, and there
+are many cats in Venice. My black cat looked wonderingly upon the snow
+for a moment, and then ran across the roof. Nothing could have been
+better. Any creature less silent, or in point of movement less soothing
+to the eye than a cat, would have been torture of the spirit. As it
+was, this little piece of action contented me so well, that I left every
+thing else out of my reverie, and could only think how deliciously the
+cat harmonized with the snow-covered tiles, the chimney-pot, and the
+dormer-window. I began to long for her reappearance, but when she did
+come forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased to have the slightest
+interest in the matter, and experienced only the disgust of satiety. I
+had felt _ennui_--nothing remained but to get up and change my relations
+with the world.
+
+In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at
+once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked _facchini_;
+[Footnote: The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve
+long seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters
+and day-laborers.] and now in St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable
+shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as
+it engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the
+Piazza. But the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the
+descending flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary
+kind of effort in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only
+to renew the task. The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the
+folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon
+its summit. But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of
+St. Mark's Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting
+threads of the snow-fall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment
+around a structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its
+fantastic loveliness to be any thing but the creation of magic. The
+tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs
+of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as
+if just from the hand of the builder--or, better said, just from the
+brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of
+the mosaics in the great arches of the fa�ade, and all that gracious
+harmony into which the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy
+exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred
+times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting
+flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble like
+peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white;
+it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work, as if
+exulting in its beauty--beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish
+yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer
+of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless
+shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.
+
+Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the
+granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is,
+and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so mild
+and gentle he looked by the tender light of the storm. [Footnote: St.
+Theodore was the first patron of Venice, but he was deposed and St. Mark
+adopted, when the bones of the latter were brought from Alexandria. The
+Venetians seem to have felt some compunctions for this desertion of an
+early friend, and they have given St. Theodore a place on one of the
+granite pillars, while the other is surmounted by the Lion, representing
+St. Mark. _Fra Marco e Todaro_, is a Venetian proverb expressing the
+state of perplexity which we indicate by the figure of an ass between
+two bundles of hay.] The towers of the island churches loomed faint and
+far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships that
+lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas
+stole in and out of the opaque distance more noiselessly and dreamily
+than ever; and a silence, almost palpable, lay upon the mutest city in
+the world.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+COMINCIA FAR CALDO.
+
+
+The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and from this beats her
+life in every direction through an intricate system of streets and
+canals that bring it back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest
+uneasiness had attended the frequency with which I lost my way in the
+city at first, there would always have been this comfort: that the place
+was very small in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I must
+reach the Piazza sooner or later. There is a crowd constantly tending to
+and from it, and you have but to take this tide, and be drifted to St.
+Mark's--or to the Rialto Bridge, whence it is directly accessible.
+
+Of all the open spaces in the city, that before the Church of St. Mark
+alone bears the name of Piazza, and the rest are called merely _campi_,
+or fields. But if the company of the noblest architecture can give
+honor, the Piazza San Marco merits its distinction, not in Venice only,
+but in the whole world; for I fancy that no other place in the world
+is set in such goodly bounds. Its westward length is terminated by
+the Imperial Palace; its lateral borders are formed by lines of palace
+called the New Procuratie on the right, and the Old Procuratie on the
+left; [Footnote: In Republican days the palaces of the _Procuratori di
+San Marco_.] and the Church of St. Mark fills up almost its whole width
+upon the east, leaving space enough, however, for a glimpse of the
+Gothic perfection of the Ducal Palace. The place then opens southward
+with the name of Piazzetta, between the eastern fa�ade of the Ducal
+Palace and the classic front of the Libreria Vecchia, and expands and
+ends at last on the mole, where stand the pillars of St. Mark and St.
+Theodore; and then this mole, passing the southern fa�ade of the Doge's
+Palace, stretches away to the Public Gardens at the eastern extremity
+of the city, over half a score of bridges, between lines of houses and
+shipping--stone and wooden walls--in the long, crescent-shaped quay
+called Riva degli Schiavoni. Looking northward up the Piazzetta from the
+Molo, the vision traverses the eastern breadth of the Piazza, and rests
+upon the Clock Tower, gleaming with blue and gold, on which the bronze
+Giants beat the hours; or it climbs the great mass of the Campanile
+San Marco, standing apart from the church at the corner of the New
+Procuratie, and rising four hundred feet toward the sky--the sky where
+the Venetian might well place his heaven, as the Moors bounded Paradise
+in the celestial expanse that roofed Granada.
+
+My first lodging was but a step out of the Piazza, and this vicinity
+brought me early into familiar acquaintance with its beauty. But I
+never, during three years, passed through it in my daily walks, without
+feeling as freshly as at first the greatness of this beauty. The church,
+which the mighty bell-tower and the lofty height of the palace-lines
+make to look low, is in nowise humbled by the contrast, but is like
+a queen enthroned amid upright reverence. The religious sentiment is
+deeply appealed to, I think, in the interior of St. Mark's; but if its
+interior is heaven's, its exterior, like a good man's daily life, is
+earth's; and it is this winning loveliness of earth that first attracts
+you to it, and when you emerge from its portals, you enter upon
+spaces of such sunny length and breadth, set round with such exquisite
+architecture, that it makes you glad to be living in this world. Before
+you expands the great Piazza, peopled with its various life; on your
+left, between the Pillars of the Piazzetta, swims the blue lagoon, and
+overhead climb the arches, one above another, in excesses of fantastic
+grace.
+
+Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to have brought hither and
+made part of his Piazza, that it might remain forever the city's supreme
+grace; and so, though there are public gardens and several pleasant
+walks in the city, the great resort in summer and winter, by day and by
+night, is the Piazza San Marco. Its ground-level, under the Procuratie,
+is belted with a glittering line of shops and caff�, the most tasteful
+and brilliant in the world, and the arcades that pass round three of its
+sides are filled with loungers and shoppers, even when there is music
+by the Austrian bands; for, as we have seen, the purest patriot may then
+walk under the Procuratie, without stain to the principles which would
+be hopelessly blackened if he set foot in the Piazza. The absence of
+dust and noisy hoofs and wheels tempts social life out of doors in
+Venice more than in any other Italian city, though the tendency to this
+sort of expansion is common throughout Italy. Beginning with the warm
+days of early May, and continuing till the _villeggiatura_ (the period
+spent at the country seat) interrupts it late in September, all Venice
+goes by a single impulse of _dolce far niente_, and sits gossiping at
+the doors of the innumerable caff� on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the
+Piazza San Marco, and in the different squares in every part of the
+city. But, of course, the most brilliant scene of this kind is in St.
+Mark's Place, which has a night-time glory indescribable, won from
+the light of uncounted lamps upon its architectural groups. The superb
+Imperial Palace--the sculptured, arcaded, and pillared Procuratie--the
+Byzantine magic and splendor of the church--will it all be there when
+you come again to-morrow night? The unfathomable heaven above seems part
+of the place, for I think it is never so tenderly blue over any other
+spot of earth. And when the sky is blurred with clouds, shall not the
+Piazza vanish with the azure?--People, I say, come to drink coffee, and
+eat ices here in the summer evenings, and then, what with the promenades
+in the arcades and in the Piazza, the music, the sound of feet, and the
+hum of voices, unbroken by the ruder uproar of cities where there are
+horses and wheels--the effect is that of a large evening party, and in
+this aspect the Piazza, is like a vast drawing-room.
+
+I liked well to see that strange life, which even the stout,
+dead-in-earnest little Bohemian musicians, piping in the centre of the
+Piazza, could not altogether substantialize, and which constantly took
+immateriality from the loveliness of its environment. In the winter the
+scene was the most purely Venetian, and in my first winter, when I had
+abandoned all thought of churches till spring, I settled down to steady
+habits of idleness and coffee, and contemplated the life of the Piazza.
+
+By all odds, the loungers at Florian's were the most interesting,
+because they were the most various. People of all shades of politics met
+in the dainty little saloons, though there were shades of division
+even there, and they did not mingle. The Italians carefully assorted
+themselves in a room furnished with green velvet, and the Austrians and
+the Austriacanti frequented a red-velvet room. They were curious to look
+at, those tranquil, indolent, Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon
+relish for them. They seldom spoke together, and when they did speak,
+they burst from silence into tumultuous controversy, and then lapsed
+again into perfect silence. The elder among them sat with their hands
+carefully folded on the heads of their sticks, gazing upon the ground,
+or else buried themselves in the perusal of the French journals. The
+younger stood a good deal about the doorways, and now and then passed
+a gentle, gentle jest with the elegant waiters in black coats and white
+cravats, who hurried to and fro with the orders, and called them out in
+strident tones to the accountant at his little table; or sometimes these
+young idlers make a journey to the room devoted to ladies and forbidden
+to smokers, looked long and deliberately in upon its loveliness, and
+then returned to the bosom of their taciturn companions. By chance I
+found them playing chess, but very rarely. They were all well-dressed,
+handsome men, with beards carefully cut, brilliant hats and boots, and
+conspicuously clean linen. I used to wonder who they were, to what order
+of society they belonged, and whether they, like my worthless self, had
+never any thing else but lounging at Florian's to do; but I really know
+none of these things to this day. Some men in Venice spend their noble,
+useful lives in this way, and it was the proud reply of a Venetian
+father, when asked of what profession his son was, "_� in Piazza!_"
+That was, he bore a cane, wore light gloves, and stared from Florian's
+windows at the ladies who went by.
+
+At the Caff� Quadri, immediately across the Piazza, there was a scene
+of equal hopefulness. But there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and
+the idling was carried on with a great noise of conversation in
+Austrian-German. Heaven knows what it was all about, but I presume the
+talk was upon topics of mutual improvement, calculated to advance the
+interests of self-government and mankind. These officers were very
+comely, intelligent-looking people with the most good-natured faces.
+They came and went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel
+scabbards against the tables, or rising and straddling off with their
+long swords kicking against their legs. They are the most stylish
+soldiers in the world, and one has no notion how ill they can dress when
+left to themselves, till one sees them in civil clothes.
+
+Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the Imperial Palace is called),
+under the Procuratie Vecchie, is the Caff� Specchi, frequented only by
+young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those who go to Florian's.
+Across from this caff� is that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to
+chiefly by non-commissioned officers, and civilian officials of lower
+grade. You know the latter, at a glance, by their beard, which in Venice
+is an index to every man's politics: no Austriacante wears the imperial,
+no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caff� Suttil, rather Austrian,
+and frequented by Italian _codini_, or old fogies, in politics: gray old
+fellows, who caress their sticks with more constant zeal than even the
+elders at Florian's. Quite at the other end of the Procuratie Nuove is
+the Caff� of the Greeks, a nation which I have commonly seen represented
+there by two or three Albanians with an Albanian boy, who, being dressed
+exactly like his father, curiously impressed me, as if he were the young
+of some Oriental animal--say a boy-elephant or infant camel.
+
+I hope that the reader adds to this sketch, even in the winter time,
+occasional tourists under the Procuratie, at the caff�, and in the
+shops, where the shop-keepers are devouring them with the keenness of
+an appetite unsated by the hordes of summer visitors. I hope that the
+reader also groups me fishermen, gondoliers, beggars, and loutish boys
+about the base of St. Mark's, and at the feet of the three flag-staffs
+before the church; that he passes me a slatternly woman and a frowzy
+girl or two through the Piazza occasionally; and that he calls down the
+flocks of pigeons hovering near. I fancy the latter half ashamed to
+show themselves, as being aware that they are a great humbug, and
+unrightfully in the guide-books.
+
+Meantime, while I sit at Florian's, sharing and studying the universal
+worthlessness about me, the brief winter passes, and the spring of the
+south--so unlike the ardent season of the north, where it burns full
+summer before the snows are dried upon the fields--descends upon the
+city and the sea. But except in the little gardens of the palaces, and
+where here and there a fig-tree lifts its head to peer over a lofty
+stone wall, the spring finds no response of swelling bud and unfolding
+leaf, and it is human nature alone which welcomes it. Perhaps it is for
+this reason that the welcome is more visible in Venice than elsewhere,
+and that here, where the effect of the season is narrowed and limited
+to men's hearts, the joy it brings is all the keener and deeper. It is
+certain at least that the rapture is more demonstrative. The city at all
+times voiceful, seems to burst into song with the advent of these
+golden days and silver nights. Bands of young men go singing through the
+moonlit streets, and the Grand Canal re�choes the music of the parties
+of young girls as they drift along in the scarcely moving boats,
+and sing the glories of the lagoons and the loves of fishermen and
+gondoliers. In the Public Gardens they walk and sing; and wandering
+minstrels come forth before the caff�, and it is hard to get beyond the
+tinkling of guitars and the scraping of fiddles. It is as if the city
+had put off its winter humor with its winter dress; and as Venice in
+winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the world, so in spring
+it is the fullest of joy and light. There is a pleasant bustle in the
+streets, a ceaseless clatter of feet over the stones of the squares, and
+a constant movement of boats upon the canals.
+
+We say, in a cheap and careless way, that the southern peoples have no
+_homes_. But this is true only in a restricted sense, for the Italian,
+and the Venetian especially, makes the whole city his home in pleasant
+weather. No one remains under a roof who can help it; and now, as I said
+before, the fascinating out-door life begins. All day long the people
+sit and drink coffee and eat ices and gossip together before the caff�,
+and the soft midnight sees the same diligent idlers in their places. The
+promenade is at all seasons the favorite Italian amusement; it has its
+rigidly fixed hours, and its limits are also fixed: but now, in spring,
+even the promenade is a little lawless, and the crowds upon the Riva
+sometimes walk as far as the Public Gardens, and throng all the wider
+avenues and the Piazza; while young Venice comes to take the sun at St.
+Mark's in the arms of its high-breasted nurses,--mighty country-women,
+who, in their bright costumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses
+of gold and silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high,
+free-stepping movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some
+elder race of barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had
+passed away from our puny, dull-clad times.
+
+    "_� la stagion che ognuno s'innamora;_"
+
+and now young girls steal to their balconies, and linger there for
+hours, subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and
+looking up at them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the
+Venetian housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their
+heads and gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers,
+filling their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their
+work. Every street down which you look is likewise vocal with gossip;
+and if the picturesque projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys,
+of which the vista is full, hide the heads of the gossipers, be sure
+there is a face looking out of every window for all that, and the
+social, expansive presence of the season is felt there.
+
+The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish the spring upon
+themselves unsparingly. They come forth from their dark dens in
+crumbling palaces and damp basements, and live in the sunlight and the
+welcome air. They work, they eat, they sleep out of doors. Mothers of
+families sit about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down
+with other slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while
+their raven-haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the
+covert insects that haunt the tangles of the children's locks. Within
+doors shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases
+talking for an instant.
+
+Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near
+the Piazza, to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the
+busiest street in Venice passes, from St. Mark's to the Rialto Bridge.
+It is one of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest,
+and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms
+early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a
+cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke, and
+the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society.
+
+Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.
+Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the
+burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's
+shop, a mercer's and draper's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop,
+a caff� more or less brilliant, a green-grocer's and fruiterer's, a
+family grocery--nay, there is also a second-hand merchant's shop where
+you buy and sell every kind of worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of
+course there is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly
+a wood-carver's and gilder's, while without a barber's shop no campo
+could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and
+political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle
+and disturbance, San Bartolomeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with
+the bargains of the Rialto market.
+
+Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamor for the absence of
+quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an
+almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper
+of hair-pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils.
+Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays
+of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back
+and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who
+advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of
+toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples
+of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets
+of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the
+crowd;--these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and
+friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolomeo.
+
+Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and I spent much time in
+the study of the vociferous life under my windows, trying to make out
+the meaning of the different cries, and to trace them back to their
+sources. There was one which puzzled me for a long time--a sharp,
+pealing cry that ended in a wail of angry despair, and, rising high
+above all other sounds, impressed the spirit like the cry of that bird
+in the tropic forests which the terrified Spaniards called the _alma
+perdida_. After many days of listening and trembling, I found that it
+proceeded from a wretched, sun-burnt girl, who carried about some
+dozens of knotty pears, and whose hair hung disheveled round her eyes,
+bloodshot with the strain of her incessant shrieks.
+
+In San Bartolomeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above
+and shops below. The ground-floor is devoted to the small commerce of
+various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied
+by tradesmen's families; and on the third or fourth floor is the
+_appartamento signorile_. From the balconies of these stories hung the
+cages of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots,
+which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the
+crowd. All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the
+casements was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite
+was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By
+all odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant
+serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief,
+and a bright-colored gown, and wearing long dangling ear-rings of
+yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over
+the balcony-rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made
+love at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in
+the crowd. On another balcony, a lady sat and knitted with crimson yarn;
+and at the window of still another house, a damsel now looked out
+upon the square, and now gave a glance into the room, in the evident
+direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbors have the amiable custom of
+studying one another's features through opera-glasses; but I could not
+persuade myself to use this means of learning the mirror's response to
+the damsel's constant "Fair or not?" being a believer in every woman's
+right to look well a little way off. I shunned whatever trifling
+temptation there was in the case, and turned again to the campo
+beneath--to the placid dandies about the door of the caff�; to the tide
+of passers from the Merceria; the smooth-shaven Venetians of other days,
+and the bearded Venetians of these; the dark-eyed, white-faced Venetian
+girls, hooped in cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly
+clad, and moving with southern grace; the files of heavily burdened
+soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily about with their swords
+at their sides, and in their spotless Austrian uniforms.
+
+As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat increases, the expansive
+delight with which the city hails its coming passes into a tranquiler
+humor, as if the joy of the beautiful season had sunk too deeply into
+the city's heart for utterance. I, too, felt this longing for quiet,
+and as San Bartolomeo continued untouched by it, and all day roared
+and thundered under my windows, and all night long gave itself up to
+sleepless youths who there melodiously bayed the moon in chorus, I was
+obliged to abandon San Bartolomeo, and seek calmer quarters where I
+might enjoy the last luxurious sensations of the spring-time in peace.
+
+Now, with the city's lapse into this tranquiler humor, the promenades
+cease. The facchino gives all his leisure to sleeping in the sun; and
+in the mellow afternoons there is scarcely a space of six feet square on
+the Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its brown-cloaked peasant,
+basking face-downward in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are
+by right the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in
+their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated
+by the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamors
+at the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard
+of _valets de place_. Even the play of the children ceases, except in
+the Public Gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games,
+and sport as noiselessly as the lizards that slide from shadow to shadow
+and glitter in the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses
+you,--the stranger in it,--not with sadness, not with melancholy, but
+with a deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference
+to all purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on
+men's tongues, behold! that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise
+would strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a
+wild and frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her
+inmost heart, and you learn her secrets--arcana unintelligible to you in
+the new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win
+new color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once
+charmed away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your
+motion. Now, at last, you know _why_
+
+    "It was an Abyssinian maid"
+
+who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu? It is the land in which you
+were born!
+
+The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail
+faints into the white distance; the gondola slides athwart the sheeted
+silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes
+at his post.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+OPERA AND THEATRES.
+
+
+With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the
+existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The
+Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private
+persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were
+intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor
+Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly
+not so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and
+tasteful theatre. The best opera was formerly given in it, and now that
+it is closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. The Italians seldom
+go to it, and as there is not a sufficient number of foreign residents
+to support it in good style, the opera commonly conforms to the
+character of the theatre San Benedetto, in which it is given, and is
+second-rate. It is nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of
+several thousand florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this
+account, of supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in
+the little German cities. A box does not cost a great deal; but as the
+theatre is carried on in Italy by two different managements,--one of
+which receives the money for the boxes and seats, and the other the fee
+of admission to the theatre,--there is always the demand of the latter
+to be satisfied with nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before
+you can reach your place. The pit is fitted up with seats, of course,
+but you do not sit down there without paying. So, most Italians (who
+if they go at all go without ladies) and the poorer sort of government
+officials stand; the orchestra seats are reserved for the officers of
+the garrison. The first row of boxes, which is on a level with the
+heads of people in the pit, is well enough, but rank and fashion take a
+loftier flight, and sit in the second tier.
+
+You look about in vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which
+once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety,--the visits from box to
+box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations.
+The people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the
+beauty is the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter
+being the fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the
+opera, some of the Venetian ladies yielded to it, but went plainly
+dressed, and sat far back in boxes of the third tier, and when they
+issued forth after the opera were veiled beyond recognition. The
+audience usually takes its enjoyment quietly; hissing now and then for
+silence in the house, and clapping hands for applause, without calling
+_bravo_,--an Italian custom which I have noted to be chiefly habitual
+with foreigners: with Germans, for instance; who spell it with a _p_ and
+_f_.
+
+I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must seek it somewhere out
+of Italy,--at London, or Paris, or New York,--though possibly it might
+be chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in Naples. The cause
+of the decay of the musical art in Venice must be looked for among the
+events which seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing; certainly
+it cannot be discerned in any indifference of the people to music. The
+_dimostrazione_ keeps the better class of citizens from the opera,
+but the passion for it still exists in every order; and God's gift of
+beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race by any Situation. You
+hear the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as
+our own colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has
+an inborn sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the
+cultivated tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth--
+
+    "That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole."
+
+In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that
+theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now
+an imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her
+stages, and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so
+famous, have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular
+in Venice as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the
+care of the state for the drama existed from the first. The government,
+which always piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as
+the theatre advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the
+Old or New Testament, began about the close of the century to protect
+and encourage the instruction of music in the different foundling
+hospitals and public refuges in the city. The young girls in these
+institutions were taught to play on instruments, and to sing,--at first
+for the alleviation of their own dull and solitary life, and afterward
+for the delight of the public. In the merry days that passed just before
+the fall of the Republic, the Latin oratorios which they performed in
+the churches attached to the hospitals were among the most fashionable
+diversions in Venice. The singers were instructed by the best masters
+of the time; and at the close of the last century, the conservatories
+of the Incurables, the Foundlings, and the Mendicants were famous
+throughout Europe for their dramatic concerts, and for those pupils who
+found the transition from sacred to profane opera natural and easy.
+
+With increasing knowledge of the language, I learned to enjoy best the
+unmusical theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It
+is hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen
+excellent acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian
+comedy, which is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of
+Goldoni--compositions deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where
+alone their admirable fidelity of drawing and coloring can be perfectly
+appreciated. The best comedy is usually given to the educated classes at
+the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a bloodier and louder drama is offered
+to the populace at Teatro Malibran, where on a Sunday night you may
+see the plebeian life of the city in one of its most entertaining and
+characteristic phases. The sparings of the whole week which have not
+been laid out for chances in the lottery, are spent for this evening's
+amusement; and in the vast pit you see, besides the families of
+comfortable artisans who can evidently afford it, a multitude of the
+ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low rate of eight or ten soldi
+[Footnote: The soldo is the hundredth part of the Austrian florin, which
+is worth about forty-nine cents of American money.] apiece, it is hard
+to account for. It is very peremptory, this audience, in its likes and
+dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great vehemence. It likes best
+the sanguinary local spectacular drama; it cheers and cheers again
+every allusion to Venice; and when the curtain rises on some well-known
+Venetian scene, it has out the scene-painter by name three times--which
+is all the police permits. The auditors wear their hats in the pit, but
+deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, and raise stormy and
+wrathful cries of _cappello!_ till these uncover. Between acts, they
+indulge in excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go to the
+extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are hawked about the theatre,
+and sold for two soldi the stick,--with the tooth-pick on which they are
+spitted thrown into the bargain.
+
+The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday night, but the one
+entertainment which never fails of drawing and delighting full houses is
+the theatre of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like best
+to go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of
+these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a
+frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude
+delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and
+traditionary tricks of the stage.
+
+The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street
+opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and
+simplest appointments. There are no boxes--the whole theatre is scarcely
+larger than a stage-box--and you pay ten soldi to go into the pit, where
+you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have paid fifteen
+for places in the dress-circle above. The stage is very small, and the
+scenery a kind of coarse miniature painting. But it is very complete,
+and every thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and to
+produce an illusion of magnitude in their figures. They are very
+artlessly introduced, and are maneuvered, according to the exigencies of
+the scene, by means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs
+to the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all
+the vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to
+mention a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral.
+
+The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated and ambitious tone
+than that of the Burattini, which exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse
+assassinations in little punch-shows on the Riva, and in the larger
+squares; but the standard characters are nearly the same with both, and
+are all descended from the _commedia a braccio_ [Footnote: Comedy by the
+yard.] which flourished on the Italian stage before the time of Goldoni.
+And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have great and
+peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing the
+most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the
+Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have
+such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only
+remember to have made out one of their comedies,--a play in which an
+ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested
+for lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other
+was raging in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic
+audiences; but for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini
+appears to be a sardonic farce, in which the chief character--a puppet
+ten inches high, with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean
+good-nature and wickedness--deludes other and weak-minded puppets into
+trusting him, and then beats them with a club upon the back of the head
+until they die. The murders of this infamous creature, which are always
+executed in a spirit of jocose _sang-froid_, and accompanied by humorous
+remarks, are received with the keenest relish by the spectators and,
+indeed, the action is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit
+of the Italian race seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they
+perform their parts with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is
+wonderful. I have witnessed death agonies on these little stages which
+the great American tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could
+not surpass in degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the
+greater credit because they are agitated by the legs from below the
+scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette
+Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and
+comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size;
+then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then
+Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat
+sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced,
+statuesque, with the drapery of their cloaks thrown over their
+shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick black hair; old women,
+all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with hooded cloaks of coarse
+brown; then boys--and boys. They all enjoy the spectacle with approval,
+and take the drama _au grand s�rieux_, uttering none of the gibes which
+sometimes attend efforts to please in our own country. Even when the
+hat, or other instrument of extortion, is passed round, and they give
+nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of fury and disappointment,
+calls out, "Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to you!" and closes the
+theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse. Though, indeed, _fioi
+de cani_ means no great reproach in Venetian parlance; and parents of
+the lower classes caressingly address their children in these terms.
+Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak upon him the deadliest
+insult which can be put into words.
+
+In the _commedia a braccio_, before mentioned as the inheritance of the
+Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline of
+the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any
+people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must
+have been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till
+the middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris
+he furnished his Italian players with the _commedia a braccio_. I
+have heard some very passable _gags_ at the Marionette, but the real
+_commedia a braccio_ no longer exists, and its familiar and invariable
+characters perform written plays.
+
+Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of _dramatis personae_,
+and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice. He is
+always, like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always a
+merchant, Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands.
+He is a dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of
+black knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black
+coat, and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in
+all his characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a
+glutton and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins
+the heart. To tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he
+has no part and I have learned to think a certain trick of his--lifting
+his leg rigidly to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying,
+"Capisse la?" or "Sa la?" (You understand? You know?)--one of the finest
+things in the world.
+
+In nearly all of Goldoni's Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote
+in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa,--Arlecchino, il
+Dottore. Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first
+puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni's witty
+management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete _commedia
+a braccio_, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by
+immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and
+commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son,
+figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The
+second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the
+University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a
+sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and
+foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley--a gibe at the poverty
+of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and
+cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion in
+Italy.
+
+The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are
+much shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace,
+however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce,
+as you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes
+for any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed
+to have been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the
+Sleeping King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna,
+with Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated
+several nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can
+fancy people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying
+it with the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward
+realizing to yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will
+also suppose great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own
+part, I find few things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never
+tired of their bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their
+irresistible touches of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the
+relenting parent (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while
+Arlecchino, as the large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of
+the erring son when the prodigal was about to be cast into the street,
+looked on and rubbed his hands with amiable satisfaction and the
+conventional delight in benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed
+the base terrors of Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the
+keen spiritual agonies of the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of
+Sebastopol. Not many passages of real life have affected me as deeply
+as the atrocious behavior of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when
+he responds to the expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,--a
+puppet of shaky and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:
+
+"Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she
+is thy brother's wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the
+sacred name of virtue." (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and
+gesticulations toward the pit.)
+
+To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh,
+"Honor?--I know it not! Virtue?--I detest it!" and attempting to
+pass the knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his
+sister-in-law, he yields to the natural infirmities of rags and
+pasteboard, and topples against him.
+
+Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous.
+You discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and
+reading his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets
+when they cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly
+noises in the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the
+dark corners of the room, and to look under the bed. When at last
+the spectral head appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a
+miserable cry under the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically
+the scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a
+spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible.
+
+The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is
+extremely funny. The _prima ballerina_ has all the difficult grace and
+far-fetched arts of the _prima ballerina_ of flesh and blood; and when
+the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is humanly
+delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike _empressement_.
+I have no doubt the _corps de ballet_ have their private jealousies
+and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all
+positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and
+legs. The puppets are great in _pirouette_ and _pas seul_; but I think
+the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall of
+Carthage, is their strong point.
+
+The people who witness their performances are of all ages and
+conditions--I remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some
+German countesses in the pit--but the greater number of spectators are
+young men of the middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and
+their wives and children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place
+for lovers in humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama
+going on between the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of
+the Venetian populace take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and
+Facanapa of the stage. I one day discovered a letter at the bottom of
+the Canal of the Giudecca, to which watery resting-place some recreant,
+addressed as "Caro Antonio," had consigned it; and from this letter I
+came to know certainly of at least one love affair at the Marionette.
+"Caro Antonio" was humbly besought, "if his heart still felt the force
+of love," to meet the writer (who softly reproached him with neglect) at
+the Marionette the night of date, at six o'clock; and I would not like
+to believe he could resist so tender a prayer, though perhaps it fell
+out so. I fished up through the lucent water this despairing little
+epistle,--it was full of womanly sweetness and bad spelling,--and dried
+away its briny tears on the blade of my oar. If ever I thought to
+keep it, with some vague purpose of offering it to any particularly
+anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as to the probable writer--its
+unaccountable loss spared me the delicate office. Still, however, when
+I go to see the puppets, it is with an interest divided between the
+drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence of expectation somewhere
+among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who wear such immense hoops
+under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at one side, and call
+each other "Ci�!" Where art thou, O fickle and cruel, yet ever dear
+Antonio? All unconscious, I think,--gallantly posed against the wall,
+thy slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long cigar, the arms
+of thy velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy ear-rings softly
+twinkling in the light.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.
+
+
+When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men
+on the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the
+restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to
+conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while
+the restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy,
+for every bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the
+restaurants are very dirty--if you wipe your plate and glass carefully
+before using them, they need not stomach you; it is not because the
+rooms are cold--if you sit near the great vase of smoldering embers in
+the centre of each room you may suffocate in comparative comfort; it is
+not because the prices are great--they are really very reasonable; it
+is not for any very tangible fault that I object to life at the
+restaurants, and yet I cannot think of its hopeless homelessness without
+rebellion against the whole system it implies, as something unnatural
+and insufferable.
+
+But before we come to look closely at this aspect of Italian
+civilization, it is better to look first at a very noticeable trait of
+Italian character,--temperance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer
+classes, one observes without great surprise how slenderly they fare,
+and how with a great habit of talking of meat and drink, the verb
+_mangiare_ remains in fact for the most part inactive with them. But
+it is only just to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be not
+wholly the result of necessity, for it prevails with other classes which
+could well afford the opposite vice. Meat and drink do not form the
+substance of conviviality with Venetians, as with the Germans and the
+English, and in degree with ourselves; and I have often noticed on the
+Mondays-at-the-Gardens, and other social festivals of the people,
+how the crowd amused itself with any thing--music, dancing, walking,
+talking--any thing but the great northern pastime of gluttony. Knowing
+the life of the place, I make quite sure that Venetian gayety is on few
+occasions connected with repletion; and I am ashamed to confess that I
+have not always been able to repress a feeling of stupid scorn for the
+empty stomachs everywhere, which do not even ask to be filled, or, at
+least, do not insist upon it. The truth is, the North has a gloomy
+pride in gastronomic excess, which unfits her children to appreciate the
+cheerful prudence of the South.
+
+Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. They breakfast on
+a piece of bread with coffee and milk; supper is a little cup of black
+coffee, or an ice, taken at a caff�. The coffee, however, is repeated
+frequently throughout the day, and in the summertime fruit is eaten, but
+eaten sparingly, like everything else. As to the nature of the dinner,
+it of course varies somewhat according to the nature of the diner; but
+in most families of the middle class a dinner at home consists of a
+piece of boiled beef, a _minestra_ (a soup thickened with vegetables,
+tripe, and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the wine of the
+country. The failings of the repast among all classes lean to the
+side of simplicity, and the abstemious character of the Venetian finds
+sufficient comment in his familiar invitation to dinner: "_Venga a
+mangiar quattro risi con me_." (Come eat four grains of rice with me.)
+
+But invitations to dinner have never formed a prime element of
+hospitality in Venice. Goldoni notices this fact in his memoirs, and
+speaking of the city in the early half of the last century, he says
+that the number and excellence of the eating-houses in the city made
+invitations to dinner at private houses rare, and superfluous among the
+courtesies offered to strangers.
+
+The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place his house at your
+disposition, and, having extended this splendid invitation, consider the
+duties of hospitality fulfilled; he does not appear to think you want to
+make use of his house for social purposes, preferring himself the caff�,
+and finding home and comfort there, rather than under his own roof.
+"What caff� do you frequent? Ah! so do I. We shall meet often there."
+This is frequently your new acquaintance's promise of friendship. And
+one may even learn to like the social footing on which people meet at
+the caff�, as well as that of the parlor or drawing-room. I could not
+help thinking one evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some
+pleasant Paduans in one of the magnificent saloons of the Caff�
+Pedrocchi, that I should like to go there for society, if I could always
+find it there, much better than to private houses. There is far greater
+ease and freedom, more elegance and luxury, and not the slightest weight
+of obligation laid upon you for the gratification your friend's company
+has given you. One has not to be a debtor in the sum of a friend's
+outlay for house, servants, refreshments, and the like. Nowhere in
+Europe is the senseless and wasteful American custom of _treating_
+known; and nothing could be more especially foreign to the frugal
+instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a party of friends at a
+caff� eat or drink, each one pays for what he takes, and pecuniarily,
+the enjoyment of the evening is uncostly or not, according as each
+prefers. Of course no one sits down in such a place without calling for
+something; but I have frequently seen people respond to this demand of
+custom by ordering a glass of water with anise, at the expense of two
+soldi. A cup of black coffee, for five soldi, secures a chair, a table,
+and as many journals as you like, for as long time as you like.
+
+I say, a stranger may learn to like the life of the caff�,--that of the
+restaurant never; though the habit of frequenting the restaurants, to
+which Goldoni somewhat vaingloriously refers, seems to have grown upon
+the Venetians with the lapse of time. The eating-houses are almost
+without number, and are of every degree, from the shop of the
+sausage-maker, who supplies gondoliers and facchini with bowls of
+_sguassetto_, to the Caff� Florian. They all have names which are not
+strange to European ears, but which ape sufficiently amusing to people
+who come from a land where nearly every public thing is named from
+some inspiration of patriotism or local pride. In Venice the principal
+restaurants are called The Steamboat, The Savage, The Little Horse, The
+Black Hat, and The Pictures; and I do not know that any one of them is
+more uncomfortable, uncleanly, or noisy than another, or that any one of
+them suffers from the fact that all are bad.
+
+You do not get breakfast at the restaurant for the reason, before
+stated, of the breakfast's unsubstantiality. The dining commences about
+three o'clock in the afternoon, and continues till nine o'clock, most
+people dining at five or six. As a rule the attendance is insufficient,
+and no guest is served until he has made a savage clapping on the
+tables, or clinking on his glass or plate. Then a hard-pushed waiter
+appears, and calls out, dramatically, "Behold me!" takes the order,
+shrieks it to the cook, and returning with the dinner, cries out again,
+more dramatically than ever, "Behold it ready!" and arrays it with a
+great flourish on the table. I have dined in an hotel at Niagara, to the
+music of a brass band; but I did not find that so utterly bewildering,
+so destructive of the individual savor of the dishes, and so conducive
+to absent-minded gluttony, as I at first found the constant rush and
+clamor of the waiters in the Venetian restaurants. The guests are,
+for the most part, patient and quiet enough, eating their minestra and
+boiled beef in such peace as the surrounding uproar permits them, and
+seldom making acquaintance with each other. It is a mistake, I think,
+to expect much talk from any people at dinner. The ingenious English
+tourists who visit the United States from time to time, find us silent
+over our meat, and I have noticed the like trait among people of divers
+races in Europe.
+
+As I have said, the greater part of the diners at the restaurants are
+single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill
+of the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals,
+is rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a
+drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,--no, not at evening
+parties,--and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the caff� and
+the restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the higher
+privileges of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once the
+most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the
+world. Our boarding-house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as
+it often is, seems to me infinitely better than the restaurant life
+of young Italy. It is creditable to Latin Europe that, with all this
+homelessness and domestic outlawry, its young men still preserve the
+gentleness of civilization.
+
+The families that share the exile of the eating-houses sometimes make
+together a feeble buzz of conversation, but the unfriendly spirit of
+the place seems soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent the
+restaurant for economy's sake. Fuel is costly, and the restaurant is
+cheap, and its cooking better than they could perhaps otherwise afford
+to have. Indeed, so cheap is the restaurant that actual experience
+proved the cost of a dinner there to be little more than the cost of
+the raw material in the market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the
+custom, which is common, of sending home to purchasers meals from the
+eating-houses.
+
+As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, the difference is not
+so noticeable in the prices of the same dishes, as in the substitution
+of cheaper varieties of food. At the best eating-houses, the Gallic
+traditions bear sway more or less, but in the poorer sort the cooking
+is done entirely by native artists, deriving their inspirations from
+the unsophisticated tastes of exclusively native diners. It is perhaps
+needless to say that they grow characteristic and picturesque as they
+grow dirty and cheap, until at last the cook-shop perfects the descent
+with a triumph of raciness and local coloring. The cook-shop in Venice
+opens upon you at almost every turn,--everywhere, in fact, but in the
+Piazza and the Merceria,--and looking in, you see its vast heaps of
+frying fish, and its huge caldrons of ever-boiling broth which smell
+to heaven with garlic and onions. In the seducing windows smoke golden
+mountains of _polenta_ (a thicker kind of mush or hasty-pudding, made
+of Indian meal, and universally eaten in North Italy), platters of crisp
+minnows, bowls of rice, roast poultry, dishes of snails and liver; and
+around the fascinating walls hang huge plates of bronzed earthenware
+for a lavish and a hospitable show, and for the representation of those
+scenes of Venetian story which are modeled upon them in bass-relief.
+Here I like to take my unknown friend--my scoundrel facchino or rascal
+gondolier--as he comes to buy his dinner, and bargains eloquently with
+the cook, who stands with a huge ladle in his hand capable of skimming
+mysterious things from vasty depths. I am spell-bound by the drama which
+ensues, and in which all the chords of the human heart are touched, from
+those that tremble at high tragedy, to those that are shaken by broad
+farce. When the diner has bought his dinner, and issues forth with
+his polenta in one hand, and his fried minnows or stewed snails in the
+other, my fancy fondly follows him to his gondola-station, where he eats
+it, and quarrels volubly with other gondoliers across the Grand Canal.
+
+A simpler and less ambitious sort of cook-shop abounds in the region
+of Rialto, where on market mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious
+business with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more limited
+resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, polenta, and
+_sguassetto_. The latter is a true _roba veneziana_, and is a
+loud-flavored broth, made of those desperate scraps of meat which
+are found impracticable even by the sausage-makers. Another, but more
+delicate dish, peculiar to the place, is the clotted blood of poultry,
+fried in slices with onions. A great number of the families of the poor
+breakfast at these shops very abundantly, for three soldi each person.
+
+In Venice every holiday has its appropriate viand. During carnival all
+the butter and cheese shop-windows are whitened with the snow of
+beaten cream--_panamontata_. At San Martino the bakers parade troops of
+gingerbread warriors. Later, for Christmas, comes _mandorlato_, which is
+a candy made of honey and enriched with almonds. In its season only can
+any of these devotional delicacies be had; but there is a species
+of cruller, fried in oil, which has all seasons for its own. On the
+occasion of every _festa_, and of every _sagra_ (which is the holiday of
+one parish only), stalls are erected in the squares for the cooking and
+sale of these crullers, between which and the religious sentiment proper
+to the whole year there seems to be some occult relation.
+
+In the winter, the whole city appears to abandon herself to cooking for
+the public, till she threatens to hopelessly disorder the law of demand
+and supply. There are, to begin with, the caff� and restaurants of
+every class. Then there are the cook-shops, and the poulterers', and the
+sausage-makers'. Then, also, every fruit-stall is misty and odorous with
+roast apples, boiled beans, cabbage, and potatoes. The chestnut-roasters
+infest every corner, and men women, and children cry roast pumpkin at
+every turn--till, at last, hunger seems an absurd and foolish vice,
+and the ubiquitous beggars, no less than the habitual abstemiousness of
+every class of the population, become the most perplexing and maddening
+of anomalies.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.
+
+
+I hope that it is by a not unnatural progress I pass from speaking of
+dinners and diners to the kindred subject of the present chapter, and I
+trust the reader will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this
+mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I
+had found most books of travel very slow to tell,--as much as possible
+of the everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our
+own; endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not only
+from the show-traits which strangers are most likely to see, but also
+from experience of such things as strangers are most likely to miss.
+
+The absolute want of society of my own nation in Venice would have
+thrown me upon study of the people for my amusement, even if I had cared
+to learn nothing of them; and the necessity of economical housekeeping
+would have caused me to live in the frugal Venetian fashion, even if
+I had been disposed to remain a foreigner in every thing. Of bachelor
+lodgings I had sufficient experience during my first year; but as most
+prudent travelers who visit the city for a week take lodgings, I need
+not describe my own particularly. You can tell the houses in which
+there are rooms to let, by the squares of white paper fastened to the
+window-shutters; and a casual glance as you pass through the streets,
+gives you the idea that the chief income of the place is derived from
+letting lodgings. Carpetless, dreary barracks the rooms usually are,
+with an uncompromising squareness of prints upon the wall, an appalling
+breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of wash-bowl, and an obduracy of
+sofa, never, never to be dissociated in their victim's mind from the
+idea of the villanous hard bread of Venice on which the gloomy landlady
+sustains her life with its immutable purposes of plunder. Flabbiness
+without softness is the tone of these discouraging chambers, which are
+dear or not according to the season and the situation. On the sunlit
+Riva during winter, and on the Grand Canal in summer, they are costly
+enough, but they are to be found on nearly all the squares at reasonable
+rates. On the narrow streets, where most native bachelors have them,
+they are absurdly cheap.
+
+As in nearly all places on the Continent, a house in Venice means a
+number of rooms, including a whole story in a building, or part of it
+only, but always completely separated from the story above and below, or
+from the other rooms on the same floor. Every house has its own entrance
+from the street, or by a common hall and stairway from the ground-floor,
+where are the cellars or store-rooms, while each kitchen is usually on
+a level with the other rooms of the house to which it belongs. The
+isolation of the different families is secured (as perfectly as where
+a building is solely appropriated to each), either by the exclusive
+possession of a streetdoor, [Footnote: Where the street entrance is in
+common, every floor has its bell, which being sounded, summons a servant
+to some upper window with the demand, most formidable to strangers,
+"_Chi xe?_" (Who is it?) But you do not answer with your name. You
+reply, "_Amici!_" (Friends!) on which comforting reassurance, the
+servant draws the latch of the door by a wire running upward to her
+hand, and permits you to enter and wander about at your leisure till you
+reach her secret height. This is, supposing the master or mistress of
+the house to be at home. If they are not in, she answers your "_Amici!_"
+with "_No ghe ne xe!_" (Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a
+string outside the window, and fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial
+domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give good-day to the people whom
+you meet in the common hall and on the common stairway, but you rarely
+know more of them than their names, and you certainly care nothing about
+them. The sociability of Europe, and more especially of Southern Europe,
+is shown abroad; under the domestic roof it dwindles and disappears. And
+indeed it is no wonder, considering how dispiriting and comfortless most
+of the houses are. The lower windows are heavily barred with iron; the
+wood-work is rude, even in many palaces in Venice; the rest is stone
+and stucco; the walls are not often papered, though they are sometimes
+painted: the most pleasing and inviting feature of the interior is the
+frescoed ceiling of the better rooms. The windows shut imperfectly,
+the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth while to observe that
+there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?); the doors lift slantingly from
+the floor, in which their lower hinges are imbedded; the stoves are of
+plaster, and consume fuel without just return of heat; the balconies
+alone are always charming, whether they hang high over the streets, or
+look out upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted ceilings, go far
+to make the houses habitable.
+
+It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly every thing else in
+Italy, that you pay about the same price for half the comfort that you
+get in America. In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on the
+Grand Canal; but here the rents are something absurdly high, when taken
+in consideration with the fact that the city is not made a place of
+residence by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial
+activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these
+circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment
+to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a
+tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with
+coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls
+like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all
+recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa is at present occupying
+these pleasant apartments, and you only gain admission to them after
+an embassy to procure her permission. Madama la Baronessa receives
+you courteously, and you pass through her rooms, which are a little
+in disorder, the Baronessa being on the point of removal. Madama la
+Baronessa's hoop-skirts prevail upon the floors; and at the side of the
+couch which her form lately pressed in slumber, you observe a French
+novel and a wasted candle in the society of a half-bottle of the wine of
+the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the whole suite, and through the
+open window comes a curious stench explained as the odor of Madama la
+Baronessa's guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that she has had their
+sty placed immediately under her window in the garden. It is this garden
+which has first taken your heart, with a glimpse caught through the
+great open door of the palace. It is disordered and wild, but so much
+the better; its firs are very thick and dark, and there are certain
+statues, fauns and nymphs, which weather stains and mosses have made
+much decenter than the sculptor intended. You think that for this
+garden's sake you could put up with the house, which must be very cheap.
+What is the price of the rooms? you ask of the smiling landlord. He
+answers, without winking, "If taken for several years, a thousand
+florins a year." At which you suppress the whistle of disdainful
+surprise, and say you think it will not suit. He calls your attention to
+the sun, which comes in at every side, which will roast you in summer,
+and will not (as he would have you think) warm you in winter. "But there
+is another apartment,"--through which you drag languidly. It is empty
+now, being last inhabited by an English Ledi,--and her stove-pipes
+went out of the windows, and blackened the shabby stucco front of the
+villanous old palace.
+
+In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the
+curiously frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which
+has a lady and gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony
+to balcony, on the fa�ade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of
+leaping from the second to the third story, promises something. Promises
+something, but does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh,
+clean, and new, and cold and dark as a cellar. This house--that is to
+say, a floor of the house--you may have for four hundred florins a year;
+and then farewell the world and the light of the sun! for neither will
+ever find you in that back court, and you will never see any body but
+the neighboring laundresses and their children, who cannot enough admire
+the front of your house.
+
+_E via in seguito!_ This is of house keeping, not house-hunting. There
+are pleasant and habitable houses in Venice--but they are not cheap, as
+many of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, discomfort and ruin
+have their price, and the tumble-down is patched up and sold at rates
+astonishing to innocent strangers who come from countries in good
+repair, where the tumble-down is worth nothing. If I were not ashamed
+of the idle and foolish old superstitions in which I once believed
+concerning life in Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect
+very little for a great deal; and how a knowledge of many houses to let,
+made me more and more contented with the house we had taken.
+
+It was in one corner of an old palace on the Grand Canal, and the window
+of the little parlor looked down upon the water, which had made friends
+with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, golden smiles upon
+it when the sun shone. The dining-room was not so much favored by the
+water, but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling tree-tops,
+that rose to it from a tiny garden-ground, no bigger than a pocket
+handkerchief. Through this window, also, we could see the quaint,
+picturesque life of the canal; and from another room we could reach
+a little terrace above the water. We were not in the _appartamento
+signorile_, [Footnote: The noble floor--as the second or third story
+of the palace is called.]--that was above,--but we were more snugly
+quartered on the first story from the ground-floor, commonly used as a
+winter apartment in the old times. But it had been cut up, and suites of
+rooms had been broken according to the caprice of successive landlords,
+till it was not at all palatial any more. The upper stories still
+retained something of former grandeur, and had acquired with time more
+than former discomfort. We were not envious of them, for they were
+humbly let at a price less than we paid; though we could not quite
+repress a covetous yearning for their arched and carven windows, which
+we saw sometimes from the canal, above the tops of the garden trees.
+
+The gondoliers used always to point out our palace (which was called
+Casa Falier) as the house in which Marino Faliero was born; and for a
+long time we clung to the hope that it might be so. But however
+pleasant it was, we were forced, on reading up the subject a little, to
+relinquish our illusion, and accredit an old palace at Santi Apostoli
+with the distinction we would fain have claimed for ours. I am rather at
+a loss to explain how it made our lives in Casa Falier any pleasanter to
+think that a beheaded traitor had been born in it, but we relished the
+superstition amazingly as long as we could possibly believe in it. What
+went far to confirm us at first in our credulity was the residence, in
+another part of the palace, of the Canonico Falier, a lineal descendant
+of the unhappy doge. He was a very mild-faced old priest, with a white
+head, which he carried downcast, and crimson legs, on which he moved but
+feebly. He owned the rooms in which he lived, and the apartment in the
+front of the palace just above our own. The rest of the house belonged
+to another, for in Venice many of the palaces are divided up and sold
+among different purchasers, floor by floor, and sometimes even room by
+room.
+
+But the tenantry of Casa Falier was far more various than its
+proprietorship. Over our heads dwelt a Dalmatian family; below our feet
+a Frenchwoman; at our right, upon the same floor, an English gentleman;
+under him a French family; and over him the family of a marquis in exile
+from Modena. Except with Mr. ----, the Englishman, who was at once our
+friend and landlord (impossible as this may appear to those who know
+any thing of landlords in Italy), we had no acquaintance, beyond that of
+salutation, with the many nations represented in our house. We could not
+help holding the French people in some sort responsible for the
+invasion of Mexico; and, though opportunity offered for cultivating the
+acquaintance of the Modenese, we did not improve it.
+
+As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and bowed to them a great
+deal, and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving
+noise as of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal
+on their balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed
+seeing them admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling.
+The father of this family was a little man of a solemn and impressive
+demeanor, who had no other occupation but to walk up and down the city
+and view its monuments, for which purpose he one day informed us he had
+left his native place in Dalmatia, after forty years' study of Venetian
+history. He further told us that this was by no means worth the time
+given it; that whereas the streets of Venice were sepulchres in point
+of narrowness and obscurity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows
+of which you might see for miles uninterruptedly! This little gentleman
+wore a black hat, in the last vivid polish of respectability, and I
+think fortune was not his friend. The hat was too large for him, as the
+hats of Italians always are; it came down to his eyes, and he carried a
+cane. Every evening he marched solemnly at the head of a procession of
+his handsome young children, who went to hear the military music in St.
+Mark's Square.
+
+The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians--we never knew their
+names--gave access also to a house in the story above them, which
+belonged to some mysterious person described on his door-plate as "Co.
+Prata." I think we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance
+some members of his family when they came back from their summer in the
+country to spend the winter in the city. Prata's "Co.," we gradually
+learnt, meant "Conte," and the little counts and countesses, his
+children, immediately on their arrival took an active part in the
+exercises of the Dalmatian cavalry. Later in the fall, certain of the
+count's vassals came to the _riva_ [Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs
+which descend to the water before palace-doors and at the ends of
+streets.] in one of the great boats of the Po, with a load of brush and
+corncobs for fuel--and this is all we ever knew of our neighbors on the
+fourth floor. As long as he remained "Co." we yearned to know who and
+what he was; being interpreted as Conte Prata, he ceased to interest us.
+
+Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little
+people, just married, came to live in Venice.
+
+They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence,
+tempering the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.
+
+The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with
+it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and "This is my wife, the
+new mistress," said the young _Paron_ [Footnote: _Padrone_ in Italian.
+A salutation with Venetian friends, and the title by which Venetian
+servants always designate their employers.] with the bashful pride
+proper to the time and place. Giovanna glowed welcome, and said, with
+adventurous politeness, she was very glad of it.
+
+"_Serva sua!_"
+
+The _Parona_, not knowing Italian, laughed in English.
+
+So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting upon the great truth that
+handsome is that handsome does, began at once to make herself a thing of
+beauty.
+
+As a measure of convenience and of deference to her feelings, we
+immediately resolved to call her G., merely, when speaking of her
+in English, instead of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with
+conjecture concerning what was said of her. And as G. thus became the
+centre around which our domestic life revolved, she must be somewhat
+particularly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. I suppose
+that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances, this would
+have been much like keeping play-house anywhere; in Venice it had, but
+for the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious property of unreality
+and impermanency. It is sufficiently bad to live in a rented house; in
+a house which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till your life
+takes root, and Home blossoms up in the alien place. For a great while
+we regarded our house merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were slow
+to form any relations which could take from our residence its temporary
+character. Had we but thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker,
+and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish ourselves at once;
+but we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us
+to our fellow-creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by housekeepers
+on a scale surprisingly small to one accustomed to wholesale American
+ways, and G., having the purse, made our little purchases in cash,
+never buying more than enough for one meal at a time. Every morning,
+the fruits and vegetables are distributed from the great market at the
+Rialto among a hundred greengrocers' stalls in all parts of the city;
+bread (which is never made at home) is found fresh at the baker's; there
+is a butcher's stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are
+therefore resorted to for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay
+in provisions there in portions graduated to a soldo of their ready
+means. A great Bostonian whom I remember to have heard speculate on the
+superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents'
+worth of beef to that in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable,
+would find the system perfected here, where you can buy half a cent's
+worth. It is a system friendly to poverty, and the small retail prices
+approximate very closely the real value of the stuff sold, as we
+sometimes proved by offering to purchase in quantity. Usually no
+reduction would be made from the retail rate, and it was sufficiently
+amusing to have the dealer figure up the cost of the quantity we
+proposed to buy, and then exhibit an exact multiplication of his retail
+rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is worth a soldo: you get no
+more than a hundred for a florin, though the dealer will cheerfully go
+under that number if he can cheat you in the count. So in most things
+we found it better to let G. do the marketing in her own small Venetian
+fashion, and "guard our strangeness."
+
+But there were some things which must be brought to the house by the
+dealers, such as water for drinking and cooking, which is drawn from
+public cisterns in the squares, and carried by stout young girls to all
+the houses. These _bigolanti_ all come from the mountains of Friuli;
+they all have rosy cheeks, white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists
+whatever (in the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The cisterns
+are opened about eight o'clock in the morning, and then their day's
+work begins with chatter, and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the
+wells; and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots off under a burden
+of two buckets,--one appended from either end of a bow resting upon the
+right shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain which
+falls on the shelving surface of the campo, and soaks through a bed of
+sea-sand around the cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante
+comes every morning and empties her brazen buckets into the great
+picturesque jars of porous earthenware which ornament Venetian kitchens;
+and the daily supply of water costs a moderate family about a florin a
+month.
+
+Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this arrives in boats. It is
+cut upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small
+coasting vessels, each of which has a plump captain in command, whose
+red face is so cunningly blended with his cap of scarlet flannel that it
+is hard on a breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other ends.
+These vessels anchor off the Custom House in the Guidecca Canal in the
+fall, and lie there all winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a
+great part of the time under the charge solely of a small yellow dog of
+the irascible breed common to the boats of the Po. Thither the smaller
+dealers in firewood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all
+parts of the city, melodiously crying their wares up and down the
+canals, and penetrating the land on foot with specimen bundles of fagots
+in their arms. They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think--their
+fancy seldom rising beyond the invention that their fagots are beautiful
+and sound and dry. But our particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted
+man. Long before I had dealings with him, I knew him by the superb song,
+or rather incantation, with which he announced his coming on the Grand
+Canal. The purport of this was merely that his bark was called the
+Beautiful Caroline, and that his fagots were fine; but he so dwelt upon
+the hidden beauties of this idea, and so prolonged their effect upon the
+mind by artful repetition, and the full, round, and resonant roar with
+which he closed his triumphal hymn, that the spirit was taken with the
+charm, and held in breathless admiration. By all odds, this woodman's
+cry was the most impressive of all the street cries of Venice. There
+may have been an exquisite sadness and sweetness in the wail of the
+chimney-sweep; a winning pathos in the voice of the vender of roast
+pumpkin; an oriental fancy and splendor in the fruiterers who cried
+"Melons with hearts of fire!" and "Juicy pears that bathe your
+beard!"--there may have been something peculiarly effective in the song
+of the chestnut-man who shouted "Fat chestnuts," and added, after a
+lapse in which you got almost beyond hearing, "and well cooked!"--I do
+not deny that there was a seductive sincerity in the proclamation of
+one whose peaches could _not_ be called beautiful to look upon, and were
+consequently advertised as "Ugly, but good!"--I say nothing to detract
+from the merits of harmonious chair-menders;--to my ears the shout
+of the melodious fisherman was delectable music, and all the birds of
+summer sang in the voices of the countrymen who sold finches and larks
+in cages, and roses and pinks in pots;--but I say, after all, none
+of these people combined the vocal power, the sonorous movement, the
+delicate grace, and the vast compass of our woodman. Yet this man, as
+far as virtue went, was _vox et praeterea nihil_. He was a vagabond of
+the most abandoned; he was habitually in drink, and I think his sins
+had gone near to make him mad--at any rate he was of a most lunatical
+deportment. In other lands, the man of whom you are a regular purchaser,
+serves you well; in Italy he conceives that his long service gives him
+the right to plunder you if possible. I felt in every fibre that this
+woodman invariably cheated me in measurement, and, indeed, he
+scarcely denied it on accusation. But my single experience of the
+more magnificent scoundrels of whom _he_ bought the wood originally,
+contented me with the swindle with which I had become familiarized. On
+this occasion I took a boat and went to the Custom House, to get my fuel
+at first hand. The captain of the ship which I boarded wished me to pay
+more than I gave for fuel delivered at my door, and thereupon ensued the
+tragic scene of bargaining, as these things are conducted in Italy. We
+stood up and bargained, we sat down and bargained; the captain turned
+his back upon me in indignation; I parted from him and took to my boat
+in scorn; he called me back and displayed the wood--good, sound, dryer
+than bones; he pointed to the threatening heavens, and declared that it
+would snow that night, and on the morrow I could not get wood for twice
+the present price; but I laughed incredulously. Then my captain took
+another tack, and tried to make the contract in obsolete currencies, in
+Austrian pounds, in Venetian pounds, but as I inexorably reduced these
+into familiar money, he paused desperately, and made me an offer which
+I accepted with mistaken exultation. For my captain was shrewder than I,
+and held arts of measurement in reserve against me. He agreed that
+the measurement and transportation should not cost me the value of his
+tooth-pick--quite an old and worthless one--which he showed me. Yet I
+was surprised into the payment of a youth whom this man called to assist
+at the measurement, and I had to give the boatman drink-money at the
+end. He promised that the measure should be just: yet if I lifted my eye
+from the work he placed the logs slantingly on the measure, and threw
+in knotty chunks that crowded wholesome fuel out, and let the daylight
+through and through the pile. I protested, and he admitted the wrong
+when I pointed it out: "_Ga razon, lu!_" (He's right!) he said to
+his fellows in infamy, and throwing aside the objectionable pieces,
+proceeded to evade justice by new artifices. When I had this memorable
+load of wood housed at home, I found that it had cost just what I paid
+my woodman, and that I had additionally lost my self-respect in being
+plundered before my face, and I resolved thereafter to be cheated
+in quiet dignity behind my back. The woodman exulted in his restored
+sovereignty, and I lost nothing in penalty for my revolt.
+
+Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice, are those
+ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed
+in baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares
+by the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their
+general stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to
+their own comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling
+ear-rings of yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning
+streets of Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of
+the country's clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great
+cream-colored cows.
+
+Fishermen, also, come down the little _calli_--with shallow baskets
+of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles and
+mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to
+bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling
+drama proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser's own
+price. "Beautiful and all alive!" is the engaging cry with which they
+hawk their fish.
+
+Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come
+to exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely,
+but glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all,
+chair-menders,--who bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a
+sign, with pieces of white wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a
+hammer, and a sheaf of rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait
+the rush bottoms of your kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant
+whittlings with their knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.
+
+But in the mean time our own serving-woman Giovanna, the great central
+principle of our housekeeping, is waiting to be personally presented to
+the company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, that it is hard
+not to believe them created just as crooked, and foul, and full of fluff
+and years as you behold them, and you cannot understand how so much
+frowziness and so little hair, so great show of fangs and so few teeth,
+are growths from any ordinary human birth. G. is no longer young, but
+she is not after the likeness of these old women. It is of a middle age,
+unbeginning, interminable, of which she gives you the impression.
+She has brown apple-cheeks, just touched with frost; her nose is of a
+strawberry formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly
+shrunken effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned.
+A tough, pleasant, indestructible woman--for use, we thought, not
+ornament--the mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower of
+serving-women.
+
+I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a class, given to
+pilfering; but knowing ourselves subject by nature to pillage, we cannot
+repress a feeling of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. She
+strictly accounts for all money given her at the close of each week, and
+to this end keeps a kind of account-book, which I cannot help regarding
+as in some sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, confirmed
+by her own confession, that G. is not good for reading and writing. On
+settling with her I have been permitted to look into this book, which is
+all in capital letters,--each the evident result of serious labor,--with
+figures representing combinations of the pot-hook according to bold
+and original conceptions. The spelling is also a remarkable effort of
+creative genius. The only difficulty under which the author labors in
+regard to the book is the confusion naturally resulting from the effort
+to get literature right side up when it has got upside down. The writing
+is a kind of pugilism--the strokes being made straight out from the
+shoulder. The account-book is always carried about with her in a
+fathomless pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a housekeeper
+who can throw nothing away, to wit: matchboxes, now appointed to hold
+buttons and hooks-and-eyes; beeswax in the lump; the door-key (which
+in Venice takes a formidable size, and impresses you at first sight as
+ordnance); a patch-bag; a porte-monnaie; many lead-pencils in the stump;
+scissors, pincushions, and the Beata Vergine in a frame. Indeed, this
+incapability of throwing things away is made to bear rather severely
+upon us in some things, such as the continual reappearance of familiar
+dishes at table--particularly veteran _bifsteca_. But we fancy that the
+same frugal instinct is exercised to our advantage and comfort in other
+things, for G. makes a great show and merit of denying our charity to
+those bold and adventurous children of sorrow, who do not scruple to
+ring your door-bell, and demand alms. It is true that with G., as
+with every Italian, almsgiving enters into the theory and practice of
+Christian life, but she will not suffer misery to abuse its privileges.
+She has no hesitation, however, in bringing certain objects of
+compassion to our notice, and she procures small services to be done for
+us by many lame and halt of her acquaintance. Having bought my boat (I
+come, in time, to be willing to sell it again for half its cost to me),
+I require a menial to clean it now and then, and Giovanna first calls
+me a youthful Gobbo for the work,--a festive hunchback, a bright-hearted
+whistler of comic opera. Whether this blithe humor is not considered
+decent, I do not know, but though the Gobbo serves me faithfully, I find
+him one day replaced by a venerable old man, whom--from his personal
+resemblance to Time--I should think much better occupied with an
+hourglass, or engaged with a scythe in mowing me and other mortals down,
+than in cleaning my boat. But all day long he sits on my riva in the
+sun, when it shines, gazing fixedly at my boat; and when the day is
+dark, he lurks about the street, accessible to my slightest boating
+impulse. He salutes my going out and coming in with grave reverence,
+and I think he has no work to do but that which G.'s wise compassion has
+given him from me. Suddenly, like the Gobbo, the Veccio also disappears,
+and I hear vaguely--for in Venice you never know any thing with
+precision--that he has found a regular employment in Padua, and again
+that he is dead. While he lasts, G. has a pleasant, even a sportive
+manner with this poor old man, calculated to cheer his declining years;
+but, as I say, cases of insolent and aggressive misery fail to touch
+her. The kind of wretchedness that comes breathing woe and _sciampagnin_
+[Footnote: Little champagne,--the name which the Venetian populace gave
+to a fierce and deadly kind of brandy drunk during the scarcity of wine.
+After the introduction of coal-oil this liquor came to be jocosely known
+as _petrolio_.] under our window, and there spends a leisure hour in the
+rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim either upon her pity or her
+weakness. She is deaf to the voice of that sorrow, and the monotonous
+whine of that dolor cannot move her to the purchase of a guilty
+tranquillity. I imagine, however, that she is afraid to deny charity to
+the fat Capuchin friar in spectacles and bare feet, who comes twice a
+month to levy contributions of bread and fuel for his convent, for
+we hear her declare from the window that the master is not at home,
+whenever the good brother rings; and at last, as this excuse gives out,
+she ceases to respond to his ring at all.
+
+Sometimes, during the summer weather, comes down our street a certain
+tremulous old troubadour with an aged cithern, on which he strums
+feebly with bones which remain to him from former fingers, and in a thin
+quivering voice pipes worn-out ditties of youth and love. Sadder music
+I have never heard, but though it has at times drawn from me the sigh of
+sensibility without referring sympathy to my pocket, I always hear the
+compassionate soldo of Giovanna clink reproof to me upon the pavement.
+Perhaps that slender note touches something finer than habitual charity
+in her middle-aged bosom, for these were songs she says that they used
+to sing when she was a girl, and Venice was gay and glad, and different
+from now--_veramente, tutt' altro, signor!_
+
+It is through Giovanna's charitable disposition that we make the
+acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle
+Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures--_creatura_
+being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being
+somewhat more pitiable than a _poveretta_. Our Creatures are both well
+stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which
+frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with
+the invalid's husband,--a mild, pleasant-faced man, a tailor by trade,
+and of batlike habits, who hovers about their dusky doorway in the
+summer twilight. These people have but one room, and a little nook of
+kitchen at the side; and not only does the sun never find his way into
+their habitation, but even the daylight cannot penetrate it. They pay
+about four florins a month for the place, and I hope their landlord is
+as happy as his tenants. For though one is sick, and all are wretchedly
+poor, they are far from being discontented. They are opulent in the
+possession of a small dog, which they have raised from the cradle, as it
+were, and adopted into the family. They are never tired of playing
+with their dog,--the poor old children,--and every slight display of
+intelligence on his part delights them. They think it fine in him to
+follow us as we go by, but pretend to beat him; and then they excuse
+him, and call him ill names, and catch him up, and hug him and kiss him.
+He feeds upon their slender means and the pickings that G. carefully
+carries him from our kitchen, and gives to him on our doorstep in spite
+of us, while she gossips with his mistresses, who chorus our appearance
+at such times with "_I miei rispetti, signori!_" We often see them in
+the street, and at a distance from home, carrying mysterious bundles of
+clothes; and at last we learn their vocation, which is one not known
+out of Italian cities, I think. There the state is Uncle to the
+hard-pressed, and instead of many pawnbrokers' shops there is one large
+municipal spout, which is called the Monte di Piet�, where the needy
+pawn their goods. The system is centuries old in Italy, but there are
+people who to this day cannot summon courage to repair in person to the
+Mount of Pity, and, to meet their wants, there has grown up a class of
+frowzy old women who transact the business for them, and receive a small
+percentage for their trouble. Our poor old Creatures were of this class,
+and as there were many persons in impoverished, decaying Venice who had
+need of the succor they procured, they made out to earn a living when
+both were well, and to eke out existence by charity when one was ill.
+They were harmless neighbors, and I believe they regretted our removal,
+when this took place, for they used to sit down under an arcade
+opposite our new house, and spend the duller intervals of trade in the
+contemplation of our windows.
+
+The alarming spirit of nepotism which Giovanna developed at a later
+day was, I fear, a growth from the encouragement we gave her charitable
+disposition. But for several months it was merely from the fact of a boy
+who came and whistled at the door until Giovanna opened it and reproved
+him in the name of all the saints and powers of darkness, that we knew
+her to be a mother; and we merely had her word for the existence of
+a husband, who dealt in poultry. Without seeing Giovanna's husband, I
+nevertheless knew him to be a man of downy exterior, wearing a canvas
+apron, thickly crusted with the gore of fowls, who sat at the door of
+his shop and plucked chickens forever, as with the tireless hand of
+Fate. I divined that he lived in an atmosphere of scalded pullet;
+that three earthen cups of clotted chickens' blood, placed upon his
+window-shelf, formed his idea of an attractive display, and that he
+shadowed forth his conceptions of the beautiful in symmetrical rows of
+plucked chickens, presenting to the public eye rear views embellished
+with a single feather erect in the tail of each bird; that he must be,
+through the ethics of competition, the sworn foe of those illogical
+peasants who bring dead poultry to town in cages, like singing birds,
+and equally the friend of those restaurateurs who furnish you a meal of
+victuals and a feather-bed in the same _mezzo-polio arrosto_. He turned
+out on actual appearance to be all I had prefigured him, with the
+additional merit of having a large red nose, a sidelong, fugitive gait,
+and a hangdog countenance. He furnished us poultry at rates slightly
+advanced, I think.
+
+As for the boy, he turned up after a while as a constant guest, and
+took possession of the kitchen. He came near banishment at one time for
+catching a large number of sea-crabs in the canal, and confining them in
+a basket in the kitchen, which they left at the dead hour of night, to
+wander all over our house,--making a mysterious and alarming sound of
+snapping, like an army of death-watches, and eluding the cunningest
+efforts at capture. On another occasion, he fell into the canal before
+our house, and terrified us by going under twice before the arrival of
+the old gondolier, who called out to him "_Petta! petta!_" (Wait!
+wait!) as he placidly pushed his boat to the spot. Developing other
+disagreeable traits, Beppi was finally driven into exile, from which he
+nevertheless furtively returned on holidays.
+
+The family of Giovanna thus gradually encroaching upon us, we came
+also to know her mother,--a dread and loathly old lady, whom we would
+willingly have seen burned at the stake for a witch. She was commonly
+encountered at nightfall in our street, where she lay in wait, as it
+were, to prey upon the fragrance of dinner drifting from the kitchen
+windows of our neighbor, the Duchess of Parma. Here was heard the voice
+of cooks and of scullions, and the ecstasies of helpless voracity in
+which we sometimes beheld this old lady were fearful to witness. Nor did
+we find her more comfortable in our own kitchen, where we often saw
+her. The place itself is weird and terrible--low ceiled, with the stone
+hearth built far out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of
+Venetian cookery dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day
+cheerfulness of cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the
+bristling embers, and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it.
+When Giovanna's mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to
+do us reverence from the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her
+good wishes for our long life, continued health, and endless happiness,
+it has the effect upon our spirits of the darkest malediction.
+
+Not more pleasing, though altogether lighter and cheerfuler, was
+Giovanna's sister-in-law, whom we knew only as the Cognata. Making her
+appearance first upon the occasion of Giovanna's sickness, she slowly
+but surely established herself as an habitual presence, and threatened
+at one time, as we fancied, to become our paid servant. But a happy
+calamity which one night carried off a carpet and the window curtains
+of an unoccupied room, cast an evil suspicion upon the Cognata, and she
+never appeared after the discovery of the theft. We suspected her of
+having invented some dishes of which we were very fond, and we hated
+her for oppressing us with a sense of many surreptitious favors.
+Objectively, she was a slim, hoopless little woman, with a tendency to
+be always at the street-door when we opened it. She had a narrow, narrow
+face, with eyes of terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a demeanor
+of slavish patronage. Our kitchen, after her addition to the household,
+became the banqueting-hall of Giovanna's family, who dined there every
+day upon dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the house the general
+savor of a low cook-shop.
+
+As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural tendency of excellent
+people to place others in subjection. Our servitude at first was
+not hard, and consisted chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to
+extraordinary efforts when G. had attempted to please us with some
+novelty in cooking. She held us to a strict account in this respect; but
+indeed our applause was for the most part willing enough. Her culinary
+execution, first revealing itself in a noble rendering of our ideas of
+roast potatoes,--a delicacy foreign to the Venetian kitchen,--culminated
+at last in the same style of _polpetti_ [Footnote: I confess a
+tenderness for this dish, which is a delicater kind of hash skillfully
+flavored and baked in rolls of a mellow complexion and fascinating
+appearance.] which furnished forth the table of our neighbor, the
+Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph with us.
+
+But G.'s spirit was not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in
+her the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a
+great babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things,
+when there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions
+of bad weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The
+crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as
+springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian
+abuse is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of
+opprobrium with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ends with the
+attribution of doggishness.) The conscription was held in the campo near
+us, and G. declared the place to have become unendurable--"_proprio un
+campo di sospiri!_" (Really a field of sighs.) "_Staga comodo!_" she
+said to a guest of ours who would have moved his chair to let her pass
+between him and the wall. "Don't move; the way to Paradise is not wider
+than this." We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did not sleep in
+the house, should come to us so late in the morning, but we could not
+deal harshly with her on that account, met, as we always were, with
+plentiful and admirable excuses. Who were we, indeed, to place our
+wishes in the balance against the welfare of the sick neighbor with whom
+Giovanna passed so many nights of vigil? Should we reproach her with
+tardiness when she had not closed the eye all night for a headache
+properly of the devil? If she came late in the morning, she stayed late
+at night; and it sometimes happened that when the Paron and Parona,
+supposing her gone, made a stealthy expedition to the kitchen for cold
+chicken, they found her there at midnight in the fell company of the
+Cognata, bibbing the wine of the country and holding a mild Italian
+revel with that vinegar and the stony bread of Venice.
+
+I have said G. was the flower of serving-women; and so at first
+she seemed, and it was long till we doubted her perfection. We knew
+ourselves to be very young, and weak, and unworthy. The Parona had the
+rare gift of learning to speak less and less Italian every day, and fell
+inevitably into subjection. The Paron in a domestic point of view was
+naturally nothing. It had been strange indeed if Giovanna, beholding the
+great contrast we presented to herself in many respects, had forborne to
+abuse her advantage over us. But we trusted her implicitly, and I hardly
+know how or when it was that we began to waver in our confidence. It is
+certain that with the lapse of time we came gradually to have breakfast
+at twelve o'clock, instead of nine, as we had originally appointed it,
+and that G. grew to consume the greater part of the day in making our
+small purchases, and to give us our belated dinners at seven o'clock.
+We protested, and temporary reforms ensued, only to be succeeded by more
+hopeless lapses; but it was not till all entreaties and threats failed
+that we began to think seriously it would be well to have done with
+Giovanna, as an unprofitable servant. I give the result, not all the
+nice causes from which it came. But the question was, How to get rid of
+a poor woman and a civil, and the mother of a family dependent in great
+part upon her labor? We solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss
+G., and we shrink a hundred times from inflicting the blow. At last,
+somewhat in the spirit of Charles Lamb's Chinaman who invented roast
+pig, and discovered that the sole method of roasting it was to burn
+down a house in order to consume the adjacent pig-sty, and thus cook
+the roaster in the flames,--we hit upon an artifice by which we could
+dispense with Giovanna, and keep an easy conscience. We had long ceased
+to dine at home, in despair; and now we resolved to take another
+house, in which there were other servants. But even then, it was a sore
+struggle to part with the flower of serving-women, who was set over the
+vacated house to put it in order after our flitting, and with whom
+the imprudent Paron settled the last account in the familiar little
+dining-room, surrounded by the depressing influences of the empty
+chambers. The place was peopled after all, though we had left it, and
+I think the tenants who come after us will be haunted by our spectres,
+crowding them on the pleasant little balcony, and sitting down with
+them at table. G. stood there, the genius of the place, and wept six
+regretful tears, each one of which drew a florin from the purse of the
+Paron. She had hoped to remain with us always while we lived in Venice;
+but now that she could no longer look to us for support, the Lord must
+take care of her. The gush of grief was transient: it relieved her,
+and she came out sunnily a moment after. The Paron went his way more
+sorrowfully, taking leave at last with the fine burst of Christian
+philosophy: "We are none of us masters of ourselves in this world, and
+cannot do what we wish. _Ma! Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!_" Yet he was
+undeniably lightened in heart. He had cut adrift from old moorings, and
+had crossed the Grand Canal. G. did not follow him, nor any of the
+long line of pensioners who used to come on certain feast-days to levy
+tribute of eggs at the old house. (The postman was among these, on
+Christmas and New Year's, and as he received eggs at every house, it was
+a problem with us, unsolved to this hour, how he carried them all,
+and what he did with them.) Not the least among the Paron's causes for
+self-gratulation was the non-appearance at his new abode of two
+local newspapers, for which in an evil hour he subscribed, which were
+delivered with unsparing regularity, and which, being never read, formed
+the keenest reproach of his imprudent outlay and his idle neglect of
+their contents.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.
+
+
+The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic
+vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some
+morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that
+there never was any such city. There our race seems to be in earnest in
+nothing. People sometimes work, but as if without any aim; they suffer,
+and you fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark,
+standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its
+innumerable pillars, is not in the least gray with time--no grayer than
+a Greek lyric.
+
+    "All has suffered a sea-change
+    Into something rich and strange,"
+
+in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its
+baptism in the sea.
+
+And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes for a little while
+forget how marvelous she is, at any moment you may be startled into
+vivid remembrance. The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and
+step by step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads
+high up to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine
+green and purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching
+their heads to look into the lofty windows,--blind long ago to their
+leafy tenderness,--while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well,
+with the beauty of the sculptor's soul wrought forever into the stone.
+Or Venice lures you in a gondola into one of her remote canals, where
+you glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under
+our work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates
+of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise, where the innumerable
+balconies are full of the Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames,
+gossiping and making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if
+the city's mood is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very
+places where you think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of
+your forgetfulness, dares a wilder beauty, and enthralls with a yet
+more unearthly and incredible enchantment. It is in the Piazza, and the
+Austrian band is playing, and the promenaders pace solemnly up and down
+to the music, and the gentle Italian loafers at Florian's brood vacantly
+over their little cups of coffee, and nothing can be more stupid; when
+suddenly every thing is changed, and a memorable tournament flashes up
+in many-glittering action upon the scene, and there upon the gallery of
+the church, before the horses of bronze, sit the Senators, bright-robed,
+and in the midst the bonneted Doge with his guest Petrarch at his side.
+Or the old Carnival, which had six months of every year to riot in,
+comes back and throngs the place with motley company,--dominoes,
+harlequins, pantaloni, illustrissimi and illustrissime, and perhaps even
+the Doge himself, who has the right of incognito when he wears a little
+mask of wax at his button-hole. Or may be the grander day revisits
+Venice when Doria has sent word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia
+that he will listen to the Senate when he has bridled the horses of
+Saint Mark,--and the whole Republic of rich and poor crowds the square,
+demanding the release of Pisani, who comes forth from his prison to
+create victory from the dust of the crumbling commonwealth.
+
+But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for
+your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay,
+what potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she
+will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal? Launched upon this
+great S have I not seen hardened travelers grow sentimental, and has not
+this prodigious sybillant, in my hearing, inspired white-haired Puritan
+ministers of the gospel to attempt to quote out of the guide-book "that
+line from Byron"? Upon my word, I have sat beside wandering editors in
+their gondolas, and witnessed the expulsion of the newspaper from
+their nature, while, lulled by the fascination of the place, they were
+powerless to take their own journals from their pockets, and instead of
+politics talked some bewildered nonsense about coming back with their
+families next summer. For myself, I must count as half-lost the year
+spent in Venice before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There
+alone can existence have the perfect local flavor. But by what witchery
+touched one's being suffers the common sea-change, till life at last
+seems to ebb and flow with the tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it
+would be idle to attempt to tell. I can only take you to our dear little
+balcony at Casa Falier, and comment not very coherently on the scene
+upon the water under us.
+
+And I am sure (since it is either in the spring or the fall) you will
+not be surprised to see, the first thing, a boat-load of those English,
+who go by from the station to their hotels, every day, in well-freighted
+gondolas. These parties of traveling Englishry are all singularly alike,
+from the "Pa'ty" traveling alone with his opera-glass and satchel, to
+the party which fills a gondola with well-cushioned English middle age,
+ruddy English youth, and substantial English baggage. We have learnt
+to know them all very well: the father and the mother sit upon the back
+seat, and their comely girls at the sides and front. These girls all
+have the honest cabbage-roses of English health upon their cheeks; they
+all wear little rowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls of hair
+tumble upon their broad English backs. They are coming from Switzerland
+and Germany, and they are going south to Rome and to Naples, and they
+always pause at Venice a few days. To-morrow we shall see them in the
+Piazza, and at Florian's, and St. Mark's, and the Ducal Palace; and the
+young ladies will cross the Bridge of Sighs, and will sentimentally feed
+the vagabond pigeons of St. Mark which loaf about the Piazza and defile
+the sculptures. But now our travelers are themselves very hungry, and
+are more anxious than Americans can understand about the table-d'h�te of
+their hotel. It is perfectly certain that if they fall into talk there
+with any of our nation, the respectable English father will remark that
+this war in America is a very sad war, and will ask to know when it will
+all end. The truth is, Americans do not like these people, and I believe
+there is no love lost on the other side. But, in many things, they
+are travelers to be honored, if not liked: they voyage through all
+countries, and without awaking fervent affection in any land through
+which they pass; but their sterling honesty and truth have made the
+English tongue a draft upon the unlimited confidence of the continental
+peoples, and French, Germans, and Italians trust and respect private
+English faith as cordially as they hate public English perfidy.
+
+They come to Venice chiefly in the autumn, and October is the month of
+the Sunsets and the English. The former are best seen from the Public
+Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind
+the domes and towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the
+Redentore. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon
+is a fine thing; for then the sun goes down into the water with a broad
+trail of bloody red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had
+dragged himself landward across the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and
+died as he reached the land. But we (upon whom the idleness of Venice
+grows daily, and from whom the Gardens, therefore, grow farther and
+farther) are commonly content to take our bit of sunset as we get
+it from our balcony, through the avenue opened by the narrow canal
+opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a little rainy,
+when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate beauty--all
+tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little palace on the
+corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the Canalazzo, and
+from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an airy balcony.
+When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that pathetic and
+angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves rich in the
+neighborhood of that part of the "Palace of Art," whereon
+
+    "The light aerial gallery, golden railed,
+    Burnt like a fringe of fire."
+
+And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in
+not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists
+are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is
+splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga.
+
+It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon
+the Grand Canal during the day. But in the hours just before the summer
+twilight the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then you may see
+whatever is left of Venetian gayety and looking down upon the groups
+in the open gondolas may witness something of the home-life of the
+Italians, who live out-of-doors.
+
+The groups do not vary a great deal one from another: inevitably the
+pale-faced papa, the fat mamma, the over-dressed handsome young girls.
+We learned to look for certain gondolas, and grew to feel a fond
+interest in a very mild young man who took the air in company and
+contrast with a ferocious bull-dog--boule-dogue he called him, I
+suppose. He was always smoking languidly, that mild young man, and I
+fancied I could read in his countenance a gentle, gentle antagonism
+to life--the proportionate Byronic misanthropy, which might arise from
+sugar and water taken instead of gin. But we really knew nothing about
+him, and our conjecture was conjecture. Officers went by in their
+brilliant uniforms, and gave the scene an alien splendor. Among these we
+enjoyed best the spectacle of an old major, or perhaps general, in
+whom the arrogance of youth had stiffened into a chill hauteur, and who
+frowned above his gray overwhelming moustache upon the passers, like
+a citadel grim with battle and age. We used to fancy, with a certain
+luxurious sense of our own safety, that one broadside from those
+fortressed eyes could blow from the water the slight pleasure-boats in
+which the young Venetian idlers were innocently disporting. But again
+this was merely conjecture. The general's glance may have had no such
+power. Indeed, the furniture of our apartment sustained no damage from
+it, even when concentrated through an opera-glass, by which means the
+brave officer at times perused our humble lodging from the balcony of
+his own over against us. He may have been no more dangerous in his way
+than two aged sisters (whom we saw every evening) were in theirs. They
+represented Beauty in its most implacable and persevering form, and
+perhaps they had one day been belles and could not forget it. They were
+very old indeed, but their dresses were new and their paint fresh, and
+as they glided by in the good-natured twilight, one had no heart to
+smile at them. We gave our smiles, and now and then our soldi, to the
+swarthy beggar, who, being short of legs, rowed up and down the canal
+in a boat, and overhauled Charity in the gondolas. He was a singular
+compromise, in his vocation and his equipment, between the mendicant
+and corsair: I fear he would not have hesitated to assume the
+pirate altogether in lonelier waters; and had I been a heavily laden
+oyster-boat returning by night through some remote and dark canal, I
+would have steered clear of that truculent-looking craft, of which the
+crew must have fought with a desperation proportioned to the lack of
+legs and the difficulty of running away, in case of defeat.
+
+About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market,
+bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the main-land; and far into
+the night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the
+boats was company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out
+again, we found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily
+happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved
+Venice, kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet
+seemed to rest.
+
+At night sometimes we saw from our balcony one of those _freschi_, which
+once formed the chief splendor of festive occasions in Venice, and are
+peculiar to the city, where alone their fine effects are possible.
+The fresco is a procession of boats with music and lights. Two immense
+barges, illumined with hundreds of paper lanterns, carry the military
+bands; the boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, and
+then the gondolas of such citizens as choose to take part in the
+display,--though since 1859 no Italian, unless a government official,
+has been seen in the procession. No gondola has less than two lanterns,
+and many have eight or ten, shedding mellow lights of blue, and red,
+and purple, over uniforms and silken robes. The soldiers of the bands
+breathe from their instruments music the most perfect and exquisite
+of its kind in the world; and as the procession takes the width of the
+Grand Canal in its magnificent course, soft crimson flushes play upon
+the old, weather-darkened palaces, and die tenderly away, giving to
+light and then to shadow the opulent sculptures of pillar, and arch, and
+spandrel, and weirdly illuminating the grim and bearded visages of stone
+that peer down from doorway and window. It is a sight more gracious and
+fairy than ever poet dreamed; and I feel that the lights and the music
+have only got into my description by name, and that you would not know
+them when you saw and heard them, from any thing I say. In other days,
+people tell you, the fresco was much more impressive than now. At
+intervals, rockets used to be sent up, and the Bengal lights, burned
+during the progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers' spectral
+shadows, giant-huge, on the palace-walls. But, for my part, I do not
+care to have the fresco other than I know it: indeed, for my own selfish
+pleasure, I should be sorry to have Venice in any way less fallen and
+forlorn than she is.
+
+Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever seen on the Grand Canal
+are the great boats of the river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from
+Chioggia, come up to the city with the swelling sea. They are built with
+a pointed stern and bow rising with the sweep of a short curve from the
+water high above the cabin roof, which is always covered with a straw
+matting. Black is not the color of the gondolas alone, but of all boats
+in Venetia; and these of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any
+one of them might be sent to take King Arthur and bear him to Avilon,
+whither I think most of them are bound. A path runs along either
+gunwale, on which the men pace as they pole the boat up the canal,--her
+great sail folded and lying with the prostrate mast upon the deck. The
+rudder is a prodigious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly kind
+enough to wear a red cap with a blue tassel, and to smoke. The other
+persons on board are no less obliging and picturesque, from the
+dark-eyed young mother who sits with her child in her arms at the
+cabin-door, to the bronze boy who figures in play at her feet with a
+small yellow dog of the race already noticed in charge of the fuel-boats
+from Dalmatia. The father of the family, whom we take to be the
+commander of the vessel, occupies himself gracefully in sitting down and
+gazing at the babe and its mother. It is an old habit of mine, formed in
+childhood from looking at rafts upon the Ohio, to attribute, with a kind
+of heart-ache, supreme earthly happiness to the navigators of lazy
+river craft; and as we glance down upon these people from our balcony,
+I choose to think them immensely contented, and try, in a feeble, tacit
+way, to make friends with so much bliss. But I am always repelled
+in these advances by the small yellow dog, who is rendered extremely
+irascible by my contemplation of the boat under his care, and who,
+ruffling his hair as a hen ruffles her feathers, never fails to bark
+furious resentment of my longing.
+
+Far different from the picture presented by this boat's progress--the
+peacefulness of which even the bad temper of the small yellow dog could
+not mar--was another scene which we witnessed upon the Grand Canal, when
+one morning we were roused from our breakfast by a wild and lamentable
+outcry. Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal opposite
+at the same time, had struck together with a violence that shook the
+boatmen to their inmost souls. One barge was laden with lime, and
+belonged to a plasterer of the city; the other was full of fuel, and
+commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival captains advanced toward the
+bows of their boats, with murderous looks,
+
+    "Con la test'alta e con rabbiosa fame,
+    S� che parea che l'aer ne temesse,"
+
+and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with hands of deathful
+challenge, while I looked on with that noble interest which the
+enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other's
+heads.
+
+But the storm burst in words.
+
+"Figure of a pig!" shrieked the Venetian, "you have ruined my boat
+forever!"
+
+"Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog!" returned the countryman, "and it
+was my right to enter the canal first."
+
+They then, after this exchange of insult, abandoned the main subject of
+dispute, and took up the quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally
+questioning the reputation of all their female relatives to the third
+and fourth cousins, they defied each other as the offspring of assassins
+and prostitutes. As the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats
+asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and forth and hurled
+opprobrium with a foamy volubility that quite left my powers of
+comprehension behind. At last the townsman, executing a _pas seul_
+of uncommon violence, stooped and picked up a bit of lime, while the
+countryman, taking shelter at the stern of his boat, there attended
+the shot. To my infinite disappointment it was not fired. The
+Venetian seemed to have touched the climax of his passion in the mere
+demonstration of hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the
+countryman the right of way. The courage of the latter rose as the
+danger passed, and as far as he could be heard, he continued to exult
+in the wildest excesses of insult: "Ah-heigh! brutal executioner!
+Ah, hideous headsman!" _Da capo._ I now know that these people never
+intended to do more than quarrel, and no doubt they parted as well
+pleased as if they had actually carried broken heads from the encounter.
+But at the time I felt affronted and trifled with by the result, for my
+disappointments arising out of the dramatic manner of the Italians had
+not yet been frequent enough to teach me to expect nothing from it.
+
+There was some compensation for me--coming, like all compensation, a
+long while after the loss--in the spectacle of a funeral procession
+on the Grand Canal, which had a singular and imposing solemnity only
+possible to the place. It was the funeral of an Austrian general, whose
+coffin, mounted on a sable catafalco, was borne upon the middle boat of
+three that moved abreast. The barges on either side bristled with the
+bayonets of soldiery, but the dead man was alone in his boat, except for
+one strange figure that stood at the head of the coffin, and rested its
+glittering hand upon the black fall of the drapery. This was a man clad
+cap-a-pie in a perfect suit of gleaming mail, with his visor down, and
+his shoulders swept by the heavy raven plumes of his helm. As at times
+he moved from side to side, and glanced upward at the old palaces, sad
+in the yellow morning light, he put out of sight, for me, every thing
+else upon the Canal, and seemed the ghost of some crusader come back to
+Venice, in wonder if this city, lying dead under the hoofs of the Croat,
+were indeed that same haughty Lady of the Sea who had once sent her
+blind old Doge to beat down the pride of an empire and disdain its
+crown.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE.
+
+
+One summer morning the mosquitoes played for me with sleep, and won. It
+was half-past four, and as it had often been my humor to see Venice at
+that hour, I got up and sallied forth for a stroll through the city.
+
+This morning walk did not lay the foundation of a habit of early rising
+in me, but I nevertheless advise people always to get up at half-past
+four, if they wish to receive the most vivid impressions, and to take
+the most absorbing interest in every thing in the world. It was with a
+feeling absolutely novel that I looked about me that morning, and
+there was a breezy freshness and clearness in my perceptions altogether
+delightful, and I fraternized so cordially with Nature that I do not
+think, if I had sat down immediately after to write out the experience,
+I should have at all patronized her, as I am afraid scribbling people
+have sometimes the custom to do. I know that my feeling of brotherhood
+in the case of two sparrows, which obliged me by hopping down from a
+garden wall at the end of Calle Falier and promenading on the pavement,
+was quite humble and sincere; and that I resented the ill-nature of a
+cat,
+
+    "Whom love kept wakeful and the muse,"
+
+and who at that hour was spitefully reviling the morn from a window
+grating. As I went by the gate of the Canonico's little garden,
+the flowers saluted me with a breath of perfume,--I think the white
+honey-suckle was first to offer me this politeness,--and the dumpy
+little statues looked far more engaging than usual.
+
+After passing the bridge, the first thing to do was to drink a cup of
+coffee at the Caff� Ponte di Ferro, where the eyebrows of the waiter
+expressed a mild surprise at my early presence. There was no one else
+in the place but an old gentleman talking thoughtfully to himself on
+the subject of two florins, while he poured his coffee into a glass of
+water, before drinking it. As I lingered a moment over my cup, I was
+reinforced by the appearance of a company of soldiers, marching to
+parade in the Campo di Marte. Their officers went at their head,
+laughing and chatting, and one of the lieutenants smoking a long pipe,
+gave me a feeling of satisfaction only comparable to that which I
+experienced shortly afterward in beholding a stoutly built small dog on
+the Ponte di San Mois�. The creature was only a few inches high, and it
+must have been through some mist of dreams yet hanging about me that
+he impressed me as having something elephantine in his manner. When I
+stooped down and patted him on the head, I felt colossal.
+
+On my way to the Piazza, I stopped in the church of Saint Mary of the
+Lily, where, in company with one other sinner, I found a relish in
+the early sacristan's deliberate manner of lighting the candles on the
+altar. Saint Mary of the Lily has a fa�ade in the taste of the declining
+Renaissance. The interior is in perfect keeping, and all is hideous,
+abominable, and abandoned. My fellow-sinner was kneeling, and repeating
+his prayers. He now and then tapped himself absent-mindedly on the
+breast and forehead, and gave a good deal of his attention to me as I
+stood at the door, hat in hand. The hour and the place invested him with
+so much interest, that I parted from him with emotion. My feelings were
+next involved by an abrupt separation from a young English East-Indian,
+whom I overheard asking the keeper of a caff� his way to the Campo di
+Marte. He was a claret-colored young fellow, tall, and wearing folds
+of white muslin around his hat. In another world I trust to know how he
+liked the parade that morning.
+
+I discovered that Piazza San Marco is every morning swept by troops
+of ragged facchini, who gossip noisily and quarrelsomely together over
+their work. Boot-blacks, also, were in attendance, and several followed
+my progress through the square, in the vague hope that I would relent
+and have my boots blacked. One peerless waiter stood alone amid the
+desert elegance of Caff� Florian, which is never shut, day or night,
+from year to year. At the Caff� of the Greeks, two individuals of the
+Greek nation were drinking coffee.
+
+I went upon the Molo, passing between the pillars of the Lion and the
+Saint, and walked freely back and forth, taking in the glory of that
+prospect of water and of vague islands breaking the silver of the
+lagoons, like those scenes cunningly wrought in apparent relief on old
+Venetian mirrors. I walked there freely, for though there were already
+many gondoliers at the station, not one took me for a foreigner or
+offered me a boat. At that hour, I was in myself so improbable, that if
+they saw me at all, I must have appeared to them as a dream. My sense
+of security was sweet, but it was false, for on going into the church
+of St. Mark, the keener eye of the sacristan detected me. He instantly
+offered to show me the Zeno Chapel; but I declined, preferring the
+church, where I found the space before the high altar filled with
+market-people come to hear the early mass. As I passed out of the
+church, I witnessed the partial awaking of a Venetian gentleman who had
+spent the night in a sitting posture, between the columns of the main
+entrance. He looked puffy, scornful, and uncomfortable, and at
+the moment of falling back to slumber, tried to smoke an unlighted
+cigarette, which he held between his lips. I found none of the shops
+open as I passed through the Merceria, and but for myself, and here and
+there a laborer going to work, the busy thoroughfare seemed deserted. In
+the mere wantonness of power, and the security of solitude, I indulged
+myself in snapping several door-latches, which gave me a pleasure as
+keen as that enjoyed in boyhood from passing a stick along the pickets
+of a fence. I was in nowise abashed to be discovered in this amusement
+by an old peasant-woman, bearing at either end of a yoke the usual
+basket with bottles of milk packed in straw.
+
+Entering Campo San Bartolomeo, I found trade already astir in that noisy
+place; the voice of cheap bargains, which by noonday swells into an
+intolerable uproar, was beginning to be heard. Having lived in Campo San
+Bartolomeo, I recognized several familiar faces there, and particularly
+noted among them that of a certain fruit-vender, who frequently swindled
+me in my small dealings with him. He now sat before his stand, and for a
+man of a fat and greasy presence, looked very fresh and brisk, and as if
+he had passed a pleasant night.
+
+On the other side of the Rialto Bridge, the market was preparing for
+the purchasers. Butchers were arranging their shops; fruit-stands, and
+stands for the sale of crockery, and--as I must say for want of a better
+word, if there is any--notions, were in a state of tasteful readiness.
+The person on the steps of the bridge who had exposed his stock of cheap
+clothing and coarse felt hats on the parapet, had so far completed his
+preparations as to have leisure to be talking himself hot and hoarse
+with the neighboring barber. He was in a perfectly good humor, and was
+merely giving a dramatic flavor to some question of six soldi.
+
+At the landings of the market-place squadrons of boats loaded with
+vegetables were arriving and unloading. Peasants were building
+cabbages into pyramids; collective squashes and cucumbers were taking a
+picturesque shape; wreaths of garlic and garlands of onions graced the
+scene. All the people were clamoring at the tops of their voices; and
+in the midst of the tumult and confusion, resting on heaps of
+cabbage-leaves and garbage, men lay on their bellies sweetly sleeping.
+Numbers of eating-houses were sending forth a savory smell, and
+everywhere were breakfasters with bowls of sguassetto. In one of the
+shops, somewhat prouder than the rest, a heated brunette was turning
+sections of eel on a gridiron, and hurriedly coqueting with the
+purchasers. Singularly calm amid all this bustle was the countenance
+of the statue called the Gobbo, as I looked at it in the centre of the
+market-place. The Gobbo (who is not a hunchback, either) was patiently
+supporting his burden, and looking with a quiet, thoughtful frown upon
+the ground, as if pondering some dream of change that had come to him
+since the statutes of the haughty Republic were read aloud to the people
+from the stone tribune on his shoulders.
+
+Indeed, it was a morning for thoughtful meditation; and as I sat at the
+feet of the four granite kings shortly after, waiting for the gate of
+the ducal palace to be opened, that I might see the girls drawing the
+water, I studied the group of the Judgment of Solomon, on the corner of
+the palace, and arrived at an entirely new interpretation of that Bible
+story, which I have now wholly forgotten.
+
+The gate remained closed too long for my patience, and I turned away
+from a scene momently losing its interest. The brilliant little shops
+opened like hollyhocks as I went home; the swelling tide of life filled
+the streets, and brought Venice back to my day-time remembrance, robbing
+her of that keen, delightful charm with which she greeted my early
+morning sense.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE MOUSE.
+
+
+Wishing to tell the story of our Mouse, because I think it illustrates
+some amusing traits of character in a certain class of Italians, I
+explain at once that he was not a mouse, but a man so called from his
+wretched, trembling little manner, his fugitive expression, and peaked
+visage.
+
+He first appeared to us on the driver's seat of that carriage in which
+we posted so splendidly one spring-time from Padua to Ponte Lagoscuro.
+But though he mounted to his place just outside the city gate, we did
+not regard him much, nor, indeed, observe what a mouse he was, until
+the driver stopped to water his horses near Battaglia, and the Mouse got
+down to stretch his forlorn little legs. Then I got down too, and bade
+him good-day, and told him it was a very hot day--for he was a mouse
+apparently so plunged in wretchedness that I doubted if he knew what
+kind of day it was.
+
+When I had spoken, he began to praise (in the wary manner of the
+Venetians when they find themselves in the company of a foreigner who
+does not look like an Englishman) the Castle of the Obiza near by, which
+is now the country-seat of the ex-Duke of Modena; and he presently said
+something to imply that he thought me a German.
+
+"But I am not a German," said I.
+
+"As many excuses," said the Mouse sadly, but with evident relief; and
+then began to talk more freely, and of the evil times.
+
+"Are you going all the way with us to Florence?" I asked.
+
+"No, signor, to Bologna; from there to Ancona."
+
+"Have you ever been in Venice? We are just coming from there."
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"It is a beautiful place. Do you like it?"
+
+"Sufficiently. But one does not enjoy himself very well there."
+
+"But I thought Venice interesting."
+
+"Sufficiently, signor. _Ma!_" said the Mouse, shrugging his shoulders,
+and putting on the air of being luxuriously fastidious in his choice of
+cities, "the water is so bad in Venice."
+
+The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter overcoat, and has no garment to
+form a compromise with his shirt-sleeves, if he should wish to render
+the weather more endurable by throwing off the surtout. In spite of his
+momentary assumption of consequence, I suspect that his coat is in the
+Monte di Piet�. It comes out directly that he is a ship-carpenter who
+has worked in the Arsenal of Venice, and at the ship-yards in Trieste.
+
+But there is no work any more. He went to Trieste lately to get a job on
+the three frigates which the Sultan had ordered to be built there. _Ma!_
+After all, the frigates are to be built in Marseilles instead. There is
+nothing. And every thing is so dear. In Venetia you spend much and gain
+little. Perhaps there is work at Ancona.
+
+By this time the horses are watered; the Mouse regains his seat, and we
+almost forget him, till he jumps from his place, just before we reach
+the hotel in Rovigo, and disappears--down the first hole in the side of
+a house, perhaps. He might have done much worse, and spent the night at
+the hotel, as we did.
+
+The next morning at four o'clock, when we start, he is on the box again,
+nibbling bread and cheese, and glancing furtively back at us to say good
+morning. He has little twinkling black eyes, just like a mouse, and a
+sharp moustache, and sharp tuft on his chin--as like Victor Emanuel's as
+a mouse's tuft can be.
+
+The cold morning air seems to shrivel him, and he crouches into a little
+gelid ball on the seat beside the driver, while we wind along the Po on
+the smooth gray road; while the twilight lifts slowly from the distances
+of field and vineyard; while the black boats of the Po, with their gaunt
+white sails, show spectrally through the mists; while the trees and the
+bushes break into innumerable voice, and the birds are glad of another
+day in Italy; while the peasant drives his mellow-eyed, dun oxen
+afield; while his wife comes in her scarlet bodice to the door, and
+the children's faces peer out from behind her skirts; while the air
+freshens, the east flushes, and the great miracle is wrought anew.
+
+Once again, before we reach the ferry of the Po, the Mouse leaps down
+and disappears as mysteriously as at Rovigo. We see him no more till we
+meet in the station on the other side of the river, where we hear him
+bargaining long and earnestly with the ticket-seller for a third-class
+passage to Bologna. He fails to get it, I think, at less than the usual
+rate, for he retires from the contest more shrunken and forlorn than
+ever, and walks up and down the station, startled at a word, shocked at
+any sudden noise.
+
+For curiosity, I ask how much he paid for crossing the river, mentioning
+the fabulous sum it had cost us.
+
+It appears that he paid sixteen soldi only. "What could they do when a
+man was in misery? I had nothing else."
+
+Even while thus betraying his poverty, the Mouse did not beg, and we
+began to respect his poverty. In a little while we pitied it, witnessing
+the manner in which he sat down on the edge of a chair, with a smile of
+meek desperation.
+
+It is a more serious case when an artisan is out of work in the Old
+World than one can understand in the New. There the struggle for bread
+is so fierce and the competition so great; and, then, a man bred to one
+trade cannot turn his hand to another as in America. Even the rudest and
+least skilled labor has more to do it than are wanted. The Italians
+are very good to the poor, but the tradesman out of work must become a
+beggar before charity can help him.
+
+We, who are poor enough to be wise, consult foolishly together
+concerning the Mouse. It blesses him that gives, and him that
+takes--this business of charity. And then, there is something
+irresistibly relishing and splendid in the consciousness of being the
+instrument of a special providence! Have I all my life admired those
+beneficent characters in novels and comedies who rescue innocence,
+succor distress, and go about pressing gold into the palm of poverty,
+and telling it to take it and be happy; and now shall I reject an
+occasion, made to my hand, for emulating them in real life?
+
+"I think I will give the Mouse five francs," I say.
+
+"Yes, certainly."
+
+"But I will be prudent," I continue. "I will not give him this money.
+I will tell him it is a loan which he may pay me back again whenever he
+can. In this way I shall relieve him now, and furnish him an incentive
+to economy."
+
+I call to the Mouse, and he runs tremulously toward me.
+
+"Have you friends in Ancona?"
+
+"No, signor."
+
+"How much money have you left?"
+
+He shows me three soldi. "Enough for a coffee."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"God knows."
+
+So I give him the five francs, and explain my little scheme of making it
+a loan, and not a gift; and then I give him my address.
+
+He does not appear to understand the scheme of the loan; but he takes
+the money, and is quite stunned by his good fortune. He thanks me
+absently, and goes and shows the piece to the guards, with a smile that
+illumines and transfigures his whole person. At Bologna, he has come
+to his senses; he loads me with blessings, he is ready to weep; he
+reverences me, he wishes me a good voyage, endless prosperity, and
+innumerable days; and takes the train for Ancona.
+
+"Ah, ah!" I congratulate myself,--"is it not a fine thing to be the
+instrument of a special providence?"
+
+It is pleasant to think of the Mouse during all that journey, and if we
+are never so tired, it rests us to say, "I wonder where the Mouse is
+by this time?" When we get home, and coldly count up our expenses, we
+rejoice in the five francs lent to the Mouse. "And I know he will pay it
+back if ever he can," I say. "That was a Mouse of integrity."
+
+Two weeks later comes a comely young woman, with a young child--a child
+strong on its legs, a child which tries to open every thing in the room,
+which wants to pull the cloth off the table, to throw itself out of
+the open window--a child of which I have never seen the peer for
+restlessness and curiosity. This young woman has been directed to call
+on me as a person likely to pay her way to Ferrara. "But who sent you?
+But, in fine, why should I pay your way to Ferrara? I have never seen
+you before."
+
+"My husband, whom you benefited on his way to Ancona, sent me. Here is
+his letter and the card you gave him."
+
+I call out to my fellow-victim,--"My dear, here is news of the Mouse!"
+
+"Don't _tell_ me he's sent you that money already!"
+
+"Not at all. He has sent me his wife and child, that I may forward them
+to him at Ferrara, out of my goodness, and the boundless prosperity
+which has followed his good wishes--I, who am a great signor in his
+eyes, and an insatiable giver of five-franc pieces--the instrument of a
+perpetual special providence. The Mouse has found work at Ferrara, and
+his wife comes here from Trieste. As for the rest, I am to send her to
+him, as I said."
+
+"You are deceived," I say solemnly to the Mouse's wife. "I am not a rich
+man. I lent your husband five francs because he had nothing. I am sorry
+but I cannot spare twenty florins to send you to Ferrara. If _one_ will
+help you?"
+
+"Thanks the same," said the young woman, who was well dressed enough;
+and blessed me, and gathered up her child, and went her way.
+
+But her blessing did not lighten my heart, depressed and troubled by
+so strange an end to my little scheme of a beneficent loan. After all,
+perhaps the Mouse may have been as keenly disappointed as myself. With
+the ineradicable idea of the Italians, that persons who speak English
+are wealthy by nature, and _tutti originali_, it was not such an absurd
+conception of the case to suppose that if I had lent him five francs
+once, I should like to do it continually. Perhaps he may yet pay back
+the loan with usury. But I doubt it. In the mean time, I am far from
+blaming the Mouse. I merely feel that there is a misunderstanding, which
+I can pardon if he can.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+CHURCHES AND PICTURES.
+
+
+One day in the gallery of the Venetian Academy a family party of the
+English, whom we had often seen from our balcony in their gondolas, were
+kind enough to pause before Titian's John the Baptist. It was attention
+that the picture could scarcely demand in strict justice, for it hangs
+at the end of a suite of smaller rooms through which visitors usually
+return from the great halls, spent with looking at much larger
+paintings. As these people stood gazing at the sublime figure of the
+Baptist,--one of the most impressive, if not the most religious,
+that the master has painted,--and the wild and singular beauty of
+the landscape made itself felt through the infinite depths of their
+respectability, the father of the family and the head of the group
+uttered approval of the painter's conception: "Quite my idea of the
+party's character," he said; and then silently and awfully led his
+domestic train away.
+
+I am so far from deriding the criticism of this honest gentleman that
+I would wish to have equal sincerity and boldness in saying what I
+thought--if I really thought any thing at all--concerning the art which
+I spent so great a share of my time at Venice in looking at. But I fear
+I should fall short of the terseness as well as the candor I applaud,
+and should presently find myself tediously rehearsing criticisms which
+I neither respect for their honesty, nor regard for their justice. It is
+the sad fortune of him who desires to arrive at full perception of the
+true and beautiful in art, to find that critics have no agreement except
+upon a few loose general principles; and that among the artists, to whom
+he turns in his despair, no two think alike concerning the same master,
+while his own little learning has made him distrust his natural likings
+and mislikings. Ruskin is undoubtedly the best guide you can have
+in your study of the Venetian painters; and after reading him, and
+suffering confusion and ignominy from his theories and egotisms, the
+exercises by which you are chastised into admission that he has taught
+you any thing cannot fail to end in a humility very favorable to your
+future as a Christian. But even in this subdued state you must distrust
+the methods by which he pretends to relate the aesthetic truths you
+perceive to certain civil and religious conditions: you scarcely
+understand how Tintoretto, who genteelly disdains (on one page) to paint
+well any person baser than a saint or senator, and with whom "exactly
+in proportion to the dignity of the character is the beauty of the
+painting,"--comes (on the next page) to paint a very "weak, mean, and
+painful" figure of Christ; and knowing a little the loose lives of the
+great Venetian painters, you must reject, with several other humorous
+postulates, the idea that good colorists are better men than bad
+colorists. Without any guide, I think, these painters may be studied and
+understood, up to a certain point, by one who lives in the atmosphere
+of their art at Venice, and who, insensibly breathing in its influence,
+acquires a feeling for it which all the critics in the world could not
+impart where the works themselves are not to be seen. I am sure that no
+one strange to the profession of artist ever received a just notion of
+any picture by reading the most accurate and faithful description of
+it: stated dimensions fail to convey ideas of size; adjectives are not
+adequate to the ideas of movement; and the names of the colors, however
+artfully and vividly introduced and repeated, cannot tell the reader
+of a painter's coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian's
+"Assumption" is like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any
+one who has seen it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning
+critic describe intelligibly the difference between the styles of
+Titian, of Tintoretto, and of Paolo Veronese,--that difference which no
+one with the slightest feeling for art can fail to discern after looking
+thrice at their works? It results from all this that I must believe
+special criticisms on art to have their small use only in the presence
+of the works they discuss. This is my sincere belief, and I could not,
+in any honesty, lumber my pages with descriptions or speculations which
+would be idle to most readers, even if I were a far wiser judge of art
+than I affect to be. As it is, doubting if I be gifted in that way at
+all, I think I may better devote myself to discussion of such things in
+Venice as can be understood by comparison with things elsewhere, and so
+rest happy in the thought that I have thrown no additional darkness on
+any of the pictures half obscured now by the religious dimness of the
+Venetian churches.
+
+Doubt, analogous to that expressed, has already made me hesitate to
+spend the reader's patience upon many well-known wonders of Venice;
+and, looking back over the preceding chapters, I find that some of the
+principal edifices of the city have scarcely got into my book even by
+name. It is possible that the reader, after all, loses nothing by this;
+but I should regret it, if it seemed ingratitude to that expression of
+the beautiful which beguiled many dull hours for me, and kept me company
+in many lonesome ones. For kindnesses of this sort, indeed, I am under
+obligations to edifices in every part of the city; and there is hardly
+a bit of sculptured stone in the Ducal Palace to which I do not owe some
+pleasant thought or harmless fancy. Yet I am shy of endeavoring in
+my gratitude to transmute the substance of the Ducal Palace into some
+substance that shall be sensible to the eyes that look on this print;
+and I forgive myself the reluctance the more readily when I remember
+how, just after reading Mr. Ruskin's description of St. Mark's Church,
+I, who had seen it every day for three years, began to have dreadful
+doubts of its existence.
+
+To be sure, this was only for a moment, and I do not think all the
+descriptive talent in the world could make me again doubt St. Mark's,
+which I remember with no less love than veneration. This church indeed
+has a beauty which touches and wins all hearts, while it appeals
+profoundly to the religious sentiment. It is as if there were a
+sheltering friendliness in its low-hovering domes and arches, which
+lures and caresses while it awes; as if here, where the meekest soul
+feels welcome and protection, the spirit oppressed with the heaviest
+load of sin might creep nearest to forgiveness, hiding the anguish of
+its repentance in the temple's dim cavernous recesses, faintly starred
+with mosaic, and twilighted by twinkling altar-lamps. Though the temple
+is enriched with incalculable value of stone and sculpture, I
+cannot remember at any time to have been struck by its mere opulence
+Preciousness of material has been sanctified to the highest uses, and
+there is such unity and justness in the solemn splendor, that wonder is
+scarcely appealed to. Even the priceless and rarely seen treasures of
+the church--such as the famous golden altarpiece, whose costly blaze
+of gems and gold was lighted in Constantinople six hundred years
+ago--failed to impress me with their pecuniary worth, though I
+
+    "Value the giddy pleasure of the eyes,"
+
+and like to marvel at precious things. The jewels of other churches are
+conspicuous and silly heaps of treasure; but St. Mark's, where every
+line of space shows delicate labor in rich material, subdues the jewels
+to their place of subordinate adornment. So, too, the magnificence
+of the Romish service seems less vainly ostentatious there. In other
+churches the ceremonies may sometimes impress you with a sense of
+their grandeur, and even spirituality, but they all need the effect of
+twilight upon them. You want a foreground of kneeling figures, and faces
+half visible through heavy bars of shadow; little lamps must tremble
+before the shrines; and in the background must rise the high altar, all
+ablaze with candles from vault to pavement, while a hidden choir pours
+music from behind, and the organ shakes the heart with its heavy tones.
+But with the daylight on its splendors even the grand function of the
+_Te Deum_ fails to awe, and wearies by its length, except in St. Mark's
+alone, which is given grace to spiritualize what elsewhere would be
+mere theatric pomp. [Footnote: The cardinal-patriarch officiates in the
+Basilica San Marco with some ceremonies which I believe are peculiar to
+the patriarchate of Venice, and which consist of an unusual number of
+robings and disrobings, and putting on and off of shoes. All this
+is performed with great gravity, and has, I suppose, some peculiar
+spiritual significance. The shoes are brought by a priest to the foot
+of the patriarchal throne, when a canon removes the profane, out-of-door
+_chaussure_, and places the sacred shoes on the patriarch's feet. A like
+ceremony replaces the patriarch's every-day gaiters, and the pious rite
+ends.] The basilica, however, is not in every thing the edifice best
+adapted to the Romish worship; for the incense, which is a main element
+of the function, is gathered and held there in choking clouds under the
+low wagon-roofs of the cross-naves.--Yet I do not know if I would
+banish incense from the formula of worship even in St. Mark's. There is
+certainly a poetic if not a religious grace in the swinging censer and
+its curling fumes; and I think the perfume, as it steals mitigated to
+your nostrils, out of the open church door, is the reverendest smell in
+the world.
+
+The music in Venetian churches is not commonly very good: the best is
+to be heard at St. Mark's, though the director of the choir always
+contrives to make so odious a slapping with his _b�ton_ as nearly
+to spoil your enjoyment. The great musical event of the year is the
+performance (immediately after the _Festa del Redentore_) of the Soldini
+Masses. These are offered for the repose of one Guiseppe Soldini of
+Verona, who, dying possessed of about a million francs, bequeathed a
+part (some six thousand francs) annually to the church of St. Mark,
+on conditions named in his will. The terms are, that during three
+successive days, every year, there shall be said for the peace of his
+soul a certain number of masses,--all to be done in the richest and
+costliest manner. In case of delinquency, the bequest passes to the
+Philharmonic Society of Milan; but the priesthood of the basilica so
+strictly regard the wishes of the deceased that they never say less
+than four masses over and above the prescribed number. [Footnote: After
+hearing these masses, curiosity led me to visit the _Casa di Ricovero_,
+in order to look at Soldini'a will, and there I had the pleasure of
+recognizing the constantly recurring fact, that beneficent humanity
+is of all countries and religions. The Casa di Ricovero is an immense
+edifice dedicated to the shelter and support of the decrepit and
+helpless of either sex, who are collected there to the number of five
+hundred. The more modern quarter was erected from a bequest by Soldini;
+and eternal provision is also made by his will for ninety of the
+inmates. The Secretary of the Casa went through all the wards and
+infirmaries with me, and everywhere I saw cleanliness and comfort (and
+such content as is possible to sickness and old age), without surprise;
+for I had before seen the Civil Hospital of Venice, and knew something
+of the perfection of Venetian charities.
+
+At last we came to the wardrobe, where the clothes of the pensioners are
+made and kept. Here we were attended by a little, slender, pallid young
+nun, who exhibited the dresses with a simple pride altogether pathetic.
+She was a woman still, poor thing, though a nun, and she could not help
+loving new clothes. They called her Madre, who would never be it except
+in name and motherly tenderness. When we had seen all, she stood a
+moment before us, and as one of the coarse woolen lappets of her cape
+had hidden it, she drew out a heavy crucifix of gold, and placed it in
+sight, with a heavenly little ostentation, over her heart. Sweet and
+beautiful vanity! An angel could have done it without harm, but she
+blushed repentance, and glided away with downcast eyes Poor little
+mother!]
+
+As there is so little in St. Mark's of the paltry or revolting character
+of modern Romanism, one would form too exalted an idea of the dignity of
+Catholic worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the sincerity
+and nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown to the Romish faith of these
+times, are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell
+upon the present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith
+honors the superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition
+in all its proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the
+Renaissance churches,--fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming
+spirit which has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of
+religion; which has made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has
+rendered the population ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its
+friendship to tyranny and its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life
+of the Church that it may sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of
+this superstition are the foolish and hideous dolls which people bow to
+in most of the Venetian temples, and of which the most abominable is in
+the church of the Carmelites. It represents the Madonna with the Child,
+elevated breast-high to the worshipers. She is crowned with tinsel and
+garlanded with paper flowers; she has a blue ribbon about her tightly
+corseted waist; and she wears an immense spreading hoop. On her painted,
+silly face of wood, with its staring eyes shadowed by a wig, is figured
+a pert smile; and people come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs
+by a chain from her girdle, and utter their prayers to her; while the
+column near which she sits is hung over with pictures celebrating the
+miracles she has performed.
+
+These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on most altars of the
+Virgin, and are no less interesting as works of art than as expressions
+of hopeless superstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is
+dressed in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited,
+is the Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and
+hopeless sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her
+interference. You behold a carriage overturned and dragged along the
+ground by frantic horses, and the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman
+in the carriage about to be dashed into millions of pieces, when the
+havoc is instantly arrested by this Madonna who breaks the clouds,
+leaving them with jagged and shattered edges, like broken panes of
+glass, and visibly holds back the fashionable lady and gentleman from
+destruction. It is the fashionable lady and gentleman who have thus
+recorded their obligation; and it is the mother, doubtless, of the
+little boy miraculously preserved from death in his fall from the
+second-floor balcony, who has gratefully caused the miracle to be
+painted and hung at the Madonna's shrine. Now and then you also find
+offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in acknowledgment of good
+crops which the Madonna has made to grow; and again you find rows of
+silver hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her intercession has
+caused to be purged. The greatest number of these, at any one shrine,
+is to be seen in the church of San Nicol� dei Tolentini, where I should
+think there were three hundred.
+
+Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna della Salute in pestilent
+times, I do not take it to be very great when the health of the city is
+good, if I may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in the church
+of her name: it is true that on the annual holiday commemorative of
+her interposition to save Venice from the plague, there is an immense
+concourse of people there; but at other times I found the masses and
+vespers slenderly attended, and I did not observe a great number of
+votive offerings in the temple,--though the great silver lamp placed
+there by the city, in memory of the Madonna's goodness during the
+visitation of the cholera in 1849, may be counted, perhaps, as
+representative of much collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb
+church, lording it over the noblest breadth of the Grand Canal; and I do
+not know what it is saves it from being as hateful to the eye as other
+temples of the Renaissance architecture. But it has certainly a fine
+effect, with its twin belltowers and single massive dome, its majestic
+breadth of steps rising from the water's edge, and the many-statued
+sculpture of its fa�ade. Strangers go there to see the splendor of its
+high altar (where the melodramatic Madonna, as the centre of a marble
+group, responds to the prayer of the operatic Venezia, and drives away
+the haggard, theatrical Pest), and the excellent Titians and the grand
+Tintoretto in the sacristy.
+
+The Salute is one of the great show-churches, like that of San Giovanni
+e Paolo, which the common poverty of imagination has decided to call the
+Venetian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many famous tombs and
+monuments. But there is only one Westminster Abbey; and I am so far a
+believer in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose that vergers
+are nowhere possible but in England. There would be nothing to say,
+after Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San
+Giovanni e Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them; I only wonder that,
+in speaking of the bad art which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he
+failed to mention the successful approach to its depraved feeling, made
+by the single figure sitting on the case of a slender shaft, at the side
+of the first altar on the right of the main entrance. I suppose this
+figure typifies Grief, but it really represents a drunken woman, whose
+drapery has fallen, as if in some vile debauch, to her waist, and
+who broods, with a horrible, heavy stupor and chopfallen vacancy, on
+something which she supports with her left hand upon her knee. It is a
+round of marble, and if you have the daring to peer under the arm of
+the debauchee, and look at it as she does, you find that it contains the
+bass-relief of a skull in bronze. Nothing more ghastly and abominable
+than the whole thing can be conceived, and it seemed to me the fit type
+of the abandoned Venice which produced it; for one even less Ruskinian
+than I might have fancied that in the sculptured countenance could be
+seen the dismay of the pleasure-wasted harlot of the sea when, from time
+to time, death confronted her amid her revels.
+
+People go into the Chapel of the Rosary here to see the painting of
+Titian, representing The Death of Peter Martyr. Behind it stands a
+painting of equal size by John Bellini,--the Madonna, Child, and Saints,
+of course,--and it is curious to study in the two pictures those points
+in which Titian excelled and fell short of his master. The treatment
+of the sky in the landscape is singularly alike in both, but where the
+greater painter has gained in breadth and freedom, he has lost in that
+indefinable charm which belonged chiefly to Bellini, and only to that
+brief age of transition, of which his genius was the fairest flower and
+ripest fruit. I have looked again and again at nearly every painting of
+note in Venice, having a foolish shame to miss a single one, and having
+also a better wish to learn something of the beautiful from them; but
+at last I must say, that, while I wondered at the greatness of some,
+and tried to wonder at the greatness of others, the only paintings which
+gave me genuine and hearty pleasure were those of Bellini, Carpaccio,
+and a few others of that school and time.
+
+Every day we used to pass through the court of the old Augustinian
+convent adjoining the church of San Stefano. It is a long time since
+the monks were driven out of their snug hold; and the convent is now
+the headquarters of the Austrian engineer corps, and the colonnade
+surrounding the court is become a public thoroughfare. On one wall of
+this court are remains--very shadowy remains indeed--of frescos painted
+by Pordenone at the period of his fiercest rivalry with Titian; and it
+is said that Pordenone, while he wrought upon the scenes of scriptural
+story here represented, wore his sword and buckler, in readiness to
+repel an attack which he feared from his competitor. The story is very
+vague, and I hunted it down in divers authorities only to find it grow
+more and more intangible and uncertain. But it gave a singular relish
+to our daily walk through the old cloister, and I added, for my own
+pleasure (and chiefly out of my own fancy, I am afraid, for I can
+nowhere localize the fable on which I built), that the rivalry between
+the painters was partly a love-jealousy, and that the disputed object of
+their passion was that fair Violante, daughter of the elder Palma, who
+is to be seen in so many pictures painted by her father, and by her
+lover, Titian. No doubt there are readers will care less for this
+idleness of mine than for the fact that the hard-headed German monk,
+Martin Luther, once said mass in the adjoining church of San Stefano,
+and lodged in the convent, on his way to Rome. The unhappy Francesco
+Carrara, last Lord of Padua, is buried in this church; but Venetians
+are chiefly interested there now by the homilies of those fervent
+preacher-monks, who deliver powerful sermons during Lent. The monks are
+gifted men, with a most earnest and graceful eloquence, and they attract
+immense audiences, like popular and eccentric ministers among ourselves.
+It is a fashion to hear them, and although the atmosphere of the
+churches in the season of Lent is raw, damp, and most uncomfortable,
+the Venetians then throng the churches where they preach. After Lent
+the sermons and church-going cease, and the sanctuaries are once more
+abandoned to the possession of the priests, droning from the altars to
+the scattered kneelers on the floor,--the foul old women and the young
+girls of the poor, the old-fashioned old gentlemen and devout ladies
+of the better class, and that singular race of poverty-stricken old men
+proper to Italian churches, who, having dabbled themselves with holy
+water, wander forlornly and aimlessly about, and seem to consort with
+the foreigners looking at the objects of interest. Lounging young
+fellows of low degree appear with their caps in their hands, long enough
+to tap themselves upon the breast and nod recognition to the high-altar;
+and lounging young fellows of high degree step in to glance at the faces
+of the pretty girls, and then vanish. The droning ends, presently,
+and the devotees disappear, the last to go being that thin old woman,
+kneeling before a shrine, with a grease-gray shawl falling from her
+head to the ground. The sacristan, in his perennial enthusiasm about
+the great picture of the church, almost treads upon her as he brings
+the strangers to see it, and she gets meekly up and begs of them in
+a whispering whimper. The sacristan gradually expels her with the
+visitors, and at one o'clock locks the door and goes home.
+
+By chance I have got a fine effect in churches at the five o'clock mass
+in the morning, when the worshipers are nearly all peasants who have
+come to market, and who are pretty sure, each one, to have a bundle
+or basket. At this hour the sacristan is heavy with sleep; he dodges
+uncertainly at the tapers as he lights and extinguishes them; and his
+manner to the congregation, as he passes through it to the altar, is
+altogether rasped and nervous. I think it is best to be one's self a
+little sleepy,--when the barefooted friar at the altar (if it is in the
+church of the Scalzi, say) has a habit of getting several centuries
+back from you, and of saying mass to the patrician ghosts from the
+tombs under your feet and there is nothing at all impossible in the
+Renaissance angels and cherubs in marble, floating and fatly tumbling
+about on the broken arches of the altars.
+
+I have sometimes been puzzled in Venice to know why churches should keep
+cats, church-mice being proverbially so poor, and so little capable of
+sustaining a cat in good condition; yet I have repeatedly found sleek
+and portly cats in the churches, where they seem to be on terms of
+perfect understanding with the priests, and to have no quarrel even with
+the little boys who assist at mass. There is, for instance, a cat in the
+sacristy of the Frari, which I have often seen in familiar association
+with the ecclesiastics there, when they came into his room to robe
+or disrobe, or warm their hands, numb with supplication, at the great
+brazier in the middle of the floor. I do not think this cat has the
+slightest interest in the lovely Madonna of Bellini which hangs in the
+sacristy; but I suspect him of dreadful knowledge concerning the tombs
+in the church. I have no doubt he has passed through the open door
+of Canova's monument, and that he sees some coherence and meaning in
+Titian's; he has been all over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro,
+and he knows whether the griffins descend from their perches at the
+midnight hour to bite the naked knees of the ragged black caryatides.
+This profound and awful animal I take to be a blood relation of the
+cat in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, who sleeps like a Christian
+during divine service, and loves a certain glorious bed on the top of a
+bench, where the sun strikes upon him through the great painted window,
+and dapples his tawny coat with lovely purples and crimsons.
+
+The church cats are apparently the friends of the sacristans, with whom
+their amity is maintained probably by entire cession of the spoils of
+visitors. In these, therefore, they seldom take any interest, merely
+opening a lazy eye now and then to wink at the sacristans as they drag
+the deluded strangers from altar to altar, with intense enjoyment of
+the absurdity, and a wicked satisfaction in the incredible stories
+rehearsed. I fancy, being Italian cats, they feel something like a
+national antipathy toward those troops of German tourists, who always
+seek the Sehensw�rdigkeiten in companies of ten or twenty,--the men
+wearing their beards, and the women their hoops and hats, to look as
+much like English people as possible; while their valet marshals them
+forward with a stream of guttural information, unbroken by a single
+punctuation point. These wise cats know the real English by their
+"Murrays;" and I think they make a shrewd guess at the nationality of us
+Americans by the speed with which we pass from one thing to another, and
+by our national ignorance of all languages but English. They must also
+hear us vaunt the superiority of our own land in unpleasant comparisons,
+and I do not think they believe us, or like us, for our boastings. I
+am sure they would say to us, if they could, "_Quando finir� mai quella
+guerra? Che sangue! che orrore_!" [Footnote: "When will this war ever be
+ended? what blood! what horror!" I have often heard the question and the
+comment from many Italians who were not cats.] The French tourist they
+distinguish by his evident skepticism concerning his own wisdom in
+quitting Paris for the present purpose; and the traveling Italian, by
+his attention to his badly dressed, handsome wife, with whom he is now
+making his wedding trip.
+
+I have found churches undergoing repairs (as most of them always are in
+Venice) rather interesting. Under these circumstances, the sacristan is
+obliged to take you into all sorts of secret places and odd corners,
+to show you the objects of interest; and you may often get glimpses of
+pictures which, if not removed from their proper places, it would be
+impossible to see. The carpenters and masons work most deliberately, as
+if in a place so set against progress that speedy workmanship would be
+a kind of impiety. Besides the mechanics, there are always idle priests
+standing about, and vagabond boys clambering over the scaffolding.
+In San Giovanni e Paolo I remember we one day saw a small boy appear
+through an opening in the roof, and descend by means of some hundred
+feet of dangling rope. The spectacle, which made us ache with fear,
+delighted his companions so much that their applause was scarcely
+subdued by the sacred character of the place. As soon as he reached the
+ground in safety, a gentle, good-natured looking priest took him by the
+arm and cuffed his ears. It was a scene for a painter.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS.
+
+
+Nothing can be fairer to the eye than these "summer isles of Eden" lying
+all about Venice, far and near. The water forever trembles and changes,
+with every change of light, from one rainbow glory to another, as with
+the restless hues of an opal; and even when the splendid tides recede,
+and go down with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the
+empurpled mud of the shallows, all strewn with green, disheveled
+sea-weed. The lagoons have almost as wide a bound as your vision. On the
+east and west you can see their borders of sea-shore and main-land; but
+looking north and south, there seems no end to the charm of their vast,
+smooth, all-but melancholy expanses. Beyond their southern limit rise
+the blue Euganean Hills, where Petrarch died; on the north loom
+the Alps, white with snow. Dotting the stretches of lagoon in every
+direction lie the islands--now piles of airy architecture that the water
+seems to float under and bear upon its breast, now
+
+    "Sunny spots of greenery,"
+
+with the bell-towers of demolished cloisters shadowily showing above
+their trees;--for in the days of the Republic nearly every one of the
+islands had its monastery and its church. At present the greater
+number have been fortified by the Austrians, whose sentinel paces the
+once-peaceful shores, and challenges all passers with his sharp "_Halt!
+Wer da_!" and warns them not to approach too closely. Other islands have
+been devoted to different utilitarian purposes, and few are able to keep
+their distant promises of loveliness. One of the more faithful is the
+island of San Clemente, on which the old convent church is yet standing,
+empty and forlorn within, but without all draped in glossy ivy. After
+I had learned to row in the gondolier fashion, I voyaged much in the
+lagoon with my boat, and often stopped at this church. It has a curious
+feature in the chapel of the Madonna di Loreto, which is built in the
+middle of the nave, faced with marble, roofed, and isolated from the
+walls of the main edifice on all sides. On the back of this there is
+a bass-relief in bronze, representing the Nativity--a work much in
+the spirit of the bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo; and one of
+the chapels has an exquisite little altar, with gleaming columns of
+porphyry. There has been no service in the church for many years;
+and this altar had a strangely pathetic effect, won from the black
+four-cornered cap of a priest that lay before it, like an offering. I
+wondered who the priest was that wore it, and why he had left it there,
+as if he had fled away in haste. I might have thought it looked like the
+signal of the abdication of a system; the gondolier who was with me took
+it up and reviled it as representative of _birbanti matricolati_, who
+fed upon the poor, and in whose expulsion from that island he rejoiced.
+But he had little reason to do so, since the last use of the place was
+for the imprisonment of refractory ecclesiastics. Some of the tombs
+of the Morosini are in San Clemente--villanous monuments, with bronze
+Deaths popping out of apertures, and holding marble scrolls inscribed
+with undying deeds. Indeed, nearly all the decorations of the poor old
+church are horrible, and there is one statue in it meant for an angel,
+with absolutely the most lascivious face I ever saw in marble.
+
+The islands near Venice are all small, except the Giudecca (which is
+properly a part of the city), the Lido, and Murano. The Giudecca,
+from being anciently the bounds in which certain factious nobles were
+confined, was later laid out in pleasure-gardens, and built up with
+summer-palaces. The gardens still remain to some extent; but they are
+now chiefly turned to practical account in raising vegetables and
+fruits for the Venetian market, and the palaces have been converted into
+warehouses and factories. This island produces a variety of beggar, the
+most truculent and tenacious in all Venice, and it has a convent of lazy
+Capuchin friars, who are likewise beggars. To them belongs the church of
+the Redentore, which only the Madonnas of Bellini in the sacristy make
+worthy to be seen,--though the island is hardly less famed for this
+church than for the difficult etymology of its name.
+
+At the eastern extremity of the Giudecca lies the Island of San Giorgio
+Maggiore, with Palladio's church of that name. There are some great
+Tintorettos in the church, and I like the beautiful wood-carvings in
+the choir. The island has a sad interest from the political prison into
+which part of the old convent has been perverted; and the next island
+eastward is the scarcely sadder abode of the mad. Then comes the fair
+and happy seat of Armenian learning and piety, San Lazzaro, and then the
+Lido.
+
+The Lido is the sea-shore, and thither in more cheerful days the
+Venetians used to resort in great numbers on certain holidays, called
+the Mondays of the Lido, to enjoy the sea-breeze and the country
+scenery, and to lunch upon the flat tombs of the Hebrews, buried there
+in exile from the consecrated Christian ground. On a summer's day there
+the sun glares down upon the sand and flat gravestones, and it seems
+the most desolate place where one's bones might be laid. The Protestants
+were once also interred on the Lido, but now they rest (apart from the
+Catholics, however) in the cemetery of San Michele.
+
+The island is long and narrow: it stretches between the lagoons and the
+sea, with a village at either end, and with bath-houses on the beach,
+which is everywhere faced with forts. There are some poor little trees
+there, and grass,--things which we were thrice a week grateful for, when
+we went thither to bathe. I do not know whether it will give the place
+further interest to say, that it was among the tombs of the Hebrews
+Cooper's ingenious Bravo had the incredible good luck to hide himself
+from the _sbirri_ of the Republic; or to relate that it was the habit of
+Lord Byron to gallop up and down the Lido in search of that conspicuous
+solitude of which the sincere bard was fond.
+
+One day of the first summer I spent in Venice (three years of Venetian
+life afterward removed it back into times of the remotest antiquity), a
+friend and I had the now-incredible enterprise to walk from one end of
+the Lido to the other,--from the port of San Nicol� (through which the
+Bucintoro passed when the Doges went to espouse the Adriatic) to the
+port of Malamocco, at the southern extremity.
+
+We began with that delicious bath which you may have in the Adriatic,
+where the light surf breaks with a pensive cadence on the soft sand, all
+strewn with brilliant shells. The Adriatic is the bluest water I have
+ever seen; and it is an ineffable, lazy delight to lie and watch the
+fishing sails of purple and yellow dotting its surface, and the greater
+ships dipping down its utmost rim. It was particularly good to do this
+after coming out of the water; but our American blood could not brook
+much repose, and we got up presently, and started on our walk to the
+little village of Malamocco, some three miles away. The double-headed
+eagle keeps watch and ward from a continuous line of forts along the
+shore, and the white-coated sentinels never cease to pace the bastions,
+night or day. Their vision of the sea must not be interrupted by even so
+much as the form of a stray passer; and as we went by the forts, we had
+to descend from the sea-wall, and walk under it, until we got beyond the
+sentry's beat. The crimson poppies grow everywhere on this sandy little
+isle, and they fringe the edges of the bastions with their bloom, as
+if the "blood-red blossoms of war" had there sprung from the seeds of
+battle sown in old forgotten fights. But otherwise the forts were not
+very engaging in appearance. A sentry-box of yellow and black, a sentry,
+a row of seaward frowning cannon--there was not much in all this to
+interest us; and so we walked idly along, and looked either to the city
+rising from the lagoons on one hand, or the ships going down the sea on
+the other. In the fields, along the road, were vines and Indian corn;
+but instead of those effigies of humanity, doubly fearful from their
+wide unlikeness to any thing human, which we contrive to scare away
+the birds, the devout peasant-folks had here displayed on poles the
+instruments of the Passion of the Lord--the hammer, the cords, the
+nails--which at once protected and blessed the fields. But I doubt if
+even these would save them from the New-World pigs, and certainly the
+fences here would not turn pork, for they are made of a matting of
+reeds, woven together, and feebly secured to tremulous posts. The
+fields were well cultivated, and the vines and garden vegetables looked
+flourishing; but the corn was spindling, and had, I thought, a homesick
+look, as if it dreamed vainly of wide ancestral bottom-lands, on
+the mighty streams that run through the heart of the Great West. The
+Italians call our corn _gran turco_, but I knew that it was for the West
+that it yearned, and not for the East.
+
+No doubt there were once finer dwellings than the peasants' houses which
+are now the only habitations on the Lido; and I suspect that a genteel
+villa must formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we found
+surmounted by broken statues of Venus and Diana. The poor goddesses were
+both headless, and some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and
+they looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering attitudes of the absurd
+period of art to which they belonged: they extended their mutilated arms
+toward the sea for pity, but it regarded them not; and we passed before
+them scoffing at their bad taste, for we were hungry, and it was yet
+some distance to Malamocco.
+
+This dirty little village was the capital of the Venetian islands before
+King Pepin and his Franks burned it, and the shifting sands of empire
+gathered solidly about the Rialto in Venice. It is a thousand years
+since that time, and Malamocco has long been given over to fishermen's
+families and the soldiers of the forts. We found the latter lounging
+about the unwholesome streets; and the former seated at their
+thresholds, engaged in those pursuits of the chase which the use of a
+fine-tooth comb would undignify to mere slaughter.
+
+There is a church at Malamocco, but it was closed, and we could not find
+the sacristan; so we went to the little restaurant, as the next best
+place, and demanded something to eat. What had the padrone? He answered
+pretty much to the same effect as the innkeeper in "Don Quixote," who
+told his guests that they could have any thing that walked on the earth,
+or swam in the sea, or flew in the air. We would take, then, some fish,
+or a bit of veal, or some mutton chops. The padrone sweetly shrugged the
+shoulders of apology. There was nothing of all this, but what would we
+say to some liver or gizzards of chickens, fried upon the instant and
+ready the next breath? No, we did not want them; so we compromised on
+some ham fried in a batter of eggs, and reeking with its own fatness.
+The truth is, it was a very bad little lunch we made, and nothing
+redeemed it but the amiability of the smiling padrone and the bustling
+padrona, who served us as kings and princes. It was a clean hostelry,
+though, and that was a merit in Malamocco, of which the chief modern
+virtue is that it cannot hold you long. No doubt it was more interesting
+in other times. In the days when the Venetians chose it for their
+capital, it was a walled town, and fortified with towers. It has been
+more than once inundated by the sea, and it might again be washed out
+with advantage.
+
+In the spring, two years after my visit to Malamocco, we people in Casa
+Falier made a long-intended expedition to the island of Torcello, which
+is perhaps the most interesting of the islands of the lagoons. We had
+talked of it all winter, and had acquired enough property there to put
+up some light Spanish castles on the desolate site of the ancient city,
+that, so many years ago, sickened of the swamp air and died. A Count
+from Torcello is the title which Venetian persiflage gives to improbable
+noblemen; and thus even the pride of the dead Republic of Torcello has
+passed into matter of scornful jest, as that of the dead Republic of
+Venice may likewise in its day.
+
+When we leave the riva of Casa Falier, we pass down the Grand Canal,
+cross the Basin of St. Mark, and enter one of the narrow canals
+that intersect the Riva degli Schiavoni, whence we wind and deviate
+southwestward till we emerge near the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on
+the Fondamenta Nuove. On our way we notice that a tree, hanging over the
+water from a little garden, is in full leaf, and at Murano we see the
+tender bloom of peaches and the drifted blossom of cherry-trees.
+
+As we go by the Cemetery of San Michele, Piero the gondolier and
+Giovanna improve us with a little solemn pleasantry.
+
+"It is a small place," says Piero, "but there is room enough for all
+Venice in it."
+
+"It is true," assents Giovanna, "and here we poor folks become
+landholders at last."
+
+At Murano we stop a moment to look at the old Duomo, and to enjoy its
+quaint mosaics within, and the fine and graceful spirit of the _apsis_
+without. It is very old, this architecture; but the eternal youth of the
+beautiful belongs to it, and there is scarce a stone fallen from it that
+I would replace.
+
+The manufacture of glass at Murano, of which the origin is so remote,
+may be said to form the only branch of industry which still flourishes
+in the lagoons. Muranese beads are exported to all quarters in vast
+quantities, and the process of making them is one of the things that
+strangers feel they must see when visiting Venice. The famous mirrors
+are no longer made, and the glass has deteriorated in quality, as well
+as in the beauty of the thousand curious forms it took. The test of the
+old glass, which is now imitated a great deal, is its extreme lightness.
+I suppose the charming notion that glass was once wrought at Murano of
+such fineness that it burst into fragments if poison were poured into
+it, must be fabulous. And yet it would have been an excellent thing in
+the good old toxicological days of Italy; and people of noble family
+would have found a sensitive goblet of this sort as sovereign against
+the arts of venomers as an exclusive diet of boiled eggs. The city of
+Murano has dwindled from thirty to five thousand in population. It is
+intersected by a system of canals like Venice, and has a Grand Canal of
+its own, of as stately breadth as that of the capital. The finer houses
+are built on this canal; but the beautiful palaces, once occupied in
+_villeggiatura_ by the noble Venetians, are now inhabited by herds of
+poor, or converted into glass-works. The famous Cardinal Bembo and other
+literati made the island their retreat, and beautified it with gardens
+and fountains. Casa Priuli in that day was, according to Venetian ideas,
+"a terrestrial Paradise," and a proper haunt of "nymphs and demi-gods."
+But the wealth, the learning, and the elegance of former times, which
+planted "groves of Academe" at Murano, have passed away, and the fair
+pleasure-gardens are now weed-grown wastes, or turned into honest
+cabbage and potato patches. It is a poor, dreary little town, with an
+inexplicable charm in its decay. The city arms are still displayed upon
+the public buildings (for Murano was ruled, independently of Venice, by
+its own council); and the heraldic cock, with a snake in its beak, has
+yet a lusty and haughty air amid the ruin of the place.
+
+The way in which the spring made itself felt upon the lagoon was full of
+curious delight. It was not so early in the season that we should know
+the spring by the first raw warmth in the air, and there was as yet
+no assurance of her presence in the growth--later so luxuriant--of the
+coarse grasses of the shallows. But somehow the spring was there, giving
+us new life with every breath. There were fewer gulls than usual, and
+those we saw sailed far overhead, debating departure. There was deeper
+languor in the laziness of the soldiers of finance, as they lounged and
+slept upon their floating custom houses in every channel of the lagoons;
+and the hollow voices of the boatmen, yelling to each other as their
+wont is, had an uncommon tendency to diffuse themselves in echo. Over
+all, the heavens had put on their summer blue, in promise of that
+delicious weather which in the lagoons lasts half the year, and which
+makes every other climate seem niggard of sunshine and azure skies.
+I know we have beautiful days at home--days of which the sumptuous
+splendor used to take my memory with unspeakable longing and regret even
+in Italy;--but we do not have, week after week, month after month, that
+
+    "Blue, unclouded weather,"
+
+which, at Venice, contents all your senses, and makes you exult to be
+alive with the inarticulate gladness of children, or of the swallows
+that there all day wheel and dart through the air, and shriek out a
+delight too intense and precipitate for song.
+
+The island of Torcello is some five miles away from Venice, in the
+northern lagoon. The city was founded far back in the troubled morning
+of Christian civilization, by refugees from barbarian invasion, and
+built with stones quarried from the ruins of old Altinum, over which
+Attila had passed desolating. During the first ages of its existence
+Torcello enjoyed the doubtful advantage of protection from the Greek
+emperors, but fell afterward under the domination of Venice. In the
+thirteenth century the _debris_ of the river that emptied into the
+lagoon there began to choke up the wholesome salt canals, and to poison
+the air with swampy malaria; and in the seventeenth century the city had
+so dwindled that the Venetian _podest�_ removed his residence from
+the depopulated island to Burano,--though the bishopric established
+immediately after the settlement of the refugees at Torcello continued
+there till 1814, to the satisfaction, no doubt, of the frogs and
+mosquitoes that had long inherited the former citizens.
+
+I confess that I know little more of the history of Torcello than I
+found in my guide-book. There I read that the city had once stately
+civic and religious edifices, and that in the tenth century the Emperor
+Porphorygenitus called it "_magnum emporium Torcellanorum_." The
+much-restored cathedral of the seventh century, a little church, a
+building supposed to have been the public palace, and other edifices so
+ruinous and so old that their exact use in other days is not now known,
+are all that remain of the _magnum emporium_, except some lines of
+moldering wall that wander along the canals, and through pastures and
+vineyards, in the last imbecile stages of dilapidation and decay. There
+is a lofty bell-tower, also, from which, no doubt, the Torcellani
+used to descry afar off the devouring hordes of the barbarians on the
+main-land, and prepare for defense. As their city was never actually
+invaded, I am at a loss to account for the so-called Throne of Attila,
+which stands in the grass-grown piazza before the cathedral; and I fear
+that it may really have been after all only the seat which the ancient
+Tribunes of Torcello occupied on public occasions. It is a stone
+arm-chair, of a rude stateliness, and though I questioned its
+authenticity, I went and sat down in it a little while, to give myself
+the benefit of a doubt in case Attila had really pressed the same seat.
+
+As soon as our gondola touched the grassy shores at Torcello, Giovanna's
+children, Beppi and Nina, whom we had brought with us to give a first
+experience of trees and flowers and mother earth, leaped from the boat
+and took possession of land and water. By a curious fatality the little
+girl, who was bred safely amid the hundred canals of Venice, signalized
+her absence from their perils by presently falling into the only
+canal in Torcello, whence she was taken dripping, to be confined at
+a farm-house during the rest of our stay. The children were wild with
+pleasure, being absolutely new to the country, and ran over the island,
+plucking bouquets of weeds and flowers by armsful. A rake, borne afield
+upon the shoulder of a peasant, afterwhile fascinated the Venetian
+Beppi, and drew him away to study its strange and wonderful uses.
+
+The simple inhabitants of Torcello came forth with gifts, or rather
+bargains, of flowers, to meet their discoverers, and, in a little while,
+exhausted our soldi. They also attended us in full force when we sat
+down to lunch,--the old, the young men and maidens, and the little
+children, all alike sallow, tattered, and dirty. Under these
+circumstances, a sense of the idyllic and the patriarchal gave zest to
+our collation, and moved us to bestow, in a splendid manner, fragments
+of the feast among the poor Torcellani. Knowing the abstemiousness
+of Italians everywhere, and seeing the hungry fashion in which the
+islanders clutched our gifts and devoured them, it was our doubt whether
+any one of them had ever experienced perfect repletion. I incline to
+think that a chronic famine gnawed their entrails, and that they never
+filled their bellies but with draughts of the east wind disdained of
+Job. The smaller among them even scrambled with the dog for the bones,
+until a little girl was bitten, when a terrific tumult arose, and the
+dog was driven home by the whole multitude. The children presently
+returned. They all had that gift of beauty which Nature seldom denies to
+the children of their race; but being, as I said, so dirty, their
+beauty shone forth chiefly from their large soft eyes. They had a very
+graceful, bashful archness of manner, and they insinuated beggary so
+winningly, that it would have been impossible for hungry people to deny
+them. As for us, having lunched, we gave them every thing that remained,
+and went off to feast our enthusiasm for art and antiquity in the
+cathedral.
+
+Of course, I have not the least intention of describing it. I remember
+best among its wonders the bearing of certain impenitents in one of
+the mosaics on the walls, whom the earnest early artist had meant to
+represent as suffering in the flames of torment. I think, however, I
+have never seen complacence equal to that of these sinners, unless it
+was in the countenances of the seven fat kine, which, as represented in
+the vestibule of St. Mark's, wear an air of the sleepiest and laziest
+enjoyment, while the seven lean kine, having just come up from the
+river, devour steaks from their bleeding haunches. There are other
+mosaics in the Torcello cathedral, especially those in the _apsis_ and
+in one of the side chapels, which are in a beautiful spirit of art, and
+form the widest possible contrast to the eighteenth-century high altar,
+with its insane and ribald angels flying off at the sides, and poising
+themselves in the rope-dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly
+persons in the decline of the Renaissance. The choir is peculiarly
+built, in the form of a half-circle, with seats rising one above
+another, as in an amphitheatre, and a flight of steps ascending to the
+bishop's seat above all,--after the manner of the earliest Christian
+churches. The partition parapet before the high altar is of almost
+transparent marble, delicately and quaintly sculptured with peacocks and
+lions, as the Byzantines loved to carve them; and the capitals of the
+columns dividing the naves are of infinite richness. Part of the marble
+pulpit has a curious bass-relief, said to be representative of the
+worship of Mercury; and indeed the Torcellani owe much of the beauty of
+their Duomo to unrequited antiquity. (They came to be robbed in their
+turn: for the opulence of their churches was so great that in the
+fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the severest penalties had to be
+enacted against those who stole from them. No one will be surprised to
+learn that the clergy themselves participated in these spoliations; but
+I believe no ecclesiastic was ever lashed in the piazza, or deprived of
+an eye or a hand for his offense.) The Duomo has the peculiar Catholic
+interest, and the horrible fascination, of a dead saint's mortal part in
+a glass case.
+
+An arcade runs along the facade of the cathedral, and around the side
+and front of the adjoining church of Santa Fosca, which is likewise very
+old. But we found nothing in it but a dusty, cadaverous stench, and so
+we came away and ascended the campanile. From the top of this you have
+a view of the lagoon, in all its iridescent hues, and of the heaven-blue
+sea. Here, looking toward the main-land, I would have been glad to
+experience the feelings of the Torcellani of old, as they descried the
+smoking advance of Huns or Vandals. But the finer emotions are like
+gifted children, and are seldom equal to occasions. I am ashamed to say
+that mine got no further than Castle Bluebeard, with Lady Bluebeard's
+sister looking out for her brothers, and tearfully responding to Lady
+B.'s repeated and agonized entreaty, "O sister, do you see them yet?"
+
+The old woman who had opened the door of the campanile was surprised
+into hospitality by the sum of money we gave her, and took us through
+her house (which was certainly very neat and clean) into her garden,
+where she explained the nature of many familiar trees and shrubs to us
+poor Venetians.
+
+We went back home over the twilight lagoon, and Giovanna expressed the
+general feeling when she said: "_Torsello xe beo--no si pol negar--la
+campagna xe bea; ma, benedetta la mia Venezia!_"
+
+(The country is beautiful--it can't be denied--Torcello is beautiful;
+but blessed be my Venice!)
+
+The panorama of the southern lagoon is best seen in a voyage to
+Chioggia, or Ciozza, the quaint and historic little city that lies
+twenty miles away from Venice, at one of the ports of the harbor. The
+Giant Sea-wall, built there by the Republic in her decline, is a work of
+Roman grandeur, which impresses you more deeply than any other monument
+of the past with a sense of her former industrial and commercial
+greatness. Strips of village border the narrow Littorale all the way
+to Chioggia, and on the right lie the islands of the lagoon. Chioggia
+itself is hardly more than a village,--a Venice in miniature, like
+Murano, with canals and boats and bridges. But here the character of
+life is more amphibious than in brine-bound Venice; and though there is
+no horse to be seen in the central streets of Chioggia, peasants' teams
+penetrate her borders by means of a long bridge from the main-land.
+
+Of course Chioggia has passed through the customary vicissitudes of
+Italian towns, and has been depopulated at divers times by pestilence,
+famine, and war. It suffered cruelly in the war with the Genoese in
+1380, when it was taken by those enemies of St. Mark; and its people
+were so wasted by the struggle that the Venetians, on regaining it, were
+obliged to invite immigration to repopulate its emptiness. I do not know
+how great comfort the Chiozzotti of that unhappy day took in the fact
+that some of the earliest experiments with cannon were made in the
+contest that destroyed them, but I can hardly offer them less tribute
+than to mention it here. At present the place is peopled almost entirely
+by sailors and fishermen, whose wives are more famous for their beauty
+than their amiability. Goldoni's "Baruffe Chiozzotte" is an amusing and
+vivid picture of the daily battles which the high-spirited ladies of
+the city fought in the dramatist's [Footnote: Goldoni's family went from
+Venice to Chioggia when the dramatist was very young. The description
+of his life there form some of the most interesting chapters of his
+Memoirs.] time, and which are said to be of frequent occurrence at this
+day. The Chiozzotte are the only women of this part of Italy who still
+preserve a semblance of national costume; and this remnant of more
+picturesque times consists merely of a skirt of white, which, being open
+in front, is drawn from the waist over the head and gathered in the hand
+under the chin, giving to the flashing black eyes and swarthy features
+of the youthful wearer a look of very dangerous slyness and cunning.
+The dialect of the Chiozzotti is said to be that of the early Venetians,
+with an admixture of Greek, and it is infinitely more sweet and musical
+than the dialect now spoken in Venice. "Whether derived," says the
+author of the "Fiore di Venezia," alluding to the speech of these
+peculiar people, "from those who first settled these shores, or
+resulting from other physical and moral causes, it is certain that the
+tone of the voice is here more varied and powerful: the mouth is thrown
+wide open in speaking; a passion, a lament mingles with laughter itself,
+and there is a continual _ritornello_ of words previously spoken. But
+this speech is full of energy; whoever would study brief and strong
+modes of expression should come here."
+
+Chioggia was once the residence of noble and distinguished persons,
+among whom was the painter Rosalba Carrera, famed throughout Europe for
+her crayon miniatures; and the place produced in the sixteenth century
+the great maestro Giuseppe Zarlino, "who passes," says Cant�, "for the
+restorer of modern music," and "whose 'Orfeo' heralded the invention
+of the musical drama." This composer claimed for his birthplace the
+doubtful honor of the institution of the order of the Capuchins, which
+he declared to have been founded by Fra Paolo (Giovanni Sambi) of
+Chioggia. There is not much now to see in poor little Chioggia except
+its common people, who, after a few minutes' contemplation, can hardly
+interest any one but the artist. There are no dwellings in the town
+which approach palatial grandeur, and nothing in the Renaissance
+churches to claim attention, unless it be an attributive Bellini in
+one of them. Yet if you have the courage to climb the bell-tower of
+the cathedral, you get from its summit the loveliest imaginable view of
+many-purpled lagoon and silver-flashing sea; and if you are sufficiently
+acquainted with Italy and Italians to observe a curious fact, and care
+to study the subject, you may note the great difference between the
+inhabitants of Chioggia and those of Palestrina,--an island divided from
+Chioggia by a half mile of lagoon, and by quite different costume, type
+of face, and accent.
+
+Just between Chioggia and the sea lies the lazy town of Sottomarina, and
+I should say that the population of Sottomarina chiefly spent its time
+in lounging up and down the Sea-wall; while that of Chioggia, when not
+professionally engaged with the net, gave its leisure to playing _mora_
+[Footnote: Mora is the game which the Italians play with their fingers,
+one throwing out two, three, or four fingers, as the case may be, and
+calling the number at the same instant. If (so I understood the game)
+the player mistakes the number of fingers he throws out, he loses; if he
+hits the number with both voice and fingers he wins. It is played with
+tempestuous interest, and is altogether fiendish in appearance.] in the
+shade, or pitilessly pursuing strangers, and offering them boats. For my
+own part, I refused the subtlest advances of this kind which were made
+me in Chiozzotto, but fell a helpless prey to a boatman who addressed me
+in some words of wonderful English, and then rowed me to the Sea-wall at
+about thrice the usual fare.
+
+These primitive people are bent, in their out-of-the-world, remote way,
+upon fleecing the passing stranger quite as earnestly as other Italians,
+and they na�vely improve every occasion for plunder. As we passed up the
+shady side of their wide street, we came upon a plump little blond boy,
+lying asleep on the stones, with his head upon his arm; and as no
+one was near, the artist of our party stopped to sketch the sleeper.
+Atmospheric knowledge of the fact spread rapidly, and in a few minutes
+we were the centre of a general assembly of the people of Chioggia,
+who discussed us, and the artist's treatment of her subject, in open
+congress. They handed round the airy chaff as usual, but were very
+orderly and respectful, nevertheless,--one father of the place quelling
+every tendency to tumult by kicking his next neighbor, who passed on the
+penalty till, by this simple and ingenious process, the guilty cause of
+the trouble was infallibly reached and kicked at last. I placed a number
+of soldi in the boy's hand, to the visible sensation of the crowd, and
+then we moved away and left him, heading, as we went, a procession of
+Chiozzotti, who could not make up their minds to relinquish us till
+we took refuge in a church. When we came out the procession had
+disappeared, but all round the church door, and picturesquely scattered
+upon the pavement in every direction, lay boys asleep, with their
+heads upon their arms. As we passed laughing through the midst of these
+slumberers, they rose and followed us with cries of "_Mi tiri zu! Mi
+tiri zu!_" (Take me down! Take me down!) They ran ahead, and fell asleep
+again in our path, and round every corner we came upon a sleeping boy;
+and, indeed, we never got out of that atmosphere of slumber till we
+returned to the steamer for Venice, when Chioggia shook off her drowsy
+stupor, and began to tempt us to throw soldi into the water, to be dived
+for by her awakened children.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE ARMENIANS.
+
+
+Among the pleasantest friends we made in Venice were the monks of the
+Armenian Convent, whose cloistral buildings rise from the glassy lagoon,
+upon the south of the city, near a mile away. This bulk
+
+    "Of mellow brick-work on an isle of bowers"
+
+is walled in with solid masonry from the sea, and encloses a
+garden-court, filled with all beautiful flowers, and with the memorable
+trees of the East; while another garden encompasses the monastery
+itself, and yields those honest fruits and vegetables which supply the
+wants of the well-cared-for mortal part of the good brothers. The island
+is called San Lazzaro, and the convent was established in 1717 by a
+learned and devoted Armenian priest named Mechithar, from whom the
+present order of monks is called Mechitharist. He was the first who
+formed the idea of educating a class of priests to act as missionaries
+among the Armenian nation in the East, and infuse into its civil and
+religious decay the life of European piety and learning. He founded at
+Sebaste, therefore, a religious order of which the seat was presently
+removed to Constantinople, where the friars met with so much persecution
+from Armenian heterodoxy that it was again transferred, and fixed at
+Modone in Morea. That territory falling into the hands of the Turks,
+the Mechitharists fled with their leader to Venice, where the Republic
+bestowed upon them a waste and desolate island, which had formerly
+been used as a place of refuge for lepers; and the monks made it the
+loveliest spot in all the lagoons.
+
+The little island has such a celebrity in travel and romance, that I
+feel my pen catching in the tatters of a threadbare theme. And yet I
+love the place and its people so well, that I could scarcely pass it
+without mention. Every tourist who spends a week in Venice goes to see
+the convent, and every one is charmed with it and the courteous welcome
+of the fathers. Its best interest is the intrinsic interest attaching
+to it as a seat of Armenian culture; but persons who relish the
+cheap sentimentalism of Byron's life, find the convent all the more
+entertaining from the fact that he did the Armenian language the favor
+to study it there, a little. The monks show his autograph, together with
+those of other distinguished persons, and the Armenian Bible which
+he used to read. I understood from one of the friars, Padre Giacomo
+Issaverdanz, that the brothers knew little or nothing of Byron's
+celebrity as a poet while he studied with them, and that his proficiency
+as an Armenian scholar was not such as to win high regard from them.
+
+I think most readers who have visited the convent will recall the
+pleasant face and manners of the young father mentioned, who shows the
+place to English-speaking travelers, and will care to know that Padre
+Giacomo was born at Smyrna, and dwelt there in the family of an English
+lady, till he came to Venice, and entered on his monastic life at San
+Lazzaro.
+
+He came one morning to breakfast with us, bringing with him Padre
+Alessio, a teacher in the Armenian College in the city. As for the
+latter, it was not without a certain shock that I heard Mesopotamia
+mentioned as his birthplace, having somehow in childhood learned to
+regard that formidable name as little better than a kind of profane
+swearing. But I soon came to know Padre Alessio apart from his
+birthplace, and to find him very interesting as a scholar and an artist.
+He threw a little grace of poetry around our simple feast, by repeating
+some Armenian verses,--grace all the more ethereal from our entire
+ignorance of what the verses meant. Our breakfast-table talk wrought to
+friendship the acquaintance made some time before, and the next morning
+we received the photograph of Padre Giacomo, and the compliments of the
+Orient, in a heaped basket of ripe and luscious figs from the garden
+of the Convent San Lazzaro. When, in turn, we went to visit him at
+the convent, we had experience of a more curious oriental hospitality.
+Refreshments were offered to us as to friends, and we lunched fairily
+upon little dishes of rose leaves, delicately preserved, with all
+their fragrance, in a "lucent sirup." It seemed that this was a common
+conserve in the East; but we could hardly divest ourselves of the notion
+of sacrilege, as we thus fed upon the very most luxurious sweetness
+and perfume of the soul of summer. Pleasant talk accompanied the dainty
+repast,--Padre Giacomo recounting for us some of his adventures with
+the people whom he had to show about the convent, and of whom many
+were disappointed at not finding a gallery or museum, and went away in
+extreme disgust; and relating with a sly, sarcastic relish that blent
+curiously with his sweetness and gentleness of spirit, how some English
+people once came with the notion that Lord Byron was an Armenian; how an
+unhappy French gentleman, who had been robbed in Southern Italy, would
+not be parted a moment from a huge bludgeon which he carried in
+his hand, and (probably disordered by his troubles) could hardly be
+persuaded from attacking the mummy which is in one of the halls; how
+a sharp, bustling, go-ahead Yankee rushed in one morning, rubbing his
+hands, and demanding, "Show me all you can in five minutes."
+
+As a seat of learning, San Lazzaro is famed throughout the Armenian
+world, and gathers under its roof the best scholars and poets of that
+nation. In the printing-office of the convent books are printed in
+some thirty different languages; and a number of the fathers employ
+themselves constantly in works of translation. The most distinguished of
+the Armenian literati now living at San Lazzaro is the Reverend Father
+Gomidas Pakraduni, who has published an Armenian version of "Paradise
+Lost," and whose great labor the translation of Homer, has been recently
+issued from the convent press. He was born at Constantinople of an
+ancient and illustrious family, and took religious orders at San
+Lazzaro, where he was educated, and where for twenty-five years after
+his consecration he held the professorship of his native tongue. He
+devoted himself especially to the culture of the ancient Armenian, and
+developed it for the expression of modern ideas, he made exhaustive
+study of the vast collection of old manuscripts at San Lazzaro, and then
+went to Paris in pursuance of his purpose, and acquainted himself with
+all the treasures of Armenian learning in the Biblioth�que Royale.
+He became the first scholar of the age in his national language, and
+acquired at the same time a profound knowledge of Latin and Greek.
+
+Returning to Constantinople, Father Pakraduni, whose fame had preceded
+him, took up his residence in the family of a noble Armenian, high in
+the service of the Turkish government; and while assuming the care of
+educating his friend's children, began those labors of translation
+which have since so largely employed him. He made an Armenian version
+of Pindar, and wrote a work on Rhetoric, both of which were destroyed
+by fire while yet in the manuscript. He labored, meanwhile, on his
+translation of the Iliad,--a youthful purpose which he did not see
+fulfilled till the year 1860, when he had already touched the Psalmist's
+limit of life. In this translation he revived with admirable success
+an ancient species of Armenian verse, which bears, in flexibility and
+strength, comparison with the original Greek. Another of his great
+labors was the production of an Armenian Grammar, in which he reduced
+to rule and order the numerous forms of his native tongue, never before
+presented by one work in all its eastern variety.
+
+Padre Giacomo, to whose great kindness I am indebted for a biographic
+and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic
+poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological
+treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed,
+this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar
+and the Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began his work anew, and after
+eight years gave his epic of twenty books and twenty-two thousand verses
+to the press. The hero of the poem is Ha�k, the first Armenian patriarch
+after the flood, and the founder of a kingly dynasty. Nimrod, the great
+hunter, drunk with his victories, declares himself a god, and ordains
+his own worship throughout the Orient. Ha�k refuses to obey the commands
+of the tyrant, takes up arms against him, and finally kills him in
+battle. "In the style of this poem," writes Padre Giacomo, "it is hard
+to tell whether to admire most its richness, its energy, its sweetness,
+its melancholy, its freedom, its dignity, or its harmony, for it has
+all these virtues in turn. The descriptive parts are depicted with the
+faithfulest pencil: the battle scenes can only be matched in the Iliad."
+
+Father Pakraduni returned, after twenty-five years' sojourn at
+Constantinople, to publish his epic at San Lazzaro, where he still
+lives, a tranquil, gentle old man, with a patriarchal beauty and
+goodness of face. In 1861 he printed his translation of Milton, with
+a dedication to Queen Victoria. His other works bear witness to the
+genuineness of his inspiration and piety, and the diligence of his
+study: they are poems, poetic translations from the Italian, religious
+essays, and grammatical treatises.
+
+Indeed, the existence of all the friars at San Lazzaro is one of close
+and earnest study; and life grows so fond of these quiet monks that it
+will hardly part with them at last. One of them is ninety-five years
+old, and, until 1863, there was a lay-brother among them whose years
+numbered a hundred and eight, and who died of old age, on the 17th
+of September, after passing fifty-eight years at San Lazzaro. From
+biographic memoranda furnished me by Padre Giacomo, I learn that the
+name of this patriarch was George Karabagiak, and that he was a native
+of Kutaieh in Asia Minor. He was for a long time the disciple of D�d�
+Vartabied, a renowned preacher of the Armenian faith, and he afterward
+taught the doctrines of his master in the Armenian schools. Failing
+in his desire to enter upon the sacerdotal life at Constantinople, he
+procured his admission as lay-brother at San Lazzaro, where all his
+remaining days were spent. He was but little learned; but he had great
+passion for poetry, and he was the author of some thirty small works
+on different subjects. During the course of his long and diligent life,
+which was chiefly spent in learning and teaching, he may be said to have
+hardly known a day's sickness. And at last he died of no perceptible
+disorder. The years tired him to death. He had a trifling illness in
+August, and as he convalesced, he grew impatient of the tenacious life
+which held him to earth. Slowly pacing up and down the corridors of
+the convent, he used to crave the prayers of the brothers whom he met,
+beseeching them to intercede with Heaven that he might be suffered to
+die. One day he said to the archbishop, "I fear that God has abandoned
+me, and I shall live." Only a little while before his death he wrote
+some verses, as Padre Giacomo's memorandum witnesses, "with a firm and
+steady hand," and the manner of his death was this,--as recorded in the
+grave and simple words of my friend's note:--"Finally, on the 17th of
+September, very early in the morning, a brother entering his chamber,
+asked him how he was. 'Well,' he replied, turning his face to the wall,
+and spoke no more. He had passed to a better life."
+
+It seems to me there is a pathos in the close of this old man's
+life,--which I hope has not been lost by my way of describing it,--and
+there is certainly a moral. I have read of an unlucky sage who
+discovered the Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renewing his
+existence, at last voluntarily resigned himself to death, because he had
+exhausted all that life had to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew
+all its vicissitudes but the very last. Brother Karabagiak seems to have
+had no humor to take even a second ease of life. It is perhaps as well
+that most men die before reaching the over-ripeness of a hundred
+and eight years; and, doubtless, with all our human willfulness and
+ignorance, we would readily consent, if we could fix the time, to go
+sooner--say, at a hundred and seven years, friends?
+
+Besides the Convent of San Lazzaro, where Armenian boys from all parts
+of the East are educated for the priesthood, the nation has a college
+in the city in which boys intended for secular careers receive their
+schooling. The Palazzo Zenobia is devoted to the use of this college,
+where, besides room for study, the boys have abundant space and
+apparatus for gymnastics, and ample grounds for gardening. We once
+passed a pleasant summer evening there, strolling through the fragrant
+alleys of the garden, in talk with the father-professors, and looking
+on at the gymnastic feats of the boys; and when the annual exhibition of
+the school took place in the fall, we were invited to be present.
+
+The room appointed for the exhibition was the great hall of the palace,
+which in other days had evidently been a ball-room. The ceiling was
+frescoed in the manner of the last century, with Cupids and Venuses,
+Vices and Virtues, fruits and fiddles, dwarfs and blackamoors; and the
+painted faces looked down on a scene of as curious interest as ever the
+extravagant loves and graces of Tiepolo might hope to see, when the boys
+of the college, after assisting at _Te Deum_ in the chapel, entered the
+room, and took their places.
+
+At the head of the hall sat the archbishop in his dark robes, with
+his heavy gold chain about his neck--a figure and a countenance in all
+things spiritual, gracious, and reverend. There is small difference, I
+believe, between the creeds of the Armenians and the Roman Catholics,
+but a very great disparity in the looks of the two priesthoods, which is
+all in favor of the former. The Armenian wears his beard, and the
+Latin shaves--which may have a great deal to do with the holiness of
+appearance. Perhaps, also, the gentle and mild nature of the
+oriental yields more sweetly and entirely to the self-denials of the
+ecclesiastical vocation, and thus wins a fairer grace from them. At any
+rate, I have not seen any thing but content and calm in the visages of
+the Armenian fathers, among whom the priest-face, as a type, does not
+exist, though it would mark the Romish ecclesiastic in whatever dress he
+wore. There is, moreover, a look of such entire confidence and unworldly
+sincerity in their eyes, that I could not help thinking, as I turned
+from the portly young fathers to the dark-faced, grave, old-fashioned
+school-boys, that an exchange of beard only was needed to effect an
+exchange of character between those youthful elders and their pupils.
+The gray-haired archbishop is a tall and slender man; but nearly all the
+fathers take kindly to curves and circles, and glancing down a row of
+these amiable priests I could scarcely repress a smile at the constant
+recurrence of the line of beauty in their well-rounded persons.
+
+On the right and left of the archbishop were the few invited guests,
+and at the other end of the saloon sat one of the fathers, the plump
+key-stone of an arch of comfortable young students expanding toward
+us. Most of the boys are from Turkey (the Armenians of Venice, though
+acknowledging the Pope as their spiritual head, are the subjects of the
+Sultan), others are of Asiatic birth, and two are Egyptians.
+
+As to the last, I think the Sphinx and the Pyramid could hardly have
+impressed me more than their dark faces, that seemed to look vaguely
+on our modern world from the remote twilights of old, and in their very
+infancy to be reverend through the antiquity of their race. The mother
+of these boys--a black-eyed, olive-cheeked lady, very handsome and
+stylish--was present with their younger brother. I hardly know whether
+to be ashamed of having been awed by hearing of the little Egyptian that
+his native tongue was Arabic, and that he spoke nothing more occidental
+than Turkish. But, indeed, was it wholly absurd to offer a tacit homage
+to this favored boy, who must know the "Arabian Nights" in the original?
+
+The exercises began with a theme in Armenian--a language which, but for
+its English abundance of sibilants, and a certain German rhythm, was
+wholly outlandish to our ears. Themes in Italian, German, and French
+succeeded, and then came one in English. We afterward had speech with
+the author of this essay, who expressed the liveliest passion for
+English, in the philosophy and poetry of which it seemed he particularly
+delighted. He told us that he was a Constantinopolitan, and that in
+six months more he would complete his collegiate course, when he would
+return to his native city, and take employment in the service of the
+Turkish Government. Many others of the Armenian students here also find
+this career open to them in the East.
+
+The literary exercises closed with another essay in Armenian; and then
+the archbishop delivered, very gracefully and impressively, an address
+to the boys. After this, the distribution of the premiums--medals of
+silver and bronze, and books--took place at the desk of the archbishop.
+Each boy, as he advanced to receive his premium, knelt and touched the
+hand of the priest with his lips and forehead,--a quaint and pleasing
+ceremony which had preceded and followed the reading of all the themes.
+
+The social greetings and congratulations that now took place ended
+an entertainment throughout which every body was pleased, and the
+goodnatured fathers seemed to be moved with a delight no less hearty
+than that of the boys themselves. Indeed, the ground of affection and
+confidence on which the lads and their teachers seemed to meet, was
+something very novel and attractive. We shook hands with our smiling
+friends among the padri, took leave of the archbishop, and then visited
+the studio of Padre Alessio, who had just finished a faithful and
+spirited portrait of monsignore. Adieux to the artist and to Padre
+Giacomo brought our visit to an end; and so, from that scene of oriental
+learning, simplicity, and kindliness, we walked into our western life
+once more, and resumed our citizenship and burden in the Venetian
+world--out of the waters of which, like a hydra or other water beast, a
+bathing boy instantly issued and begged of us.
+
+A few days later our good Armenians went to pass a month on the
+main-land near Padua, where they have comfortable possessions. Peace
+followed them, and they came back as plump as they went.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE.
+
+
+As I think it extremely questionable whether I could get through a
+chapter on this subject without some feeble pleasantry about Shylock,
+and whether, if I did, the reader would be at all satisfied that I had
+treated the matter fully and fairly, I say at the beginning that Shylock
+is dead; that if he lived, Antonio would hardly spit upon his gorgeous
+pantaloons or his Parisian coat, as he met him on the Rialto; that
+he would far rather call out to him, "_Ci� Shylock! Bon d�! Go piaser
+vederla;_" [Footnote: "Shylock, old fellow, good-day. Glad to see you."]
+that if Shylock by any chance entrapped Antonio into a foolish promise
+to pay him a pound of his flesh on certain conditions, the honest
+commissary of police before whom they brought their affair would dismiss
+them both to the madhouse at San Servolo. In a word, the present social
+relations of Jew and Christian in this city render the "Merchant of
+Venice" quite impossible; and the reader, though he will find the Ghetto
+sufficiently noisome and dirty, will not find an oppressed people there,
+nor be edified by any of those insults or beatings which it was once a
+large share of Christian duty to inflict upon the enemies of our
+faith. The Catholic Venetian certainly understands that his Jewish
+fellow-citizen is destined to some very unpleasant experiences in the
+next world, but _Corpo di Bacco_! that is no reason why he should not
+be friends with him in this. He meets him daily on exchange and at the
+Casino, and he partakes of the hospitality of his conversazioni. If he
+still despises him--and I think he does, a little--he keeps his contempt
+to himself, for the Jew is gathering into his own hands great part of
+the trade of the city, and has the power that belongs to wealth. He is
+educated, liberal, and enlightened, and the last great name in Venetian
+literature is that of the Jewish historian of the Republic, Romanin.
+The Jew's political sympathies are invariably patriotic, and he calls
+himself, not Ebreo, but Veneziano. He lives, when rich, in a palace or a
+fine house on the Grand Canal, and he furnishes and lets many others (I
+must say at rates which savor of the loan secured by the pound of flesh)
+in which he does not live. The famous and beautiful Ca' Doro now belongs
+to a Jewish family; and an Israelite, the most distinguished physician
+in Venice, occupies the _appartamento signorile_ in the palace of the
+famous Cardinal Bembo. The Jew is a physician, a banker, a manufacturer,
+a merchant; and he makes himself respected for his intelligence and
+his probity,--which perhaps does not infringe more than that of Italian
+Catholics. He dresses well,--with that indefinable difference, however,
+which distinguishes him in every thing from a Christian,--and his wife
+and daughter are fashionable and stylish, They are sometimes, also, very
+pretty; and I have seen one Jewish lady who might have stepped out
+of the sacred page, down from the patriarchal age, and been known for
+Rebecca, with her oriental grace, and delicate, sensitive, high-bred
+look and bearing--no more western and modern than a lily of Palestine.
+
+But it is to the Ghetto I want to take you now (by the way we went one
+sunny day late last fall), that I may show you something of the Jewish
+past, which has survived to the nineteenth century in much of the
+discomfort and rank savor of the dark ages.
+
+In the fifteenth century all the riches of the Orient had been poured
+into the lap of Venice, and a spirit of reckless profusion took
+possession of her citizens. The money, hastily and easily amassed, went
+as rapidly as it came. It went chiefly for dress, in which the Venetian
+still indulges very often to the stint of his stomach; and the ladies of
+that bright-colored, showy day bore fortunes on their delicate persons
+in the shape of costly vestments of scarlet, black, green, white,
+maroon, or violet, covered with gems, glittering with silver buttons,
+and ringing with silver bells. The fine gentlemen of the period were not
+behind them in extravagance; and the priests were peculiarly luxurious
+in dress, wearing gay silken robes, with cowls of fur, and girdles
+of gold and silver. Sumptuary laws were vainly passed to repress the
+general license, and fortunes were wasted, and wealthy families reduced
+to beggary. [Footnote: Galliciolli, _Memorie Venete_.] At this time,
+when so many worthy gentlemen and ladies had need of the Uncle to whom
+hard-pressed nephews fly to pledge the wrecks of prosperity, there
+was yet no Monte di Piet�, and the demand for pawnbrokers becoming
+imperative, the Republic was obliged to recall the Hebrews from the
+exile into which they had been driven some time before, that they might
+set up pawnshops and succor necessity. They came back, however, only for
+a limited time, and were obliged to wear a badge of yellow color upon
+the breast, to distinguish them from the Christians, and later a yellow
+cap, then a red hat, and then a hat of oil-cloth. They could not acquire
+houses or lands in Venice, nor practice any trade, nor exercise any
+noble art but medicine. They were assigned a dwelling-place in the
+vilest and unhealthiest part of the city, and their quarter was
+called Ghetto, from the Hebrew _nghedah_, a congregation. [Footnote:
+Mutinelli.] They were obliged to pay their landlords a third more rent
+than Christians paid; the Ghetto was walled in, and its gates were kept
+by Christian guards, who every day opened them at dawn and closed them
+at dark, and who were paid by the Jews. They were not allowed to issue
+at all from the Ghetto on holidays; and two barges, with armed men,
+watched over them night and day, while a special magistracy had
+charge of their affairs. Their synagogues were built at Mestre, on the
+main-land; and their dead were buried in the sand upon the seashore,
+whither, on the Mondays of September, the baser sort of Venetians went
+to make merry, and drunken men and women danced above their desecrated
+tombs. These unhappy people were forced also to pay tribute to the state
+at first every third year, then every fifth year, and then every tenth
+year, the privilege of residence being ingeniously renewed to them at
+these periods for a round sum; but, in spite of all, they flourished
+upon the waste and wickedness of their oppressors, waxed rich as these
+waxed poor, and were not again expelled from the city. [Footnote: _Del
+Commercia del Veneziani_. Mutinelli.]
+
+There never was any attempt to disturb the Hebrews by violence, except
+on one occasion, about the close of the fifteenth century, when a tumult
+was raised against them for child-murder. This, however, was promptly
+quelled by the Republic before any harm was done them; and they dwelt
+peacefully in their Ghetto till the lofty gates of their prison caught
+the sunlight of modern civilization, and crumbled beneath it. Then many
+of the Jews came forth and fixed their habitations in different parts
+of the city, but many others clung to the spot where their temples still
+remain, and which was hallowed by long suffering, and soaked with the
+blood of innumerable generations of geese. So, although you find Jews
+everywhere in Venice, you never find a Christian in the Ghetto, which is
+held to this day by a large Hebrew population.
+
+We had not started purposely to see the Ghetto, and for this reason it
+had that purely incidental relish, which is the keenest possible savor
+of the object of interest. We were on an expedition to find Sior Antonio
+Rioba, who has been, from time immemorial, the means of ponderous
+practical jokes in Venice. Sior Antonio is a rough-hewn statue set in
+the corner of an ordinary grocery, near the Ghetto. He has a pack on
+his back and a staff in his hand; his face is painted, and is habitually
+dishonored with dirt thrown upon it by boys. On the wall near him is
+painted a bell-pull, with the legend, _Sior Antonio Rioba_. Rustics,
+raw apprentices, and honest Germans new to the city, are furnished with
+packages to be carried to Sior Antonio Rioba, who is very hard to find,
+and not able to receive the messages when found, though there is always
+a crowd of loafers near to receive the unlucky simpleton who brings
+them. _"E poi, che commedia vederli arrabiarsi! Che ridere_!" That is
+the Venetian notion of fun, and no doubt the scene is amusing. I was
+curious to see Sior Antonio, because a comic journal bearing his name
+had been published during the time of the Republic of 1848, and from the
+fact that he was then a sort of Venetian Pasquino. But I question now
+if he was worth seeing, except as something that brought me into the
+neighborhood of the Ghetto, and suggested to me the idea of visiting
+that quarter.
+
+As we left him and passed up the canal in our gondola, we came unawares
+upon the church of Santa Maria dell' Orto, one of the most graceful
+Gothic churches in the city. The fa�ade is exquisite, and has two Gothic
+windows of that religious and heavenly beauty which pains the heart
+with its inexhaustible richness. One longed to fall down on the space
+of green turf before the church, now bathed in the soft golden October
+sunshine, and recant these happy, commonplace centuries of heresy,
+and have back again the good old believing days of bigotry, and
+superstition, and roasting, and racking, if only to have once more the
+men who dreamed those windows out of their faith and piety (if they did,
+which I doubt), and made them with their patient, reverent hands (if
+their hands _were_ reverent, which I doubt). The church is called Santa
+Maria dell' Orto, from the miraculous image of Our Lady which was
+found in an orchard where the temple now stands. We saw this miraculous
+sculpture, and thought it reflected little credit upon the supernatural
+artist. The church is properly that of Saint Christopher, but the
+saint has been titularly vanquished by the Madonna, though he comes out
+gigantically triumphant in a fresco above the high altar, and leads to
+confused and puzzling reminiscences of Bluebeard and Morgante Maggiore,
+to both of which characters he bears a bewildering personal resemblance.
+
+There were once many fine paintings by Tintoretto and Bellini in
+this church; but as the interior is now in course of restoration, the
+paintings have been removed to the Academy, and we only saw one, which
+was by the former master, and had all his striking imagination in the
+conception, all his strength in the drawing and all his lampblack in the
+faded coloring. In the centre of the church, the sacristan scraped the
+carpenter's rubbish away from a flat tablet in the floor, and said that
+it was Tintoretto's tomb. It is a sad thing to doubt even a sacristan,
+but I pointed out that the tomb bore any name in the world rather than
+Robusti. "Ah!" said the sacristan, "it is just that which makes it so
+very curious,--that Tintoretto should wish to be buried under another
+name!" [Footnote: Members of the family of Tintoretto are actually
+buried in this church; and no sacristan of right feeling could do less
+than point out some tomb as that of the great painter himself.]
+
+It was a warm, sunny day in the fall, as I said; yet as we drew near the
+Ghetto, we noticed in the air many white, floating particles, like lazy,
+straggling flakes of snow. These we afterward found to be the down of
+multitudes of geese, which are forever plucked by the whole apparent
+force of the populace,--the fat of the devoted birds being substituted
+for lard in the kitchens of the Ghetto, and their flesh for pork. As
+we approached the obscene little riva at which we landed, a blond young
+Israelite, lavishly adorned with feathers, came running to know if we
+wished to see the church--by which name he put the synagogue to the
+Gentile comprehension. The street through which we passed had shops
+on either hand, and at the doors groups of jocular Hebrew youth sat
+plucking geese; while within, long files of all that was mortal of geese
+hung from the rafters and the walls. The ground was webbed with the feet
+of geese, and certain loutish boys, who paused to look at us, had each
+a goose dragging at his heels, in the forlorn and elongated manner
+peculiar to dead poultry. The ground was stained with the blood of
+geese, and the smell of roasting geese came out of the windows of the
+grim and lofty houses.
+
+Our guide was picturesque, but the most helpless and inconclusive
+cicerone I ever knew; and while his long, hooked Hebrew nose caught my
+idle fancy, and his soft blue eyes excused a great deal of inefficiency,
+the aimless fashion in which he mounted dirty staircases for the keys
+of the synagogue, and came down without them, and the manner in which
+he shouted to the heads of unctuous Jessicas thrust out of windows, and
+never gained the slightest information by his efforts, were imbecilities
+that we presently found insupportable, and we gladly cast him off for a
+dark-faced Hebrew boy who brought us at once to the door of the Spanish
+synagogue.
+
+Of seven synagogues in the Ghetto, the principal was built in 1655, by
+the Spanish Jews who had fled to Venice from the terrors of the Holy
+Office. Its exterior has nothing to distinguish it as a place of
+worship, and we reached the interior of the temple by means of some dark
+and narrow stairs. In the floor and on the walls of the passage-way
+were set tablets to the memory of rich and pious Israelites who had
+bequeathed their substance for the behoof of the sanctuary; and the
+sacristan informed us that the synagogue was also endowed with a fund by
+rich descendants of Spanish Jews in Amsterdam. These moneys are kept to
+furnish indigent Israelitish couples with the means of marrying, and
+who claim the benefit of the fund are entitled to it. The sacristan--a
+little wiry man, with bead-black eyes, and of a shoemakerish
+presence--told us with evident pride that he was himself a descendant of
+the Spanish Jews. Howbeit, he was now many centuries from speaking the
+Castilian, which, I had read, was still used in the families of the
+Jewish fugitives from Spain to the Levant. He spoke, instead, the
+abominable Venetian of Cannaregio, with that Jewish thickness which
+distinguishes the race's utterance, no matter what language its children
+are born to. It is a curious philological fact, which I have heard
+repeatedly alleged by Venetians, and which is perhaps worth noting
+here, that Jews speaking their dialect, have not only this thickness of
+accent, but also a peculiarity of construction which marks them at once.
+
+We found the contracted interior of the synagogue hardly worth
+looking at. Instead of having any thing oriental or peculiar in its
+architecture, it was in a bad spirit of Renaissance art. A gallery
+encircled the inside, and here the women, during worship, sat apart
+from the men, who had seats below, running back from either side of the
+altar. I had no right, coming from a Protestant land of pews, to indulge
+in that sentimentality; but I could not help being offended to see that
+each of these seats might be lifted up and locked into the upright back
+and thus placed beyond question at the disposal of the owner: I like the
+freedom and equality in the Catholic churches much better. The sacristan
+brought a ponderous silver key, and unlocking the door behind the
+pulpit, showed us the Hebrew Scriptures used during the service by the
+Rabbi. They formed an immense parchment volume, and were rolled in
+silk upon a wooden staff. This was the sole object of interest in the
+synagogue, and its inspection concluded our visit.
+
+We descended the narrow stairs and emerged upon the piazza which we
+had left. It was only partly paved with brick, and was very dirty. The
+houses which surrounded it were on the outside old and shabby, and,
+even in this Venice of lofty edifices, remarkably high. A wooden bridge
+crossed a vile canal to another open space, where once congregated
+the merchants who sell antique furniture, old pictures, and objects of
+vertu. They are now, however, found everywhere in the city, and most
+of them are on the Grand Canal, where they heap together marvelous
+collections, and establish authenticities beyond cavil. "Is it an
+original?" asked a young lady who was visiting one of their shops, as
+she paused before an attributive Veronese, or--what know I?--perhaps a
+Titian. "_Si, signora, originalissimo_!"
+
+I do not understand why any class of Jews should still remain in the
+Ghetto, but it is certain, as I said, that they do remain there in great
+numbers. It may be that the impurity of the place and the atmosphere is
+conducive to purity of race; but I question if the Jews buried on the
+sandy slope of the Lido, and blown over by the sweet sea wind--it must
+needs blow many centuries to cleanse them of the Ghetto--are not rather
+to be envied by the inhabitants of those high dirty houses and low dirty
+lanes. There was not a touch of any thing wholesome, or pleasant, or
+attractive, to relieve the noisomeness of the Ghetto to its visitors;
+and they applauded, with a common voice, the neatness which had prompted
+Andrea the gondolier to roll up the carpet from the floor of his
+gondola, and not to spread it again within the limits of that quarter.
+
+In the good old times, when pestilence avenged the poor and oppressed
+upon their oppressors, what grim and dismal plagues may not have stalked
+by night and noonday out of those hideous streets, and passed the marble
+bounds of patrician palaces, and brought to the bedsides of the rich and
+proud the filthy misery of the Ghetto turned to poison! Thank God that
+the good old times are gone and going. One learns in these aged lands to
+hate and execrate the past.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+SOME MEMORABLE PLACES.
+
+
+We came away from the Ghetto, as we had arrived, in a gentle fall of
+goose-down, and winding crookedly through a dirty canal, glided into
+purer air and cleaner waters. I cannot well say how it was we came
+upon the old Servite Convent, which I had often looked for in vain, and
+which, associated with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of
+the most memorable places in Venice. We reached it, after passing by
+that old, old palace, which was appointed in the early ages of Venetian
+commerce for the reception of oriental traffic and traffickers, and
+where it is said the Moorish merchants resided till the later time of
+the Fondaco dei Turchi on the Grand Canal. The fa�ade of the palace is
+richly sculptured; and near one corner is the bass-relief of a camel
+and his turbaned driver,--in token, perhaps, that man and beast (as
+orientals would understand them) were here entertained.
+
+We had lived long enough in Venice to know that it was by no means worth
+while to explore the interior of this old palace because the outside was
+attractive, and so we left it; and turning a corner, found ourselves
+in a shallow canal, with houses on one side, and a grassy bank on the
+other. The bank sloped gently from the water up to the walls of some
+edifice, on which ruin seemed to have fastened soon after the architect
+had begun his work. The vast walls, embracing several acres in their
+close, rose only some thirty or forty feet from the ground--only high
+enough, indeed, to join over the top of the great Gothic gates, which
+pierced them on two fa�ades. There must have been barracks near; for on
+the sward, under the walls, muskets were stacked, and Austrian soldiers
+were practicing the bayonet-exercise with long poles padded at the
+point. "_Ein, zwei, drei,--vorw�rts! Ein, zwei, drei,--ruckw�rts_!"
+snarled the drill-sergeant, and the dark-faced Hungarian soldiers--who
+may have soon afterward prodded their Danish fellow-beings all the
+more effectively for that day's training--stooped, writhed, and leaped
+obedient. I, who had already caught sight of a little tablet in the wall
+bearing the name of Paolo Sarpi, could not feel the propriety of the
+military performance on that scene; yet I was very glad, dismounting
+from the gondola, to get by the soldiers without being forced back at
+the padded point of a pole, and offered no audible objection to their
+presence.
+
+So passing to the other side, I found entrance through a disused chapel
+to the interior of the convent. The gates on the outside were richly
+sculptured, and were reverend and clean; tufts of harsh grass grew
+from their arches, and hung down like the "overwhelming brows" of age.
+Within, at first light, I saw nothing but heaps of rubbish, piles of
+stone, and here and there a mutilated statue. I remember two pathetic
+caryatides, that seemed to have broken and sunk under too heavy a weight
+for their gentle beauty--and everywhere the unnamable filth with which
+ruin is always dishonored in Italy, and which makes the most picturesque
+and historic places inaccessible to the foot, and intolerable to the
+senses and the soul. I was thinking with a savage indignation on this
+incurable _porcheria_, of the Italian poor (who are guilty of such
+desecrations), when my eye fell upon an enclosed space in one corner,
+where some odd-looking boulders were heaped together. It was a space
+about six feet in depth, and twenty feet square; and the boulders, on
+closer inspection, turned out to be human skulls, nestling on piles of
+human bones. In any other land than Italy I think I should have turned
+from the grisly sight with a cowardly sickness and shuddering;
+but here!--Why, heaven and earth seem to take the loss of men so
+good-naturedly,--so many men have died and passed away with their
+difficult, ambitious, and troublesome little schemes,--and the great
+mass of mankind is taken so small account of in the course of destiny,
+that the idea of death does not appear so alien and repulsive as
+elsewhere, and the presence of such evidences of our poor mortality can
+scarcely offend sensibility. These were doubtless the bones of the good
+Servite friars who had been buried in their convent, and had been digged
+up to make way for certain improvements now taking place within its
+walls. I have no doubt that their deaths were a rest to their bodies,
+to say nothing of their souls. If they were at all in their lives
+like those who have come after them, the sun baked their bald brows in
+Summer, and their naked feet--poor feet! clapping round in wooden-soled
+sandals over the frozen stones of Venice--were swollen and gnawed with
+chilblains in winter; and no doubt some fat friar of their number,
+looking all the droller in his bare feet for the spectacles on his nose,
+came down Calle Falier then, as now, to collect the charity of bread and
+fuel, far oftener than the dwellers in that aristocratic precinct wished
+to see him.
+
+The friars' skulls looked contented enough, and smiled after the hearty
+manner of skulls; and some of the leg-bones were thrust through the
+enclosing fence, and hung rakishly over the top. As to their spirits,
+I suppose they must have found out by this time that these confused
+and shattered tabernacles which they left behind them are not nearly so
+corrupt and dead as the monastic system which still cumbers the earth.
+People are building on the site of the old convent a hospital for
+indigent and decrepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have care
+of the inmates. It is a good end enough, but I think it would be the
+true compensation if all the rubbish of the old cloister were cleared
+from the area of those walls, and a great garden planted in the space,
+where lovers might whisper their wise nonsense, and children might
+romp and frolic, till the crumbling, masonry forgot its old office of
+imprisonment and the memory of its prisoners. For here, one could only
+think of the moping and mumming herd of monks, who were certainly not
+worth remembering, while the fame of Paolo Sarpi, and the good which
+he did, refused to be localized. That good is an inheritance which has
+enriched the world; but the share of Venice has been comparatively
+small in it, and that of this old convent ground still less. I rather
+wondered, indeed, that I should have taken the trouble to look up the
+place; but it is a harmless, if even a very foolish, pastime to go
+seeking for the sublime secret of the glory of the palm in the earth
+where it struck root and flourished. So far as the lifelong presence and
+the death of a man of clear brain and true heart could hallow any scene,
+this ground was holy; for here Sarpi lived, and here in his cell
+he died, a simple Servite friar--he who had caught the bolts of
+excommunication launched against the Republic from Rome, and broken
+them in his hand,--who had breathed upon the mighty arm of the temporal
+power, and withered it to the juiceless stock it now remains. And yet I
+could not feel that the ground _was_ holy, and it did not make me think
+of Sarpi; and I believe that only those travelers who invent in cold
+blood their impressions of memorable places ever have remarkable
+impressions to record.
+
+Once, before the time of Sarpi, an excommunication was pronounced
+against the Republic with a result as terrible as that of the later
+interdict was absurd. Venice took possession, early in the fourteenth
+century, of Ferrara, by virtue of a bargain which the high contracting
+parties--the Republic and an exiled claimant to the ducal crown of
+Ferrara--had no right to make. The father of the banished prince had
+displeased him by marrying late in life, when the thoughts of a good
+man should be turned on other things, and the son compassed the sire's
+death. For this the Ferrarese drove him away, and as they would not take
+him back to reign over them at the suggestion of Venice, he resigned his
+rights in favor of the Republic, and the Republic at once annexed the
+city to its territories. The Ferrarese appealed to the pope for his
+protection, and Clement V., supporting an ancient but long quiescent
+claim to Ferrara on the part of the Church, called upon the Venetians
+to surrender the city, and, on their refusal, excommunicated them. All
+Christian peoples were commanded "to arm against the Venetians, to spoil
+them of their goods, as separated from the union of Christians, and as
+enemies of the Roman Church." They were driven out of Ferrara, but
+their troubles did not end with their loss of the city. Giustina
+Renier-Michiel says the nations, under the shelter of the pope's
+permission and command, "exercised against them every species of
+cruelty; there was no wrong or violence of which they were not victims.
+All the rich merchandise which they had in France, in Flanders, and
+in other places, was confiscated; their merchants were arrested,
+maltreated, and some of them killed. Woe to us, if the Saracens had been
+baptized Christians! our nation would have been utterly destroyed." Such
+was the ruin brought upon us by this excommunication that to this day it
+is a popular saying, concerning a man of gloomy aspect, "_He looks as if
+he were bringing the excommunication of Ferrara_."
+
+No proverb, sprung from the popular terror, commemorates the interdict
+of the Republic which took place in 1606, and which, I believe, does not
+survive in popular recollection at Venice. It was at first a collision
+of the Venetian and Papal authorities at Ferrara, and then an
+interference of the pope to prevent the execution of secular justice
+upon certain ecclesiastical offenders in Venetia, which resulted in the
+excommunication of the Republic, and finally in the defeat of St. Peter
+and the triumph of St. Mark. Chief among the ecclesiastical offenders
+mentioned were the worthy Abbate Brandolino of Narvesa, who was accused,
+among other things, of poisoning his own father; and the good Canonico
+Saraceni of Vicenza, who was repulsed in overtures made to his beautiful
+cousin, and who revenged himself by defaming her character, and
+"filthily defacing" the doors of her palace. The abbate was arrested,
+and the canon, on this lady's complaint to the Ten at Venice, was thrown
+into prison, and the weak and furious Pope Paul V., being refused their
+release by the Ten, excommunicated the whole Republic.
+
+In the same year, that is to say 1552, the bane and antidote, Paul the
+Pope and Paul Sarpi the friar, were sent into the world. The latter
+grew in piety, fame, and learning, and at the time the former began his
+quarrel with the Republic, there was none in Venice so fit and prompt
+as Sarpi to stand forth in her defense. He was at once taken into the
+service of St. Mark, and his clear, acute mind fashioned the spiritual
+weapons of the Republic, and helped to shape the secular measures taken
+to annul the interdict. As soon as the bull of excommunication was
+issued, the Republic instructed her officers to stop every copy of it
+at the frontier, and it was never read in any church in the Venetian
+dominions. The Senate refused to receive it from the Papal Nuncio. All
+priests, monks, and other servants of the Church, as well as all secular
+persons, were commanded to disregard it; and refractory ecclesiastics
+were forced to open their churches on pain of death. The Jesuits and
+Capuchins were banished; and clerical intriguers, whom Rome sent in
+swarms to corrupt social and family relations, by declaring an end of
+civil government in Venice, and preaching among women disobedience to
+patriotic husbands and fathers, were severely punished. With internal
+safety thus provided for, the Republic intrusted her moral, religious,
+and political defense entirely to Sarpi, who devoted himself to his
+trust with fidelity, zeal, and power.
+
+It might have been expected that the friend of Galileo, and the most
+learned and enlightened man of his country, would have taken the short
+and decisive method of discarding all allegiance to Rome as the most
+logical resistance to the unjust interdict. But the Venetians have ever
+been faithful Catholics, [Footnote: It is convenient here to attest
+the truth of certain views of religious sentiment in Italy, which Mr.
+Trollope, in his _Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar_, quotes from an
+"Italian author, by no means friendly to Catholicism, and very well
+qualified to speak of the progress of opinions and tendencies among his
+fellow-countrymen."
+
+This author is Bianchi Giovini, who, speaking of modern Catholicism as
+the heir of the old materialistic paganism, says: "The Italians have
+identified themselves with this mode of religion. Cultivated men find
+in it the truth there is in it, and the people find what is agreeable
+to them. But both the former and the latter approve it as conformable to
+the national character. And whatever may be the religious system which
+shall govern our descendants twenty centuries hence, I venture to affirm
+that the exterior forms of it will be pretty nearly the same as those
+which prevail at present, and which did prevail twenty centuries ago."
+Mr. Trollope generously dissents from the "_pessimism_" of these views.
+The views are discouraging for some reasons; but, with considerable
+disposition and fair opportunity to observe Italian character in this
+respect, I had arrived at precisely these conclusions. I wish here to
+state that in my slight sketch of Sarpi and his times I have availed
+myself freely of Mr. Trollope's delightful book--it is near being too
+much of a good thing--named above.] and Sarpi was (or, according to
+the papal writers, seemed to be) a sincere and obedient Servite friar,
+believing in the spiritual supremacy of the pope, and revering the
+religion of Rome. He therefore fought Paul inside of the Church, and his
+writings on the interdict remain the monument of his polemical success.
+He was the heart and brain of the Republic's whole resistance,--he
+supplied her with inexhaustible reasons and answers,--and, though
+tempted, accused, and threatened, he never swerved from his fidelity to
+her.
+
+As he was the means of her triumph, [Footnote: The triumph was such only
+so far as the successful resistance to the interdict was concerned;
+for at the intercession of the Catholic powers the Republic gave up the
+ecclesiastical prisoners, and he allowed all the banished priests except
+the Jesuits to return. The Venetians utterly refused to perform any
+act of humiliation or penance. The interdict had been defied, and it
+remained despised.] remained the object of her love. He could never be
+persuaded to desert his cell in the Minorite Convent for the apartments
+appointed him by the State; and even when his busy days were spent in
+council at the Ducal Palace, he returned each night to sleep in the
+cloister. After the harmless interdict had been removed by Paul, and the
+unyielding Republic forgiven, the wrath of Rome remained kindled against
+the friar whose logic had been too keen for the last reason of popes. He
+had been tried for heresy in his youth at Milan, and acquitted; again,
+during the progress of St. Mark's quarrel with Rome, his orthodoxy had
+been questioned; and now that all was over, and Rome could turn
+her attention to one particular offender, he was entreated, coaxed,
+commanded to come to her, and put her heart at rest concerning these old
+accusations. But Sarpi was very well in Venice. He had been appointed
+Consultor in Theology to the Republic, and had received free admission
+to the secret archives of the State,--a favor, till then, never bestowed
+on any. So he would not go to Rome, and Rome sent assassins to take his
+life. One evening, as he was returning from the Ducal Palace in company
+with a lay-brother of the convent, and an old patrician, very infirm and
+helpless, he was attacked by these _nuncios_ of the papal court: one of
+them seized the lay-brother, and another the patrician, while a third
+dealt Sarpi innumerable dagger thrusts. He fell as if dead, and the
+ruffians made off in the confusion.
+
+Sarpi had been fearfully wounded, but he recovered. The action of the
+Republic in this affair is a comforting refutation of the saying
+that Republics are ungrateful, and the common belief that Venice was
+particularly so. The most strenuous and unprecedented efforts were made
+to take the assassins, and the most terrific penalties were denounced
+against them. What was much better, new honors were showered upon Sarpi,
+and extraordinary and affectionate measures were taken to provide for
+his safety.
+
+And, in fine, he lived in the service of the Republic, revered and
+beloved, till his seventieth year, when he died with zeal for her good
+shaping his last utterance: "I must go to St. Mark, for it is late, and
+I have much to do."
+
+Brave Sarpi, and brave Republic! Men cannot honor them enough. For
+though the terrors of the interdict were doubted to be harmless even
+at that time, it had remained for them to prove the interdict, then and
+forever, an instrument as obsolete as the catapult.
+
+I was so curious as to make some inquiry among the workmen on the old
+convent ground, whether any stone or other record commemorative of Sarpi
+had been found in the demolished cells. I hoped, not very confidently,
+to gather some trace of his presence there--to have, perhaps, the spot
+on which he died shown me. To a man, they were utterly ignorant of
+Sarpi, while affecting, in the Italian manner, to be perfectly informed
+on the subject. I was passed, with my curiosity, from one to another,
+till I fell into the hands of a kind of foreman, to whom I put my
+questions anew. He was a man of Napoleonic beard, and such fair
+red-and-white complexion that he impressed me as having escaped from
+a show of wax-works, and I was not at all surprised to find him a wax
+figure in point of intelligence. He seemed to think my questions the
+greatest misfortunes which had ever befallen him, and to regard each
+suggestion of Sarpi--_tempo della Repubblica--scomunica di Paolo
+Quinto_--as an intolerable oppression. He could only tell me that on
+a certain spot (which he pointed out with his foot) in the demolished
+church, there had been found a stone with Sarpi's name upon it.
+The padrone, who had the contract for building the new convent, had
+said,--"Truly, I have heard speak of this Sarpi;" but the stone had been
+broken, and he did not know what had become of it.
+
+And, in fact, the only thing that remembered Sarpi, on the site of the
+convent where he spent his life, died, and was buried, was the little
+tablet on the outside of the wall, of which the abbreviated Latin
+announced that he had been Theologue to the Republic, and that his dust
+was now removed to the island of San Michele. After this failure, I
+had no humor to make researches for the bridge on which the friar
+was attacked by his assassins. But, indeed, why should I look for it?
+Finding it, could I have kept in my mind the fine dramatic picture I now
+have, of Sarpi returning to his convent on a mild October evening, weary
+with his long walk from St. Mark's, and pacing with downcast eyes,--the
+old patrician and the lay-brother at his side, and the masked and
+stealthy assassins, with uplifted daggers, behind him? Nay, I fear I
+should have found the bridge with some scene of modern life upon it,
+and brought away in my remembrance an old woman with an oil-bottle, or a
+straggling boy with a tumbler, and a very little wine in it.
+
+On our way home from the Servite Convent, we stopped again near the
+corner and bridge of Sior Antonio Rioba,--this time to go into the house
+of Tintoretto, which stands close at the right hand, on the same quay.
+The house, indeed, might make some pretensions to be called a palace: it
+is large, and has a carved and balconied front, in which are set a
+now illegible tablet describing it as the painter's dwelling, and
+a medallion portrait of Robusti. It would have been well if I had
+contented myself with this goodly outside; for penetrating, by a long
+narrow passage and complicated stairway, to the interior of the house,
+I found that it had nothing to offer me but the usual number of
+commonplace rooms in the usual blighting state of restoration. I must
+say that the people of the house, considering they had nothing in
+the world to show me, were kind and patient under the intrusion, and
+answered with very polite affirmation my discouraged inquiry if this
+were really Tintoretto's house.
+
+Their conduct was different from that of the present inmates of Titian's
+house, near the Fondamenta Nuove, in a little court at the left of
+the church of the Jesuits. These unreasonable persons think it an
+intolerable bore that the enlightened traveling public should break in
+upon their privacy. They put their heads out of the upper windows, and
+assure the strangers that the house is as utterly restored within as
+they behold it without (and it _is_ extremely restored), that it merely
+occupies the site of the painter's dwelling, and that there is nothing
+whatever to see in it. I never myself had the heart to force an entrance
+after these protests; but an acquaintance of the more obdurate sex, whom
+I had the honor to accompany thither, once did so, and came out with a
+story of rafters of the original Titianic kitchen being still visible in
+the new one. After a lapse of two years I revisited the house, and found
+that so far from having learned patience by frequent trial, the inmates
+had been apparently goaded into madness during the interval. They seemed
+to know of our approach by instinct, and thrust their heads out, ready
+for protest, before we were near enough to speak. The lazy, frowzy
+women, the worthless men, and idle, loafing boys of the neighborhood,
+gathered round to witness the encounter; but though repeatedly commanded
+to ring (I was again in company with ladies), and try to force the
+place, I refused decidedly to do so. The garrison were strengthening
+their position by plastering and renewed renovation, and I doubt that by
+this time the original rafters are no longer to be seen. A plasterer's
+boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood clapping his trowel on his board,
+inside the house, while we debated retreat, and derisively invited us
+to enter: _"Suoni pure, O signore! Questa e la famosa casa del gran
+pittore, l'immortale Tiziano,--suoni, signore!_" (Ring, by all means,
+sir. This is the famous house of the great painter, the immortal Titian.
+Ring!) _Da capo_. We retired amid the scorn of the populace. But
+indeed I could not blame the inhabitants of Titian's house; and were
+I condemned to live in a place so famous as to attract idle curiosity,
+flushed and insolent with travel, I should go to the verge of man-traps
+and shot-guns to protect myself.
+
+This house, which is now hemmed in by larger buildings of later date,
+had in the painter's time an incomparably "lovely and delightful
+situation." Standing near the northern boundary of the city, it
+looked out over the lagoon,--across the quiet isle of sepulchres, San
+Michele,--across the smoking chimneys of the Murano glass-works, and the
+bell-towers of her churches,--to the long line of the sea-shore on the
+right and to the mainland on the left; and beyond the nearer lagoon
+islands and the faintly penciled outlines of Torcello and Burano in
+front, to the sublime distance of the Alps, shining in silver and
+purple, and resting their snowy heads against the clouds. It had a
+pleasant garden of flowers and trees, into which the painter descended
+by an open stairway, and in which he is said to have studied the famous
+tree in The Death of Peter Martyr. Here he entertained the great and
+noble of his day, and here he feasted and made merry with the gentle
+sculptor Sansovino, and with their common friend, the rascal-poet
+Aretino. The painter's and the sculptor's wives knew each other, and
+Sansovino's Paola was often in the house of Cecilia Vecellio; [Footnote:
+The wife of Titian's youth was, according to Ticozzi, named Lucia. It is
+in Mutinelli that I find allusion to Cecilia. The author of the _Annali
+Urbani_, speaking of the friendship and frequent meetings of Titian and
+Sansovino, says,--"Vivevano ... allora ambedue di un amore fatto sacro
+dalle leggi divine, essendo moglie di Tiziano una Cecilia." I would not
+advise the reader to place too fond a trust in any thing concerning the
+house of Titian. Mutinelli refers to but one house of the painter, while
+Ticozzi makes him proprietor of two.] and any one who is wise enough not
+to visit the place, can easily think of those ladies there, talking at
+an open window that gives upon the pleasant garden, where their husbands
+walk up and down together in the purple evening light.
+
+In the palace where Goldoni was born a servant showed me an entirely new
+room near the roof, in which he said the great dramatist had composed
+his immortal comedies. As I knew, however, that Goldoni had left the
+house when a child, I could scarcely believe what the cicerone said,
+though I was glad he said it, and that he knew any thing at all of
+Goldoni. It is a fine old Gothic palace on a small canal near the Frari,
+and on the Calle del Nomboli, just across from a shop of indigestible
+pastry. It is known by an inscription, and by the medallion of the
+dramatist above the land-door; and there is no harm in looking in at the
+court on the ground-floor, where you may be pleased with the picturesque
+old stairway, wandering upward I hardly know how high, and adorned with
+many little heads of lions.
+
+Several palaces dispute the honor of being Bianca Cappello's birthplace,
+but Mutinelli awards the distinction to the palace at Sant' Appollinare
+near the Ponte Storto. One day a gondolier vaingloriously rowed us to
+the water-gate of the edifice through a very narrow, damp, and uncleanly
+canal, pretending that there was a beautiful staircase in its court. At
+the moment of our arrival, however, Bianca happened to be hanging out
+clothes from a window, and shrilly disclaimed the staircase, attributing
+this merit to another Palazzo Cappello. We were less pleased with her
+appearance here, than with that portrait of her which we saw on another
+occasion in the palace of a lady of her name and blood. This lady has
+since been married, and the name of Cappello is now extinct.
+
+The Palazzo Mocenigo, in which Byron lived, is galvanized into ghastly
+newness by recent repairs, and as it is one of the ugliest palaces on
+the Grand Canal, it has less claim than ever upon one's interest. The
+custodian shows people the rooms where the poet wrote, dined, and slept,
+and I suppose it was from the hideous basket-balcony over the main door
+that one of his mistresses threw herself into the canal. Another of
+these interesting relicts is pointed out in the small butter-and-cheese
+shop which she keeps in the street leading from Campo Sant' Angelo to
+San Paterinan: she is a fat sinner, long past beauty, bald, and somewhat
+melancholy to behold. Indeed, Byron's memory is not a presence which I
+approach with pleasure, and I had most enjoyment in his palace when
+I thought of good-natured little Thomas Moore, who once visited his
+lordship there. Byron himself hated the recollection of his life in
+Venice, and I am sure no one else need like it. But he is become a _cosa
+di Venezia_, and you cannot pass his palace without having it pointed
+out to you by the gondoliers. Early after my arrival in the city I made
+the acquaintance of an old smooth-shaven, smooth-mannered Venetian, who
+said he had known Byron, and who told me that he once swam with him from
+the Port of San Nicol� to his palace-door. The distance is something
+over three miles, but if the swimmers came in with the sea the feat
+was not so great as it seems, for the tide is as swift and strong as a
+mill-race. I think it would be impossible to make the distance against
+the tide.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+COMMERCE.
+
+
+To make an annual report in September upon the Commercial Transactions
+of the port, was an official duty to which I looked forward at Venice
+with a vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted
+tranquillity. It was not because the preparation of the report was an
+affair of so great labor that I shrank from it; but because the material
+was wanting with which to make a respectable show among my consular
+peers in the large and handsomely misprinted volume of Commercial
+Relations annually issued by the enterprising Congressional publishers.
+It grieved me that upstart ports like Marseilles, Liverpool, and Bremen,
+should occupy so much larger space in this important volume than my
+beloved Venice; and it was with a feeling of profound mortification that
+I used to post my meagre account of a commerce that once was greater
+than all the rest of the world's together. I sometimes desperately eked
+out the material furnished me in the statistics of the Venetian Chamber
+of Commerce by an agricultural essay on the disease of the grapes and
+its cure, or by a few wretched figures representative of a very slender
+mining interest in the province. But at last I determined to end these
+displeasures, and to make such researches into the history of her
+Commerce as should furnish me forth material for a report worthy of the
+high place Venice held in my reverence.
+
+Indeed, it seemed to be by a sort of anachronism that I had ever
+mentioned contemporary Venetian Commerce; and I turned with exultation
+from the phantom transactions of the present to that solid and
+magnificent prosperity of the past, of which the long-enduring
+foundations were laid in the earliest Christian times. For the new
+cities formed by the fugitives from barbarian invasion of the main-land,
+during the fifth century, had hardly settled around a common democratic
+government on the islands of the lagoons, when they began to develop
+maritime energies and resources; and long before this government was
+finally established at Rialto, (the ancient sea-port of Padua,) or
+Venice had become the capital of the young Republic, the Veneti had
+thriftily begun to turn the wild invaders of the main-land to account,
+to traffic with them, and to make treaties of commerce with their
+rulers. Theodoric, the king of the Goths, had fixed his capital at
+Ravenna, in the sixth century, and would have been glad to introduce
+Italian civilization among his people; but this warlike race were not
+prepared to practice the useful arts, and although they inhabited one of
+the most fruitful parts of Italy, with ample borders of sea, they were
+neither sailors nor tillers of the ground. The Venetians supplied them
+(at a fine profit, no doubt,) with the salt made in the lagoons, and
+with wines brought from Istria. The Goths viewed with especial amazement
+their skill in the management of their river-craft, by means of which
+the dauntless traders ascended the shallowest streams to penetrate the
+main-land, "running on the grass of the meadows, and between the stalks
+of the harvest field,"--just as in this day our own western steamers are
+known to run in a heavy dew.
+
+The Venetians continued to extend and confirm their commerce with those
+helpless and hungry warriors, and were ready also to open a lucrative
+trade with the Longobards when they descended into Italy about the year
+570. They had, in fact, abetted the Longobards in their war with the
+Greek Emperor Justinian, (who had opposed their incursion,) and in
+return the barbarians gave them the right to hold great free marts or
+fairs on the shores of the lagoons, whither the people resorted from
+every part of the Longobard kingdom to buy the salt of the lagoons,
+grain from Istria and Dalmatia, and slaves from every country.
+
+The slave-trade, indeed, formed then one of the most lucrative branches
+of Venetian commerce, as now it forms the greatest stain upon the annals
+of that commerce. The islanders, however, were not alone guilty of this
+infamous trade in men; other Italian states made profit of it, and it
+may be said to have been all but universal. But the Venetians were the
+most deeply involved in it, they pursued it the most unscrupulously,
+and they relinquished it the last. The pope forbade and execrated their
+commerce, and they sailed from the papal ports with cargoes of slaves
+for the infidels in Africa. In spite of the prohibitions of their own
+government, they bought Christians of kidnappers throughout Europe, and
+purchased the captives of the pirates on the seas, to sell them again to
+the Saracens. Nay, being an ingenious people, they turned their honest
+penny over and over again: they sold the Christians to the Saracens,
+and then for certain sums ransomed them and restored them to their
+countries; they sold Saracens to the Christians, and plundered the
+infidels in similar transactions of ransom and restoration. It is not
+easy to fix the dates of the rise or fall of this slave-trade; but
+slavery continued in Venice as late as the fifteenth century, and in
+earlier ages was so common that every prosperous person had two or
+three slaves. [Footnote: Mutinelli, _Del Costume Veneziano_. The present
+sketch of the history of Venetian commerce is based upon facts
+chiefly drawn from Mutinelli's delightful treatise, _Del Commercio dei
+Veneziani_.] The corruption of the citizens at this time is properly
+attributed in part to the existence of slavery among them; and Mutinelli
+goes so far as to declare that the institution impressed permanent
+traits on the populace, rendering them idle and indisposed to honest
+labor, by degrading labor and making it the office of bondmen.
+
+While this hateful and enormous traffic in man was growing up,
+the Venetians enriched themselves by many other more blameless and
+legitimate forms of commerce, and gradually gathered into their grasp
+that whole trade of the East with Europe which passed through their
+hands for so many ages. After the dominion of the Franks was established
+in Italy in the eighth century, they began to supply that people, more
+luxurious than the Lombards, with the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry,
+and the perfumes of Byzantium; and held a great annual fair at the
+imperial city of Pavia, where they sold the Franks the manufactures of
+the polished and effeminate Greeks, and whence in return they carried
+back to the East the grain, wine, wool, iron, lumber, and excellent
+armor of Lombardy.
+
+From the time when they had assisted the Longobards against the Greeks,
+the Venetians found it to their interest to cultivate the friendship of
+the latter, until, in the twelfth century, they mastered the people
+so long caressed, and took their capital, under Enrico Dandolo. The
+privileges conceded to the wily and thrifty republican traders by the
+Greek Emperors, were extraordinary in their extent and value. Otho, the
+western Caesar, having succeeded the Franks in the dominion of Italy,
+had already absolved the Venetians from the annual tribute paid the
+Italian kings for the liberty of traffic, and had declared their
+commerce free throughout the Peninsula. In the mean time they had
+attacked and beaten the pirates of Dalmatia, and the Greeks now
+recognized their rule all over Dalmatia, thus securing to the Republic
+every port on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Then, as they aided
+the Greeks to repel the aggressions of the Saracens and Normans, their
+commerce was declared free in all the ports of the empire, and they were
+allowed to trade without restriction in all the cities, and to build
+warehouses and d�p�ts throughout the dominions of the Greeks, wherever
+they chose. The harvest they reaped from the vast field thus opened to
+their enterprise, must have more than compensated them for their losses
+in the barbarization of the Italian continent by the incessant civil
+wars which followed the disruption of the Lombard League, when trade and
+industry languished throughout Italy. When the Crusaders had taken the
+Holy Land, the king of Jerusalem bestowed upon the Venetians, in return
+for important services against the infidel, the same privileges conceded
+them by the Greek Emperor; and when, finally, Constantinople fell into
+the hands of the Crusaders, (whom they had skillfully diverted from the
+reconquest of Palestine to the siege of the Greek metropolis,) nearly
+all the Greek islands fell to the share of Venice; and the Latin
+emperors, who succeeded the Greeks in dominion, gave her such privileges
+as made her complete mistress of the commerce of the Levant.
+
+From this opulent traffic the insatiable enterprise of the Republic
+turned, without relinquishing the old, to new gains in the farthest
+Orient. Against her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the
+Egyptian ports, but she did not scruple to coax the barbarous prince of
+the Scythian Tartars, newly descended upon the shores of the Black Sea;
+and having secured his friendship, she proceeded, without imparting
+her design to her Latin allies at Constantinople, to plant a commercial
+colony at the mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands. Through
+this entrep�t, thenceforward, Venetian energy, with Tartar favor,
+directed the entire commerce of Asia with Europe, and incredibly
+enriched the Republic. The vastness and importance of such a trade, even
+at that day, when the wants of men were far simpler and fewer than now,
+could hardly be over-stated; and one nation then monopolized the traffic
+which is now free to the whole world. The Venetians bought their wares
+at the great marts of Samarcand, and crossed the country of Tartary
+in caravans to the shores of the Caspian Sea, where they set sail and
+voyaged to the River Volga, which they ascended to the point of its
+closest proximity to the Don. Their goods were then transported overland
+to the Don, and were again carried by water down to their mercantile
+colony at its mouth. Their ships, having free access to the Black Sea,
+could, after receiving their cargoes, return direct to Venice. The
+products of every country of Asia were carried into Europe by these
+dauntless traffickers, who, enlightened and animated by the travels and
+discoveries of Matteo, Nicol�, and Marco Polo, penetrated the remotest
+regions, and brought away the treasures which the prevalent fears and
+superstitions of other nations would have deterred them from seeking,
+even if they had possessed the means of access to them.
+
+The partial civilization of the age of chivalry had now reached its
+climax, and the class which had felt its refining effects was that
+best able to gratify the tastes still unknown to the great mass of the
+ignorant and impoverished people. It was a splendid time, and the robber
+counts and barons of the continent, newly tamed and Christianized into
+knights, spent splendidly, as became magnificent cavaliers serving noble
+ladies. The Venetians, who seldom did merely heroic things, who turned
+the Crusades to their own account and made money out of the Holy Land,
+and whom one always fancies as having a half scorn of the noisy grandeur
+of chivalry, were very glad to supply the knights and ladies with the
+gorgeous stuffs, precious stones, and costly perfumes of the East; and
+they now also began to establish manufactories, and to practice the
+industrial arts at home. Their jewelers and workers in precious metals
+soon became famous throughout Europe; the glass-works of Murano rose
+into celebrity and importance which they have never since lost (for they
+still supply the world with beads); and they began to weave stuffs of
+gold tissue at Venice, and silks so exquisitely dyed that no cavalier
+or dame of perfect fashion was content with any other. Besides this they
+gilded leather for lining walls, wove carpets, and wrought miracles of
+ornament in wax,--a material that modern taste is apt to disdain,--while
+Venetian candles in chandeliers of Venetian glass lighted up the palaces
+of the whole civilized world.
+
+The private enterprise of citizens was in every way protected and
+encouraged by the State, which did not, however, fail to make due and
+just profit out of it. The ships of the merchants always sailed to
+and from Venice in fleets, at stated seasons, seven fleets departing
+annually,--one for the Greek dominions, a second for Azof, a third for
+Trebizond, a fourth for Cyprus, a fifth for Armenia, a sixth for Spain,
+France, the Low Countries, and England, and a seventh for Africa. Each
+squadron of traders was accompanied and guarded from attacks of corsairs
+and other enemies, by a certain number of the state galleys, let
+severally to the highest bidders for the voyage, at a price never less
+than about five hundred dollars of our money. The galleys were all
+manned and armed by the State, and the crew of each amounted to three
+hundred persons; including a captain, four supercargoes, eight pilots,
+two carpenters, two calkers, a master of the oars, fifty cross-bowmen,
+three drummers, and two hundred rowers. The State also appointed a
+commandant of the whole squadron, with absolute authority to hear
+complaints, decide controversies, and punish offences.
+
+While the Republic was thus careful in the protection and discipline of
+its citizens in their commerce upon the seas, it was no less zealous for
+their security and its own dignity in their traffic with the continent
+of Europe. In that rude day, neither the life nor the property of the
+merchant who visited the ultramontane countries was safe; for the sorry
+device which he practiced, of taking with him a train of apes, buffoons,
+dancers, and singers, in order to divert his ferocious patrons from
+robbery and murder, was not always successful. The Venetians, therefore,
+were forbidden by the State to trade in those parts; and the Bohemians,
+Germans, and Hungarians, who wished to buy their wares, were obliged to
+come to the lagoons and buy them at the great marts which were held in
+different parts of the city, and on the neighboring main-land. A triple
+purpose was thus served,--the Venetian merchants were protected in their
+lives and goods, the national honor was saved from insult, and many an
+honest zecchino was turned by the innkeepers and others who lodged and
+entertained the customers of the merchants.
+
+Five of these great fairs were held every week, the chief market being
+at Rialto; and the transactions in trade were carefully supervised by
+the servants of the State. Among the magistracies especially appointed
+for the orderly conduct of the foreign and domestic commerce were the
+so-called Mercantile Consuls (_Ufficio dei Consoli dei Mercanti_), whose
+special duty it was to see that the traffic of the nation received
+no hurt from the schemes of any citizen or foreigner, and to punish
+offenses of this kind with banishment and even graver penalties. They
+measured every ship about to depart, to learn if her cargo exceeded the
+lawful amount; they guarded creditors against debtors and protected
+poor debtors against the rapacity of creditors, and they punished thefts
+sustained by the merchants. It is curious to find contemporary with
+this beneficent magistracy, a charge of equal dignity exercised by
+the College of Reprisals. A citizen offended in his person or property
+abroad, demanded justice of the government of the country in which the
+offense was committed. If the demand was refused, it was repeated by the
+Republic; if still refused, then the Republic, although at peace with
+the nation from which the offense came, seized any citizen of that
+country whom it could find, and, through its College of Reprisals,
+spoiled him of sufficient property to pay the damage done to its
+citizen. Finally, besides several other magistracies resident in Venice,
+the Republic appointed Consuls in its colonies and some foreign ports,
+to superintend the traffic of its citizens, and to compose their
+controversies. The Consuls were paid out of duties levied on the
+merchandise; they were usually nobles, and acted with the advice and
+consent of twelve other Venetian nobles or merchants.
+
+At this time, and, indeed, throughout its existence, the great lucrative
+monopoly of the Republic was the salt manufactured in the lagoons, and
+forced into every market, at rates that no other salt could compete
+with. Wherever alien enterprise attempted rivalry, it was instantly
+discouraged by Venice. There were troublesome salt mines, for example,
+in Croatia; and in 1381 the Republic caused them to be closed by paying
+the King of Hungary an annual pension of seven thousand crowns of gold.
+The exact income of the State, however, from the monopoly of salt, or
+from the various imposts and duties levied upon merchandise, it is now
+difficult to know, and it is impossible to compute accurately the value
+or extent of Venetian commerce at any one time. It reached the acme of
+its prosperity under Tommaso Mocenigo, who was Doge from 1414 to
+1423. There were then three thousand and three hundred vessels of the
+mercantile marine, giving employment to thirty-three thousand seamen,
+and netting to their owners a profit of forty per cent, on the capital
+invested. How great has been the decline of this trade may be understood
+from the fact that in 1863 it amounted, according to the careful
+statistics of the Chamber of Commerce, to only $60,229,740, and that the
+number of vessels now owned in Venice is one hundred and fifty. As the
+total tonnage of these is but 26,000, it may be inferred that they are
+small craft, and in fact they are nearly all coasting vessels. They no
+longer bring to Venice the drugs and spices and silks of Samarcand, or
+carry her own rare manufactures to the ports of western Europe; but they
+sail to and from her canals with humble freights of grain, lumber, and
+hemp. Almost as many Greek as Venetian ships now visit the old queen,
+who once levied a tax upon every foreign vessel in her Adriatic; and the
+shipping from the cities of the kingdom of Italy exceeds hers by ninety
+sail, while the tonnage of Great Britain is vastly greater. Her commerce
+has not only wasted to the shadow of its former magnitude, but it has
+also almost entirely lost its distinctive character. Glass of Murano is
+still exported to a value of about two millions of dollars annually; but
+in this industry, as in nearly all others of the lagoons, there is
+an annual decline. The trade of the port falls off from one to three
+millions of dollars yearly, and the manufacturing interests of the
+province have dwindled in the same proportion. So far as silk is
+concerned, there has been an immediate cause for the decrease in the
+disease which has afflicted the cocoons for several years past. Wine and
+oil are at present articles of import solely,--the former because of a
+malady of the grape, the latter because of negligent cultivation of the
+olive.
+
+A considerable number of persons are still employed in the manufacture
+of objects of taste and ornament; and in the Ruga Vecchia at Rialto they
+yet make the famous Venetian gold chain, which few visitors to the city
+can have failed to notice hanging in strands and wound upon spools, in
+the shop windows of the Old Procuratie and the Bridge of Rialto. It is
+wrought of all degrees of fineness, and is always so flexile that it
+may be folded and wound in any shape. It is now no longer made in great
+quantity, and is chiefly worn by contadine (as a safe investment of
+their ready money), [Footnote: Certain foreigners living in Venice were
+one day astonished to find their maid-servant in possession of a mass of
+this chain, and thought it their business to reprove her extravagance.
+"Signori," she explained paradoxically, "if I keep my money, I spend
+it; if I buy this chain, it is always money (_� sempre soldi_)."] and
+old-fashioned people of the city, who display the finer sort in
+skeins or strands. At Chioggia, I remember to have seen a babe at its
+christening in church literally manacled and shackled with Venetian
+chain; and the little girl who came to us one day, to show us the
+splendors in which she had appeared at a _disputa_ (examination of
+children in doctrine), was loaded with it. Formerly, in the luxurious
+days of the Republic, it is said the chain was made as fine as
+sewing-silk, and worn embroidered on Genoa velvet by the patrician
+dames. It had then a cruel interest from the fact that its manufacture,
+after a time, cost the artisans their eyesight, so nice and subtle was
+the work. I could not help noticing that the workmen at the shops in the
+Ruga Vecchia still suffer in their eyes, even though the work is much
+coarser. I do not hope to describe the chain, except by saying that the
+links are horseshoe and oval shaped, and are connected by twos,--an
+oval being welded crosswise into a horseshoe, and so on, each two being
+linked loosely into the next.
+
+An infinitely more important art, in which Venice was distinguished a
+thousand years ago, has recently been revived there by Signor Salviati,
+an enthusiast in mosaic painting. His establishment is on the Grand
+Canal, not far from the Academy, and you might go by the old palace
+quite unsuspicious of the ancient art stirring with new life in its
+breast. "A. Salviati, Avvocato," is the legend of the bell-pull, and you
+do not by any means take this legal style for that of the restorer of a
+neglected art, and a possessor of forgotten secrets in gilded glass and
+"smalts," as they term the small delicate rods of vitreous substance,
+with which the wonders of the art are achieved. But inside of the palace
+are some two hundred artisans at work,--cutting the smalts and glass
+into the minute fragments of which the mosaics are made, grinding
+and smoothing these fragments, polishing the completed works, and
+reproducing, with incredible patience and skill, the lights and shadows
+of the pictures to be copied.
+
+You first enter the rooms of those whose talent distinguishes them as
+artists, and in whose work all the wonderful neatness and finish and
+long-suffering toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original
+life and inspiration alike impossible and profane to the elder
+mosaicists. Each artist has at hand a great variety of the slender stems
+of smalts already mentioned, and breaking these into minute fragments
+as he proceeds, he inserts them in the bed of cement prepared to receive
+his picture, and thus counterfeits in enduring mineral the perishable
+work of the painter.
+
+In other rooms artisans are at work upon various tasks of
+_marqueterie_,--table-tops, album-covers, paper-weights, brooches, pins
+and the like,--and in others they are sawing the smalts and glass into
+strips, and grinding the edges. Passing through yet another room, where
+the finished mosaic-works--of course not the pictorial mosaics--are
+polished by machinery, we enter the store-room, where the crowded
+shelves display blocks of smalts and glass of endless variety of
+color. By far the greater number of these colors are discoveries or
+improvements of the venerable mosaicist Lorenzo Radi, who has found
+again the Byzantine secrets of counterfeiting, in vitreous paste,
+aventurine (gold stone), onyx, chalcedony, malachite, and other natural
+stones, and who has been praised by the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice
+for producing mosaics even more durable in tint and workmanship than
+those of the Byzantine artists.
+
+In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart for the exhibition
+of the many beautiful and costly things which the art of the
+establishment produces. Here, besides pictures in mosaic, there are
+cunningly inlaid tables and cabinets, caskets, rich vases of chalcedony
+mounted in silver, and delicately wrought jewelry, while the floor is
+covered with a mosaic pavement ordered for the Viceroy of Egypt. There
+are here, moreover, to be seen the designs furnished by the Crown
+Princess of Prussia for the mosaics of the Queen's Chapel at Windsor.
+These, like all other pictures and decorations in mosaic, are completed
+in the establishment on the Grand Canal, and are afterward put up as
+wholes in the places intended for them.
+
+In Venice nothing in decay is strange. But it is startling to find her
+in her old age nourishing into fresh life an art that, after feebly
+preserving the memory of painting for so many centuries, had decorated
+her prime only with the glories of its decline;--for Kugler ascribes the
+completion of the mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to
+the year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark's to the tenth or
+eleventh centuries, when the Greek Church had already laid her ascetic
+hand on Byzantine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed its
+motives, and forbidden its inspirations. I think, however, one would
+look about him in vain for other evidences of a returning prosperity in
+the lagoons. The old prosperity of Venice, was based upon her monopoly
+of the most lucrative traffic in the world, as we have already
+seen,--upon her exclusive privileges in foreign countries, upon the
+enlightened zeal of her government, and upon men's imperfect knowledge
+of geography, and the barbarism of the rest of Europe, as well as upon
+the indefatigable industry and intelligent enterprise of her citizens.
+America was still undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only
+one known; the people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty
+serfs, ruled and ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world's ignorance,
+pride, and sloth were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions
+of the day, which, gross as they were, embodied perhaps its noblest
+and most hopeful sentiment, were a source of incalculable profit to
+the sharp-witted mistress of the Adriatic. It was the age of penances,
+pilgrimages, and relic-hunting, and the wealth which she wrung from the
+devotion of others was exceedingly great. Her ships carried the pilgrims
+to and from the Holy Land; her adventurers ransacked Palestine and
+the whole Orient for the bones and memorials of the saints; and her
+merchants sold the precious relics throughout Europe at an immense
+advance upon first cost.
+
+But the foundations of this prosperity were at last tapped by the tide
+of wealth which poured into Venice from every quarter of the world. Her
+citizens brought back the vices as well as the luxuries of the debauched
+Orient, and the city became that seat of splendid idleness and proud
+corruption which it continued till the Republic fell. It is needless
+here to rehearse the story of her magnificence and decay. At the time
+when the hardy, hungry people of other nations were opening paths to
+prosperity by land and sea, the Venetians, gorged with the spoils of
+ages, relinquished their old habits of daring enterprise, and dropped
+back into luxury and indolence. Their incessant wars with the Genoese
+began, and though they signally defeated the rival Republic in battle,
+Genoa finally excelled in commerce. A Greek prince had arisen to dispute
+the sovereignty of the Latin Emperors, whom the Venetians had helped
+to place upon the Byzantine throne; the Genoese, seeing the favorable
+fortunes of the Greek, threw the influence of their arms and intrigues
+in his favor, and the Latins were expelled from Constantinople in 1271.
+The new Greek Emperor had promised to give the sole navigation of the
+Black Sea to his allies, together with the church and palaces possessed
+by the Venetians in his capital, and he bestowed also upon the Genoese
+the city of Smyrna. It does not seem that he fulfilled literally all his
+promises, for the Venetians still continued to sail to and from their
+colony of Tana, at the head of the Sea of Azof, though it is certain
+that they had no longer the sovereignty of those waters; and the Genoese
+now planted on the shores of the Black Sea three large and important
+colonies to serve as entrep�ts for the trade taken from their rivals.
+The oriental traffic of the latter was maintained through Tana, however,
+for nearly two centuries later, when, in 1410, the Mongol Tartars,
+under Tamerlane, fell upon the devoted colony, took, sacked, burnt,
+and utterly destroyed it. This was the first terrible blow to the
+most magnificent commerce which the world had ever seen, and which had
+endured for ages. No wonder that, on the day of Tana's fall, terrible
+portents of woe were seen at Venice,--that meteors appeared, that demons
+rode the air, that the winds and waters rose and blew down houses and
+swallowed ships! A thousand persons are said to have perished in the
+calamities which commemorated a stroke so mortally disastrous to the
+national grandeur. After that the Venetians humbly divided with their
+ancient foes the possession and maintenance of the Genoese colony of
+Caffa, and continued, with greatly diminished glory, their traffic
+in the Black Sea; till the Turks having taken Constantinople, and the
+Greeks having acquired under their alien masters a zeal for commerce
+unknown to them during the times of their native princes, the Venetians
+were finally, on the first pretext of war, expelled from those waters in
+which they had latterly maintained themselves only by payment of heavy
+tribute to the Turks.
+
+In the mean time the industrial arts, in which Venice had heretofore
+excelled, began to be practiced elsewhere, and the Florentines and
+the English took that lead in the manufactures of the world, which the
+latter still retain. The league of the Hanseatic cities was established
+and rose daily in importance. At London, at Bruges, at Bergen, and
+Novogorod banks were opened under the protection and special favor of
+the Hanseatic League; its ships were preferred to any other, and the
+tide of commerce setting northward, the cities of the League persecuted
+the foreigners who would have traded in their ports. On the
+west, Barcelona began to dispute the pre�minence of Venice in the
+Mediterranean, and Spanish salt was brought to Italy itself and sold
+by the enterprising Catalonians. Their corsairs vexed Venetian commerce
+everywhere; and in that day, as in our own, private English enterprise
+was employed in piratical depredations on the traffic of a friendly
+power.
+
+The Portuguese also began to extend their commerce, once so important,
+and catching the rage for discovery then prevalent, infested every sea
+in search of unknown land. One of their navigators, sailing by a chart
+which a monk named Fra Mauro, in his convent on the island of San
+Michele, had put together from the stories of travelers, and his own
+guesses at geography, discovered the Cape of Good Hope, and the trade
+of India with Europe was turned in that direction, and the old over-land
+traffic perished. The Venetian monopoly of this traffic had long been
+gone; had its recovery been possible, it would now have been useless to
+the declining prosperity of the Republic.
+
+It remained for Christopher Columbus, born of that Genoese nation which
+had hated the Venetians so long and so bitterly, to make the discovery
+of America, and thus to give the death-blow to the supremacy of Venice.
+While all these discoveries were taking place, the old queen of the seas
+had been weighed down with many and unequal wars. Her naval power
+had been everywhere crippled; her revenues had been reduced; her
+possessions, one after one, had been lopped away; and at the time
+Columbus was on his way to America half Europe, united in the League of
+Cambray, was attempting to crush the Republic of Venice.
+
+The whole world was now changed. Commerce sought new channels; fortune
+smiled on other nations. How Venice dragged onward from the end of
+her commercial greatness, and tottered with a delusive splendor to her
+political death, is surely one of the saddest of stories if not the
+sternest of lessons.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+VENETIAN HOLIDAYS.
+
+
+The national character of the Venetians was so largely influenced by the
+display and dissipation of the frequent festivals of the Republic, that
+it cannot be fairly estimated without taking them into consideration,
+nor can the disuse of these holidays (of which I have heretofore spoken)
+be appreciated in all its import, without particular allusion to their
+number and nature. They formed part of the aristocratic polity of the
+old commonwealth, which substituted popular indulgence for popular
+liberty, and gave the people costly pleasures in return for the
+priceless rights of which they had been robbed, set up national pride in
+the place of patriotism, and was as well satisfied with a drunken joy in
+its subjects as if they had possessed a true content.
+
+Full notice of these holidays would be history [Footnote: "Siccome,"
+says the editor of Giustina Renier-Michiel's _Origine delle Feste
+Veneziane_,--"Siccome l'illustre Autrice ha voluto applicare al suo
+lavoro il modesto titolo di _Origins delle Feste Veneziane_, e siccome
+questo potrebbe porgere un' idea assai diversa dell' opera a chi non ne
+ha alcuna cognizione, da quello che � sostanzialmente, si espone questo
+Epitome, perch� ognun regga almeno in parte, che quest' opera sarebbe
+del titolo di _storia_ condegna, giacch� essa non � che una costante
+descrizione degli avvenimenti pi� importanti e luminosi della Repubblica
+di Venezia." The work in question is one of much research and small
+philosophy, like most books which Venetians have written upon Venice;
+but it has admirably served my purpose, and I am indebted to it for most
+of the information contained in this chapter.] of Venice, for each one
+had its origin in some great event of her existence, and they were so
+numerous as to commemorate nearly every notable incident in her annals.
+Though, as has been before observed, they had nearly all a general
+religious character, the Church, as usual in Venice, only seemed to
+direct the ceremonies in its own honor, while it really ministered
+to the political glory of the oligarchy, which knew how to manage its
+priests as well as its prince and people. Nay, it happened in one case,
+at least, that a religious anniversary was selected by the Republic
+as the day on which to put to shame before the populace certain of the
+highest and reverendest dignitaries of the Church. In 1162, Ulrich, the
+Patriarch of Aquileja, seized, by a treacherous stratagem, the city of
+Grado, then subject to Venice. The Venetians immediately besieged and
+took the city, with the patriarch and twelve of his canons in it, and
+carried them prisoners to the lagoons. The turbulent patriarchs of
+Aquileja had long been disturbers of the Republic's dominion, and
+the people now determined to make an end of these displeasures. They
+refused, therefore, to release the patriarch, except on condition that
+he should bind himself to send them annually a bull and twelve fat hogs.
+It is not known what meaning the patriarch attached to this singular
+ceremony; but with the Venetians the bull was typical of himself,
+and the swine of his canons, and they yearly suffered death in these
+animals, which were slaughtered during Shrovetide in the Piazza San
+Marco amid a great concourse of the people, in the presence of the
+Doge and Signory. The locksmiths, and other workers in iron, had
+distinguished themselves in the recapture of Grado, and to their guild
+was allotted the honor of putting to death the bull and swine. Great art
+was shown in striking off the bull's head at one blow, without suffering
+the sword to touch the ground after passing through the animal's neck;
+the swine were slain with lances. Athletic games among the people
+succeeded, and the Doge and his Senators attacked and destroyed, with
+staves, several lightly built wooden castles, to symbolize the abasement
+of the feudal power before the Republic. As the centuries advanced this
+part of the ceremony, together with the slaughter of the swine, was
+disused; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of a corrupt disdain of
+simple and healthy allegory on the part of the proud doges, but in which
+I think most people will discern only a natural wish to discontinue in
+more civilized times a puerile barbarity. Mr. Ruskin himself finds
+no evidence of "state pride" in the abolition of the slaughter of the
+swine. The festival was very popular, and continued a long time, though
+I believe not till the fall of the Republic.
+
+Another tribute, equally humiliating to those who paid it, was imposed
+upon the Paduans for an insult offered to St. Mark, and gave occasion
+for a national holiday, some fifty years after the Patriarch of Aquileja
+began atonement for his outrage. In the year 1214, the citizens of
+Treviso made an entertainment to which they invited the noble youth of
+the surrounding cities. In the chief piazza of the town a castle of wood
+exquisitely decorated was held against all comers by a garrison of the
+fairest Trevisan damsels. The weapons of defense were flowers, fruits,
+bonbons, and the bright eyes of the besieged; while the missiles of
+attack were much the same, with whatever added virtue might lie in
+tender prayers and sugared supplications. Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and
+Venice sent their gallantest youths, under their municipal banners, to
+take part in this famous enterprise; and the attack was carried on by
+the leagued forces with great vigor, but with no effect on the Castle
+of Love, as it was called, till the Venetians made a breach at a weak
+point. These young men were better skilled in the arts of war than their
+allies; they were richer, and had come to Treviso decked in the spoils
+of the recent sack of Constantinople, and at the moment they neared
+the castle it is reported that they corrupted the besieged by throwing
+handfuls of gold into the tower. Whether this be true or not, it is
+certain that the conduct of the Venetians in some manner roused the
+Paduans to insult, and that the hot youths came to blows. In an instant
+the standard of St. Mark was thrown down and trampled under the feet of
+the furious Paduans; blood flowed, and the indignant Trevisans drove the
+combatants out of their city. The spark of war spreading to the rival
+cities, the Paduans were soon worsted, and three hundred of their number
+were made prisoners. These they would willingly have ransomed at any
+price, but their enemies would not release them except on the payment of
+two white pullets for each warrior. The shameful ransom was paid in the
+Piazza, to the inextinguishable delight of the Venetians, who, never
+wanting in sharp and biting wit, abandoned themselves to sarcastic
+exultation. They demanded that the Paduans should, like the patriarch,
+repeat the tribute annually; but the prudent Doge Ziani judged the
+single humiliation sufficient, and refused to establish a yearly
+celebration of the feast.
+
+One of the most famous occasional festivals of Venice is described by
+Petrarch in a Latin letter to his friend Pietro Bolognese. It was in
+celebration of the reduction of the Greeks of Candia, an island which
+in 1361 had recently been ceded to the Republic. The Candiotes rose in
+general rebellion, but were so promptly subdued that the news of the
+outbreak scarcely anticipated the announcement of its suppression in
+Venice. Petrarch was at this time the guest of the Republic, and from
+his seat at the right of the Doge on the gallery of St. Mark's Church,
+in front of the bronze horses, he witnessed the chivalric shows given
+in the Piazza below, which was then unpaved, and admirably adapted for
+equestrian feats of arms. It is curious to read the poet's account of
+these in a city where there is now no four-footed beast larger than a
+dog. But in the age of chivalry even the Venetians were mounted, and
+rode up and down their narrow streets, and jousted in their great
+campos.
+
+Speaking of twenty-four noble and handsome youths, whose feats formed
+a chief part of a show of which he "does not know if in the whole world
+there has been seen the equal," Petrarch says: "It was a gentle sight
+to see so many youths decked in purple and gold, as they ruled with
+the rein and urged with the spur their coursers, moving in glittering
+harness, with iron-shod feet which scarcely seemed to touch the ground."
+And it must have been a noble sight, indeed, to behold all this before
+the "golden fa�ade of the temple," in a place so packed with spectators
+"that a grain of barley could not have fallen to the ground. The great
+piazza, the church itself, the towers, the roofs, the arcades, the
+windows, all were--I will not say full, but running over, walled
+and paved with people." At the right of the church was built a great
+platform, on which sat "four hundred honestest gentlewomen, chosen
+from the flower of the nobility, and distinguished in their dress and
+bearing, who, amid the continual homage offered them morning, noon, and
+night, presented the image of a celestial congress." Some noblemen, come
+hither by chance, "from the part of Britain, comrades and kinsmen of
+their King, were present," and attracted the notice of the poet. The
+feasts lasted many days, but on the third day Petrarch excused himself
+to the Doge, pleading, he says, his "ordinary occupations, already known
+to all."
+
+Among remoter feasts in honor of national triumphs, was one on the Day
+of the Annunciation, commemorative of the removal of the capital of the
+Venetian isles to Rialto from Malamocco, after King Pepin had burnt the
+latter city, and when, advancing on Venice, he was met in the lagoons
+and beaten by the islanders and the tides: these by their recession
+stranding his boats in the mud, and those falling upon his helpless host
+with the fury of an insulted and imperiled people. The Doge annually
+assisted at mass in St. Mark's in honor of the victory, but not long
+afterward the celebration of it ceased, as did that of a precisely
+similar defeat of the Hungarians, who had just descended from Asia into
+Europe. In 1339 there were great rejoicings in the Piazza for the peace
+with Mastino della Scala, who, beaten by the Republic, ceded his city of
+Treviso to her.
+
+Doubtless the most splendid of all the occasional festivals was that
+held for the Venetian share of the great Christian victory at Lepanto
+over the Turks. All orders of the State took part in it; but the most
+remarkable feature of the celebration was the roofing of the Merceria,
+all the way from St. Mark's to Rialto, with fine blue cloth, studded
+with golden stars to represent the firmament, as the shopkeepers
+imagined it. The pictures of the famous painters of that day, Titian,
+Tintoretto, Palma, and the rest, were exposed under this canopy, at the
+end near Rialto. Later, the Venetian victories over the Turks at the
+Dardanelles were celebrated by a regatta, in 1658; and Morosini's
+brilliant reconquest of the Morea, in 1688, was the occasion of other
+magnificent shows.
+
+The whole world has now adopted, with various modifications, the
+picturesque and exciting pastime of the regatta, which, according to
+Mutinelli, [Footnote: _Annali Urbani di Venezia_.] originated among the
+lagoons at a very early period, from a peculiar feature in the military
+discipline of the Republic. A target for practice with the bow and
+cross-bow was set up every week on the beach at the Lido, and nobles and
+plebeians rowed thither in barges of thirty oars, vying with each other
+in the speed and skill with which the boats were driven. To divert
+the popular discontent that followed the Serrar del Consiglio and the
+suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo's conspiracy early in the fourteenth
+century, the proficiency arising from this rivalry was turned to
+account, and the spectacle of the regatta was instituted. Agreeably,
+however, to the aristocratic spirit of the newly established oligarchy,
+the patricians withdrew from the lists, and the regatta became the
+affair exclusively of the gondoliers. In other Italian cities, where
+horse and donkey races were the favorite amusement, the riders were of
+both sexes; and now at Venice women also entered into the rivalry of the
+regatta. But in gallant deference to their weakness, they were permitted
+to begin the course at the mouth of the Grand Canal before the Doganna
+di Mare, while the men were obliged to start from the Public Gardens.
+They followed the Grand Canal to its opposite extremity, beyond the
+present railway station, and there doubling a pole planted in the water
+near the Ponte della Croce, returned to the common goal before the
+Palazzo Foscari. Here was erected an ornate scaffolding to which the
+different prizes were attached. The first boat carried off a red banner;
+the next received a green flag; the third, a blue; and the fourth, a
+yellow one. With each of these was given a purse, and with the last was
+added, by way of gibe, a live pig, a picture of which was painted on the
+yellow banner. Every regatta included five courses, in which single and
+double oared boats, and single and double oared gondolas successively
+competed,--the fifth contest being that in which the women participated
+with two-oared boats. Four prizes like those described were awarded to
+the winners in each course.
+
+The regatta was celebrated with all the pomp which the superb city could
+assume. As soon as the government announced that it was to take place,
+the preparations of the champions began. "From that time the gondolier
+ceased to be a servant; he became almost an adoptive son;" [Footnote:
+_Feste Veneziane_.] his master giving him every possible assistance and
+encouragement in the daily exercises by which he trained himself for the
+contest, and his parish priest visiting him in his own house, to bless
+his person, his boat, and the image of the Madonna or other saint
+attached to the gondola. When the great day arrived the Canalazzo
+swarmed with boats of every kind. "All the trades and callings," says
+Giustina Renier-Michiel, [Footnote: _Feste Veneziane_] with that pride
+in the Venetian past which does not always pass from verbosity to
+eloquence, "had each its boats appropriately mounted and adorned; and
+private societies filled an hundred more. The chief families among the
+nobility appeared in their boats, on which they had lavished their taste
+and wealth." The rowers were dressed with the most profuse and
+elaborate luxury, and the barges were made to represent historical and
+mythological conceptions. "To this end the builders employed carving and
+sculpture, together with all manner of costly stuffs of silk and velvet,
+gorgeous fringes and tassels of silver and gold, flowers, fruits,
+shrubs, mirrors, furs, and plumage of rare birds.... Young patricians,
+in fleet and narrow craft, propelled by swift rowers, preceded the
+champions and cleared the way for them, obliging the spectators to
+withdraw on either side.... They knelt on sumptuous cushions in the
+prows of their gondolas, cross-bow in hand, and launched little pellets
+of plaster at the directors of such obstinate boats as failed to obey
+their orders to retire....
+
+"To augment the brilliancy of the regatta the nature of the place
+concurred. Let us imagine that superb canal, flanked on either side by
+a long line of edifices of every sort; with great numbers of marble
+palaces,--nearly all of noble and majestic structure, some admirable
+for an antique and Gothic taste, some for the richest Greek and Roman
+architecture,--their windows and balconies decked with damasks, stuffs
+of the Levant, tapestries, and velvets, the vivid colors of which were
+animated still more by borders and fringes of gold, and on which leaned
+beautiful women richly dressed and wearing tremulous and glittering
+jewels in their hair. Wherever the eye turned, it beheld a vast
+multitude at doorways, on the rivas, and even on the roofs. Some of the
+spectators occupied scaffoldings erected at favorable points along the
+sides of the canal; and the patrician ladies did not disdain to leave
+their palaces, and, entering their gondolas, lose themselves among the
+infinite number of the boats....
+
+"The cannons give the signal of departure. The boats dart over the
+water with the rapidity of lightning.... They advance and fall behind
+alternately. One champion who seems to yield the way to a rival suddenly
+leaves him in the rear. The shouts of his friends and kinsmen hail his
+advantage, while others already passing him, force him to redouble his
+efforts. Some weaker ones succumb midway, exhausted.... They withdraw,
+and the kindly Venetian populace will not aggravate their shame with
+jeers; the spectators glance at them compassionately, and turn again to
+those still in the lists. Here and there they encourage them by
+waving handkerchiefs, and the women toss their shawls in the air. Each
+patrician following close upon his gondolier's boat, incites him with
+his voice, salutes him by name, and flatters his pride and spirit....
+The water foams under the repeated strokes of the oars; it leaps up in
+spray and falls in showers on the backs of the rowers already dripping
+with their own sweat.... At last behold the dauntless mortal who seizes
+the red banner! His rival had almost clutched it, but one mighty stroke
+of the oar gave him the victory.... The air reverberates with a clapping
+of hands so loud that at the remotest point on the canal the moment of
+triumph is known. The victors plant on their agile boat the conquered
+flag, and instead of thinking to rest their weary arms, take up the oars
+again and retrace their course to receive congratulations and applause."
+
+The regattas were by no means of frequent occurrence, for only forty-one
+took place during some five centuries. The first was given in 1315,
+and the last in 1857, in honor of the luckless Archduke Maximilian's
+marriage with Princess Charlotte of Belgium. The most sumptuous and
+magnificent regatta of all was that given to the city in the year 1686,
+by Duke Ernest of Brunswick. This excellent prince having sold a great
+part of his subjects to the Republic for use in its wars against
+the Turk, generously spent their price in the costly and edifying
+entertainments of which Venice had already become the scene. The
+Judgment of Paris, and the Triumph of the Marine Goddesses had been
+represented at his expense on the Grand Canal, with great acceptance.
+And now the Triumph of Neptune formed a principal feature in the
+gayeties of his regatta. Nearly the whole of the salt-water mythology
+was employed in the ceremony. An immense wooden whale supporting a
+structure of dolphins and Tritons, surmounted by a statue of Neptune,
+and drawn by sea-horses, moved from the Piazzetta to the Palazzo
+Foscari, where numbers of Sirens sported about in every direction till
+the Regatta began. The whole company of the deities, very splendidly
+arrayed, then joined them as spectators, and behaved in the manner
+affected by gods and goddesses on these occasions. Mutinelli [Footnote:
+_Annali Urbani._] recounts the story with many sighs and sneers and
+great exactness; but it is not interesting. The miraculous recovery of
+the body of St. Mark, in 1094, after it had been lost for nearly two
+centuries, created a festive anniversary which was celebrated for a
+while with great religious pomp; but the rejoicings were not separately
+continued in after years. The festival was consolidated (if one may
+so speak) with two others in honor of the same saint, and the triple
+occasions were commemorated by a single holiday. The holidays annually
+distinguished by civil or ecclesiastical displays were twenty-five in
+number, of which only eleven were of religious origin, though all were
+of partly religious observance. One of the most curious and interesting
+of the former was of the earliest date, and was continued till the last
+years of the Republic. In 596 Narses, the general of the Greek Emperor,
+was furnished by the Venetians with means of transport by sea from
+Aquieja to Ravenna for the army which he was leading against the
+Ostrogoths; and he made a vow that if successful in his campaign, he
+would requite their generosity by erecting two churches in Venice.
+Accordingly, when he had beaten the Ostrogoths, he caused two votive
+churches to be built,--one to St. Theodore, on the site of the present
+St. Mark's Church, and another to San Geminiano, on the opposite bank
+of the canal which then flowed there. In lapse of time the citizens,
+desiring to enlarge their Piazza, removed the church of San Geminiano
+back as far as the present Fabbrica Nuova, which Napoleon built on the
+site of the demolished temple, between the western ends of the New and
+Old Procuratie. The removal was effected without the pope's leave, which
+had been asked, but was refused in these words,--"The Holy Father
+cannot sanction the commission of a sacrilege, though he can pardon
+it afterwards." The pontiff, therefore, imposed on the Venetians for
+penance that the Doge should pay an annual visit forever to the church.
+On the occasion of this visit the parish priest met him at the door,
+and offered the holy water to him; and then the Doge, having assisted
+at mass, marched with his Signory and the clergy of the church to its
+original site, where the clergy demanded that it should be rebuilt, and
+the Doge replied with the promise,--"Next year." A red stone was set
+in the pavement to mark the spot where the Doge renewed this
+never-fulfilled promise. [Footnote: As the author of the _Feste
+Veneziane_ tells this story it is less dramatic and characteristic. The
+clergy, she says, reminded the Doge of the occasion of his visit, and
+his obligation to renew it the following year, which he promised to do.
+I cling to the version in the text, for it seems to me that the Doge's
+perpetual promise to rebuild the church was a return in kind for the
+pope's astute answer to the petition asking him to allow its removal. So
+good a thing ought to be history.] The old church was destroyed by fire,
+and Sansovino built, in 1506, the temple thrown down by Napoleon to make
+room for his palace.
+
+The 31st of January, on which day in 828 the body of St. Mark was
+brought from Alexandria to Venice, is still observed, though the
+festival has lost all the splendor which it received from civil
+intervention. For a thousand years the day was hallowed by a solemn mass
+in St. Mark's, at which the Doge and his Signory assisted.
+
+The chief of the State annually paid a number of festive visits, which
+were made the occasion of as many holidays. To the convent of San
+Zaccaria he went in commemoration of the visit paid to that retreat by
+Pope Benedict III., in 855, when the pontiff was so charmed by the piety
+and goodness of the fair nuns, that, after his return to Rome, he sent
+them great store of relics and indulgences. It thus became one of the
+most popular of the holidays, and the people repaired in great multitude
+with their Doge to the convent, on each recurrence of the day, that
+they might see the relics and buy the indulgences. The nuns were of the
+richest and noblest families of the city, and on the Doge's first visit,
+they presented him with that bonnet which became the symbol of his
+sovereignty. It was wrought of pure gold, and set with precious stones
+of marvelous great beauty and value; and in order that the State might
+never seem forgetful of the munificence which bestowed the gift, the
+bonnet was annually taken from the treasury and shown by the Doge
+himself to the Sisters of San Zaccaria. The Doge Pietro Tradonico,
+to whom the bonnet was given, was killed in a popular tumult on this
+holiday, while going to the convent.
+
+There was likewise a vast concourse of people and traffic in indulgences
+at the church of Santa Maria della Carita (now the Academy of Fine
+Arts), on the anniversary of the day when Pope Alexander III., in 1177,
+flying from the Emperor Barbarossa, found refuge in that monastery.
+[Footnote: Selvatico and Lazari in their admirable _Guida Artistica e
+Storica di Veneza_, say that the pope merely lodged in the monastery on
+the day when he signed the treaty of peace with Barbarossa.] He bestowed
+great privileges upon it, and the Venetians honored the event to the end
+of their national existence.
+
+One of the rare occasions during the year when the Doge appeared
+officially in public after nightfall, was on St. Stephen's Day. He then
+repaired at dusk in his gilded barge, with splendid attendance of nobles
+and citizens, to the island church of San Giorgio Maggiore, whither, in
+1009, the body of St. Stephen was brought from Constantinople. On the
+first of May the Doge visited the Convent of the Virgins, (the convent
+building now forms part of the Arsenal,) where the abbess presented
+him with a bouquet, and graceful and pleasing ceremonies took place in
+commemoration of the erection and endowment of the church. The head of
+the State also annually assisted at mass in St. Mark's, to celebrate the
+arrival in Venice of St. Isidore's body, which the Doge Domenico Michiel
+brought with him from the East, at the end of twenty-six years' war
+against the infidels; and, finally, after the year 1485, when the
+Venetians stole the bones of San Rocco from the Milanese, and deposited
+them in the newly finished Scuola di San Rocco, a ducal visit was
+annually paid to that edifice.
+
+Two only of the national religious festivals yet survive the
+Republic,--that of the church of the Redentore on the Giudecca, and that
+of the church of the Salute on the Grand Canal,--both votive churches,
+built in commemoration of the city's deliverances from the pest in 1578
+and 1630. In their general features the celebrations of the two holidays
+are much alike; but that of the Salute is the less important of the two,
+and is more entirely religious in its character. A bridge of boats
+is annually thrown across the Canalazzo, and on the day of the
+Purification, the people throng to the Virgin's shrine to express their
+gratitude for her favor. This gratitude was so strong immediately after
+the cessation of the pest in 1630, that the Senate, while the architects
+were preparing their designs for the present church, caused a wooden
+one to be built on its site, and consecrated with ceremonies of singular
+splendor. On the Festa del Redentore (the third Sunday of July) a bridge
+of boats crosses the great canal of the Giudecca, and vast throngs
+constantly pass it, day and night. But though the small tradesmen who
+deal in fried cakes, and in apples, peaches, pears, and other fruits,
+make intolerable uproar behind their booths on the long quay before the
+church; though the venders of mulberries (for which the gardens of the
+Giudecca are famous) fill the air with their sweet jargoning (for
+their cries are like the shrill notes of so many singing-birds); though
+thousands of people pace up and down, and come and go upon the bridge,
+yet the Festa del Redentore has now none of the old-time gayety it wore
+when the Venetians thronged the gardens, and feasted, sang, danced,
+and flirted the night away, and at dawn went in their fleets of
+many-lanterned boats, covering the lagoon with fairy light, to behold
+the sunrise on the Adriatic Sea.
+
+Besides the religious festivals mentioned, there were five banquets
+annually given by the State on the several days of St. Mark, St. Vitus,
+St. Jerome, and St. Stephen, and the Day of the Ascension, all of which
+were attended with religious observances. Good Friday was especially
+hallowed by church processions in each of the campos; and St. Martha's
+Day was occasion for junketings on the Giudecca Canal, when a favorite
+fish, being in season, was devotionally eaten.
+
+The civil and political holidays which lasted till the fall of the
+Republic were eleven. One of the earliest was the anniversary of
+the recapture of the Venetian Brides, who were snatched from their
+bridegrooms, at the altar of San Pietro di Castello, by Triestine
+pirates. The class of citizens most distinguished in the punishment
+of the abductors was the trade of carpenters, who lived chiefly in the
+parish of Santa Maria Formosa; and when the Doge in his gratitude bade
+them demand any reasonable grace, the trade asked that he should pay
+their quarter an annual visit. "But if it rains?" said the Doge. "We
+will give you a hat to cover you," answered the carpenters. "And if I am
+hungry?" "We will give you to eat and drink." So when the Doge made his
+visit on the day of the Virgin's Purification, he was given a hat of
+gilded straw, a bottle of wine, and loaves of bread. On this occasion
+the State bestowed dowers upon twelve young girls among the fairest and
+best of Venice (chosen two from each of the six sections of the city),
+who marched in procession to the church of Santa Maria Formosa. But as
+time passed, the custom lost its simplicity and purity: pretty girls
+were said to make eyes at handsome youths in the crowd, and scandals
+occurred in public. Twelve wooden figures were then substituted, but the
+procession in which they were carried was followed by a disgusted
+and hooting populace, and assailed with a shower of turnips.
+The festivities, which used to last eight days, with incredible
+magnificence, fell into discredit, and were finally abolished during the
+war when the Genoese took Chioggia and threatened Venice, under Doria.
+This was the famous Festa delle Marie.
+
+In 997 the Venetians beat the Narentines at sea, and annexed all Istria,
+as far as Dalmatia, to the Republic. On the day of the Ascension, of
+the same year, the Doge, for the first time, celebrated the dominion of
+Venice over the Adriatic, though it was not till some two hundred years
+later that the Pope Alexander III. blessed the famous espousals, and
+confirmed the Republic in the possession of the sea forever. "What,"
+cries Giustina Renier-Michiel, turning to speak of the holiday
+thus established, and destined to be the proudest in the Venetian
+calendar,--"what shall I say of the greatest of all our solemnities,
+that of the Ascension? Alas! I myself saw Frenchmen and Venetians, full
+of derision and insult, combine to dismantle the Bucintoro and burn it
+for the gold upon it!" [Footnote: That which follows is a translation
+of the report given by Cesare Cant�, in his _Grande Illustrazione
+del Lombardo-Veneto_, of a conversation with the author of _Feste
+Veneziane_. It is not necessary to remind readers of Venetian history
+that Renier and Michiel were of the foremost names in the Golden Book.
+She who bore them both was born before the fall of the Republic which
+she so much loved and lamented, and no doubt felt more than the grief
+she expresses for the fate of the last Bucintoro. It was destroyed, as
+she describes, in 1796, by the French Republicans and Venetian Democrats
+after the abdication of the oligarchy; but a fragment of its mast yet
+remains, and is to be seen in the museum of the Arsenal.].... (This
+was the nuptial-ship in which the Doge went to wed the sea, and the
+patriotic lady tells us concerning the Bucintoro of her day): "It was
+in the form of a galley, and two hundred feet long, with two decks.
+The first of these was occupied by an hundred and sixty rowers, the
+handsomest and strongest of the fleet, who sat four men to each oar, and
+there awaited their orders; forty other sailors completed the crew. The
+upper deck was divided lengthwise by a partition, pierced with arched
+doorways, ornamented with gilded figures, and covered with a roof
+supported by caryatides--the whole surmounted by a canopy of crimson
+velvet embroidered with gold. Under this were ninety seats, and at the
+stern a still richer chamber for the Doge's throne, over which drooped
+the banner of St. Mark. The prow was double-beaked, and the sides of
+the vessel were enriched with figures of Justice, Peace, Sea, Land, and
+other allegories and ornaments.
+
+"Let me imagine those times--it is the habit of the old. At midday,
+having heard mass in the chapel of the Collegio, the Doge descends the
+Giant's Stairs, issues from the Porta della Carta, [Footnote: The gate
+of the Ducal Palace which opens upon the Piazzetta next St. Mark's.] and
+passes the booths of the mercers and glass-venders erected for the fair
+beginning that evening. He is preceded by eight standard-bearers with
+the flags of the Republic,--red, blue, white, and purple,--given by
+Alexander III. to the Doge Ziani. Six trumpets of silver, borne by as
+many boys, mix their notes with the clangor of the bells of the city.
+Behind come the retinues of the ambassadors in sumptuous liveries, and
+the fifty Comandadori in their flowing blue robes and red caps; then
+follow musicians, and the squires of the Doge in black velvet; then the
+guards of the Doge, two chancellors, the secretary of the Pregadi, a
+deacon clad in purple and bearing a wax taper, six canons, three parish
+priests in their sacerdotal robes, and the Doge's chaplain dressed
+in crimson. The grand chancellor is known by his crimson vesture. Two
+squires bear the Doge's chair and the cushion of cloth of gold. And
+the Doge--the representative, and not the master of his country; the
+executor, and not the maker of the laws; citizen and prince, revered and
+guarded, sovereign of individuals, servant of the State--comes clad in
+a long mantle of ermine, cassock of blue, and vest and hose of _tocca
+d'oro_ [Footnote: A gauze of gold and silk.] with the golden bonnet on
+his head, under the umbrella borne by a squire, and surrounded by the
+foreign ambassadors and the papal nuncio, while his drawn sword is
+carried by a patrician recently destined for some government of land or
+sea, and soon to depart upon his mission. In the rear comes a throng of
+personages,--the grand captain of the city, the judges, the three chiefs
+of the Forty, the Avogodori, the three chiefs of the Council of Ten,
+the three censors, and the sixty of the Senate with the sixty of the
+Aggiunta, all in robes of crimson silk.
+
+"On the Bucintoro, each takes the post assigned him, and the prince
+ascends the throne. The Admiral of the Arsenal and the Lido stands in
+front as pilot; at the helm is the Admiral of Malamacco, and around him
+the ship-carpenters of the Arsenal. The Bucintoro, amid redoubled clamor
+of bells and roar of cannon, quits the riva and majestically plows the
+lagoon, surrounded by innumerable boats of every form and size.
+
+"The Patriarch, who had already sent several vases of flowers to do
+courtesy to the company in the Bucintoro, joins them at the island of
+Sant' Elena, and sprinkles their course with holy water. So they reach
+the port of Lido, whence they formerly issued out upon the open sea;
+but in my time they paused there, turning the stern of the vessel to the
+sea. Then the Doge, amid the thunders of the artillery of the fort, took
+the ring blessed by the Patriarch,--who now emptied a cup of holy water
+into the sea,--and, advancing into a little gallery behind his throne,
+threw the ring into the waves, pronouncing the words, _Desponsamus te,
+mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii_. Proceeding then to the
+church of San Nicoletto, they listened to a solemn mass, and returned to
+Venice, where the dignitaries were entertained at a banquet, while
+the multitude peacefully dispersed among the labyrinths of the booths
+erected for the fair." [Footnote: One of the sops thrown to the populace
+on this occasion, as we learn from Mutinelli, was the admission to the
+train of gilded barges following the Bucintoro of a boat bearing
+the chief of the Nicolotti, one of the factions into which from time
+immemorial the lower classes of Venice had been divided. The distinction
+between the two parties seems to have been purely geographical; for
+there is no apparent reason why a man should have belonged to the
+Castellani except that he lived in the eastern quarter of the city,
+or to the Nicolotti, except that he lived in the western quarter. The
+government encouraged a rivalry not dangerous to itself, and for a long
+time the champions of the two sections met annually and beat each other
+with rods. The form of contest was afterwards modified, and became a
+struggle for the possession of certain bridges, in which the defeated
+were merely thrown into the canals. I often passed the scene of the
+fiercest of these curious battles at San Barnaba, where the Ponte de
+Pugni is adorned with four feet of stone let into the pavement, and
+defying each other from the four corners of the bridge. Finally, even
+these contests were given up and the Castellani and Nicolotti spent
+their rivalry in marvelous acrobatic feats.] This fair, which was
+established as early as 1180, was an industrial exhibition of the
+arts and trades peculiar to Venice, and was repeated annually, with
+increasing ostentation, till the end, in 1796. Indeed, the feasts of the
+Republic at last grew so numerous that it became necessary, as we have
+seen before, to make a single holiday pay a double or triple debt of
+rejoicing. When the Venetians recovered Chioggia after the terrible war
+of 1380, the Senate refused to yield them another _festa_, and merely
+ordered that St. Mark's Day should be thereafter observed with some
+added ceremony: there was already one festival commemorative of a
+triumph over the Genoese (that of San Giovanni Decollate, on whose day,
+in 1358, the Venetians beat the Genoese at Negroponte), and the Senate
+declared that this was sufficient. A curious custom, however, on the
+Sunday after Ascension, celebrated a remoter victory over the same
+enemies, to which it is hard to attach any historic probability. It
+is not known exactly when the Genoese in immense force penetrated to
+Poveglia (one of the small islands of the lagoons), nor why being there
+they stopped to ask the islanders the best way of getting to Venice.
+But tradition says that the sly Povegliesi persuaded these silly Genoese
+that the best method of navigating the lagoons was by means of rafts,
+which they constructed for them, and on which they sent them afloat.
+About the time the Venetians came out to meet the armada, the withes
+binding the members of the rafts gave way, and the Genoese who were not
+drowned in the tides stuck in the mud, and were cut in pieces like so
+many melons. No one will be surprised to learn that not a soul of them
+escaped, and that only the Povegliesi lived to tell the tale. Special
+and considerable privileges were conferred on them for their part in
+this exploit, and were annually confirmed by the Doge, when a deputation
+of the islanders called on him in his palace, and hugged and kissed the
+devoted prince.
+
+People who _will_ sentimentalize over the pigeons of St. Mark's, may
+like to know that they have been settled in the city ever since 877.
+After the religious services on Palm Sunday, it was anciently the custom
+of the sacristans of St. Mark's to release doves fettered with fragments
+of paper, and thus partly disabled from flight, for the people to
+scramble for in the Piazza. The people fatted such of the birds as they
+caught, and ate them at Easter, but those pigeons which escaped took
+refuge in the roof of the church, where they gradually assumed a certain
+sacredness of character, and increased to enormous numbers. They were
+fed by provision of the Republic, and being neglected at the time of its
+fall, many of them were starved. But they now flourish on a bequest left
+by a pious lady for their maintenance, and on the largess of grain
+and polenta constantly bestowed by strangers. Besides the holidays
+mentioned, the 6th of December was religiously observed in honor of the
+taking of Constantinople, the Doge assisting at mass in the ducal chapel
+of St. Nicholas. He also annually visited, with his Signory in the state
+barges, and with great concourse of people, the church of San Vito
+on the 15th of June, in memory of the change of the government from a
+democracy to an oligarchy, and of the suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo's
+conspiracy. On St. Isidore's Day he went with his Signory, and the
+religious confraternities, in torchlight procession, to hear mass at St.
+Mark's in celebration of the failure of Marin Falier's plot. On the 17th
+of January he visited by water the hospital erected for invalid soldiers
+and sailors, and thus commemorated the famous defence of Scutari
+against the Turks, in 1413. For the peace of 1516, concluded after the
+dissolution of the League of Cambray, he went in his barge to the
+church of Santa Marina, who had potently exerted her influence for the
+preservation of the Republic against allied France, Austria, Spain, and
+Rome. On St. Jerome's Day, when the newly-elected members of the Council
+of Ten took their seats, the Doge entertained them with a banquet, and
+there were great popular rejoicings over an affair in which the people
+had no interest.
+
+It is by a singular caprice of fortune that, while not only all the
+Venetian holidays in anywise connected with the glory of the Republic,
+but also those which peculiarly signalized her piety and gratitude, have
+ceased to be, a festival common to the whole Catholic world should still
+be observed in Venice with extraordinary display. On the day of Corpus
+Christi there is a superb ecclesiastical procession in the Piazza.
+
+The great splendor of the solemnization is said to date from the times
+when Enrico Dandolo and his fellow-Crusaders so far forgot their purpose
+of taking Palestine from the infidels as to take Constantinople from the
+schismatics. Up to that period the day of Corpus Christi was honored by
+a procession from what was then the Cathedral of San Pietro di Castello;
+but now all the thirty parishes of the city, with their hundred
+churches, have part in the procession, which is of such great length as
+to take some two hours in its progress round the Piazza.
+
+Several days before the holiday workmen begin to build, within the Place
+of St. Mark, the colonnade through which the procession is to pass; they
+roof it with blue cotton cloth, and adorn it with rolls of pasteboard
+representing garlands of palm. At last, on the festive morning,
+the dwellers on the Grand Canal are drawn to their balconies by the
+apparition of boat-loads of facchini, gorgeous in scarlet robes,
+and bearing banners, painted candles, and other movable elements of
+devotion, with which they pass to the Piazzetta, and thence into St.
+Mark's. They re-appear presently, and, with a guard of Austrian troops
+to clear the way before them, begin their march under the canopy of the
+colonnade.
+
+When you have seen the Place of St. Mark by night your eye has tasted
+its most delicate delight, but then it is the delight given by a
+memory only, and it touches you with sadness. You must see the Piazza
+to-day,--every window fluttering with rich stuffs and vivid colors; the
+three great flag staffs [Footnote: Once bearing the standards of Cyprus,
+Candia, and Venice.] hanging their heavy flags; the brilliant square
+alive with a holiday population, with resplendent uniforms, with Italian
+gesture and movement, and that long glittering procession, bearing
+slowly on the august paraphernalia of the Church--you must see all this
+before you can enter into the old heart of Venetian magnificence, and
+feel its life about you.
+
+To-day, the ancient church of San Pietro di Castello comes first in the
+procession, and, with a proud humility, the Basilica San Marco last.
+Before each parochial division goes a banner displaying the picture
+or distinctive device of its titular saint, under the shadow of which
+chants a priest; there are the hosts of the different churches, and
+the gorgeous canopies under which they are elevated; then come facchini
+dressed in scarlet and bearing the painted candles, or the long
+carved and gilded candlesticks; and again facchini delicately robed
+in vestments of the purest white linen, with caps of azure, green, and
+purple, and shod with sandals or white shoes, carrying other apparatus
+of worship. Each banner and candlestick has a fluttering leaf of tinsel
+paper attached to it, and the procession makes a soft rustling as
+it passes. The matter-of-fact character of the external Church walks
+between those symbolists, the candle-bearers,--in the form of persons
+who gather the dropping fatness of the candles, and deposit it in a vase
+carried for that purpose. Citizens march in the procession with candles;
+and there are charity-schools which also take part, and sing in the
+harsh, shrill manner, of which I think only little boys who have their
+heads closely shorn are capable.
+
+On all this we looked down from a window of the Old Procuratie--of
+course with that calm sense of superiority which people are apt to have
+in regarding the solemnities of a religion different from their own.
+But that did not altogether prevent us from enjoying what was really
+beautiful and charming in the scene. I thought most of the priests, very
+good and gentle looking,--and in all respects they were much pleasanter
+to the eye than the monks of the Carmelite order, who, in shaving their
+heads to simulate the Saviour's crown of thorns, produce a hideous
+burlesque of the divine humiliation. Yet many even of these had earnest
+and sincere faces, and I could not think so much as I ought, perhaps, of
+their idle life, and the fleas in their coarse brown cloaks. I confess,
+indeed, I felt rather a sadness than an indignation at all that
+self-sacrifice to an end of which I could but dimly see the usefulness.
+With some things in this grand spectacle we were wholly charmed, and
+doubtless had most delight in the little child who personated John the
+Baptist, and who was quite naked, but for a fleece folded about him: he
+bore the cross-headed staff in one small hand, and led with the other
+a lamb much tied up with blue ribbon. Here and there in the procession
+little girls, exquisitely dressed, and gifted by fond mothers with wings
+and aureoles, walked, scattering flowers. I likewise greatly relished
+the lively holiday air of a company of airy old men, the pensioners of
+some charity, who, in their white linen trousers and blue coats, formed
+a prominent feature of the display. Far from being puffed up with their
+consequence, they gossiped cheerfully with the spectators in the pauses
+of the march, and made jests to each other in that light-hearted,
+careless way observable in old men taken care of, and with nothing
+before them to do worth speaking of but to die. I must own that the
+honest facchini who bore the candles were equally affable, and even
+freer with their jokes. But in this they formed a fine contrast to here
+and there a closely hooded devotee, who, with hidden face and silent
+lips, was carrying a taper for religion, and not, like them, for money.
+I liked the great good-natured crowd, so orderly and amiable; and I
+enjoyed even that old citizen in the procession who, when the Patriarch
+gave his blessing, found it inconvenient to kneel, and compromised by
+stretching one leg a great way out behind him. These things, indeed,
+quite took my mind off of the splendors; and I let the canopy of the
+Scuola di San Rocco (worth 40,000 ducats) go by with scarce a glance,
+and did not bestow much more attention upon the brilliant liveries of
+the Patriarch's servants,--though the appearance of these ecclesiastical
+flunkies is far more impressive than that of any of their secular
+brethren. They went gorgeously before the Patriarch, who was surrounded
+by the richly dressed clergy of St. Mark's, and by clouds of incense
+rising from the smoking censers. He walked under the canopy in his
+cardinal's robes, and with his eye fixed upon the Host.
+
+All at once the procession halted, and the Patriarch blessed the crowd,
+which knelt in a profound silence. Then the military band before him
+struck up an air from "Un Ballo in Maschera;" the procession moved on to
+the cathedral, and the crowd melted away.
+
+The once-magnificent day of the Ascension the Venetians now honor by
+closing all shop-doors behind them and putting all thought of labor
+out of their minds, and going forth to enjoy themselves in the mild,
+inexplosive fashion which seems to satisfy Italian nature. It is the
+same on all the feast-days: then the city sinks into profounder quiet;
+only bells are noisy, and where their clangor is so common as in
+Venice, it seems at last to make friends with the general stillness, and
+disturbs none but people of untranquil minds. We always go to the Piazza
+San Marco when we seek pleasure, and now, for eight days only of all the
+year, we have there the great spectacle of the Adoration of the Magi,
+performed every hour by automata within the little golden-railed gallery
+on the facade of the Giant's Clock Tower. There the Virgin sits above
+the azure circle of the zodiac, all heavily gilded, and holding the
+Child, equally splendid. Through the doors on either side, usually
+occupied by the illuminated figures of the hours, appears the procession
+and disappears. The stately giant on the summit of the tower, at the
+hither side of the great bell, solemnly strikes the hour--as a giant
+should who has struck it for centuries--with a grand, whole-arm
+movement, and a slow, muscular pride. We look up--we tourists of the
+red-backed books; we peasant-girls radiant with converging darts of
+silver piercing the masses of our thick black hair; we Austrian soldiers
+in white coats and blue tights; we voiceful sellers of the cherries
+of Padua, and we calm loafers about the many-pillared base of the
+church--we look up and see the Adoration. First, the trumpeter, blowing
+the world news of the act; then the first king, turning softly to the
+Virgin, and bowing; then the second, that enthusiastic devotee,--the
+second who lifts his crown quite from his head; last the Ethiopian
+prince, gorgeous in green and gold, who, I am sorry to say, burlesques
+the whole solemnity. His devotion may be equally heart-felt, but it is
+more jerky than that of the others. He bows well and adequately, but
+recovers his balance with a prodigious start, altogether too suggestive
+of springs and wheels. Perhaps there is a touch of the pathetic in this
+grotesque fatality of the black king, whose suffering race has always
+held mankind between laughter and tears, and has seldom done a fine
+thing without leaving somewhere the neutralizing absurdity; but if
+there is, the sentimental may find it, not I. When the procession has
+disappeared, we wait till the other giant has struck the hour, and then
+we disperse.
+
+If it is six o'clock, and the sea has begun to breathe cool across the
+Basin of St. Mark, we find our account in strolling upon the long Riva
+degli Schiavoni towards the Public Gardens. One would suppose, at first
+thought, that here, on this magnificent quay, with its glorious lookout
+over the lagoons, the patricians would have built their finest palaces;
+whereas there is hardly any thing but architectural shabbiness from the
+Ponte della Paglia at one end, to the Ponte Santa Marina at the other.
+But there need be nothing surprising in the fact, after all. The feudal
+wealth and nobility of other cities kept the base at a respectful
+distance by means of lofty stone walls, and so shut in their palaces and
+gardens. Here equal seclusion could only be achieved by building flush
+upon the water, and therefore all the finest palaces rise sheer from
+the canals; and caff�, shops, barracks, and puppet-shows occupy the
+Riva degli Schiavoni. Nevertheless, it is the favorite promenade of the
+Venetians for the winter sunshine, and at such times in the summer as
+when the sun's rage is tempered. There is always variety in the throng
+on the Riva, but the fashionable part of it is the least interesting:
+here and there a magnificent Greek flashes through the crowd, in
+dazzling white petticoats and gold-embroidered leggings and jacket;
+now and then a tall Dalmat or a solemn Turk; even the fishermen and
+the peasants, and the lower orders of the people, are picturesque; but
+polite Venice is hopelessly given to the pride of the eyes, and commits
+all the excesses of the French modes. The Venetian dandy, when dressed
+to his own satisfaction, is the worst-dressed man in the world. His
+hat curls outrageously in brim and sides; his coatsleeves are extremely
+full, and the garment pinches him at the waist; his pantaloons flow
+forth from the hips, and contract narrowly at the boot, which is
+square-toed and made too long. The whole effect is something not to
+be seen elsewhere, and is well calculated to move the beholder to
+desperation. [Footnote: These exaggerations of the fashions of 1862 have
+been succeeded by equal travesties of the present modes.] The Venetian
+fine lady, also, is prone to be superfine. Her dress is as full of color
+as a Paolo Veronese; in these narrow streets, where it is hard to expand
+an umbrella, she exaggerates hoops to the utmost; and she fatally hides
+her ankles in pantalets.
+
+In the wide thoroughfare leading from the last bridge of the Riva to the
+gate of the gardens there is always a clapping of wooden shoes on the
+stones, a braying of hand-organs, a shrieking of people who sell fish
+and fruit, at once insufferable and indescribable. The street is a _rio
+terr�_,--a filled-up canal,--and, as always happens with _rii terrai_,
+is abandoned to the poorest classes who manifest themselves, as the
+poorest classes are apt to do always, in groups of frowzy women, small
+girls carrying large babies, beggars, of course, and soldiers. I spoke
+of fruit-sellers; but in this quarter the traffic in pumpkin-seeds is
+the most popular,--the people finding these an inexpensive and pleasant
+excess, when taken with a glass of water flavored with anise.
+
+The Gardens were made by Napoleon, who demolished to that end some
+monasteries once cumbering the ground. They are pleasant enough, and
+are not gardens at all, but a park of formally-planted trees--sycamores,
+chiefly. I do not remember to have seen here any Venetians of the better
+class, except on the Mondays-of-the-Garden, in September. Usually the
+promenaders are fishermen, Austrian corporals, loutish youth of
+low degree, and women too old and too poor to have any thing to do.
+Strangers go there, and the German visitors even drink the exceptionable
+beer which is sold in the wooden cottage on the little hillock at the
+end of the Gardens. There is also a stable--where are the only horses
+in Venice. They are let at a florin an hour, and I do not know why the
+riders are always persons of the Hebrew faith. In a word, nothing can be
+drearier than the company in the Gardens, and nothing lovelier than the
+view they command,--from the sunset on the dome of the church of the
+Salute, all round the broad sweep of lagoon, to the tower at the port of
+San Nicol�, where you catch a glimpse of the Adriatic.
+
+The company is commonly stupid, but one evening, as we strolled idly
+through the walks, we came upon an interesting group--forty or fifty
+sailors, soldiers, youth of the people, gray-haired fishermen and
+contadini--sitting and lying on the grass, and listening with rapt
+attention to an old man reclining against a tree. I never saw a manner
+of sweeter or easier dignity than the speaker's. Nature is so lavish of
+her grace to these people that grow near her heart--the sun! Infinite
+study could not have taught one northern-born the charm of oratory as
+this old man displayed it. I listened, and heard that he was speaking
+Tuscan. Do you guess with what he was enchanting his simple auditors?
+Nothing less than "Orlando Furioso." They listened with the hungriest
+delight, and when Ariosto's interpreter raised his finger and said,
+"Disse l'imperatore," or, "Orlando disse, Carlomano mio," they hardly
+breathed.
+
+On the _Luned� dei Giardini_, already mentioned, all orders of the
+people flock thither, and promenade, and banquet on the grass. The trees
+get back the voices of their dryads, and the children fill the aisles
+with glancing movement and graceful sport.
+
+Of course, the hand-organ seeks here its proper element, the
+populace,--but here it brays to a peculiarly beautiful purpose. For
+no sooner does it sound than the young girls of the people wreathe
+themselves into dances, and improvise the poetry of motion. Over the
+grass they whirl, and up and down the broad avenues, and no one of all
+the gentle and peaceable crowd molests or makes them afraid. It is a
+scene to make you believe in Miriam dancing with Donatello there in that
+old garden at Rome, and reveals a simple beauty in the nature of the
+Italian poor, which shall one day, I hope, be counted in their favor
+when they are called to answer for lying and swindling.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.
+
+
+It often happens, even after the cold has announced itself in
+Venice, that the hesitating winter lingers in the Tyrol, and a mellow
+Indian-summer weather has possession of the first weeks of December.
+There was nothing in the December weather of 1863 to remind us
+Northerners that Christmas was coming. The skies were as blue as those
+of June, the sun was warm, and the air was bland, with only now and then
+a trenchant breath from the Alps, coming like a delicate sarcasm from
+loveliness unwilling to be thought insipidly amiable. But if there was
+no warning in the weather, there were other signs of Christmas-time
+not to be mistaken: a certain foolish leaping of the heart in one's
+own breast, as if the dead raptures of childhood were stirred in their
+graves by the return of the happy season; and in Venice, in weary,
+forlorn Venice, there was the half-unconscious tumult, the expectant
+bustle which cities feel at the approach of holidays. The little shops
+put on their gayest airs; there was a great clapping and hammering
+on the stalls and booths which were building in the campos; the
+street-cries were more shrill and resonant than ever, and the air was
+shaken with the continual clangor of the church bells. All this note of
+preparation is rather bewildering to strangers, and is apt to disorder
+the best-disciplined intentions of seeing Christmas as the Venetians
+keep it. The public observance of the holiday in the churches and on the
+streets is evident and accessible to the most transient sojourner;
+but it is curious proof of the difficulty of knowledge concerning the
+in-door life and usages of the Italians, that I had already spent
+two Christmases in Venice without learning any thing of their home
+celebration of the day. Perhaps a degree of like difficulty attends like
+inquiry everywhere, for the happiness of Christmas contracts the
+family circle more exclusively than ever around the home hearth, or the
+domestic scaldino, as the case may be. But, at any rate, I was quite
+ready to say that the observance of Christmas in Venice was altogether
+public, when I thought it a measure of far-sighted prudence to consult
+my barber.
+
+In all Latin countries the barber is a source of information, which,
+skillfully tapped, pours forth in a stream of endless gossip and local
+intelligence. Every man talks with his barber; and perhaps a lingering
+dignity clings to this artist from his former profession of surgeon:
+it is certain the barber here prattles on with a freedom and importance
+perfectly admitted and respected by the interlocutory count under his
+razor. Those who care to know how things passed in an Italian barber
+shop three hundred years ago, may read it in Miss Evans's "Romola;"
+those who are willing to see Nello alive and carrying on his art in
+Venice at this day, must go to be shaved at his shop in the Frezzaria.
+Here there is a continual exchange of gossip, and I have often listened
+with profit to the sage and piquant remarks of the head barber and chief
+_ciarlone_, on the different events of human life brought to his notice.
+His shop is well known as a centre of scandal, and I have heard a fair
+Venetian declare that she had cut from her list all acquaintance who
+go there, as persons likely to become infected with the worst habits of
+gossip.
+
+To this Nello, however, I used to go only when in the most brilliant
+humor for listening, and my authority on Christmas observances is
+another and humbler barber, but not less a babbler, than the first. By
+birth, I believe, he is a Mantuan, and he prides himself on speaking
+Italian instead of Venetian. He has a defective eye, which obliges him
+to tack before bringing his razor to bear, but which is all the more
+favorable to conversation. On the whole, he is flattered to be asked
+about Christmas in Venice, and he first tells me that it is one of the
+chief holidays of the year:--
+
+"It is then, Signore, that the Venetians have the custom to make three
+sorts of peculiar presents: Mustard, Fish, and Mandorlato. You must have
+seen the mustard in the shop windows: it is a thick conserve of fruits,
+flavored with mustard; and the mandorlato is a candy made of honey, and
+filled with almonds. Well, they buy fish, as many as they will, and a
+vase of mustard, and a box of mandorlato, and make presents of them, one
+family to another, the day before Christmas. It is not too much for a
+rich family to present a hundred boxes of mandorlato and as many pots of
+mustard. These are exchanged between friends in the city, and Venetians
+also send them to acquaintance in the country, whence the gift is
+returned in cakes and eggs at Easter. Christmas Eve people invite each
+other to great dinners, and eat and drink, and make merry; but there
+are only fish and vegetables, for it is a meagre day, and meats are
+forbidden. This dinner lasts so long that, when it is over, it is almost
+time to so to midnight mass, which all must attend, or else hear three
+masses on the morrow; and no doubt it was some delinquent who made our
+saying,--'Long as a Christmas mass.' On Christmas Day people dine at
+home, keeping the day with family reunions. But the day after! Ah-heigh!
+That is the first of Carnival, and all the theatres are opened, and
+there is no end to the amusements--or was not, in the old time. Now,
+they never begin. A week later comes the day of the Lord's Circumcision,
+and then the next holiday is Easter. The Nativity, the Circumcision, and
+the Resurrection--behold! these are the three mysteries of the Christian
+faith. Of what religion are the Americans, Signore?"
+
+I think I was justified in answering that we were Christians. My barber
+was politely surprised. "But there are so many different religions," he
+said, in excuse.
+
+On the afternoon before Christmas I walked through the thronged Merceria
+to the Rialto Bridge, where the tumultuous mart which opens at Piazza
+San Marco culminates in a deafening uproar of bargains. At this time the
+Merceria, or street of the shops, presents the aspect of a fair, and is
+arranged with a tastefulness and a cunning ability to make the most of
+every thing, which are seldom applied to the abundance of our fairs at
+home. The shops in Venice are all very small, and the streets of lofty
+houses are so narrow and dark, that whatever goods are not exposed
+in the shop-windows are brought to the door to be clamored over by
+purchasers; so that the Merceria is roused by unusual effort to produce
+a more pronounced effect of traffic and noise than it always wears; but
+now the effort had been made and the effect produced. The street was
+choked with the throngs, through which all sorts of peddlers battled
+their way and cried their wares. In Campo San Bartolomeo, into which
+the Merceria expands, at the foot of Rialto Bridge, holiday traffic
+had built enormous barricades of stalls, and entrenched itself behind
+booths, whence purchasers were assailed with challenges to buy bargains.
+More than half the campo was paved with crockery from Rovigo and
+glass-ware from Murano; clothing of every sort, and all kinds of small
+household wares, were offered for sale; and among the other booths, in
+the proportion of two to one, were stalls of the inevitable Christmas
+mustard and mandorlato.
+
+But I cared rather for the crowd than what the crowd cared for. I had
+been long ago obliged to throw aside my preconceived notions of the
+Italian character, though they were not, I believe, more absurd than the
+impressions of others who have never studied Italian character in Italy.
+I hardly know what of bacchantic joyousness I had not attributed to them
+on their holidays: a people living in a mild climate under such a lovely
+sky, with wine cheap and abundant, might not unreasonably have been
+expected to put on a show of the greatest jollity when enjoying
+themselves. Venetian crowds are always perfectly gentle and kindly, but
+they are also as a whole usually serious; and this Christmas procession,
+moving up and down the Merceria, and to and fro between the markets of
+Rialto, was in the fullest sense a solemnity. It is true that the scene
+was dramatic, but the drama was not consciously comic. Whether these
+people bought or sold, or talked together, or walked up and down in
+silence, they were all equally in earnest. The crowd, in spite of its
+noisy bustle and passionate uproar, did not seem to me a blithe or
+light-hearted crowd. Its sole activity was that of traffic, for, far
+more dearly than any Yankee, a Venetian loves a bargain, and puts his
+whole heart into upholding and beating down demands.
+
+Across the Bridge began the vegetable and fruit market, where whole
+Hollands of cabbage and Spains of onions opened on the view, with every
+other succulent and toothsome growth; and beyond this we entered the
+glory of Rialto, the fish-market, which is now more lavishly supplied
+than at any other season. It was picturesque and full of gorgeous color
+for the fish of Venice seem all to catch the rainbow hues of the lagoon.
+There is a certain kind of red mullet, called _triglia_, which is
+as rich and tender in its dyes as if it had never swam in water
+less glorious than that which crimsons under October sunsets. But
+a fish-market, even at Rialto, with fishermen in scarlet caps and
+_triglie_ in sunset splendors, is only a fish-market after all: it is
+wet and slimy under foot, and the innumerable gigantic eels, writhing
+everywhere, set the soul asquirm, and soon-sated curiosity slides
+willingly away.
+
+We had an appointment with a young Venetian lady to attend midnight mass
+at the church of San Mois�, and thither about half-past eleven we went
+to welcome in Christmas. The church of San Mois� is in the highest style
+of the Renaissance art, which is, I believe, the lowest style of any
+other. The richly sculptured fa�ade is divided into stories; the fluted
+columns are stilted upon pedestals, and their lines are broken by the
+bands which encircle them like broad barrel-hoops. At every possible
+point theatrical saints and angels, only sustained from falling to the
+ground by iron bars let into their backs, start from the niches and
+cling to the sculpture. The outside of the church is in every way
+detestable, and the inside is consistently bad. All the side-altars have
+broken arches, and the high altar is built of rough blocks of marble to
+represent Mount Sinai, on which a melodramatic statue of Moses receives
+the tables of the law from God the Father, with frescoed seraphim in
+the background. For the same reason, I suppose, that the devout prefer a
+hideous Bambino and a Madonna in crinoline to the most graceful artistic
+conception of those sacred personages, San Mois� is the most popular
+church for the midnight mass in Venice, and there is no mass at all in
+St. Mark's, where its magnificence would be so peculiarly impressive.
+
+On Christmas Eve, then, this church was crowded, and the door-ways were
+constantly thronged with people passing in and out. I was puzzled to
+see so many young men present, for Young Italy is not usually in great
+number at church; but a friend explained the anomaly: "After the guests
+at our Christmas Eve dinners have well eaten and drunken, they all go to
+mass in at least one church, and the younger offer a multiplied devotion
+by going to all. It is a good thing in some ways, for by this means
+they manage to see every pretty face in the city, which that night has
+specially prepared itself to be seen;" and from this slender text my
+friend began to discourse at large about these Christmas Eve dinners,
+and chiefly how jollily the priests fared, ending with the devout wish,
+"Would God had made me nephew of a canonico!" The great dinners of the
+priests are a favorite theme with Italian talkers; but I doubt it is
+after all only a habit of speech. The priests are too numerous to feed
+sumptuously in most cases.
+
+We had a good place to see and hear, sitting in the middle of the main
+aisle, directly over the dust of John Law, who alighted in Venice
+when his great Mississippi bubble burst, and died here, and now sleeps
+peacefully under a marble tablet in the ugly church of San Mois�. The
+thought of that busy, ambitious life, come to this unscheming repose
+under our feet,--so far from the scene of its hopes, successes, and
+defeats,--gave its own touch of solemnity to the time and place, and
+helped the offended sense of propriety through the bursts of operatic
+music, which interspersed the mass. But on the whole, the music was good
+and the function sufficiently impressive,--what with the gloom of the
+temple everywhere starred with tapers, and the grand altar lighted to
+the mountain-top. The singing of the priests also was here much better
+than I had found it elsewhere in Venice.
+
+The equality of all classes in church is a noticeable thing always in
+Italy, but on this Christmas Eve it was unusually evident. The rags of
+the beggar brushed the silks of luxury, as the wearers knelt side by
+side on the marble floor; and on the night when God was born to poverty
+on earth, the rich seemed to feel that they drew nearer Him in the
+neighborhood of the poor. In these costly temples of the eldest
+Christianity, the poor seem to enter upon their inheritance of the
+future, for it is they who frequent them most and possess them with the
+deepest sense of ownership. The withered old woman, who creeps into St
+Mark's with her scaldino in her hand, takes visible possession of its
+magnificence as God's and hers, and Catholic wealth and rank would
+hardly, if challenged, dispute her claim.
+
+Even the longest mass comes to an end at last, and those of our party
+who could credit themselves with no gain of masses against the morrow,
+received the benediction at San Mois� with peculiar unction. We all
+issued forth, and passing through the lines of young men who draw
+themselves up on either side of the doors of public places in Venice, to
+look at the young ladies as they come out, we entered the Place of
+St. Mark. The Piazza was more gloriously beautiful than ever I saw it
+before, and the church had a saintly loveliness. The moon was full, and
+snowed down the mellowest light on the gray domes, which in their soft,
+elusive outlines, and strange effect of far-withdrawal, rhymed like
+faint-heard refrains to the bright and vivid arches of the fa�ade. And
+if the bronze horses had been minded to quit their station before the
+great window over the central arch, they might have paced around the
+night's whole half-world, and found no fairer resting-place.
+
+As for Christmas Day in Venice, it amounted to very little; every thing
+was closed, and whatever merry-making went on was all within doors.
+Although the shops and the places of amusement were opened the day
+following, the city entered very sparingly on the pleasures of
+Carnival, and Christmas week passed off in every-day fashion. It will be
+remembered that on St. Stephen's Day--the first of Carnival--one of the
+five annual banquets took place at the Ducal Palace in the time of the
+Republic. A certain number of patricians received invitations to the
+dinner, and those for whom there was no room were presented with fish
+and poultry by the Doge. The populace were admitted to look on during
+the first course, and then, having sated their appetites with this
+savory observance, were invited to withdraw. The patriotic Giustina
+Renier-Michiel of course makes much of the courtesy thus extended to the
+people by the State, but I cannot help thinking it must have been hard
+to bear. The banquet, however, has passed away with the Republic which
+gave it, and the only savor of dinner which Venetian poverty now inhales
+on St. Stephen's Day, is that which arises from its own proper pot of
+broth.
+
+New Year's is the carnival of the beggars in Venice. Their business is
+carried on briskly throughout the year, but on this day it is pursued
+with an unusual degree of perseverance, and an enterprise worthy of all
+disinterested admiration. At every corner, on every bridge, under every
+door-way, hideous shapes of poverty, mutilation, and deformity stand
+waiting, and thrust out palms, plates, and pans, and advance good wishes
+and blessings to all who pass, It is an immemorial custom, and it is one
+in which all but the quite comfortable classes participate. The facchini
+in every square take up their collections; the gondoliers have their
+plates prepared for contribution at every ferry; at every caff� and
+restaurant begging-boxes appeal to charity. Whoever has lifted hand in
+your service in any way during the past year expects a reward on New
+Year's for the complaisance, and in some cases the shop-keepers send to
+wish you a _bel capo d'anno_, with the same practical end in view. On
+New Year's Eve and morning bands of facchini and gondoliers go about
+howling _vivas_ under charitable windows till they open and drop
+alms. The Piazza is invaded by the legions of beggary, and held in
+overpowering numbers against all comers; and to traverse it is like a
+progress through a lazar-house.
+
+Beyond encouraging so gross an abuse as this, I do not know that Venice
+celebrates New Year's in a peculiar manner. It is a _festa_, and there
+are masses, of course. Presents are exchanged, which consist chiefly of
+books--printed for the season, and brilliant outside and dull within,
+like all annuals.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING; BAPTISMS AND BURIALS.
+
+
+The Venetians have had a practical and strictly business-like way of
+arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has
+always been made for the dower and for the good of the State; private
+and public interest being consulted, the small matters of affections
+have been left to the chances of association; and it does not seem that
+Venetian society has ever dealt severely with husbands or wives whom
+incompatibilities forced to seek consolation outside of matrimony.
+Herodotus relates that the Illyrian Veneti sold their daughters at
+auction to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably
+placed in life, the hard-favored were given to whomsoever would take
+them, with such dower as might be considered a reasonable compensation.
+The auction was discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts
+still partook of the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction.
+At a comparatively late period Venetian fathers went with their
+daughters to a great annual matrimonial fair at San Pietro di Castello
+Olivolo, and the youth of the lagoons repaired thither to choose wives
+from the number of the maidens. These were all dressed in white, with
+hair loose about the neck, and each bore her dower in a little box,
+slung over her shoulder by a ribbon. It is to be supposed that there was
+commonly a previous understanding between each damsel and some youth in
+the crowd: as soon as all had paired off, the bishop gave them a sermon
+and his benediction, and the young men gathered up their brides and
+boxes, and went away wedded. It was on one of these occasions, in the
+year 944, that the Triestine pirates stole the Brides of Venice with
+their dowers, and gave occasion to the Festa delle Marie, already
+described, and to Rogers's poem, which every body pretends to have read.
+
+This going to San Pietro's, selecting a wife and marrying her on
+the spot, out of hand, could only have been the contrivance of a
+straightforward, practical race. Among the common people betrothals were
+managed with even greater ease and dispatch, till a very late day in
+history; and in the record of a certain trial which took place in 1443
+there is an account of one of these brief and unceremonious courtships.
+Donna Catarussa, who gives evidence, and whom I take to have been a
+worthless, idle gossip, was one day sitting at her door, when Piero di
+Trento passed, selling brooms, and said to her, "Madonna, find me some
+nice girl." To which Donna Catarussa replied, "Ugly fool! do you take me
+for a go-between?" "No," said Piero, "not that; I mean a girl to be my
+wife." And as Donna Catarussa thought at once of a suitable match, she
+said, "In faith of God, I know one for you. Come again to-morrow." So
+they both met next day, and the woman chosen by Donna Catarussa being
+asked, "Wouldst thou like to have Piero for thy husband, as God commands
+and holy Church?" she answered, "Yes." And Peter being asked the like
+question, answered, "Why, yes, certainly." And they went off and had
+the wedding feast. A number of these betrothals takes place in the last
+scene of Goldoni's "Baruffe Chiozzotte," where the belligerent women and
+their lovers take hands in the public streets, and saluting each
+other as man and wife, are affianced, and get married as quickly as
+possible:--
+
+"_Checa_ (to Tofolo). Take my hand.
+
+"_Tofolo_. Wife!
+
+"_Checa_. Husband!
+
+"_Tofolo_. Hurra!"
+
+The betrothals of the Venetian nobles were celebrated with as much
+pomp and ceremony as could possibly distinguish them from those of the
+people, and there was much more polite indifference to the inclinations
+of the parties immediately concerned. The contract was often concluded
+before the betrothed had seen each other, by means of a third person,
+when the amount of the dower was fixed. The bridegroom elect having
+verbally agreed with the parents of the bride, repaired at an early day
+to the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, where the match was published,
+and where he shook hands with his kinsmen and friends. On the day fixed
+for signing the contract the bride's father invited to his house the
+bridegroom and all his friends, and hither came the high officers of
+state to compliment the future husband. He, with the father of his
+betrothed, met the guests at the door of the palace, and conducted them
+to the grand saloon, which no woman was allowed (_si figuri!_) at this
+time to enter. When the company was seated, the bride, clad in white,
+was led from her rooms and presented. She wore a crown of pearls and
+brilliants on her head, and her hair, mixed with long threads of
+gold, fell loose about her shoulders, as you may see it in Carpaccio's
+pictures of the Espousals of St. Ursula. Her ear-rings were pendants of
+three pearls set in gold; her neck and throat were bare but for a collar
+of lace and gems, from which slid a fine jeweled chain into her bosom.
+Over her breast she wore a stomacher of cloth of gold, to which were
+attached her sleeves, open from the elbow to the hand. The formal words
+of espousal being pronounced, the bride paced slowly round the hall to
+the music of fifes and trumpets, and made a gentle inclination to each
+of the guests; and then returned to her chamber, from which she issued
+again on the arrival of any tardy friend, and repeated the ceremony.
+After all this, she descended to the courtyard, where she was received
+by gentlewomen, her friends, and placed on a raised seat (which was
+covered with rich stuffs) in an open gondola, and thus, followed by a
+fleet of attendant gondolas, went to visit all the convents in which
+there were kinspeople of herself or her betrothed. The excessive
+publicity of these ceremonies was supposed to strengthen the validity
+of the marriage contract. At an early day after the espousals the
+betrothed, preceded by musicians and followed by relatives and friends,
+went at dawn to be married in the church,--the bridegroom wearing a
+toga, and the bride a dress of white silk or crimson velvet, with
+jewels in her hair, and pearls embroidered on her robes. Visits of
+congratulation followed, and on the same day a public feast was given
+in honor of the wedding, to which at least three hundred persons were
+always invited, and at which the number, quality, and cost of the dishes
+were carefully regulated by the Republic's laws. On this occasion, one
+or more persons were chosen as governors of the feast, and after the
+tables were removed, a mock-heroic character appeared, and recounted
+with absurd exaggeration the deeds of the ancestors of the bride and
+groom. The next morning _ristorativi_ of sweetmeats and confectionery
+were presented to the happy couple, by whom the presents were returned
+in kind.
+
+A splendor so exceptional, even in the most splendid age of the most
+splendid city, as that which marked the nuptial feasts of the unhappy
+Jacopo Foscari, could not be left unnoticed in this place. He
+espoused Lucrezia, daughter of Lionardo Contarini, a noble as rich
+and magnificent as Jacopo's own father, the Doge; and, on the 29th of
+January 1441, the noble Eustachio Balbi being chosen lord of the feasts,
+the bridegroom, the bride's brother and eighteen other patrician youths,
+assembled in the Palazzo Balbi, whence they went on horseback to conduct
+Lucrezia to the Ducal Palace. They were all sumptuously dressed in
+crimson velvet and silver brocade of Alexandria, and rode chargers
+superbly caparisoned. Other noble friends attended them; musicians went
+before; a troop of soldiers brought up the rear. They thus proceeded to
+the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, and then, returning, traversed
+the Piazza, and threading the devious little streets to the Campo San
+Samuele, there crossed the Grand Canal upon a bridge of boats, to San
+Barnaba opposite, where the Contarini lived. On their arrival at this
+place the bride, supported by two Procuratori di San Marco, and attended
+by sixty ladies, descended to the church and heard mass, after which
+an oration was delivered in Campo San Barnaba before the Doge, the
+ambassadors, and a multitude of nobles and people, in praise of the
+spouses and their families. The bride then returned to her father's
+house, and jousts took place in the campos of Santa Maria Formosa and
+San Polo (the largest in the city), and in the Piazza San Marco. The
+Doge gave a great banquet, and at its close one hundred and fifty ladies
+proceeded to the bride's palace in the Bucintoro, where one hundred
+other ladies joined them, together with Lucrezia, who, seated between
+Francesco Sforza (then General-in-chief of the Republic's armies) and
+the Florentine ambassador, was conducted, amid the shouts of the people
+and the sound of trumpets, to the Ducal Palace. The Doge received her
+at the riva of the Piazzetta, and, with Sforza and Balbi led her to
+the foot of the palace stairs, where the Dogaressa, with sixty ladies,
+welcomed her. A state supper ended this day's rejoicings, and on the
+following day a tournament took place in the Piazza, for a prize of
+cloth of gold, which was offered by Sforza. Forty knights contested the
+prize and supped afterward with the Doge. On the next day there were
+processions of boats with music on the Grand Canal; on the fourth and
+last day there were other jousts for prizes offered by the jewelers and
+Florentine merchants; and every night there were dancing and feasting in
+the Ducal Palace. The Doge was himself the giver of the last tournament,
+and with this the festivities came to an end.
+
+I have read an account by an old-fashioned English traveler of a
+Venetian marriage which he saw, sixty or seventy years ago, at the
+church of San Giorgio Maggiore: "After a crowd of nobles," he says, "in
+their usual black robes, had been some time in attendance, the gondolas
+appearing, exhibited a fine show, though all of them were painted of a
+sable hue, in consequence of a sumptuary law, which is very necessary in
+this place, to prevent an expense which many who could not bear it would
+incur; nevertheless the barcarioli, or boatmen, were dressed in handsome
+liveries; the gondolas followed one another in a line, each carrying two
+ladies, who were likewise dressed in black. As they landed they arranged
+themselves in order, forming a line from the gate to the great altar.
+At length the bride, arrayed in white as the symbol of innocence, led
+by the bridesman, ascended the stairs of the landing-place. There she
+received the compliments of the bridegroom, in his black toga, who
+walked at her right hand to the altar, where they and all the company
+kneeled. I was often afraid the poor young creature would have sunk upon
+the ground before she arrived, for she trembled with great agitation,
+while she made her low courtesies from side to side: however, the
+ceremony was no sooner performed than she seemed to recover her spirits,
+and looked matrimony in the face with a determined smile. Indeed, in
+all appearance she had nothing to fear from her husband, whose age and
+aspect were not at all formidable; accordingly she tripped back to the
+gondola with great activity and resolution, and the procession ended as
+it began. Though there was something attractive in this aquatic parade,
+the black hue of the boats and the company presented to a stranger,
+like me, the idea of a funeral rather than a wedding. My expectation
+was raised too high by the previous description of the Italians, who are
+much given to hyperbole, who gave me to understand that this procession
+would far exceed any thing I had ever seen. When I reflect upon this
+rhodomontade," disdainfully adds Mr. Drummond, "I cannot help comparing,
+in my memory, the paltry procession of the Venetian marriage with a very
+august occurrence of which I was eyewitness in Sweden," and which being
+the reception of their Swedish Majesties by the British fleet, I am sure
+the reader will not ask me to quote. With change of government, changes
+of civilization following the revolutions, and the decay of wealth among
+the Venetian nobles, almost all their splendid customs have passed away,
+and the habit of making wedding presents of sweetmeats and confectionery
+is perhaps the only relic which has descended from the picturesque past
+to the present time. These gifts are still exchanged not only by nobles,
+but by all commoners according to their means, and are sometimes a
+source of very profuse outlay. It is the habit to send the candies in
+the elegant and costly paper caskets which the confectioners sell, and
+the sum of a thousand florins scarcely suffices to pass the courtesy
+round a moderately large circle of friends.
+
+With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still
+greatly a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to
+the principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that
+they have not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the
+poorest, who cannot and do not seclude the youth of either sex from each
+other, and with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and subterfuge
+would be superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the _capa y
+espada_ comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried on with
+all the cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and stolen
+interviews.
+
+Let us take our nominal friends, Marco and Todaro, and attend them in
+their solemn promenade under the arcades of the Procuratie, or upon the
+Molo, whither they go every evening to taste the air and to look at
+the ladies, while the Austrians and the other foreigners listen to the
+military music in the Piazza. They are both young, our friends; they
+have both glossy silk hats; they have both light canes and an innocent
+swagger. Inconceivably mild are these youth, and in their talk
+indescribably small and commonplace.
+
+They look at the ladies, and suddenly Todaro feels the consuming ardors
+of love.
+
+_Todaro_ (to Marco). Here, dear! Behold this beautiful blonde here!
+Beautiful as an angel! But what loveliness!
+
+_Marco_. But where?
+
+_Todaro_. It is enough. Let us go. I follow her.
+
+Such is the force of the passion in southern hearts. They follow that
+beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of the gray-moustached
+papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is electrically
+conscious of pursuit. They follow her during the whole evening, and, at
+a distance, softly follow her home, where the burning Todaro photographs
+the number of the house upon the sensitized tablets of his soul.
+
+This is the first great step in love: he has seen his adored one, and he
+knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardor. The next advance
+is to be decided between himself and the faithful Marco, and is to
+be debated over many cups of black coffee, not to name glasses of
+sugar-and-water and the like exciting beverages. The friends may now
+find out the caff� which the Biondina frequents with her parents, and
+to which Todaro may go every evening and feast his eyes upon her
+loveliness, never making his regard known by any word, till some night,
+when he has followed her home, he steals speech with her as he stands in
+the street under her balcony,--and looks sufficiently sheepish as
+people detect him on their late return from the theatre. [Footnote:
+The love-making scenes in Goldoni's comedy of _Il Bugiarda_ are
+photographically faithful to present usage in Venice.] Or, if the
+friends do not take this course in their courtship (for they are both
+engaged in the wooing), they decide that Todaro, after walking back
+and forth a sufficient number of times in the street where the Biondina
+lives, shall write her a tender letter, to demand if she be disposed to
+correspond his love. This billet must always be conveyed to her by her
+serving-maid, who must be bribed by Marco for the purpose. At every
+juncture Marco must be consulted, and acquainted with every step of
+progress; and no doubt the Biondina has some lively Moretta for her
+friend, to whom she confides her part of the love-affair in all its
+intricacy.
+
+It may likewise happen that Todaro shall go to see the Biondina in
+church, whither, but for her presence, he would hardly go, and that
+there, though he may not have speech with her, he shall still fan
+the ardors of her curiosity and pity by persistent sighs. It must
+be confessed that if the Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his
+devotion must assume the character of an intolerable bore to her; and
+that to see him everywhere at her heels--to behold him leaning against
+the pillar near which she kneels at church, the head of his stick in his
+mouth, and his attitude carefully taken with a view to captivation--to
+be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or,
+turning round at the caff� encounter his pleading gaze--that all
+this must drive the Biondina to a state bordering upon blasphemy and
+finger-nails. _Ma, come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!_ This is the sole
+course open to ingenuous youth in Venice, where confessed and unashamed
+acquaintance between young people is extremely difficult; and so this
+blind pursuit must go on, till the Biondina's inclinations are at last
+laboriously ascertained.
+
+Suppose the Biondina consents to be loved? Then Todaro has just and
+proper inquiries to make concerning her dower, and if her fortune is
+as pleasing as herself, he has only to demand her in marriage of her
+father, and after that to make her acquaintance.
+
+One day a Venetian friend of mine, who spoke a little English, came to
+me with a joyous air and said:
+
+"I am in lofe."
+
+The recipient of repeated confidences of this kind from the same person,
+I listened with tempered effusion.
+
+"It is a blonde again?"
+
+"Yes, you have right; blonde again."
+
+"And pretty?"
+
+"Oh, but beautiful. I lofe her--_come si dice!--immensamente."_ "And
+where did you see her? Where did you make her acquaintance?"
+
+"I have not make the acquaintance. I see her pass with his fazer every
+night on Rialto Bridge We did not spoke yet--only with the eyes.
+The lady is not of Venice. She has four thousand florins. It is not
+much--no. But!"
+
+Is not this love at first sight almost idyllic? Is it not also a sublime
+prudence to know the lady's fortune better than herself, before herself?
+These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before
+they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and
+white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After
+that may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of
+friendship, and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating
+the auspicious event. If he be rich, or can write _nobile_ after his
+Christian name, perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and
+alive to grateful consequences, may publish a poem, elegantly printed
+by the matchless printers at Rovigo, and send it to all the bridegroom's
+friends. It is not the only event which the facile Venetian Muse shall
+sing for him. If his child is brought happily through the measles by
+Dottor Cavasangue, the Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any
+public honor or scholastic degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and
+when he dies the mortuary rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every
+occurrence--a boy's success at school, an advocate's triumphal passage
+of the perils of examination at Padua, a priest's first mass, a nun's
+novitiate, a birth, an amputation--is the subject of tuneful effusion,
+and no less the occasion of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring
+campo, who assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of voices around
+the victim's door, and proclaim his skill or good fortune, and break
+into _vivas_ that never end till he bribes their enthusiasm into
+silence. The na�ve commonplaceness of feeling in all matrimonial
+transactions, in spite of the gloss which the operatic methods of
+courtship threw about them, was a source of endless amusement, as
+it stole out in different ways. "You know my friend Marco?" asked an
+acquaintance one day. "Well, we are looking out a wife for him. He
+doesn't want to marry, but his father insists; and he has begged us
+to find somebody. There are three of us on the look-out. But he hates
+women, and is very hard to suit. _Ben! Ci vuol pazienza!"_
+
+It rarely happens now that the religious part of the marriage ceremony
+is not performed in church, though it may be performed at the house of
+the bride. In this case, it usually takes place in the evening, and the
+spouses attend five o'clock mass next morning. But if the marriage takes
+place at church, it must be between five and eleven in the morning, and
+the blessing is commonly pronounced about six o'clock. Civil marriage
+is still unknown among the Venetians. It is entirely the affair of the
+Church, in which the bans are published beforehand, and which exacts
+from the candidates a preliminary visit to their parish priest, for
+examination in their catechism, and for instruction in religion when
+they are defective in knowledge of the kind. There is no longer any
+civil publication of the betrothals, and the hand-shaking in the court
+of the Ducal Palace has long been disused. I cannot help thinking
+that the ceremony must have been a great affliction, and that, in the
+Republican times at Venice, a bridegroom must have fared nearly as hard
+as a President elect in our times at home.
+
+There was a curious display on occasion of births among the nobility
+in former times. The room of the young mother was decorated with a
+profusion of paintings, sculpture, and jewelry; and, while yet in bed,
+she received the congratulations of her friends, and regaled them with
+sweetmeats served in vases of gold and silver.
+
+The child of noble parents had always at least two godfathers, and
+sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty; but in order that the
+relationship of godfather (which is the same according to the canonical
+law as a tie of consanguinity) should not prevent desirable matrimony
+between nobles, no patrician was allowed to be godfather to another's
+child. Consequently the _compare_ was usually a client of the noble
+parent, and was not expected to make any present to the godchild, whose
+father, on the day following the baptism, sent him a piece of marchpane,
+in acknowledgment of their relationship. No women were present at the
+baptism except those who had charge of the babe. After the fall of
+the Republic the French custom of baptism in the parents' house was
+introduced, as well as the custom, on the godfather's part, of giving a
+present,--usually of sugarplums and silver toys. But I think that most
+baptisms still take place in church, if I may judge from the numbers
+of tight little glass cases I have noticed,--half bed and half
+coffin,--containing little eight-day-old Venetians, closely swathed in
+mummy-like bandages, and borne to and from the churches by mysterious
+old women. The ceremony of baptism itself does not apparently differ
+from that in other Catholic countries, and is performed, like all
+religious services in Italy, without a ray of religious feeling or
+solemnity of any kind.
+
+For many centuries funeral services in Venice have been conducted by the
+_Scuole del Sacramento,_ instituted for that purpose. To one of
+these societies the friends of the defunct pay a certain sum, and the
+association engages to inter the dead, and bear all the expenses of the
+ceremony, the dignity of which is regulated by the priest of the parish
+in which the deceased lived. The rite is now most generally undertaken
+by the Scuola di San Rocco. The funeral train is of ten or twenty
+facchini, wearing tunics of white, with caps and capes of red, and
+bearing the society's long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted
+tapers. Priests follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the
+bier,--with a gilt crown lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to
+indicate the triumph of innocence. Formerly, hired mourners attended,
+and a candle, weighing a pound, was given to any one who chose to carry
+it in the procession.
+
+Anciently there was great show of mourning in Venice for the dead, when,
+according to Mutinelli, the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having
+seen his body deposited in the church, "fell to weeping and howling,
+tore their hair and rent their clothes, and withdrew forever from that
+church, thenceforth become for them a place of abomination." Decenter
+customs prevailed in after-times, and there was a pathetic dignity in
+the ceremony of condolence among patricians: the mourners, on the day
+following the interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the
+court of the Ducal Palace, and their friends came, one after one, and
+expressed their sympathy by a mute pressure of the hand.
+
+Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible in modern Venice. The
+corpse is hurried from the house of mourning to the parish church, where
+the friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. Then it is
+placed in a boat and carried to the burial-ground, where it is quickly
+interred. I was fortunate, therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral
+at which I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There was a church
+on this island as early as the tenth century, and in the thirteenth
+century it fell into the possession of the Comandulensen Friars. They
+built a monastery on it, which became famous as a seat of learning, and
+gave much erudite scholarship to the world. In later times Pope Gregory
+XVI. carried his profound learning from San Michele to the Vatican. The
+present church is in the Renaissance style, but not very offensively so,
+and has some indifferent paintings. The arcades and the courts around
+which it is built contain funeral monuments as unutterably ugly and
+tasteless as any thing of the kind I ever saw at home; but the dead, for
+the most part, lie in graves marked merely by little iron crosses in
+the narrow and roofless space walled in from the lagoon, which laps
+sluggishly at the foot of the masonry with the impulses of the tide.
+The old monastery was abolished in 1810, and there is now a convent of
+Reformed Benedictines on the island, who perform the last service for
+the dead.
+
+On the day of which I speak, I was taking a friend to see the objects
+of interest at San Michele, which I had seen before, and the funeral
+procession touched at the riva of the church just as we arrived. The
+procession was of one gondola only, and the pallbearers were four
+pleasant ruffians in scarlet robes of cotton, hooded, and girdled at
+the waist. They were accompanied by a priest of a broad and jolly
+countenance, two grinning boys, and finally the corpse itself, severely
+habited in an under-dress of black box, but wearing an outer garment of
+red velvet, bordered and tasseled gayly. The pleasant ruffians (who all
+wore smoking-caps with some other name) placed this holiday corpse upon
+a bier, and after a lively dispute with our gondolier, in which the
+compliments of the day were passed in the usual terms of Venetian chaff,
+lifted the bier on shore and set it down. The priest followed with the
+two boys, whom he rebuked for levity, simultaneously tripping over the
+Latin of a prayer, with his eyes fixed on our harmless little party
+as if we were a funeral, and the dead in the black box an indifferent
+spectator Then he popped down upon his knees, and made us a lively
+little supplication, while a blind beggar scuffled for a lost soldo
+about his feet, and the gondoliers quarreled volubly. After which, he
+threw off his surplice with the air of one who should say his day's work
+was done, and preceded the coffin into the church.
+
+We had hardly deposited the bier upon the floor in the centre of the
+nave, when two pale young friars appeared, throwing off their hooded
+cloaks of coarse brown, as they passed to the sacristy, and reappearing
+in their rope-girdled gowns. One of them bore a lighted taper in his
+right hand and a book in his left; the other had also a taper, but a pot
+of holy water instead of the book.
+
+They are very handsome young men, these monks, with heavy, sad eyes,
+and graceful, slender figures, which their monastic life will presently
+overload with gross humanity full of coarse appetites. They go and stand
+beside the bier, giving a curious touch of solemnity to a scene composed
+of the four pleasant ruffians in the loaferish postures which they have
+learned as facchini waiting for jobs; of the two boys with inattentive
+grins, and of the priest with wandering eyes, kneeling behind them.
+
+A weak, thin-voiced organ pipes huskily from its damp loft: the monk
+hurries rapidly over the Latin text of the service, while
+
+    "His breath to heaven like vapor goes"
+
+on the chilly, humid air; and the other monk makes the responses,
+giving and taking the sprinkler, which his chief shakes vaguely in the
+direction of the coffin. They both bow their heads--shaven down to the
+temples, to simulate His crown of thorns. Silence. The organ is still,
+the priest has vanished; the tapers are blown out; the pall-bearers lay
+hold of the bier, and raise it to their shoulders; the boys slouch into
+procession behind them; the monks glide softly and dispiritedly away.
+The soul is prepared for eternal life, and the body for the grave.
+
+The ruffians are expansively gay on reaching the open air again. They
+laugh, they call "Ci�!" [Footnote: Literally, _That_ in Italian, and
+meaning in Venetian, _You! Heigh!_ To talk in _Ci� ciappa_ is to assume
+insolent familiarity or unbounded good fellowship with the person
+addressed. A Venetian says _Ci�_ a thousand times in a day, and hails
+every one but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian
+pronoun, but rather a contraction of _Veccio_ (vecchio), _Old fellow!_
+It is common with all classes of the people: parents use it in speaking
+to their children, and brothers and sisters call one mother _Ci�_. It
+is a salutation between friends, who cry out, _Ci�!_ as they pass in the
+street. Acquaintances, men who meet after separation, rush together
+with _"Ah Ci�!"_ Then they kiss on the right cheek _"Ci�!"_ on the left,
+_"Ci�!"_ on the lips, _"Ci�! Bon di Ci�!"_] continually, and banter each
+other as they trot to the grave.
+
+The boys follow them, gamboling among the little iron crosses, and
+trying if here and there one of them may not be overthrown.
+
+We two strangers follow the boys.
+
+But here the pall-bearers become puzzled: on the right is an open
+trench, on the left is an open trench.
+
+"Presence of the Devil! To which grave does this dead belong?" They
+discuss, they dispute, they quarrel.
+
+From the side of the wall, as if he rose from the sea, appears the grave
+digger, with his shovel on his shoulder--slouching toward us.
+
+"Ah heigh! Ci�, the grave-digger! Where does this dead belong?"
+
+"Body of Bacchus, what potatoes! Here, in this trench to the right."
+
+They set down the bier there, gladly. They strip away the coffin's gay
+upper garment; they leave but the under-dress of black box, painted to
+that favor with pitch. They shove it into the grave-digger's arms, where
+he stands in the trench, in the soft earth, rich with bones. He lets it
+slide swiftly to the ground--thump! _Ecco fatto!_
+
+The two boys pick up the empty bier, and dance merrily away with it
+to the riva-gate, feigning a little play after the manner of
+children,--"Oh, what a beautiful dead!"
+
+The eldest of the pleasant ruffians is all the pleasanter for
+_sciampagnin_, and can hardly be persuaded to go out at the right gate.
+
+We strangers stay behind a little, to consult with mother spectator--
+Venetian, this. "Who is the dead man, signore?"
+
+"It is a woman, poor little thing! Dead in child-bed. The baby is in
+there with her."
+
+It has been a cheerful funeral, and yet we are not in great spirits as
+we go back to the city.
+
+For my part, I do not think the cry of sea-gulls on a gloomy day is
+a joyous sound; and the sight of those theatrical angels, with their
+shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo fa�ade of
+the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with
+despondency and foreboding.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.
+
+
+On a small canal, not far from the railroad station, the gondoliers
+show you a house, by no means notable (except for the noble statue of
+a knight, occupying a niche in one corner), as the house of Othello. It
+was once the palace of the patrician family Moro, a name well known in
+the annals of the Republic, and one which, it has been suggested, misled
+Shakespeare into the invention of a Moor of Venice. Whether this
+is possibly the fact, or whether there is any tradition of a tragic
+incident in the history of the Moro family similar to that upon which
+the play is founded, I do not know; but it is certain that the story
+of Othello, very nearly as Shakespeare tells it, is popularly known in
+Venice; and the gondoliers have fixed upon the Casa Moro in question as
+the edifice best calculated to give satisfaction to strangers in search
+of the True and the Memorable. The statue is happily darkened by time,
+and thus serves admirably to represent Othello's complexion, and to
+place beyond the shadow of a doubt the fact of his residence in the
+house. Indeed, what can you say to the gondolier, who, in answer to your
+cavils, points to the knight, with the convincing argument, "There is
+his statue!"
+
+One day I was taken to see this house, in company with some friends, and
+when it had been victoriously pointed out, as usual, we asked meekly,
+"Who was Othello?"
+
+"Othello, Signori," answered the gondolier, "was a general of
+the Republic, in the old times. He was an African, and black; but
+nevertheless the State valued him, and he beat the Turks in many
+battles. Well, Signori, this general Othello had a very young and
+beautiful wife, and his wife's cousin (_sic!_), Cassio was his
+major-domo, or, as some say, his lieutenant. But after a while happens
+along (_capita_) another soldier of Othello, who wants Cassio's
+employment, and so accuses him to the general of corrupting his wife.
+Very well, Signori! Without thinking an instant, Othello, being made so,
+flew into a passion (_si riscald� l� t�sta_), and killed his wife; and
+then when her innocence came out, he killed himself and that liar; and
+the State confiscated his goods, he being a very rich man. There has
+been a tragedy written about all this, you know."
+
+"But how is it called? Who wrote it?"
+
+"Oh! in regard to that, then, I don't know. Some Englishman."
+
+"Shakespeare?"
+
+"I don't know, Signori. But if you doubt what I tell you, go to any
+bookseller, and say, 'Favor me with the tragedy of "Othello."' He will
+give it you, and there you will find it all written out just as I tell
+it."
+
+This gondolier confirmed the authenticity of his story, by showing us
+the house of Cassio near the Rialto Bridge, and I have no doubt he would
+also have pointed out that of Iago if we had wished it.
+
+But as a general thing, the lore of the gondoliers is not rich nor very
+great. They are a loquacious and a gossiping race, but they love better
+to have a quiet chat at the tops of their voices, as they loaf idly at
+the ferries, or to scream repartees across the Grand Canal, than to tell
+stories. In all history that relates to localities they are sufficiently
+versed to find the notable places for strangers, but beyond this they
+trouble themselves as little with the past as with the future. Three
+tragic legends, however, they know, and will tell with the most amusing
+effect, namely: Biasio, _luganegher_; the Innocent Baker-Boy, and
+Veneranda Porta.
+
+The first of these legends is that of a sausage-maker who flourished
+in Venice some centuries ago, and who improved the quality of the broth
+which the _luganegheri_ make of their scraps and sell to the gondoliers,
+by cutting up into it now and then a child of some neighbor. He was
+finally detected by a gondolier who discovered a little finger in his
+broth, and being brought to justice, was dragged through the city at the
+heels of a wild horse. This most uncomfortable character appears to
+be the first hero in the romance of the gondoliers, and he certainly
+deserves to rank with that long line of imaginary personages who have
+made childhood so wretched and tractable. The second is the Innocent
+Baker-Boy already named, who was put to death on suspicion of having
+murdered a noble, because in the dead man's heart was found a dagger
+fitting a sheath which the baker had picked up in the street, on
+the morning of the murder, and kept in his possession. Many years
+afterwards, a malefactor who died in Padua confessed the murder, and
+thereupon two lamps were lighted before a shrine in the southern fa�ade
+of St. Mark's Church,--one for the murdered nobleman's soul, and the
+other for that of the innocent boy. Such is the gondoliers' story, and
+the lamps still burn every night before the shrine from dark till
+dawn, in witness of its truth. The fact of the murder and its guiltless
+expiation is an incident of Venetian history, and it is said that the
+Council of the Ten never pronounced a sentence of death thereafter, till
+they had been solemnly warned by one of their number with _"Ricordatevi
+del povero Fornaretto!"_ (Remember the poor Baker-Boy!) The poet Dall
+'Ongaro has woven the story into a beautiful and touching tragedy; but I
+believe the poet is still to be born who shall take from the gondoliers
+their Veneranda Porta, and place her historic figure in dramatic
+literature. Veneranda Porta was a lady of the days of the Republic,
+between whom and her husband existed an incompatibility. This was
+increased by the course of Signora Porta in taking a lover, and it at
+last led to the assassination of the husband by the paramours. The head
+of the murdered man was found in one of the canals, and being exposed,
+as the old custom was, upon the granite pedestal at the corner of St.
+Mark's Church, it was recognized by his brother who found among the
+papers on which the long hair was curled fragments of a letter he had
+written to the deceased. The crime was traced to the paramours, and
+being brought before the Ten, they were both condemned to be hanged
+between the columns of the Piazzetta. The gondoliers relate that when
+the sentence was pronounced, Veneranda said to the Chief of the Ten,
+"But as for me this sentence will never be carried out. You cannot hang
+a woman. Consider the impropriety!" The Venetian rulers were wise men
+in their generation, and far from being balked by this question of
+delicacy, the Chief replied, solving it, "My dear, you shall be hanged
+in my breeches."
+
+It is very coarse salt which keeps one of these stories; another is
+remembered because it concerns one of the people; and another for its
+abomination and horror. The incidents of Venetian history which take the
+fancy and touch the sensibility of the world seem hardly known to the
+gondoliers, the most intelligent and quick-witted of the populace, and
+themselves the very stuff that some romantic dreams of Venice are made
+of. However sad the fact, it is undeniable that the stories of the
+sausage-maker whose broth was flavored with murder, and the baker-boy
+who suffered guiltlessly, and that savage jest at the expense of the
+murderess, interest these people more than the high-well-born sorrows
+of the Foscari, the tragic fate of Carmagnola, or the story of
+Falier,--which last they know partly, however, because of the scandal
+about Falier's wife. Yet after all, though the gondoliers are not
+the gondoliers of imaginative literature, they have qualities which
+recommended them to my liking, and I look back upon my acquaintance
+with two or three of them in a very friendly spirit. Compared with
+the truculent hackmen, who prey upon the traveling public in all other
+cities of the civilized world, they are eminently intelligent and
+amiable. Rogues they are, of course, for small dishonesties are the
+breath in the nostrils of common carriers by land or water, everywhere;
+but the trickery of the gondoliers is so good-natured and simple that
+it can hardly offend. A very ordinary jocular sagacity defeats their
+profoundest purposes of swindling, and no one enjoys their exposure
+half so much as themselves, while a faint prospect of future employment
+purifies them of every trait of dishonesty. I had only one troublesome
+experience with them, and that was in the case of the old gondolier who
+taught me to row. He, when I had no longer need of his services, plunged
+into drunkenness, and came and dismissed me one day with every mark of
+ignominy. But he afterwards forgave me, and saluted me kindly when we
+met.
+
+The immediate goal of every gondolier's ambition is to serve, no matter
+for how short a time, an Inglese, by which generic title nearly all
+foreigners except Germans are known to him. The Inglese, whether he
+be English or American, is apt to make the tour of the whole city in
+a gondola, and to give handsome drink money at the end, whereas your
+Tedesco frugally walks to every place accessible by land, or when, in
+a party of six or eight, he takes a gondola, plants himself upon the
+letter of the tariff, and will give no more than the rate fixed by law.
+The gondolier is therefore flowingly polite to the Inglese, and he is
+even civil to the Tedesco; but he is not at all bound in courtesy to
+that provincial Italian who comes from the country to Venice, bargains
+furiously for his boat, and commonly pays under the tariff. The Venetian
+who does not himself keep a gondola seldom hires one, and even on this
+rare occasion makes no lavish demand such as "How much do you want for
+taking me to the rail-way station?" Lest the fervid imagination of the
+gondolier rise to zwanzigers and florins, and a tedious dispute ensue,
+he asks: "How many centissimi do you want?" and the contract is made,
+for a number of soldi.
+
+The number of private gondolas owned in Venice is not very great. The
+custom is rather to hire a gondolier with his boat. The exclusive use of
+the gondola is thus secured, and the gondolier gives his services as a
+domestic when off his special duty. He waits at table, goes marketing,
+takes the children to school, and serves the ladies as footman, for five
+francs a day, himself paying the proprietor of the gondola about a
+franc daily for the boat. In former times, when Venice was rich and
+prosperous, many noble families kept six or seven gondolas; and what
+with this service, and the numerous gala-days of the Republic, when the
+whole city took boat for the Lido, or the Giudecca, or Murano, and
+the gondoliers were allowed to exact any pay they could, they were a
+numerous and prosperous class. But these times have passed from Venice
+forever, and though the gondoliers are still, counting the boatmen of
+the Giudecca and Lido, some thousands in number, there are comparatively
+few young men among them, and their gains are meagre.
+
+In the little city of Venice, where the dialect spoken at Canareggio or
+Castello is a different tongue from that heard under the Procuratie of
+St. Mark's Place, the boatmen of the several quarters of the city of
+course vary greatly in character and appearance; and the gondolier who
+lounges at the base of the columns of the Piazzetta, and airily invites
+the Inglesi to tours of the Grand Canal, is of quite a different type
+from the weather-beaten _barcaiuolo_, who croaks _"Barca!"_ at the
+promenaders on the Zattere. But all, as I say, are simple and harmless
+enough, and however loudly they quarrel among themselves, they never
+pass from the defamation of their female relatives to blows. As for
+the game of knives, as it is said to be played at Naples, and as About
+describes it at Rome, I doubt if it is much known to the populace of
+Venice. Only the doctors let blood there--though from their lancets it
+flows pretty freely and constantly.
+
+It is true that the gondolier loves best of everything a clamorous
+quarrel, carried on with the canal between him and his antagonist; but
+next to this, he loves to spend his leisure at the ferry in talking
+of eating and of money, and he does not differ from many of his
+fellow-citizens in choice of topics. I have seldom caught a casual
+expression from passers in the streets of Venice which did not relate
+in some way to gold Napoleons, zwanzigers, florins, or soldi, or else
+to wine and polenta. I note this trait in the Venetians, which Goldoni
+observed in the Milanese a hundred years ago, and which I incline to
+believe is common to all Italians. The gondoliers talk a great deal in
+figure and hyperbole, and their jocose chaff is quite inscrutable even
+to some classes of Venetians. With foreigners, to whom the silence and
+easy progress of the gondola gives them the opportunity to talk, they
+are fond of using a word or two of French. They are quick at repartee,
+and have a clever answer ready for most occasions. I was one day
+bargaining for a boat to the Lido, whither I refused to be taken in
+a shabby gondola, or at a rate higher than seventy-five soldi for the
+trip. At last the patience of the gondoliers was exhausted, and one of
+them called out, "Somebody fetch the Bucintoro, and take this
+gentleman to the Lido for seventy-five soldi!" (The Bucintoro being the
+magnificent barge in which the Doge went to wed the Adriatic.)
+
+The skill with which the gondoliers manage their graceful craft is
+always admired by strangers, and is certainly remarkable. The gondola is
+very long and slender, and rises high from the water at either end. Both
+bow and stern are sharp, the former being ornamented with that deeply
+serrated blade of steel, which it is the pride of the gondolier to keep
+bright is silver, and the poop having a small platform, not far behind
+the cabin, on which he stands when he rows. The danger of collision has
+always obliged Venetian boatmen to face the bow, and the stroke with the
+oar (for the gondolier uses only a single oar) is made by pushing, and
+not by pulling. No small degree of art (as I learnt from experience)
+is thus required to keep the gondola's head straight,--all the strokes
+being made on one side,--and the sculling return of the oar-blade,
+preparatory for each new stroke, is extremely difficult to effect. Under
+the hands of the gondolier, however, the gondola seems a living thing,
+full of grace and winning movement. The wood-work of the little cabin is
+elaborately carved, and it is usually furnished with mirrors and seats
+luxuriously cushioned. The sensation of the gondola's progress, felt by
+the occupant of the cabin, as he falls back upon these cushions, may be
+described, to the female apprehension at least, as "_too_ divine." The
+cabin is removable at pleasure, and is generally taken off and replaced
+by awnings in summer. But in the evening, when the fair Venetians go out
+in their gondolas to take the air, even this awning is dispensed with,
+and the long slender boat glides darkly down the Grand Canal, bearing
+its dazzling freight of white _tulle_, pale-faced, black-eyed beauty,
+and flashing jewels, in full view.
+
+As for the singing of the gondoliers, they are the only class of
+Venetians who have not good voices, and I am scarcely inclined to regret
+the silence which long ago fell upon them. I am quite satisfied with the
+peculiar note of warning which they utter as they approach the corner of
+a canal, and which meaning simply, "To the Right," or "To the Left," is
+the most pathetic and melancholy sound in the world. If, putting
+aside my own comfort, I have sometimes wished for the sake of a dear,
+sentimental old friend at home, who loves such idle illusions with an
+ardor unbecoming his years, that I might hear the voice
+
+    "of Adria's gondolier,
+    By distance mellowed, o'er the waters sweep,"
+
+I must still confess that I never did hear it under similar
+circumstances, except in conversation across half a mile of lagoon,
+when, as usual, the burden of the lay was polenta or soldi.
+
+A recent Venetian writer, describing the character of the lower classes
+of Venice, says: "No one can deny that our populace is loquacious
+and quickwitted; but, on the other hand, no one can deny that it
+is regardless of improvement. Venice, a city exceptional in its
+construction, its customs, and its habits, has also an exceptional
+populace. It still feels, although sixty-eight years have passed, the
+influence of the system of the fallen Republic, of that oligarchic
+government, which, affording almost every day some amusement to the
+people, left them no time to think of their offended rights.... Since
+1859 Venice has resembled a sepulchre of the living,--squalor and
+beggary gaining ground with each day, and commerce, with few exceptions,
+converted into monopoly; yet the populace remains attached to its old
+habits, and will have its pleasure. If the earnings are little, what
+then? Must one die of ennui? The caff� is depopulated: not so the
+drinking-house. The last day before the drawing of the lottery, the
+offices are thronged with fathers and mothers of families, who stint
+their children of bread to buy dearly a few hours of golden illusion....
+At the worst, there is the Monte di Piet�, as a last resort."
+
+It is true, as this writer says, that the pleasure-loving populace still
+looks back fondly to the old Republican times of feasting and holidays;
+but there is certainly no truth any more in the old idea that any part
+of Italy is a place where people may be "idle with impunity," or make
+amusement the serious business of life. I can remember that the book
+from which I received my first impressions of geography was illuminated
+with a picture professing to represent Italian customs. The spirit of
+inquiry had long before caused me to doubt the exact fidelity of this
+representation; but it cost me a pang to learn that the picture was
+utterly delusive. It has been no part of my experience in Venice to see
+an Italian sitting upon the ground, and strumming the guitar, while two
+gayly dressed peasants danced to the music. Indeed, the indolence
+of Venetians is listless and silent, not playful or joyous; and as I
+learned to know their life more intimately, I came to understand that
+in many cases they are idle from despair of finding work, and that
+indolence is as much their fate as their fault. Any diligence of theirs
+is surprising to us of northern and free lands, because their climate
+subdues and enervates us, and because we can see before them no career
+open to intelligent industry. With the poorest, work is necessarily
+a hand-to-hand struggle against hunger; with those who would not
+absolutely starve without it, work is an inexplicable passion.
+
+Partly because the ways of these people are so childlike and simple in
+many things, and partly from one's own swindling tendency to take one's
+self in (a tendency really fatal to all sincerity of judgment, and
+incalculably mischievous to such downfallen peoples as have felt the
+baleful effects of the world's sentimental, impotent sympathy), there is
+something pathetic in the patient content with which Italians work. They
+have naturally so large a capacity for enjoyment, that the degree of
+selfdenial involved in labor seems exorbitant, and one feels that these
+children, so loved of Nature, and so gifted by her, are harshly dealt
+with by their stepmother Circumstance. No doubt there ought to be
+truth in the silly old picture, if there is none, and I would willingly
+make-believe to credit it, if I could. I am glad that they at least work
+in old-world, awkward, picturesque ways, and not in commonplace, handy,
+modern fashion. Neither the habits nor the implements of labor are
+changed since the progress of the Republic ceased, and her heart
+began to die within her. All sorts of mechanics' tools are clumsy and
+inconvenient: the turner's lathe moves by broken impulses; door-hinges
+are made to order, and lift the door from the ground as it opens upon
+them; all nails and tacks we hand-made; window-sashes are contrived to
+be glazed without putty, and the panes are put in from the top, so that
+to repair a broken glass the whole sash is taken apart; cooking-stoves
+are unknown to the native cooks, who work at an open fire, with crane
+and dangling pot-hooks; furniture is put together with wooden pegs
+instead of screws; you do not buy a door-lock at a hardware store,--you
+get a _fabbro_ to make it, and he comes with a leathern satchel full
+of tools to fit and finish it on the door. The wheelbarrow of this
+civilization is peculiarly wonderful in construction, with a prodigious
+wooden wheel, and a ponderous, incapable body. The canals are dredged
+with scoops mounted on long poles, and manned each by three or four
+Chiozzotti. There never was a pile-driving machine known in Venice;
+nor a steam-tug in all the channels of the lagoons, through which the
+largest craft are towed to and from the ports by row-boats. In the model
+of the sea-going vessels there has apparently been little change from
+the first. Yet in spite of all this backwardness in invention, the city
+is full of beautiful workmanship in every branch of artificing, and the
+Venetians are still the best sailors in the Adriatic.
+
+I do not offer the idea as a contribution to statistics, but it seems to
+me that the most active branch of industry in Venice is plucking fowls.
+In summer the people all work on their thresholds, and in their windows,
+and as nearly out of doors as the narrowness of the streets will let
+them,--and it is hard to pass through any part of the city without
+coming to a poulterer's shop, in the door of which inevitably sits a
+boy, tugging at the plumage of some wretched bird. He is seldom to be
+seen except in that crisis of plucking when he seems to have all but
+finished; yet he seems never to accomplish the fact perfectly. Perhaps
+it is part of his hard fate that the feathers shall grow again under
+his hand as fast as he plucks them away: at the restaurants, I know,
+the quantity of plumage one devours in consuming roast chicken is
+surprising--at first. The birds are always very lean, too, and have but
+a languid and weary look, in spite of the ardent manner in which the boy
+clasps them while at work. It may be that the Venetians do not like
+fat poultry. Their turkeys, especially, are of that emaciation which
+is attributed among ourselves only to the turkey of Job; and as for the
+geese and ducks, they can only interest anatomists. It is as if the long
+ages of incursion and oppression which have impoverished and devastated
+Italy had at last taken effect upon the poultry, and made it as poor as
+the population.
+
+I do not want to give too exclusive an impression of Venetian industry,
+however, for now I remember the Venetian _lasagnoni_, whom I never saw
+doing any thing, and who certainly abound in respectable numbers.
+
+The lasagnone is a loafer, as an Italian can be a loafer, without the
+admixture of ruffianism, which blemishes most loafers of northern race.
+He may be quite worthless, and even impertinent, but he cannot be
+a rowdy,--that pleasing blossom on the nose of our fast, high-fed,
+thick-blooded civilization. In Venice he must not be confounded with
+other loiterers at the caff�; not with the natty people who talk
+politics interminably over little cups of black coffee; not with those
+old habitu�s, who sit forever under the Procuratie, their hands folded
+upon the tops of their sticks, and staring at the ladies who pass with
+a curious steadfastness and knowing skepticism of gaze, not pleasing in
+the dim eyes of age; certainly, the last persons who bear any likeness
+to the lasagnone are the Germans, with their honest, heavy faces
+comically anglicized by leg-of-mutton whiskers. The truth is, the
+lasagnone does not flourish in the best caff�; he comes to perfection
+in cheaper resorts, for he is commonly not rich. It often happens that a
+glass of water, flavored with a little anisette, is the order over which
+he sits a whole evening. He knows the waiter intimately, and does not
+call him "Shop!" (Bottega,) as less familiar people do, but Gigi, or
+Beppi, as the waiter is pretty sure to be named. "Behold!" he says, when
+the servant places his modest drink before him, "who is that loveliest
+blonde there?" Or to his fellow-lasagnone: "She regards me! I have
+broken her the heart!" This is his sole business and mission, the cruel
+lasagnone--to break ladies the heart. He spares no condition,--neither
+rank nor wealth is any defense against him. I often wonder what is in
+that note he continually shows to his friend. The confession of some
+broken heart, I think. When he has folded it, and put it away, he
+chuckles _"Ah, cara!"_ and sucks at his long, slender Virginia cigar.
+It is unlighted, for fire consumes cigars. I never see him read the
+papers,--neither the Italian papers nor the Parisian journals, though
+if he can get "Galignani" he is glad, and he likes to pretend to a
+knowledge of English, uttering upon occasion, with great relish, such
+distinctively English words as "Yes" and "Not," and to the waiter,
+"A-little-fire-if-you-please." He sits very late in the caff�, and he
+touches his hat--his curly French hat--to the company as he goes out
+with a mild swagger, his cane held lightly in his left hand, his coat
+cut snugly to show his hips, and genteelly swaying with the motion of
+his body. He is a dandy, of course,--all Italians are dandies,--but his
+vanity is perfectly harmless, and his heart is not bad. He would go
+half an hour out of his way to put you in the direction of the Piazza. A
+little thing can make him happy,--to stand in the pit at the opera, and
+gaze at the ladies in the lower boxes--to attend the Marionette, or
+the Malibran Theatre, and imperil the peace of pretty seamstresses and
+contadinas--to stand at the church doors and ogle the fair saints as
+they pass out. Go, harmless lasagnone, to thy lodging in some mysterious
+height, and break hearts if thou wilt. They are quickly mended.
+
+Of other vagabonds in Venice, if I had my choice, I think I must select
+a certain ruffian who deals in dog-flesh, as the nearest my ideal of
+what a vagabond should be in all respects. He stands habitually under
+the Old Procuratie, beside a basket of small puppies in that snuffling
+and quivering state which appears to be the favorite condition of very
+young dogs, and occupies himself in conversation with an adjacent dealer
+in grapes and peaches, or sometimes fastidiously engages in trimming the
+hair upon the closely shaven bodies of the dogs; for in Venice it is the
+ambition of every dog to look as much like the Lion of St. Mark as the
+nature of the case will permit. My vagabond at times makes expeditions
+to the groups of travelers always seated in summer before the Caff�
+Florian, appearing at such times with a very small puppy,--neatly poised
+upon the palm of his hand, and winking pensively,--which he advertises
+to the company as a "Beautiful Beast," or a "Lovely Babe," according to
+the inspiration of his light and pleasant fancy. I think the latter term
+is used generally as a means of ingratiation with the ladies, to whom my
+vagabond always shows a demeanor of agreeable gallantry. I never saw him
+sell any of these dogs, nor ever in the least cast down by his failure
+to do so. His air is grave, but not severe; there is even, at times, a
+certain playfulness in his manner, possibly attributable to sciampagnin.
+His curling black locks, together with his velveteen jacket and
+pantaloons, are oiled and glossy, and his beard is cut in the
+French-imperial mode. His personal presence is unwholesome, and it is
+chiefly his moral perfection as a vagabond that makes him fascinating.
+One is so confident, however, of his fitness for his position and
+business, and of his entire contentment with it, that it is impossible
+not to exult in him.
+
+He is not without self-respect. I doubt, it would be hard to find any
+Venetian of any vocation, however base, who forgets that he too is a
+man and a brother. There is enough servility in the language,--it is the
+fashion of the Italian tongue, with its _Tu_ for inferiors, _Voi_ for
+intimates and friendly equals, and _Lei_ for superiors,--but in the
+manner there is none, and there is a sense of equality in the ordinary
+intercourse of the Venetians, at once apparent to foreigners.
+
+All ranks are orderly; the spirit of aggression seems not to exist among
+them, and the very boys and dogs in Venice are so well-behaved, that I
+have never seen the slightest disposition in them to quarrel. Of course,
+it is of the street-boy--the _biricchino_, the boy in his natural,
+unreclaimed state--that I speak. This state is here, in winter, marked
+by a clouded countenance, bare head, tatters, and wooden-soled shoes
+open at the heels; in summer by a preternatural purity of person, by
+abandon to the amphibious pleasure of leaping off the bridges into the
+canals, and by an insatiable appetite for polenta, fried minnows, and
+water-melons.
+
+When one of these boys takes to beggary, as a great many of them do, out
+of a spirit of adventure and wish to pass the time, he carries out the
+enterprise with splendid daring. A favorite artifice is to approach
+Charity with a slice of polenta in one hand, and, with the other
+extended, implore a soldo to buy cheese to eat with the polenta. The
+street-boys also often perform the duties of the _gransieri_, who draw
+your gondola to shore, and keep it firm with a hook. To this order
+of beggar I usually gave; but one day at the railway station I had
+no soldi, and as I did not wish to render my friend discontented with
+future alms by giving silver, I deliberately apologized, praying him to
+excuse me, and promising him for another time. I cannot forget the lofty
+courtesy with which he returned,--"_S'accomodi pur, Signor!_" They have
+sometimes a sense of humor, these poor swindlers, and can enjoy the
+exposure of their own enormities. An amiable rogue drew our gondola to
+land one evening when we went too late to see the church of San Giorgio
+Maggiore. The sacristan made us free of a perfectly dark church, and we
+rewarded him as if it had been noonday. On our return to the gondola,
+the same beggar whom we had just feed held out his hat for another
+alms. "But we have just paid you," we cried in an agony of grief and
+desperation. _"S�, signori!"_ he admitted with an air of argument, _"�
+vero. Ma, la chiesa!"_ (Yes, gentlemen, it is true. But the church!) he
+added with confidential insinuation, and a patronizing wave of the hand
+toward the edifice, as if he had been San Giorgio himself, and held the
+church as a source of revenue. This was too much, and we laughed him to
+scorn; at which, beholding the amusing abomination of his conduct, he
+himself joined in our laugh with a cheerfulness that won our hearts.
+
+Beggary is attended by no disgrace in Italy, and it therefore comes that
+no mendicant is without a proper degree of the self-respect common to
+all classes. Indeed, the habit of taking gifts of money is so general
+and shameless that the street beggars must be diffident souls indeed if
+they hesitated to ask for it. A perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered
+man will take ten soldi from you for a trifling service, and not
+consider himself in the least abased. The detestable custom of largess,
+instead of wages, still obtains in so great degree in Venice that a
+physician, when asked for his account, replies: "What you please to
+give." Knowing these customs, I hope I have never acted discourteously
+to the street beggars of Venice even when I gave them nothing, and I
+know that only one of them ever so far forgot himself as to curse me for
+not giving. Him, however, I think to have been out of his right mind at
+the time.
+
+There were two mad beggars in the parish of San Stefano, whom I should
+be sorry to leave unmentioned here. One, who presided chiefly over the
+Campo San Stefano, professed to be also a facchino, but I never saw him
+employed, except in addressing select circles of idlers whom a brawling
+noise always draws together in Venice. He had been a soldier, and he
+sometimes put himself at the head of a file of Croats passing through
+the campo, and gave them the word of command, to the great amusement of
+those swarthy barbarians. He was a good deal in drink, and when in this
+state was proud to go before any ladies who might be passing, and clear
+away the boys and idlers, to make room for them. When not occupied in
+any of these ways, he commonly slept in the arcades of the old convent.
+
+But the mad beggar of Campo Sant' Angelo seemed to have a finer sense
+of what became him as a madman and a beggar, and never made himself
+obnoxious by his noise. He was, in fact, very fat and amiable, and in
+the summer lay asleep, for the most part, at a certain street corner
+which belonged to him. When awake he was a man of extremely complaisant
+presence, and suffered no lady to go by without a compliment to her
+complexion, her blond hair, or her beautiful eyes, whichever it might
+be. He got money for these attentions, and people paid him for any
+sort of witticism. One day he said to the richest young dandy of the
+city,--"Pah! you stomach me with your perfumes and fine airs;" for which
+he received half a florin. His remarks to gentlemen had usually this
+sarcastic flavor. I am sorry to say that so excellent a madman was often
+drunk and unable to fulfill his duties to society.
+
+There are, of course, laws against mendicancy in Venice, and they are,
+of course, never enforced. Beggars abound everywhere, and nobody molests
+them. There was long a troop of weird sisters in Campo San Stefano,
+who picked up a livelihood from the foreigners passing to and from the
+Academy of Fine Arts. They addressed people with the title of Count,
+and no doubt gained something by this sort of heraldry, though there
+are counts in Venice almost as poor as themselves, and titles are
+not distinctions. The Venetian seldom gives to beggars; he says
+deliberately, "_No go_" (I have nothing), or "_Quando ritorner�_" (when
+I return), and never comes back that way. I noticed that professional
+hunger and cold took this sort of denial very patiently, as they did
+every other; but I confess I had never the heart to practice it. In
+my walks to the Public Gardens there was a venerable old man, with the
+beard and bearing of a patriarch, whom I encountered on the last bridge
+of the Riva, and who there asked alms of me. When I gave him a soldo,
+he returned me a blessing which I would be ashamed to take in the United
+States for half a dollar; and when the soldo was in some inaccessible
+pocket, and I begged him to await my coming back, he said
+sweetly,--"Very well, Signor, I will be here." And I must say, to his
+credit, that he never broke his promise, nor suffered me, for shame's
+sake, to break mine. He was quite a treasure to me in this respect, and
+assisted me to form habits of punctuality.
+
+That exuberance of manner which one notes, the first thing, in his
+intercourse with Venetians, characterizes all classes, but is most
+excessive and relishing in the poor. There is a vast deal of ceremony
+with every order, and one hardly knows what to do with the numbers of
+compliments it is necessary to respond to. A Venetian does not come to
+see you, he comes to revere you; he not only asks if you be well when
+he meets you, but he bids you remain well at parting, and desires you to
+salute for him all common friends; he reverences you at leave-taking;
+he will sometimes consent to incommode you with a visit; he will relieve
+you of the disturbance when he rises to go. All spontaneous wishes
+which must, with us, take original forms, for lack of the complimentary
+phrase, are formally expressed by him,--good appetite to you, when you
+go to dinner much enjoyment, when you go to the theatre; a pleasant
+walk, if you meet in promenade. He is your servant at meeting and
+parting; he begs to be commanded when he has misunderstood you. But
+courtesy takes its highest flights, as I hinted, from the poorest
+company. Acquaintances of this sort, when not on the _Ci� ciappa_
+footing, or that of the familiar thee and thou, always address each
+other in _Lei_ (lordship), or _Elo_, as the Venetians have it; and their
+compliment-making at encounter and separation is endless: I salute you!
+Remain well! Master! Mistress! (_Paron! parona!_) being repeated as long
+as the polite persons are within hearing.
+
+One day, as we passed through the crowded Merceria, an old Venetian
+friend of mine, who trod upon the dress of a young person before us,
+called out, "_Scusate, bella giovane_!" (Pardon, beautiful girl!) She
+was not so fair nor so young as I have seen women; but she half turned
+her face with a forgiving smile, and seemed pleased with the accident
+that had won her the amiable apology. The waiter of the caff� frequented
+by the people, says to the ladies for whom he places seats,--"Take
+this place, beautiful blonde;" or, "Sit here, lovely brunette," as it
+happens.
+
+A Venetian who enters or leaves any place of public resort touches his
+hat to the company, and one day at the restaurant some ladies, who had
+been dining there, said "_Complimenti!_" on going out, with a grace that
+went near to make the beefsteak tender. It is this uncostly gentleness
+of bearing which gives a winning impression of the whole people,
+whatever selfishness or real discourtesy lie beneath it. At home it
+sometimes seems that we are in such haste to live and be done with it,
+we have no time to be polite. Or is popular politeness merely a vice of
+servile peoples? And is it altogether better to be rude? I wish it were
+not. If you are lost in his city (and you are pretty sure to be lost
+there, continually), a Venetian will go with you wherever you wish.
+And he will do this amiable little service out of what one may say old
+civilization has established in place of goodness of heart, but which is
+perhaps not so different from it.
+
+You hear people in the streets bless each other in the most dramatic
+fashion. I once caught these parting words between an old man and a
+young girl;
+
+_Giovanetta_. Revered sir! (_Patron riverito!_)
+
+_Vecchio_. (With that peculiar backward wave and beneficent wag of the
+hand, only possible to Italians.) Blessed child! (_Benedetta!_)
+
+It was in a crowd, but no one turned round at the utterance of terms
+which Anglo-Saxons would scarcely use in their most emotional moments.
+The old gentleman who sells boxes for the theatre in the Old Procuratie
+always gave me his benediction when I took a box.
+
+There is equal exuberance of invective, and I have heard many fine
+maledictions on the Venetian streets, but I recollect none more
+elaborate than that of a gondolier who, after listening peacefully to
+a quarrel between two other boatmen, suddenly took part against one of
+them, and saluted him with,--"Ah! baptized son of a dog! And if I had
+been present at thy baptism, I would have dashed thy brains out against
+the baptismal font!"
+
+All the theatrical forms of passion were visible in a scene I witnessed
+in a little street near San Samuele, where I found the neighborhood
+assembled at doors and windows in honor of a wordy battle between
+two poor women. One of these had been forced in-doors by her prudent
+husband, and the other upbraided her across the marital barrier. The
+assailant was washing, and twenty times she left her tub to revile the
+besieged, who thrust her long arms out over those of her husband, and
+turned each reproach back upon her who uttered it, thus:--
+
+_Assailant_. Beast!
+
+_Besieged_. Thou!
+
+_A_. Fool!
+
+_B_. Thou!
+
+_A_. Liar!
+
+_B_. Thou!
+
+_E via in seguito!_ At last the assailant, beating her breast with both
+hands, and tempestuously swaying her person back and forth, wreaked her
+scorn in one wild outburst of vituperation, and returned finally to
+her tub, wisely saying, on the purple verge of asphyxiation, "_O, non
+discorre pi� con gente_."
+
+I returned half an hour later, and she was laughing and playing sweetly
+with her babe.
+
+It suits the passionate nature of the Italians to have incredible ado
+about buying and selling, and a day's shopping is a sort of campaign,
+from which the shopper returns plundered and discomfited, or laden with
+the spoil of vanquished shopmen.
+
+The embattled commercial transaction is conducted in this wise:
+
+The shopper enters, and prices a given article. The shopman names a
+sum of which only the fervid imagination of the South could conceive as
+corresponding to the value of the goods.
+
+The purchaser instantly starts back with a wail of horror and
+indignation, and the shopman throws himself forward over the counter
+with a protest that, far from being dear, the article is ruinously cheap
+at the price stated, though they may nevertheless agree for something
+less.
+
+What, then, is the very most ultimate price?
+
+Properly, the very most ultimate price is so much. (Say, the smallest
+trifle under the price first asked.)
+
+The purchaser moves toward the door. He comes back, and offers one third
+of the very most ultimate price.
+
+The shopman, with a gentle desperation, declares that the thing cost
+him as much. He cannot really take the offer. He regrets, but he cannot.
+That the gentleman would say something more! So much--for example. That
+he regard the stuff, its quality, fashion, beauty.
+
+The gentleman laughs him to scorn. Ah, heigh! and, coming forward, he
+picks up the article and reviles it. Out of the mode, old, fragile, ugly
+of its kind. The shopman defends his wares. There is no such quantity
+and quality elsewhere in Venice. But if the gentleman will give even so
+much (still something preposterous), he may have it, though truly its
+sale for that money is utter ruin.
+
+The shopper walks straight to the door. The shopman calls him back from
+the threshold, or sends his boy to call him back from the street.
+
+Let him accommodate himself--which is to say, take the thing at his own
+price.
+
+He takes it.
+
+The shopman says cheerfully, "Servo suo!"
+
+The purchaser responds, "Bon d�! Patron!" (Good day! my Master!)
+
+Thus, as I said, every bargain is a battle, and every purchase a triumph
+or a defeat. The whole thing is understood; the opposing forces know
+perfectly well all that is to be done beforehand, and retire after the
+contest, like the captured knights in "_Morgante Maggiore_" "calm as
+oil,"--however furious and deadly their struggle may have appeared to
+strangers.
+
+Foreigners soon discern, however, that there is no bloodshed in such
+encounters, and enter into them with a zeal as great as that of natives,
+though with less skill. I knew one American who prided himself on such
+matters, and who haughtily closed a certain bargain without words, as he
+called it. The shopman offered several articles, for which he demanded
+prices amounting in all to ninety-three francs. His wary customer
+rapidly computed the total and replied "Without words, now, I'll give
+you a hundred francs for the lot." With a pensive elevation of the
+eyebrows, and a reluctant shrug of the shoulders, the shopman suffered
+him to take them.
+
+Your Venetian is _simpatico_, if he is any thing. He is always ready to
+feel and to express the deepest concern, and I rather think he likes to
+have his sensibilities appealed to, as a pleasant and healthful exercise
+for them. His sympathy begins at home, and he generously pities himself
+as the victim of a combination of misfortunes, which leave him citizen
+of a country without liberty, without commerce, without money, without
+hope. He next pities his fellow-citizens, who are as desperately
+situated as himself. Then he pities the degradation, corruption, and
+despair into which the city has fallen. And I think his compassion is
+the most hopeless thing in his character. That alone is touched; that
+alone is moved; and when its impulse ceases he and every thing about him
+remain just as before.
+
+With the poor, this sensibility is amusingly mischievous. They never
+speak of one of their own class without adding some such ejaculation as
+"Poor fellow!" or, "Poor little creature!" They pity all wretchedness,
+no matter from what cause, and the greatest rogue has their compassion
+when under a cloud. It is all but impossible to punish thieves in
+Venice, where they are very bold and numerous for the police are too
+much occupied with political surveillance to give due attention to mere
+cutpurses and housebreakers, and even when they make an arrest, people
+can hardly be got to bear witness against their unhappy prisoner.
+_Povareto anca lu!_ There is no work and no money; people must do
+something; so they steal. _Ci vuol pazienza!_ Bear witness against an
+ill-fated fellow-sufferer? God forbid! Stop a thief? I think a burglar
+might run from Rialto to San Marco, and not one compassionate soul in
+the Merceria would do aught to arrest him--_povareto!_ Thieves came to
+the house of a friend of mine at noonday, when his servant was out. They
+tied their boat to his landing, entered his house, filled their boat
+with plunder from it, and rowed out into the canal. The neighbors on the
+floor above saw them, and cried "Thieves! thieves!" It was in the most
+frequented part of the Grand Canal, where scores of boats passed and
+repassed; but no one molested the thieves, and these _povareti_ escaped
+with their booty. [Footnote: The rogues, it must be confessed, are often
+very polite. This same friend of mine one day found a man in the act
+of getting down into a boat with his favorite singing bird in its cage.
+"What are you doing with that bird?" he thought himself authorized to
+inquire. The thief looked about him a moment, and perceiving himself
+detected, handed back the cage with a cool "_La scusi!_" ("Beg pardon!")
+as if its removal had been a trifling inadvertance.]
+
+One night, in a little street through which we passed to our ferry,
+there came a wild rush before us, of a woman screaming for help,
+and pursued by her husband with a knife in his hand; their children,
+shrieking piteously, came after them. The street was crowded with
+people and soldiers, but no one put out his hand; and the man presently
+overtook his wife and stabbed her in the back. We only knew of the rush,
+but what it all meant we could not tell, till we saw the woman bleeding
+from the stab, which, happily, was slight. Inquiry of the bystanders
+developed the facts, but, singularly enough, scarcely a word of pity.
+It was entirely a family affair, it seemed; the man, poor little fellow,
+had a mistress, and his wife had maddened him with reproaches. _Come si
+fa_? He had to stab her. The woman's case was not one that appealed to
+popular compassion, and the only words of pity for her which I heard
+were expressed by the wife of a fruiterer, whom her husband angrily
+silenced.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+SOCIETY.
+
+
+It was natural that the Venetians, whose State lay upon the borders
+of the Greek Empire, and whose greatest commerce was with the Orient,
+should be influenced by the Constantinopolitan civilization. Mutinelli
+records that in the twelfth century they had many religious offices and
+observances in common with the Greeks, especially the homily or sermon,
+which formed a very prominent part of the service of worship. At this
+time, also, when the rupture of the Lombard League had left other
+Italian cities to fall back into incessant local wars, and barbarized
+their customs, the people of Venice dressed richly and delicately, after
+the Greek fashion. They combed and dressed their hair, and wore the
+long, pointed Greek beard; [Footnote: A. Foscarini, in 1687, was the
+last patrician who wore the beard.] and though these Byzantine modes
+fell, for the most part, into disuse, in after-time, there is still a
+peculiarity of dress among the women of the Venetian poor which is said
+to have been inherited from the oriental costumes of Constantinople;
+namely, that high-heeled, sharp-toed slipper, or sandal, which covers
+the front of the foot, and drops from the heel at every step, requiring
+no slight art in the wearer to keep it on at all.
+
+The philosophic vision, accustomed to relate trifling particulars to
+important generalities, may perhaps see another relic of Byzantine
+civilization among the Venetians, in that jealous restraint which they
+put upon all the social movements of young girls, and the great liberty
+which they allow to married women. It is true that their damsels are now
+no longer imprisoned under the parental roof, as they were in times when
+they never left its shelter but to go, closely veiled, to communion in
+the church, on Christmas and Easter; but it is still quite impossible
+that any young lady should go out alone. Indeed, she would scarcely be
+secure from insult in broad day if she did so. She goes out with her
+governess, and, even with this protection, she cannot be too guarded and
+circumspect in her bearing; for in Venice a woman has to encounter upon
+the public street a rude license of glance, from men of all ages and
+conditions, which falls little short of outrage. They stare at her as
+she approaches; and I have seen them turn and contemplate ladies as they
+passed them, keeping a few paces in advance, with a leisurely sidelong
+gait. Something of this insolence might be forgiven to thoughtless,
+hot-blooded youth; but the gross and knowing leer that the elders of
+the Piazza and the caff� put on at the approach of a pretty girl is an
+ordeal which few women, not as thoroughly inured to it as the Venetians,
+would care to encounter. However, as I never heard the trial complained
+of by any but foreigners, I suppose it is not regarded by Italians as
+intolerable; and it is certain that an audible compliment, upon the
+street, to a pretty girl of the poor, is by no means an affront.
+
+The arts of pleasing and of coquetry come by nature to the gentler sex;
+and if in Italy they add to them a habit of intrigue, I wonder how much
+they are to blame, never being in anywise trusted? They do not differ
+from persons of any age or sex in that country, if the world has been as
+justly, as it has always been firmly, persuaded that the people of Italy
+are effete in point of good faith. I have seen much to justify this
+opinion, and something also to confute it; and as long as Garibaldi
+lives, I shall not let myself believe that a race which could produce
+a man so signally truthful and single-hearted is a race of liars and
+cheats. I think the student of their character should also be slow to
+upbraid Italians for their duplicity, without admitting, in palliation
+of the fault, facts of long ages of alien and domestic oppression, in
+politics and religion, which must account for a vast deal of every kind
+of evil in Italy. Yet after exception and palliation has been duly
+made, it must be confessed that in Italy it does not seem to be thought
+shameful to tell lies, and that there the standard of sincerity,
+compared with that of the English or American, is low, as the Italian
+standard of morality in ether respects is also comparatively low.
+With the women, bred in idleness and ignorance, the imputed national
+untruthfulness takes the form naturally to be expected, and contributes
+to a state of things which must be examined with the greatest caution
+and reservation by every one but the Italians themselves. Goethe says
+that there is no society so corrupt that a man may not live virtuously
+in it; and I think the immorality of any people will not be directly
+and wholly seen by the stranger who does not seek it. Certainly, the
+experience and acquaintance of a foreigner in Italy must have been
+most unfortunate, if they confirm all the stories of corruption told by
+Italians themselves. A little generous distrust is best in matters of
+this kind; but while I strengthen my incredulity concerning the utter
+depravation of Venetian society in one respect, I am not disposed to
+deal so leniently with it in others. The state of things is bad in
+Venice, not because all women in society are impure, but because the
+Italian theory of morals does not admit the existence of opportunity
+without sin. It is by rare chance that a young girl makes acquaintance
+with young men in society; she seldom talks with them at the parties to
+which she is sometimes taken by her mother, and they do not call upon
+her at her home; while for her to walk alone with a young man would be
+vastly more scandalous than much worse things, and is, consequently,
+unheard of. The Italians say freely they cannot trust their women as
+northern women are trusted; and some Italian women frankly confess that
+their sex would be worse if it were trusted more. But the truth does not
+appear in this shallow suspicion and this shallow self-conviction; and
+one who cares to have a just estimate of this matter must by no means
+believe all the evil he hears. There may be much corruption in society,
+but there is infinitely more wrong in the habits of idle gossip and
+guilty scandal, which eat all sense of shame and pity out of the heart
+of Venice. There is no parallel to the prying, tattling, backbiting
+littleness of the place elsewhere in the world. A small country village
+in America or England has its meddlesomeness, but not its worldly,
+wicked sharpness. Figure the meanness of a chimney-corner gossip, added
+to the bitter shrewdness and witty penetration of a gifted rou�, and you
+have some idea of Venetian scandal. In that city, where all the nobler
+organs of expression are closed by political conditions, the viler
+channels run continual filth and poison, and the people, shut out from
+public and free discussion of religious and political themes, occupy
+themselves with private slander, and rend each other in their abject
+desperation. As it is part of the existing political demonstration
+to avoid the opera and theatre, the Venetians are deprived of these
+harmless distractions; balls and evening parties, at which people,
+in other countries, do nothing worse than bore each other, are almost
+unknown, for the same reason; and when persons meet in society, it
+is too often to retail personalities, or Italian politics made as
+unintelligible and as like local gossip as possible. The talk which is
+small and noxious in private circles is the same thing at the caff�,
+when the dread of spies does not reduce the talkers to a dreary silence.
+Not permitted to feel the currents of literature and the great world's
+thought in religion freshly and directly, they seldom speak of these
+things, except in that tone of obsolete superiority which Italians are
+still prone to affect, as the monopolists of culture. As to Art, the
+Venetians are insensible to it and ignorant of it, here in the very
+atmosphere of Art, to a degree absolutely amusing. I would as soon think
+of asking a fish's opinion of water as of asking a Venetian's notion of
+architecture or painting, unless he were himself a professed artist or
+critic.
+
+Admitting, however, that a great part of the corruption of society is
+imputed, there still remains, no doubt, a great deal of real immorality
+to be accounted for. This, I think, is often to be attributed to the bad
+system of female education, and the habits of idleness in which women
+are bred. Indeed, to Americans, the whole system of Italian education
+seems calculated to reduce women to a state of imbecile captivity before
+marriage; and I have no fault to find with the Italians that they are
+jealous in guarding those whom they have unfitted to protect themselves,
+but have rather to blame them that, after marriage, their women are
+thrown at once upon society, when worse than helpless against its
+temptations. Except with those people who attempt to maintain a certain
+appearance in public upon insufficient means (and there are too many of
+these in Venice as everywhere else), and who spare in every other way
+that they may spend on dress, it does not often happen that Venetian
+ladies are housekeepers. Servants are cheap and numerous, as they are
+uncleanly and untrustworthy, and the Venetians prefer to keep them
+[Footnote: A clerk or employ� with a salary of fifty cents a day keeps a
+maid-servant, that his wife may fulfill to society the important duty of
+doing nothing.] rather than take part in housewifely duties; and, since
+they must lavish upon dress and show, to suffer from cold and hunger in
+their fireless houses and at their meagre boards. In this way the young
+girls, kept imprisoned from the world, instead of learning cookery and
+other domestic arts, have the grievous burden of idleness added to that
+of their solitary confinement, not only among the rich and noble, but
+among that large class which is neither and wishes to appear both.
+[Footnote: The poet Gray, genteelly making the grand tour in 1740, wrote
+to his father from Florence: "The only thing the Italians shine in is
+their reception of strangers. At such times every thing is magnificence:
+the more remarkable as in their ordinary course of life they are
+parsimonious to a degree of nastiness. I saw in one of the vastest
+palaces of Rome (that of the Prince Pamfilio), the apartment which he
+himself inhabited, a bed that most servants in England would disdain to
+lie in, and furniture much like that of a soph at Cambridge. This man
+is worth 30,000_l_. a year." Italian nature has changed so little in a
+century, that all this would hold admirably true of Italian life at this
+time. The goodly outside in religion, in morals, in every thing is too
+much the ambition of Italy; this achieved, she is content to endure
+any pang of self-denial, and sell what little comfort she knows--it is
+mostly imported, like the word, from England--to strangers at fabulous
+prices. In Italy the luxuries of life are cheap, and the conveniences
+unknown or excessively dear.] Their idle thoughts, not drilled by study
+nor occupied with work, run upon the freedom which marriage shall bring
+them, and form a distorted image of the world, of which they know
+as little as of their own undisciplined selves. Denied the just and
+wholesome amusements of society during their girlhood, it is scarcely a
+matter of surprise that they should throw themselves into the giddiest
+whirl of its excitement when marriage sets them free to do so.
+
+I have said I do not think Venetians who give each other bad names are
+always to be credited, and I have no doubt that many a reputation in
+Venice is stained while the victim remains without guilt. A questioned
+reputation is, however, no great social calamity. It forms no bar to
+society, and few people are so cruel as to blame it, though all discuss
+it. And it is here that the harshness of American and English society
+toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but
+half-justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad
+na�vet� and lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl
+is accustomed to hear of things and speak of things which, with us,
+parents strive in every way to keep from their daughters' knowledge;
+and while her sense of delicacy is thus early blunted, while she is thus
+used to know good and evil, she hears her father and mother comment on
+the sinful errors of a friend or neighbor, who visits them and meets
+them every day in society. How can the impunity of the guilt which she
+believes to exist around her but sometimes have its effect, and ripen,
+with opportunity, into wrong? Nay, if the girl reveres her parents at
+all, how can she think the sin, which they caress in the sinner, is
+so very bad? If, however, she escape all these early influences of
+depravation; if her idleness, and solitude and precocious knowledge
+leave her unvitiated, if, when she goes into society, it is by marriage
+with a man who is neither a dotard nor a fortune-seeker, and who remains
+constant and does not tempt her, by neglect, to forbode offense and to
+inflict anticipative reprisals--yet her purity goes uncredited, as her
+guilt would go unpunished; scandal makes haste to blacken her name to
+the prevailing hue; and whether she has sin or not, those with sin will
+cast, not the stone that breaks and kills, but the filth that sticks and
+stinks. The wife must continue the long social exile of her girlhood if
+she would not be the prey of scandal. The _cavaliere servente_ no longer
+exists, but gossip now attributes often more than one lover in his
+place, and society has the cruel clemency to wink at the license.
+Nothing is in worse taste than jealousy, and, consequently, though
+intrigue sometimes causes stabbing, and the like, among low people, it
+is rarely noticed by persons of good breeding. It seems to me that in
+Venetian society the reform must begin, not with dissolute life, but
+with the social toleration of the impure, and with the wanton habits of
+scandal, which make all other life incredible, and deny to virtue the
+triumph of fair fame.
+
+I confess that what I saw of the innocent amusements of this society was
+not enough to convince me of their brilliancy and attractiveness; but
+I doubt if a foreigner can be a trustworthy judge of these things, and
+perhaps a sketch drawn by an alien hand, in the best faith, might have
+an air of caricature. I would not, therefore, like to trust my own
+impression of social diversions. They were, very probably, much more
+lively and brilliant than I thought them. But Italians assembled
+anywhere, except at the theatre or the caff�, have a certain stiffness,
+all the more surprising, because tradition has always led one to expect
+exactly the reverse of them. I have seen nothing equal to the formality
+of this people, who deride colder nations for inflexible manners; and I
+have certainly never seen society in any small town in America so ill
+at ease as I have seen society in Venice, writhing under self-imposed
+restraints. At a musical soir�e, attended by the class of people who at
+home would have been chatty and sociable, given to making acquaintance
+and to keeping up acquaintance,--the young men harmlessly talking and
+walking with the young ladies, and the old people listening together,
+while constant movement and intercourse kept life in the assembly, and
+there was some real pleasure felt amidst a good deal of unavoidable
+suffering,--I say, I found such a soir�e in Venice to be a spectacle of
+ladies planted in formal rows of low-necks and white dresses around
+the four sides of one room, and of gentlemen restively imprisoned in
+dress-coats and white gloves in another. During the music all these
+devoted people listened attentively, and at the end, the ladies lapsed
+back into their chairs and fanned themselves, while the gentlemen walked
+up and down the floor of their cell, and stopped, two by two, at the
+door of the ladies' room, glanced mournfully athwart the moral barrier
+which divided them, and sadly and dejectedly turned away. Amazed at
+this singular species of social enjoyment, I inquired afterward, of a
+Venetian lady, if evening parties in Venice were usually such ordeals,
+and was discouraged to learn that what I had seen was scarcely an
+exaggeration of prevailing torments. Commonly people do not know each
+other, and it is difficult for the younger to procure introductions;
+and when there is previous acquaintance, the presence of some commanding
+spirit is necessary to break the ice of propriety, and substitute
+enjoyment for correctness of behavior. Even at dancing parties, where
+it would seem that the poetry of motion might do something to soften the
+rigid bosom of Venetian deportment, the poor young people separate
+after each dance, and take each sex its appointed prison, till the next
+quadrille offers them a temporary liberation. For my own part, I cannot
+wonder that young men fly these virtuous scenes, and throng the rooms of
+those pleasant women of the _demi-monde_, who only exact from them that
+they shall be natural and agreeable; I cannot wonder that their
+fair partners in wretchedness seize the first opportunity to revenge
+themselves upon the propriety which has so cruelly used them. It is
+said that the assemblies of the Jews, while quite as unexceptionable
+in character, are far more sociable and lively than those of the
+Christians. The young Hebrews are frequently intelligent, well-bred, and
+witty, with a _savoir faire_ which their Christian brethren lack. But,
+indeed, the young Venetian is, at that age when all men are owlish,
+ignorant, and vapid, the most owlish, ignorant, and vapid man in the
+world. He talks, not milk-and-water, but warm water alone, a little
+sweetened; and, until he has grown wicked, has very little good in him.
+
+Most ladies of fashion receive calls on a certain day of each week, when
+it is made a matter of pride to receive as many calls as possible. The
+number sometimes reaches three hundred, when nobody sits down, and few
+exchange more than a word with the hostess. In winter, the stove is
+heated on these reception days, and little cups of black coffee are
+passed round to the company; in summer lemonade is substituted for the
+coffee; but in all seasons a thin, waferish slice of toasted rusk
+(the Venetian _baicolo_) is offered to each guest with the drink. At
+receptions where the sparsity of the company permits the lady of the
+house to be seen, she is commonly visible on a sofa, surrounded by
+visitors in a half-circle. Nobody stays more than ten or fifteen
+minutes, and I have sometimes found even this brief time of much greater
+apparent length, and apt to produce a low state of nerves, from which
+one seldom recovers before dinner. Gentlemen, however, do not much
+frequent these receptions; and I assert again the diffidence I should
+feel in offering this glance at Venetian social enjoyment as conveying
+a just and full idea of it. There is no doubt that the Venetians find
+delight in their assemblies, where a stranger seeks it in vain. I dare
+say they would not think our own reunions brilliant, and that, looking
+obliquely (as a foreigner must) on the most sensible faces at one of
+our evening parties, they might mistake the look of pathetic dejection,
+visible in them, as the expression of people rather bored by their
+pleasure than otherwise.
+
+The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the conversazioni of the rigid
+proprietarians, where people sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at
+a soldo the point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the
+_demi-monde_ where they say any thing. There are persons in Venice, as
+well as everywhere else, of new-fashioned modes of thinking, and
+these strive to give a greater life and ease to their assemblies,
+by attracting as many young men as possible; and in their families,
+gentlemen are welcome to visit, and to talk with the young ladies in the
+presence of their mothers. But though such people are no more accused
+of impropriety than the straitest of the old-fashioned, they are not
+regarded with the greatest esteem, and their daughters do not so readily
+find husbands. The Italians are fickle, the women say; they get soon
+tired of their wives after marriage, and when they see much of ladies
+before marriage, they get tired of them then, and never make them their
+wives. So it is much better to see nothing of a possible husband till
+you actually have him. I do not think conversazioni of any kind are
+popular with young men, however; they like better to go to the caff�,
+and the people you meet at private houses are none the less interesting
+for being old, or middle-aged. A great many of the best families, at
+present, receive no company at all, and see their friends only in the
+most private manner; though there are still cultivated circles to
+which proper introduction gives the stranger (who has no Austrian
+acquaintance) access. But unless he have thorough knowledge of Italian
+politics localized to apply to Venice, an interest in the affairs,
+fortunes, and misfortunes of his neighbors, and an acquaintance with
+the Venetian dialect, I doubt if he will be able to enjoy himself in the
+places so cautiously opened to him. Even in the most cultivated society,
+the dialect is habitually spoken; and if Italian is used, it is only in
+compliment to some foreigner present, for whose sake, also, topics of
+general interest are sometimes chosen.
+
+The best society is now composed of the families of professional men,
+such as the advocates, the physicians, and the richer sort of merchants.
+The shopkeepers, master-artisans, and others, whom industry and thrift
+distinguish from the populace, seem not to have any social life, in
+the American sense. They are wholly devoted to affairs, and partly from
+choice, and partly from necessity, are sordid and grasping. It is their
+class which has to fight hardest for life in Europe, and they give no
+quarter to those above or below them. The shop is their sole thought and
+interest, and they never, never sink it. But, since they have habits of
+diligence, and, as far as they are permitted, of enterprise, they seem
+to be in great part the stuff from which a prosperous State is to be
+rebuilt in Venice, if ever the fallen edifice rise again. They have
+sometimes a certain independence of character, which a better condition
+of things, and further education, would perhaps lift into honesty;
+though as yet they seem not to scruple to take any unfair advantage,
+and not to know that commercial success can never rest permanently on a
+system of bad faith. Below this class is the populace, between which and
+the patrician order a relation something like Roman clientage existed,
+contributing greatly to the maintenance of exclusively aristocratic
+power in the State. The greatest conspiracy (that of Marin Falier) which
+the commons ever moved against the oligarchy was revealed to one of
+the nobility by his plebeian creature, or client; and the government
+rewarded by every species of indulgence a class in which it had
+extinguished even the desire of popular liberty. The heirs of the
+servile baseness which such a system as this must create are not yet
+extinct. There is still a helplessness in many of the servant class, and
+a disposition to look for largess as well as wages, which are the traits
+naturally resulting from a state of voluntary submission to others. The
+nobles, as the government, enervated and debauched the character of the
+poor by public shows and countless holidays; as individuals, they taught
+them to depend upon patrician favor, and not upon their own plebeian
+industry, for support. The lesson was an evil one, hard to be unlearned,
+and it is yet to be forgotten in Venice. Certain traits of soft
+and familiar dependence give great charm to the populace; but their
+existence makes the student doubtful of a future to which the plebeians
+themselves look forward with perfect hope and confidence. It may be that
+they are right, and will really rise to the dignity of men, when free
+government shall have taught them that the laborer is worthy of his
+hire--after he has earned it. This has been the result, to some degree,
+in the kingdom of Italy, where the people have found that freedom, like
+happiness, means work.
+
+Undoubtedly the best people in the best society of Venice are the
+advocates, an order of consequence even in the times of the Republic,
+though then shut out from participation in public affairs by a native
+government, as now by a foreign one. Acquaintance with several members
+of this profession impressed me with a sense of its liberality of
+thought and feeling, where all liberal thinking and feeling must be done
+by stealth, and where the common intelligence of the world sheds its
+light through multiplied barriers. Daniele Manin, the President of the
+Republic of 1848, was of this class, which, by virtue of its learning,
+enlightenment, and talent, occupies a place in the esteem and regard of
+the Venetian people far above that held by the effete aristocracy.
+The better part of the nobility, indeed, is merged in the professional
+class, and some of the most historic names are now preceded by the
+learned titles of Doctor and Advocate, rather than the cheap dignity
+of Count, offered by the Austrian government to all the patricians who
+chose to ask for it, when Austrian rule was extended over their country.
+
+The physicians rank next to the advocates, and are usually men learned
+in their profession, however erroneous and old-fashioned some of their
+theories of practice may be. Like the advocates, they are often men of
+letters: they write for the journals, and publish little pamphlets on
+those topics of local history which it is so much the fashion to treat
+in Venice. No one makes a profession of authorship. The returns of an
+author's work would be too uncertain, and its restrictions and penalties
+would be too vexatious and serious; and so literary topics are only
+occasionally treated by those whose main energies are bent in another
+direction.
+
+The doctors are very numerous, and a considerable number of them are
+Hebrews, who, even in the old jealous times, exercised the noble art
+of medicine, and who now rank very highly among their professional
+brethren. These physicians haunt the neat and tasteful apothecary shops,
+where they sit upon the benching that passes round the interior, read
+the newspapers, and discuss the politics of Europe, Asia, Africa, and
+America, with all the zest that you may observe to characterize their
+discussions in Goldoni's plays. There they spend their evenings, and
+many hours of every day, and thither the sick send to call them,--each
+physician resorting to a particular apothecary's, and keeping his name
+inscribed on a brass plate against the wall, above the head of the
+druggist, who presides over the reunions of the doctors, while his
+apprentice pestles away at their prescriptions.
+
+In 1786 there were, what with priests, monks, and nuns, a multitude of
+persons of ecclesiastical profession in Venice; and though many convents
+and monasteries were abolished by Napoleon, the priests are still very
+numerous, and some monastic establishments have been revived under
+Austrian rule. The high officers of the Church are, of course, well
+paid, but most of the priesthood live miserably enough. They receive
+from the government a daily stipend of about thirty-five soldi, and they
+celebrate mass when they can get something to do in that way, for forty
+soldi. Unless, then, they have private income from their own family, or
+have pay for the education of some rich man's son or daughter, they must
+fare slenderly.
+
+There is much said, in and out of Venice, about their influence in
+society; but this is greatly modified, and I think is chiefly exercised
+upon the women of the old-fashioned families. [Footnote: It is no longer
+usual for girls to be educated in convents, and most young ladies of
+the better classes, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen years, receive
+their schooling in secular establishments, whither they go every day
+for study, or where they sometimes live as in our boarding-schools, and
+where they are taught the usual accomplishments, greater attention being
+paid to French and music than to other things.] I need hardly repeat
+the wellknown fact that all the moral power of the Roman Church over the
+younger men is gone; these seldom attend mass, and almost never go to
+confession, and the priests are their scorn and by-word. Their example,
+in some degree, must be much followed also by women; and though women
+must everywhere make more public professions of religion than men, in
+order to retain social standing, I doubt if the priests have a very firm
+hold upon the fears or reverence of the sisters and wives of liberal
+Venetians.
+
+If, however, they contribute in anywise to keep down the people, they
+are themselves enslaved to their superiors and to each other. No priest
+can leave the city of Venice without permission of the Patriarch. He is
+cut off as much as possible from his own kinspeople, and subjected
+to the constant surveillance of his class. Obliged to maintain a
+respectable appearance on twenty cents a day,--hampered and hindered
+from all personal liberty and private friendship, and hated by the great
+mass of the people,--I hardly think the Venetian priest is to be envied
+in his life. For my own part, knowing these things, I was not able to
+cherish toward the priests those feelings of scornful severity which
+swell many Protestant bosoms; and so far as I made their acquaintance, I
+found them kind and amiable. One ecclesiastic, at least, I may describe
+as one of the most agreeable and cultivated gentlemen I ever met.
+
+Those who fare best among the priests are the Jesuits, who returned from
+repeated banishment with the Austrians in this century. Their influence
+is very extended, and the confessional is their forte. Venetians say
+that with the old and the old-fashioned these crafty priests suggest
+remorse and impose penances; that with the young men and the latter-day
+thinkers they are men of the world, and pass off pleasant sins as
+trifles. All the students of the government schools are obliged by
+law to confess twice a month, and are given printed certificates of
+confession, in blank, which the confessor fills up and stamps with the
+seal of the Church. Most of them go to confess at the church of the
+Jesuits, who are glad to hear the cock-and-bull story invented by
+the student, and to cultivate his friendship by an easy penance and
+a liberal tone. This ingenuous young man of course despises the
+confessional. He goes to confess because the law obliges him to do so;
+but the law cannot dictate what he must confess. Therefore, he ventures
+as near downright burlesque as he dares, and (if the account he gives of
+the matter be true) puts off his confessor with some well-known fact, as
+that he has blasphemed. Of course he has blasphemed, blasphemy being as
+common as the forms of salutation in Venice. So the priest, who wishes
+him to come again, and to found some sort of influence over him,
+says,--"Oh dear, dear! This is very bad. Blasphemy is deadly sin. If you
+_must_ swear, swear by the heathen gods: say Body of Diana, instead of
+Body of God; Presence of the Devil, instead of Blood of Mary. Then
+there is no harm done." The students laugh over the pleasant absurdity
+together, and usually agree upon the matter of their semimonthly
+confessions beforehand.
+
+As I have hinted, the young men do not love the government or the
+Church, and though I account for the loss of much high hope and generous
+sympathy in growth from youth to middle age, I cannot see how, when
+they have replaced their fathers, the present religious and political
+discontent is to be modified. Nay, I believe it must become worse. The
+middle-aged men of Venice grew up in times of comparative quiet, when
+she did not so much care who ruled over her, and negatively, at least,
+they honored the Church. They may now hate the foreign rule, but there
+are many considerations of timidity, and many effects of education, to
+temper their hate. They may dislike the priests, but they revere the
+Church. The young men of to-day are bred in a different school, and all
+their thoughts are of opposition to the government and of war upon the
+Church, which they detest and ridicule. The fact that their education is
+still in the hands of the priests in some measure, does not render them
+more tractable. They have no fears to be wrought upon by their clerical
+professors, who seldom have sought to act upon their nobler qualities.
+The influence of the priesthood is again limited by the fact that the
+teachers in the free schools of the city, to which the poor send their
+children, are generally not priests; and ecclesiastics are no longer so
+commonly the private tutors of the children of the rich, as they
+once were when they lived with the family, and exercised a direct and
+important influence on it. Express permission from the pope is now
+necessary to the maintenance of a family chaplain, and the office is
+nearly disused. [Footnote: In early days every noble Venetian family
+had its chaplain, who, on the occasion of great dinners and suppers,
+remained in the kitchen, and received as one of his perquisites the
+fragments that came back from the table.]
+
+The Republic was extremely jealous of the political power of the
+priests, who could not hold secular office in its time. A curious
+punishment was inflicted upon the priest who proved false to his own
+vows of chastity, and there is a most amusing old ballad--by no means
+cleanly in its language--purporting to be the lament of a priest
+suspended in the iron cage, appointed for the purpose, from the belfry
+of the Campanile San Marco, and enduring the jeers and insults of the
+mob below. We may suppose that with advancing corruption (if corruption
+has indeed advanced from remote to later times) this punishment was
+disused for want of room to hang out the delinquents. In the last
+century, especially, the nuns and monks led a pleasant life. You may
+see in the old pictures of Pietro Longhi and his school, how at the
+aristocratic and fashionable convent of San Zaccaria, the lady nuns
+received their friends and acquaintances of this world in the anteroom,
+where the dames and their cavaliers flirted and drank coffee, and the
+gentlemen coquetted with the brides of heaven through their grated
+windows.
+
+Among other privileges of the Church, abolished in Venice long ago, was
+that ancient right of the monks of St. Anthony, Abbot, by which
+their herds of swine were made free of the whole city. These animals,
+enveloped in an odor of sanctity, wandered here and there, and were
+piously fed by devout people, until the year 1409, when, being found
+dangerous to children and inconvenient to every body, they were made
+the subject of a special decree, which deprived them of their freedom of
+movement. The Republic was always limiting the privileges of the
+Church! It is known how when the holy inquisition was established in its
+dominions in 1249, the State stipulated that great part of the process
+against heresy should be conducted by secular functionaries, and that
+the sentence should rest with the Doge and his councillors,--a kind of
+inquisition with claws clipped and teeth filed, as one may say, and
+the only sort ever permitted in Venice. At present there is no absolute
+disfavor shown to the clergy; but, as we have seen, many a pleasant
+island, which the monks of old reclaimed from the salty marshes, and
+planted with gardens and vineyards, now bears only the ruins of their
+convents, or else, converted into a fortress or government d�p�t, is
+all thistly with bayonets. Anciently, moreover, there were many little
+groves in different parts of the city, where the pleasant clergy, of
+what Mr. Ruskin would have us believe the pure and religious days of
+Venice, met and made merry so riotously together by night that the
+higher officers of the Church were forced to prohibit their little
+soir�es.
+
+An old custom of rejoicing over the installation of a new parish priest
+is still to be seen in almost primitive quaintness. The people of each
+parish--nobles, citizens, and plebeians alike--formerly elected their
+own priest, and, till the year 1576, they used to perambulate the city
+to the sound of drums, with banners flying, after an election, and
+proclaim the name of their favorite. On the day of the _parroco_'s
+induction his portrait was placed over the church door and after the
+celebration of the morning mass, a breakfast was given, which grew to be
+so splendid in time, that in the fifteenth century a statute limited
+its profusion. In the afternoon the new parroco, preceded by a band of
+military music, visited all the streets and courts of his parish,
+and then, as now, all the windows of the parish were decorated with
+brilliant tapestries, and other gay-colored cloths and pictures. In
+those times as in these, there was an illumination at night, throngs of
+people in the campo of the church, and booths for traffic in cakes of
+flour and raisins,--fried in lard upon the spot, and sold smoking hot,
+with immense uproar on the part of the merchant; and for three days
+afterward the parish bells were sounded in concert.
+
+The difficulty of ascertaining any thing with certainty in Venice
+attends in a degree peculiarly great the effort to learn exactly the
+present influence and standing of the nobility as a class. One is
+tempted, on observing the free and unembarrassed bearing of all ranks
+of people toward each other, to say that no sense of difference
+exists,--and I do not think there is ever shown, among Italians, either
+the aggressive pride or the abject meanness which marks the intercourse
+of people and nobles elsewhere in Europe, and I have not seen the
+distinction of rich and poor made so brutally in Italy as sometimes in
+our own _soi-disant_ democratic society at home. There is, indeed, that
+equality in Italian fibre which I believe fits the nation for democratic
+institutions better than any other, and which is perhaps partly the
+result of their ancient civilization. At any rate, it fascinates a
+stranger to see people so mutually gentle and deferential; and must
+often be a matter of surprise to the Anglo-Saxon, in whose race,
+reclaimed from barbarism more recently, the native wild-beast is still
+so strong as to sometimes inform the manner. The uneducated Anglo-Saxon
+is a savage; the Italian, though born to utter ignorance, poverty, and
+depravity, is a civilized man. I do not say that his civilization is of
+a high order, or that the civilization of the most cultivated Italian is
+at all comparable to that of a gentleman among ourselves. The Italian's
+education, however profound, has left his passions undisciplined, while
+it has carefully polished his manner; he yields lightly to temptation,
+he loses his self-control, he blasphemes habitually; his gentleness is
+conventional, his civilization not individual. With us the education of
+a gentleman (I do not mean a person born to wealth or station, but any
+man who has trained himself in morals or religion, in letters, and in
+the world) disciplines the impulses, and leaves the good manner to
+grow naturally out of habits of self-command and consequent habitual
+self-respect.
+
+The natural equality of the Italians is visible in their community of
+good looks as well as good manners. They have never, perhaps, that
+high beauty of sensitive expression which is found among Englishmen and
+Americans (preferably among the latter), but it very rarely happens that
+they are brutally ugly; and the man of low rank and mean vocation has
+often a beauty of as fine sort as the man of education and refinement.
+If they changed clothes, and the poor man could be persuaded to wash
+himself, they might successfully masquerade, one for another. The
+plebeian Italian, inspired by the national vanity, bears himself as
+proudly as the noble, without at all aggressing in his manner. His
+beauty, like that of the women of his class, is world-old,--the beauty
+of the pictures and the statues: the ideal types of loveliness are
+realized in Italy; the saints and heroes, the madonnas and nymphs, come
+true to the stranger at every encounter with living faces. In Venice,
+particularly, the carriage of the women, of whatever rank, is very free
+and noble, and the servant is sometimes to be distinguished from the
+mistress only by her dress and by her labor-coarsened hands; certainly
+not always by her dirty finger-nails and foul teeth, for though the
+clean shirt is now generally in Italy, some lesser virtues are still
+unknown: the nail-brush and tooth-brush are of but infrequent use; the
+four-pronged fork is still imperfectly understood, and as a nation the
+Italians may be said to eat with their knives.
+
+The Venetian, then, seeing so little difference between himself and
+others, whatever his rank may be, has, as I said, little temptation to
+arrogance or servility. The effects of the old relationship of patron
+and client are amusingly noticeable in the superior as well as the
+inferior; a rich man's dependents are perfectly free with advice and
+comment, and it sometimes happens that he likes to hear their lively
+talk, and at home secretly consorts with his servants. The former social
+differences between commoners and patricians (which, I think, judging
+from the natural temper of the race, must have been greatly modified
+at all times by concession and exception) may be said to have quite
+disappeared in point of fact; the nobility is now almost as effete
+socially as it is politically. There is still a number of historic
+families, which are in a certain degree exclusive; but rich _parvenus_
+have admission to their friendship, and commoners in good circumstances
+are permitted their acquaintance; the ladies of this patrician society
+visit ladies of less rank, and receive them at their great parties,
+though not at more sacred assemblies, where they see only each other.
+
+The Venetians have a habit of saying their best families are in exile,
+but this is not meant to be taken literally. Many of the best families
+are yet in the city, living in perfect retirement, or very often merged
+in the middle class, and become men of professions, and active, useful
+lives. Of these nobles (they usually belong to the families which
+did not care to ask nobility of Austria, and are therefore untitled)
+[Footnote: The only title conferred on any patrician of Venice during
+the Republic was Cavaliere, and this was conferred by a legislative
+act in reward of distinguished service. The names of the nobility were
+written in the Golden Book of the Republic, and they were addressed
+as Illustrissimo or Eccellenza. They also signed themselves _nobile_,
+between the Christian name and surname, as it is still the habit of the
+untitled nobility to do.] the citizens are affectionately proud, while I
+have heard from them nothing but contempt and ridicule of the patricians
+who, upon a wretched pension or meagre government office, attempt to
+maintain patrician distinction. Such nobles are usually Austriacanti in
+their politics, and behind the age in every thing; while there are
+other descendants of patrician families mingled at last with the very
+populace, sharing their ignorance and degradation, and feeling with
+them. These sometimes exercise the most menial employments: I knew one
+noble lord who had been a facchino, and I heard of another who was a
+street-sweeper. _Conte che non conta, non conta niente_, [Footnote: A
+count who doesn't count (money) counts for nothing.] says the sneering
+Italian proverb; and it would be little less than miraculous if a
+nobility like that of modern Venice maintained superior state and regard
+in the eyes of the quick-witted, intelligent, sarcastic commonalty.
+
+The few opulent patricians are by no means the most violent of
+Italianissimi. They own lands and houses, and as property is unsafe when
+revolutionary feeling is rife, their patriotism is tempered. The wealth
+amassed in early times by the vast and enterprising commerce of the
+country was, when not dissipated in riotous splendor, invested in real
+estate upon the main-land as the Republic grew in territory, and the
+income of the nobles is now from the rents of these lands. They reside
+upon their estates during the season of the _villeggiatura_, which
+includes the months of September and October, when every one who can
+possibly leave the city goes into the country. Then the patricians
+betake themselves to their villas near Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and
+Treviso, and people the sad-colored, weather-worn stucco hermitages,
+where the mutilated statues, swaggering above the gates, forlornly
+commemorate days when it was a far finer thing to be a noble than it is
+now. I say the villas look dreary and lonesome as places can be made to
+look in Italy, what with their high garden walls, their long, low piles
+of stabling, and the _pass�e_ indecency of their nymphs and fauns,
+foolishly strutting in the attitudes of the silly and sinful old Past;
+and it must be but a dull life that the noble proprietors lead there.
+
+It is better, no doubt, on the banks of the Brenta, where there are
+still so many villas as to form a street of these seats of luxury,
+almost the whole length of the canal, from Fusina to Padua. I am
+not certain that they have a right to the place which they hold in
+literature and sentiment, and yet there is something very charming about
+them, with their gardens, and chapels, and statues, and shaded walks.
+We went to see them one day early in October, and found them every one,
+when habitable, inhabited, and wearing a cheerful look, that made their
+proximity to Venice incredible. As we returned home after dark, we saw
+the ladies from the villas walking unattended along the road, and giving
+the scene an air of homelike peace and trustfulness which I had not
+found before in Italy; while the windows of the houses were brilliantly
+lighted, as if people lived in them; whereas, you seldom see a light in
+Venetian palaces. I am not sure that I did not like better, however, the
+villas that were empty and ruinous, and the gardens that had run wild,
+and the statues that had lost legs and arms. Some of the ingenious
+proprietors had enterprisingly whitewashed their statues, and there
+was a horrible primness about certain of the well-kept gardens which
+offended me. Most of the houses were not large, but there was here and
+there a palace as grand as any in the city. Such was the great villa
+of the Contarini of the Lions, which was in every way superb, with
+two great lions of stone guarding its portals, and a gravel walk,
+over-arched with stately trees, stretching a quarter of a mile before
+it. At the moment I was walking down this aisle I met a cleanshaven old
+canonico, with red legs and red-tasseled hat, and with a book under his
+arm, and a meditative look, whom I here thank for being so venerably
+picturesque. The palace itself was shut up, and I wish I had known, when
+I saw it, that it had a ghostly underground passage from its cellar to
+the chapel,--wherein, when you get half way, your light goes out, and
+you consequently never reach the chapel.
+
+This is at Mira; but the greatest of all the villas is the magnificent
+country-seat of the family Pisani at Stra, which now, with scarcely
+any addition to its splendor, serves for the residence of the abdicated
+Emperor of Austria. There is such pride in the vastness of this edifice
+and its gardens as impresses you with the material greatness which found
+expression in it, and never raises a regret that it has utterly passed
+away. You wander around through the aisles of trim-cut lime-trees,
+bullied and overborne by the insolent statues, and expect at every turn
+to come upon intriguing spectres in bag-wigs, immense hoops and
+patches. How can you feel sympathy for those dull and wicked ghosts of
+eighteenth-century corruption? There is rottenness enough in the world
+without digging up old putridity and sentimentalizing on it; and I doubt
+if you will care to know much of the way in which the noble owner of
+such a villa ascended the Brenta at the season of the _villeggiatura_ in
+his great gilded barge, all carven outside with the dumpling loves and
+loose nymphs of the period, with fruits, and flowers, and what not;
+and within, luxuriously cushioned and furnished, and stocked with
+good things for pleasure making in the gross old fashion. [Footnote:
+Mutinelli, _Gli Ultimi Cinquant' Anni della Repubblica di Veneza_.]
+King Cole was not a merrier old soul than Illustrissimo of that day; he
+outspent princes; and his agent, while he harried the tenants to supply
+his master's demands, plundered Illustrissimo frightfully. Illustrissimo
+never looked at accounts. He said to his steward, "_Caro veccio, f� vu.
+Mi remeto a quel che f� vu._" (Old fellow, you attend to it. I shall be
+satisfied with what you do.) So the poor agent had no other course but
+to swindle him, which he did; and Illustrissimo, when he died, died
+poor, and left his lordly debts and vices to his sons.
+
+In Venice, the noble still lives sometimes in his ancestral palace,
+dimly occupying the halls where his forefathers flourished in so much
+splendor. I can conceive, indeed, of no state of things more flattering
+to human pride than that which surrounded the patrician of the old
+aristocratic Republic. The house in which he dwelt was the palace of
+a king, in luxury of appointment and magnificence of size. Troops of
+servants that ministered to his state peopled its vast extent; and the
+gondolas that carried his grandeur abroad were moored in little fleets
+to the piles that rose before his palace, painted with the family arms
+and colors. The palace itself stood usually on the Grand Canal, and
+rose sheer from the water, giving the noble that haughty inaccessibility
+which the lord of the main-land achieved only by building lofty walls
+and multiplying gates. The architecture was as costly in its ornament
+as wild Gothic fancy, or Renaissance luxury of bad taste, could make it;
+and when the palace front was not of sculptured marble, the painter's
+pencil filled it with the delight of color. The main-land noble's house
+was half a fortress, and formed his stronghold in times of popular
+tumult or family fray; but at Venice the strong arm of St. Mark
+suppressed all turbulence in a city secure from foreign war; and the
+peaceful arts rejoiced in undisturbed possession of the palaces, which
+rose in the most delicate and fantastic beauty, and mirrored in the
+brine a dream of sea-deep strangeness and richness. You see much of the
+beauty yet, but the pride and opulence which called it into being are
+gone forever.
+
+Most palaces, whether of the Gothic or classicistic period, have the
+same internal arrangement of halls and chambers, and are commonly built
+of two lofty and two low stories. On the ground floor, or water level,
+is a hall running back from the gate to a bit of garden at the other
+side of the palace; and on either side of this hall, which in old times
+was hung with the family trophies of the chase and war, are the porter's
+lodge and gondoliers' rooms. On the first and second stories are the
+family apartments, opening on either side from great halls, of the same
+extent as that below, but with loftier roofs, of heavy rafters gilded
+or painted. The fourth floor is of the same arrangement, but has a
+lower roof, and was devoted to the better class of servants. Of the two
+stories used by the family, the third is the loftier and airier, and was
+occupied in summer; the second was the winter apartment. On either hand
+the rooms open in suites.
+
+We have seen something of the ceremonies, public and private, which gave
+peculiar gayety and brilliance to the life of the Venetians of
+former days; but in his political character the noble had yet greater
+consequence. He was part of the proudest, strongest, and securest system
+of his time. He was a king with the fellowship of kings, flattered with
+the equality of an aristocracy which was master of itself, and of its
+nominal head. During the earlier times it was his office to go daily to
+Rialto and instruct the people in their political rights and duties for
+four hours; and even when the duties became every thing and the rights
+nothing (after the Serrar del Consiglio), the friendly habit of daily
+intercourse between patricians and citizens was still kept up at the
+same place. Once each week, and on every holiday, the noble took his
+seat in the Grand Council (the most august assembly in the world,
+without doubt), or the Ten, or the Three, according to his office in the
+State,--holding his place in the Council by right of birth, and in the
+other bodies by election of his peers.
+
+Although the patricians were kept as one family apart from the people,
+and jealously guarded in their aristocratic purity by the State, they
+were only equals of the poorest before the laws of their own creation,
+and their condescension to the people was frequent and great. Indeed,
+the Venetians of all classes are social creatures, loving talk and
+gossip, and these constant habits of intercourse must have done much to
+produce that equality of manner now observable in them. Their amusements
+were for a long time the same, the nobles taking part in the public
+holidays, and in the popular exercises of rowing and swimming. In the
+earlier times, hunting in the lagoons was a favorite diversion; but as
+the decay of the Republic advanced, and the patrician blossomed into
+the fine gentleman of the last century, these hearty sports were
+relinquished, and every thing was voted vulgar but masking in carnival,
+dancing and gaming at Ridotto, and intriguing everywhere.
+
+The accounts which Venetian writers give of Republican society in the
+eighteenth century form a _chronique scandaleuse_ which need not be
+minutely copied here. Much may be learned of Venetian manners of this
+time from the comedies of Goldoni; and the faithlessness of society
+may be argued from the fact that in these plays, which contain nothing
+salacious or indecent, there is scarcely a character of any rank
+who scruples to tell lies; and the truth is not to be found in works
+intended to school the public to virtue. The ingenious old playwright's
+memoirs are full of gossip concerning that poor old Venice, which is
+now no more; and the worthy autobiographer, Casanova, also gives much
+information about things that had best not be known.
+
+As the Republic drew near its fall, in 1797, there was little left in
+its dominant class worth saving, if we may believe the testimony of
+Venetians which Mutinelli brings to bear upon the point in his "Annali
+Urbani," and his "History of the Last Fifty Years of the Republic."
+Long prosperity and prodigious opulence had done their worst, and the
+patricians, and the lowest orders of the people, their creatures and
+dependants, were thoroughly corrupt; while the men of professions began
+to assume that station which they now hold. The days of a fashionable
+patrician of those times began at a little before sunset, and ended with
+the following dawn. Rising from his bed, he dressed himself in dainty
+linen, and placed himself in the hands of the hairdresser to be combed,
+oiled, perfumed, and powdered; and then sallied forth for a stroll
+through the Merceria, where this excellent husband and father made
+tasteful purchases to be carried to the lady he served. At dinner,
+which he took about seven or eight, his board was covered with the most
+tempting viands, and surrounded by needy parasites, who detailed the
+spicy scandals of the day in payment of their dinner, while the children
+of the host were confided to the care of the corrupt and negligent
+servants. After dinner, the father went to the theatre, or to the
+_casino_, and spent the night over cards and wine, in the society of
+dissolute women; and renewed on the morrow the routine of his useful
+existence. The education of the children of the man of fashion was
+confided to a priest, who lived in his family, and called himself an
+abbate, after the mode of the _abb�s_ of French society; he had winning
+manners with the ladies, indulgent habits with his pupils, and dressed
+his elegant person in silks of Lyons and English broadcloths. In the
+pleasant old days he flitted from palace to villa, dining and supping,
+and flattering the ladies, and tapping the lid of his jeweled snuffbox
+in all fashionable companies. He was the cadet of a patrician family
+(when not the ambitious son of a low family), with a polite taste for
+idleness and intrigue, for whom no secular sinecure could be found in
+the State, and who obliged the Church by accepting orders. Whether in
+the palace on the Grand Canal, or the villa on the Brenta, this gentle
+and engaging priest was surely the most agreeable person to be met, and
+the most dangerous to ladies' hearts,--with his rich suit of black,
+and his smug, clean-shaven face, and his jeweled hands, and his sweet,
+seducing manners. Alas! the world is changed! The priests whom you see
+playing _tre-sette_ now at the conversazioni are altogether different
+men, and the delightful abbate is as much out of fashion as the bag-wig
+or the queue. When in fashion he loved the theatre, and often showed
+himself there at the side of his noble patron's wife. Nay, in that time
+the theatre was so prized by the Church that a popular preacher thought
+it becoming to declare from his pulpit that to compose well his
+hearers should study the comedies of Goldoni,--and his hearers were the
+posterity of that devout old aristocracy which never undertook a journey
+without first receiving the holy sacrament; which had built the churches
+and endowed them from private wealth!
+
+Ignorance, as well as vice, was the mode in those elegant days, and it
+is related that a charming lady of good society once addressed a foreign
+_savant_ at her conversazione, and begged him to favor the company with
+a little music, because, having heard that he was _virtuous_, she had
+no other association with the word than its technical use in Italy to
+indicate a professional singer as a _virtuoso_. A father of a family who
+kept no abbate for the education of his children ingeniously taught them
+himself. "Father," asked one of his children, "what are the stars?" "The
+stars are stars, and little things that shine as thou seest." "Then they
+are candles, perhaps?" "Make thy account that they are candles exactly."
+"Of wax or tallow?" pursues the boy. "What! tallow-candles in heaven?
+No, certainly--wax, wax!"
+
+These, and many other scandalous stories, the Venetian writers recount
+of the last days of their Republic, and the picture they produce is one
+of the most shameless ignorance, the most polite corruption, the
+most unblushing baseness. I have no doubt that the picture is full of
+national exaggeration. Indeed, the method of Mutinelli (who I believe
+intends to tell the truth) in writing social history is altogether too
+credulous and incautious. It is well enough to study contemporary comedy
+for light upon past society, but satirical ballads and lampoons, and
+scurrilous letters, cannot be accepted as historical authority. Still
+there is no question but Venice was very corrupt. As you read of her
+people in the last century, one by one the ideas of family faith and
+domestic purity fade away; one by one the beliefs in public virtue
+are dissipated; until at last you are glad to fly the study, close the
+filthy pages, and take refuge in doubt of the writers, who declare
+that they must needs disgrace Venice with facts since her children have
+dishonored her in their lives. "Such as we see them," they say, "were
+the patricians, such the people of Venice, after the middle of the
+eighteenth century. The Venetians might be considered as extinguished;
+the marvelous city, the pomp only of the Venetians, existed."
+
+Shall we believe this? Let each choose for himself. At that very time
+the taste and wealth of a Venetian noble fostered the genius of Canova
+and then, when their captains starved the ragged soldiers of the
+Republic to feed their own idleness and vice,--when the soldiers
+dismantled her forts to sell the guns to the Turk,--when her sailors
+rioted on shore and her ships rotted in her ports, she had still
+military virtue enough to produce that Emo, who beat back the Algerine
+corsairs from the commerce of Christendom, and attacked them in their
+stronghold, as of old her galleys beat back the Turks. Alas! there was
+not the virtue in her statesmen to respond to this greatness in the
+hero. One of their last public acts was to break his heart with insult,
+and to crave peace of the pirates whom he had cowed. It remained for the
+helpless Doge and the abject patricians, terrified at a threat of war,
+to declare the Republic at an end, and San Marco was no more.
+
+I love Republics too well to lament the fall of Venice. And yet, _Pax
+tibi, Marce!_ If I have been slow to praise, I shall not hasten to
+condemn, a whole nation. Indeed, so much occurs to me to qualify with
+contrary sense what I have written concerning Venice, that I wonder if,
+after all, I have not been treating throughout less of the rule than of
+the exception. It is a doubt which must force itself upon every fair
+and temperate man who attempts to describe another people's life and
+character; and I confess that it troubles me so sorely now, at the end
+of my work, that I would fain pray the gentle reader to believe much
+more good and much less evil of the Venetians than I have said. I am
+glad that it remains for me to express a faith and hope in them for the
+future, founded upon their present political feeling, which, however
+tainted with self-interest in the case of many, is no doubt with
+the great majority a high and true feeling of patriotism. And it is
+impossible to believe that a people which can maintain the stern and
+unyielding attitude now maintained by the Venetians toward an alien
+government disposed to make them any concession short of freedom, in
+order to win them into voluntary submission, can be wanting in the great
+qualities which distinguish living peoples from those passed hopelessly
+into history and sentiment. In truth, glancing back over the whole
+career of the nation, I can discern in it nothing so admirable, so
+dignified, so steadfastly brave, as its present sacrifice of all that
+makes life easy and joyous, to the attainment of a good which shall make
+life noble.
+
+The Venetians desire now, and first of all things, Liberty, knowing
+that in slavery men can learn no virtues; and I think them fit, with all
+their errors and defects, to be free now, because men are never fit to
+be slaves.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+OUR LAST YEAR IN VENICE.
+
+_(As it seems Seven Years after.)_
+
+
+The last of four years which it was our fortune to live in the city
+of Venice was passed under the roof of one of her most beautiful and
+memorable palaces, namely, the Palazzo Giustiniani, whither we went,
+as has been told in an earlier chapter of this book, to escape the
+encroaching nepotism of Giovanna, the flower of serving-women. The
+experience now, in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to consort with ordinary
+remembrances, and has such a fantastic preference for the company of
+rather vivid and circumstantial dreams, that it is with no very strong
+hope of making it seem real that I shall venture to speak of it.
+
+The Giustiniani were a family of patricians very famous during the times
+of a Republic that gave so many splendid names to history, and the race
+was preserved to the honor and service of Saint Mark by one of the most
+romantic facts of his annals. During a war with the Greek Emperor in the
+twelfth century every known Giustiniani was slain, and the heroic strain
+seemed lost forever. But the state that mourned them bethought itself
+of a half forgotten monk of their house, who was wasting his life in the
+Convent of San Nicol�; he was drawn forth from this seclusion, and,
+the permission of Rome being won, he was married to the daughter of the
+reigning doge. From them descended the Giustiniani of aftertimes, who
+still exist; in deed, in the year 1865 there came one day a gentleman of
+the family, and tried to buy from our landlord that part of the palace
+which we so humbly and insufficiently inhabited. It is said that as the
+unfrocked friar and his wife declined in life they separated, and, as if
+in doubt of what had been done for the state through them, retired each
+into a convent, Giustiniani going back to San Nicol�, and dying at last
+to the murmur of the Adriatic waves along the Lido's sands.
+
+Next after this Giustiniani I like best to think of that latest hero of
+the family, who had the sad fortune to live when the ancient Republic
+fell at a threat of Napoleon, and who alone among her nobles had
+the courage to meet with a manly spirit the insolent menaces of the
+conqueror. The Giustiniani governed Treviso for the Senate; he refused,
+when Napoleon ordered him from his presence, to quit Treviso without the
+command of the Senate; he flung back the taunts of bad faith cast upon
+the Venetians; and when Napoleon changed his tone from that of disdain
+to one of compliment, and promised that in the general disaster he
+was preparing for Venice, Giustiniani should be spared, the latter
+generously replied that he had been a friend of the French only because
+the Senate was so; as to the immunity offered, all was lost to him
+in the loss of his country, and he should blush for his wealth if it
+remained intact amidst the ruin of his countrymen.
+
+The family grew in riches and renown from age to age, and, some
+four centuries after the marriage of the monk, they reared the three
+beautiful Gothic palaces, in the noblest site on the Grand Canal, whence
+on one hand you can look down to the Rialto Bridge, and on the other far
+up towards the church of the Salute, and the Basin of Saint Mark. The
+architects were those Buoni, father and son, who did some of the
+most beautiful work on the Ducal Palace, and who wrought in an equal
+inspiration upon these homes of the Giustiniani, building the delicate
+Gothic arches of the windows, with their slender columns and their
+graceful balconies, and crowning all with the airy battlements.
+
+The largest of the three palaces became later the property of the
+Foscari family, and here dwelt with his father that unhappy Jacopo
+Foscari, who after thrice suffering torture by the state for a murder he
+never did, at last died in exile; hither came the old Doge Foscari, who
+had consented to this cruel error of the state, and who after a life
+spent in its service was deposed and disgraced before his death; and
+whither when he lay dead, came remorseful Venice, and claimed for
+sumptuous obsequies the dust which his widow yielded with bitter
+reproaches. Here the family faded away generation by generation, till,
+(according to the tale told us) early in this century, when the ultimate
+male survivor of the line had died, under a false name, in London, where
+he had been some sort of obscure actor, there were but two old maiden
+sisters left, who, lapsing into imbecility, were shown to strangers by
+the rascal servants as the last of the Foscari; and here in our time was
+quartered a regiment of Austrian troops, whose neatly pipe-clayed belts
+decorated the balconies on which the princely ladies of the house had
+rested their jewelled arms in other days.
+
+The Foscari added a story to the palace to distinguish it from the two
+other palaces Giustiniani, but these remain to the present day as they
+were originally planned. That in which we lived was called Palazzo
+Giustiniani of the Bishops, because one of the family was the first
+patriarch of Venice. After his death he was made a saint by the Pope;
+and it is related that he was not only a very pious, but a very good
+man. In his last hours he admitted his beloved people to his chamber,
+where he meekly lay upon a pallet of straw, and at the moment he
+expired, two monks in the solitude of their cloister, heard an angelical
+harmony in the air: the clergy performed his obsequies not in black,
+funereal robes, but in white garments, and crowned with laurel, and
+bearing gilded torches, and although the patriarch had died of a
+malignant fever, his body was miraculously preserved incorrupt during
+the sixty-five days that the obsequies lasted. The other branch of the
+family was called the Giustiniani of the Jewels, from the splendor of
+their dress; but neither palace now shelters any of their magnificent
+race. The edifice on our right was exclusively occupied by a noble
+Viennese lady, who as we heard,--vaguely, in the right Venetian
+fashion,--had been a ballet-dancer in her youth, and who now in her
+matronly days dwelt apart from her husband, the Russian count, and had
+gondoliers in blue silk, and the finest gondola on the Grand Canal, but
+was a plump, florid lady, looking long past beauty, even as we saw her
+from our balcony.
+
+Our own palace--as we absurdly grew to call it--was owned and inhabited
+in a manner much more proper to modern Venice, the proprietorship being
+about equally divided between our own landlord and a very well known
+Venetian painter, son of a painter still more famous. This artist was
+a very courteous old gentleman, who went with Italian and clock-like
+regularity every evening in summer to a certain caff�, where he seemed
+to make it a point of conscience to sip one sherbet, and to read the
+"Journal des D�bats." In his coming and going we met him so often that
+we became friends, and he asked us many times to visit him, and see his
+father's pictures, and some famous frescos with which his part of the
+palace was adorned. It was a characteristic trait of our life, that
+though we constantly meant to avail ourselves of this kindness, we never
+did so. But we continued in the enjoyment of the beautiful garden, which
+this gentleman owned at the rear of the palace and on which our chamber
+windows looked. It was full of oleanders and roses, and other bright
+and odorous blooms, which we could enjoy perfectly well without knowing
+their names; and I could hardly say whether the garden was more charming
+when it was in its summer glory, or when, on some rare winter day, a
+breath from the mountains had clothed its tender boughs and sprays with
+a light and evanescent flowering of snow. At any season the lofty palace
+walls rose over it, and shut it in a pensive seclusion which was loved
+by the old mother of the painter and by his elderly maiden sister. These
+often walked on its moss-grown paths, silent as the roses and oleanders
+to which one could have fancied the blossom of their youth had
+flown; and sometimes there came to them there, grave, black-gowned
+priests,--for the painter's was a devout family,--and talked with them
+in tones almost as tranquil as the silence was, save when one of the
+ecclesiastics placidly took snuff,--it is a dogma of the Church for
+priests to take snuff in Italy,--and thereafter, upon a prolonged search
+for his handkerchief, blew a resounding nose. So far as we knew, the
+garden walls circumscribed the whole life of these ladies; and I am
+afraid that such topics of this world as they touched upon with their
+priests must have been deplorably small.
+
+Their kinsman owned part of the story under us, and both of the stories
+above us; he had the advantage of the garden over our landlord; but
+he had not so grand a gondola-gate as we, and in some other respects
+I incline to think that our part of the edifice was the finer. It
+is certain that no mention is made of any such beautiful hall in the
+property of the painter as is noted in that of our landlord, by
+the historian of a "Hundred Palaces of Venice,"--a work for which
+I subscribed, and then for my merit was honored by a visit from the
+author, who read aloud to me in a deep and sonorous voice the annals
+of our temporary home. This hall occupied half the space of the whole
+floor; but it was altogether surrounded by rooms of various shapes and
+sizes, except upon one side of its length, where it gave through Gothic
+windows of vari-colored glass, upon a small court below,--a green-mouldy
+little court, further dampened by a cistern, which had the usual curb
+of a single carven block of marble. The roof of this stately _sala_ was
+traversed by a long series of painted rafters, which in the halls of
+nearly all Venetian palaces are left exposed, and painted or carved and
+gilded. A suite of stately rooms closed the hall from the Grand Canal,
+and one of these formed our parlor; on the side opposite the Gothic
+windows was a vast aristocratic kitchen, which, with its rows of shining
+coppers, its great chimney-place well advanced toward the middle of the
+floor, and its tall gloomy windows, still affects my imagination as one
+of the most patrician rooms which I ever saw; at the back of the hall
+were those chambers of ours overlooking the garden of which I have
+already spoken, and another kitchen, less noble than the first, but
+still sufficiently grandiose to make most New World kitchens seem very
+meekly minute and unimpressive. Between the two kitchens was another
+court, with another cistern, from which the painter's family drew water
+with a bucket on a long rope, which, when let down from the fourth
+story, appeared to be dropped from the clouds, and descended with a
+noise little less alarming than thunder.
+
+Altogether the most surprising object in the great _sala_ was a
+sewing-machine, and we should have been inconsolably outraged by its
+presence there, amid so much that was merely venerable and beautiful,
+but for the fact that it was in a state of harmonious and hopeless
+disrepair, and, from its general contrivance, gave us the idea that it
+had never been of any use. It was, in fact, kept as a sort of curiosity
+by the landlord, who exhibited it to the admiration of his Venetian
+friends.
+
+The reader will doubtless have imagined, from what I have been saying,
+that the Palazzo Giustiniani had not all that machinery which we know in
+our houses here as modern improvements. It had nothing of the kind, and
+life there was, as in most houses in Italy, a kind of permanent camping
+out. When I remember the small amount of carpeting, of furniture, and of
+upholstery we enjoyed, it appears to me pathetic; and yet, I am not sure
+that it was not the wisest way to live. I know that we had compensation
+in things not purchasable here for money. If the furniture of the
+principal bedroom was somewhat scanty, its dimensions were unstinted
+the ceiling was fifteen feet high, and was divided into rich and heavy
+panels, adorned each with a mighty rosette of carved and gilded wood,
+two feet across. The parlor had not its original decorations in our
+time, but it had once had so noble a carved ceiling that it was found
+worth while to take it down and sell it into England; and it still had
+two grand Venetian mirrors, a vast and very good painting of a miracle
+of St. Anthony, and imitation-antique tables and arm-chairs. The last
+were frolicked all over with carven nymphs and cupids; but they were of
+such frail construction that they were not meant to be sat in, much less
+to be removed from the wall against which they stood; and more than one
+of our American visitors was dismayed at having these proud articles of
+furniture go to pieces upon his attempt to use them like mere arm-chairs
+of ordinary life. Scarcely less impressive or useless than these was a
+monumental plaster-stove, surmounted by a bust of �sculapius; when this
+was broken by accident, we cheaply repaired the loss with a bust of
+Homer (the dealer in the next campo being out of �sculapiuses) which no
+one could have told from the bust it replaced; and this and the other
+artistic glories of the room made us quite forget all possible
+blemishes and defects. And will the reader mention any house with modern
+improvements in America which has also windows, with pointed arches of
+marble, opening upon balconies that overhang the Grand Canal?
+
+For our new apartment, which consisted of six rooms, furnished with
+every article necessary for Venetian housekeeping, we paid one dollar a
+day which, in the innocence of our hearts we thought rather dear, though
+we were somewhat consoled by reflecting that this extravagant outlay
+secured us the finest position on the Grand Canal. We did not mean to
+keep house as we had in Casa Falier, and perhaps a sketch of our easier
+_m�nage_ may not be out of place. Breakfast was prepared in the house,
+for in that blessed climate all you care for in the morning is a cup of
+coffee, with a little bread and butter, a musk-melon, and some clusters
+of white grapes, more or less. Then we had our dinners sent in warm from
+a cook's who had learned his noble art in France; he furnished a dinner
+of five courses for three persons at a cost of about eighty cents; and
+they were dinners so happily conceived and so justly executed, that I
+cannot accuse myself of an excess of sentiment when I confess that I
+sigh for them to this day. Then as for our immaterial tea, we always
+took that at the Caff� Florian in the Piazza of Saint Mark, where
+we drank a cup of black coffee and ate an ice, while all the world
+promenaded by, and the Austrian bands made heavenly music.
+
+Those bands no longer play in Venice, and I believe that they are not
+the only charm which she has lost in exchanging Austrian servitude for
+Italian freedom; though I should be sorry to think that freedom was not
+worth all other charms. The poor Venetians used to be very rigorous
+(as I have elsewhere related), about the music of their oppressors,
+and would not come into the Piazza until it had ceased and the Austrian
+promenaders had disappeared, when they sat down at Florian's, and
+listened to such bands of strolling singers and minstrels as chose to
+give them a concord of sweet sounds, without foreign admixture. We, in
+our neutrality, were wont to sit out both entertainments, and then go
+home well toward midnight, through the sleepy little streets, and over
+the bridges that spanned the narrow canals, dreaming in the shadows of
+the palaces.
+
+We moved with half-conscious steps till we came to the silver expanse
+of the Grand Canal, where, at the ferry, darkled a little brood of black
+gondolas, into one of which we got, and were rowed noiselessly to the
+thither side, where we took our way toward the land-gate of our palace
+through the narrow streets of the parish of San Barnab�, and the campo
+before the ugly fa�ade of the church; or else we were rowed directly to
+the water-gate, where we got out on the steps worn by the feet of the
+Giustiniani of old, and wandered upward through the darkness of the
+stairway, which gave them a far different welcome of servants and lights
+when they returned from an evening's pleasure in the Piazza. It seemed
+scarcely just; but then, those Giustiniani were dead, and we were alive,
+and that was one advantage; and, besides, the loneliness and desolation
+of the palace had a peculiar charm, and were at any rate cheaper than
+its former splendor could have been. I am afraid that people who live
+abroad in the palaces of extinct nobles do not keep this important fact
+sufficiently in mind; and as the Palazzo Giustiniani is still let in
+furnished lodgings, and it is quite possible that some of my readers may
+be going to spend next summer in it, I venture to remind them that if
+they have to draw somewhat upon their fancy for patrician accommodations
+there, it will cost them far less in money than it did the original
+proprietors, who contributed to our selfish pleasure by the very thought
+of their romantic absence and picturesque decay. In fact, the Past is
+everywhere like the cake of proverb: you cannot enjoy it and have it.
+
+And here I am reminded of another pleasure of modern dwellers in
+Venetian palaces, which could hardly have been indulged by the
+patricians of old, and which is hardly imaginable by people of this day,
+whose front doors open upon dry land: I mean to say the privilege of
+sea-bathing from one's own threshold. From the beginning of June
+till far into September all the canals of Venice are populated by the
+amphibious boys, who clamor about in the brine, or poise themselves for
+a leap from the tops of bridges, or show their fine, statuesque figures,
+bronzed by the ardent sun, against the fa�ades of empty palaces, where
+they hover among the marble sculptures, and meditate a headlong plunge.
+It is only the Venetian ladies, in fact, who do not share this healthful
+amusement. Fathers of families, like so many plump, domestic drakes,
+lead forth their aquatic broods, teaching the little ones to swim by
+the aid of various floats, and delighting in the gambols of the larger
+ducklings. When the tide comes in fresh and strong from the sea the
+water in the Grand Canal is pure and refreshing; and at these times
+it is a singular pleasure to leap from one's door-step into the swift
+current, and spend a half-hour, very informally, among one's neighbors
+there. The Venetian bathing-dress is a mere sketch of the pantaloons of
+ordinary life; and when I used to stand upon our balcony, and see some
+bearded head ducking me a polite salutation from a pair of broad,
+brown shoulders that showed above the water, I was not always able
+to recognize my acquaintance, deprived of his factitious identity of
+clothes. But I always knew a certain stately consul-general by a vast
+expanse of baldness upon the top of his head; and it must be owned,
+I think, that this form of social assembly was, with all its
+disadvantages, a novel and vivacious spectacle. The Venetian ladies,
+when they bathed, went to the Lido, or else to the bath-houses in front
+of the Ducal Palace, where they saturated themselves a good part of the
+day, and drank coffee, and, possibly, gossiped.
+
+I think that our balconies at Palazzo Giustiniani were even better
+places to see the life of the Grand Canal from than the balcony of Casa
+Falier, which we had just left. Here at least we had a greater stretch
+of the Canal, looking, as we could, up either side of its angle. Here,
+too, we had more gondola stations in sight, and as we were nearer the
+Rialto, there was more picturesque passing of the market-boats. But if
+we saw more of this life, we did not see it in greater variety, for
+I think we had already exhausted this. There was a movement all night
+long. If I woke at three or four o'clock, and offered myself the novel
+spectacle of the Canal at that hour, I saw the heavy-laden barges go
+by to the Rialto, with now and then also a good-sized coasting schooner
+making lazily for the lagoons, with its ruddy fire already kindled for
+cooking the morning's meal, and looking very enviably cosey. After our
+own breakfast we began to watch for the gondolas of the tourists of
+different nations, whom we came to distinguish at a glance. Then the
+boats of the various artisans went by, the carpenter's, the mason's, the
+plasterer's, with those that sold fuel, and vegetables, and fruit, and
+fish, to any household that arrested them. From noon till three or four
+o'clock the Canal was comparatively deserted; but before twilight it was
+thronged again by people riding out in their open gondolas to take the
+air after the day's fervor. After nightfall they ceased, till only at
+long intervals a solitary lamp, stealing over the dark surface, gave
+token of the movement of some gondola bent upon an errand that could not
+fail to seem mysterious or fail to be matter of fact. We never wearied
+of this oft-repeated variety, nor of our balcony in any way; and when
+the moon shone in through the lovely arched window and sketched its
+exquisite outline on the floor, we were as happy as moonshine could make
+us.
+
+Were we otherwise content? As concerns Venice, it is very hard to say,
+and I do not know that I shall ever be able to say with certainty. For
+all the entertainment it afforded us, it was a very lonely life, and we
+felt the sadness of the city in many fine and not instantly recognizable
+ways. Englishmen who lived there bade us beware of spending the whole
+year in Venice, which they declared apt to result in a morbid depression
+of the spirits. I believe they attributed this to the air of the
+place, but I think it was more than half owing to her mood, to her old,
+ghostly, aimless life. She was, indeed, a phantom of the past, haunting
+our modern world,--serene, inexpressibly beautiful, yet inscrutably and
+unspeakably sad. Remembering the charm that was in her, we often sigh
+for the renewal of our own vague life there,--a shadow within the
+shadow; but remembering also her deep melancholy, an involuntary shiver
+creeps over us, and we are glad not to be there. Perhaps some of you who
+have spent a summer day or a summer week in Venice do not recognize this
+feeling; but if you will remain there, not four years as we did, but a
+year or six months even, it will ever afterwards be only too plain. All
+changes, all events, were affected by the inevitable local melancholy;
+the day was as pensive amidst that populous silence as the night; the
+winter not more pathetic than the long, tranquil, lovely summer. We
+rarely sentimentalized consciously, and still more seldom openly, about
+the present state of Venice as contrasted with her past glory.
+
+I am glad to say that we despised the conventional poetastery about her;
+but I believe that we had so far lived into sympathy with her, that,
+whether we realized it or not, we took the tone of her dispiritedness,
+and assumed a part of the common experience of loss and of hopelessness.
+History, if you live where it was created, is a far subtler influence
+than you suspect; and I would not say how much Venetian history, amidst
+the monuments of her glory and the witnesses of her fall, had to do in
+secret and tacit ways with the prevailing sentiment of existence, which
+I now distinctly recognize to have been a melancholy one. No doubt this
+sentiment was deepened by every freshly added association with memorable
+places; and each fact, each great name and career, each strange
+tradition as it rose out of the past for us and shed its pale lustre
+upon the present, touched us with a pathos which we could neither trace
+nor analyze.
+
+I do not know how much the modern Venetians had to do with this
+impression, but something I have no question. They were then under
+Austrian rule; and in spite of much that was puerile and theatrical in
+it, there was something very affecting in their attitude of what may
+best be described as passive defiance. This alone made them heroic, but
+it also made them tedious. They rarely talked of anything but politics;
+and as I have elsewhere said, they were very jealous to have every one
+declare himself of their opinion. Hemmed in by this jealousy on one
+side, and by a heavy and rebellious sense of the wrongful presence of
+the Austrian troops and the Austrian spies on the other, we forever felt
+dimly constrained by something, we could not say precisely what, and we
+only knew what, when we went sometimes on a journey into free Italy, and
+threw off the irksome caution we had maintained both as to patriotic and
+alien tyrants. This political misery circumscribed our acquaintance
+very much, and reduced the circle of our friendship to three or four
+families, who were content to know our sympathies without exacting
+constant expression of them. So we learned to depend mainly upon passing
+Americans for our society; we hailed with rapture the arrival of a
+gondola distinguished by the easy hats of our countrymen and the pretty
+faces and pretty dresses of our countrywomen. It was in the days of our
+war; and talking together over its events, we felt a brotherhood with
+every other American.
+
+Of course, in these circumstances, we made thorough acquaintance with
+the people about us in the palace. The landlord had come somehow into
+a profitable knowledge of Anglo-Saxon foibles and susceptibilities; but
+his lodgings were charming, and I recognize the principle that it is not
+for literature to make its prey of any possibly conscious object. For
+this reason, I am likewise mostly silent concerning a certain _attach�_
+of the palace, the right-hand man and intimate associate of the
+landlord. He was the descendant of one of the most ancient and noble
+families of Italy,--a family of popes and cardinals, of princes and
+ministers, which in him was diminished and tarnished in an almost
+inexplicable degree. He was not at all worldly-wise, but he was a man
+of great learning, and of a capacity for acquiring knowledge that I have
+never seen surpassed. He possessed, I think, not many shirts on earth;
+but he spoke three or four languages, and wrote very pretty sonnets in
+Italian and German. He was one of the friendliest and willingest souls
+living, and as generous as utter destitution can make a man; yet he had
+a proper spirit, and valued himself upon his name. Sometimes he brought
+his great-grandfather to the palace; a brisk old gentleman in his
+nineties, who had seen the fall of the Republic and three other
+revolutions in Venice, but had contrived to keep a government pension
+through all, and now smiled with unabated cheerfulness upon a world
+which he seemed likely never to leave.
+
+The palace-servants were two, the gondolier and a sort of
+housekeeper,--a handsome, swarthy woman, with beautiful white teeth and
+liquid black eyes. She was the mother of a pretty little boy, who was
+going to bring himself up for a priest, and whose chief amusement was
+saying mimic masses to an imaginary congregation. She was perfectly
+statuesque and obliging, and we had no right, as lovers of the beautiful
+or as lodgers, to complain of her, whatever her faults might have been.
+As to the gondolier, who was a very important personage in our palatial
+household, he was a handsome bashful, well-mannered fellow, with a
+good-natured blue eye and a neatly waxed mustache. He had been ten years
+a soldier in the Austrian army, and was, from his own account and from
+all I saw of him, one of the least courageous men in the world; but
+then no part of the Austrian system tends to make men brave, and I
+could easily imagine that before it had done with one it might give him
+reasons enough to be timid all the rest of his life. Piero had not very
+much to do, and he spent the greater part of his leisure in a sort
+of lazy flirtation with the women about the kitchen-fire, or in the
+gondola, in which he sometimes gave them the air. We always liked him;
+I should have trusted him in any sort of way, except one that involved
+danger. It once happened that burglars attempted to enter our rooms,
+and Piero declared to us that he knew the men; but before the police, he
+swore that he knew nothing about them. Afterwards he returned privately
+to his first assertion, and accounted for his conduct by saying that
+if he had borne witness against the burglars, he was afraid that their
+friends would jump on his back (_saltarmi adosso_), as he phrased it,
+in the dark; for by this sort of terrorism the poor and the wicked have
+long been bound together in Italy. Piero was a humorist in his dry way,
+and made a jest of his own caution; but his favorite joke was, when
+he dressed himself with particular care, to tell the women that he was
+going to pay a visit to the Princess Clary, then the star of
+Austrian society. This mild pleasantry was repeated indefinitely with
+never-failing effect.
+
+More interesting to us than all the rest was our own servant, Bettina,
+who came to us from a village on the mainland. She was very dark, so
+dark and so Southern in appearance as almost to verge upon the negro
+type; yet she bore the English-sounding name of Scarbro, and how she
+ever came by it remains a puzzle to this day, for she was one of the
+most pure and entire of Italians. I mean this was her maiden name; she
+was married to a trumpeter in the Austrian service, whose Bohemian name
+she was unable to pronounce, and consequently never gave us. She was a
+woman of very few ideas indeed, but perfectly honest and good-hearted.
+She was pious, in her peasant fashion, and in her walks about the city
+did not fail to bless the baby before every picture of the Madonna.
+She provided it with an engraved portrait of that Holy Nail which was
+venerated in the neighboring church of San Pantaleon; and she apparently
+aimed to supply it with playthings of a religious and saving character
+like that piece of ivory, which resembled a small torso, and which
+Bettina described as "A bit of the Lord, Signor,"--and it was, in fact,
+a fragment of an ivory crucifix, which she had somewhere picked up.
+To Bettina's mind, mankind broadly divided themselves into two races,
+Italians and Germans, to which latter she held that we Americans in some
+sort belonged. She believed that America lay a little to the south of
+Vienna and in her heart I think she was persuaded that the real national
+complexion was black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw
+at our house were merely a multitude of exceptions. But with all her
+ignorance, she had no superstitions of a gloomy kind: the only ghost she
+seemed ever to have heard of was the spectre of an American ship captain
+which a friend of Piero's had seen at the Lido. She was perfectly kind
+and obedient, and was deeply attached in an inarticulate way to the
+baby, which was indeed the pet of the whole palace. This young lady
+ruled arbitrarily over them all, and was forever being kissed and
+adored. When Piero went out to the wine-shop for a little temperate
+dissipation, he took her with him on his shoulder, and exhibited her to
+the admiring gondoliers of his acquaintance; there was no puppetshow, no
+church festival, in that region to which she was not carried; and
+when Bettina, and Giulia, and all the idle women of the neighborhood
+assembled on a Saturday afternoon in the narrow alley behind the palace
+(where they dressed one another's thick black hair in fine braids soaked
+in milk, and built it up to last the whole of the next week), the baby
+was the cynosure of all hearts and eyes. But her supremacy was yet more
+distinguished when, late at night, the household gave itself a feast of
+snails stewed in oil and garlic, in the vast kitchen. There her anxious
+parents have found her seated in the middle of the table with the bowl
+of snails before her, and armed with a great spoon, while her vassals
+sat round, and grinned their fondness and delight in her small
+tyrannies; and the immense room, dimly lit, with the mystical implements
+of cookery glimmering from the wall, showed like some witch's cavern,
+where a particularly small sorceress was presiding over the concoction
+of an evil potion or the weaving of a powerful spell.
+
+From time to time we had fellow-lodgers, who were always more or less
+interesting and mysterious. Among the rest there was once a French lady,
+who languished, during her stay, under the disfavor of the police, and
+for whose sake there was a sentinel with a fixed bayonet stationed
+day and night at the palace gate. At last, one night, this French lady
+escaped by a rope-ladder from her chamber window, and thus no doubt
+satisfied alike the female instinct for intrigue and elopement and
+the political agitator's love of a mysterious disappearance. It
+was understood dimly that she was an author, and had written a book
+displeasing to the police.
+
+Then there was the German baroness and her son and daughter, the last
+very beautiful and much courted by handsome Austrian officers; the son
+rather weak-minded, and a great care to his sister and mother, from his
+propensity to fall in love and marry below his station; the mother very
+red-faced and fat, a good-natured old creature who gambled the summer
+months away at Hombourg and Baden and in the winter resorted to Venice
+to make a match for her pretty daughter. Then, moreover, there was that
+English family, between whom and ourselves there was the reluctance and
+antipathy, personal and national, which exists between all right-minded
+Englishmen and Americans. No Italian can understand this just and
+natural condition, and it was the constant aim of our landlord to
+make us acquainted. So one day when he found a member of each of these
+unfriendly families on the neutral ground of the grand _sala_, he
+introduced them. They had, happily, the piano-forte between them, and I
+flatter myself that the insulting coldness and indifference with which
+they received each other's names carried to our landlord's bosom a
+dismay never before felt by a good-natured and well-meaning man.
+
+The piano-forte which I have mentioned belonged to the landlord, who was
+fond of music and of all fine and beautiful things; and now and then
+he gave a musical _soir�e_, which was attended, more or less
+surreptitiously, by the young people of his acquaintance. I do not
+think he was always quite candid in giving his invitations, for on one
+occasion a certain count, who had taken refuge from the glare of the
+_sala_ in our parlor for the purpose of concealing the very loud-plaided
+pantaloons he wore, explained pathetically that he had no idea it was
+a party, and that he had been so long out of society, for patriotic
+reasons, that he had no longer a dress suit. But to us they were very
+delightful entertainments, no less from the great variety of character
+they afforded than from the really charming and excellent music which
+the different amateurs made; for we had airs from all the famous operas,
+and the instrumentation was by a gifted young composer. Besides, the
+gayety seemed to recall in some degree the old, brilliant life of
+the palace, and at least showed us how well it was adapted to social
+magnificence and display.
+
+We enjoyed our whole year in Palazzo Giustiniani, though some of the
+days were too long and some too short, as everywhere. From heat we
+hardly suffered at all, so perfectly did the vast and lofty rooms answer
+to the purpose of their builders in this respect. A current of sea air
+drew through to the painter's garden by day; and by night there was
+scarcely a mosquito of the myriads that infested some parts of Venice.
+In winter it was not so well. Then we shuffled about in wadded gowns and
+boots lined with sheep-skin,--the woolly side in, as in the song. The
+passage of the _sala_, was something to be dreaded, and we shivered
+as fleetly through it as we could, and were all the colder for the
+deceitful warmth of the colors which the sun cast upon the stone floor
+from the window opening on the court.
+
+I do not remember any one event of our life more exciting than that
+attempted burglary of which I have spoken. In a city where the police
+gave their best attention to political offenders, there were naturally a
+great many rogues, and the Venetian rogues, if not distinguished for the
+more heroic crimes, were very skillful in what I may call the _genre_
+branch of robbing rooms through open windows, and committing all kinds
+of safe domestic depredations. It was judged best to acquaint Justice
+(as they call law in Latin countries) with the attempt upon our
+property, and I found her officers housed in a small room of the Doge's
+Palace, clerkly men in velvet skull-caps, driving loath quills over the
+rough official paper of those regions. After an exchange of diplomatic
+courtesies, the commissary took my statement of the affair down in
+writing, pertinent to which were my father's name, place, and business,
+with a full and satisfactory personal history of myself down to the
+period of the attempted burglary. This, I said, occurred one morning
+about daylight, when I saw the head of the burglar peering above the
+window-sill, and the hand of the burglar extended to prey upon my
+wardrobe.
+
+"Excuse me, Signor Console," interrupted the commissary, "how could you
+see him?"
+
+"Why, there was nothing in the world to prevent me. The window was
+open."
+
+"The window was open!" gasped the commissary. "Do you mean that you
+sleep with your windows open?"
+
+"Most certainly!"
+
+"Pardon!" said the commissary, suspiciously. "Do _all_ Americans sleep
+with their windows open?"
+
+"I may venture to say that they all do, in summer," I answered; "at
+least, it's the general custom."
+
+Such a thing as this indulgence in fresh air seemed altogether foreign
+to the commissary's experience; and but for my official dignity, I am
+sure that I should have been effectually browbeaten by him. As it was,
+he threw himself back in his armchair and stared at me fixedly for some
+moments. Then he recovered himself with another "Per-doni!" and,
+turning to his clerk, said, "Write down that, _according to the American
+custom_, they were sleeping with their windows open." But I know that
+the commissary, for all his politeness, considered this habit a relic
+of the times when we Americans all abode in wigwams; and I suppose it
+paralyzed his energies in the effort to bring the burglars to justice,
+for I have never heard anything of them from that day to this.
+
+The truth is, it was a very uneventful year; and I am the better
+satisfied with it as an average Venetian year on that account. We
+sometimes varied the pensive monotony by a short visit to the cities of
+the mainland; but we always came back to it willingly, and I think
+we unconsciously abhorred any interruption of it. The days, as they
+followed each other, were wonderfully alike, in every respect. For eight
+months of summer they were alike in their clear-skied, sweet-breathed
+loveliness; in the autumn, there where the melancholy of the falling
+leaf could not spread its contagion to the sculptured foliage of Gothic
+art, the days were alike in their sentiment of tranquil oblivion and
+resignation which was as autumnal as any aspect of woods or fields
+could have been; in the winter they were alike in their dreariness and
+discomfort. As I remember, we spent by far the greater part of our time
+in going to the Piazza, and we were devoted Florianisti, as the Italians
+call those that lounge habitually at the Caff� Florian. We went every
+evening to the Piazza as a matter of course; if the morning was long, we
+went to the Piazza; if we did not know what to do with the afternoon, we
+went to the Piazza; if we had friends with us, we went to the Piazza;
+if we were alone, we went to the Piazza; and there was no mood or
+circumstances in which it did not seem a natural and fitting thing to
+go to the Piazza. There were all the prettiest shops; there were all the
+finest caff�s; there was the incomparable Church of St. Mark; there was
+the whole world of Venice.
+
+Of course, we had other devices besides going to the Piazza; and
+sometimes we spent entire weeks in visiting the churches, one after
+another, and studying their artistic treasures, down to the smallest
+scrap of an old master in their darkest chapel; their history, their
+storied tombs, their fictitious associations. Very few churches escaped,
+I believe, except such as had been turned into barracks, and were
+guarded by an incorruptible Austrian sentinel. For such churches as did
+escape, we have a kind of envious longing to this day, and should find
+it hard to like anybody who had succeeded better in visiting them. There
+is, for example, the church of San Giobbe, the doors of which we haunted
+with more patience than that of the titulary saint: now the sacristan
+was out; now the church was shut up for repairs; now it was Holy Week
+and the pictures were veiled; we had to leave Venice at last without a
+sight of San Giobbe's three Saints by Bordone, and Madonna by Bellini,
+which, unseen, outvalue all the other Saints and Madonnas that we looked
+at; and I am sure that life can never become so aimless, but we shall
+still have the desire of some day going to see the church of San Giobbe.
+If we read some famous episode of Venetian history, we made it the
+immediate care of our lives to visit the scene of its occurrence; if
+Ruskin told us of some recondite beauty of sculpture hid away in
+some unthought-of palace court, we invaded that palace at once; if in
+entirely purposeless strolls through the city, we came upon anything
+that touched the fancy or piqued curiosity, there was no gate or
+bar proof against our bribes. What strange old nests of ruin, what
+marvellous homes of solitude and dilapidation, did we not wander into!
+What boarded-up windows peer through, what gloomy recesses penetrate!
+I have lumber enough in my memory stored from such rambles to load the
+nightmares of a generation, and stuff for the dreams of a whole people.
+Does any gentleman or lady wish to write a romance? Sir or madam, I know
+just the mouldy and sunless alley for your villain to stalk his victim
+in, the canal in which to plunge his body, the staircase and the hall
+for the subsequent wanderings of his ghost; and all these scenes and
+localities I will sell at half the cost price; as also, balconies for
+flirtation, gondolas for intrigue and elopement, confessionals for the
+betrayal of guilty secrets. I have an assortment of bad and beautiful
+faces and picturesque attitudes and effective tones of voice; and a
+large stock of sympathetic sculptures and furniture and dresses, with
+other articles too numerous to mention, all warranted Venetian, and
+suitable to every style of romance. Who bids? Nay, I cannot sell, nor
+you buy. Each memory, as I hold it up for inspection, loses its subtle
+beauty and value, and turns common and poor in my hawker's fingers.
+
+Yet I must needs try to fix here the remembrance of two or three
+palaces, of which our fancy took the fondest hold, and to which it yet
+most fondly clings. It cannot locate them all, and least of all can it
+place that vast old palace, somewhere near Cannaregio, which faced upon
+a campo, with lofty windows blinded by rough boards, and empty from top
+to bottom. It was of the later Renaissance in style, and we imagined
+it built in the Republic's declining years by some ruinous noble,
+whose extravagance forbade his posterity to live in it, for it had that
+peculiarly forlorn air which belongs to a thing decayed without being
+worn out. We entered its coolness and dampness, and wandered up the wide
+marble staircase, past the vacant niches of departed statuary, and came
+on the third floor to a grand portal which was closed against us by a
+barrier of lumber. But this could not hinder us from looking within, and
+we were aware that we stood upon the threshold of our ruinous noble's
+great banqueting-hall, where he used to give his magnificent _feste da
+ballo_. Lustrissimo was long gone with all his guests; but there in the
+roof were the amazing frescos of Tiepolo's school, which had smiled down
+on them, as now they smiled on us, great piles of architecture, airy
+tops of palaces, swimming in summer sky, and wantoned over by a joyous
+populace of divinities of the lovelier sex that had nothing but their
+loveliness to clothe them and keep them afloat; the whole grandiose and
+superb beyond the effect of words, and luminous with delicious color.
+How it all rioted there with its inextinguishable beauty in the solitude
+and silence, from day to day, from year to year, while men died, and
+systems passed, and nothing remained unchanged but the instincts of
+youth and love that inspired it! It was music and wine and wit; it was
+so warm and glowing that it made the sunlight cold; and it seemed
+ever after a secret of gladness and beauty that the sad old palace was
+keeping in its heart against the time to which Venice looks forward when
+her splendor and opulence shall be indestructibly renewed.
+
+There is a ball-room in the Palazzo Pisani, which some of my readers
+may have passed through on their way to the studio of the charming
+old Prussian painter, Nerl�; the frescos of this are dim and faded and
+dusty, and impress you with a sense of irreparable decay, but the noble
+proportions and the princely air of the place are inalienable, while
+the palace stands. Here might have danced that Contarini who, when his
+wife's necklace of pearls fell upon the floor in the way of her partner,
+the King of Denmark, advanced and ground it into powder with his foot
+that the king might not be troubled to avoid treading on it; and here,
+doubtless, many a gorgeous masquerade had been in the long Venetian
+carnival; and what passion and intrigue and jealousy, who knows? Now the
+palace was let in apartments, and was otherwise a barrack, and in the
+great court, steadfast as any of the marble statues, stood the Austrian
+sentinel. One of the statues was a figure veiled from head to foot, at
+the base of which it was hard not to imagine lovers, masked and hooded,
+and forever hurriedly whispering their secrets in the shadow cast in
+perpetual moonlight.
+
+Yet another ball-room in yet another palace opens to memory, but this
+is all bright and fresh with recent decoration. In the blue vaulted roof
+shine stars of gold; the walls are gay with dainty frescos; a gallery
+encircles the whole, and from this drops a light stairway, slim-railed,
+and guarded at the foot by torch-bearing statues of swarthy Eastern
+girls; through the glass doors at the other side glimmers the green and
+red of a garden. It was a place to be young in, to dance in, dream in,
+make love in; but it was no more a surprise than the whole palace to
+which it belonged, and which there in that tattered and poverty-stricken
+old Venice was a vision of untarnished splendor and prosperous fortune.
+It was richly furnished throughout all its vast extent, adorned with
+every caprice and delight of art, and appointed with every modern
+comfort The foot was hushed by costly carpets, the eye was flattered by
+a thousand beauties and prettinesses. In the grates the fires were
+laid and ready to be lighted; the candles stood upon the mantles; the
+toilet-linen was arranged for instant use in the luxurious chambers; but
+from basement to roof the palace was a solitude; no guest came there,
+no one dwelt there save the custodian; the eccentric lady of whose
+possessions it formed a part abode in a little house behind the palace,
+and on her door-plate had written her _vanitas vanitatum_ in the
+sarcastic inscription, "John Humdrum, Esquire."
+
+Of course she was Inglese; and that other lady, who was selling off the
+furniture of her palace, and was so amiable a guide to its wonders in
+her curious broken English, was Hungarian. Her great pride and joy,
+amidst the objects of _vertu_ and the works of art, was a set of
+"Punch," which she made us admire, and which she prized the more because
+she had always been allowed to receive it when the government prohibited
+it to everybody else. But we were Americans, she said; and had we ever
+seen this book? She held up the "The Potiphar Papers," a volume which
+must have been inexpressibly amused and bewildered to find itself there,
+in that curious little old lady's hand.
+
+Shall I go on and tell of the palace in which our strange friend Padre
+L------ dwelt, and the rooms of which he had filled up with the fruits
+of his passion for the arts and sciences; the anteroom he had frescoed
+to represent a grape-arbor with a multitude of clusters overhead; the
+parlor with his oil-paintings on the walls, and the piano and melodeon
+arranged so that Padre L------ could play upon them both at once; the
+oratory turned forge, and harboring the most alchemic-looking apparatus
+of all kinds; the other rooms in which he had stored his inventions
+in portable furniture, steam-propulsion, rifled cannon, and perpetual
+motion; the attic with the camera by which one could photograh one's
+self,--shall I tell of this, and yet other palaces? I think there is
+enough already; and I have begun to doubt somewhat the truth of my
+reminiscences, as I advise the reader to do.
+
+Besides, I feel that the words fail to give all the truth that is in
+them; and if I cannot make them serve my purpose as to the palaces,
+how should I hope to impart through them my sense of the glory and
+loveliness of Venetian art? I could not give the imagination and the
+power of Tintoretto as we felt it, nor the serene beauty, the gracious
+luxury of Titian, nor the opulence, the worldly magnificence of Paolo
+Veronese. There hang their mighty works forever, high above the reach
+of any palaverer; they smile their stately welcome from the altars and
+palace-walls, upon whoever approaches them in the sincerity and love
+of beauty that produced them; and thither you must thus go if you would
+know them. Like fragments of dreams, like the fleeting
+
+
+     "Images of glimmering dawn,"
+
+I am from time to time aware, amid the work-day world, of some happiness
+from them, some face or form, some drift of a princely robe or ethereal
+drapery, some august shape of painted architecture, some un-namable
+delight of color; but to describe them more strictly and explicitly, how
+should I undertake?
+
+There was the exhaustion following every form of intense pleasure, in
+their contemplation, such a wear of vision and thought, that I could not
+call the life we led in looking at them an idle one, even if it had
+no result in after times; so I will not say that it was to severer
+occupation our minds turned more and more in our growing desire to
+return home. For my own part personally I felt keenly the fictitious and
+transitory character of official life. I knew that if I had become fit
+to serve the government by four years' residence in Venice, that was
+a good reason why the government, according to our admirable system,
+should dismiss me, and send some perfectly unqualified person to take my
+place; and in my heart also I knew that there was almost nothing for me
+to do where I was, and I dreaded the easily formed habit of receiving, a
+salary for no service performed. I reminded myself that, soon or late, I
+must go back to the old fashion of earning money, and that it had better
+be sooner than later. Therefore, though for some reasons it was the
+saddest and strangest thing in the world to do, I was on the whole
+rejoiced when a leave of absence came, and we prepared to quit Venice.
+
+Never had the city seemed so dream-like and unreal as in this light of
+farewell,--this tearful glimmer which our love and regret cast upon it.
+As in a maze, we haunted once more and for the last time the scenes
+we had known so long, and spent our final, phantasmal evening in the
+Piazza; looked, through the moonlight, our mute adieu to islands and
+lagoons, to church and tower; and then returned to our own palace, and
+stood long upon the balconies that overhung the Grand Canal. There the
+future became as incredible and improbable as the past; and if we had
+often felt the incongruity of our coming to live in such a place, now,
+with tenfold force, we felt the cruel absurdity of proposing to live
+anywhere else. We had become part of Venice; and how could such atoms of
+her fantastic personality ever mingle with the alien and unsympathetic
+world?
+
+The next morning the whole palace household bestirred itself to
+accompany us to the station: the landlord in his best hat and coat, our
+noble friend in phenomenal linen, Giulia and her little boy, Bettina
+shedding bitter tears over the baby, and Piero, sad but firm, bending
+over the oar and driving us swiftly forward. The first turn of the Canal
+shut the Palazzo Giustiniani from our lingering gaze, a few more curves
+and windings brought us to the station. The tickets were bought, the
+baggage was registered; the little oddly assorted company drew itself
+up in a line, and received with tears our husky adieux. I feared there
+might be a remote purpose in the hearts of the landlord and his retainer
+to embrace and kiss me, after the Italian manner, but if there was, by
+a final inspiration they spared me the ordeal. Piero turned away to
+his gondola; the two other men moved aside; Bettina gave one long,
+hungering, devouring hug to the baby; and as we hurried into the
+waiting-room, we saw her, as upon a stage, standing without the barrier,
+supported and sobbing in the arms of Giulia.
+
+It was well to be gone, but I cannot say we were glad to be going.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Venetian Life, by William  Dean Howells
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+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Venetian Life, by William Dean Howells
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Venetian Life, by William  Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Venetian Life
+
+Author: William  Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7083]
+This file was first posted on March 8, 2003
+Last Updated: August 22, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VENETIAN LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, David Widger and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      VENETIAN LIFE
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      <b> By William Dean Howells </b>
+    </h3>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0011}.jpg" alt="{0011}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0011}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In correcting this book for a second edition, I have sought to complete it
+      without altering its original plan: I have given a new chapter sketching
+      the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the present trade and
+      industry of Venice; I have amplified somewhat the chapter on the national
+      holidays, and have affixed an index to the chief historical persons,
+      incidents, and places mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Believing that such value as my book may have is in fidelity to what I
+      actually saw and knew of Venice, I have not attempted to follow
+      speculatively the grand and happy events of last summer in their effects
+      upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that in the traits at which I loved most to
+      look, the life of Venice is not so much changed as her fortunes; but at
+      any rate I am content to remain true to what was fact one year ago.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      W. D. H.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Cambridge, January 1, 1867.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_TOC"> CONTENTS. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_TOC" id="link2H_TOC">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DETAILED CONTENTS.
+    </h2>
+    <div class="middle">
+      I. Venice in Venice <br /> II. Arrival and first Days in Venice <br /> III.
+      The Winter in Venice <br /> IV. Comincia far Caldo <br /> V. Opera and
+      Theatres <br /> VI. Venetian Dinners and Diners <br /> VII. Housekeeping in
+      Venice <br /> VIII. The Balcony on the Grand Canal <br /> IX. A Day-Break
+      Ramble <br /> X. The Mouse <br /> XI. Churches and Pictures <br /> XII. Some
+      Islands of the Lagoons <br /> XIII. The Armenians <br /> XIV. The Ghetto and
+      the Jews of Venice <br /> XV. Some Memorable Places <br /> XVI. Commerce
+      <br /> XVII. Venetian Holidays <br /> XVIII. Christmas Holidays <br /> XIX.
+      Love-making and Marrying; Baptisms and Burials <br /> XX. Venetian Traits
+      and Characters <br /> XXI. Society <br /> XXII. Our Last Year in Venice
+      <br /> Index <br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VENICE IN VENICE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the
+      stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and the
+      byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief part
+      in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian theatre),
+      and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters. We could not help
+      seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the villain of the piece,
+      pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all tears and desperation, upon
+      the stage; and we were dismayed to behold the injured husband and his
+      abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the scenes. All the shabbiness of
+      the theatre was perfectly apparent to us; we saw the grossness of the
+      painting and the unreality of the properties. And yet I cannot say that
+      the play lost one whit of its charm for me, or that the working of the
+      machinery and its inevitable clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the
+      least. There was so much truth and beauty in the playing, that I did not
+      care for the sham of the ropes and gilding, and presently ceased to take
+      any note of them. The illusion which I had thought an essential in the
+      dramatic spectacle, turned out to be a condition of small importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at
+      another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE,
+      which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to
+      every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in
+      Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without
+      learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it
+      in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help seeing from my
+      point of observation the sham and cheapness with which Venice is usually
+      brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the same time, it has
+      never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise and regard, nor the
+      fascination of its excellent beauty, its peerless picturesqueness, its
+      sole and wondrous grandeur. It is true that the streets in Venice are
+      canals; and yet you can walk to any part of the city, and need not take
+      boat whenever you go out of doors, as I once fondly thought you must. But
+      after all, though I find dry land enough in it, I do not find the place
+      less unique, less a mystery, or less a charm. By day, the canals are still
+      the main thoroughfares; and if these avenues are not so full of light and
+      color as some would have us believe, they, at least, do not smell so
+      offensively as others pretend. And by night, they are still as dark and
+      silent as when the secret vengeance of the Republic plunged its victims
+      into the ungossiping depths of the Canalazzo!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did the vengeance of the Republic ever do any such thing?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to question that reputation for
+      vindictive and gloomy cruelty alien historians have given to a government
+      which endured so many centuries in the willing obedience of its subjects;
+      but to think that the careful student of the old Republican system will
+      condemn it for faults far different from those for which it is chiefly
+      blamed. At all events, I find it hard to understand why, if the Republic
+      was an oligarchy utterly selfish and despotic, it has left to all classes
+      of Venetians so much regret and sorrow for its fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will
+      hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams&mdash;the
+      Venice of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his
+      prejudices&mdash;the merciless Venice of Darù, and of the historians who
+      follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he
+      sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion
+      removed; and&mdash;to take leave of our theatrical metaphor&mdash;I
+      promise to fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to
+      them may go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer
+      no annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often
+      get from travelers&rsquo; beds into their books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors
+      concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves hereafter,
+      but which no doubt form a large part of every one&rsquo;s associations with the
+      name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that pathetic swindle, the
+      Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will hear it mentioned
+      without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the taciturn justice of
+      the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the Serenest Republic&rsquo;s
+      policy. When I entered it the first time I was at the pains to call about
+      me the sad company of those who had passed its corridors from imprisonment
+      to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent tourists have done the same. I
+      was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward that I had, on this occasion, been
+      in very low society, and that the melancholy assemblage which I then
+      conjured up was composed entirely of honest rogues, who might indeed have
+      given as graceful and ingenious excuses for being in misfortune as the
+      galley-slaves rescued by Don Quixote,&mdash;who might even have been very
+      picturesque,&mdash;but who were not at all the material with which a
+      well-regulated imagination would deal. The Bridge of Sighs was not built
+      till the end of the sixteenth century, and no romantic episode of
+      political imprisonment and punishment (except that of Antonio Foscarini)
+      occurs in Venetian history later than that period. But the Bridge of Sighs
+      could have nowise a savor of sentiment from any such episode, being, as it
+      was, merely a means of communication between the Criminal Courts sitting
+      in the Ducal Palace, and the Criminal Prison across the little canal.
+      Housebreakers, cut-purse knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a
+      poetic interest to places which have known them; and yet these are the
+      only sufferers on whose Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has
+      looked with pathetic sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The
+      name of the bridge was given by the people from that opulence of
+      compassion which enables the Italians to pity even rascality in
+      difficulties. [Footnote: The reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said
+      in a few words, much better than I have said in many, the same thing of
+      sentimental errors about Venice:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere
+      efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of daylight
+      must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth remembering, or
+      whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs, which
+      is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice
+      ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with breathless
+      interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address at one of his great
+      ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years
+      after Faliero&rsquo;s death.&rdquo;&mdash;<i>Stories of Venice</i>.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Political offenders were not confined in the &ldquo;prison on each hand&rdquo; of the
+      poet, but in the famous <i>pozzi</i> (literally, wells) or dungeons under
+      the Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been
+      uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for their
+      exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom some
+      foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to be
+      afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say now
+      that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with
+      prison-life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped. They
+      are not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants could
+      have suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden casing
+      of the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the state to
+      inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But on whose account had I to be interested in the <i>pozzi</i>? It was
+      difficult to learn, unless I took the word of sentimental hearsay. I began
+      with Marin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to languish in
+      these dungeons for a moment. He was imprisoned in the apartments of state,
+      and during one night only. His fellow-conspirators were hanged nearly as
+      fast as taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several other political prisoners
+      of sad and famous memory with scarcely better effect. To a man, they
+      struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and escaped
+      from the <i>pozzi</i> by every artifice of fact and figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their
+      story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history. But it was
+      not the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed their cruel
+      taking-off: they were strangled in the prison formerly existing at the top
+      of the palace, called the Torresella. [Footnote: Galliciolli, <i>Memorie
+      Venete</i>.] It is possible, however, that Jacopo Foscari may have been
+      confined in the <i>pozzi</i> at different times about the middle of the
+      fifteenth century. With his fate alone, then, can the horror of these
+      cells be satisfactorily associated by those who relish the dark romance of
+      Venetian annals; for it is not to be expected that the less tragic
+      fortunes of Carlo Zeno and Vittore Pisani, who may also have been
+      imprisoned in the <i>pozzi</i>, can move the true sentimentalizer.
+      Certainly, there has been anguish enough in the prisons of the Ducal
+      Palace, but we know little of it by name, and cannot confidently relate it
+      to any great historic presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Touching the Giant&rsquo;s Stairs in the court of the palace, the inexorable
+      dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin
+      Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground&mdash;at
+      the end of Lord Byron&rsquo;s tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of
+      the Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed
+      the traitor&rsquo;s death to the people from between the two red columns in the
+      southern gallery of the palace;&mdash;that façade was not built till
+      nearly a century later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose,&mdash;always judging by my own average experience,&mdash;that
+      besides these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up
+      scenes of brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the
+      brightest picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight,
+      romantic adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old
+      merry-making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this way,
+      the conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is become as gross
+      a fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of which I have but
+      spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social dullness and
+      sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the whole
+      world&rsquo;s civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the city, doomed
+      four hundred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly (the Venetians
+      would be apt to tell you wholly) in the implacable anger, the inconsolable
+      discontent, with which the people regard their present political
+      condition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If there be more than one opinion among men elsewhere concerning the means
+      by which Austria acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she holds the
+      province, there would certainly seem to be no division on the question in
+      Venice. To the stranger first inquiring into public feeling, there is
+      something almost sublime in the unanimity with which the Venetians appear
+      to believe that these means were iniquitous, and that this tenure is
+      abominable; and though shrewder study and carefuler observation will
+      develop some interested attachment to the present government, and some
+      interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge will discover, in the
+      hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness, and selfish ignorance to
+      take off its sublimity, the hatred is still found marvelously unanimous
+      and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no disposition to discuss the
+      question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising at Venice official functions
+      by permission and trust of the Austrian government, I cannot regard the
+      cessation of those functions as release from obligations both to that
+      government and my own, which render it improper for me, so long as the
+      Austrians remain in Venice, to criticize their rule, or contribute, by
+      comment on existing things, to embitter the feeling against them
+      elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, speak dispassionately of facts of the
+      abnormal social and political state of the place; and I can certainly do
+      this, for the present situation is so disagreeable in many ways to the
+      stranger forced to live there,&mdash;the inappeasable hatred of the
+      Austrians by the Italians is so illiberal in application to those in any
+      wise consorting with them, and so stupid and puerile in many respects,
+      that I think the annoyance which it gives the foreigner might well damp
+      any passion with which he was disposed to speak of its cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity from the defeat of
+      patriotic hopes of union with Italy in 1859, when Napoleon found the
+      Adriatic at Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was concluded. But it
+      is not to be supposed that a feeling so general, and so thoroughly
+      interwoven with Venetian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to the
+      Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the subjection into which she fell
+      a second time after Napoleon&rsquo;s ruin, by the treaties of the Holy Alliance,
+      defeated in several attempts to throw off her yoke, and loaded with
+      heavier servitude after the fall of the short-lived Republic of 1849,&mdash;Venice
+      has always hated her masters with an exasperation deepened by each remove
+      from the hope of independence, and she now detests them with a rancor
+      which no concession short of absolute relinquishment of dominion would
+      appease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead, therefore, of finding that public gayety and private hospitality
+      in Venice for which the city was once famous, the stranger finds himself
+      planted between two hostile camps, with merely the choice of sides open to
+      him. Neutrality is solitude and friendship with neither party; society is
+      exclusive association with the Austrians or with the Italians. The latter
+      do not spare one of their own number if he consorts with their masters,
+      and though a foreigner might expect greater allowance, it is seldom shown
+      to him. To be seen in the company of officers is enmity to Venetian
+      freedom, and in the case of Italians it is treason to country and to race.
+      Of course, in a city where there is a large garrison and a great many
+      officers who have nothing else to do, there is inevitably some
+      international love-making, although the Austrian officers are rigidly
+      excluded from association with the citizens. But the Italian who marries
+      an Austrian severs the dearest ties that bind her to life, and remains an
+      exile in the heart of her country. Her friends mercilessly cast her off,
+      as they cast off every body who associates with the dominant race. In rare
+      cases I have known Italians to receive foreigners who had Austrian
+      friends, but this with the explicit understanding that there was to be no
+      sign of recognition if they met them in the company of these detested
+      acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are all degrees of intensity in Venetian hatred, and after hearing
+      certain persons pour out the gall of bitterness upon the Austrians, you
+      may chance to hear these persons spoken of as tepid in their patriotism by
+      yet more fiery haters. Yet it must not be supposed that the Italians hate
+      the Austrians as individuals. On the contrary, they have rather a liking
+      for them&mdash;rather a contemptuous liking, for they think them somewhat
+      slow and dull-witted&mdash;and individually the Austrians are amiable
+      people, and try not to give offence. The government is also very strict in
+      its control of the military. I have never seen the slightest affront
+      offered by a soldier to a citizen; and there is evidently no personal
+      ill-will engendered. The Austrians are simply hated as the means by which
+      an alien and despotic government is imposed upon a people believing
+      themselves born for freedom and independence. This hatred, then, is a
+      feeling purely political, and there is political machinery by which it is
+      kept in a state of perpetual tension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Comitato Veneto is a body of Venetians residing within the province
+      and abroad, who have charge of the Italian interests, and who work in
+      every way to promote union with the dominions of Victor Emanuel. They live
+      for the most part in Venice, where they have a secret press for the
+      publication of their addresses and proclamations, and where they remain
+      unknown to the police, upon whose spies they maintain an espionage. On
+      every occasion of interest, the Committee is sure to make its presence
+      felt; and from time to time persons find themselves in the possession of
+      its printed circulars, stamped with the Committee&rsquo;s seal; but no one knows
+      how or whence they came. Constant arrests of suspected persons are made,
+      but no member of the Committee has yet been identified; and it is said
+      that the mysterious body has its agents in every department of the
+      government, who keep it informed of inimical action. The functions of the
+      Committee are multiplied and various. It takes care that on all patriotic
+      anniversaries (such as that of the establishment of the Republic in 1848,
+      and that of the union of the Italian States under Victor Emanuel in 1860)
+      salutes shall be fired in Venice, and a proper number of red, white, and
+      green lights displayed. It inscribes revolutionary sentiments on the
+      walls; and all attempts on the part of the Austrians to revive popular
+      festivities are frustrated by the Committee, which causes petards to be
+      exploded in the Place of St. Mark, and on the different promenades. Even
+      the churches are not exempt from these demonstrations: I was present at
+      the Te Deum performed on the Emperor&rsquo;s birthday, in St. Mark&rsquo;s, when the
+      moment of elevating the host was signalized by the bursting of a petard in
+      the centre of the cathedral. All this, which seems of questionable
+      utility, and worse than questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of
+      the Italianissimi, and though possibly the strictness of the patriotic
+      discipline in which the members of the Committee keep their
+      fellow-citizens may gall some of them, yet any public demonstration of
+      content, such as going to the opera, or to the Piazza while the Austrian
+      band plays, is promptly discontinued at a warning from the Committee. It
+      is, of course, the Committee&rsquo;s business to keep the world informed of
+      public feeling in Venice, and of each new act of Austrian severity. Its
+      members are inflexible men, whose ability has been as frequently
+      manifested as their patriotism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians are now, therefore, a nation in mourning, and have, as I
+      said, disused all their former pleasures and merry-makings. Every class,
+      except a small part of the resident <i>titled</i> nobility (a great part
+      of the nobility is in either forced or voluntary exile), seems to be
+      comprehended by this feeling of despondency and suspense. The poor of the
+      city formerly found their respite and diversion in the numerous holidays
+      which fell in different parts of the year, and which, though religious in
+      their general character, were still inseparably bound up in their origin
+      with ideas of patriotism and national glory. Such of these holidays as
+      related to the victories and pride of the Republic naturally ended with
+      her fall. Many others, however, survived this event in all their splendor,
+      but there is not one celebrated now as in other days. It is true that the
+      churches still parade their pomps in the Piazza on the day of Corpus
+      Christi; it is true that the bridges of boats are still built across the
+      Canalazzo to the church of Our Lady of Salvation, and across the Canal of
+      the Giudecca to the temple of the Redeemer, on the respective festivals of
+      these churches; but the concourse is always meagre, and the mirth is
+      forced and ghastly. The Italianissimi have so far imbued the people with
+      their own ideas and feelings, that the recurrence of the famous holidays
+      now merely awakens them to lamentations over the past and vague longings
+      for the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the carnival, which once lasted six months of the year, charming
+      hither all the idlers of the world by its peculiar splendor and variety of
+      pleasure, it does not, as I said, any longer exist. It is dead, and its
+      shabby, wretched ghost is a party of beggars, hideously dressed out with
+      masks and horns and women&rsquo;s habits, who go from shop to shop droning forth
+      a stupid song, and levying tribute upon the shopkeepers. The crowd through
+      which these melancholy jesters pass, regards them with a pensive scorn,
+      and goes about its business untempted by the delights of carnival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All other social amusements have shared in greater or less degree the fate
+      of the carnival. At some houses conversazioni are still held, and it is
+      impossible that balls and parties should not now and then be given. But
+      the greater number of the nobles and the richer of the professional
+      classes lead for the most part a life of listless seclusion, and attempts
+      to lighten the general gloom and heaviness in any way are not looked upon
+      with favor. By no sort of chance are Austrians, or Austriacanti ever
+      invited to participate in the pleasures of Venetian society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the social life of Italy, and especially of Venice, was in great part
+      to be once enjoyed at the theatres, at the caffè, and at the other places
+      of public resort, so is its absence now to be chiefly noted in those
+      places. No lady of perfect standing among her people goes to the opera,
+      and the men never go in the boxes, but if they frequent the theatre at
+      all, they take places in the pit, in order that the house may wear as
+      empty and dispirited a look as possible. Occasionally a bomb is exploded
+      in the theatre, as a note of reminder, and as means of keeping away such
+      of the nobles as are not enemies of the government. As it is less easy for
+      the Austrians to participate in the diversion of comedy, it is a less
+      offence to attend the comedy, though even this is not good
+      Italianissimism. In regard to the caffè there is a perfectly understood
+      system by which the Austrians go to one, and the Italians to another; and
+      Florian&rsquo;s, in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground in the city
+      on which the hostile forces consent to meet. This is because it is
+      thronged with foreigners of all nations, and to go there is not thought a
+      demonstration of any kind. But the other caffè in the Piazza do not enjoy
+      Florian&rsquo;s cosmopolitan immunity, and nothing would create more wonder in
+      Venice than to see an Austrian officer at the Specchi, unless, indeed, it
+      were the presence of a good Italian at the Quadri.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is in the Piazza that the tacit demonstration of hatred and discontent
+      chiefly takes place. Here, thrice a week, in winter and summer, the
+      military band plays that exquisite music for which the Austrians are
+      famous. The selections are usually from Italian operas, and the attraction
+      is the hardest of all others for the music-loving Italian to resist. But
+      he does resist it. There are some noble ladies who have not entered the
+      Piazza while the band was playing there, since the fall of the Republic of
+      1849; and none of good standing for patriotism has attended the concerts
+      since the treaty of Villafranca in &lsquo;59. Until very lately, the promenaders
+      in the Piazza were exclusively foreigners, or else the families of such
+      government officials as were obliged to show themselves there. Last
+      summer, however, before the Franco-Italian convention for the evacuation
+      of Rome revived the drooping hopes of the Venetians, they had begun
+      visibly to falter in their long endurance. But this was, after all, only a
+      slight and transient weakness. As a general thing, now, they pass from the
+      Piazza when the music begins, and walk upon the long quay at the sea-side
+      of the Ducal Palace; or if they remain in the Piazza they pace up and down
+      under the arcades on either side; for Venetian patriotism makes a delicate
+      distinction between listening to the Austrian band in the Piazza and
+      hearing it under the Procuratie, forbidding the first and permitting the
+      last. As soon as the music ceases the Austrians disappear, and the
+      Italians return to the Piazza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But since the catalogue of demonstrations cannot be made full, it need not
+      be made any longer. The political feeling in Venice affects her prosperity
+      in a far greater degree than may appear to those who do not understand how
+      large an income the city formerly derived from making merry. The poor have
+      to lament not merely the loss of their holidays, but also of the fat
+      employments and bountiful largess which these occasions threw into their
+      hands. With the exile or the seclusion of the richer families, and the
+      reluctance of foreigners to make a residence of the gloomy and dejected
+      city, the trade of the shopkeepers has fallen off; the larger commerce of
+      the place has also languished and dwindled year by year; while the cost of
+      living has constantly increased, and heavier burdens of taxation have been
+      laid upon the impoverished and despondent people. And in all this, Venice
+      is but a type of the whole province of Venetia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely worth noting. The
+      Austrians have a <i>casino</i>, and they give balls and parties, and now
+      and then make some public manifestation of gayety. But they detest Venice
+      as a place of residence, being naturally averse to living in the midst of
+      a people who shun them like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are
+      obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, and it is amusing
+      enough to find the few English residents divided into Austriacanti and
+      Italianissimi. [Footnote: Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics,
+      though not of Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union with
+      Italy at any cost.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in every way bound to
+      neutrality and indifference, are popularly reputed to be of one party or
+      the other, and my predecessor, whose unhappy knowledge of German threw him
+      on his arrival among people of that race, was always regarded as the enemy
+      of Venetian freedom, though I believe his principles were of the most
+      vivid republican tint in the United States.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The present situation has now endured five years, with only slight
+      modifications by time, and only faint murmurs from some of the more
+      impatient, that <i>bisogna, una volta o l&rsquo;altra, romper il chiodo</i>,
+      (sooner or later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are a people
+      of indomitable perseverance, long schooled to obstinacy by oppression, I
+      suppose they will hold out till their union with the kingdom of Italy.
+      They can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content to wait forever
+      in their present gloom. How deeply their attitude affects their national
+      character I shall inquire hereafter, when I come to look somewhat more
+      closely at the spirit of their demonstration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the present, it is certain that the discontent of the people has its
+      peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a
+      glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving
+      it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing
+      that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be
+      faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday and
+      to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five o&rsquo;clock,
+      and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer weather. Yet I
+      was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the large, many-seated
+      boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for myself and my luggage.
+      The porter who seized my valise in the station, inferred from some very
+      polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of my wish, and ran out and threw
+      that slender piece of luggage into a gondola. I followed, lighted to my
+      seat by a beggar in picturesque and desultory costume. He was one of a
+      class of mendicants whom I came, for my sins, to know better in Venice,
+      and whom I dare say every traveler recollects,&mdash;the merciless tribe
+      who hold your gondola to shore, and affect to do you a service and not a
+      displeasure, and pretend not to be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call
+      them <i>gransieri</i>, or crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the
+      name or the purpose of this <i>poverino</i> [Footnote: <i>Poverino</i> is
+      the compassionate generic for all unhappy persons who work for a living in
+      Venice, as well as many who decline to do so.] at the station, but merely
+      saw that he had the Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and
+      arrangement of his fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous
+      effects of red, and he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend
+      of brigands would like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab
+      me and sink my body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I
+      felt that he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly
+      know now whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and
+      left him empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings
+      which he had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard
+      nothing, for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my
+      nether-spirit, so to speak, was dulled and jaded by the long, cold,
+      railway journey from Vienna, while every surface-sense was taken and
+      tangled in the bewildering brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think
+      there can be nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite
+      surprise, as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches as he
+      issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon her peerless
+      strangeness. There is something in the blessed breath of Italy (how
+      quickly, coming south, you know it, and how bland it is, after the harsh,
+      transalpine air!) which prepares you for your nocturnal advent into the
+      place; and O you! whoever you are, that journey toward this enchanted city
+      for the first time, let me tell you how happy I count you! There lies
+      before you for your pleasure, the spectacle of such singular beauty as no
+      picture can ever show you nor book tell you,&mdash;beauty which you shall
+      feel perfectly but once, and regret forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze and bustle of
+      the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot that I
+      had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment very cold
+      and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that beautiful
+      silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars. Then on either
+      hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the dark waters,
+      holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which brought
+      balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief, and threw
+      long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that uncertain
+      glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so, unhaunted by
+      any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the forlorn beauty
+      of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper time to think all
+      the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them; but they passed
+      vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the sensations of
+      sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there, and the moral
+      and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty and surprise.
+      The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and unlooked-for events
+      gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and safely around sharp
+      corners of life. And all the while I knew that this was a progress through
+      narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles of palaces. But I did
+      not know then that this fine confusion of sense and spirit was the first
+      faint impression of the charm of life in Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had
+      warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the
+      lines of balconied palaces had never ended;&mdash;here and there at their
+      doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving uncertainly
+      about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the Grand Canal into
+      one of the smaller channels, and from comparative light into a darkness
+      only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner lamp. But always the
+      pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven with its trembling stars
+      above, and the dark water with its trembling stars below; but now
+      innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness, and ceaseless sudden turns
+      and windings. One could not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these
+      strait and solitary passages, which was part of the strange enjoyment of
+      the time, and which was referable to the novelty, the hush, the darkness,
+      and the piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers.
+      Was not this Venice, and is not Venice forever associated with bravoes and
+      unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise of mine might represent fabulous
+      wealth to the uncultivated imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could
+      understand the Facts of the Situation&mdash;(as we say in the journals)?
+      To move on was relief; to pause was regret for past transgressions mingled
+      with good resolutions for the future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of
+      all these emotions, when, slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola
+      suddenly rested at the foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door.
+      The gondoliers rang and rang again, while their passenger
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Divided the swift mind,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could
+      possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles and
+      service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest
+      swindling countenance of a hotel <i>portier</i>, he felt secure against
+      every thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and
+      conjecture at once faded from his thought, when the <i>portier</i>
+      suffered the gondoliers to make him pay a florin too much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that complex
+      spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most alluring
+      glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any fragment of
+      her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had been
+      penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had been
+      touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
+      presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
+      occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my arrival
+      need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I would not
+      wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and alien to the
+      place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the first. I believe it
+      was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the beautiful that I here
+      found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full of society and friendship,
+      speaking a language which, even in its unfamiliar forms, I could partly
+      understand, and at once making me citizen of that Venice from which I
+      shall never be exiled. It was not in the presence of the great and famous
+      monuments of art alone that I felt at home&mdash;indeed, I could as yet
+      understand their excellence and grandeur only very imperfectly&mdash;but
+      wherever I wandered through the quaint and marvelous city, I found the
+      good company of
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;The fair, the old;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and I
+      learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of
+      relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
+      locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or
+      destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest,
+      crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left me
+      cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible from
+      the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for my
+      blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to surrender
+      by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden brinks of
+      canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable churches of the
+      city were equally victorious, and continually took me prisoner. But all
+      places had something rare and worthy to be seen: if not loveliness of
+      sculpture or architecture, at least interesting squalor and picturesque
+      wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight in proper Objects of
+      Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that reeked with unwholesome
+      winter damps below, and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and
+      beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered casements above. Every court
+      had its carven well to show me, in the noisy keeping of the water-carriers
+      and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of the place. The remote and
+      noisome canals were pathetic with empty old palaces peopled by herds of
+      poor, that decorated the sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene
+      linen, and patched the lofty windows with obsolete hats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
+      the brilliancy of St. Mark&rsquo;s and the glittering streets of shops that
+      branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
+      courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little
+      oil-lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines of
+      the Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole means
+      of street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and
+      deepening the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches. I
+      remember distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft
+      night of late winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from
+      the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli
+      Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I
+      turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a
+      solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its
+      moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the
+      vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the
+      Piazzetta to the Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and
+      casting deep into the water under them a crimson glory that sank also down
+      and down in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty and
+      delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and palace;
+      the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the gondola drifted away to
+      the northward; the islands of the lagoons seemed to rise and sink with the
+      light palpitations of the waves like pictures on the undulating fields of
+      banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black against the sky, the
+      Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore had composed itself to
+      sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music of the surge that gently
+      beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of the trees above me stirred
+      themselves together, and out of one of those trembling towers in the
+      lagoons, one rich, full sob burst from the heart of a bell, too deeply
+      stricken with the glory of the scene, and suffused the languid night with
+      the murmur of luxurious, ineffable sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful, and
+      whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how low
+      its origin or humble its composition; and the magnificence of that
+      moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I won from the fine spectacle
+      of an old man whom I saw burning coffee one night in the little court
+      behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as one of the most
+      interesting people I saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the air
+      of that neighbourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant berry, and
+      all day long this patient old man&mdash;sage, let me call him&mdash;had
+      turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over an open fire
+      after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. Now that the
+      night had fallen, and the stars shone down upon him, and the red of the
+      flame luridly illumined him, he showed more grand and venerable than ever.
+      Simple, abstract humanity, has its own grandeur in Italy; and it is not
+      hard here for the artist to find the primitive types with which genius
+      loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had the beard of a saint, and
+      the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the squalor of a beggar,
+      superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious grandeur of humanity. A
+      vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to do with burning coffee,
+      dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had been some dread
+      supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and doing men, instead
+      of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly and weirdly
+      impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and lifted the
+      cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after it, and he
+      shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and glorified him&mdash;then
+      I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond art, and turned sadly from
+      the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless magnificence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the
+      aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked
+      Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and
+      whom I often noted from the windows of the little caffè there, where you
+      get an excellent <i>caffè bianco</i> (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and
+      one to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly
+      with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of the
+      sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than olive;
+      and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of lustrous
+      black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket and
+      pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity of his
+      spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes. Habitually came a
+      barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Took the soul
+    Of that waste place with joy;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw his
+      whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved
+      ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus
+      embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of figures, in which there
+      was something grotesquely rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric
+      magnificence, spiritualized into a grace of movement superior to the
+      energy of the North and the extravagant fervor of the East. It was coffee
+      and not wine that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw reflected
+      in this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of dancing in
+      that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that combated and
+      vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea-washed sands in marble
+      structures of airy and stately splendor, and gave to architecture new
+      glories full of eternal surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with Venice, and
+      being newly from a land where every thing, morally and materially, was in
+      good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the pleasant
+      discomfort and hopelessness of every thing about me here. It was not yet
+      the season to behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door life of the
+      place; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that great part of the
+      people, both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do, and that nobody
+      seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse. When, however, I
+      ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a spectator of this idleness, and
+      learned that I too must assume my share of the common indolence, I found
+      it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old habits of hope, made my
+      endless leisure irksome to me, and almost intolerable when I ascertained
+      fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill long-cherished, but, after
+      all, merely general designs of literary study, I had forsaken wholesome
+      struggle in the currents where I felt the motion of the age, only to drift
+      into a lifeless eddy of the world, remote from incentive and sensation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For such is Venice, and the will must be strong and the faith indomitable
+      in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her stagnant quiet, a
+      practical belief in God&rsquo;s purpose of a great moving, anxious, toiling,
+      aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as after a while I yielded,
+      to these influences, a gentle incredulity possesses you, and if you
+      consent that such a thing is as earnest and useful life, you cannot help
+      wondering why it need be. The charm of the place sweetens your temper, but
+      corrupts you; and I found it a sad condition of my perception of the
+      beauty of Venice and friendship with it, that I came in some unconscious
+      way to regard her fate as my own; and when I began to write the sketches
+      which go to form this book, it was as hard to speak of any ugliness in
+      her, or of the doom written against her in the hieroglyphic seams and
+      fissures of her crumbling masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine.
+      I do not so greatly blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so
+      many sins of omission concerning her, and made her all light, color,
+      canals, and palaces. One&rsquo;s conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant
+      elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is more
+      virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the city,
+      and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there might
+      have been some incentive to keep one&rsquo;s thoughts and words from lapsing
+      into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the whole
+      hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But now,
+      what matter?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE WINTER IN VENICE
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my experiences
+      of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was, indeed, an every-day
+      roughness and discomfort in the weather, which travelers passing their
+      first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile with the habitual ideas of
+      the season&rsquo;s clemency in the South. But winter is apt to be very severe in
+      mild climates. People do not acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense
+      that it is summer only a little out of humor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much
+      favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure a
+      degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the
+      winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd
+      prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer equally
+      with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the cold,
+      objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the effort
+      to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It is not a
+      pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the affliction among
+      people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh you out sugar, by no
+      means reconciles the Northern stomach to its prevalence. I have observed
+      that priests, and those who have much to do in the frigid churches, are
+      the worst sufferers in this way; and I think no one can help noting in the
+      harsh, raw winter-complexion (for in summer the tone is quite different)
+      of the women of all classes, the protest of systems cruelly starved of the
+      warmth which health demands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight
+      months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in summer,
+      and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very large, lofty,
+      and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of apartments&mdash;the
+      smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the winter, and the
+      grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for defence against the
+      insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most part, people must occupy
+      the same room summer and winter, the sole change being in the strip of
+      carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during the latter season. In the
+      comparatively few houses where carpets are the rule and not the exception,
+      they are always removed during the summer&mdash;for the triple purpose of
+      sparing them some months&rsquo; wear, banishing fleas and other domestic
+      insects, and showing off the beauty of the oiled and shining pavement,
+      which in the meanest houses is tasteful, and in many of the better sort is
+      often in-wrought with figures and designs of mosaic work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the floors in Venice are of stone, and whether of marble flags, or of
+      that species of composition formed of dark cement, with fragments of
+      colored marble imbedded and smoothed and polished to the most glassy and
+      even surface, and the general effect and complexion of petrified
+      plum-pudding, all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with
+      their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded
+      gowns. When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too
+      heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian
+      sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the only
+      legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous prices to
+      such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the utmost
+      rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as possible in
+      the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm afternoon sun in
+      its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders of every class,
+      condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines in the Piazza,
+      shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men crowd the close
+      little caffè, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration, and animal heat,
+      and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and beguile the time with
+      solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself, throughout this book, the use
+      of the expressive American words <i>loaf</i> and <i>loafer</i>, as the
+      only terms adequate to the description of professional idling in Venice]
+      and the perusal of dingy little journals, drinking small cups of black
+      coffee, and playing long games of chess,&mdash;an evening that seemed to
+      me as torpid and lifeless as a Lap&rsquo;s, and intolerable when I remembered
+      the bright, social winter evenings of another and happier land and
+      civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes you find a heated stove&mdash;that is to say, one in which there
+      has been a fire during the day&mdash;in a Venetian house; but the stove
+      seems usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged
+      only in diffusing a very acrid smoke,&mdash;as if the Venetian preferred
+      to take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove itself
+      is a curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and plastering,&mdash;whitewashed
+      and painted outside. It is a great consumer of fuel, and radiates but
+      little heat. By dint of constant wooding I contrived to warm mine; but my
+      Italian friends always avoided its vicinity when they came to see me, and
+      most amusingly regarded my determination to be comfortable as part of the
+      eccentricity inseparable from the Anglo-Saxon character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in his
+      northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his
+      severity is the <i>scaldino</i>, and this is made chiefly by the yielding
+      sex, who are denied the warmth of the caffè. The use of the scaldino is
+      known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are most
+      addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware, having
+      an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and the pot
+      full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana&rsquo;s defense against cold is
+      complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room to
+      room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been my
+      fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting over
+      the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while she
+      sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with religion,
+      baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino. In one of the
+      public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the walls, intended
+      to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea of the four seasons.
+      There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization of Spring, Summer, and
+      Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by a fine lady dressed in
+      furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned foot-stool, and a scaldino in
+      her lap! When we talk of being invaded in the north, we poetize the idea
+      of defense by the figure of defending our hearthstones. Alas! <i>could</i>
+      we fight for our sacred <i>scaldini</i>?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell hot pumpkins and pears, for
+      they can unite pleasure and profit. There are some degrees of poverty
+      below the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars and the wretcheder
+      poor keep themselves warm, I think, by sultry recollections of summer, as
+      Don Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remembrances, during one of
+      his periods of fast. One mendicant whom I know, and who always sits upon
+      the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe, as the season
+      advances, in heating the marble beneath him by firm and unswerving
+      adhesion, and establishes a reciprocity of warmth with it. I have no
+      reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a moment during the
+      whole winter; and indeed, it would be a vicious waste of comfort to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the winter, the whole city <i>sniffs</i>, and if the Pipchin theory of
+      the effect of sniffing upon the eternal interests of the soul be true, few
+      people go to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly wondered if Desdemona,
+      in <i>her</i> time, sniffed, and found little comfort in the reflection
+      that Shylock must have had a cold in his head. There is comparative warmth
+      in the broad squares before the churches, but the narrow streets are
+      bitter thorough-draughts, and fell influenza lies in wait for its prey in
+      all those picturesque, seducing little courts of which I have spoken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twilight and airy height one
+      finds so grateful in summer, that the sharpest malice of the winter is
+      felt; and having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, I deferred
+      the remaining seventy-five or eighty, together with the gallery of the
+      Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have mitigated the
+      severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination affected me, I
+      thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the temples of
+      Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge marbles, and
+      their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their frescoed roofs and
+      broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of Palladio&rsquo;s architecture
+      was especially grievous to the sense in cold weather; and I warn the
+      traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of Bellini to beware how he
+      trusts himself in winter to the gusty, arctic magnificence of the church
+      of the Redentore. But by all means the coldest church in the city is that
+      of the Jesuits, which those who have seen it will remember for its famous
+      marble drapery. This base, mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not
+      art) is effected by inlaying the white marble of columns and pulpits and
+      altars with a certain pattern of verd-antique. The workmanship is
+      marvelously skillful, and the material costly, but it only gives the
+      church the effect of being draped in damask linen; and even where the
+      marble is carven in vast and heavy folds over a pulpit to simulate a
+      curtain, or wrought in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent
+      a carpet, it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a coldness, a
+      harshness indescribably table-clothy. I think all this has tended to chill
+      the soul of the sacristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan
+      conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his temples quite incapable of
+      thawing. In this dreary sanctuary is one of Titian&rsquo;s great paintings, The
+      Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly disposed as
+      to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once) you turn
+      involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on his
+      gridiron amid all that frigidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much severer
+      than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less support in
+      fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to claim that such weather
+      as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen before. In fine,
+      the winter climate of north Italy is really very harsh, and though the
+      season is not so severe in Venice as in Milan, or even Florence, it is
+      still so sharp as to make foreigners regret the generous fires and
+      warmly-built houses of the north. There was snow but once during my first
+      Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none at all; but the third,
+      which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to considerable depth, and lay
+      unmelted for many weeks in the shade. The lagoons were frozen for miles in
+      every direction; and under our windows on the Grand Canal, great sheets of
+      ice went up and down with the rising and the falling tide for nearly a
+      whole month. The visible misery throughout the fireless city was great;
+      and it was a problem I never could solve, whether people in-doors were
+      greater sufferers from the cold than those who weathered the cruel winds
+      sweeping the squares and the canals, and whistling through the streets of
+      stone and brine. The boys had an unwonted season of sliding on the frozen
+      lagoons, though a good deal persecuted by the police, who must have looked
+      upon such a tremendous innovation as little better than revolution; and it
+      was said that there were card-parties on the ice; but the only creatures
+      which seemed really to enjoy the weather were the seagulls. These birds,
+      which flock into the city in vast numbers at the first approach of cold,
+      and, sailing up and down the canals between the palaces, bring to the
+      dwellers in the city a full sense of mid-ocean forlornness and desolation,
+      now rioted on the savage winds, with harsh cries, and danced upon the
+      waves of the bitter brine, with a clamorous joy that had something
+      eldritch and unearthly in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A place so much given to gossip as Venice did not fail to produce many
+      memorable incidents of the cold; but the most singular adventure was that
+      of the old man employed at the Armenian Convent to bring milk from the
+      island of San Lazzaro to the city. One night, shortly after the coldest
+      weather set in, he lost his oar as he was returning to the island. The
+      wind, which is particularly furious in that part of the lagoon, blew his
+      boat away into the night, and the good brothers at the convent naturally
+      gave up their milkman for lost. The winds and waters drifted him eight
+      miles from the city into the northern lagoon, and there lodged his boat in
+      the marshes, where it froze fast in the stiffening mud. The luckless
+      occupant had nothing to eat or drink in his boat, where he remained five
+      days and nights, exposed to the inclemency of cold many degrees below
+      friendship in severity. He made continual signs of distress, but no boat
+      came near enough to discover him. At last, when the whole marsh was frozen
+      solid, he was taken off by some fishermen, and carried to the convent,
+      where he remains in perfectly recovered health, and where no doubt he will
+      be preserved alive many years in an atmosphere which renders dying a San
+      Lazzaro a matter of no small difficulty. During the whole time of his
+      imprisonment, he sustained life against hunger and cold by smoking. I
+      suppose no one will be surprised to learn that he was rescued by the
+      fishermen through the miraculous interposition of the Madonna&mdash;as any
+      one might have seen by the votive picture hung up at her shrine on a
+      bridge of the Riva degli Schiavoni, wherein the Virgin was represented
+      breaking through the clouds in one corner of the sky, and unmistakably
+      directing the operations of the fishermen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is said that no such winter as that of 1863-4 has been known in Venice
+      since the famous <i>Anno del Ghiaccio</i> (Year of the Ice), which fell
+      about the beginning of the last century. This year is celebrated in the
+      local literature; the play which commemorates it always draws full houses
+      at the people&rsquo;s theatre, Malibran; and the often-copied picture, by a
+      painter of the time, representing Lustrissime and Lustrissimi in hoops and
+      bag-wigs on the ice, never fails to block up the street before the
+      shop-window in which it is exposed. The King of Denmark was then the guest
+      of the Republic, and as the unprecedented cold defeated all the plans
+      arranged for his diversion, the pleasure-loving government turned the cold
+      itself to account, and made the ice occasion of novel brilliancy in its
+      festivities. The duties on commerce between the city and the mainland were
+      suspended for as long time as the lagoon should remain frozen, and the ice
+      became a scene of the liveliest traffic, and was everywhere covered with
+      sledges, bringing the produce of the country to the capital, and carrying
+      away its stuffs in return. The Venetians of every class amused themselves
+      in visiting this free mart, and the gentler and more delicate sex pressed
+      eagerly forward to traverse with their feet a space hitherto passable only
+      in gondolas. [Footnote: <i>Origine delle Feste Veneziane</i>, di Giustina
+      Renier-Michiel] The lagoon remained frozen, and these pleasures lasted
+      eighteen days, a period of cold unequaled till last winter. A popular song
+      now declares that the present generation has known a winter quite as
+      marvelous as that of the Year of the Ice, and celebrates the wonder of
+      walking on the water:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Che bell&rsquo; affar!
+    Che patetico affar!
+    Che immenso affar!
+    Sora l&rsquo;acqua camminar!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But after all the disagreeable winter, which hardly commences before
+      Christmas, and which ends about the middle of March, is but a small part
+      of the glorious Venetian year; and even this ungracious season has a
+      loveliness, at times, which it can have nowhere but in Venice. What
+      summer-delight of other lands could match the beauty of the first Venetian
+      snow-fall which I saw? It had snowed overnight, and in the morning when I
+      woke it was still snowing. The flakes fell softly and vertically through
+      the motionless air, and all the senses were full of languor and repose. It
+      was rapture to lie still, and after a faint glimpse of the golden-winged
+      angel on the bell-tower of St. Mark&rsquo;s, to give indolent eye solely to the
+      contemplation of the roof opposite, where the snow lay half an inch deep
+      upon the brown tiles. The little scene&mdash;a few square yards of roof, a
+      chimney-pot, and a dormer-window&mdash;was all that the most covetous
+      spirit could demand; and I lazily lorded it over that domain of pleasure,
+      while the lingering mists of a dream of new-world events blent themselves
+      with the luxurious humor of the moment and the calm of the snow-fall, and
+      made my reverie one of the perfectest things in the world. When I was lost
+      the deepest in it, I was inexpressibly touched and gratified by the
+      appearance of a black cat at the dormer-window. In Venice, roofs
+      commanding pleasant exposures seem to be chiefly devoted to the
+      cultivation of this animal, and there are many cats in Venice. My black
+      cat looked wonderingly upon the snow for a moment, and then ran across the
+      roof. Nothing could have been better. Any creature less silent, or in
+      point of movement less soothing to the eye than a cat, would have been
+      torture of the spirit. As it was, this little piece of action contented me
+      so well, that I left every thing else out of my reverie, and could only
+      think how deliciously the cat harmonized with the snow-covered tiles, the
+      chimney-pot, and the dormer-window. I began to long for her reappearance,
+      but when she did come forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased to have the
+      slightest interest in the matter, and experienced only the disgust of
+      satiety. I had felt <i>ennui</i>&mdash;nothing remained but to get up and
+      change my relations with the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once
+      shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked <i>facchini</i>;
+      [Footnote: The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve
+      long seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters and
+      day-laborers.] and now in St. Mark&rsquo;s Place the music of innumerable
+      shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it
+      engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But
+      the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the descending
+      flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary kind of effort
+      in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only to renew the task.
+      The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow,
+      and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at
+      across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark&rsquo;s Church was
+      perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snow-fall
+      were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around a structure that
+      always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be any
+      thing but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the
+      beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and
+      ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder&mdash;or,
+      better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous
+      freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the façade,
+      and all that gracious harmony into which the temple rises, of marble
+      scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints,
+      was a hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the
+      drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble
+      like peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest
+      white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work, as
+      if exulting in its beauty&mdash;beauty which filled me with subtle,
+      selfish yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the
+      little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair to think that even
+      the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture
+      or poem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the granite
+      pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is, and the
+      winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so mild and gentle
+      he looked by the tender light of the storm. [Footnote: St. Theodore was
+      the first patron of Venice, but he was deposed and St. Mark adopted, when
+      the bones of the latter were brought from Alexandria. The Venetians seem
+      to have felt some compunctions for this desertion of an early friend, and
+      they have given St. Theodore a place on one of the granite pillars, while
+      the other is surmounted by the Lion, representing St. Mark. <i>Fra Marco e
+      Todaro</i>, is a Venetian proverb expressing the state of perplexity which
+      we indicate by the figure of an ass between two bundles of hay.] The
+      towers of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness;
+      the sailors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like
+      phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque
+      distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost
+      palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      COMINCIA FAR CALDO.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and from this beats her life
+      in every direction through an intricate system of streets and canals that
+      bring it back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest uneasiness
+      had attended the frequency with which I lost my way in the city at first,
+      there would always have been this comfort: that the place was very small
+      in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I must reach the Piazza
+      sooner or later. There is a crowd constantly tending to and from it, and
+      you have but to take this tide, and be drifted to St. Mark&rsquo;s&mdash;or to
+      the Rialto Bridge, whence it is directly accessible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the open spaces in the city, that before the Church of St. Mark
+      alone bears the name of Piazza, and the rest are called merely <i>campi</i>,
+      or fields. But if the company of the noblest architecture can give honor,
+      the Piazza San Marco merits its distinction, not in Venice only, but in
+      the whole world; for I fancy that no other place in the world is set in
+      such goodly bounds. Its westward length is terminated by the Imperial
+      Palace; its lateral borders are formed by lines of palace called the New
+      Procuratie on the right, and the Old Procuratie on the left; [Footnote: In
+      Republican days the palaces of the <i>Procuratori di San Marco</i>.] and
+      the Church of St. Mark fills up almost its whole width upon the east,
+      leaving space enough, however, for a glimpse of the Gothic perfection of
+      the Ducal Palace. The place then opens southward with the name of
+      Piazzetta, between the eastern façade of the Ducal Palace and the classic
+      front of the Libreria Vecchia, and expands and ends at last on the mole,
+      where stand the pillars of St. Mark and St. Theodore; and then this mole,
+      passing the southern façade of the Doge&rsquo;s Palace, stretches away to the
+      Public Gardens at the eastern extremity of the city, over half a score of
+      bridges, between lines of houses and shipping&mdash;stone and wooden walls&mdash;in
+      the long, crescent-shaped quay called Riva degli Schiavoni. Looking
+      northward up the Piazzetta from the Molo, the vision traverses the eastern
+      breadth of the Piazza, and rests upon the Clock Tower, gleaming with blue
+      and gold, on which the bronze Giants beat the hours; or it climbs the
+      great mass of the Campanile San Marco, standing apart from the church at
+      the corner of the New Procuratie, and rising four hundred feet toward the
+      sky&mdash;the sky where the Venetian might well place his heaven, as the
+      Moors bounded Paradise in the celestial expanse that roofed Granada.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My first lodging was but a step out of the Piazza, and this vicinity
+      brought me early into familiar acquaintance with its beauty. But I never,
+      during three years, passed through it in my daily walks, without feeling
+      as freshly as at first the greatness of this beauty. The church, which the
+      mighty bell-tower and the lofty height of the palace-lines make to look
+      low, is in nowise humbled by the contrast, but is like a queen enthroned
+      amid upright reverence. The religious sentiment is deeply appealed to, I
+      think, in the interior of St. Mark&rsquo;s; but if its interior is heaven&rsquo;s, its
+      exterior, like a good man&rsquo;s daily life, is earth&rsquo;s; and it is this winning
+      loveliness of earth that first attracts you to it, and when you emerge
+      from its portals, you enter upon spaces of such sunny length and breadth,
+      set round with such exquisite architecture, that it makes you glad to be
+      living in this world. Before you expands the great Piazza, peopled with
+      its various life; on your left, between the Pillars of the Piazzetta,
+      swims the blue lagoon, and overhead climb the arches, one above another,
+      in excesses of fantastic grace.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0084}.jpg" alt="{0084}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0084}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to have brought hither and made
+      part of his Piazza, that it might remain forever the city&rsquo;s supreme grace;
+      and so, though there are public gardens and several pleasant walks in the
+      city, the great resort in summer and winter, by day and by night, is the
+      Piazza San Marco. Its ground-level, under the Procuratie, is belted with a
+      glittering line of shops and caffè, the most tasteful and brilliant in the
+      world, and the arcades that pass round three of its sides are filled with
+      loungers and shoppers, even when there is music by the Austrian bands;
+      for, as we have seen, the purest patriot may then walk under the
+      Procuratie, without stain to the principles which would be hopelessly
+      blackened if he set foot in the Piazza. The absence of dust and noisy
+      hoofs and wheels tempts social life out of doors in Venice more than in
+      any other Italian city, though the tendency to this sort of expansion is
+      common throughout Italy. Beginning with the warm days of early May, and
+      continuing till the <i>villeggiatura</i> (the period spent at the country
+      seat) interrupts it late in September, all Venice goes by a single impulse
+      of <i>dolce far niente</i>, and sits gossiping at the doors of the
+      innumerable caffè on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the Piazza San Marco,
+      and in the different squares in every part of the city. But, of course,
+      the most brilliant scene of this kind is in St. Mark&rsquo;s Place, which has a
+      night-time glory indescribable, won from the light of uncounted lamps upon
+      its architectural groups. The superb Imperial Palace&mdash;the sculptured,
+      arcaded, and pillared Procuratie&mdash;the Byzantine magic and splendor of
+      the church&mdash;will it all be there when you come again to-morrow night?
+      The unfathomable heaven above seems part of the place, for I think it is
+      never so tenderly blue over any other spot of earth. And when the sky is
+      blurred with clouds, shall not the Piazza vanish with the azure?&mdash;People,
+      I say, come to drink coffee, and eat ices here in the summer evenings, and
+      then, what with the promenades in the arcades and in the Piazza, the
+      music, the sound of feet, and the hum of voices, unbroken by the ruder
+      uproar of cities where there are horses and wheels&mdash;the effect is
+      that of a large evening party, and in this aspect the Piazza, is like a
+      vast drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I liked well to see that strange life, which even the stout,
+      dead-in-earnest little Bohemian musicians, piping in the centre of the
+      Piazza, could not altogether substantialize, and which constantly took
+      immateriality from the loveliness of its environment. In the winter the
+      scene was the most purely Venetian, and in my first winter, when I had
+      abandoned all thought of churches till spring, I settled down to steady
+      habits of idleness and coffee, and contemplated the life of the Piazza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By all odds, the loungers at Florian&rsquo;s were the most interesting, because
+      they were the most various. People of all shades of politics met in the
+      dainty little saloons, though there were shades of division even there,
+      and they did not mingle. The Italians carefully assorted themselves in a
+      room furnished with green velvet, and the Austrians and the Austriacanti
+      frequented a red-velvet room. They were curious to look at, those
+      tranquil, indolent, Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon relish for
+      them. They seldom spoke together, and when they did speak, they burst from
+      silence into tumultuous controversy, and then lapsed again into perfect
+      silence. The elder among them sat with their hands carefully folded on the
+      heads of their sticks, gazing upon the ground, or else buried themselves
+      in the perusal of the French journals. The younger stood a good deal about
+      the doorways, and now and then passed a gentle, gentle jest with the
+      elegant waiters in black coats and white cravats, who hurried to and fro
+      with the orders, and called them out in strident tones to the accountant
+      at his little table; or sometimes these young idlers make a journey to the
+      room devoted to ladies and forbidden to smokers, looked long and
+      deliberately in upon its loveliness, and then returned to the bosom of
+      their taciturn companions. By chance I found them playing chess, but very
+      rarely. They were all well-dressed, handsome men, with beards carefully
+      cut, brilliant hats and boots, and conspicuously clean linen. I used to
+      wonder who they were, to what order of society they belonged, and whether
+      they, like my worthless self, had never any thing else but lounging at
+      Florian&rsquo;s to do; but I really know none of these things to this day. Some
+      men in Venice spend their noble, useful lives in this way, and it was the
+      proud reply of a Venetian father, when asked of what profession his son
+      was, &ldquo;<i>È in Piazza!</i>&rdquo; That was, he bore a cane, wore light gloves,
+      and stared from Florian&rsquo;s windows at the ladies who went by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the Caffè Quadri, immediately across the Piazza, there was a scene of
+      equal hopefulness. But there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and the
+      idling was carried on with a great noise of conversation in
+      Austrian-German. Heaven knows what it was all about, but I presume the
+      talk was upon topics of mutual improvement, calculated to advance the
+      interests of self-government and mankind. These officers were very comely,
+      intelligent-looking people with the most good-natured faces. They came and
+      went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel scabbards against
+      the tables, or rising and straddling off with their long swords kicking
+      against their legs. They are the most stylish soldiers in the world, and
+      one has no notion how ill they can dress when left to themselves, till one
+      sees them in civil clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the Imperial Palace is called),
+      under the Procuratie Vecchie, is the Caffè Specchi, frequented only by
+      young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those who go to Florian&rsquo;s.
+      Across from this caffè is that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to
+      chiefly by non-commissioned officers, and civilian officials of lower
+      grade. You know the latter, at a glance, by their beard, which in Venice
+      is an index to every man&rsquo;s politics: no Austriacante wears the imperial,
+      no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caffè Suttil, rather Austrian, and
+      frequented by Italian <i>codini</i>, or old fogies, in politics: gray old
+      fellows, who caress their sticks with more constant zeal than even the
+      elders at Florian&rsquo;s. Quite at the other end of the Procuratie Nuove is the
+      Caffè of the Greeks, a nation which I have commonly seen represented there
+      by two or three Albanians with an Albanian boy, who, being dressed exactly
+      like his father, curiously impressed me, as if he were the young of some
+      Oriental animal&mdash;say a boy-elephant or infant camel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hope that the reader adds to this sketch, even in the winter time,
+      occasional tourists under the Procuratie, at the caffè, and in the shops,
+      where the shop-keepers are devouring them with the keenness of an appetite
+      unsated by the hordes of summer visitors. I hope that the reader also
+      groups me fishermen, gondoliers, beggars, and loutish boys about the base
+      of St. Mark&rsquo;s, and at the feet of the three flag-staffs before the church;
+      that he passes me a slatternly woman and a frowzy girl or two through the
+      Piazza occasionally; and that he calls down the flocks of pigeons hovering
+      near. I fancy the latter half ashamed to show themselves, as being aware
+      that they are a great humbug, and unrightfully in the guide-books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, while I sit at Florian&rsquo;s, sharing and studying the universal
+      worthlessness about me, the brief winter passes, and the spring of the
+      south&mdash;so unlike the ardent season of the north, where it burns full
+      summer before the snows are dried upon the fields&mdash;descends upon the
+      city and the sea. But except in the little gardens of the palaces, and
+      where here and there a fig-tree lifts its head to peer over a lofty stone
+      wall, the spring finds no response of swelling bud and unfolding leaf, and
+      it is human nature alone which welcomes it. Perhaps it is for this reason
+      that the welcome is more visible in Venice than elsewhere, and that here,
+      where the effect of the season is narrowed and limited to men&rsquo;s hearts,
+      the joy it brings is all the keener and deeper. It is certain at least
+      that the rapture is more demonstrative. The city at all times voiceful,
+      seems to burst into song with the advent of these golden days and silver
+      nights. Bands of young men go singing through the moonlit streets, and the
+      Grand Canal reëchoes the music of the parties of young girls as they drift
+      along in the scarcely moving boats, and sing the glories of the lagoons
+      and the loves of fishermen and gondoliers. In the Public Gardens they walk
+      and sing; and wandering minstrels come forth before the caffè, and it is
+      hard to get beyond the tinkling of guitars and the scraping of fiddles. It
+      is as if the city had put off its winter humor with its winter dress; and
+      as Venice in winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the world, so
+      in spring it is the fullest of joy and light. There is a pleasant bustle
+      in the streets, a ceaseless clatter of feet over the stones of the
+      squares, and a constant movement of boats upon the canals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We say, in a cheap and careless way, that the southern peoples have no <i>homes</i>.
+      But this is true only in a restricted sense, for the Italian, and the
+      Venetian especially, makes the whole city his home in pleasant weather. No
+      one remains under a roof who can help it; and now, as I said before, the
+      fascinating out-door life begins. All day long the people sit and drink
+      coffee and eat ices and gossip together before the caffè, and the soft
+      midnight sees the same diligent idlers in their places. The promenade is
+      at all seasons the favorite Italian amusement; it has its rigidly fixed
+      hours, and its limits are also fixed: but now, in spring, even the
+      promenade is a little lawless, and the crowds upon the Riva sometimes walk
+      as far as the Public Gardens, and throng all the wider avenues and the
+      Piazza; while young Venice comes to take the sun at St. Mark&rsquo;s in the arms
+      of its high-breasted nurses,&mdash;mighty country-women, who, in their
+      bright costumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses of gold and
+      silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high, free-stepping
+      movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some elder race of
+      barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had passed away from our
+      puny, dull-clad times.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;<i>È la stagion che ognuno s&rsquo;innamora;</i>&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and now young girls steal to their balconies, and linger there for hours,
+      subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and looking up at
+      them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the Venetian
+      housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their heads and
+      gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers, filling
+      their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their work. Every
+      street down which you look is likewise vocal with gossip; and if the
+      picturesque projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys, of which the
+      vista is full, hide the heads of the gossipers, be sure there is a face
+      looking out of every window for all that, and the social, expansive
+      presence of the season is felt there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish the spring upon
+      themselves unsparingly. They come forth from their dark dens in crumbling
+      palaces and damp basements, and live in the sunlight and the welcome air.
+      They work, they eat, they sleep out of doors. Mothers of families sit
+      about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down with other
+      slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while their
+      raven-haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the covert
+      insects that haunt the tangles of the children&rsquo;s locks. Within doors
+      shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases talking for
+      an instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near the
+      Piazza, to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the busiest
+      street in Venice passes, from St. Mark&rsquo;s to the Rialto Bridge. It is one
+      of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the
+      spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March,
+      when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and
+      made company for me; but when the winter broke, and the windows were
+      opened, I found that I had too much society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.
+      Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the
+      burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary&rsquo;s shop,
+      a mercer&rsquo;s and draper&rsquo;s shop, a blacksmith&rsquo;s and shoemaker&rsquo;s shop, a caffè
+      more or less brilliant, a green-grocer&rsquo;s and fruiterer&rsquo;s, a family grocery&mdash;nay,
+      there is also a second-hand merchant&rsquo;s shop where you buy and sell every
+      kind of worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there is a
+      coppersmith&rsquo;s and a watchmaker&rsquo;s, and pretty certainly a wood-carver&rsquo;s and
+      gilder&rsquo;s, while without a barber&rsquo;s shop no campo could preserve its
+      integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day. In
+      addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolomeo
+      swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto market.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamor for the absence of
+      quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost
+      imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper of hair-pins,
+      is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils. Fishermen, with
+      baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays of housewife wares;
+      louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back and forth by long
+      cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who advertised cement
+      for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of toothache; jugglers
+      who spread their carpets and arranged their temples of magic upon the
+      ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets of the people who
+      brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the crowd;&mdash;these
+      were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and friendly air
+      woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolomeo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and I spent much time in
+      the study of the vociferous life under my windows, trying to make out the
+      meaning of the different cries, and to trace them back to their sources.
+      There was one which puzzled me for a long time&mdash;a sharp, pealing cry
+      that ended in a wail of angry despair, and, rising high above all other
+      sounds, impressed the spirit like the cry of that bird in the tropic
+      forests which the terrified Spaniards called the <i>alma perdida</i>.
+      After many days of listening and trembling, I found that it proceeded from
+      a wretched, sun-burnt girl, who carried about some dozens of knotty pears,
+      and whose hair hung disheveled round her eyes, bloodshot with the strain
+      of her incessant shrieks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In San Bartolomeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above
+      and shops below. The ground-floor is devoted to the small commerce of
+      various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied by
+      tradesmen&rsquo;s families; and on the third or fourth floor is the <i>appartamento
+      signorile</i>. From the balconies of these stories hung the cages of
+      innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots, which sang
+      and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the crowd. All the
+      human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the casements was
+      perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite was used as a
+      hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By all odds the most
+      interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant serving-girl, dressed
+      in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief, and a bright-colored
+      gown, and wearing long dangling ear-rings of yellowest gold. For hours
+      this idle maiden balanced herself half over the balcony-rail in perusal of
+      the people under her, and I suspect made love at that distance, and in
+      that constrained position, to some one in the crowd. On another balcony, a
+      lady sat and knitted with crimson yarn; and at the window of still another
+      house, a damsel now looked out upon the square, and now gave a glance into
+      the room, in the evident direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbors have
+      the amiable custom of studying one another&rsquo;s features through
+      opera-glasses; but I could not persuade myself to use this means of
+      learning the mirror&rsquo;s response to the damsel&rsquo;s constant &ldquo;Fair or not?&rdquo;
+       being a believer in every woman&rsquo;s right to look well a little way off. I
+      shunned whatever trifling temptation there was in the case, and turned
+      again to the campo beneath&mdash;to the placid dandies about the door of
+      the caffè; to the tide of passers from the Merceria; the smooth-shaven
+      Venetians of other days, and the bearded Venetians of these; the
+      dark-eyed, white-faced Venetian girls, hooped in cruel disproportion to
+      the narrow streets, but richly clad, and moving with southern grace; the
+      files of heavily burdened soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily
+      about with their swords at their sides, and in their spotless Austrian
+      uniforms.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0100}.jpg" alt="{0100}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0100}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat increases, the expansive
+      delight with which the city hails its coming passes into a tranquiler
+      humor, as if the joy of the beautiful season had sunk too deeply into the
+      city&rsquo;s heart for utterance. I, too, felt this longing for quiet, and as
+      San Bartolomeo continued untouched by it, and all day roared and thundered
+      under my windows, and all night long gave itself up to sleepless youths
+      who there melodiously bayed the moon in chorus, I was obliged to abandon
+      San Bartolomeo, and seek calmer quarters where I might enjoy the last
+      luxurious sensations of the spring-time in peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, with the city&rsquo;s lapse into this tranquiler humor, the promenades
+      cease. The facchino gives all his leisure to sleeping in the sun; and in
+      the mellow afternoons there is scarcely a space of six feet square on the
+      Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its brown-cloaked peasant,
+      basking face-downward in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are by
+      right the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in
+      their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated by
+      the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamors at
+      the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard of <i>valets
+      de place</i>. Even the play of the children ceases, except in the Public
+      Gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games, and sport as
+      noiselessly as the lizards that slide from shadow to shadow and glitter in
+      the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses you,&mdash;the
+      stranger in it,&mdash;not with sadness, not with melancholy, but with a
+      deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference to all
+      purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on men&rsquo;s
+      tongues, behold! that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise would
+      strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a wild and
+      frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her inmost
+      heart, and you learn her secrets&mdash;arcana unintelligible to you in the
+      new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win new
+      color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once charmed
+      away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your motion.
+      Now, at last, you know <i>why</i>
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;It was an Abyssinian maid&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu? It is the land in which you were
+      born!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail
+      faints into the white distance; the gondola slides athwart the sheeted
+      silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes
+      at his post.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      OPERA AND THEATRES.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the
+      existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The
+      Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private
+      persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were
+      intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor
+      Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly not
+      so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and tasteful
+      theatre. The best opera was formerly given in it, and now that it is
+      closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. The Italians seldom go to
+      it, and as there is not a sufficient number of foreign residents to
+      support it in good style, the opera commonly conforms to the character of
+      the theatre San Benedetto, in which it is given, and is second-rate. It is
+      nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of several thousand
+      florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this account, of
+      supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in the little
+      German cities. A box does not cost a great deal; but as the theatre is
+      carried on in Italy by two different managements,&mdash;one of which
+      receives the money for the boxes and seats, and the other the fee of
+      admission to the theatre,&mdash;there is always the demand of the latter
+      to be satisfied with nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before
+      you can reach your place. The pit is fitted up with seats, of course, but
+      you do not sit down there without paying. So, most Italians (who if they
+      go at all go without ladies) and the poorer sort of government officials
+      stand; the orchestra seats are reserved for the officers of the garrison.
+      The first row of boxes, which is on a level with the heads of people in
+      the pit, is well enough, but rank and fashion take a loftier flight, and
+      sit in the second tier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You look about in vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which
+      once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety,&mdash;the visits from box
+      to box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations.
+      The people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the beauty
+      is the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter being
+      the fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the opera,
+      some of the Venetian ladies yielded to it, but went plainly dressed, and
+      sat far back in boxes of the third tier, and when they issued forth after
+      the opera were veiled beyond recognition. The audience usually takes its
+      enjoyment quietly; hissing now and then for silence in the house, and
+      clapping hands for applause, without calling <i>bravo</i>,&mdash;an
+      Italian custom which I have noted to be chiefly habitual with foreigners:
+      with Germans, for instance; who spell it with a <i>p</i> and <i>f</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must seek it somewhere out of
+      Italy,&mdash;at London, or Paris, or New York,&mdash;though possibly it
+      might be chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in Naples. The
+      cause of the decay of the musical art in Venice must be looked for among
+      the events which seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing;
+      certainly it cannot be discerned in any indifference of the people to
+      music. The <i>dimostrazione</i> keeps the better class of citizens from
+      the opera, but the passion for it still exists in every order; and God&rsquo;s
+      gift of beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race by any Situation.
+      You hear the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as
+      our own colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has an
+      inborn sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the
+      cultivated tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that
+      theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now an
+      imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her stages,
+      and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so famous,
+      have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular in Venice
+      as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the care of the
+      state for the drama existed from the first. The government, which always
+      piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as the theatre
+      advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the Old or New
+      Testament, began about the close of the century to protect and encourage
+      the instruction of music in the different foundling hospitals and public
+      refuges in the city. The young girls in these institutions were taught to
+      play on instruments, and to sing,&mdash;at first for the alleviation of
+      their own dull and solitary life, and afterward for the delight of the
+      public. In the merry days that passed just before the fall of the
+      Republic, the Latin oratorios which they performed in the churches
+      attached to the hospitals were among the most fashionable diversions in
+      Venice. The singers were instructed by the best masters of the time; and
+      at the close of the last century, the conservatories of the Incurables,
+      the Foundlings, and the Mendicants were famous throughout Europe for their
+      dramatic concerts, and for those pupils who found the transition from
+      sacred to profane opera natural and easy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With increasing knowledge of the language, I learned to enjoy best the
+      unmusical theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It is
+      hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen excellent
+      acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian comedy, which
+      is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of Goldoni&mdash;compositions
+      deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where alone their admirable fidelity
+      of drawing and coloring can be perfectly appreciated. The best comedy is
+      usually given to the educated classes at the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a
+      bloodier and louder drama is offered to the populace at Teatro Malibran,
+      where on a Sunday night you may see the plebeian life of the city in one
+      of its most entertaining and characteristic phases. The sparings of the
+      whole week which have not been laid out for chances in the lottery, are
+      spent for this evening&rsquo;s amusement; and in the vast pit you see, besides
+      the families of comfortable artisans who can evidently afford it, a
+      multitude of the ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low rate of
+      eight or ten soldi [Footnote: The soldo is the hundredth part of the
+      Austrian florin, which is worth about forty-nine cents of American money.]
+      apiece, it is hard to account for. It is very peremptory, this audience,
+      in its likes and dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great vehemence.
+      It likes best the sanguinary local spectacular drama; it cheers and cheers
+      again every allusion to Venice; and when the curtain rises on some
+      well-known Venetian scene, it has out the scene-painter by name three
+      times&mdash;which is all the police permits. The auditors wear their hats
+      in the pit, but deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, and raise
+      stormy and wrathful cries of <i>cappello!</i> till these uncover. Between
+      acts, they indulge in excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go
+      to the extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are hawked about the
+      theatre, and sold for two soldi the stick,&mdash;with the tooth-pick on
+      which they are spitted thrown into the bargain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday night, but the one
+      entertainment which never fails of drawing and delighting full houses is
+      the theatre of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like best to
+      go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of
+      these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a
+      frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude
+      delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and
+      traditionary tricks of the stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street
+      opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and
+      simplest appointments. There are no boxes&mdash;the whole theatre is
+      scarcely larger than a stage-box&mdash;and you pay ten soldi to go into
+      the pit, where you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have
+      paid fifteen for places in the dress-circle above. The stage is very
+      small, and the scenery a kind of coarse miniature painting. But it is very
+      complete, and every thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and
+      to produce an illusion of magnitude in their figures. They are very
+      artlessly introduced, and are maneuvered, according to the exigencies of
+      the scene, by means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs to
+      the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all the
+      vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to mention
+      a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated and ambitious tone than
+      that of the Burattini, which exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse
+      assassinations in little punch-shows on the Riva, and in the larger
+      squares; but the standard characters are nearly the same with both, and
+      are all descended from the <i>commedia a braccio</i> [Footnote: Comedy by
+      the yard.] which flourished on the Italian stage before the time of
+      Goldoni. And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have
+      great and peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing
+      the most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the
+      Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have
+      such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only
+      remember to have made out one of their comedies,&mdash;a play in which an
+      ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested for
+      lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other was raging
+      in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic audiences; but
+      for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini appears to be a
+      sardonic farce, in which the chief character&mdash;a puppet ten inches
+      high, with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean good-nature
+      and wickedness&mdash;deludes other and weak-minded puppets into trusting
+      him, and then beats them with a club upon the back of the head until they
+      die. The murders of this infamous creature, which are always executed in a
+      spirit of jocose <i>sang-froid</i>, and accompanied by humorous remarks,
+      are received with the keenest relish by the spectators and, indeed, the
+      action is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit of the Italian
+      race seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they perform their
+      parts with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is wonderful. I
+      have witnessed death agonies on these little stages which the great
+      American tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could not surpass
+      in degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the greater credit
+      because they are agitated by the legs from below the scene, and not
+      managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette Theatre. Their
+      audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and comprise: first, boys
+      ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size; then weak little girls,
+      supporting immense weight of babies; then Austrian soldiers, with long
+      coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat sailors; a transient Greek or
+      Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced, statuesque, with the drapery of their
+      cloaks thrown over their shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick
+      black hair; old women, all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with
+      hooded cloaks of coarse brown; then boys&mdash;and boys. They all enjoy
+      the spectacle with approval, and take the drama <i>au grand sérieux</i>,
+      uttering none of the gibes which sometimes attend efforts to please in our
+      own country. Even when the hat, or other instrument of extortion, is
+      passed round, and they give nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of
+      fury and disappointment, calls out, &ldquo;Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to
+      you!&rdquo; and closes the theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse.
+      Though, indeed, <i>fioi de cani</i> means no great reproach in Venetian
+      parlance; and parents of the lower classes caressingly address their
+      children in these terms. Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak
+      upon him the deadliest insult which can be put into words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the <i>commedia a braccio</i>, before mentioned as the inheritance of
+      the Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline
+      of the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any
+      people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must have
+      been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till the
+      middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris he
+      furnished his Italian players with the <i>commedia a braccio</i>. I have
+      heard some very passable <i>gags</i> at the Marionette, but the real <i>commedia
+      a braccio</i> no longer exists, and its familiar and invariable characters
+      perform written plays.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of <i>dramatis personae</i>,
+      and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice. He is always,
+      like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always a merchant,
+      Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands. He is a
+      dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of black
+      knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black coat,
+      and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in all his
+      characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a glutton and
+      avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins the heart. To
+      tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he has no part and I
+      have learned to think a certain trick of his&mdash;lifting his leg rigidly
+      to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying, &ldquo;Capisse la?&rdquo; or &ldquo;Sa
+      la?&rdquo; (You understand? You know?)&mdash;one of the finest things in the
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In nearly all of Goldoni&rsquo;s Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote
+      in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa,&mdash;Arlecchino,
+      il Dottore. Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first
+      puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni&rsquo;s witty
+      management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete <i>commedia
+      a braccio</i>, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by
+      immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and
+      commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son,
+      figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The
+      second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the
+      University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a
+      sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and
+      foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley&mdash;a gibe at the
+      poverty of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity
+      and cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion in
+      Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are much
+      shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace,
+      however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce, as
+      you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes for
+      any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed to have
+      been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the Sleeping
+      King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna, with
+      Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated several
+      nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can fancy
+      people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying it with
+      the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward realizing to
+      yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will also suppose
+      great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own part, I find few
+      things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never tired of their
+      bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their irresistible touches
+      of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the relenting parent
+      (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while Arlecchino, as the
+      large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of the erring son when
+      the prodigal was about to be cast into the street, looked on and rubbed
+      his hands with amiable satisfaction and the conventional delight in
+      benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed the base terrors of
+      Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the keen spiritual agonies of
+      the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of Sebastopol. Not many
+      passages of real life have affected me as deeply as the atrocious behavior
+      of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when he responds to the
+      expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,&mdash;a puppet of shaky
+      and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she is
+      thy brother&rsquo;s wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the sacred name of
+      virtue.&rdquo; (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and gesticulations
+      toward the pit.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh, &ldquo;Honor?&mdash;I
+      know it not! Virtue?&mdash;I detest it!&rdquo; and attempting to pass the
+      knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his sister-in-law, he
+      yields to the natural infirmities of rags and pasteboard, and topples
+      against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous. You
+      discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and reading
+      his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets when they
+      cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly noises in
+      the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the dark corners of
+      the room, and to look under the bed. When at last the spectral head
+      appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a miserable cry under
+      the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically the scene is not
+      much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a spirit, a drollery
+      wholly irresistible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is
+      extremely funny. The <i>prima ballerina</i> has all the difficult grace
+      and far-fetched arts of the <i>prima ballerina</i> of flesh and blood; and
+      when the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is
+      humanly delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike <i>empressement</i>.
+      I have no doubt the <i>corps de ballet</i> have their private jealousies
+      and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all
+      positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and
+      legs. The puppets are great in <i>pirouette</i> and <i>pas seul</i>; but I
+      think the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall
+      of Carthage, is their strong point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The people who witness their performances are of all ages and conditions&mdash;I
+      remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some German countesses
+      in the pit&mdash;but the greater number of spectators are young men of the
+      middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and their wives and
+      children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place for lovers in
+      humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama going on between
+      the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of the Venetian populace
+      take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and Facanapa of the stage. I
+      one day discovered a letter at the bottom of the Canal of the Giudecca, to
+      which watery resting-place some recreant, addressed as &ldquo;Caro Antonio,&rdquo; had
+      consigned it; and from this letter I came to know certainly of at least
+      one love affair at the Marionette. &ldquo;Caro Antonio&rdquo; was humbly besought, &ldquo;if
+      his heart still felt the force of love,&rdquo; to meet the writer (who softly
+      reproached him with neglect) at the Marionette the night of date, at six
+      o&rsquo;clock; and I would not like to believe he could resist so tender a
+      prayer, though perhaps it fell out so. I fished up through the lucent
+      water this despairing little epistle,&mdash;it was full of womanly
+      sweetness and bad spelling,&mdash;and dried away its briny tears on the
+      blade of my oar. If ever I thought to keep it, with some vague purpose of
+      offering it to any particularly anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as
+      to the probable writer&mdash;its unaccountable loss spared me the delicate
+      office. Still, however, when I go to see the puppets, it is with an
+      interest divided between the drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence
+      of expectation somewhere among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who
+      wear such immense hoops under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at
+      one side, and call each other &ldquo;Ciò!&rdquo; Where art thou, O fickle and cruel,
+      yet ever dear Antonio? All unconscious, I think,&mdash;gallantly posed
+      against the wall, thy slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long
+      cigar, the arms of thy velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy
+      ear-rings softly twinkling in the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men on
+      the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the
+      restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to
+      conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while the
+      restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy, for every
+      bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the restaurants
+      are very dirty&mdash;if you wipe your plate and glass carefully before
+      using them, they need not stomach you; it is not because the rooms are
+      cold&mdash;if you sit near the great vase of smoldering embers in the
+      centre of each room you may suffocate in comparative comfort; it is not
+      because the prices are great&mdash;they are really very reasonable; it is
+      not for any very tangible fault that I object to life at the restaurants,
+      and yet I cannot think of its hopeless homelessness without rebellion
+      against the whole system it implies, as something unnatural and
+      insufferable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before we come to look closely at this aspect of Italian civilization,
+      it is better to look first at a very noticeable trait of Italian
+      character,&mdash;temperance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer
+      classes, one observes without great surprise how slenderly they fare, and
+      how with a great habit of talking of meat and drink, the verb <i>mangiare</i>
+      remains in fact for the most part inactive with them. But it is only just
+      to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be not wholly the result of
+      necessity, for it prevails with other classes which could well afford the
+      opposite vice. Meat and drink do not form the substance of conviviality
+      with Venetians, as with the Germans and the English, and in degree with
+      ourselves; and I have often noticed on the Mondays-at-the-Gardens, and
+      other social festivals of the people, how the crowd amused itself with any
+      thing&mdash;music, dancing, walking, talking&mdash;any thing but the great
+      northern pastime of gluttony. Knowing the life of the place, I make quite
+      sure that Venetian gayety is on few occasions connected with repletion;
+      and I am ashamed to confess that I have not always been able to repress a
+      feeling of stupid scorn for the empty stomachs everywhere, which do not
+      even ask to be filled, or, at least, do not insist upon it. The truth is,
+      the North has a gloomy pride in gastronomic excess, which unfits her
+      children to appreciate the cheerful prudence of the South.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. They breakfast on a
+      piece of bread with coffee and milk; supper is a little cup of black
+      coffee, or an ice, taken at a caffè. The coffee, however, is repeated
+      frequently throughout the day, and in the summertime fruit is eaten, but
+      eaten sparingly, like everything else. As to the nature of the dinner, it
+      of course varies somewhat according to the nature of the diner; but in
+      most families of the middle class a dinner at home consists of a piece of
+      boiled beef, a <i>minestra</i> (a soup thickened with vegetables, tripe,
+      and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the wine of the country. The
+      failings of the repast among all classes lean to the side of simplicity,
+      and the abstemious character of the Venetian finds sufficient comment in
+      his familiar invitation to dinner: &ldquo;<i>Venga a mangiar quattro risi con me</i>.&rdquo;
+       (Come eat four grains of rice with me.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But invitations to dinner have never formed a prime element of hospitality
+      in Venice. Goldoni notices this fact in his memoirs, and speaking of the
+      city in the early half of the last century, he says that the number and
+      excellence of the eating-houses in the city made invitations to dinner at
+      private houses rare, and superfluous among the courtesies offered to
+      strangers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place his house at your
+      disposition, and, having extended this splendid invitation, consider the
+      duties of hospitality fulfilled; he does not appear to think you want to
+      make use of his house for social purposes, preferring himself the caffè,
+      and finding home and comfort there, rather than under his own roof. &ldquo;What
+      caffè do you frequent? Ah! so do I. We shall meet often there.&rdquo; This is
+      frequently your new acquaintance&rsquo;s promise of friendship. And one may even
+      learn to like the social footing on which people meet at the caffè, as
+      well as that of the parlor or drawing-room. I could not help thinking one
+      evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some pleasant Paduans in one
+      of the magnificent saloons of the Caffè Pedrocchi, that I should like to
+      go there for society, if I could always find it there, much better than to
+      private houses. There is far greater ease and freedom, more elegance and
+      luxury, and not the slightest weight of obligation laid upon you for the
+      gratification your friend&rsquo;s company has given you. One has not to be a
+      debtor in the sum of a friend&rsquo;s outlay for house, servants, refreshments,
+      and the like. Nowhere in Europe is the senseless and wasteful American
+      custom of <i>treating</i> known; and nothing could be more especially
+      foreign to the frugal instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a
+      party of friends at a caffè eat or drink, each one pays for what he takes,
+      and pecuniarily, the enjoyment of the evening is uncostly or not,
+      according as each prefers. Of course no one sits down in such a place
+      without calling for something; but I have frequently seen people respond
+      to this demand of custom by ordering a glass of water with anise, at the
+      expense of two soldi. A cup of black coffee, for five soldi, secures a
+      chair, a table, and as many journals as you like, for as long time as you
+      like.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I say, a stranger may learn to like the life of the caffè,&mdash;that of
+      the restaurant never; though the habit of frequenting the restaurants, to
+      which Goldoni somewhat vaingloriously refers, seems to have grown upon the
+      Venetians with the lapse of time. The eating-houses are almost without
+      number, and are of every degree, from the shop of the sausage-maker, who
+      supplies gondoliers and facchini with bowls of <i>sguassetto</i>, to the
+      Caffè Florian. They all have names which are not strange to European ears,
+      but which ape sufficiently amusing to people who come from a land where
+      nearly every public thing is named from some inspiration of patriotism or
+      local pride. In Venice the principal restaurants are called The Steamboat,
+      The Savage, The Little Horse, The Black Hat, and The Pictures; and I do
+      not know that any one of them is more uncomfortable, uncleanly, or noisy
+      than another, or that any one of them suffers from the fact that all are
+      bad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You do not get breakfast at the restaurant for the reason, before stated,
+      of the breakfast&rsquo;s unsubstantiality. The dining commences about three
+      o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, and continues till nine o&rsquo;clock, most people
+      dining at five or six. As a rule the attendance is insufficient, and no
+      guest is served until he has made a savage clapping on the tables, or
+      clinking on his glass or plate. Then a hard-pushed waiter appears, and
+      calls out, dramatically, &ldquo;Behold me!&rdquo; takes the order, shrieks it to the
+      cook, and returning with the dinner, cries out again, more dramatically
+      than ever, &ldquo;Behold it ready!&rdquo; and arrays it with a great flourish on the
+      table. I have dined in an hotel at Niagara, to the music of a brass band;
+      but I did not find that so utterly bewildering, so destructive of the
+      individual savor of the dishes, and so conducive to absent-minded
+      gluttony, as I at first found the constant rush and clamor of the waiters
+      in the Venetian restaurants. The guests are, for the most part, patient
+      and quiet enough, eating their minestra and boiled beef in such peace as
+      the surrounding uproar permits them, and seldom making acquaintance with
+      each other. It is a mistake, I think, to expect much talk from any people
+      at dinner. The ingenious English tourists who visit the United States from
+      time to time, find us silent over our meat, and I have noticed the like
+      trait among people of divers races in Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have said, the greater part of the diners at the restaurants are
+      single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill of
+      the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals, is
+      rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a
+      drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,&mdash;no, not at
+      evening parties,&mdash;and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the
+      caffè and the restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the
+      higher privileges of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once
+      the most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the
+      world. Our boarding-house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as it
+      often is, seems to me infinitely better than the restaurant life of young
+      Italy. It is creditable to Latin Europe that, with all this homelessness
+      and domestic outlawry, its young men still preserve the gentleness of
+      civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The families that share the exile of the eating-houses sometimes make
+      together a feeble buzz of conversation, but the unfriendly spirit of the
+      place seems soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent the restaurant
+      for economy&rsquo;s sake. Fuel is costly, and the restaurant is cheap, and its
+      cooking better than they could perhaps otherwise afford to have. Indeed,
+      so cheap is the restaurant that actual experience proved the cost of a
+      dinner there to be little more than the cost of the raw material in the
+      market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the custom, which is common,
+      of sending home to purchasers meals from the eating-houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, the difference is not so
+      noticeable in the prices of the same dishes, as in the substitution of
+      cheaper varieties of food. At the best eating-houses, the Gallic
+      traditions bear sway more or less, but in the poorer sort the cooking is
+      done entirely by native artists, deriving their inspirations from the
+      unsophisticated tastes of exclusively native diners. It is perhaps
+      needless to say that they grow characteristic and picturesque as they grow
+      dirty and cheap, until at last the cook-shop perfects the descent with a
+      triumph of raciness and local coloring. The cook-shop in Venice opens upon
+      you at almost every turn,&mdash;everywhere, in fact, but in the Piazza and
+      the Merceria,&mdash;and looking in, you see its vast heaps of frying fish,
+      and its huge caldrons of ever-boiling broth which smell to heaven with
+      garlic and onions. In the seducing windows smoke golden mountains of <i>polenta</i>
+      (a thicker kind of mush or hasty-pudding, made of Indian meal, and
+      universally eaten in North Italy), platters of crisp minnows, bowls of
+      rice, roast poultry, dishes of snails and liver; and around the
+      fascinating walls hang huge plates of bronzed earthenware for a lavish and
+      a hospitable show, and for the representation of those scenes of Venetian
+      story which are modeled upon them in bass-relief. Here I like to take my
+      unknown friend&mdash;my scoundrel facchino or rascal gondolier&mdash;as he
+      comes to buy his dinner, and bargains eloquently with the cook, who stands
+      with a huge ladle in his hand capable of skimming mysterious things from
+      vasty depths. I am spell-bound by the drama which ensues, and in which all
+      the chords of the human heart are touched, from those that tremble at high
+      tragedy, to those that are shaken by broad farce. When the diner has
+      bought his dinner, and issues forth with his polenta in one hand, and his
+      fried minnows or stewed snails in the other, my fancy fondly follows him
+      to his gondola-station, where he eats it, and quarrels volubly with other
+      gondoliers across the Grand Canal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A simpler and less ambitious sort of cook-shop abounds in the region of
+      Rialto, where on market mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious
+      business with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more limited
+      resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, polenta, and <i>sguassetto</i>.
+      The latter is a true <i>roba veneziana</i>, and is a loud-flavored broth,
+      made of those desperate scraps of meat which are found impracticable even
+      by the sausage-makers. Another, but more delicate dish, peculiar to the
+      place, is the clotted blood of poultry, fried in slices with onions. A
+      great number of the families of the poor breakfast at these shops very
+      abundantly, for three soldi each person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Venice every holiday has its appropriate viand. During carnival all the
+      butter and cheese shop-windows are whitened with the snow of beaten cream&mdash;<i>panamontata</i>.
+      At San Martino the bakers parade troops of gingerbread warriors. Later,
+      for Christmas, comes <i>mandorlato</i>, which is a candy made of honey and
+      enriched with almonds. In its season only can any of these devotional
+      delicacies be had; but there is a species of cruller, fried in oil, which
+      has all seasons for its own. On the occasion of every <i>festa</i>, and of
+      every <i>sagra</i> (which is the holiday of one parish only), stalls are
+      erected in the squares for the cooking and sale of these crullers, between
+      which and the religious sentiment proper to the whole year there seems to
+      be some occult relation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the winter, the whole city appears to abandon herself to cooking for
+      the public, till she threatens to hopelessly disorder the law of demand
+      and supply. There are, to begin with, the caffè and restaurants of every
+      class. Then there are the cook-shops, and the poulterers&rsquo;, and the
+      sausage-makers&rsquo;. Then, also, every fruit-stall is misty and odorous with
+      roast apples, boiled beans, cabbage, and potatoes. The chestnut-roasters
+      infest every corner, and men women, and children cry roast pumpkin at
+      every turn&mdash;till, at last, hunger seems an absurd and foolish vice,
+      and the ubiquitous beggars, no less than the habitual abstemiousness of
+      every class of the population, become the most perplexing and maddening of
+      anomalies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I hope that it is by a not unnatural progress I pass from speaking of
+      dinners and diners to the kindred subject of the present chapter, and I
+      trust the reader will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this
+      mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I had
+      found most books of travel very slow to tell,&mdash;as much as possible of
+      the everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our own;
+      endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not only from the
+      show-traits which strangers are most likely to see, but also from
+      experience of such things as strangers are most likely to miss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The absolute want of society of my own nation in Venice would have thrown
+      me upon study of the people for my amusement, even if I had cared to learn
+      nothing of them; and the necessity of economical housekeeping would have
+      caused me to live in the frugal Venetian fashion, even if I had been
+      disposed to remain a foreigner in every thing. Of bachelor lodgings I had
+      sufficient experience during my first year; but as most prudent travelers
+      who visit the city for a week take lodgings, I need not describe my own
+      particularly. You can tell the houses in which there are rooms to let, by
+      the squares of white paper fastened to the window-shutters; and a casual
+      glance as you pass through the streets, gives you the idea that the chief
+      income of the place is derived from letting lodgings. Carpetless, dreary
+      barracks the rooms usually are, with an uncompromising squareness of
+      prints upon the wall, an appalling breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of
+      wash-bowl, and an obduracy of sofa, never, never to be dissociated in
+      their victim&rsquo;s mind from the idea of the villanous hard bread of Venice on
+      which the gloomy landlady sustains her life with its immutable purposes of
+      plunder. Flabbiness without softness is the tone of these discouraging
+      chambers, which are dear or not according to the season and the situation.
+      On the sunlit Riva during winter, and on the Grand Canal in summer, they
+      are costly enough, but they are to be found on nearly all the squares at
+      reasonable rates. On the narrow streets, where most native bachelors have
+      them, they are absurdly cheap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As in nearly all places on the Continent, a house in Venice means a number
+      of rooms, including a whole story in a building, or part of it only, but
+      always completely separated from the story above and below, or from the
+      other rooms on the same floor. Every house has its own entrance from the
+      street, or by a common hall and stairway from the ground-floor, where are
+      the cellars or store-rooms, while each kitchen is usually on a level with
+      the other rooms of the house to which it belongs. The isolation of the
+      different families is secured (as perfectly as where a building is solely
+      appropriated to each), either by the exclusive possession of a streetdoor,
+      [Footnote: Where the street entrance is in common, every floor has its
+      bell, which being sounded, summons a servant to some upper window with the
+      demand, most formidable to strangers, &ldquo;<i>Chi xe?</i>&rdquo; (Who is it?) But
+      you do not answer with your name. You reply, &ldquo;<i>Amici!</i>&rdquo; (Friends!) on
+      which comforting reassurance, the servant draws the latch of the door by a
+      wire running upward to her hand, and permits you to enter and wander about
+      at your leisure till you reach her secret height. This is, supposing the
+      master or mistress of the house to be at home. If they are not in, she
+      answers your &ldquo;<i>Amici!</i>&rdquo; with &ldquo;<i>No ghe ne xe!</i>&rdquo; (Nobody here!)
+      and lets down a basket by a string outside the window, and fishes up your
+      card.] or by the unsocial domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give
+      good-day to the people whom you meet in the common hall and on the common
+      stairway, but you rarely know more of them than their names, and you
+      certainly care nothing about them. The sociability of Europe, and more
+      especially of Southern Europe, is shown abroad; under the domestic roof it
+      dwindles and disappears. And indeed it is no wonder, considering how
+      dispiriting and comfortless most of the houses are. The lower windows are
+      heavily barred with iron; the wood-work is rude, even in many palaces in
+      Venice; the rest is stone and stucco; the walls are not often papered,
+      though they are sometimes painted: the most pleasing and inviting feature
+      of the interior is the frescoed ceiling of the better rooms. The windows
+      shut imperfectly, the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth while
+      to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?); the doors lift
+      slantingly from the floor, in which their lower hinges are imbedded; the
+      stoves are of plaster, and consume fuel without just return of heat; the
+      balconies alone are always charming, whether they hang high over the
+      streets, or look out upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted
+      ceilings, go far to make the houses habitable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly every thing else in
+      Italy, that you pay about the same price for half the comfort that you get
+      in America. In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on the Grand
+      Canal; but here the rents are something absurdly high, when taken in
+      consideration with the fact that the city is not made a place of residence
+      by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial activity to
+      enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these circumstances,
+      becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment to the stranger.
+      You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a tumble-down old palace,
+      where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with coarse paper, crumble at your
+      touch; where the floor rises and falls like the sea, and the door-frames
+      and window-cases have long lost all recollection of the plumb. Madama la
+      Baronessa is at present occupying these pleasant apartments, and you only
+      gain admission to them after an embassy to procure her permission. Madama
+      la Baronessa receives you courteously, and you pass through her rooms,
+      which are a little in disorder, the Baronessa being on the point of
+      removal. Madama la Baronessa&rsquo;s hoop-skirts prevail upon the floors; and at
+      the side of the couch which her form lately pressed in slumber, you
+      observe a French novel and a wasted candle in the society of a half-bottle
+      of the wine of the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the whole suite, and
+      through the open window comes a curious stench explained as the odor of
+      Madama la Baronessa&rsquo;s guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that she has
+      had their sty placed immediately under her window in the garden. It is
+      this garden which has first taken your heart, with a glimpse caught
+      through the great open door of the palace. It is disordered and wild, but
+      so much the better; its firs are very thick and dark, and there are
+      certain statues, fauns and nymphs, which weather stains and mosses have
+      made much decenter than the sculptor intended. You think that for this
+      garden&rsquo;s sake you could put up with the house, which must be very cheap.
+      What is the price of the rooms? you ask of the smiling landlord. He
+      answers, without winking, &ldquo;If taken for several years, a thousand florins
+      a year.&rdquo; At which you suppress the whistle of disdainful surprise, and say
+      you think it will not suit. He calls your attention to the sun, which
+      comes in at every side, which will roast you in summer, and will not (as
+      he would have you think) warm you in winter. &ldquo;But there is another
+      apartment,&rdquo;&mdash;through which you drag languidly. It is empty now, being
+      last inhabited by an English Ledi,&mdash;and her stove-pipes went out of
+      the windows, and blackened the shabby stucco front of the villanous old
+      palace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the curiously
+      frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which has a lady and
+      gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony to balcony, on
+      the façade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of leaping from the
+      second to the third story, promises something. Promises something, but
+      does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh, clean, and new, and
+      cold and dark as a cellar. This house&mdash;that is to say, a floor of the
+      house&mdash;you may have for four hundred florins a year; and then
+      farewell the world and the light of the sun! for neither will ever find
+      you in that back court, and you will never see any body but the
+      neighboring laundresses and their children, who cannot enough admire the
+      front of your house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>E via in seguito!</i> This is of house keeping, not house-hunting.
+      There are pleasant and habitable houses in Venice&mdash;but they are not
+      cheap, as many of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, discomfort
+      and ruin have their price, and the tumble-down is patched up and sold at
+      rates astonishing to innocent strangers who come from countries in good
+      repair, where the tumble-down is worth nothing. If I were not ashamed of
+      the idle and foolish old superstitions in which I once believed concerning
+      life in Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect very little for
+      a great deal; and how a knowledge of many houses to let, made me more and
+      more contented with the house we had taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in one corner of an old palace on the Grand Canal, and the window
+      of the little parlor looked down upon the water, which had made friends
+      with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, golden smiles upon it
+      when the sun shone. The dining-room was not so much favored by the water,
+      but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling tree-tops, that rose to it
+      from a tiny garden-ground, no bigger than a pocket handkerchief. Through
+      this window, also, we could see the quaint, picturesque life of the canal;
+      and from another room we could reach a little terrace above the water. We
+      were not in the <i>appartamento signorile</i>, [Footnote: The noble floor&mdash;as
+      the second or third story of the palace is called.]&mdash;that was above,&mdash;but
+      we were more snugly quartered on the first story from the ground-floor,
+      commonly used as a winter apartment in the old times. But it had been cut
+      up, and suites of rooms had been broken according to the caprice of
+      successive landlords, till it was not at all palatial any more. The upper
+      stories still retained something of former grandeur, and had acquired with
+      time more than former discomfort. We were not envious of them, for they
+      were humbly let at a price less than we paid; though we could not quite
+      repress a covetous yearning for their arched and carven windows, which we
+      saw sometimes from the canal, above the tops of the garden trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gondoliers used always to point out our palace (which was called Casa
+      Falier) as the house in which Marino Faliero was born; and for a long time
+      we clung to the hope that it might be so. But however pleasant it was, we
+      were forced, on reading up the subject a little, to relinquish our
+      illusion, and accredit an old palace at Santi Apostoli with the
+      distinction we would fain have claimed for ours. I am rather at a loss to
+      explain how it made our lives in Casa Falier any pleasanter to think that
+      a beheaded traitor had been born in it, but we relished the superstition
+      amazingly as long as we could possibly believe in it. What went far to
+      confirm us at first in our credulity was the residence, in another part of
+      the palace, of the Canonico Falier, a lineal descendant of the unhappy
+      doge. He was a very mild-faced old priest, with a white head, which he
+      carried downcast, and crimson legs, on which he moved but feebly. He owned
+      the rooms in which he lived, and the apartment in the front of the palace
+      just above our own. The rest of the house belonged to another, for in
+      Venice many of the palaces are divided up and sold among different
+      purchasers, floor by floor, and sometimes even room by room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the tenantry of Casa Falier was far more various than its
+      proprietorship. Over our heads dwelt a Dalmatian family; below our feet a
+      Frenchwoman; at our right, upon the same floor, an English gentleman;
+      under him a French family; and over him the family of a marquis in exile
+      from Modena. Except with Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, the Englishman, who was at
+      once our friend and landlord (impossible as this may appear to those who
+      know any thing of landlords in Italy), we had no acquaintance, beyond that
+      of salutation, with the many nations represented in our house. We could
+      not help holding the French people in some sort responsible for the
+      invasion of Mexico; and, though opportunity offered for cultivating the
+      acquaintance of the Modenese, we did not improve it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and bowed to them a great deal,
+      and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving noise as
+      of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal on their
+      balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed seeing them
+      admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling. The father of
+      this family was a little man of a solemn and impressive demeanor, who had
+      no other occupation but to walk up and down the city and view its
+      monuments, for which purpose he one day informed us he had left his native
+      place in Dalmatia, after forty years&rsquo; study of Venetian history. He
+      further told us that this was by no means worth the time given it; that
+      whereas the streets of Venice were sepulchres in point of narrowness and
+      obscurity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows of which you might see
+      for miles uninterruptedly! This little gentleman wore a black hat, in the
+      last vivid polish of respectability, and I think fortune was not his
+      friend. The hat was too large for him, as the hats of Italians always are;
+      it came down to his eyes, and he carried a cane. Every evening he marched
+      solemnly at the head of a procession of his handsome young children, who
+      went to hear the military music in St. Mark&rsquo;s Square.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians&mdash;we never knew their
+      names&mdash;gave access also to a house in the story above them, which
+      belonged to some mysterious person described on his door-plate as &ldquo;Co.
+      Prata.&rdquo; I think we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance some
+      members of his family when they came back from their summer in the country
+      to spend the winter in the city. Prata&rsquo;s &ldquo;Co.,&rdquo; we gradually learnt, meant
+      &ldquo;Conte,&rdquo; and the little counts and countesses, his children, immediately
+      on their arrival took an active part in the exercises of the Dalmatian
+      cavalry. Later in the fall, certain of the count&rsquo;s vassals came to the <i>riva</i>
+      [Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs which descend to the water before
+      palace-doors and at the ends of streets.] in one of the great boats of the
+      Po, with a load of brush and corncobs for fuel&mdash;and this is all we
+      ever knew of our neighbors on the fourth floor. As long as he remained
+      &ldquo;Co.&rdquo; we yearned to know who and what he was; being interpreted as Conte
+      Prata, he ceased to interest us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little
+      people, just married, came to live in Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence, tempering
+      the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with
+      it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and &ldquo;This is my wife, the new
+      mistress,&rdquo; said the young <i>Paron</i> [Footnote: <i>Padrone</i> in
+      Italian. A salutation with Venetian friends, and the title by which
+      Venetian servants always designate their employers.] with the bashful
+      pride proper to the time and place. Giovanna glowed welcome, and said,
+      with adventurous politeness, she was very glad of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Serva sua!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Parona</i>, not knowing Italian, laughed in English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting upon the great truth that
+      handsome is that handsome does, began at once to make herself a thing of
+      beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a measure of convenience and of deference to her feelings, we
+      immediately resolved to call her G., merely, when speaking of her in
+      English, instead of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with
+      conjecture concerning what was said of her. And as G. thus became the
+      centre around which our domestic life revolved, she must be somewhat
+      particularly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. I suppose
+      that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances, this would
+      have been much like keeping play-house anywhere; in Venice it had, but for
+      the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious property of unreality and
+      impermanency. It is sufficiently bad to live in a rented house; in a house
+      which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till your life takes
+      root, and Home blossoms up in the alien place. For a great while we
+      regarded our house merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were slow to
+      form any relations which could take from our residence its temporary
+      character. Had we but thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker,
+      and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish ourselves at once; but
+      we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us to
+      our fellow-creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by housekeepers on a
+      scale surprisingly small to one accustomed to wholesale American ways, and
+      G., having the purse, made our little purchases in cash, never buying more
+      than enough for one meal at a time. Every morning, the fruits and
+      vegetables are distributed from the great market at the Rialto among a
+      hundred greengrocers&rsquo; stalls in all parts of the city; bread (which is
+      never made at home) is found fresh at the baker&rsquo;s; there is a butcher&rsquo;s
+      stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are therefore resorted to
+      for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay in provisions there in
+      portions graduated to a soldo of their ready means. A great Bostonian whom
+      I remember to have heard speculate on the superiority of a state of
+      civilization in which you could buy two cents&rsquo; worth of beef to that in
+      which so small a quantity was unpurchasable, would find the system
+      perfected here, where you can buy half a cent&rsquo;s worth. It is a system
+      friendly to poverty, and the small retail prices approximate very closely
+      the real value of the stuff sold, as we sometimes proved by offering to
+      purchase in quantity. Usually no reduction would be made from the retail
+      rate, and it was sufficiently amusing to have the dealer figure up the
+      cost of the quantity we proposed to buy, and then exhibit an exact
+      multiplication of his retail rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is
+      worth a soldo: you get no more than a hundred for a florin, though the
+      dealer will cheerfully go under that number if he can cheat you in the
+      count. So in most things we found it better to let G. do the marketing in
+      her own small Venetian fashion, and &ldquo;guard our strangeness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0138}.jpg" alt="{0138}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0138}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      But there were some things which must be brought to the house by the
+      dealers, such as water for drinking and cooking, which is drawn from
+      public cisterns in the squares, and carried by stout young girls to all
+      the houses. These <i>bigolanti</i> all come from the mountains of Friuli;
+      they all have rosy cheeks, white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists
+      whatever (in the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The cisterns
+      are opened about eight o&rsquo;clock in the morning, and then their day&rsquo;s work
+      begins with chatter, and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the wells;
+      and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots off under a burden of two
+      buckets,&mdash;one appended from either end of a bow resting upon the
+      right shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain which falls on
+      the shelving surface of the campo, and soaks through a bed of sea-sand
+      around the cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante comes every
+      morning and empties her brazen buckets into the great picturesque jars of
+      porous earthenware which ornament Venetian kitchens; and the daily supply
+      of water costs a moderate family about a florin a month.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this arrives in boats. It is
+      cut upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small
+      coasting vessels, each of which has a plump captain in command, whose red
+      face is so cunningly blended with his cap of scarlet flannel that it is
+      hard on a breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other ends.
+      These vessels anchor off the Custom House in the Guidecca Canal in the
+      fall, and lie there all winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a
+      great part of the time under the charge solely of a small yellow dog of
+      the irascible breed common to the boats of the Po. Thither the smaller
+      dealers in firewood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all parts
+      of the city, melodiously crying their wares up and down the canals, and
+      penetrating the land on foot with specimen bundles of fagots in their
+      arms. They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think&mdash;their fancy
+      seldom rising beyond the invention that their fagots are beautiful and
+      sound and dry. But our particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted man.
+      Long before I had dealings with him, I knew him by the superb song, or
+      rather incantation, with which he announced his coming on the Grand Canal.
+      The purport of this was merely that his bark was called the Beautiful
+      Caroline, and that his fagots were fine; but he so dwelt upon the hidden
+      beauties of this idea, and so prolonged their effect upon the mind by
+      artful repetition, and the full, round, and resonant roar with which he
+      closed his triumphal hymn, that the spirit was taken with the charm, and
+      held in breathless admiration. By all odds, this woodman&rsquo;s cry was the
+      most impressive of all the street cries of Venice. There may have been an
+      exquisite sadness and sweetness in the wail of the chimney-sweep; a
+      winning pathos in the voice of the vender of roast pumpkin; an oriental
+      fancy and splendor in the fruiterers who cried &ldquo;Melons with hearts of
+      fire!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Juicy pears that bathe your beard!&rdquo;&mdash;there may have been
+      something peculiarly effective in the song of the chestnut-man who shouted
+      &ldquo;Fat chestnuts,&rdquo; and added, after a lapse in which you got almost beyond
+      hearing, &ldquo;and well cooked!&rdquo;&mdash;I do not deny that there was a seductive
+      sincerity in the proclamation of one whose peaches could <i>not</i> be
+      called beautiful to look upon, and were consequently advertised as &ldquo;Ugly,
+      but good!&rdquo;&mdash;I say nothing to detract from the merits of harmonious
+      chair-menders;&mdash;to my ears the shout of the melodious fisherman was
+      delectable music, and all the birds of summer sang in the voices of the
+      countrymen who sold finches and larks in cages, and roses and pinks in
+      pots;&mdash;but I say, after all, none of these people combined the vocal
+      power, the sonorous movement, the delicate grace, and the vast compass of
+      our woodman. Yet this man, as far as virtue went, was <i>vox et praeterea
+      nihil</i>. He was a vagabond of the most abandoned; he was habitually in
+      drink, and I think his sins had gone near to make him mad&mdash;at any
+      rate he was of a most lunatical deportment. In other lands, the man of
+      whom you are a regular purchaser, serves you well; in Italy he conceives
+      that his long service gives him the right to plunder you if possible. I
+      felt in every fibre that this woodman invariably cheated me in
+      measurement, and, indeed, he scarcely denied it on accusation. But my
+      single experience of the more magnificent scoundrels of whom <i>he</i>
+      bought the wood originally, contented me with the swindle with which I had
+      become familiarized. On this occasion I took a boat and went to the Custom
+      House, to get my fuel at first hand. The captain of the ship which I
+      boarded wished me to pay more than I gave for fuel delivered at my door,
+      and thereupon ensued the tragic scene of bargaining, as these things are
+      conducted in Italy. We stood up and bargained, we sat down and bargained;
+      the captain turned his back upon me in indignation; I parted from him and
+      took to my boat in scorn; he called me back and displayed the wood&mdash;good,
+      sound, dryer than bones; he pointed to the threatening heavens, and
+      declared that it would snow that night, and on the morrow I could not get
+      wood for twice the present price; but I laughed incredulously. Then my
+      captain took another tack, and tried to make the contract in obsolete
+      currencies, in Austrian pounds, in Venetian pounds, but as I inexorably
+      reduced these into familiar money, he paused desperately, and made me an
+      offer which I accepted with mistaken exultation. For my captain was
+      shrewder than I, and held arts of measurement in reserve against me. He
+      agreed that the measurement and transportation should not cost me the
+      value of his tooth-pick&mdash;quite an old and worthless one&mdash;which
+      he showed me. Yet I was surprised into the payment of a youth whom this
+      man called to assist at the measurement, and I had to give the boatman
+      drink-money at the end. He promised that the measure should be just: yet
+      if I lifted my eye from the work he placed the logs slantingly on the
+      measure, and threw in knotty chunks that crowded wholesome fuel out, and
+      let the daylight through and through the pile. I protested, and he
+      admitted the wrong when I pointed it out: &ldquo;<i>Ga razon, lu!</i>&rdquo; (He&rsquo;s
+      right!) he said to his fellows in infamy, and throwing aside the
+      objectionable pieces, proceeded to evade justice by new artifices. When I
+      had this memorable load of wood housed at home, I found that it had cost
+      just what I paid my woodman, and that I had additionally lost my
+      self-respect in being plundered before my face, and I resolved thereafter
+      to be cheated in quiet dignity behind my back. The woodman exulted in his
+      restored sovereignty, and I lost nothing in penalty for my revolt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice, are those
+      ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed in
+      baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares by
+      the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their general
+      stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to their own
+      comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling ear-rings of
+      yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning streets of
+      Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of the country&rsquo;s
+      clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great cream-colored
+      cows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fishermen, also, come down the little <i>calli</i>&mdash;with shallow
+      baskets of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles
+      and mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to
+      bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling drama
+      proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser&rsquo;s own price.
+      &ldquo;Beautiful and all alive!&rdquo; is the engaging cry with which they hawk their
+      fish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come to
+      exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely, but
+      glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all, chair-menders,&mdash;who
+      bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a sign, with pieces of white
+      wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a hammer, and a sheaf of
+      rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait the rush bottoms of your
+      kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant whittlings with their
+      knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the mean time our own serving-woman Giovanna, the great central
+      principle of our housekeeping, is waiting to be personally presented to
+      the company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, that it is hard
+      not to believe them created just as crooked, and foul, and full of fluff
+      and years as you behold them, and you cannot understand how so much
+      frowziness and so little hair, so great show of fangs and so few teeth,
+      are growths from any ordinary human birth. G. is no longer young, but she
+      is not after the likeness of these old women. It is of a middle age,
+      unbeginning, interminable, of which she gives you the impression. She has
+      brown apple-cheeks, just touched with frost; her nose is of a strawberry
+      formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly shrunken
+      effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned. A tough,
+      pleasant, indestructible woman&mdash;for use, we thought, not ornament&mdash;the
+      mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower of serving-women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a class, given to pilfering;
+      but knowing ourselves subject by nature to pillage, we cannot repress a
+      feeling of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. She strictly
+      accounts for all money given her at the close of each week, and to this
+      end keeps a kind of account-book, which I cannot help regarding as in some
+      sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, confirmed by her own
+      confession, that G. is not good for reading and writing. On settling with
+      her I have been permitted to look into this book, which is all in capital
+      letters,&mdash;each the evident result of serious labor,&mdash;with
+      figures representing combinations of the pot-hook according to bold and
+      original conceptions. The spelling is also a remarkable effort of creative
+      genius. The only difficulty under which the author labors in regard to the
+      book is the confusion naturally resulting from the effort to get
+      literature right side up when it has got upside down. The writing is a
+      kind of pugilism&mdash;the strokes being made straight out from the
+      shoulder. The account-book is always carried about with her in a
+      fathomless pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a housekeeper who
+      can throw nothing away, to wit: matchboxes, now appointed to hold buttons
+      and hooks-and-eyes; beeswax in the lump; the door-key (which in Venice
+      takes a formidable size, and impresses you at first sight as ordnance); a
+      patch-bag; a porte-monnaie; many lead-pencils in the stump; scissors,
+      pincushions, and the Beata Vergine in a frame. Indeed, this incapability
+      of throwing things away is made to bear rather severely upon us in some
+      things, such as the continual reappearance of familiar dishes at table&mdash;particularly
+      veteran <i>bifsteca</i>. But we fancy that the same frugal instinct is
+      exercised to our advantage and comfort in other things, for G. makes a
+      great show and merit of denying our charity to those bold and adventurous
+      children of sorrow, who do not scruple to ring your door-bell, and demand
+      alms. It is true that with G., as with every Italian, almsgiving enters
+      into the theory and practice of Christian life, but she will not suffer
+      misery to abuse its privileges. She has no hesitation, however, in
+      bringing certain objects of compassion to our notice, and she procures
+      small services to be done for us by many lame and halt of her
+      acquaintance. Having bought my boat (I come, in time, to be willing to
+      sell it again for half its cost to me), I require a menial to clean it now
+      and then, and Giovanna first calls me a youthful Gobbo for the work,&mdash;a
+      festive hunchback, a bright-hearted whistler of comic opera. Whether this
+      blithe humor is not considered decent, I do not know, but though the Gobbo
+      serves me faithfully, I find him one day replaced by a venerable old man,
+      whom&mdash;from his personal resemblance to Time&mdash;I should think much
+      better occupied with an hourglass, or engaged with a scythe in mowing me
+      and other mortals down, than in cleaning my boat. But all day long he sits
+      on my riva in the sun, when it shines, gazing fixedly at my boat; and when
+      the day is dark, he lurks about the street, accessible to my slightest
+      boating impulse. He salutes my going out and coming in with grave
+      reverence, and I think he has no work to do but that which G.&lsquo;s wise
+      compassion has given him from me. Suddenly, like the Gobbo, the Veccio
+      also disappears, and I hear vaguely&mdash;for in Venice you never know any
+      thing with precision&mdash;that he has found a regular employment in
+      Padua, and again that he is dead. While he lasts, G. has a pleasant, even
+      a sportive manner with this poor old man, calculated to cheer his
+      declining years; but, as I say, cases of insolent and aggressive misery
+      fail to touch her. The kind of wretchedness that comes breathing woe and
+      <i>sciampagnin</i> [Footnote: Little champagne,&mdash;the name which the
+      Venetian populace gave to a fierce and deadly kind of brandy drunk during
+      the scarcity of wine. After the introduction of coal-oil this liquor came
+      to be jocosely known as <i>petrolio</i>.] under our window, and there
+      spends a leisure hour in the rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim
+      either upon her pity or her weakness. She is deaf to the voice of that
+      sorrow, and the monotonous whine of that dolor cannot move her to the
+      purchase of a guilty tranquillity. I imagine, however, that she is afraid
+      to deny charity to the fat Capuchin friar in spectacles and bare feet, who
+      comes twice a month to levy contributions of bread and fuel for his
+      convent, for we hear her declare from the window that the master is not at
+      home, whenever the good brother rings; and at last, as this excuse gives
+      out, she ceases to respond to his ring at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes, during the summer weather, comes down our street a certain
+      tremulous old troubadour with an aged cithern, on which he strums feebly
+      with bones which remain to him from former fingers, and in a thin
+      quivering voice pipes worn-out ditties of youth and love. Sadder music I
+      have never heard, but though it has at times drawn from me the sigh of
+      sensibility without referring sympathy to my pocket, I always hear the
+      compassionate soldo of Giovanna clink reproof to me upon the pavement.
+      Perhaps that slender note touches something finer than habitual charity in
+      her middle-aged bosom, for these were songs she says that they used to
+      sing when she was a girl, and Venice was gay and glad, and different from
+      now&mdash;<i>veramente, tutt&rsquo; altro, signor!</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is through Giovanna&rsquo;s charitable disposition that we make the
+      acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle
+      Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures&mdash;<i>creatura</i>
+      being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being
+      somewhat more pitiable than a <i>poveretta</i>. Our Creatures are both
+      well stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which
+      frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with the
+      invalid&rsquo;s husband,&mdash;a mild, pleasant-faced man, a tailor by trade,
+      and of batlike habits, who hovers about their dusky doorway in the summer
+      twilight. These people have but one room, and a little nook of kitchen at
+      the side; and not only does the sun never find his way into their
+      habitation, but even the daylight cannot penetrate it. They pay about four
+      florins a month for the place, and I hope their landlord is as happy as
+      his tenants. For though one is sick, and all are wretchedly poor, they are
+      far from being discontented. They are opulent in the possession of a small
+      dog, which they have raised from the cradle, as it were, and adopted into
+      the family. They are never tired of playing with their dog,&mdash;the poor
+      old children,&mdash;and every slight display of intelligence on his part
+      delights them. They think it fine in him to follow us as we go by, but
+      pretend to beat him; and then they excuse him, and call him ill names, and
+      catch him up, and hug him and kiss him. He feeds upon their slender means
+      and the pickings that G. carefully carries him from our kitchen, and gives
+      to him on our doorstep in spite of us, while she gossips with his
+      mistresses, who chorus our appearance at such times with &ldquo;<i>I miei
+      rispetti, signori!</i>&rdquo; We often see them in the street, and at a distance
+      from home, carrying mysterious bundles of clothes; and at last we learn
+      their vocation, which is one not known out of Italian cities, I think.
+      There the state is Uncle to the hard-pressed, and instead of many
+      pawnbrokers&rsquo; shops there is one large municipal spout, which is called the
+      Monte di Pietà, where the needy pawn their goods. The system is centuries
+      old in Italy, but there are people who to this day cannot summon courage
+      to repair in person to the Mount of Pity, and, to meet their wants, there
+      has grown up a class of frowzy old women who transact the business for
+      them, and receive a small percentage for their trouble. Our poor old
+      Creatures were of this class, and as there were many persons in
+      impoverished, decaying Venice who had need of the succor they procured,
+      they made out to earn a living when both were well, and to eke out
+      existence by charity when one was ill. They were harmless neighbors, and I
+      believe they regretted our removal, when this took place, for they used to
+      sit down under an arcade opposite our new house, and spend the duller
+      intervals of trade in the contemplation of our windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The alarming spirit of nepotism which Giovanna developed at a later day
+      was, I fear, a growth from the encouragement we gave her charitable
+      disposition. But for several months it was merely from the fact of a boy
+      who came and whistled at the door until Giovanna opened it and reproved
+      him in the name of all the saints and powers of darkness, that we knew her
+      to be a mother; and we merely had her word for the existence of a husband,
+      who dealt in poultry. Without seeing Giovanna&rsquo;s husband, I nevertheless
+      knew him to be a man of downy exterior, wearing a canvas apron, thickly
+      crusted with the gore of fowls, who sat at the door of his shop and
+      plucked chickens forever, as with the tireless hand of Fate. I divined
+      that he lived in an atmosphere of scalded pullet; that three earthen cups
+      of clotted chickens&rsquo; blood, placed upon his window-shelf, formed his idea
+      of an attractive display, and that he shadowed forth his conceptions of
+      the beautiful in symmetrical rows of plucked chickens, presenting to the
+      public eye rear views embellished with a single feather erect in the tail
+      of each bird; that he must be, through the ethics of competition, the
+      sworn foe of those illogical peasants who bring dead poultry to town in
+      cages, like singing birds, and equally the friend of those restaurateurs
+      who furnish you a meal of victuals and a feather-bed in the same <i>mezzo-polio
+      arrosto</i>. He turned out on actual appearance to be all I had prefigured
+      him, with the additional merit of having a large red nose, a sidelong,
+      fugitive gait, and a hangdog countenance. He furnished us poultry at rates
+      slightly advanced, I think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the boy, he turned up after a while as a constant guest, and took
+      possession of the kitchen. He came near banishment at one time for
+      catching a large number of sea-crabs in the canal, and confining them in a
+      basket in the kitchen, which they left at the dead hour of night, to
+      wander all over our house,&mdash;making a mysterious and alarming sound of
+      snapping, like an army of death-watches, and eluding the cunningest
+      efforts at capture. On another occasion, he fell into the canal before our
+      house, and terrified us by going under twice before the arrival of the old
+      gondolier, who called out to him &ldquo;<i>Petta! petta!</i>&rdquo; (Wait! wait!) as
+      he placidly pushed his boat to the spot. Developing other disagreeable
+      traits, Beppi was finally driven into exile, from which he nevertheless
+      furtively returned on holidays.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The family of Giovanna thus gradually encroaching upon us, we came also to
+      know her mother,&mdash;a dread and loathly old lady, whom we would
+      willingly have seen burned at the stake for a witch. She was commonly
+      encountered at nightfall in our street, where she lay in wait, as it were,
+      to prey upon the fragrance of dinner drifting from the kitchen windows of
+      our neighbor, the Duchess of Parma. Here was heard the voice of cooks and
+      of scullions, and the ecstasies of helpless voracity in which we sometimes
+      beheld this old lady were fearful to witness. Nor did we find her more
+      comfortable in our own kitchen, where we often saw her. The place itself
+      is weird and terrible&mdash;low ceiled, with the stone hearth built far
+      out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of Venetian cookery
+      dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day cheerfulness of
+      cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the bristling embers,
+      and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it. When Giovanna&rsquo;s
+      mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to do us reverence from
+      the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her good wishes for our
+      long life, continued health, and endless happiness, it has the effect upon
+      our spirits of the darkest malediction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not more pleasing, though altogether lighter and cheerfuler, was
+      Giovanna&rsquo;s sister-in-law, whom we knew only as the Cognata. Making her
+      appearance first upon the occasion of Giovanna&rsquo;s sickness, she slowly but
+      surely established herself as an habitual presence, and threatened at one
+      time, as we fancied, to become our paid servant. But a happy calamity
+      which one night carried off a carpet and the window curtains of an
+      unoccupied room, cast an evil suspicion upon the Cognata, and she never
+      appeared after the discovery of the theft. We suspected her of having
+      invented some dishes of which we were very fond, and we hated her for
+      oppressing us with a sense of many surreptitious favors. Objectively, she
+      was a slim, hoopless little woman, with a tendency to be always at the
+      street-door when we opened it. She had a narrow, narrow face, with eyes of
+      terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a demeanor of slavish
+      patronage. Our kitchen, after her addition to the household, became the
+      banqueting-hall of Giovanna&rsquo;s family, who dined there every day upon
+      dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the house the general savor of a low
+      cook-shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural tendency of excellent people
+      to place others in subjection. Our servitude at first was not hard, and
+      consisted chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to extraordinary efforts
+      when G. had attempted to please us with some novelty in cooking. She held
+      us to a strict account in this respect; but indeed our applause was for
+      the most part willing enough. Her culinary execution, first revealing
+      itself in a noble rendering of our ideas of roast potatoes,&mdash;a
+      delicacy foreign to the Venetian kitchen,&mdash;culminated at last in the
+      same style of <i>polpetti</i> [Footnote: I confess a tenderness for this
+      dish, which is a delicater kind of hash skillfully flavored and baked in
+      rolls of a mellow complexion and fascinating appearance.] which furnished
+      forth the table of our neighbor, the Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph
+      with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But G.&lsquo;s spirit was not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in her
+      the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a great
+      babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things, when
+      there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions of bad
+      weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The
+      crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as
+      springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian abuse
+      is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of opprobrium
+      with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ends with the attribution
+      of doggishness.) The conscription was held in the campo near us, and G.
+      declared the place to have become unendurable&mdash;&ldquo;<i>proprio un campo
+      di sospiri!</i>&rdquo; (Really a field of sighs.) &ldquo;<i>Staga comodo!</i>&rdquo; she
+      said to a guest of ours who would have moved his chair to let her pass
+      between him and the wall. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t move; the way to Paradise is not wider
+      than this.&rdquo; We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did not sleep in the
+      house, should come to us so late in the morning, but we could not deal
+      harshly with her on that account, met, as we always were, with plentiful
+      and admirable excuses. Who were we, indeed, to place our wishes in the
+      balance against the welfare of the sick neighbor with whom Giovanna passed
+      so many nights of vigil? Should we reproach her with tardiness when she
+      had not closed the eye all night for a headache properly of the devil? If
+      she came late in the morning, she stayed late at night; and it sometimes
+      happened that when the Paron and Parona, supposing her gone, made a
+      stealthy expedition to the kitchen for cold chicken, they found her there
+      at midnight in the fell company of the Cognata, bibbing the wine of the
+      country and holding a mild Italian revel with that vinegar and the stony
+      bread of Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have said G. was the flower of serving-women; and so at first she
+      seemed, and it was long till we doubted her perfection. We knew ourselves
+      to be very young, and weak, and unworthy. The Parona had the rare gift of
+      learning to speak less and less Italian every day, and fell inevitably
+      into subjection. The Paron in a domestic point of view was naturally
+      nothing. It had been strange indeed if Giovanna, beholding the great
+      contrast we presented to herself in many respects, had forborne to abuse
+      her advantage over us. But we trusted her implicitly, and I hardly know
+      how or when it was that we began to waver in our confidence. It is certain
+      that with the lapse of time we came gradually to have breakfast at twelve
+      o&rsquo;clock, instead of nine, as we had originally appointed it, and that G.
+      grew to consume the greater part of the day in making our small purchases,
+      and to give us our belated dinners at seven o&rsquo;clock. We protested, and
+      temporary reforms ensued, only to be succeeded by more hopeless lapses;
+      but it was not till all entreaties and threats failed that we began to
+      think seriously it would be well to have done with Giovanna, as an
+      unprofitable servant. I give the result, not all the nice causes from
+      which it came. But the question was, How to get rid of a poor woman and a
+      civil, and the mother of a family dependent in great part upon her labor?
+      We solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss G., and we shrink a hundred
+      times from inflicting the blow. At last, somewhat in the spirit of Charles
+      Lamb&rsquo;s Chinaman who invented roast pig, and discovered that the sole
+      method of roasting it was to burn down a house in order to consume the
+      adjacent pig-sty, and thus cook the roaster in the flames,&mdash;we hit
+      upon an artifice by which we could dispense with Giovanna, and keep an
+      easy conscience. We had long ceased to dine at home, in despair; and now
+      we resolved to take another house, in which there were other servants. But
+      even then, it was a sore struggle to part with the flower of
+      serving-women, who was set over the vacated house to put it in order after
+      our flitting, and with whom the imprudent Paron settled the last account
+      in the familiar little dining-room, surrounded by the depressing
+      influences of the empty chambers. The place was peopled after all, though
+      we had left it, and I think the tenants who come after us will be haunted
+      by our spectres, crowding them on the pleasant little balcony, and sitting
+      down with them at table. G. stood there, the genius of the place, and wept
+      six regretful tears, each one of which drew a florin from the purse of the
+      Paron. She had hoped to remain with us always while we lived in Venice;
+      but now that she could no longer look to us for support, the Lord must
+      take care of her. The gush of grief was transient: it relieved her, and
+      she came out sunnily a moment after. The Paron went his way more
+      sorrowfully, taking leave at last with the fine burst of Christian
+      philosophy: &ldquo;We are none of us masters of ourselves in this world, and
+      cannot do what we wish. <i>Ma! Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!</i>&rdquo; Yet he
+      was undeniably lightened in heart. He had cut adrift from old moorings,
+      and had crossed the Grand Canal. G. did not follow him, nor any of the
+      long line of pensioners who used to come on certain feast-days to levy
+      tribute of eggs at the old house. (The postman was among these, on
+      Christmas and New Year&rsquo;s, and as he received eggs at every house, it was a
+      problem with us, unsolved to this hour, how he carried them all, and what
+      he did with them.) Not the least among the Paron&rsquo;s causes for
+      self-gratulation was the non-appearance at his new abode of two local
+      newspapers, for which in an evil hour he subscribed, which were delivered
+      with unsparing regularity, and which, being never read, formed the keenest
+      reproach of his imprudent outlay and his idle neglect of their contents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic
+      vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some morning,
+      and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that there never
+      was any such city. There our race seems to be in earnest in nothing.
+      People sometimes work, but as if without any aim; they suffer, and you
+      fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark, standing so
+      solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pillars,
+      is not in the least gray with time&mdash;no grayer than a Greek lyric.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;All has suffered a sea-change
+    Into something rich and strange,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its
+      baptism in the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes for a little while
+      forget how marvelous she is, at any moment you may be startled into vivid
+      remembrance. The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and step by
+      step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads high up
+      to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine green and
+      purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching their heads
+      to look into the lofty windows,&mdash;blind long ago to their leafy
+      tenderness,&mdash;while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well,
+      with the beauty of the sculptor&rsquo;s soul wrought forever into the stone. Or
+      Venice lures you in a gondola into one of her remote canals, where you
+      glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under our
+      work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates of the
+      palaces stare at you in austere surprise, where the innumerable balconies
+      are full of the Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames, gossiping and
+      making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if the city&rsquo;s mood
+      is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very places where you
+      think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of your forgetfulness,
+      dares a wilder beauty, and enthralls with a yet more unearthly and
+      incredible enchantment. It is in the Piazza, and the Austrian band is
+      playing, and the promenaders pace solemnly up and down to the music, and
+      the gentle Italian loafers at Florian&rsquo;s brood vacantly over their little
+      cups of coffee, and nothing can be more stupid; when suddenly every thing
+      is changed, and a memorable tournament flashes up in many-glittering
+      action upon the scene, and there upon the gallery of the church, before
+      the horses of bronze, sit the Senators, bright-robed, and in the midst the
+      bonneted Doge with his guest Petrarch at his side. Or the old Carnival,
+      which had six months of every year to riot in, comes back and throngs the
+      place with motley company,&mdash;dominoes, harlequins, pantaloni,
+      illustrissimi and illustrissime, and perhaps even the Doge himself, who
+      has the right of incognito when he wears a little mask of wax at his
+      button-hole. Or may be the grander day revisits Venice when Doria has sent
+      word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia that he will listen to the
+      Senate when he has bridled the horses of Saint Mark,&mdash;and the whole
+      Republic of rich and poor crowds the square, demanding the release of
+      Pisani, who comes forth from his prison to create victory from the dust of
+      the crumbling commonwealth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for
+      your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay, what
+      potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she will,
+      than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal? Launched upon this great S
+      have I not seen hardened travelers grow sentimental, and has not this
+      prodigious sybillant, in my hearing, inspired white-haired Puritan
+      ministers of the gospel to attempt to quote out of the guide-book &ldquo;that
+      line from Byron&rdquo;? Upon my word, I have sat beside wandering editors in
+      their gondolas, and witnessed the expulsion of the newspaper from their
+      nature, while, lulled by the fascination of the place, they were powerless
+      to take their own journals from their pockets, and instead of politics
+      talked some bewildered nonsense about coming back with their families next
+      summer. For myself, I must count as half-lost the year spent in Venice
+      before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There alone can existence have
+      the perfect local flavor. But by what witchery touched one&rsquo;s being suffers
+      the common sea-change, till life at last seems to ebb and flow with the
+      tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it would be idle to attempt to
+      tell. I can only take you to our dear little balcony at Casa Falier, and
+      comment not very coherently on the scene upon the water under us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I am sure (since it is either in the spring or the fall) you will not
+      be surprised to see, the first thing, a boat-load of those English, who go
+      by from the station to their hotels, every day, in well-freighted
+      gondolas. These parties of traveling Englishry are all singularly alike,
+      from the &ldquo;Pa&rsquo;ty&rdquo; traveling alone with his opera-glass and satchel, to the
+      party which fills a gondola with well-cushioned English middle age, ruddy
+      English youth, and substantial English baggage. We have learnt to know
+      them all very well: the father and the mother sit upon the back seat, and
+      their comely girls at the sides and front. These girls all have the honest
+      cabbage-roses of English health upon their cheeks; they all wear little
+      rowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls of hair tumble upon their
+      broad English backs. They are coming from Switzerland and Germany, and
+      they are going south to Rome and to Naples, and they always pause at
+      Venice a few days. To-morrow we shall see them in the Piazza, and at
+      Florian&rsquo;s, and St. Mark&rsquo;s, and the Ducal Palace; and the young ladies will
+      cross the Bridge of Sighs, and will sentimentally feed the vagabond
+      pigeons of St. Mark which loaf about the Piazza and defile the sculptures.
+      But now our travelers are themselves very hungry, and are more anxious
+      than Americans can understand about the table-d&rsquo;hôte of their hotel. It is
+      perfectly certain that if they fall into talk there with any of our
+      nation, the respectable English father will remark that this war in
+      America is a very sad war, and will ask to know when it will all end. The
+      truth is, Americans do not like these people, and I believe there is no
+      love lost on the other side. But, in many things, they are travelers to be
+      honored, if not liked: they voyage through all countries, and without
+      awaking fervent affection in any land through which they pass; but their
+      sterling honesty and truth have made the English tongue a draft upon the
+      unlimited confidence of the continental peoples, and French, Germans, and
+      Italians trust and respect private English faith as cordially as they hate
+      public English perfidy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They come to Venice chiefly in the autumn, and October is the month of the
+      Sunsets and the English. The former are best seen from the Public Gardens,
+      whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind the domes and
+      towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the Redentore. Sometimes,
+      when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon is a fine thing; for then
+      the sun goes down into the water with a broad trail of bloody red behind
+      him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had dragged himself landward across
+      the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and died as he reached the land. But
+      we (upon whom the idleness of Venice grows daily, and from whom the
+      Gardens, therefore, grow farther and farther) are commonly content to take
+      our bit of sunset as we get it from our balcony, through the avenue opened
+      by the narrow canal opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a
+      little rainy, when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate
+      beauty&mdash;all tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little
+      palace on the corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the
+      Canalazzo, and from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an
+      airy balcony. When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that
+      pathetic and angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves
+      rich in the neighborhood of that part of the &ldquo;Palace of Art,&rdquo; whereon
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;The light aerial gallery, golden railed,
+    Burnt like a fringe of fire.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in not
+      seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists are always
+      painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is splendid over
+      and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon the
+      Grand Canal during the day. But in the hours just before the summer
+      twilight the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then you may see
+      whatever is left of Venetian gayety and looking down upon the groups in
+      the open gondolas may witness something of the home-life of the Italians,
+      who live out-of-doors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The groups do not vary a great deal one from another: inevitably the
+      pale-faced papa, the fat mamma, the over-dressed handsome young girls. We
+      learned to look for certain gondolas, and grew to feel a fond interest in
+      a very mild young man who took the air in company and contrast with a
+      ferocious bull-dog&mdash;boule-dogue he called him, I suppose. He was
+      always smoking languidly, that mild young man, and I fancied I could read
+      in his countenance a gentle, gentle antagonism to life&mdash;the
+      proportionate Byronic misanthropy, which might arise from sugar and water
+      taken instead of gin. But we really knew nothing about him, and our
+      conjecture was conjecture. Officers went by in their brilliant uniforms,
+      and gave the scene an alien splendor. Among these we enjoyed best the
+      spectacle of an old major, or perhaps general, in whom the arrogance of
+      youth had stiffened into a chill hauteur, and who frowned above his gray
+      overwhelming moustache upon the passers, like a citadel grim with battle
+      and age. We used to fancy, with a certain luxurious sense of our own
+      safety, that one broadside from those fortressed eyes could blow from the
+      water the slight pleasure-boats in which the young Venetian idlers were
+      innocently disporting. But again this was merely conjecture. The general&rsquo;s
+      glance may have had no such power. Indeed, the furniture of our apartment
+      sustained no damage from it, even when concentrated through an
+      opera-glass, by which means the brave officer at times perused our humble
+      lodging from the balcony of his own over against us. He may have been no
+      more dangerous in his way than two aged sisters (whom we saw every
+      evening) were in theirs. They represented Beauty in its most implacable
+      and persevering form, and perhaps they had one day been belles and could
+      not forget it. They were very old indeed, but their dresses were new and
+      their paint fresh, and as they glided by in the good-natured twilight, one
+      had no heart to smile at them. We gave our smiles, and now and then our
+      soldi, to the swarthy beggar, who, being short of legs, rowed up and down
+      the canal in a boat, and overhauled Charity in the gondolas. He was a
+      singular compromise, in his vocation and his equipment, between the
+      mendicant and corsair: I fear he would not have hesitated to assume the
+      pirate altogether in lonelier waters; and had I been a heavily laden
+      oyster-boat returning by night through some remote and dark canal, I would
+      have steered clear of that truculent-looking craft, of which the crew must
+      have fought with a desperation proportioned to the lack of legs and the
+      difficulty of running away, in case of defeat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market,
+      bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the main-land; and far into the
+      night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the boats was
+      company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out again, we
+      found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily happy in
+      haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved Venice,
+      kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet seemed to
+      rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At night sometimes we saw from our balcony one of those <i>freschi</i>,
+      which once formed the chief splendor of festive occasions in Venice, and
+      are peculiar to the city, where alone their fine effects are possible. The
+      fresco is a procession of boats with music and lights. Two immense barges,
+      illumined with hundreds of paper lanterns, carry the military bands; the
+      boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, and then the gondolas
+      of such citizens as choose to take part in the display,&mdash;though since
+      1859 no Italian, unless a government official, has been seen in the
+      procession. No gondola has less than two lanterns, and many have eight or
+      ten, shedding mellow lights of blue, and red, and purple, over uniforms
+      and silken robes. The soldiers of the bands breathe from their instruments
+      music the most perfect and exquisite of its kind in the world; and as the
+      procession takes the width of the Grand Canal in its magnificent course,
+      soft crimson flushes play upon the old, weather-darkened palaces, and die
+      tenderly away, giving to light and then to shadow the opulent sculptures
+      of pillar, and arch, and spandrel, and weirdly illuminating the grim and
+      bearded visages of stone that peer down from doorway and window. It is a
+      sight more gracious and fairy than ever poet dreamed; and I feel that the
+      lights and the music have only got into my description by name, and that
+      you would not know them when you saw and heard them, from any thing I say.
+      In other days, people tell you, the fresco was much more impressive than
+      now. At intervals, rockets used to be sent up, and the Bengal lights,
+      burned during the progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers&rsquo; spectral
+      shadows, giant-huge, on the palace-walls. But, for my part, I do not care
+      to have the fresco other than I know it: indeed, for my own selfish
+      pleasure, I should be sorry to have Venice in any way less fallen and
+      forlorn than she is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever seen on the Grand Canal are
+      the great boats of the river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from
+      Chioggia, come up to the city with the swelling sea. They are built with a
+      pointed stern and bow rising with the sweep of a short curve from the
+      water high above the cabin roof, which is always covered with a straw
+      matting. Black is not the color of the gondolas alone, but of all boats in
+      Venetia; and these of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any one
+      of them might be sent to take King Arthur and bear him to Avilon, whither
+      I think most of them are bound. A path runs along either gunwale, on which
+      the men pace as they pole the boat up the canal,&mdash;her great sail
+      folded and lying with the prostrate mast upon the deck. The rudder is a
+      prodigious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly kind enough to wear
+      a red cap with a blue tassel, and to smoke. The other persons on board are
+      no less obliging and picturesque, from the dark-eyed young mother who sits
+      with her child in her arms at the cabin-door, to the bronze boy who
+      figures in play at her feet with a small yellow dog of the race already
+      noticed in charge of the fuel-boats from Dalmatia. The father of the
+      family, whom we take to be the commander of the vessel, occupies himself
+      gracefully in sitting down and gazing at the babe and its mother. It is an
+      old habit of mine, formed in childhood from looking at rafts upon the
+      Ohio, to attribute, with a kind of heart-ache, supreme earthly happiness
+      to the navigators of lazy river craft; and as we glance down upon these
+      people from our balcony, I choose to think them immensely contented, and
+      try, in a feeble, tacit way, to make friends with so much bliss. But I am
+      always repelled in these advances by the small yellow dog, who is rendered
+      extremely irascible by my contemplation of the boat under his care, and
+      who, ruffling his hair as a hen ruffles her feathers, never fails to bark
+      furious resentment of my longing.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0170}.jpg" alt="{0170}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0170}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Far different from the picture presented by this boat&rsquo;s progress&mdash;the
+      peacefulness of which even the bad temper of the small yellow dog could
+      not mar&mdash;was another scene which we witnessed upon the Grand Canal,
+      when one morning we were roused from our breakfast by a wild and
+      lamentable outcry. Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal
+      opposite at the same time, had struck together with a violence that shook
+      the boatmen to their inmost souls. One barge was laden with lime, and
+      belonged to a plasterer of the city; the other was full of fuel, and
+      commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival captains advanced toward the
+      bows of their boats, with murderous looks,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Con la test&rsquo;alta e con rabbiosa fame,
+    Sì che parea che l&rsquo;aer ne temesse,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with hands of deathful
+      challenge, while I looked on with that noble interest which the
+      enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other&rsquo;s heads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the storm burst in words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Figure of a pig!&rdquo; shrieked the Venetian, &ldquo;you have ruined my boat
+      forever!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog!&rdquo; returned the countryman, &ldquo;and it was
+      my right to enter the canal first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They then, after this exchange of insult, abandoned the main subject of
+      dispute, and took up the quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally
+      questioning the reputation of all their female relatives to the third and
+      fourth cousins, they defied each other as the offspring of assassins and
+      prostitutes. As the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats
+      asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and forth and hurled
+      opprobrium with a foamy volubility that quite left my powers of
+      comprehension behind. At last the townsman, executing a <i>pas seul</i> of
+      uncommon violence, stooped and picked up a bit of lime, while the
+      countryman, taking shelter at the stern of his boat, there attended the
+      shot. To my infinite disappointment it was not fired. The Venetian seemed
+      to have touched the climax of his passion in the mere demonstration of
+      hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the countryman the right
+      of way. The courage of the latter rose as the danger passed, and as far as
+      he could be heard, he continued to exult in the wildest excesses of
+      insult: &ldquo;Ah-heigh! brutal executioner! Ah, hideous headsman!&rdquo; <i>Da capo.</i>
+      I now know that these people never intended to do more than quarrel, and
+      no doubt they parted as well pleased as if they had actually carried
+      broken heads from the encounter. But at the time I felt affronted and
+      trifled with by the result, for my disappointments arising out of the
+      dramatic manner of the Italians had not yet been frequent enough to teach
+      me to expect nothing from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was some compensation for me&mdash;coming, like all compensation, a
+      long while after the loss&mdash;in the spectacle of a funeral procession
+      on the Grand Canal, which had a singular and imposing solemnity only
+      possible to the place. It was the funeral of an Austrian general, whose
+      coffin, mounted on a sable catafalco, was borne upon the middle boat of
+      three that moved abreast. The barges on either side bristled with the
+      bayonets of soldiery, but the dead man was alone in his boat, except for
+      one strange figure that stood at the head of the coffin, and rested its
+      glittering hand upon the black fall of the drapery. This was a man clad
+      cap-a-pie in a perfect suit of gleaming mail, with his visor down, and his
+      shoulders swept by the heavy raven plumes of his helm. As at times he
+      moved from side to side, and glanced upward at the old palaces, sad in the
+      yellow morning light, he put out of sight, for me, every thing else upon
+      the Canal, and seemed the ghost of some crusader come back to Venice, in
+      wonder if this city, lying dead under the hoofs of the Croat, were indeed
+      that same haughty Lady of the Sea who had once sent her blind old Doge to
+      beat down the pride of an empire and disdain its crown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      One summer morning the mosquitoes played for me with sleep, and won. It
+      was half-past four, and as it had often been my humor to see Venice at
+      that hour, I got up and sallied forth for a stroll through the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This morning walk did not lay the foundation of a habit of early rising in
+      me, but I nevertheless advise people always to get up at half-past four,
+      if they wish to receive the most vivid impressions, and to take the most
+      absorbing interest in every thing in the world. It was with a feeling
+      absolutely novel that I looked about me that morning, and there was a
+      breezy freshness and clearness in my perceptions altogether delightful,
+      and I fraternized so cordially with Nature that I do not think, if I had
+      sat down immediately after to write out the experience, I should have at
+      all patronized her, as I am afraid scribbling people have sometimes the
+      custom to do. I know that my feeling of brotherhood in the case of two
+      sparrows, which obliged me by hopping down from a garden wall at the end
+      of Calle Falier and promenading on the pavement, was quite humble and
+      sincere; and that I resented the ill-nature of a cat,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Whom love kept wakeful and the muse,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and who at that hour was spitefully reviling the morn from a window
+      grating. As I went by the gate of the Canonico&rsquo;s little garden, the
+      flowers saluted me with a breath of perfume,&mdash;I think the white
+      honey-suckle was first to offer me this politeness,&mdash;and the dumpy
+      little statues looked far more engaging than usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After passing the bridge, the first thing to do was to drink a cup of
+      coffee at the Caffè Ponte di Ferro, where the eyebrows of the waiter
+      expressed a mild surprise at my early presence. There was no one else in
+      the place but an old gentleman talking thoughtfully to himself on the
+      subject of two florins, while he poured his coffee into a glass of water,
+      before drinking it. As I lingered a moment over my cup, I was reinforced
+      by the appearance of a company of soldiers, marching to parade in the
+      Campo di Marte. Their officers went at their head, laughing and chatting,
+      and one of the lieutenants smoking a long pipe, gave me a feeling of
+      satisfaction only comparable to that which I experienced shortly afterward
+      in beholding a stoutly built small dog on the Ponte di San Moisè. The
+      creature was only a few inches high, and it must have been through some
+      mist of dreams yet hanging about me that he impressed me as having
+      something elephantine in his manner. When I stooped down and patted him on
+      the head, I felt colossal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On my way to the Piazza, I stopped in the church of Saint Mary of the
+      Lily, where, in company with one other sinner, I found a relish in the
+      early sacristan&rsquo;s deliberate manner of lighting the candles on the altar.
+      Saint Mary of the Lily has a façade in the taste of the declining
+      Renaissance. The interior is in perfect keeping, and all is hideous,
+      abominable, and abandoned. My fellow-sinner was kneeling, and repeating
+      his prayers. He now and then tapped himself absent-mindedly on the breast
+      and forehead, and gave a good deal of his attention to me as I stood at
+      the door, hat in hand. The hour and the place invested him with so much
+      interest, that I parted from him with emotion. My feelings were next
+      involved by an abrupt separation from a young English East-Indian, whom I
+      overheard asking the keeper of a caffè his way to the Campo di Marte. He
+      was a claret-colored young fellow, tall, and wearing folds of white muslin
+      around his hat. In another world I trust to know how he liked the parade
+      that morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I discovered that Piazza San Marco is every morning swept by troops of
+      ragged facchini, who gossip noisily and quarrelsomely together over their
+      work. Boot-blacks, also, were in attendance, and several followed my
+      progress through the square, in the vague hope that I would relent and
+      have my boots blacked. One peerless waiter stood alone amid the desert
+      elegance of Caffè Florian, which is never shut, day or night, from year to
+      year. At the Caffè of the Greeks, two individuals of the Greek nation were
+      drinking coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went upon the Molo, passing between the pillars of the Lion and the
+      Saint, and walked freely back and forth, taking in the glory of that
+      prospect of water and of vague islands breaking the silver of the lagoons,
+      like those scenes cunningly wrought in apparent relief on old Venetian
+      mirrors. I walked there freely, for though there were already many
+      gondoliers at the station, not one took me for a foreigner or offered me a
+      boat. At that hour, I was in myself so improbable, that if they saw me at
+      all, I must have appeared to them as a dream. My sense of security was
+      sweet, but it was false, for on going into the church of St. Mark, the
+      keener eye of the sacristan detected me. He instantly offered to show me
+      the Zeno Chapel; but I declined, preferring the church, where I found the
+      space before the high altar filled with market-people come to hear the
+      early mass. As I passed out of the church, I witnessed the partial awaking
+      of a Venetian gentleman who had spent the night in a sitting posture,
+      between the columns of the main entrance. He looked puffy, scornful, and
+      uncomfortable, and at the moment of falling back to slumber, tried to
+      smoke an unlighted cigarette, which he held between his lips. I found none
+      of the shops open as I passed through the Merceria, and but for myself,
+      and here and there a laborer going to work, the busy thoroughfare seemed
+      deserted. In the mere wantonness of power, and the security of solitude, I
+      indulged myself in snapping several door-latches, which gave me a pleasure
+      as keen as that enjoyed in boyhood from passing a stick along the pickets
+      of a fence. I was in nowise abashed to be discovered in this amusement by
+      an old peasant-woman, bearing at either end of a yoke the usual basket
+      with bottles of milk packed in straw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Entering Campo San Bartolomeo, I found trade already astir in that noisy
+      place; the voice of cheap bargains, which by noonday swells into an
+      intolerable uproar, was beginning to be heard. Having lived in Campo San
+      Bartolomeo, I recognized several familiar faces there, and particularly
+      noted among them that of a certain fruit-vender, who frequently swindled
+      me in my small dealings with him. He now sat before his stand, and for a
+      man of a fat and greasy presence, looked very fresh and brisk, and as if
+      he had passed a pleasant night.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0182}.jpg" alt="{0182}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0182}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      On the other side of the Rialto Bridge, the market was preparing for the
+      purchasers. Butchers were arranging their shops; fruit-stands, and stands
+      for the sale of crockery, and&mdash;as I must say for want of a better
+      word, if there is any&mdash;notions, were in a state of tasteful
+      readiness. The person on the steps of the bridge who had exposed his stock
+      of cheap clothing and coarse felt hats on the parapet, had so far
+      completed his preparations as to have leisure to be talking himself hot
+      and hoarse with the neighboring barber. He was in a perfectly good humor,
+      and was merely giving a dramatic flavor to some question of six soldi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the landings of the market-place squadrons of boats loaded with
+      vegetables were arriving and unloading. Peasants were building cabbages
+      into pyramids; collective squashes and cucumbers were taking a picturesque
+      shape; wreaths of garlic and garlands of onions graced the scene. All the
+      people were clamoring at the tops of their voices; and in the midst of the
+      tumult and confusion, resting on heaps of cabbage-leaves and garbage, men
+      lay on their bellies sweetly sleeping. Numbers of eating-houses were
+      sending forth a savory smell, and everywhere were breakfasters with bowls
+      of sguassetto. In one of the shops, somewhat prouder than the rest, a
+      heated brunette was turning sections of eel on a gridiron, and hurriedly
+      coqueting with the purchasers. Singularly calm amid all this bustle was
+      the countenance of the statue called the Gobbo, as I looked at it in the
+      centre of the market-place. The Gobbo (who is not a hunchback, either) was
+      patiently supporting his burden, and looking with a quiet, thoughtful
+      frown upon the ground, as if pondering some dream of change that had come
+      to him since the statutes of the haughty Republic were read aloud to the
+      people from the stone tribune on his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, it was a morning for thoughtful meditation; and as I sat at the
+      feet of the four granite kings shortly after, waiting for the gate of the
+      ducal palace to be opened, that I might see the girls drawing the water, I
+      studied the group of the Judgment of Solomon, on the corner of the palace,
+      and arrived at an entirely new interpretation of that Bible story, which I
+      have now wholly forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gate remained closed too long for my patience, and I turned away from
+      a scene momently losing its interest. The brilliant little shops opened
+      like hollyhocks as I went home; the swelling tide of life filled the
+      streets, and brought Venice back to my day-time remembrance, robbing her
+      of that keen, delightful charm with which she greeted my early morning
+      sense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE MOUSE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Wishing to tell the story of our Mouse, because I think it illustrates
+      some amusing traits of character in a certain class of Italians, I explain
+      at once that he was not a mouse, but a man so called from his wretched,
+      trembling little manner, his fugitive expression, and peaked visage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He first appeared to us on the driver&rsquo;s seat of that carriage in which we
+      posted so splendidly one spring-time from Padua to Ponte Lagoscuro. But
+      though he mounted to his place just outside the city gate, we did not
+      regard him much, nor, indeed, observe what a mouse he was, until the
+      driver stopped to water his horses near Battaglia, and the Mouse got down
+      to stretch his forlorn little legs. Then I got down too, and bade him
+      good-day, and told him it was a very hot day&mdash;for he was a mouse
+      apparently so plunged in wretchedness that I doubted if he knew what kind
+      of day it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I had spoken, he began to praise (in the wary manner of the Venetians
+      when they find themselves in the company of a foreigner who does not look
+      like an Englishman) the Castle of the Obiza near by, which is now the
+      country-seat of the ex-Duke of Modena; and he presently said something to
+      imply that he thought me a German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am not a German,&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As many excuses,&rdquo; said the Mouse sadly, but with evident relief; and then
+      began to talk more freely, and of the evil times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going all the way with us to Florence?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, signor, to Bologna; from there to Ancona.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you ever been in Venice? We are just coming from there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a beautiful place. Do you like it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sufficiently. But one does not enjoy himself very well there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I thought Venice interesting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sufficiently, signor. <i>Ma!</i>&rdquo; said the Mouse, shrugging his
+      shoulders, and putting on the air of being luxuriously fastidious in his
+      choice of cities, &ldquo;the water is so bad in Venice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter overcoat, and has no garment to
+      form a compromise with his shirt-sleeves, if he should wish to render the
+      weather more endurable by throwing off the surtout. In spite of his
+      momentary assumption of consequence, I suspect that his coat is in the
+      Monte di Pietà. It comes out directly that he is a ship-carpenter who has
+      worked in the Arsenal of Venice, and at the ship-yards in Trieste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there is no work any more. He went to Trieste lately to get a job on
+      the three frigates which the Sultan had ordered to be built there. <i>Ma!</i>
+      After all, the frigates are to be built in Marseilles instead. There is
+      nothing. And every thing is so dear. In Venetia you spend much and gain
+      little. Perhaps there is work at Ancona.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time the horses are watered; the Mouse regains his seat, and we
+      almost forget him, till he jumps from his place, just before we reach the
+      hotel in Rovigo, and disappears&mdash;down the first hole in the side of a
+      house, perhaps. He might have done much worse, and spent the night at the
+      hotel, as we did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning at four o&rsquo;clock, when we start, he is on the box again,
+      nibbling bread and cheese, and glancing furtively back at us to say good
+      morning. He has little twinkling black eyes, just like a mouse, and a
+      sharp moustache, and sharp tuft on his chin&mdash;as like Victor Emanuel&rsquo;s
+      as a mouse&rsquo;s tuft can be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cold morning air seems to shrivel him, and he crouches into a little
+      gelid ball on the seat beside the driver, while we wind along the Po on
+      the smooth gray road; while the twilight lifts slowly from the distances
+      of field and vineyard; while the black boats of the Po, with their gaunt
+      white sails, show spectrally through the mists; while the trees and the
+      bushes break into innumerable voice, and the birds are glad of another day
+      in Italy; while the peasant drives his mellow-eyed, dun oxen afield; while
+      his wife comes in her scarlet bodice to the door, and the children&rsquo;s faces
+      peer out from behind her skirts; while the air freshens, the east flushes,
+      and the great miracle is wrought anew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once again, before we reach the ferry of the Po, the Mouse leaps down and
+      disappears as mysteriously as at Rovigo. We see him no more till we meet
+      in the station on the other side of the river, where we hear him
+      bargaining long and earnestly with the ticket-seller for a third-class
+      passage to Bologna. He fails to get it, I think, at less than the usual
+      rate, for he retires from the contest more shrunken and forlorn than ever,
+      and walks up and down the station, startled at a word, shocked at any
+      sudden noise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For curiosity, I ask how much he paid for crossing the river, mentioning
+      the fabulous sum it had cost us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It appears that he paid sixteen soldi only. &ldquo;What could they do when a man
+      was in misery? I had nothing else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even while thus betraying his poverty, the Mouse did not beg, and we began
+      to respect his poverty. In a little while we pitied it, witnessing the
+      manner in which he sat down on the edge of a chair, with a smile of meek
+      desperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a more serious case when an artisan is out of work in the Old World
+      than one can understand in the New. There the struggle for bread is so
+      fierce and the competition so great; and, then, a man bred to one trade
+      cannot turn his hand to another as in America. Even the rudest and least
+      skilled labor has more to do it than are wanted. The Italians are very
+      good to the poor, but the tradesman out of work must become a beggar
+      before charity can help him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We, who are poor enough to be wise, consult foolishly together concerning
+      the Mouse. It blesses him that gives, and him that takes&mdash;this
+      business of charity. And then, there is something irresistibly relishing
+      and splendid in the consciousness of being the instrument of a special
+      providence! Have I all my life admired those beneficent characters in
+      novels and comedies who rescue innocence, succor distress, and go about
+      pressing gold into the palm of poverty, and telling it to take it and be
+      happy; and now shall I reject an occasion, made to my hand, for emulating
+      them in real life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I will give the Mouse five francs,&rdquo; I say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I will be prudent,&rdquo; I continue. &ldquo;I will not give him this money. I
+      will tell him it is a loan which he may pay me back again whenever he can.
+      In this way I shall relieve him now, and furnish him an incentive to
+      economy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I call to the Mouse, and he runs tremulously toward me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you friends in Ancona?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, signor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How much money have you left?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shows me three soldi. &ldquo;Enough for a coffee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So I give him the five francs, and explain my little scheme of making it a
+      loan, and not a gift; and then I give him my address.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He does not appear to understand the scheme of the loan; but he takes the
+      money, and is quite stunned by his good fortune. He thanks me absently,
+      and goes and shows the piece to the guards, with a smile that illumines
+      and transfigures his whole person. At Bologna, he has come to his senses;
+      he loads me with blessings, he is ready to weep; he reverences me, he
+      wishes me a good voyage, endless prosperity, and innumerable days; and
+      takes the train for Ancona.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, ah!&rdquo; I congratulate myself,&mdash;&ldquo;is it not a fine thing to be the
+      instrument of a special providence?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is pleasant to think of the Mouse during all that journey, and if we
+      are never so tired, it rests us to say, &ldquo;I wonder where the Mouse is by
+      this time?&rdquo; When we get home, and coldly count up our expenses, we rejoice
+      in the five francs lent to the Mouse. &ldquo;And I know he will pay it back if
+      ever he can,&rdquo; I say. &ldquo;That was a Mouse of integrity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Two weeks later comes a comely young woman, with a young child&mdash;a
+      child strong on its legs, a child which tries to open every thing in the
+      room, which wants to pull the cloth off the table, to throw itself out of
+      the open window&mdash;a child of which I have never seen the peer for
+      restlessness and curiosity. This young woman has been directed to call on
+      me as a person likely to pay her way to Ferrara. &ldquo;But who sent you? But,
+      in fine, why should I pay your way to Ferrara? I have never seen you
+      before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My husband, whom you benefited on his way to Ancona, sent me. Here is his
+      letter and the card you gave him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I call out to my fellow-victim,&mdash;&ldquo;My dear, here is news of the
+      Mouse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t <i>tell</i> me he&rsquo;s sent you that money already!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. He has sent me his wife and child, that I may forward them to
+      him at Ferrara, out of my goodness, and the boundless prosperity which has
+      followed his good wishes&mdash;I, who am a great signor in his eyes, and
+      an insatiable giver of five-franc pieces&mdash;the instrument of a
+      perpetual special providence. The Mouse has found work at Ferrara, and his
+      wife comes here from Trieste. As for the rest, I am to send her to him, as
+      I said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are deceived,&rdquo; I say solemnly to the Mouse&rsquo;s wife. &ldquo;I am not a rich
+      man. I lent your husband five francs because he had nothing. I am sorry
+      but I cannot spare twenty florins to send you to Ferrara. If <i>one</i>
+      will help you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks the same,&rdquo; said the young woman, who was well dressed enough; and
+      blessed me, and gathered up her child, and went her way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But her blessing did not lighten my heart, depressed and troubled by so
+      strange an end to my little scheme of a beneficent loan. After all,
+      perhaps the Mouse may have been as keenly disappointed as myself. With the
+      ineradicable idea of the Italians, that persons who speak English are
+      wealthy by nature, and <i>tutti originali</i>, it was not such an absurd
+      conception of the case to suppose that if I had lent him five francs once,
+      I should like to do it continually. Perhaps he may yet pay back the loan
+      with usury. But I doubt it. In the mean time, I am far from blaming the
+      Mouse. I merely feel that there is a misunderstanding, which I can pardon
+      if he can.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      CHURCHES AND PICTURES.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      One day in the gallery of the Venetian Academy a family party of the
+      English, whom we had often seen from our balcony in their gondolas, were
+      kind enough to pause before Titian&rsquo;s John the Baptist. It was attention
+      that the picture could scarcely demand in strict justice, for it hangs at
+      the end of a suite of smaller rooms through which visitors usually return
+      from the great halls, spent with looking at much larger paintings. As
+      these people stood gazing at the sublime figure of the Baptist,&mdash;one
+      of the most impressive, if not the most religious, that the master has
+      painted,&mdash;and the wild and singular beauty of the landscape made
+      itself felt through the infinite depths of their respectability, the
+      father of the family and the head of the group uttered approval of the
+      painter&rsquo;s conception: &ldquo;Quite my idea of the party&rsquo;s character,&rdquo; he said;
+      and then silently and awfully led his domestic train away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am so far from deriding the criticism of this honest gentleman that I
+      would wish to have equal sincerity and boldness in saying what I thought&mdash;if
+      I really thought any thing at all&mdash;concerning the art which I spent
+      so great a share of my time at Venice in looking at. But I fear I should
+      fall short of the terseness as well as the candor I applaud, and should
+      presently find myself tediously rehearsing criticisms which I neither
+      respect for their honesty, nor regard for their justice. It is the sad
+      fortune of him who desires to arrive at full perception of the true and
+      beautiful in art, to find that critics have no agreement except upon a few
+      loose general principles; and that among the artists, to whom he turns in
+      his despair, no two think alike concerning the same master, while his own
+      little learning has made him distrust his natural likings and mislikings.
+      Ruskin is undoubtedly the best guide you can have in your study of the
+      Venetian painters; and after reading him, and suffering confusion and
+      ignominy from his theories and egotisms, the exercises by which you are
+      chastised into admission that he has taught you any thing cannot fail to
+      end in a humility very favorable to your future as a Christian. But even
+      in this subdued state you must distrust the methods by which he pretends
+      to relate the aesthetic truths you perceive to certain civil and religious
+      conditions: you scarcely understand how Tintoretto, who genteelly disdains
+      (on one page) to paint well any person baser than a saint or senator, and
+      with whom &ldquo;exactly in proportion to the dignity of the character is the
+      beauty of the painting,&rdquo;&mdash;comes (on the next page) to paint a very
+      &ldquo;weak, mean, and painful&rdquo; figure of Christ; and knowing a little the loose
+      lives of the great Venetian painters, you must reject, with several other
+      humorous postulates, the idea that good colorists are better men than bad
+      colorists. Without any guide, I think, these painters may be studied and
+      understood, up to a certain point, by one who lives in the atmosphere of
+      their art at Venice, and who, insensibly breathing in its influence,
+      acquires a feeling for it which all the critics in the world could not
+      impart where the works themselves are not to be seen. I am sure that no
+      one strange to the profession of artist ever received a just notion of any
+      picture by reading the most accurate and faithful description of it:
+      stated dimensions fail to convey ideas of size; adjectives are not
+      adequate to the ideas of movement; and the names of the colors, however
+      artfully and vividly introduced and repeated, cannot tell the reader of a
+      painter&rsquo;s coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian&rsquo;s &ldquo;Assumption&rdquo; is
+      like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any one who has seen
+      it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning critic describe
+      intelligibly the difference between the styles of Titian, of Tintoretto,
+      and of Paolo Veronese,&mdash;that difference which no one with the
+      slightest feeling for art can fail to discern after looking thrice at
+      their works? It results from all this that I must believe special
+      criticisms on art to have their small use only in the presence of the
+      works they discuss. This is my sincere belief, and I could not, in any
+      honesty, lumber my pages with descriptions or speculations which would be
+      idle to most readers, even if I were a far wiser judge of art than I
+      affect to be. As it is, doubting if I be gifted in that way at all, I
+      think I may better devote myself to discussion of such things in Venice as
+      can be understood by comparison with things elsewhere, and so rest happy
+      in the thought that I have thrown no additional darkness on any of the
+      pictures half obscured now by the religious dimness of the Venetian
+      churches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubt, analogous to that expressed, has already made me hesitate to spend
+      the reader&rsquo;s patience upon many well-known wonders of Venice; and, looking
+      back over the preceding chapters, I find that some of the principal
+      edifices of the city have scarcely got into my book even by name. It is
+      possible that the reader, after all, loses nothing by this; but I should
+      regret it, if it seemed ingratitude to that expression of the beautiful
+      which beguiled many dull hours for me, and kept me company in many
+      lonesome ones. For kindnesses of this sort, indeed, I am under obligations
+      to edifices in every part of the city; and there is hardly a bit of
+      sculptured stone in the Ducal Palace to which I do not owe some pleasant
+      thought or harmless fancy. Yet I am shy of endeavoring in my gratitude to
+      transmute the substance of the Ducal Palace into some substance that shall
+      be sensible to the eyes that look on this print; and I forgive myself the
+      reluctance the more readily when I remember how, just after reading Mr.
+      Ruskin&rsquo;s description of St. Mark&rsquo;s Church, I, who had seen it every day
+      for three years, began to have dreadful doubts of its existence.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0200}.jpg" alt="{0200}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0200}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      To be sure, this was only for a moment, and I do not think all the
+      descriptive talent in the world could make me again doubt St. Mark&rsquo;s,
+      which I remember with no less love than veneration. This church indeed has
+      a beauty which touches and wins all hearts, while it appeals profoundly to
+      the religious sentiment. It is as if there were a sheltering friendliness
+      in its low-hovering domes and arches, which lures and caresses while it
+      awes; as if here, where the meekest soul feels welcome and protection, the
+      spirit oppressed with the heaviest load of sin might creep nearest to
+      forgiveness, hiding the anguish of its repentance in the temple&rsquo;s dim
+      cavernous recesses, faintly starred with mosaic, and twilighted by
+      twinkling altar-lamps. Though the temple is enriched with incalculable
+      value of stone and sculpture, I cannot remember at any time to have been
+      struck by its mere opulence Preciousness of material has been sanctified
+      to the highest uses, and there is such unity and justness in the solemn
+      splendor, that wonder is scarcely appealed to. Even the priceless and
+      rarely seen treasures of the church&mdash;such as the famous golden
+      altarpiece, whose costly blaze of gems and gold was lighted in
+      Constantinople six hundred years ago&mdash;failed to impress me with their
+      pecuniary worth, though I
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Value the giddy pleasure of the eyes,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and like to marvel at precious things. The jewels of other churches are
+      conspicuous and silly heaps of treasure; but St. Mark&rsquo;s, where every line
+      of space shows delicate labor in rich material, subdues the jewels to
+      their place of subordinate adornment. So, too, the magnificence of the
+      Romish service seems less vainly ostentatious there. In other churches the
+      ceremonies may sometimes impress you with a sense of their grandeur, and
+      even spirituality, but they all need the effect of twilight upon them. You
+      want a foreground of kneeling figures, and faces half visible through
+      heavy bars of shadow; little lamps must tremble before the shrines; and in
+      the background must rise the high altar, all ablaze with candles from
+      vault to pavement, while a hidden choir pours music from behind, and the
+      organ shakes the heart with its heavy tones. But with the daylight on its
+      splendors even the grand function of the <i>Te Deum</i> fails to awe, and
+      wearies by its length, except in St. Mark&rsquo;s alone, which is given grace to
+      spiritualize what elsewhere would be mere theatric pomp. [Footnote: The
+      cardinal-patriarch officiates in the Basilica San Marco with some
+      ceremonies which I believe are peculiar to the patriarchate of Venice, and
+      which consist of an unusual number of robings and disrobings, and putting
+      on and off of shoes. All this is performed with great gravity, and has, I
+      suppose, some peculiar spiritual significance. The shoes are brought by a
+      priest to the foot of the patriarchal throne, when a canon removes the
+      profane, out-of-door <i>chaussure</i>, and places the sacred shoes on the
+      patriarch&rsquo;s feet. A like ceremony replaces the patriarch&rsquo;s every-day
+      gaiters, and the pious rite ends.] The basilica, however, is not in every
+      thing the edifice best adapted to the Romish worship; for the incense,
+      which is a main element of the function, is gathered and held there in
+      choking clouds under the low wagon-roofs of the cross-naves.&mdash;Yet I
+      do not know if I would banish incense from the formula of worship even in
+      St. Mark&rsquo;s. There is certainly a poetic if not a religious grace in the
+      swinging censer and its curling fumes; and I think the perfume, as it
+      steals mitigated to your nostrils, out of the open church door, is the
+      reverendest smell in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The music in Venetian churches is not commonly very good: the best is to
+      be heard at St. Mark&rsquo;s, though the director of the choir always contrives
+      to make so odious a slapping with his <i>bâton</i> as nearly to spoil your
+      enjoyment. The great musical event of the year is the performance
+      (immediately after the <i>Festa del Redentore</i>) of the Soldini Masses.
+      These are offered for the repose of one Guiseppe Soldini of Verona, who,
+      dying possessed of about a million francs, bequeathed a part (some six
+      thousand francs) annually to the church of St. Mark, on conditions named
+      in his will. The terms are, that during three successive days, every year,
+      there shall be said for the peace of his soul a certain number of masses,&mdash;all
+      to be done in the richest and costliest manner. In case of delinquency,
+      the bequest passes to the Philharmonic Society of Milan; but the
+      priesthood of the basilica so strictly regard the wishes of the deceased
+      that they never say less than four masses over and above the prescribed
+      number. [Footnote: After hearing these masses, curiosity led me to visit
+      the <i>Casa di Ricovero</i>, in order to look at Soldini&rsquo;a will, and there
+      I had the pleasure of recognizing the constantly recurring fact, that
+      beneficent humanity is of all countries and religions. The Casa di
+      Ricovero is an immense edifice dedicated to the shelter and support of the
+      decrepit and helpless of either sex, who are collected there to the number
+      of five hundred. The more modern quarter was erected from a bequest by
+      Soldini; and eternal provision is also made by his will for ninety of the
+      inmates. The Secretary of the Casa went through all the wards and
+      infirmaries with me, and everywhere I saw cleanliness and comfort (and
+      such content as is possible to sickness and old age), without surprise;
+      for I had before seen the Civil Hospital of Venice, and knew something of
+      the perfection of Venetian charities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last we came to the wardrobe, where the clothes of the pensioners are
+      made and kept. Here we were attended by a little, slender, pallid young
+      nun, who exhibited the dresses with a simple pride altogether pathetic.
+      She was a woman still, poor thing, though a nun, and she could not help
+      loving new clothes. They called her Madre, who would never be it except in
+      name and motherly tenderness. When we had seen all, she stood a moment
+      before us, and as one of the coarse woolen lappets of her cape had hidden
+      it, she drew out a heavy crucifix of gold, and placed it in sight, with a
+      heavenly little ostentation, over her heart. Sweet and beautiful vanity!
+      An angel could have done it without harm, but she blushed repentance, and
+      glided away with downcast eyes Poor little mother!]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As there is so little in St. Mark&rsquo;s of the paltry or revolting character
+      of modern Romanism, one would form too exalted an idea of the dignity of
+      Catholic worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the sincerity and
+      nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown to the Romish faith of these times,
+      are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell upon the
+      present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith honors the
+      superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition in all its
+      proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the Renaissance
+      churches,&mdash;fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming spirit which
+      has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of religion; which has
+      made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has rendered the
+      population ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its friendship to
+      tyranny and its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life of the Church
+      that it may sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of this superstition
+      are the foolish and hideous dolls which people bow to in most of the
+      Venetian temples, and of which the most abominable is in the church of the
+      Carmelites. It represents the Madonna with the Child, elevated breast-high
+      to the worshipers. She is crowned with tinsel and garlanded with paper
+      flowers; she has a blue ribbon about her tightly corseted waist; and she
+      wears an immense spreading hoop. On her painted, silly face of wood, with
+      its staring eyes shadowed by a wig, is figured a pert smile; and people
+      come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs by a chain from her girdle,
+      and utter their prayers to her; while the column near which she sits is
+      hung over with pictures celebrating the miracles she has performed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on most altars of the
+      Virgin, and are no less interesting as works of art than as expressions of
+      hopeless superstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is dressed
+      in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited, is the
+      Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and hopeless
+      sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her interference.
+      You behold a carriage overturned and dragged along the ground by frantic
+      horses, and the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman in the carriage
+      about to be dashed into millions of pieces, when the havoc is instantly
+      arrested by this Madonna who breaks the clouds, leaving them with jagged
+      and shattered edges, like broken panes of glass, and visibly holds back
+      the fashionable lady and gentleman from destruction. It is the fashionable
+      lady and gentleman who have thus recorded their obligation; and it is the
+      mother, doubtless, of the little boy miraculously preserved from death in
+      his fall from the second-floor balcony, who has gratefully caused the
+      miracle to be painted and hung at the Madonna&rsquo;s shrine. Now and then you
+      also find offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in acknowledgment
+      of good crops which the Madonna has made to grow; and again you find rows
+      of silver hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her intercession has
+      caused to be purged. The greatest number of these, at any one shrine, is
+      to be seen in the church of San Nicolò dei Tolentini, where I should think
+      there were three hundred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna della Salute in pestilent
+      times, I do not take it to be very great when the health of the city is
+      good, if I may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in the church of
+      her name: it is true that on the annual holiday commemorative of her
+      interposition to save Venice from the plague, there is an immense
+      concourse of people there; but at other times I found the masses and
+      vespers slenderly attended, and I did not observe a great number of votive
+      offerings in the temple,&mdash;though the great silver lamp placed there
+      by the city, in memory of the Madonna&rsquo;s goodness during the visitation of
+      the cholera in 1849, may be counted, perhaps, as representative of much
+      collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb church, lording it over the
+      noblest breadth of the Grand Canal; and I do not know what it is saves it
+      from being as hateful to the eye as other temples of the Renaissance
+      architecture. But it has certainly a fine effect, with its twin belltowers
+      and single massive dome, its majestic breadth of steps rising from the
+      water&rsquo;s edge, and the many-statued sculpture of its façade. Strangers go
+      there to see the splendor of its high altar (where the melodramatic
+      Madonna, as the centre of a marble group, responds to the prayer of the
+      operatic Venezia, and drives away the haggard, theatrical Pest), and the
+      excellent Titians and the grand Tintoretto in the sacristy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Salute is one of the great show-churches, like that of San Giovanni e
+      Paolo, which the common poverty of imagination has decided to call the
+      Venetian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many famous tombs and
+      monuments. But there is only one Westminster Abbey; and I am so far a
+      believer in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose that vergers
+      are nowhere possible but in England. There would be nothing to say, after
+      Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San Giovanni e
+      Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them; I only wonder that, in speaking of
+      the bad art which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he failed to mention
+      the successful approach to its depraved feeling, made by the single figure
+      sitting on the case of a slender shaft, at the side of the first altar on
+      the right of the main entrance. I suppose this figure typifies Grief, but
+      it really represents a drunken woman, whose drapery has fallen, as if in
+      some vile debauch, to her waist, and who broods, with a horrible, heavy
+      stupor and chopfallen vacancy, on something which she supports with her
+      left hand upon her knee. It is a round of marble, and if you have the
+      daring to peer under the arm of the debauchee, and look at it as she does,
+      you find that it contains the bass-relief of a skull in bronze. Nothing
+      more ghastly and abominable than the whole thing can be conceived, and it
+      seemed to me the fit type of the abandoned Venice which produced it; for
+      one even less Ruskinian than I might have fancied that in the sculptured
+      countenance could be seen the dismay of the pleasure-wasted harlot of the
+      sea when, from time to time, death confronted her amid her revels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People go into the Chapel of the Rosary here to see the painting of
+      Titian, representing The Death of Peter Martyr. Behind it stands a
+      painting of equal size by John Bellini,&mdash;the Madonna, Child, and
+      Saints, of course,&mdash;and it is curious to study in the two pictures
+      those points in which Titian excelled and fell short of his master. The
+      treatment of the sky in the landscape is singularly alike in both, but
+      where the greater painter has gained in breadth and freedom, he has lost
+      in that indefinable charm which belonged chiefly to Bellini, and only to
+      that brief age of transition, of which his genius was the fairest flower
+      and ripest fruit. I have looked again and again at nearly every painting
+      of note in Venice, having a foolish shame to miss a single one, and having
+      also a better wish to learn something of the beautiful from them; but at
+      last I must say, that, while I wondered at the greatness of some, and
+      tried to wonder at the greatness of others, the only paintings which gave
+      me genuine and hearty pleasure were those of Bellini, Carpaccio, and a few
+      others of that school and time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every day we used to pass through the court of the old Augustinian convent
+      adjoining the church of San Stefano. It is a long time since the monks
+      were driven out of their snug hold; and the convent is now the
+      headquarters of the Austrian engineer corps, and the colonnade surrounding
+      the court is become a public thoroughfare. On one wall of this court are
+      remains&mdash;very shadowy remains indeed&mdash;of frescos painted by
+      Pordenone at the period of his fiercest rivalry with Titian; and it is
+      said that Pordenone, while he wrought upon the scenes of scriptural story
+      here represented, wore his sword and buckler, in readiness to repel an
+      attack which he feared from his competitor. The story is very vague, and I
+      hunted it down in divers authorities only to find it grow more and more
+      intangible and uncertain. But it gave a singular relish to our daily walk
+      through the old cloister, and I added, for my own pleasure (and chiefly
+      out of my own fancy, I am afraid, for I can nowhere localize the fable on
+      which I built), that the rivalry between the painters was partly a
+      love-jealousy, and that the disputed object of their passion was that fair
+      Violante, daughter of the elder Palma, who is to be seen in so many
+      pictures painted by her father, and by her lover, Titian. No doubt there
+      are readers will care less for this idleness of mine than for the fact
+      that the hard-headed German monk, Martin Luther, once said mass in the
+      adjoining church of San Stefano, and lodged in the convent, on his way to
+      Rome. The unhappy Francesco Carrara, last Lord of Padua, is buried in this
+      church; but Venetians are chiefly interested there now by the homilies of
+      those fervent preacher-monks, who deliver powerful sermons during Lent.
+      The monks are gifted men, with a most earnest and graceful eloquence, and
+      they attract immense audiences, like popular and eccentric ministers among
+      ourselves. It is a fashion to hear them, and although the atmosphere of
+      the churches in the season of Lent is raw, damp, and most uncomfortable,
+      the Venetians then throng the churches where they preach. After Lent the
+      sermons and church-going cease, and the sanctuaries are once more
+      abandoned to the possession of the priests, droning from the altars to the
+      scattered kneelers on the floor,&mdash;the foul old women and the young
+      girls of the poor, the old-fashioned old gentlemen and devout ladies of
+      the better class, and that singular race of poverty-stricken old men
+      proper to Italian churches, who, having dabbled themselves with holy
+      water, wander forlornly and aimlessly about, and seem to consort with the
+      foreigners looking at the objects of interest. Lounging young fellows of
+      low degree appear with their caps in their hands, long enough to tap
+      themselves upon the breast and nod recognition to the high-altar; and
+      lounging young fellows of high degree step in to glance at the faces of
+      the pretty girls, and then vanish. The droning ends, presently, and the
+      devotees disappear, the last to go being that thin old woman, kneeling
+      before a shrine, with a grease-gray shawl falling from her head to the
+      ground. The sacristan, in his perennial enthusiasm about the great picture
+      of the church, almost treads upon her as he brings the strangers to see
+      it, and she gets meekly up and begs of them in a whispering whimper. The
+      sacristan gradually expels her with the visitors, and at one o&rsquo;clock locks
+      the door and goes home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By chance I have got a fine effect in churches at the five o&rsquo;clock mass in
+      the morning, when the worshipers are nearly all peasants who have come to
+      market, and who are pretty sure, each one, to have a bundle or basket. At
+      this hour the sacristan is heavy with sleep; he dodges uncertainly at the
+      tapers as he lights and extinguishes them; and his manner to the
+      congregation, as he passes through it to the altar, is altogether rasped
+      and nervous. I think it is best to be one&rsquo;s self a little sleepy,&mdash;when
+      the barefooted friar at the altar (if it is in the church of the Scalzi,
+      say) has a habit of getting several centuries back from you, and of saying
+      mass to the patrician ghosts from the tombs under your feet and there is
+      nothing at all impossible in the Renaissance angels and cherubs in marble,
+      floating and fatly tumbling about on the broken arches of the altars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have sometimes been puzzled in Venice to know why churches should keep
+      cats, church-mice being proverbially so poor, and so little capable of
+      sustaining a cat in good condition; yet I have repeatedly found sleek and
+      portly cats in the churches, where they seem to be on terms of perfect
+      understanding with the priests, and to have no quarrel even with the
+      little boys who assist at mass. There is, for instance, a cat in the
+      sacristy of the Frari, which I have often seen in familiar association
+      with the ecclesiastics there, when they came into his room to robe or
+      disrobe, or warm their hands, numb with supplication, at the great brazier
+      in the middle of the floor. I do not think this cat has the slightest
+      interest in the lovely Madonna of Bellini which hangs in the sacristy; but
+      I suspect him of dreadful knowledge concerning the tombs in the church. I
+      have no doubt he has passed through the open door of Canova&rsquo;s monument,
+      and that he sees some coherence and meaning in Titian&rsquo;s; he has been all
+      over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro, and he knows whether the
+      griffins descend from their perches at the midnight hour to bite the naked
+      knees of the ragged black caryatides. This profound and awful animal I
+      take to be a blood relation of the cat in the church of San Giovanni e
+      Paolo, who sleeps like a Christian during divine service, and loves a
+      certain glorious bed on the top of a bench, where the sun strikes upon him
+      through the great painted window, and dapples his tawny coat with lovely
+      purples and crimsons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The church cats are apparently the friends of the sacristans, with whom
+      their amity is maintained probably by entire cession of the spoils of
+      visitors. In these, therefore, they seldom take any interest, merely
+      opening a lazy eye now and then to wink at the sacristans as they drag the
+      deluded strangers from altar to altar, with intense enjoyment of the
+      absurdity, and a wicked satisfaction in the incredible stories rehearsed.
+      I fancy, being Italian cats, they feel something like a national antipathy
+      toward those troops of German tourists, who always seek the
+      Sehenswürdigkeiten in companies of ten or twenty,&mdash;the men wearing
+      their beards, and the women their hoops and hats, to look as much like
+      English people as possible; while their valet marshals them forward with a
+      stream of guttural information, unbroken by a single punctuation point.
+      These wise cats know the real English by their &ldquo;Murrays;&rdquo; and I think they
+      make a shrewd guess at the nationality of us Americans by the speed with
+      which we pass from one thing to another, and by our national ignorance of
+      all languages but English. They must also hear us vaunt the superiority of
+      our own land in unpleasant comparisons, and I do not think they believe
+      us, or like us, for our boastings. I am sure they would say to us, if they
+      could, &ldquo;<i>Quando finirà mai quella guerra? Che sangue! che orrore</i>!&rdquo;
+       [Footnote: &ldquo;When will this war ever be ended? what blood! what horror!&rdquo; I
+      have often heard the question and the comment from many Italians who were
+      not cats.] The French tourist they distinguish by his evident skepticism
+      concerning his own wisdom in quitting Paris for the present purpose; and
+      the traveling Italian, by his attention to his badly dressed, handsome
+      wife, with whom he is now making his wedding trip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have found churches undergoing repairs (as most of them always are in
+      Venice) rather interesting. Under these circumstances, the sacristan is
+      obliged to take you into all sorts of secret places and odd corners, to
+      show you the objects of interest; and you may often get glimpses of
+      pictures which, if not removed from their proper places, it would be
+      impossible to see. The carpenters and masons work most deliberately, as if
+      in a place so set against progress that speedy workmanship would be a kind
+      of impiety. Besides the mechanics, there are always idle priests standing
+      about, and vagabond boys clambering over the scaffolding. In San Giovanni
+      e Paolo I remember we one day saw a small boy appear through an opening in
+      the roof, and descend by means of some hundred feet of dangling rope. The
+      spectacle, which made us ache with fear, delighted his companions so much
+      that their applause was scarcely subdued by the sacred character of the
+      place. As soon as he reached the ground in safety, a gentle, good-natured
+      looking priest took him by the arm and cuffed his ears. It was a scene for
+      a painter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Nothing can be fairer to the eye than these &ldquo;summer isles of Eden&rdquo; lying
+      all about Venice, far and near. The water forever trembles and changes,
+      with every change of light, from one rainbow glory to another, as with the
+      restless hues of an opal; and even when the splendid tides recede, and go
+      down with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the empurpled mud of
+      the shallows, all strewn with green, disheveled sea-weed. The lagoons have
+      almost as wide a bound as your vision. On the east and west you can see
+      their borders of sea-shore and main-land; but looking north and south,
+      there seems no end to the charm of their vast, smooth, all-but melancholy
+      expanses. Beyond their southern limit rise the blue Euganean Hills, where
+      Petrarch died; on the north loom the Alps, white with snow. Dotting the
+      stretches of lagoon in every direction lie the islands&mdash;now piles of
+      airy architecture that the water seems to float under and bear upon its
+      breast, now
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Sunny spots of greenery,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      with the bell-towers of demolished cloisters shadowily showing above their
+      trees;&mdash;for in the days of the Republic nearly every one of the
+      islands had its monastery and its church. At present the greater number
+      have been fortified by the Austrians, whose sentinel paces the
+      once-peaceful shores, and challenges all passers with his sharp &ldquo;<i>Halt!
+      Wer da</i>!&rdquo; and warns them not to approach too closely. Other islands
+      have been devoted to different utilitarian purposes, and few are able to
+      keep their distant promises of loveliness. One of the more faithful is the
+      island of San Clemente, on which the old convent church is yet standing,
+      empty and forlorn within, but without all draped in glossy ivy. After I
+      had learned to row in the gondolier fashion, I voyaged much in the lagoon
+      with my boat, and often stopped at this church. It has a curious feature
+      in the chapel of the Madonna di Loreto, which is built in the middle of
+      the nave, faced with marble, roofed, and isolated from the walls of the
+      main edifice on all sides. On the back of this there is a bass-relief in
+      bronze, representing the Nativity&mdash;a work much in the spirit of the
+      bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo; and one of the chapels has an
+      exquisite little altar, with gleaming columns of porphyry. There has been
+      no service in the church for many years; and this altar had a strangely
+      pathetic effect, won from the black four-cornered cap of a priest that lay
+      before it, like an offering. I wondered who the priest was that wore it,
+      and why he had left it there, as if he had fled away in haste. I might
+      have thought it looked like the signal of the abdication of a system; the
+      gondolier who was with me took it up and reviled it as representative of
+      <i>birbanti matricolati</i>, who fed upon the poor, and in whose expulsion
+      from that island he rejoiced. But he had little reason to do so, since the
+      last use of the place was for the imprisonment of refractory
+      ecclesiastics. Some of the tombs of the Morosini are in San Clemente&mdash;villanous
+      monuments, with bronze Deaths popping out of apertures, and holding marble
+      scrolls inscribed with undying deeds. Indeed, nearly all the decorations
+      of the poor old church are horrible, and there is one statue in it meant
+      for an angel, with absolutely the most lascivious face I ever saw in
+      marble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The islands near Venice are all small, except the Giudecca (which is
+      properly a part of the city), the Lido, and Murano. The Giudecca, from
+      being anciently the bounds in which certain factious nobles were confined,
+      was later laid out in pleasure-gardens, and built up with summer-palaces.
+      The gardens still remain to some extent; but they are now chiefly turned
+      to practical account in raising vegetables and fruits for the Venetian
+      market, and the palaces have been converted into warehouses and factories.
+      This island produces a variety of beggar, the most truculent and tenacious
+      in all Venice, and it has a convent of lazy Capuchin friars, who are
+      likewise beggars. To them belongs the church of the Redentore, which only
+      the Madonnas of Bellini in the sacristy make worthy to be seen,&mdash;though
+      the island is hardly less famed for this church than for the difficult
+      etymology of its name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the eastern extremity of the Giudecca lies the Island of San Giorgio
+      Maggiore, with Palladio&rsquo;s church of that name. There are some great
+      Tintorettos in the church, and I like the beautiful wood-carvings in the
+      choir. The island has a sad interest from the political prison into which
+      part of the old convent has been perverted; and the next island eastward
+      is the scarcely sadder abode of the mad. Then comes the fair and happy
+      seat of Armenian learning and piety, San Lazzaro, and then the Lido.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Lido is the sea-shore, and thither in more cheerful days the Venetians
+      used to resort in great numbers on certain holidays, called the Mondays of
+      the Lido, to enjoy the sea-breeze and the country scenery, and to lunch
+      upon the flat tombs of the Hebrews, buried there in exile from the
+      consecrated Christian ground. On a summer&rsquo;s day there the sun glares down
+      upon the sand and flat gravestones, and it seems the most desolate place
+      where one&rsquo;s bones might be laid. The Protestants were once also interred
+      on the Lido, but now they rest (apart from the Catholics, however) in the
+      cemetery of San Michele.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The island is long and narrow: it stretches between the lagoons and the
+      sea, with a village at either end, and with bath-houses on the beach,
+      which is everywhere faced with forts. There are some poor little trees
+      there, and grass,&mdash;things which we were thrice a week grateful for,
+      when we went thither to bathe. I do not know whether it will give the
+      place further interest to say, that it was among the tombs of the Hebrews
+      Cooper&rsquo;s ingenious Bravo had the incredible good luck to hide himself from
+      the <i>sbirri</i> of the Republic; or to relate that it was the habit of
+      Lord Byron to gallop up and down the Lido in search of that conspicuous
+      solitude of which the sincere bard was fond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day of the first summer I spent in Venice (three years of Venetian
+      life afterward removed it back into times of the remotest antiquity), a
+      friend and I had the now-incredible enterprise to walk from one end of the
+      Lido to the other,&mdash;from the port of San Nicolò (through which the
+      Bucintoro passed when the Doges went to espouse the Adriatic) to the port
+      of Malamocco, at the southern extremity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We began with that delicious bath which you may have in the Adriatic,
+      where the light surf breaks with a pensive cadence on the soft sand, all
+      strewn with brilliant shells. The Adriatic is the bluest water I have ever
+      seen; and it is an ineffable, lazy delight to lie and watch the fishing
+      sails of purple and yellow dotting its surface, and the greater ships
+      dipping down its utmost rim. It was particularly good to do this after
+      coming out of the water; but our American blood could not brook much
+      repose, and we got up presently, and started on our walk to the little
+      village of Malamocco, some three miles away. The double-headed eagle keeps
+      watch and ward from a continuous line of forts along the shore, and the
+      white-coated sentinels never cease to pace the bastions, night or day.
+      Their vision of the sea must not be interrupted by even so much as the
+      form of a stray passer; and as we went by the forts, we had to descend
+      from the sea-wall, and walk under it, until we got beyond the sentry&rsquo;s
+      beat. The crimson poppies grow everywhere on this sandy little isle, and
+      they fringe the edges of the bastions with their bloom, as if the
+      &ldquo;blood-red blossoms of war&rdquo; had there sprung from the seeds of battle sown
+      in old forgotten fights. But otherwise the forts were not very engaging in
+      appearance. A sentry-box of yellow and black, a sentry, a row of seaward
+      frowning cannon&mdash;there was not much in all this to interest us; and
+      so we walked idly along, and looked either to the city rising from the
+      lagoons on one hand, or the ships going down the sea on the other. In the
+      fields, along the road, were vines and Indian corn; but instead of those
+      effigies of humanity, doubly fearful from their wide unlikeness to any
+      thing human, which we contrive to scare away the birds, the devout
+      peasant-folks had here displayed on poles the instruments of the Passion
+      of the Lord&mdash;the hammer, the cords, the nails&mdash;which at once
+      protected and blessed the fields. But I doubt if even these would save
+      them from the New-World pigs, and certainly the fences here would not turn
+      pork, for they are made of a matting of reeds, woven together, and feebly
+      secured to tremulous posts. The fields were well cultivated, and the vines
+      and garden vegetables looked flourishing; but the corn was spindling, and
+      had, I thought, a homesick look, as if it dreamed vainly of wide ancestral
+      bottom-lands, on the mighty streams that run through the heart of the
+      Great West. The Italians call our corn <i>gran turco</i>, but I knew that
+      it was for the West that it yearned, and not for the East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt there were once finer dwellings than the peasants&rsquo; houses which
+      are now the only habitations on the Lido; and I suspect that a genteel
+      villa must formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we found
+      surmounted by broken statues of Venus and Diana. The poor goddesses were
+      both headless, and some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and they
+      looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering attitudes of the absurd period
+      of art to which they belonged: they extended their mutilated arms toward
+      the sea for pity, but it regarded them not; and we passed before them
+      scoffing at their bad taste, for we were hungry, and it was yet some
+      distance to Malamocco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This dirty little village was the capital of the Venetian islands before
+      King Pepin and his Franks burned it, and the shifting sands of empire
+      gathered solidly about the Rialto in Venice. It is a thousand years since
+      that time, and Malamocco has long been given over to fishermen&rsquo;s families
+      and the soldiers of the forts. We found the latter lounging about the
+      unwholesome streets; and the former seated at their thresholds, engaged in
+      those pursuits of the chase which the use of a fine-tooth comb would
+      undignify to mere slaughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a church at Malamocco, but it was closed, and we could not find
+      the sacristan; so we went to the little restaurant, as the next best
+      place, and demanded something to eat. What had the padrone? He answered
+      pretty much to the same effect as the innkeeper in &ldquo;Don Quixote,&rdquo; who told
+      his guests that they could have any thing that walked on the earth, or
+      swam in the sea, or flew in the air. We would take, then, some fish, or a
+      bit of veal, or some mutton chops. The padrone sweetly shrugged the
+      shoulders of apology. There was nothing of all this, but what would we say
+      to some liver or gizzards of chickens, fried upon the instant and ready
+      the next breath? No, we did not want them; so we compromised on some ham
+      fried in a batter of eggs, and reeking with its own fatness. The truth is,
+      it was a very bad little lunch we made, and nothing redeemed it but the
+      amiability of the smiling padrone and the bustling padrona, who served us
+      as kings and princes. It was a clean hostelry, though, and that was a
+      merit in Malamocco, of which the chief modern virtue is that it cannot
+      hold you long. No doubt it was more interesting in other times. In the
+      days when the Venetians chose it for their capital, it was a walled town,
+      and fortified with towers. It has been more than once inundated by the
+      sea, and it might again be washed out with advantage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the spring, two years after my visit to Malamocco, we people in Casa
+      Falier made a long-intended expedition to the island of Torcello, which is
+      perhaps the most interesting of the islands of the lagoons. We had talked
+      of it all winter, and had acquired enough property there to put up some
+      light Spanish castles on the desolate site of the ancient city, that, so
+      many years ago, sickened of the swamp air and died. A Count from Torcello
+      is the title which Venetian persiflage gives to improbable noblemen; and
+      thus even the pride of the dead Republic of Torcello has passed into
+      matter of scornful jest, as that of the dead Republic of Venice may
+      likewise in its day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we leave the riva of Casa Falier, we pass down the Grand Canal, cross
+      the Basin of St. Mark, and enter one of the narrow canals that intersect
+      the Riva degli Schiavoni, whence we wind and deviate southwestward till we
+      emerge near the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the Fondamenta Nuove.
+      On our way we notice that a tree, hanging over the water from a little
+      garden, is in full leaf, and at Murano we see the tender bloom of peaches
+      and the drifted blossom of cherry-trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we go by the Cemetery of San Michele, Piero the gondolier and Giovanna
+      improve us with a little solemn pleasantry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a small place,&rdquo; says Piero, &ldquo;but there is room enough for all
+      Venice in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is true,&rdquo; assents Giovanna, &ldquo;and here we poor folks become landholders
+      at last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At Murano we stop a moment to look at the old Duomo, and to enjoy its
+      quaint mosaics within, and the fine and graceful spirit of the <i>apsis</i>
+      without. It is very old, this architecture; but the eternal youth of the
+      beautiful belongs to it, and there is scarce a stone fallen from it that I
+      would replace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The manufacture of glass at Murano, of which the origin is so remote, may
+      be said to form the only branch of industry which still flourishes in the
+      lagoons. Muranese beads are exported to all quarters in vast quantities,
+      and the process of making them is one of the things that strangers feel
+      they must see when visiting Venice. The famous mirrors are no longer made,
+      and the glass has deteriorated in quality, as well as in the beauty of the
+      thousand curious forms it took. The test of the old glass, which is now
+      imitated a great deal, is its extreme lightness. I suppose the charming
+      notion that glass was once wrought at Murano of such fineness that it
+      burst into fragments if poison were poured into it, must be fabulous. And
+      yet it would have been an excellent thing in the good old toxicological
+      days of Italy; and people of noble family would have found a sensitive
+      goblet of this sort as sovereign against the arts of venomers as an
+      exclusive diet of boiled eggs. The city of Murano has dwindled from thirty
+      to five thousand in population. It is intersected by a system of canals
+      like Venice, and has a Grand Canal of its own, of as stately breadth as
+      that of the capital. The finer houses are built on this canal; but the
+      beautiful palaces, once occupied in <i>villeggiatura</i> by the noble
+      Venetians, are now inhabited by herds of poor, or converted into
+      glass-works. The famous Cardinal Bembo and other literati made the island
+      their retreat, and beautified it with gardens and fountains. Casa Priuli
+      in that day was, according to Venetian ideas, &ldquo;a terrestrial Paradise,&rdquo;
+       and a proper haunt of &ldquo;nymphs and demi-gods.&rdquo; But the wealth, the
+      learning, and the elegance of former times, which planted &ldquo;groves of
+      Academe&rdquo; at Murano, have passed away, and the fair pleasure-gardens are
+      now weed-grown wastes, or turned into honest cabbage and potato patches.
+      It is a poor, dreary little town, with an inexplicable charm in its decay.
+      The city arms are still displayed upon the public buildings (for Murano
+      was ruled, independently of Venice, by its own council); and the heraldic
+      cock, with a snake in its beak, has yet a lusty and haughty air amid the
+      ruin of the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The way in which the spring made itself felt upon the lagoon was full of
+      curious delight. It was not so early in the season that we should know the
+      spring by the first raw warmth in the air, and there was as yet no
+      assurance of her presence in the growth&mdash;later so luxuriant&mdash;of
+      the coarse grasses of the shallows. But somehow the spring was there,
+      giving us new life with every breath. There were fewer gulls than usual,
+      and those we saw sailed far overhead, debating departure. There was deeper
+      languor in the laziness of the soldiers of finance, as they lounged and
+      slept upon their floating custom houses in every channel of the lagoons;
+      and the hollow voices of the boatmen, yelling to each other as their wont
+      is, had an uncommon tendency to diffuse themselves in echo. Over all, the
+      heavens had put on their summer blue, in promise of that delicious weather
+      which in the lagoons lasts half the year, and which makes every other
+      climate seem niggard of sunshine and azure skies. I know we have beautiful
+      days at home&mdash;days of which the sumptuous splendor used to take my
+      memory with unspeakable longing and regret even in Italy;&mdash;but we do
+      not have, week after week, month after month, that
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Blue, unclouded weather,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      which, at Venice, contents all your senses, and makes you exult to be
+      alive with the inarticulate gladness of children, or of the swallows that
+      there all day wheel and dart through the air, and shriek out a delight too
+      intense and precipitate for song.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The island of Torcello is some five miles away from Venice, in the
+      northern lagoon. The city was founded far back in the troubled morning of
+      Christian civilization, by refugees from barbarian invasion, and built
+      with stones quarried from the ruins of old Altinum, over which Attila had
+      passed desolating. During the first ages of its existence Torcello enjoyed
+      the doubtful advantage of protection from the Greek emperors, but fell
+      afterward under the domination of Venice. In the thirteenth century the <i>debris</i>
+      of the river that emptied into the lagoon there began to choke up the
+      wholesome salt canals, and to poison the air with swampy malaria; and in
+      the seventeenth century the city had so dwindled that the Venetian <i>podestà</i>
+      removed his residence from the depopulated island to Burano,&mdash;though
+      the bishopric established immediately after the settlement of the refugees
+      at Torcello continued there till 1814, to the satisfaction, no doubt, of
+      the frogs and mosquitoes that had long inherited the former citizens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that I know little more of the history of Torcello than I found
+      in my guide-book. There I read that the city had once stately civic and
+      religious edifices, and that in the tenth century the Emperor
+      Porphorygenitus called it &ldquo;<i>magnum emporium Torcellanorum</i>.&rdquo; The
+      much-restored cathedral of the seventh century, a little church, a
+      building supposed to have been the public palace, and other edifices so
+      ruinous and so old that their exact use in other days is not now known,
+      are all that remain of the <i>magnum emporium</i>, except some lines of
+      moldering wall that wander along the canals, and through pastures and
+      vineyards, in the last imbecile stages of dilapidation and decay. There is
+      a lofty bell-tower, also, from which, no doubt, the Torcellani used to
+      descry afar off the devouring hordes of the barbarians on the main-land,
+      and prepare for defense. As their city was never actually invaded, I am at
+      a loss to account for the so-called Throne of Attila, which stands in the
+      grass-grown piazza before the cathedral; and I fear that it may really
+      have been after all only the seat which the ancient Tribunes of Torcello
+      occupied on public occasions. It is a stone arm-chair, of a rude
+      stateliness, and though I questioned its authenticity, I went and sat down
+      in it a little while, to give myself the benefit of a doubt in case Attila
+      had really pressed the same seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as our gondola touched the grassy shores at Torcello, Giovanna&rsquo;s
+      children, Beppi and Nina, whom we had brought with us to give a first
+      experience of trees and flowers and mother earth, leaped from the boat and
+      took possession of land and water. By a curious fatality the little girl,
+      who was bred safely amid the hundred canals of Venice, signalized her
+      absence from their perils by presently falling into the only canal in
+      Torcello, whence she was taken dripping, to be confined at a farm-house
+      during the rest of our stay. The children were wild with pleasure, being
+      absolutely new to the country, and ran over the island, plucking bouquets
+      of weeds and flowers by armsful. A rake, borne afield upon the shoulder of
+      a peasant, afterwhile fascinated the Venetian Beppi, and drew him away to
+      study its strange and wonderful uses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The simple inhabitants of Torcello came forth with gifts, or rather
+      bargains, of flowers, to meet their discoverers, and, in a little while,
+      exhausted our soldi. They also attended us in full force when we sat down
+      to lunch,&mdash;the old, the young men and maidens, and the little
+      children, all alike sallow, tattered, and dirty. Under these
+      circumstances, a sense of the idyllic and the patriarchal gave zest to our
+      collation, and moved us to bestow, in a splendid manner, fragments of the
+      feast among the poor Torcellani. Knowing the abstemiousness of Italians
+      everywhere, and seeing the hungry fashion in which the islanders clutched
+      our gifts and devoured them, it was our doubt whether any one of them had
+      ever experienced perfect repletion. I incline to think that a chronic
+      famine gnawed their entrails, and that they never filled their bellies but
+      with draughts of the east wind disdained of Job. The smaller among them
+      even scrambled with the dog for the bones, until a little girl was bitten,
+      when a terrific tumult arose, and the dog was driven home by the whole
+      multitude. The children presently returned. They all had that gift of
+      beauty which Nature seldom denies to the children of their race; but
+      being, as I said, so dirty, their beauty shone forth chiefly from their
+      large soft eyes. They had a very graceful, bashful archness of manner, and
+      they insinuated beggary so winningly, that it would have been impossible
+      for hungry people to deny them. As for us, having lunched, we gave them
+      every thing that remained, and went off to feast our enthusiasm for art
+      and antiquity in the cathedral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, I have not the least intention of describing it. I remember
+      best among its wonders the bearing of certain impenitents in one of the
+      mosaics on the walls, whom the earnest early artist had meant to represent
+      as suffering in the flames of torment. I think, however, I have never seen
+      complacence equal to that of these sinners, unless it was in the
+      countenances of the seven fat kine, which, as represented in the vestibule
+      of St. Mark&rsquo;s, wear an air of the sleepiest and laziest enjoyment, while
+      the seven lean kine, having just come up from the river, devour steaks
+      from their bleeding haunches. There are other mosaics in the Torcello
+      cathedral, especially those in the <i>apsis</i> and in one of the side
+      chapels, which are in a beautiful spirit of art, and form the widest
+      possible contrast to the eighteenth-century high altar, with its insane
+      and ribald angels flying off at the sides, and poising themselves in the
+      rope-dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly persons in the
+      decline of the Renaissance. The choir is peculiarly built, in the form of
+      a half-circle, with seats rising one above another, as in an amphitheatre,
+      and a flight of steps ascending to the bishop&rsquo;s seat above all,&mdash;after
+      the manner of the earliest Christian churches. The partition parapet
+      before the high altar is of almost transparent marble, delicately and
+      quaintly sculptured with peacocks and lions, as the Byzantines loved to
+      carve them; and the capitals of the columns dividing the naves are of
+      infinite richness. Part of the marble pulpit has a curious bass-relief,
+      said to be representative of the worship of Mercury; and indeed the
+      Torcellani owe much of the beauty of their Duomo to unrequited antiquity.
+      (They came to be robbed in their turn: for the opulence of their churches
+      was so great that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the severest
+      penalties had to be enacted against those who stole from them. No one will
+      be surprised to learn that the clergy themselves participated in these
+      spoliations; but I believe no ecclesiastic was ever lashed in the piazza,
+      or deprived of an eye or a hand for his offense.) The Duomo has the
+      peculiar Catholic interest, and the horrible fascination, of a dead
+      saint&rsquo;s mortal part in a glass case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An arcade runs along the facade of the cathedral, and around the side and
+      front of the adjoining church of Santa Fosca, which is likewise very old.
+      But we found nothing in it but a dusty, cadaverous stench, and so we came
+      away and ascended the campanile. From the top of this you have a view of
+      the lagoon, in all its iridescent hues, and of the heaven-blue sea. Here,
+      looking toward the main-land, I would have been glad to experience the
+      feelings of the Torcellani of old, as they descried the smoking advance of
+      Huns or Vandals. But the finer emotions are like gifted children, and are
+      seldom equal to occasions. I am ashamed to say that mine got no further
+      than Castle Bluebeard, with Lady Bluebeard&rsquo;s sister looking out for her
+      brothers, and tearfully responding to Lady B.&lsquo;s repeated and agonized
+      entreaty, &ldquo;O sister, do you see them yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old woman who had opened the door of the campanile was surprised into
+      hospitality by the sum of money we gave her, and took us through her house
+      (which was certainly very neat and clean) into her garden, where she
+      explained the nature of many familiar trees and shrubs to us poor
+      Venetians.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went back home over the twilight lagoon, and Giovanna expressed the
+      general feeling when she said: &ldquo;<i>Torsello xe beo&mdash;no si pol negar&mdash;la
+      campagna xe bea; ma, benedetta la mia Venezia!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (The country is beautiful&mdash;it can&rsquo;t be denied&mdash;Torcello is
+      beautiful; but blessed be my Venice!)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The panorama of the southern lagoon is best seen in a voyage to Chioggia,
+      or Ciozza, the quaint and historic little city that lies twenty miles away
+      from Venice, at one of the ports of the harbor. The Giant Sea-wall, built
+      there by the Republic in her decline, is a work of Roman grandeur, which
+      impresses you more deeply than any other monument of the past with a sense
+      of her former industrial and commercial greatness. Strips of village
+      border the narrow Littorale all the way to Chioggia, and on the right lie
+      the islands of the lagoon. Chioggia itself is hardly more than a village,&mdash;a
+      Venice in miniature, like Murano, with canals and boats and bridges. But
+      here the character of life is more amphibious than in brine-bound Venice;
+      and though there is no horse to be seen in the central streets of
+      Chioggia, peasants&rsquo; teams penetrate her borders by means of a long bridge
+      from the main-land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course Chioggia has passed through the customary vicissitudes of
+      Italian towns, and has been depopulated at divers times by pestilence,
+      famine, and war. It suffered cruelly in the war with the Genoese in 1380,
+      when it was taken by those enemies of St. Mark; and its people were so
+      wasted by the struggle that the Venetians, on regaining it, were obliged
+      to invite immigration to repopulate its emptiness. I do not know how great
+      comfort the Chiozzotti of that unhappy day took in the fact that some of
+      the earliest experiments with cannon were made in the contest that
+      destroyed them, but I can hardly offer them less tribute than to mention
+      it here. At present the place is peopled almost entirely by sailors and
+      fishermen, whose wives are more famous for their beauty than their
+      amiability. Goldoni&rsquo;s &ldquo;Baruffe Chiozzotte&rdquo; is an amusing and vivid picture
+      of the daily battles which the high-spirited ladies of the city fought in
+      the dramatist&rsquo;s [Footnote: Goldoni&rsquo;s family went from Venice to Chioggia
+      when the dramatist was very young. The description of his life there form
+      some of the most interesting chapters of his Memoirs.] time, and which are
+      said to be of frequent occurrence at this day. The Chiozzotte are the only
+      women of this part of Italy who still preserve a semblance of national
+      costume; and this remnant of more picturesque times consists merely of a
+      skirt of white, which, being open in front, is drawn from the waist over
+      the head and gathered in the hand under the chin, giving to the flashing
+      black eyes and swarthy features of the youthful wearer a look of very
+      dangerous slyness and cunning. The dialect of the Chiozzotti is said to be
+      that of the early Venetians, with an admixture of Greek, and it is
+      infinitely more sweet and musical than the dialect now spoken in Venice.
+      &ldquo;Whether derived,&rdquo; says the author of the &ldquo;Fiore di Venezia,&rdquo; alluding to
+      the speech of these peculiar people, &ldquo;from those who first settled these
+      shores, or resulting from other physical and moral causes, it is certain
+      that the tone of the voice is here more varied and powerful: the mouth is
+      thrown wide open in speaking; a passion, a lament mingles with laughter
+      itself, and there is a continual <i>ritornello</i> of words previously
+      spoken. But this speech is full of energy; whoever would study brief and
+      strong modes of expression should come here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chioggia was once the residence of noble and distinguished persons, among
+      whom was the painter Rosalba Carrera, famed throughout Europe for her
+      crayon miniatures; and the place produced in the sixteenth century the
+      great maestro Giuseppe Zarlino, &ldquo;who passes,&rdquo; says Cantù, &ldquo;for the
+      restorer of modern music,&rdquo; and &ldquo;whose &lsquo;Orfeo&rsquo; heralded the invention of
+      the musical drama.&rdquo; This composer claimed for his birthplace the doubtful
+      honor of the institution of the order of the Capuchins, which he declared
+      to have been founded by Fra Paolo (Giovanni Sambi) of Chioggia. There is
+      not much now to see in poor little Chioggia except its common people, who,
+      after a few minutes&rsquo; contemplation, can hardly interest any one but the
+      artist. There are no dwellings in the town which approach palatial
+      grandeur, and nothing in the Renaissance churches to claim attention,
+      unless it be an attributive Bellini in one of them. Yet if you have the
+      courage to climb the bell-tower of the cathedral, you get from its summit
+      the loveliest imaginable view of many-purpled lagoon and silver-flashing
+      sea; and if you are sufficiently acquainted with Italy and Italians to
+      observe a curious fact, and care to study the subject, you may note the
+      great difference between the inhabitants of Chioggia and those of
+      Palestrina,&mdash;an island divided from Chioggia by a half mile of
+      lagoon, and by quite different costume, type of face, and accent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just between Chioggia and the sea lies the lazy town of Sottomarina, and I
+      should say that the population of Sottomarina chiefly spent its time in
+      lounging up and down the Sea-wall; while that of Chioggia, when not
+      professionally engaged with the net, gave its leisure to playing <i>mora</i>
+      [Footnote: Mora is the game which the Italians play with their fingers,
+      one throwing out two, three, or four fingers, as the case may be, and
+      calling the number at the same instant. If (so I understood the game) the
+      player mistakes the number of fingers he throws out, he loses; if he hits
+      the number with both voice and fingers he wins. It is played with
+      tempestuous interest, and is altogether fiendish in appearance.] in the
+      shade, or pitilessly pursuing strangers, and offering them boats. For my
+      own part, I refused the subtlest advances of this kind which were made me
+      in Chiozzotto, but fell a helpless prey to a boatman who addressed me in
+      some words of wonderful English, and then rowed me to the Sea-wall at
+      about thrice the usual fare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These primitive people are bent, in their out-of-the-world, remote way,
+      upon fleecing the passing stranger quite as earnestly as other Italians,
+      and they naïvely improve every occasion for plunder. As we passed up the
+      shady side of their wide street, we came upon a plump little blond boy,
+      lying asleep on the stones, with his head upon his arm; and as no one was
+      near, the artist of our party stopped to sketch the sleeper. Atmospheric
+      knowledge of the fact spread rapidly, and in a few minutes we were the
+      centre of a general assembly of the people of Chioggia, who discussed us,
+      and the artist&rsquo;s treatment of her subject, in open congress. They handed
+      round the airy chaff as usual, but were very orderly and respectful,
+      nevertheless,&mdash;one father of the place quelling every tendency to
+      tumult by kicking his next neighbor, who passed on the penalty till, by
+      this simple and ingenious process, the guilty cause of the trouble was
+      infallibly reached and kicked at last. I placed a number of soldi in the
+      boy&rsquo;s hand, to the visible sensation of the crowd, and then we moved away
+      and left him, heading, as we went, a procession of Chiozzotti, who could
+      not make up their minds to relinquish us till we took refuge in a church.
+      When we came out the procession had disappeared, but all round the church
+      door, and picturesquely scattered upon the pavement in every direction,
+      lay boys asleep, with their heads upon their arms. As we passed laughing
+      through the midst of these slumberers, they rose and followed us with
+      cries of &ldquo;<i>Mi tiri zu! Mi tiri zu!</i>&rdquo; (Take me down! Take me down!)
+      They ran ahead, and fell asleep again in our path, and round every corner
+      we came upon a sleeping boy; and, indeed, we never got out of that
+      atmosphere of slumber till we returned to the steamer for Venice, when
+      Chioggia shook off her drowsy stupor, and began to tempt us to throw soldi
+      into the water, to be dived for by her awakened children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE ARMENIANS.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Among the pleasantest friends we made in Venice were the monks of the
+      Armenian Convent, whose cloistral buildings rise from the glassy lagoon,
+      upon the south of the city, near a mile away. This bulk
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Of mellow brick-work on an isle of bowers&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      is walled in with solid masonry from the sea, and encloses a garden-court,
+      filled with all beautiful flowers, and with the memorable trees of the
+      East; while another garden encompasses the monastery itself, and yields
+      those honest fruits and vegetables which supply the wants of the
+      well-cared-for mortal part of the good brothers. The island is called San
+      Lazzaro, and the convent was established in 1717 by a learned and devoted
+      Armenian priest named Mechithar, from whom the present order of monks is
+      called Mechitharist. He was the first who formed the idea of educating a
+      class of priests to act as missionaries among the Armenian nation in the
+      East, and infuse into its civil and religious decay the life of European
+      piety and learning. He founded at Sebaste, therefore, a religious order of
+      which the seat was presently removed to Constantinople, where the friars
+      met with so much persecution from Armenian heterodoxy that it was again
+      transferred, and fixed at Modone in Morea. That territory falling into the
+      hands of the Turks, the Mechitharists fled with their leader to Venice,
+      where the Republic bestowed upon them a waste and desolate island, which
+      had formerly been used as a place of refuge for lepers; and the monks made
+      it the loveliest spot in all the lagoons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little island has such a celebrity in travel and romance, that I feel
+      my pen catching in the tatters of a threadbare theme. And yet I love the
+      place and its people so well, that I could scarcely pass it without
+      mention. Every tourist who spends a week in Venice goes to see the
+      convent, and every one is charmed with it and the courteous welcome of the
+      fathers. Its best interest is the intrinsic interest attaching to it as a
+      seat of Armenian culture; but persons who relish the cheap sentimentalism
+      of Byron&rsquo;s life, find the convent all the more entertaining from the fact
+      that he did the Armenian language the favor to study it there, a little.
+      The monks show his autograph, together with those of other distinguished
+      persons, and the Armenian Bible which he used to read. I understood from
+      one of the friars, Padre Giacomo Issaverdanz, that the brothers knew
+      little or nothing of Byron&rsquo;s celebrity as a poet while he studied with
+      them, and that his proficiency as an Armenian scholar was not such as to
+      win high regard from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think most readers who have visited the convent will recall the pleasant
+      face and manners of the young father mentioned, who shows the place to
+      English-speaking travelers, and will care to know that Padre Giacomo was
+      born at Smyrna, and dwelt there in the family of an English lady, till he
+      came to Venice, and entered on his monastic life at San Lazzaro.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came one morning to breakfast with us, bringing with him Padre Alessio,
+      a teacher in the Armenian College in the city. As for the latter, it was
+      not without a certain shock that I heard Mesopotamia mentioned as his
+      birthplace, having somehow in childhood learned to regard that formidable
+      name as little better than a kind of profane swearing. But I soon came to
+      know Padre Alessio apart from his birthplace, and to find him very
+      interesting as a scholar and an artist. He threw a little grace of poetry
+      around our simple feast, by repeating some Armenian verses,&mdash;grace
+      all the more ethereal from our entire ignorance of what the verses meant.
+      Our breakfast-table talk wrought to friendship the acquaintance made some
+      time before, and the next morning we received the photograph of Padre
+      Giacomo, and the compliments of the Orient, in a heaped basket of ripe and
+      luscious figs from the garden of the Convent San Lazzaro. When, in turn,
+      we went to visit him at the convent, we had experience of a more curious
+      oriental hospitality. Refreshments were offered to us as to friends, and
+      we lunched fairily upon little dishes of rose leaves, delicately
+      preserved, with all their fragrance, in a &ldquo;lucent sirup.&rdquo; It seemed that
+      this was a common conserve in the East; but we could hardly divest
+      ourselves of the notion of sacrilege, as we thus fed upon the very most
+      luxurious sweetness and perfume of the soul of summer. Pleasant talk
+      accompanied the dainty repast,&mdash;Padre Giacomo recounting for us some
+      of his adventures with the people whom he had to show about the convent,
+      and of whom many were disappointed at not finding a gallery or museum, and
+      went away in extreme disgust; and relating with a sly, sarcastic relish
+      that blent curiously with his sweetness and gentleness of spirit, how some
+      English people once came with the notion that Lord Byron was an Armenian;
+      how an unhappy French gentleman, who had been robbed in Southern Italy,
+      would not be parted a moment from a huge bludgeon which he carried in his
+      hand, and (probably disordered by his troubles) could hardly be persuaded
+      from attacking the mummy which is in one of the halls; how a sharp,
+      bustling, go-ahead Yankee rushed in one morning, rubbing his hands, and
+      demanding, &ldquo;Show me all you can in five minutes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As a seat of learning, San Lazzaro is famed throughout the Armenian world,
+      and gathers under its roof the best scholars and poets of that nation. In
+      the printing-office of the convent books are printed in some thirty
+      different languages; and a number of the fathers employ themselves
+      constantly in works of translation. The most distinguished of the Armenian
+      literati now living at San Lazzaro is the Reverend Father Gomidas
+      Pakraduni, who has published an Armenian version of &ldquo;Paradise Lost,&rdquo; and
+      whose great labor the translation of Homer, has been recently issued from
+      the convent press. He was born at Constantinople of an ancient and
+      illustrious family, and took religious orders at San Lazzaro, where he was
+      educated, and where for twenty-five years after his consecration he held
+      the professorship of his native tongue. He devoted himself especially to
+      the culture of the ancient Armenian, and developed it for the expression
+      of modern ideas, he made exhaustive study of the vast collection of old
+      manuscripts at San Lazzaro, and then went to Paris in pursuance of his
+      purpose, and acquainted himself with all the treasures of Armenian
+      learning in the Bibliothèque Royale. He became the first scholar of the
+      age in his national language, and acquired at the same time a profound
+      knowledge of Latin and Greek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to Constantinople, Father Pakraduni, whose fame had preceded
+      him, took up his residence in the family of a noble Armenian, high in the
+      service of the Turkish government; and while assuming the care of
+      educating his friend&rsquo;s children, began those labors of translation which
+      have since so largely employed him. He made an Armenian version of Pindar,
+      and wrote a work on Rhetoric, both of which were destroyed by fire while
+      yet in the manuscript. He labored, meanwhile, on his translation of the
+      Iliad,&mdash;a youthful purpose which he did not see fulfilled till the
+      year 1860, when he had already touched the Psalmist&rsquo;s limit of life. In
+      this translation he revived with admirable success an ancient species of
+      Armenian verse, which bears, in flexibility and strength, comparison with
+      the original Greek. Another of his great labors was the production of an
+      Armenian Grammar, in which he reduced to rule and order the numerous forms
+      of his native tongue, never before presented by one work in all its
+      eastern variety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Padre Giacomo, to whose great kindness I am indebted for a biographic and
+      critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by
+      that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises,
+      profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem
+      perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and the
+      Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began his work anew, and after eight
+      years gave his epic of twenty books and twenty-two thousand verses to the
+      press. The hero of the poem is Haïk, the first Armenian patriarch after
+      the flood, and the founder of a kingly dynasty. Nimrod, the great hunter,
+      drunk with his victories, declares himself a god, and ordains his own
+      worship throughout the Orient. Haïk refuses to obey the commands of the
+      tyrant, takes up arms against him, and finally kills him in battle. &ldquo;In
+      the style of this poem,&rdquo; writes Padre Giacomo, &ldquo;it is hard to tell whether
+      to admire most its richness, its energy, its sweetness, its melancholy,
+      its freedom, its dignity, or its harmony, for it has all these virtues in
+      turn. The descriptive parts are depicted with the faithfulest pencil: the
+      battle scenes can only be matched in the Iliad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Pakraduni returned, after twenty-five years&rsquo; sojourn at
+      Constantinople, to publish his epic at San Lazzaro, where he still lives,
+      a tranquil, gentle old man, with a patriarchal beauty and goodness of
+      face. In 1861 he printed his translation of Milton, with a dedication to
+      Queen Victoria. His other works bear witness to the genuineness of his
+      inspiration and piety, and the diligence of his study: they are poems,
+      poetic translations from the Italian, religious essays, and grammatical
+      treatises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, the existence of all the friars at San Lazzaro is one of close and
+      earnest study; and life grows so fond of these quiet monks that it will
+      hardly part with them at last. One of them is ninety-five years old, and,
+      until 1863, there was a lay-brother among them whose years numbered a
+      hundred and eight, and who died of old age, on the 17th of September,
+      after passing fifty-eight years at San Lazzaro. From biographic memoranda
+      furnished me by Padre Giacomo, I learn that the name of this patriarch was
+      George Karabagiak, and that he was a native of Kutaieh in Asia Minor. He
+      was for a long time the disciple of Dèdè Vartabied, a renowned preacher of
+      the Armenian faith, and he afterward taught the doctrines of his master in
+      the Armenian schools. Failing in his desire to enter upon the sacerdotal
+      life at Constantinople, he procured his admission as lay-brother at San
+      Lazzaro, where all his remaining days were spent. He was but little
+      learned; but he had great passion for poetry, and he was the author of
+      some thirty small works on different subjects. During the course of his
+      long and diligent life, which was chiefly spent in learning and teaching,
+      he may be said to have hardly known a day&rsquo;s sickness. And at last he died
+      of no perceptible disorder. The years tired him to death. He had a
+      trifling illness in August, and as he convalesced, he grew impatient of
+      the tenacious life which held him to earth. Slowly pacing up and down the
+      corridors of the convent, he used to crave the prayers of the brothers
+      whom he met, beseeching them to intercede with Heaven that he might be
+      suffered to die. One day he said to the archbishop, &ldquo;I fear that God has
+      abandoned me, and I shall live.&rdquo; Only a little while before his death he
+      wrote some verses, as Padre Giacomo&rsquo;s memorandum witnesses, &ldquo;with a firm
+      and steady hand,&rdquo; and the manner of his death was this,&mdash;as recorded
+      in the grave and simple words of my friend&rsquo;s note:&mdash;&ldquo;Finally, on the
+      17th of September, very early in the morning, a brother entering his
+      chamber, asked him how he was. &lsquo;Well,&rsquo; he replied, turning his face to the
+      wall, and spoke no more. He had passed to a better life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems to me there is a pathos in the close of this old man&rsquo;s life,&mdash;which
+      I hope has not been lost by my way of describing it,&mdash;and there is
+      certainly a moral. I have read of an unlucky sage who discovered the
+      Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renewing his existence, at last
+      voluntarily resigned himself to death, because he had exhausted all that
+      life had to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew all its vicissitudes
+      but the very last. Brother Karabagiak seems to have had no humor to take
+      even a second ease of life. It is perhaps as well that most men die before
+      reaching the over-ripeness of a hundred and eight years; and, doubtless,
+      with all our human willfulness and ignorance, we would readily consent, if
+      we could fix the time, to go sooner&mdash;say, at a hundred and seven
+      years, friends?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the Convent of San Lazzaro, where Armenian boys from all parts of
+      the East are educated for the priesthood, the nation has a college in the
+      city in which boys intended for secular careers receive their schooling.
+      The Palazzo Zenobia is devoted to the use of this college, where, besides
+      room for study, the boys have abundant space and apparatus for gymnastics,
+      and ample grounds for gardening. We once passed a pleasant summer evening
+      there, strolling through the fragrant alleys of the garden, in talk with
+      the father-professors, and looking on at the gymnastic feats of the boys;
+      and when the annual exhibition of the school took place in the fall, we
+      were invited to be present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room appointed for the exhibition was the great hall of the palace,
+      which in other days had evidently been a ball-room. The ceiling was
+      frescoed in the manner of the last century, with Cupids and Venuses, Vices
+      and Virtues, fruits and fiddles, dwarfs and blackamoors; and the painted
+      faces looked down on a scene of as curious interest as ever the
+      extravagant loves and graces of Tiepolo might hope to see, when the boys
+      of the college, after assisting at <i>Te Deum</i> in the chapel, entered
+      the room, and took their places.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the head of the hall sat the archbishop in his dark robes, with his
+      heavy gold chain about his neck&mdash;a figure and a countenance in all
+      things spiritual, gracious, and reverend. There is small difference, I
+      believe, between the creeds of the Armenians and the Roman Catholics, but
+      a very great disparity in the looks of the two priesthoods, which is all
+      in favor of the former. The Armenian wears his beard, and the Latin shaves&mdash;which
+      may have a great deal to do with the holiness of appearance. Perhaps,
+      also, the gentle and mild nature of the oriental yields more sweetly and
+      entirely to the self-denials of the ecclesiastical vocation, and thus wins
+      a fairer grace from them. At any rate, I have not seen any thing but
+      content and calm in the visages of the Armenian fathers, among whom the
+      priest-face, as a type, does not exist, though it would mark the Romish
+      ecclesiastic in whatever dress he wore. There is, moreover, a look of such
+      entire confidence and unworldly sincerity in their eyes, that I could not
+      help thinking, as I turned from the portly young fathers to the
+      dark-faced, grave, old-fashioned school-boys, that an exchange of beard
+      only was needed to effect an exchange of character between those youthful
+      elders and their pupils. The gray-haired archbishop is a tall and slender
+      man; but nearly all the fathers take kindly to curves and circles, and
+      glancing down a row of these amiable priests I could scarcely repress a
+      smile at the constant recurrence of the line of beauty in their
+      well-rounded persons.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0246}.jpg" alt="{0246}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0246}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      On the right and left of the archbishop were the few invited guests, and
+      at the other end of the saloon sat one of the fathers, the plump key-stone
+      of an arch of comfortable young students expanding toward us. Most of the
+      boys are from Turkey (the Armenians of Venice, though acknowledging the
+      Pope as their spiritual head, are the subjects of the Sultan), others are
+      of Asiatic birth, and two are Egyptians.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the last, I think the Sphinx and the Pyramid could hardly have
+      impressed me more than their dark faces, that seemed to look vaguely on
+      our modern world from the remote twilights of old, and in their very
+      infancy to be reverend through the antiquity of their race. The mother of
+      these boys&mdash;a black-eyed, olive-cheeked lady, very handsome and
+      stylish&mdash;was present with their younger brother. I hardly know
+      whether to be ashamed of having been awed by hearing of the little
+      Egyptian that his native tongue was Arabic, and that he spoke nothing more
+      occidental than Turkish. But, indeed, was it wholly absurd to offer a
+      tacit homage to this favored boy, who must know the &ldquo;Arabian Nights&rdquo; in
+      the original?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The exercises began with a theme in Armenian&mdash;a language which, but
+      for its English abundance of sibilants, and a certain German rhythm, was
+      wholly outlandish to our ears. Themes in Italian, German, and French
+      succeeded, and then came one in English. We afterward had speech with the
+      author of this essay, who expressed the liveliest passion for English, in
+      the philosophy and poetry of which it seemed he particularly delighted. He
+      told us that he was a Constantinopolitan, and that in six months more he
+      would complete his collegiate course, when he would return to his native
+      city, and take employment in the service of the Turkish Government. Many
+      others of the Armenian students here also find this career open to them in
+      the East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The literary exercises closed with another essay in Armenian; and then the
+      archbishop delivered, very gracefully and impressively, an address to the
+      boys. After this, the distribution of the premiums&mdash;medals of silver
+      and bronze, and books&mdash;took place at the desk of the archbishop. Each
+      boy, as he advanced to receive his premium, knelt and touched the hand of
+      the priest with his lips and forehead,&mdash;a quaint and pleasing
+      ceremony which had preceded and followed the reading of all the themes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The social greetings and congratulations that now took place ended an
+      entertainment throughout which every body was pleased, and the goodnatured
+      fathers seemed to be moved with a delight no less hearty than that of the
+      boys themselves. Indeed, the ground of affection and confidence on which
+      the lads and their teachers seemed to meet, was something very novel and
+      attractive. We shook hands with our smiling friends among the padri, took
+      leave of the archbishop, and then visited the studio of Padre Alessio, who
+      had just finished a faithful and spirited portrait of monsignore. Adieux
+      to the artist and to Padre Giacomo brought our visit to an end; and so,
+      from that scene of oriental learning, simplicity, and kindliness, we
+      walked into our western life once more, and resumed our citizenship and
+      burden in the Venetian world&mdash;out of the waters of which, like a
+      hydra or other water beast, a bathing boy instantly issued and begged of
+      us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few days later our good Armenians went to pass a month on the main-land
+      near Padua, where they have comfortable possessions. Peace followed them,
+      and they came back as plump as they went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      As I think it extremely questionable whether I could get through a chapter
+      on this subject without some feeble pleasantry about Shylock, and whether,
+      if I did, the reader would be at all satisfied that I had treated the
+      matter fully and fairly, I say at the beginning that Shylock is dead; that
+      if he lived, Antonio would hardly spit upon his gorgeous pantaloons or his
+      Parisian coat, as he met him on the Rialto; that he would far rather call
+      out to him, &ldquo;<i>Ció Shylock! Bon dí! Go piaser vederla;</i>&rdquo; [Footnote:
+      &ldquo;Shylock, old fellow, good-day. Glad to see you.&rdquo;] that if Shylock by any
+      chance entrapped Antonio into a foolish promise to pay him a pound of his
+      flesh on certain conditions, the honest commissary of police before whom
+      they brought their affair would dismiss them both to the madhouse at San
+      Servolo. In a word, the present social relations of Jew and Christian in
+      this city render the &ldquo;Merchant of Venice&rdquo; quite impossible; and the
+      reader, though he will find the Ghetto sufficiently noisome and dirty,
+      will not find an oppressed people there, nor be edified by any of those
+      insults or beatings which it was once a large share of Christian duty to
+      inflict upon the enemies of our faith. The Catholic Venetian certainly
+      understands that his Jewish fellow-citizen is destined to some very
+      unpleasant experiences in the next world, but <i>Corpo di Bacco</i>! that
+      is no reason why he should not be friends with him in this. He meets him
+      daily on exchange and at the Casino, and he partakes of the hospitality of
+      his conversazioni. If he still despises him&mdash;and I think he does, a
+      little&mdash;he keeps his contempt to himself, for the Jew is gathering
+      into his own hands great part of the trade of the city, and has the power
+      that belongs to wealth. He is educated, liberal, and enlightened, and the
+      last great name in Venetian literature is that of the Jewish historian of
+      the Republic, Romanin. The Jew&rsquo;s political sympathies are invariably
+      patriotic, and he calls himself, not Ebreo, but Veneziano. He lives, when
+      rich, in a palace or a fine house on the Grand Canal, and he furnishes and
+      lets many others (I must say at rates which savor of the loan secured by
+      the pound of flesh) in which he does not live. The famous and beautiful
+      Ca&rsquo; Doro now belongs to a Jewish family; and an Israelite, the most
+      distinguished physician in Venice, occupies the <i>appartamento signorile</i>
+      in the palace of the famous Cardinal Bembo. The Jew is a physician, a
+      banker, a manufacturer, a merchant; and he makes himself respected for his
+      intelligence and his probity,&mdash;which perhaps does not infringe more
+      than that of Italian Catholics. He dresses well,&mdash;with that
+      indefinable difference, however, which distinguishes him in every thing
+      from a Christian,&mdash;and his wife and daughter are fashionable and
+      stylish, They are sometimes, also, very pretty; and I have seen one Jewish
+      lady who might have stepped out of the sacred page, down from the
+      patriarchal age, and been known for Rebecca, with her oriental grace, and
+      delicate, sensitive, high-bred look and bearing&mdash;no more western and
+      modern than a lily of Palestine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is to the Ghetto I want to take you now (by the way we went one
+      sunny day late last fall), that I may show you something of the Jewish
+      past, which has survived to the nineteenth century in much of the
+      discomfort and rank savor of the dark ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the fifteenth century all the riches of the Orient had been poured into
+      the lap of Venice, and a spirit of reckless profusion took possession of
+      her citizens. The money, hastily and easily amassed, went as rapidly as it
+      came. It went chiefly for dress, in which the Venetian still indulges very
+      often to the stint of his stomach; and the ladies of that bright-colored,
+      showy day bore fortunes on their delicate persons in the shape of costly
+      vestments of scarlet, black, green, white, maroon, or violet, covered with
+      gems, glittering with silver buttons, and ringing with silver bells. The
+      fine gentlemen of the period were not behind them in extravagance; and the
+      priests were peculiarly luxurious in dress, wearing gay silken robes, with
+      cowls of fur, and girdles of gold and silver. Sumptuary laws were vainly
+      passed to repress the general license, and fortunes were wasted, and
+      wealthy families reduced to beggary. [Footnote: Galliciolli, <i>Memorie
+      Venete</i>.] At this time, when so many worthy gentlemen and ladies had
+      need of the Uncle to whom hard-pressed nephews fly to pledge the wrecks of
+      prosperity, there was yet no Monte di Pietà, and the demand for
+      pawnbrokers becoming imperative, the Republic was obliged to recall the
+      Hebrews from the exile into which they had been driven some time before,
+      that they might set up pawnshops and succor necessity. They came back,
+      however, only for a limited time, and were obliged to wear a badge of
+      yellow color upon the breast, to distinguish them from the Christians, and
+      later a yellow cap, then a red hat, and then a hat of oil-cloth. They
+      could not acquire houses or lands in Venice, nor practice any trade, nor
+      exercise any noble art but medicine. They were assigned a dwelling-place
+      in the vilest and unhealthiest part of the city, and their quarter was
+      called Ghetto, from the Hebrew <i>nghedah</i>, a congregation. [Footnote:
+      Mutinelli.] They were obliged to pay their landlords a third more rent
+      than Christians paid; the Ghetto was walled in, and its gates were kept by
+      Christian guards, who every day opened them at dawn and closed them at
+      dark, and who were paid by the Jews. They were not allowed to issue at all
+      from the Ghetto on holidays; and two barges, with armed men, watched over
+      them night and day, while a special magistracy had charge of their
+      affairs. Their synagogues were built at Mestre, on the main-land; and
+      their dead were buried in the sand upon the seashore, whither, on the
+      Mondays of September, the baser sort of Venetians went to make merry, and
+      drunken men and women danced above their desecrated tombs. These unhappy
+      people were forced also to pay tribute to the state at first every third
+      year, then every fifth year, and then every tenth year, the privilege of
+      residence being ingeniously renewed to them at these periods for a round
+      sum; but, in spite of all, they flourished upon the waste and wickedness
+      of their oppressors, waxed rich as these waxed poor, and were not again
+      expelled from the city. [Footnote: <i>Del Commercia del Veneziani</i>.
+      Mutinelli.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There never was any attempt to disturb the Hebrews by violence, except on
+      one occasion, about the close of the fifteenth century, when a tumult was
+      raised against them for child-murder. This, however, was promptly quelled
+      by the Republic before any harm was done them; and they dwelt peacefully
+      in their Ghetto till the lofty gates of their prison caught the sunlight
+      of modern civilization, and crumbled beneath it. Then many of the Jews
+      came forth and fixed their habitations in different parts of the city, but
+      many others clung to the spot where their temples still remain, and which
+      was hallowed by long suffering, and soaked with the blood of innumerable
+      generations of geese. So, although you find Jews everywhere in Venice, you
+      never find a Christian in the Ghetto, which is held to this day by a large
+      Hebrew population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had not started purposely to see the Ghetto, and for this reason it had
+      that purely incidental relish, which is the keenest possible savor of the
+      object of interest. We were on an expedition to find Sior Antonio Rioba,
+      who has been, from time immemorial, the means of ponderous practical jokes
+      in Venice. Sior Antonio is a rough-hewn statue set in the corner of an
+      ordinary grocery, near the Ghetto. He has a pack on his back and a staff
+      in his hand; his face is painted, and is habitually dishonored with dirt
+      thrown upon it by boys. On the wall near him is painted a bell-pull, with
+      the legend, <i>Sior Antonio Rioba</i>. Rustics, raw apprentices, and
+      honest Germans new to the city, are furnished with packages to be carried
+      to Sior Antonio Rioba, who is very hard to find, and not able to receive
+      the messages when found, though there is always a crowd of loafers near to
+      receive the unlucky simpleton who brings them. <i>&ldquo;E poi, che commedia
+      vederli arrabiarsi! Che ridere</i>!&rdquo; That is the Venetian notion of fun,
+      and no doubt the scene is amusing. I was curious to see Sior Antonio,
+      because a comic journal bearing his name had been published during the
+      time of the Republic of 1848, and from the fact that he was then a sort of
+      Venetian Pasquino. But I question now if he was worth seeing, except as
+      something that brought me into the neighborhood of the Ghetto, and
+      suggested to me the idea of visiting that quarter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we left him and passed up the canal in our gondola, we came unawares
+      upon the church of Santa Maria dell&rsquo; Orto, one of the most graceful Gothic
+      churches in the city. The façade is exquisite, and has two Gothic windows
+      of that religious and heavenly beauty which pains the heart with its
+      inexhaustible richness. One longed to fall down on the space of green turf
+      before the church, now bathed in the soft golden October sunshine, and
+      recant these happy, commonplace centuries of heresy, and have back again
+      the good old believing days of bigotry, and superstition, and roasting,
+      and racking, if only to have once more the men who dreamed those windows
+      out of their faith and piety (if they did, which I doubt), and made them
+      with their patient, reverent hands (if their hands <i>were</i> reverent,
+      which I doubt). The church is called Santa Maria dell&rsquo; Orto, from the
+      miraculous image of Our Lady which was found in an orchard where the
+      temple now stands. We saw this miraculous sculpture, and thought it
+      reflected little credit upon the supernatural artist. The church is
+      properly that of Saint Christopher, but the saint has been titularly
+      vanquished by the Madonna, though he comes out gigantically triumphant in
+      a fresco above the high altar, and leads to confused and puzzling
+      reminiscences of Bluebeard and Morgante Maggiore, to both of which
+      characters he bears a bewildering personal resemblance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were once many fine paintings by Tintoretto and Bellini in this
+      church; but as the interior is now in course of restoration, the paintings
+      have been removed to the Academy, and we only saw one, which was by the
+      former master, and had all his striking imagination in the conception, all
+      his strength in the drawing and all his lampblack in the faded coloring.
+      In the centre of the church, the sacristan scraped the carpenter&rsquo;s rubbish
+      away from a flat tablet in the floor, and said that it was Tintoretto&rsquo;s
+      tomb. It is a sad thing to doubt even a sacristan, but I pointed out that
+      the tomb bore any name in the world rather than Robusti. &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said the
+      sacristan, &ldquo;it is just that which makes it so very curious,&mdash;that
+      Tintoretto should wish to be buried under another name!&rdquo; [Footnote:
+      Members of the family of Tintoretto are actually buried in this church;
+      and no sacristan of right feeling could do less than point out some tomb
+      as that of the great painter himself.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a warm, sunny day in the fall, as I said; yet as we drew near the
+      Ghetto, we noticed in the air many white, floating particles, like lazy,
+      straggling flakes of snow. These we afterward found to be the down of
+      multitudes of geese, which are forever plucked by the whole apparent force
+      of the populace,&mdash;the fat of the devoted birds being substituted for
+      lard in the kitchens of the Ghetto, and their flesh for pork. As we
+      approached the obscene little riva at which we landed, a blond young
+      Israelite, lavishly adorned with feathers, came running to know if we
+      wished to see the church&mdash;by which name he put the synagogue to the
+      Gentile comprehension. The street through which we passed had shops on
+      either hand, and at the doors groups of jocular Hebrew youth sat plucking
+      geese; while within, long files of all that was mortal of geese hung from
+      the rafters and the walls. The ground was webbed with the feet of geese,
+      and certain loutish boys, who paused to look at us, had each a goose
+      dragging at his heels, in the forlorn and elongated manner peculiar to
+      dead poultry. The ground was stained with the blood of geese, and the
+      smell of roasting geese came out of the windows of the grim and lofty
+      houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our guide was picturesque, but the most helpless and inconclusive cicerone
+      I ever knew; and while his long, hooked Hebrew nose caught my idle fancy,
+      and his soft blue eyes excused a great deal of inefficiency, the aimless
+      fashion in which he mounted dirty staircases for the keys of the
+      synagogue, and came down without them, and the manner in which he shouted
+      to the heads of unctuous Jessicas thrust out of windows, and never gained
+      the slightest information by his efforts, were imbecilities that we
+      presently found insupportable, and we gladly cast him off for a dark-faced
+      Hebrew boy who brought us at once to the door of the Spanish synagogue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of seven synagogues in the Ghetto, the principal was built in 1655, by the
+      Spanish Jews who had fled to Venice from the terrors of the Holy Office.
+      Its exterior has nothing to distinguish it as a place of worship, and we
+      reached the interior of the temple by means of some dark and narrow
+      stairs. In the floor and on the walls of the passage-way were set tablets
+      to the memory of rich and pious Israelites who had bequeathed their
+      substance for the behoof of the sanctuary; and the sacristan informed us
+      that the synagogue was also endowed with a fund by rich descendants of
+      Spanish Jews in Amsterdam. These moneys are kept to furnish indigent
+      Israelitish couples with the means of marrying, and who claim the benefit
+      of the fund are entitled to it. The sacristan&mdash;a little wiry man,
+      with bead-black eyes, and of a shoemakerish presence&mdash;told us with
+      evident pride that he was himself a descendant of the Spanish Jews.
+      Howbeit, he was now many centuries from speaking the Castilian, which, I
+      had read, was still used in the families of the Jewish fugitives from
+      Spain to the Levant. He spoke, instead, the abominable Venetian of
+      Cannaregio, with that Jewish thickness which distinguishes the race&rsquo;s
+      utterance, no matter what language its children are born to. It is a
+      curious philological fact, which I have heard repeatedly alleged by
+      Venetians, and which is perhaps worth noting here, that Jews speaking
+      their dialect, have not only this thickness of accent, but also a
+      peculiarity of construction which marks them at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We found the contracted interior of the synagogue hardly worth looking at.
+      Instead of having any thing oriental or peculiar in its architecture, it
+      was in a bad spirit of Renaissance art. A gallery encircled the inside,
+      and here the women, during worship, sat apart from the men, who had seats
+      below, running back from either side of the altar. I had no right, coming
+      from a Protestant land of pews, to indulge in that sentimentality; but I
+      could not help being offended to see that each of these seats might be
+      lifted up and locked into the upright back and thus placed beyond question
+      at the disposal of the owner: I like the freedom and equality in the
+      Catholic churches much better. The sacristan brought a ponderous silver
+      key, and unlocking the door behind the pulpit, showed us the Hebrew
+      Scriptures used during the service by the Rabbi. They formed an immense
+      parchment volume, and were rolled in silk upon a wooden staff. This was
+      the sole object of interest in the synagogue, and its inspection concluded
+      our visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We descended the narrow stairs and emerged upon the piazza which we had
+      left. It was only partly paved with brick, and was very dirty. The houses
+      which surrounded it were on the outside old and shabby, and, even in this
+      Venice of lofty edifices, remarkably high. A wooden bridge crossed a vile
+      canal to another open space, where once congregated the merchants who sell
+      antique furniture, old pictures, and objects of vertu. They are now,
+      however, found everywhere in the city, and most of them are on the Grand
+      Canal, where they heap together marvelous collections, and establish
+      authenticities beyond cavil. &ldquo;Is it an original?&rdquo; asked a young lady who
+      was visiting one of their shops, as she paused before an attributive
+      Veronese, or&mdash;what know I?&mdash;perhaps a Titian. &ldquo;<i>Si, signora,
+      originalissimo</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not understand why any class of Jews should still remain in the
+      Ghetto, but it is certain, as I said, that they do remain there in great
+      numbers. It may be that the impurity of the place and the atmosphere is
+      conducive to purity of race; but I question if the Jews buried on the
+      sandy slope of the Lido, and blown over by the sweet sea wind&mdash;it
+      must needs blow many centuries to cleanse them of the Ghetto&mdash;are not
+      rather to be envied by the inhabitants of those high dirty houses and low
+      dirty lanes. There was not a touch of any thing wholesome, or pleasant, or
+      attractive, to relieve the noisomeness of the Ghetto to its visitors; and
+      they applauded, with a common voice, the neatness which had prompted
+      Andrea the gondolier to roll up the carpet from the floor of his gondola,
+      and not to spread it again within the limits of that quarter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the good old times, when pestilence avenged the poor and oppressed upon
+      their oppressors, what grim and dismal plagues may not have stalked by
+      night and noonday out of those hideous streets, and passed the marble
+      bounds of patrician palaces, and brought to the bedsides of the rich and
+      proud the filthy misery of the Ghetto turned to poison! Thank God that the
+      good old times are gone and going. One learns in these aged lands to hate
+      and execrate the past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      SOME MEMORABLE PLACES.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We came away from the Ghetto, as we had arrived, in a gentle fall of
+      goose-down, and winding crookedly through a dirty canal, glided into purer
+      air and cleaner waters. I cannot well say how it was we came upon the old
+      Servite Convent, which I had often looked for in vain, and which,
+      associated with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of the most
+      memorable places in Venice. We reached it, after passing by that old, old
+      palace, which was appointed in the early ages of Venetian commerce for the
+      reception of oriental traffic and traffickers, and where it is said the
+      Moorish merchants resided till the later time of the Fondaco dei Turchi on
+      the Grand Canal. The façade of the palace is richly sculptured; and near
+      one corner is the bass-relief of a camel and his turbaned driver,&mdash;in
+      token, perhaps, that man and beast (as orientals would understand them)
+      were here entertained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had lived long enough in Venice to know that it was by no means worth
+      while to explore the interior of this old palace because the outside was
+      attractive, and so we left it; and turning a corner, found ourselves in a
+      shallow canal, with houses on one side, and a grassy bank on the other.
+      The bank sloped gently from the water up to the walls of some edifice, on
+      which ruin seemed to have fastened soon after the architect had begun his
+      work. The vast walls, embracing several acres in their close, rose only
+      some thirty or forty feet from the ground&mdash;only high enough, indeed,
+      to join over the top of the great Gothic gates, which pierced them on two
+      façades. There must have been barracks near; for on the sward, under the
+      walls, muskets were stacked, and Austrian soldiers were practicing the
+      bayonet-exercise with long poles padded at the point. &ldquo;<i>Ein, zwei, drei,&mdash;vorwärts!
+      Ein, zwei, drei,&mdash;ruckwärts</i>!&rdquo; snarled the drill-sergeant, and the
+      dark-faced Hungarian soldiers&mdash;who may have soon afterward prodded
+      their Danish fellow-beings all the more effectively for that day&rsquo;s
+      training&mdash;stooped, writhed, and leaped obedient. I, who had already
+      caught sight of a little tablet in the wall bearing the name of Paolo
+      Sarpi, could not feel the propriety of the military performance on that
+      scene; yet I was very glad, dismounting from the gondola, to get by the
+      soldiers without being forced back at the padded point of a pole, and
+      offered no audible objection to their presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So passing to the other side, I found entrance through a disused chapel to
+      the interior of the convent. The gates on the outside were richly
+      sculptured, and were reverend and clean; tufts of harsh grass grew from
+      their arches, and hung down like the &ldquo;overwhelming brows&rdquo; of age. Within,
+      at first light, I saw nothing but heaps of rubbish, piles of stone, and
+      here and there a mutilated statue. I remember two pathetic caryatides,
+      that seemed to have broken and sunk under too heavy a weight for their
+      gentle beauty&mdash;and everywhere the unnamable filth with which ruin is
+      always dishonored in Italy, and which makes the most picturesque and
+      historic places inaccessible to the foot, and intolerable to the senses
+      and the soul. I was thinking with a savage indignation on this incurable
+      <i>porcheria</i>, of the Italian poor (who are guilty of such
+      desecrations), when my eye fell upon an enclosed space in one corner,
+      where some odd-looking boulders were heaped together. It was a space about
+      six feet in depth, and twenty feet square; and the boulders, on closer
+      inspection, turned out to be human skulls, nestling on piles of human
+      bones. In any other land than Italy I think I should have turned from the
+      grisly sight with a cowardly sickness and shuddering; but here!&mdash;Why,
+      heaven and earth seem to take the loss of men so good-naturedly,&mdash;so
+      many men have died and passed away with their difficult, ambitious, and
+      troublesome little schemes,&mdash;and the great mass of mankind is taken
+      so small account of in the course of destiny, that the idea of death does
+      not appear so alien and repulsive as elsewhere, and the presence of such
+      evidences of our poor mortality can scarcely offend sensibility. These
+      were doubtless the bones of the good Servite friars who had been buried in
+      their convent, and had been digged up to make way for certain improvements
+      now taking place within its walls. I have no doubt that their deaths were
+      a rest to their bodies, to say nothing of their souls. If they were at all
+      in their lives like those who have come after them, the sun baked their
+      bald brows in Summer, and their naked feet&mdash;poor feet! clapping round
+      in wooden-soled sandals over the frozen stones of Venice&mdash;were
+      swollen and gnawed with chilblains in winter; and no doubt some fat friar
+      of their number, looking all the droller in his bare feet for the
+      spectacles on his nose, came down Calle Falier then, as now, to collect
+      the charity of bread and fuel, far oftener than the dwellers in that
+      aristocratic precinct wished to see him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The friars&rsquo; skulls looked contented enough, and smiled after the hearty
+      manner of skulls; and some of the leg-bones were thrust through the
+      enclosing fence, and hung rakishly over the top. As to their spirits, I
+      suppose they must have found out by this time that these confused and
+      shattered tabernacles which they left behind them are not nearly so
+      corrupt and dead as the monastic system which still cumbers the earth.
+      People are building on the site of the old convent a hospital for indigent
+      and decrepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have care of the
+      inmates. It is a good end enough, but I think it would be the true
+      compensation if all the rubbish of the old cloister were cleared from the
+      area of those walls, and a great garden planted in the space, where lovers
+      might whisper their wise nonsense, and children might romp and frolic,
+      till the crumbling, masonry forgot its old office of imprisonment and the
+      memory of its prisoners. For here, one could only think of the moping and
+      mumming herd of monks, who were certainly not worth remembering, while the
+      fame of Paolo Sarpi, and the good which he did, refused to be localized.
+      That good is an inheritance which has enriched the world; but the share of
+      Venice has been comparatively small in it, and that of this old convent
+      ground still less. I rather wondered, indeed, that I should have taken the
+      trouble to look up the place; but it is a harmless, if even a very
+      foolish, pastime to go seeking for the sublime secret of the glory of the
+      palm in the earth where it struck root and flourished. So far as the
+      lifelong presence and the death of a man of clear brain and true heart
+      could hallow any scene, this ground was holy; for here Sarpi lived, and
+      here in his cell he died, a simple Servite friar&mdash;he who had caught
+      the bolts of excommunication launched against the Republic from Rome, and
+      broken them in his hand,&mdash;who had breathed upon the mighty arm of the
+      temporal power, and withered it to the juiceless stock it now remains. And
+      yet I could not feel that the ground <i>was</i> holy, and it did not make
+      me think of Sarpi; and I believe that only those travelers who invent in
+      cold blood their impressions of memorable places ever have remarkable
+      impressions to record.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, before the time of Sarpi, an excommunication was pronounced against
+      the Republic with a result as terrible as that of the later interdict was
+      absurd. Venice took possession, early in the fourteenth century, of
+      Ferrara, by virtue of a bargain which the high contracting parties&mdash;the
+      Republic and an exiled claimant to the ducal crown of Ferrara&mdash;had no
+      right to make. The father of the banished prince had displeased him by
+      marrying late in life, when the thoughts of a good man should be turned on
+      other things, and the son compassed the sire&rsquo;s death. For this the
+      Ferrarese drove him away, and as they would not take him back to reign
+      over them at the suggestion of Venice, he resigned his rights in favor of
+      the Republic, and the Republic at once annexed the city to its
+      territories. The Ferrarese appealed to the pope for his protection, and
+      Clement V., supporting an ancient but long quiescent claim to Ferrara on
+      the part of the Church, called upon the Venetians to surrender the city,
+      and, on their refusal, excommunicated them. All Christian peoples were
+      commanded &ldquo;to arm against the Venetians, to spoil them of their goods, as
+      separated from the union of Christians, and as enemies of the Roman
+      Church.&rdquo; They were driven out of Ferrara, but their troubles did not end
+      with their loss of the city. Giustina Renier-Michiel says the nations,
+      under the shelter of the pope&rsquo;s permission and command, &ldquo;exercised against
+      them every species of cruelty; there was no wrong or violence of which
+      they were not victims. All the rich merchandise which they had in France,
+      in Flanders, and in other places, was confiscated; their merchants were
+      arrested, maltreated, and some of them killed. Woe to us, if the Saracens
+      had been baptized Christians! our nation would have been utterly
+      destroyed.&rdquo; Such was the ruin brought upon us by this excommunication that
+      to this day it is a popular saying, concerning a man of gloomy aspect, &ldquo;<i>He
+      looks as if he were bringing the excommunication of Ferrara</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No proverb, sprung from the popular terror, commemorates the interdict of
+      the Republic which took place in 1606, and which, I believe, does not
+      survive in popular recollection at Venice. It was at first a collision of
+      the Venetian and Papal authorities at Ferrara, and then an interference of
+      the pope to prevent the execution of secular justice upon certain
+      ecclesiastical offenders in Venetia, which resulted in the excommunication
+      of the Republic, and finally in the defeat of St. Peter and the triumph of
+      St. Mark. Chief among the ecclesiastical offenders mentioned were the
+      worthy Abbate Brandolino of Narvesa, who was accused, among other things,
+      of poisoning his own father; and the good Canonico Saraceni of Vicenza,
+      who was repulsed in overtures made to his beautiful cousin, and who
+      revenged himself by defaming her character, and &ldquo;filthily defacing&rdquo; the
+      doors of her palace. The abbate was arrested, and the canon, on this
+      lady&rsquo;s complaint to the Ten at Venice, was thrown into prison, and the
+      weak and furious Pope Paul V., being refused their release by the Ten,
+      excommunicated the whole Republic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the same year, that is to say 1552, the bane and antidote, Paul the
+      Pope and Paul Sarpi the friar, were sent into the world. The latter grew
+      in piety, fame, and learning, and at the time the former began his quarrel
+      with the Republic, there was none in Venice so fit and prompt as Sarpi to
+      stand forth in her defense. He was at once taken into the service of St.
+      Mark, and his clear, acute mind fashioned the spiritual weapons of the
+      Republic, and helped to shape the secular measures taken to annul the
+      interdict. As soon as the bull of excommunication was issued, the Republic
+      instructed her officers to stop every copy of it at the frontier, and it
+      was never read in any church in the Venetian dominions. The Senate refused
+      to receive it from the Papal Nuncio. All priests, monks, and other
+      servants of the Church, as well as all secular persons, were commanded to
+      disregard it; and refractory ecclesiastics were forced to open their
+      churches on pain of death. The Jesuits and Capuchins were banished; and
+      clerical intriguers, whom Rome sent in swarms to corrupt social and family
+      relations, by declaring an end of civil government in Venice, and
+      preaching among women disobedience to patriotic husbands and fathers, were
+      severely punished. With internal safety thus provided for, the Republic
+      intrusted her moral, religious, and political defense entirely to Sarpi,
+      who devoted himself to his trust with fidelity, zeal, and power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It might have been expected that the friend of Galileo, and the most
+      learned and enlightened man of his country, would have taken the short and
+      decisive method of discarding all allegiance to Rome as the most logical
+      resistance to the unjust interdict. But the Venetians have ever been
+      faithful Catholics, [Footnote: It is convenient here to attest the truth
+      of certain views of religious sentiment in Italy, which Mr. Trollope, in
+      his <i>Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar</i>, quotes from an &ldquo;Italian
+      author, by no means friendly to Catholicism, and very well qualified to
+      speak of the progress of opinions and tendencies among his
+      fellow-countrymen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This author is Bianchi Giovini, who, speaking of modern Catholicism as the
+      heir of the old materialistic paganism, says: &ldquo;The Italians have
+      identified themselves with this mode of religion. Cultivated men find in
+      it the truth there is in it, and the people find what is agreeable to
+      them. But both the former and the latter approve it as conformable to the
+      national character. And whatever may be the religious system which shall
+      govern our descendants twenty centuries hence, I venture to affirm that
+      the exterior forms of it will be pretty nearly the same as those which
+      prevail at present, and which did prevail twenty centuries ago.&rdquo; Mr.
+      Trollope generously dissents from the &ldquo;<i>pessimism</i>&rdquo; of these views.
+      The views are discouraging for some reasons; but, with considerable
+      disposition and fair opportunity to observe Italian character in this
+      respect, I had arrived at precisely these conclusions. I wish here to
+      state that in my slight sketch of Sarpi and his times I have availed
+      myself freely of Mr. Trollope&rsquo;s delightful book&mdash;it is near being too
+      much of a good thing&mdash;named above.] and Sarpi was (or, according to
+      the papal writers, seemed to be) a sincere and obedient Servite friar,
+      believing in the spiritual supremacy of the pope, and revering the
+      religion of Rome. He therefore fought Paul inside of the Church, and his
+      writings on the interdict remain the monument of his polemical success. He
+      was the heart and brain of the Republic&rsquo;s whole resistance,&mdash;he
+      supplied her with inexhaustible reasons and answers,&mdash;and, though
+      tempted, accused, and threatened, he never swerved from his fidelity to
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he was the means of her triumph, [Footnote: The triumph was such only
+      so far as the successful resistance to the interdict was concerned; for at
+      the intercession of the Catholic powers the Republic gave up the
+      ecclesiastical prisoners, and he allowed all the banished priests except
+      the Jesuits to return. The Venetians utterly refused to perform any act of
+      humiliation or penance. The interdict had been defied, and it remained
+      despised.] remained the object of her love. He could never be persuaded to
+      desert his cell in the Minorite Convent for the apartments appointed him
+      by the State; and even when his busy days were spent in council at the
+      Ducal Palace, he returned each night to sleep in the cloister. After the
+      harmless interdict had been removed by Paul, and the unyielding Republic
+      forgiven, the wrath of Rome remained kindled against the friar whose logic
+      had been too keen for the last reason of popes. He had been tried for
+      heresy in his youth at Milan, and acquitted; again, during the progress of
+      St. Mark&rsquo;s quarrel with Rome, his orthodoxy had been questioned; and now
+      that all was over, and Rome could turn her attention to one particular
+      offender, he was entreated, coaxed, commanded to come to her, and put her
+      heart at rest concerning these old accusations. But Sarpi was very well in
+      Venice. He had been appointed Consultor in Theology to the Republic, and
+      had received free admission to the secret archives of the State,&mdash;a
+      favor, till then, never bestowed on any. So he would not go to Rome, and
+      Rome sent assassins to take his life. One evening, as he was returning
+      from the Ducal Palace in company with a lay-brother of the convent, and an
+      old patrician, very infirm and helpless, he was attacked by these <i>nuncios</i>
+      of the papal court: one of them seized the lay-brother, and another the
+      patrician, while a third dealt Sarpi innumerable dagger thrusts. He fell
+      as if dead, and the ruffians made off in the confusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarpi had been fearfully wounded, but he recovered. The action of the
+      Republic in this affair is a comforting refutation of the saying that
+      Republics are ungrateful, and the common belief that Venice was
+      particularly so. The most strenuous and unprecedented efforts were made to
+      take the assassins, and the most terrific penalties were denounced against
+      them. What was much better, new honors were showered upon Sarpi, and
+      extraordinary and affectionate measures were taken to provide for his
+      safety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, in fine, he lived in the service of the Republic, revered and
+      beloved, till his seventieth year, when he died with zeal for her good
+      shaping his last utterance: &ldquo;I must go to St. Mark, for it is late, and I
+      have much to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brave Sarpi, and brave Republic! Men cannot honor them enough. For though
+      the terrors of the interdict were doubted to be harmless even at that
+      time, it had remained for them to prove the interdict, then and forever,
+      an instrument as obsolete as the catapult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was so curious as to make some inquiry among the workmen on the old
+      convent ground, whether any stone or other record commemorative of Sarpi
+      had been found in the demolished cells. I hoped, not very confidently, to
+      gather some trace of his presence there&mdash;to have, perhaps, the spot
+      on which he died shown me. To a man, they were utterly ignorant of Sarpi,
+      while affecting, in the Italian manner, to be perfectly informed on the
+      subject. I was passed, with my curiosity, from one to another, till I fell
+      into the hands of a kind of foreman, to whom I put my questions anew. He
+      was a man of Napoleonic beard, and such fair red-and-white complexion that
+      he impressed me as having escaped from a show of wax-works, and I was not
+      at all surprised to find him a wax figure in point of intelligence. He
+      seemed to think my questions the greatest misfortunes which had ever
+      befallen him, and to regard each suggestion of Sarpi&mdash;<i>tempo della
+      Repubblica&mdash;scomunica di Paolo Quinto</i>&mdash;as an intolerable
+      oppression. He could only tell me that on a certain spot (which he pointed
+      out with his foot) in the demolished church, there had been found a stone
+      with Sarpi&rsquo;s name upon it. The padrone, who had the contract for building
+      the new convent, had said,&mdash;&ldquo;Truly, I have heard speak of this
+      Sarpi;&rdquo; but the stone had been broken, and he did not know what had become
+      of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, in fact, the only thing that remembered Sarpi, on the site of the
+      convent where he spent his life, died, and was buried, was the little
+      tablet on the outside of the wall, of which the abbreviated Latin
+      announced that he had been Theologue to the Republic, and that his dust
+      was now removed to the island of San Michele. After this failure, I had no
+      humor to make researches for the bridge on which the friar was attacked by
+      his assassins. But, indeed, why should I look for it? Finding it, could I
+      have kept in my mind the fine dramatic picture I now have, of Sarpi
+      returning to his convent on a mild October evening, weary with his long
+      walk from St. Mark&rsquo;s, and pacing with downcast eyes,&mdash;the old
+      patrician and the lay-brother at his side, and the masked and stealthy
+      assassins, with uplifted daggers, behind him? Nay, I fear I should have
+      found the bridge with some scene of modern life upon it, and brought away
+      in my remembrance an old woman with an oil-bottle, or a straggling boy
+      with a tumbler, and a very little wine in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On our way home from the Servite Convent, we stopped again near the corner
+      and bridge of Sior Antonio Rioba,&mdash;this time to go into the house of
+      Tintoretto, which stands close at the right hand, on the same quay. The
+      house, indeed, might make some pretensions to be called a palace: it is
+      large, and has a carved and balconied front, in which are set a now
+      illegible tablet describing it as the painter&rsquo;s dwelling, and a medallion
+      portrait of Robusti. It would have been well if I had contented myself
+      with this goodly outside; for penetrating, by a long narrow passage and
+      complicated stairway, to the interior of the house, I found that it had
+      nothing to offer me but the usual number of commonplace rooms in the usual
+      blighting state of restoration. I must say that the people of the house,
+      considering they had nothing in the world to show me, were kind and
+      patient under the intrusion, and answered with very polite affirmation my
+      discouraged inquiry if this were really Tintoretto&rsquo;s house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their conduct was different from that of the present inmates of Titian&rsquo;s
+      house, near the Fondamenta Nuove, in a little court at the left of the
+      church of the Jesuits. These unreasonable persons think it an intolerable
+      bore that the enlightened traveling public should break in upon their
+      privacy. They put their heads out of the upper windows, and assure the
+      strangers that the house is as utterly restored within as they behold it
+      without (and it <i>is</i> extremely restored), that it merely occupies the
+      site of the painter&rsquo;s dwelling, and that there is nothing whatever to see
+      in it. I never myself had the heart to force an entrance after these
+      protests; but an acquaintance of the more obdurate sex, whom I had the
+      honor to accompany thither, once did so, and came out with a story of
+      rafters of the original Titianic kitchen being still visible in the new
+      one. After a lapse of two years I revisited the house, and found that so
+      far from having learned patience by frequent trial, the inmates had been
+      apparently goaded into madness during the interval. They seemed to know of
+      our approach by instinct, and thrust their heads out, ready for protest,
+      before we were near enough to speak. The lazy, frowzy women, the worthless
+      men, and idle, loafing boys of the neighborhood, gathered round to witness
+      the encounter; but though repeatedly commanded to ring (I was again in
+      company with ladies), and try to force the place, I refused decidedly to
+      do so. The garrison were strengthening their position by plastering and
+      renewed renovation, and I doubt that by this time the original rafters are
+      no longer to be seen. A plasterer&rsquo;s boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood
+      clapping his trowel on his board, inside the house, while we debated
+      retreat, and derisively invited us to enter: <i>&ldquo;Suoni pure, O signore!
+      Questa e la famosa casa del gran pittore, l&rsquo;immortale Tiziano,&mdash;suoni,
+      signore!</i>&rdquo; (Ring, by all means, sir. This is the famous house of the
+      great painter, the immortal Titian. Ring!) <i>Da capo</i>. We retired amid
+      the scorn of the populace. But indeed I could not blame the inhabitants of
+      Titian&rsquo;s house; and were I condemned to live in a place so famous as to
+      attract idle curiosity, flushed and insolent with travel, I should go to
+      the verge of man-traps and shot-guns to protect myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This house, which is now hemmed in by larger buildings of later date, had
+      in the painter&rsquo;s time an incomparably &ldquo;lovely and delightful situation.&rdquo;
+       Standing near the northern boundary of the city, it looked out over the
+      lagoon,&mdash;across the quiet isle of sepulchres, San Michele,&mdash;across
+      the smoking chimneys of the Murano glass-works, and the bell-towers of her
+      churches,&mdash;to the long line of the sea-shore on the right and to the
+      mainland on the left; and beyond the nearer lagoon islands and the faintly
+      penciled outlines of Torcello and Burano in front, to the sublime distance
+      of the Alps, shining in silver and purple, and resting their snowy heads
+      against the clouds. It had a pleasant garden of flowers and trees, into
+      which the painter descended by an open stairway, and in which he is said
+      to have studied the famous tree in The Death of Peter Martyr. Here he
+      entertained the great and noble of his day, and here he feasted and made
+      merry with the gentle sculptor Sansovino, and with their common friend,
+      the rascal-poet Aretino. The painter&rsquo;s and the sculptor&rsquo;s wives knew each
+      other, and Sansovino&rsquo;s Paola was often in the house of Cecilia Vecellio;
+      [Footnote: The wife of Titian&rsquo;s youth was, according to Ticozzi, named
+      Lucia. It is in Mutinelli that I find allusion to Cecilia. The author of
+      the <i>Annali Urbani</i>, speaking of the friendship and frequent meetings
+      of Titian and Sansovino, says,&mdash;&ldquo;Vivevano ... allora ambedue di un
+      amore fatto sacro dalle leggi divine, essendo moglie di Tiziano una
+      Cecilia.&rdquo; I would not advise the reader to place too fond a trust in any
+      thing concerning the house of Titian. Mutinelli refers to but one house of
+      the painter, while Ticozzi makes him proprietor of two.] and any one who
+      is wise enough not to visit the place, can easily think of those ladies
+      there, talking at an open window that gives upon the pleasant garden,
+      where their husbands walk up and down together in the purple evening
+      light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the palace where Goldoni was born a servant showed me an entirely new
+      room near the roof, in which he said the great dramatist had composed his
+      immortal comedies. As I knew, however, that Goldoni had left the house
+      when a child, I could scarcely believe what the cicerone said, though I
+      was glad he said it, and that he knew any thing at all of Goldoni. It is a
+      fine old Gothic palace on a small canal near the Frari, and on the Calle
+      del Nomboli, just across from a shop of indigestible pastry. It is known
+      by an inscription, and by the medallion of the dramatist above the
+      land-door; and there is no harm in looking in at the court on the
+      ground-floor, where you may be pleased with the picturesque old stairway,
+      wandering upward I hardly know how high, and adorned with many little
+      heads of lions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several palaces dispute the honor of being Bianca Cappello&rsquo;s birthplace,
+      but Mutinelli awards the distinction to the palace at Sant&rsquo; Appollinare
+      near the Ponte Storto. One day a gondolier vaingloriously rowed us to the
+      water-gate of the edifice through a very narrow, damp, and uncleanly
+      canal, pretending that there was a beautiful staircase in its court. At
+      the moment of our arrival, however, Bianca happened to be hanging out
+      clothes from a window, and shrilly disclaimed the staircase, attributing
+      this merit to another Palazzo Cappello. We were less pleased with her
+      appearance here, than with that portrait of her which we saw on another
+      occasion in the palace of a lady of her name and blood. This lady has
+      since been married, and the name of Cappello is now extinct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Palazzo Mocenigo, in which Byron lived, is galvanized into ghastly
+      newness by recent repairs, and as it is one of the ugliest palaces on the
+      Grand Canal, it has less claim than ever upon one&rsquo;s interest. The
+      custodian shows people the rooms where the poet wrote, dined, and slept,
+      and I suppose it was from the hideous basket-balcony over the main door
+      that one of his mistresses threw herself into the canal. Another of these
+      interesting relicts is pointed out in the small butter-and-cheese shop
+      which she keeps in the street leading from Campo Sant&rsquo; Angelo to San
+      Paterinan: she is a fat sinner, long past beauty, bald, and somewhat
+      melancholy to behold. Indeed, Byron&rsquo;s memory is not a presence which I
+      approach with pleasure, and I had most enjoyment in his palace when I
+      thought of good-natured little Thomas Moore, who once visited his lordship
+      there. Byron himself hated the recollection of his life in Venice, and I
+      am sure no one else need like it. But he is become a <i>cosa di Venezia</i>,
+      and you cannot pass his palace without having it pointed out to you by the
+      gondoliers. Early after my arrival in the city I made the acquaintance of
+      an old smooth-shaven, smooth-mannered Venetian, who said he had known
+      Byron, and who told me that he once swam with him from the Port of San
+      Nicolò to his palace-door. The distance is something over three miles, but
+      if the swimmers came in with the sea the feat was not so great as it
+      seems, for the tide is as swift and strong as a mill-race. I think it
+      would be impossible to make the distance against the tide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      COMMERCE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      To make an annual report in September upon the Commercial Transactions of
+      the port, was an official duty to which I looked forward at Venice with a
+      vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted
+      tranquillity. It was not because the preparation of the report was an
+      affair of so great labor that I shrank from it; but because the material
+      was wanting with which to make a respectable show among my consular peers
+      in the large and handsomely misprinted volume of Commercial Relations
+      annually issued by the enterprising Congressional publishers. It grieved
+      me that upstart ports like Marseilles, Liverpool, and Bremen, should
+      occupy so much larger space in this important volume than my beloved
+      Venice; and it was with a feeling of profound mortification that I used to
+      post my meagre account of a commerce that once was greater than all the
+      rest of the world&rsquo;s together. I sometimes desperately eked out the
+      material furnished me in the statistics of the Venetian Chamber of
+      Commerce by an agricultural essay on the disease of the grapes and its
+      cure, or by a few wretched figures representative of a very slender mining
+      interest in the province. But at last I determined to end these
+      displeasures, and to make such researches into the history of her Commerce
+      as should furnish me forth material for a report worthy of the high place
+      Venice held in my reverence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, it seemed to be by a sort of anachronism that I had ever mentioned
+      contemporary Venetian Commerce; and I turned with exultation from the
+      phantom transactions of the present to that solid and magnificent
+      prosperity of the past, of which the long-enduring foundations were laid
+      in the earliest Christian times. For the new cities formed by the
+      fugitives from barbarian invasion of the main-land, during the fifth
+      century, had hardly settled around a common democratic government on the
+      islands of the lagoons, when they began to develop maritime energies and
+      resources; and long before this government was finally established at
+      Rialto, (the ancient sea-port of Padua,) or Venice had become the capital
+      of the young Republic, the Veneti had thriftily begun to turn the wild
+      invaders of the main-land to account, to traffic with them, and to make
+      treaties of commerce with their rulers. Theodoric, the king of the Goths,
+      had fixed his capital at Ravenna, in the sixth century, and would have
+      been glad to introduce Italian civilization among his people; but this
+      warlike race were not prepared to practice the useful arts, and although
+      they inhabited one of the most fruitful parts of Italy, with ample borders
+      of sea, they were neither sailors nor tillers of the ground. The Venetians
+      supplied them (at a fine profit, no doubt,) with the salt made in the
+      lagoons, and with wines brought from Istria. The Goths viewed with
+      especial amazement their skill in the management of their river-craft, by
+      means of which the dauntless traders ascended the shallowest streams to
+      penetrate the main-land, &ldquo;running on the grass of the meadows, and between
+      the stalks of the harvest field,&rdquo;&mdash;just as in this day our own
+      western steamers are known to run in a heavy dew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians continued to extend and confirm their commerce with those
+      helpless and hungry warriors, and were ready also to open a lucrative
+      trade with the Longobards when they descended into Italy about the year
+      570. They had, in fact, abetted the Longobards in their war with the Greek
+      Emperor Justinian, (who had opposed their incursion,) and in return the
+      barbarians gave them the right to hold great free marts or fairs on the
+      shores of the lagoons, whither the people resorted from every part of the
+      Longobard kingdom to buy the salt of the lagoons, grain from Istria and
+      Dalmatia, and slaves from every country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The slave-trade, indeed, formed then one of the most lucrative branches of
+      Venetian commerce, as now it forms the greatest stain upon the annals of
+      that commerce. The islanders, however, were not alone guilty of this
+      infamous trade in men; other Italian states made profit of it, and it may
+      be said to have been all but universal. But the Venetians were the most
+      deeply involved in it, they pursued it the most unscrupulously, and they
+      relinquished it the last. The pope forbade and execrated their commerce,
+      and they sailed from the papal ports with cargoes of slaves for the
+      infidels in Africa. In spite of the prohibitions of their own government,
+      they bought Christians of kidnappers throughout Europe, and purchased the
+      captives of the pirates on the seas, to sell them again to the Saracens.
+      Nay, being an ingenious people, they turned their honest penny over and
+      over again: they sold the Christians to the Saracens, and then for certain
+      sums ransomed them and restored them to their countries; they sold
+      Saracens to the Christians, and plundered the infidels in similar
+      transactions of ransom and restoration. It is not easy to fix the dates of
+      the rise or fall of this slave-trade; but slavery continued in Venice as
+      late as the fifteenth century, and in earlier ages was so common that
+      every prosperous person had two or three slaves. [Footnote: Mutinelli, <i>Del
+      Costume Veneziano</i>. The present sketch of the history of Venetian
+      commerce is based upon facts chiefly drawn from Mutinelli&rsquo;s delightful
+      treatise, <i>Del Commercio dei Veneziani</i>.] The corruption of the
+      citizens at this time is properly attributed in part to the existence of
+      slavery among them; and Mutinelli goes so far as to declare that the
+      institution impressed permanent traits on the populace, rendering them
+      idle and indisposed to honest labor, by degrading labor and making it the
+      office of bondmen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While this hateful and enormous traffic in man was growing up, the
+      Venetians enriched themselves by many other more blameless and legitimate
+      forms of commerce, and gradually gathered into their grasp that whole
+      trade of the East with Europe which passed through their hands for so many
+      ages. After the dominion of the Franks was established in Italy in the
+      eighth century, they began to supply that people, more luxurious than the
+      Lombards, with the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry, and the perfumes of
+      Byzantium; and held a great annual fair at the imperial city of Pavia,
+      where they sold the Franks the manufactures of the polished and effeminate
+      Greeks, and whence in return they carried back to the East the grain,
+      wine, wool, iron, lumber, and excellent armor of Lombardy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the time when they had assisted the Longobards against the Greeks,
+      the Venetians found it to their interest to cultivate the friendship of
+      the latter, until, in the twelfth century, they mastered the people so
+      long caressed, and took their capital, under Enrico Dandolo. The
+      privileges conceded to the wily and thrifty republican traders by the
+      Greek Emperors, were extraordinary in their extent and value. Otho, the
+      western Caesar, having succeeded the Franks in the dominion of Italy, had
+      already absolved the Venetians from the annual tribute paid the Italian
+      kings for the liberty of traffic, and had declared their commerce free
+      throughout the Peninsula. In the mean time they had attacked and beaten
+      the pirates of Dalmatia, and the Greeks now recognized their rule all over
+      Dalmatia, thus securing to the Republic every port on the eastern shores
+      of the Adriatic. Then, as they aided the Greeks to repel the aggressions
+      of the Saracens and Normans, their commerce was declared free in all the
+      ports of the empire, and they were allowed to trade without restriction in
+      all the cities, and to build warehouses and dépôts throughout the
+      dominions of the Greeks, wherever they chose. The harvest they reaped from
+      the vast field thus opened to their enterprise, must have more than
+      compensated them for their losses in the barbarization of the Italian
+      continent by the incessant civil wars which followed the disruption of the
+      Lombard League, when trade and industry languished throughout Italy. When
+      the Crusaders had taken the Holy Land, the king of Jerusalem bestowed upon
+      the Venetians, in return for important services against the infidel, the
+      same privileges conceded them by the Greek Emperor; and when, finally,
+      Constantinople fell into the hands of the Crusaders, (whom they had
+      skillfully diverted from the reconquest of Palestine to the siege of the
+      Greek metropolis,) nearly all the Greek islands fell to the share of
+      Venice; and the Latin emperors, who succeeded the Greeks in dominion, gave
+      her such privileges as made her complete mistress of the commerce of the
+      Levant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this opulent traffic the insatiable enterprise of the Republic
+      turned, without relinquishing the old, to new gains in the farthest
+      Orient. Against her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the Egyptian
+      ports, but she did not scruple to coax the barbarous prince of the
+      Scythian Tartars, newly descended upon the shores of the Black Sea; and
+      having secured his friendship, she proceeded, without imparting her design
+      to her Latin allies at Constantinople, to plant a commercial colony at the
+      mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands. Through this entrepôt,
+      thenceforward, Venetian energy, with Tartar favor, directed the entire
+      commerce of Asia with Europe, and incredibly enriched the Republic. The
+      vastness and importance of such a trade, even at that day, when the wants
+      of men were far simpler and fewer than now, could hardly be over-stated;
+      and one nation then monopolized the traffic which is now free to the whole
+      world. The Venetians bought their wares at the great marts of Samarcand,
+      and crossed the country of Tartary in caravans to the shores of the
+      Caspian Sea, where they set sail and voyaged to the River Volga, which
+      they ascended to the point of its closest proximity to the Don. Their
+      goods were then transported overland to the Don, and were again carried by
+      water down to their mercantile colony at its mouth. Their ships, having
+      free access to the Black Sea, could, after receiving their cargoes, return
+      direct to Venice. The products of every country of Asia were carried into
+      Europe by these dauntless traffickers, who, enlightened and animated by
+      the travels and discoveries of Matteo, Nicolò, and Marco Polo, penetrated
+      the remotest regions, and brought away the treasures which the prevalent
+      fears and superstitions of other nations would have deterred them from
+      seeking, even if they had possessed the means of access to them.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0288}.jpg" alt="{0288}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0288}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      The partial civilization of the age of chivalry had now reached its
+      climax, and the class which had felt its refining effects was that best
+      able to gratify the tastes still unknown to the great mass of the ignorant
+      and impoverished people. It was a splendid time, and the robber counts and
+      barons of the continent, newly tamed and Christianized into knights, spent
+      splendidly, as became magnificent cavaliers serving noble ladies. The
+      Venetians, who seldom did merely heroic things, who turned the Crusades to
+      their own account and made money out of the Holy Land, and whom one always
+      fancies as having a half scorn of the noisy grandeur of chivalry, were
+      very glad to supply the knights and ladies with the gorgeous stuffs,
+      precious stones, and costly perfumes of the East; and they now also began
+      to establish manufactories, and to practice the industrial arts at home.
+      Their jewelers and workers in precious metals soon became famous
+      throughout Europe; the glass-works of Murano rose into celebrity and
+      importance which they have never since lost (for they still supply the
+      world with beads); and they began to weave stuffs of gold tissue at
+      Venice, and silks so exquisitely dyed that no cavalier or dame of perfect
+      fashion was content with any other. Besides this they gilded leather for
+      lining walls, wove carpets, and wrought miracles of ornament in wax,&mdash;a
+      material that modern taste is apt to disdain,&mdash;while Venetian candles
+      in chandeliers of Venetian glass lighted up the palaces of the whole
+      civilized world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The private enterprise of citizens was in every way protected and
+      encouraged by the State, which did not, however, fail to make due and just
+      profit out of it. The ships of the merchants always sailed to and from
+      Venice in fleets, at stated seasons, seven fleets departing annually,&mdash;one
+      for the Greek dominions, a second for Azof, a third for Trebizond, a
+      fourth for Cyprus, a fifth for Armenia, a sixth for Spain, France, the Low
+      Countries, and England, and a seventh for Africa. Each squadron of traders
+      was accompanied and guarded from attacks of corsairs and other enemies, by
+      a certain number of the state galleys, let severally to the highest
+      bidders for the voyage, at a price never less than about five hundred
+      dollars of our money. The galleys were all manned and armed by the State,
+      and the crew of each amounted to three hundred persons; including a
+      captain, four supercargoes, eight pilots, two carpenters, two calkers, a
+      master of the oars, fifty cross-bowmen, three drummers, and two hundred
+      rowers. The State also appointed a commandant of the whole squadron, with
+      absolute authority to hear complaints, decide controversies, and punish
+      offences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the Republic was thus careful in the protection and discipline of
+      its citizens in their commerce upon the seas, it was no less zealous for
+      their security and its own dignity in their traffic with the continent of
+      Europe. In that rude day, neither the life nor the property of the
+      merchant who visited the ultramontane countries was safe; for the sorry
+      device which he practiced, of taking with him a train of apes, buffoons,
+      dancers, and singers, in order to divert his ferocious patrons from
+      robbery and murder, was not always successful. The Venetians, therefore,
+      were forbidden by the State to trade in those parts; and the Bohemians,
+      Germans, and Hungarians, who wished to buy their wares, were obliged to
+      come to the lagoons and buy them at the great marts which were held in
+      different parts of the city, and on the neighboring main-land. A triple
+      purpose was thus served,&mdash;the Venetian merchants were protected in
+      their lives and goods, the national honor was saved from insult, and many
+      an honest zecchino was turned by the innkeepers and others who lodged and
+      entertained the customers of the merchants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Five of these great fairs were held every week, the chief market being at
+      Rialto; and the transactions in trade were carefully supervised by the
+      servants of the State. Among the magistracies especially appointed for the
+      orderly conduct of the foreign and domestic commerce were the so-called
+      Mercantile Consuls (<i>Ufficio dei Consoli dei Mercanti</i>), whose
+      special duty it was to see that the traffic of the nation received no hurt
+      from the schemes of any citizen or foreigner, and to punish offenses of
+      this kind with banishment and even graver penalties. They measured every
+      ship about to depart, to learn if her cargo exceeded the lawful amount;
+      they guarded creditors against debtors and protected poor debtors against
+      the rapacity of creditors, and they punished thefts sustained by the
+      merchants. It is curious to find contemporary with this beneficent
+      magistracy, a charge of equal dignity exercised by the College of
+      Reprisals. A citizen offended in his person or property abroad, demanded
+      justice of the government of the country in which the offense was
+      committed. If the demand was refused, it was repeated by the Republic; if
+      still refused, then the Republic, although at peace with the nation from
+      which the offense came, seized any citizen of that country whom it could
+      find, and, through its College of Reprisals, spoiled him of sufficient
+      property to pay the damage done to its citizen. Finally, besides several
+      other magistracies resident in Venice, the Republic appointed Consuls in
+      its colonies and some foreign ports, to superintend the traffic of its
+      citizens, and to compose their controversies. The Consuls were paid out of
+      duties levied on the merchandise; they were usually nobles, and acted with
+      the advice and consent of twelve other Venetian nobles or merchants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this time, and, indeed, throughout its existence, the great lucrative
+      monopoly of the Republic was the salt manufactured in the lagoons, and
+      forced into every market, at rates that no other salt could compete with.
+      Wherever alien enterprise attempted rivalry, it was instantly discouraged
+      by Venice. There were troublesome salt mines, for example, in Croatia; and
+      in 1381 the Republic caused them to be closed by paying the King of
+      Hungary an annual pension of seven thousand crowns of gold. The exact
+      income of the State, however, from the monopoly of salt, or from the
+      various imposts and duties levied upon merchandise, it is now difficult to
+      know, and it is impossible to compute accurately the value or extent of
+      Venetian commerce at any one time. It reached the acme of its prosperity
+      under Tommaso Mocenigo, who was Doge from 1414 to 1423. There were then
+      three thousand and three hundred vessels of the mercantile marine, giving
+      employment to thirty-three thousand seamen, and netting to their owners a
+      profit of forty per cent, on the capital invested. How great has been the
+      decline of this trade may be understood from the fact that in 1863 it
+      amounted, according to the careful statistics of the Chamber of Commerce,
+      to only $60,229,740, and that the number of vessels now owned in Venice is
+      one hundred and fifty. As the total tonnage of these is but 26,000, it may
+      be inferred that they are small craft, and in fact they are nearly all
+      coasting vessels. They no longer bring to Venice the drugs and spices and
+      silks of Samarcand, or carry her own rare manufactures to the ports of
+      western Europe; but they sail to and from her canals with humble freights
+      of grain, lumber, and hemp. Almost as many Greek as Venetian ships now
+      visit the old queen, who once levied a tax upon every foreign vessel in
+      her Adriatic; and the shipping from the cities of the kingdom of Italy
+      exceeds hers by ninety sail, while the tonnage of Great Britain is vastly
+      greater. Her commerce has not only wasted to the shadow of its former
+      magnitude, but it has also almost entirely lost its distinctive character.
+      Glass of Murano is still exported to a value of about two millions of
+      dollars annually; but in this industry, as in nearly all others of the
+      lagoons, there is an annual decline. The trade of the port falls off from
+      one to three millions of dollars yearly, and the manufacturing interests
+      of the province have dwindled in the same proportion. So far as silk is
+      concerned, there has been an immediate cause for the decrease in the
+      disease which has afflicted the cocoons for several years past. Wine and
+      oil are at present articles of import solely,&mdash;the former because of
+      a malady of the grape, the latter because of negligent cultivation of the
+      olive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A considerable number of persons are still employed in the manufacture of
+      objects of taste and ornament; and in the Ruga Vecchia at Rialto they yet
+      make the famous Venetian gold chain, which few visitors to the city can
+      have failed to notice hanging in strands and wound upon spools, in the
+      shop windows of the Old Procuratie and the Bridge of Rialto. It is wrought
+      of all degrees of fineness, and is always so flexile that it may be folded
+      and wound in any shape. It is now no longer made in great quantity, and is
+      chiefly worn by contadine (as a safe investment of their ready money),
+      [Footnote: Certain foreigners living in Venice were one day astonished to
+      find their maid-servant in possession of a mass of this chain, and thought
+      it their business to reprove her extravagance. &ldquo;Signori,&rdquo; she explained
+      paradoxically, &ldquo;if I keep my money, I spend it; if I buy this chain, it is
+      always money (<i>è sempre soldi</i>).&rdquo;] and old-fashioned people of the
+      city, who display the finer sort in skeins or strands. At Chioggia, I
+      remember to have seen a babe at its christening in church literally
+      manacled and shackled with Venetian chain; and the little girl who came to
+      us one day, to show us the splendors in which she had appeared at a <i>disputa</i>
+      (examination of children in doctrine), was loaded with it. Formerly, in
+      the luxurious days of the Republic, it is said the chain was made as fine
+      as sewing-silk, and worn embroidered on Genoa velvet by the patrician
+      dames. It had then a cruel interest from the fact that its manufacture,
+      after a time, cost the artisans their eyesight, so nice and subtle was the
+      work. I could not help noticing that the workmen at the shops in the Ruga
+      Vecchia still suffer in their eyes, even though the work is much coarser.
+      I do not hope to describe the chain, except by saying that the links are
+      horseshoe and oval shaped, and are connected by twos,&mdash;an oval being
+      welded crosswise into a horseshoe, and so on, each two being linked
+      loosely into the next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An infinitely more important art, in which Venice was distinguished a
+      thousand years ago, has recently been revived there by Signor Salviati, an
+      enthusiast in mosaic painting. His establishment is on the Grand Canal,
+      not far from the Academy, and you might go by the old palace quite
+      unsuspicious of the ancient art stirring with new life in its breast. &ldquo;A.
+      Salviati, Avvocato,&rdquo; is the legend of the bell-pull, and you do not by any
+      means take this legal style for that of the restorer of a neglected art,
+      and a possessor of forgotten secrets in gilded glass and &ldquo;smalts,&rdquo; as they
+      term the small delicate rods of vitreous substance, with which the wonders
+      of the art are achieved. But inside of the palace are some two hundred
+      artisans at work,&mdash;cutting the smalts and glass into the minute
+      fragments of which the mosaics are made, grinding and smoothing these
+      fragments, polishing the completed works, and reproducing, with incredible
+      patience and skill, the lights and shadows of the pictures to be copied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You first enter the rooms of those whose talent distinguishes them as
+      artists, and in whose work all the wonderful neatness and finish and
+      long-suffering toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original
+      life and inspiration alike impossible and profane to the elder mosaicists.
+      Each artist has at hand a great variety of the slender stems of smalts
+      already mentioned, and breaking these into minute fragments as he
+      proceeds, he inserts them in the bed of cement prepared to receive his
+      picture, and thus counterfeits in enduring mineral the perishable work of
+      the painter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other rooms artisans are at work upon various tasks of <i>marqueterie</i>,&mdash;table-tops,
+      album-covers, paper-weights, brooches, pins and the like,&mdash;and in
+      others they are sawing the smalts and glass into strips, and grinding the
+      edges. Passing through yet another room, where the finished mosaic-works&mdash;of
+      course not the pictorial mosaics&mdash;are polished by machinery, we enter
+      the store-room, where the crowded shelves display blocks of smalts and
+      glass of endless variety of color. By far the greater number of these
+      colors are discoveries or improvements of the venerable mosaicist Lorenzo
+      Radi, who has found again the Byzantine secrets of counterfeiting, in
+      vitreous paste, aventurine (gold stone), onyx, chalcedony, malachite, and
+      other natural stones, and who has been praised by the Academy of Fine Arts
+      in Venice for producing mosaics even more durable in tint and workmanship
+      than those of the Byzantine artists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart for the exhibition of
+      the many beautiful and costly things which the art of the establishment
+      produces. Here, besides pictures in mosaic, there are cunningly inlaid
+      tables and cabinets, caskets, rich vases of chalcedony mounted in silver,
+      and delicately wrought jewelry, while the floor is covered with a mosaic
+      pavement ordered for the Viceroy of Egypt. There are here, moreover, to be
+      seen the designs furnished by the Crown Princess of Prussia for the
+      mosaics of the Queen&rsquo;s Chapel at Windsor. These, like all other pictures
+      and decorations in mosaic, are completed in the establishment on the Grand
+      Canal, and are afterward put up as wholes in the places intended for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Venice nothing in decay is strange. But it is startling to find her in
+      her old age nourishing into fresh life an art that, after feebly
+      preserving the memory of painting for so many centuries, had decorated her
+      prime only with the glories of its decline;&mdash;for Kugler ascribes the
+      completion of the mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to the
+      year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark&rsquo;s to the tenth or eleventh
+      centuries, when the Greek Church had already laid her ascetic hand on
+      Byzantine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed its motives,
+      and forbidden its inspirations. I think, however, one would look about him
+      in vain for other evidences of a returning prosperity in the lagoons. The
+      old prosperity of Venice, was based upon her monopoly of the most
+      lucrative traffic in the world, as we have already seen,&mdash;upon her
+      exclusive privileges in foreign countries, upon the enlightened zeal of
+      her government, and upon men&rsquo;s imperfect knowledge of geography, and the
+      barbarism of the rest of Europe, as well as upon the indefatigable
+      industry and intelligent enterprise of her citizens. America was still
+      undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only one known; the
+      people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty serfs, ruled and
+      ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world&rsquo;s ignorance, pride, and sloth
+      were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions of the day, which,
+      gross as they were, embodied perhaps its noblest and most hopeful
+      sentiment, were a source of incalculable profit to the sharp-witted
+      mistress of the Adriatic. It was the age of penances, pilgrimages, and
+      relic-hunting, and the wealth which she wrung from the devotion of others
+      was exceedingly great. Her ships carried the pilgrims to and from the Holy
+      Land; her adventurers ransacked Palestine and the whole Orient for the
+      bones and memorials of the saints; and her merchants sold the precious
+      relics throughout Europe at an immense advance upon first cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the foundations of this prosperity were at last tapped by the tide of
+      wealth which poured into Venice from every quarter of the world. Her
+      citizens brought back the vices as well as the luxuries of the debauched
+      Orient, and the city became that seat of splendid idleness and proud
+      corruption which it continued till the Republic fell. It is needless here
+      to rehearse the story of her magnificence and decay. At the time when the
+      hardy, hungry people of other nations were opening paths to prosperity by
+      land and sea, the Venetians, gorged with the spoils of ages, relinquished
+      their old habits of daring enterprise, and dropped back into luxury and
+      indolence. Their incessant wars with the Genoese began, and though they
+      signally defeated the rival Republic in battle, Genoa finally excelled in
+      commerce. A Greek prince had arisen to dispute the sovereignty of the
+      Latin Emperors, whom the Venetians had helped to place upon the Byzantine
+      throne; the Genoese, seeing the favorable fortunes of the Greek, threw the
+      influence of their arms and intrigues in his favor, and the Latins were
+      expelled from Constantinople in 1271. The new Greek Emperor had promised
+      to give the sole navigation of the Black Sea to his allies, together with
+      the church and palaces possessed by the Venetians in his capital, and he
+      bestowed also upon the Genoese the city of Smyrna. It does not seem that
+      he fulfilled literally all his promises, for the Venetians still continued
+      to sail to and from their colony of Tana, at the head of the Sea of Azof,
+      though it is certain that they had no longer the sovereignty of those
+      waters; and the Genoese now planted on the shores of the Black Sea three
+      large and important colonies to serve as entrepôts for the trade taken
+      from their rivals. The oriental traffic of the latter was maintained
+      through Tana, however, for nearly two centuries later, when, in 1410, the
+      Mongol Tartars, under Tamerlane, fell upon the devoted colony, took,
+      sacked, burnt, and utterly destroyed it. This was the first terrible blow
+      to the most magnificent commerce which the world had ever seen, and which
+      had endured for ages. No wonder that, on the day of Tana&rsquo;s fall, terrible
+      portents of woe were seen at Venice,&mdash;that meteors appeared, that
+      demons rode the air, that the winds and waters rose and blew down houses
+      and swallowed ships! A thousand persons are said to have perished in the
+      calamities which commemorated a stroke so mortally disastrous to the
+      national grandeur. After that the Venetians humbly divided with their
+      ancient foes the possession and maintenance of the Genoese colony of
+      Caffa, and continued, with greatly diminished glory, their traffic in the
+      Black Sea; till the Turks having taken Constantinople, and the Greeks
+      having acquired under their alien masters a zeal for commerce unknown to
+      them during the times of their native princes, the Venetians were finally,
+      on the first pretext of war, expelled from those waters in which they had
+      latterly maintained themselves only by payment of heavy tribute to the
+      Turks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the mean time the industrial arts, in which Venice had heretofore
+      excelled, began to be practiced elsewhere, and the Florentines and the
+      English took that lead in the manufactures of the world, which the latter
+      still retain. The league of the Hanseatic cities was established and rose
+      daily in importance. At London, at Bruges, at Bergen, and Novogorod banks
+      were opened under the protection and special favor of the Hanseatic
+      League; its ships were preferred to any other, and the tide of commerce
+      setting northward, the cities of the League persecuted the foreigners who
+      would have traded in their ports. On the west, Barcelona began to dispute
+      the preëminence of Venice in the Mediterranean, and Spanish salt was
+      brought to Italy itself and sold by the enterprising Catalonians. Their
+      corsairs vexed Venetian commerce everywhere; and in that day, as in our
+      own, private English enterprise was employed in piratical depredations on
+      the traffic of a friendly power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portuguese also began to extend their commerce, once so important, and
+      catching the rage for discovery then prevalent, infested every sea in
+      search of unknown land. One of their navigators, sailing by a chart which
+      a monk named Fra Mauro, in his convent on the island of San Michele, had
+      put together from the stories of travelers, and his own guesses at
+      geography, discovered the Cape of Good Hope, and the trade of India with
+      Europe was turned in that direction, and the old over-land traffic
+      perished. The Venetian monopoly of this traffic had long been gone; had
+      its recovery been possible, it would now have been useless to the
+      declining prosperity of the Republic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remained for Christopher Columbus, born of that Genoese nation which
+      had hated the Venetians so long and so bitterly, to make the discovery of
+      America, and thus to give the death-blow to the supremacy of Venice. While
+      all these discoveries were taking place, the old queen of the seas had
+      been weighed down with many and unequal wars. Her naval power had been
+      everywhere crippled; her revenues had been reduced; her possessions, one
+      after one, had been lopped away; and at the time Columbus was on his way
+      to America half Europe, united in the League of Cambray, was attempting to
+      crush the Republic of Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole world was now changed. Commerce sought new channels; fortune
+      smiled on other nations. How Venice dragged onward from the end of her
+      commercial greatness, and tottered with a delusive splendor to her
+      political death, is surely one of the saddest of stories if not the
+      sternest of lessons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VENETIAN HOLIDAYS.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The national character of the Venetians was so largely influenced by the
+      display and dissipation of the frequent festivals of the Republic, that it
+      cannot be fairly estimated without taking them into consideration, nor can
+      the disuse of these holidays (of which I have heretofore spoken) be
+      appreciated in all its import, without particular allusion to their number
+      and nature. They formed part of the aristocratic polity of the old
+      commonwealth, which substituted popular indulgence for popular liberty,
+      and gave the people costly pleasures in return for the priceless rights of
+      which they had been robbed, set up national pride in the place of
+      patriotism, and was as well satisfied with a drunken joy in its subjects
+      as if they had possessed a true content.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0307}.jpg" alt="{0307}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0307}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Full notice of these holidays would be history [Footnote: &ldquo;Siccome,&rdquo; says
+      the editor of Giustina Renier-Michiel&rsquo;s <i>Origine delle Feste Veneziane</i>,&mdash;&ldquo;Siccome
+      l&rsquo;illustre Autrice ha voluto applicare al suo lavoro il modesto titolo di
+      <i>Origins delle Feste Veneziane</i>, e siccome questo potrebbe porgere
+      un&rsquo; idea assai diversa dell&rsquo; opera a chi non ne ha alcuna cognizione, da
+      quello che è sostanzialmente, si espone questo Epitome, perchè ognun regga
+      almeno in parte, che quest&rsquo; opera sarebbe del titolo di <i>storia</i>
+      condegna, giacchè essa non è che una costante descrizione degli
+      avvenimenti più importanti e luminosi della Repubblica di Venezia.&rdquo; The
+      work in question is one of much research and small philosophy, like most
+      books which Venetians have written upon Venice; but it has admirably
+      served my purpose, and I am indebted to it for most of the information
+      contained in this chapter.] of Venice, for each one had its origin in some
+      great event of her existence, and they were so numerous as to commemorate
+      nearly every notable incident in her annals. Though, as has been before
+      observed, they had nearly all a general religious character, the Church,
+      as usual in Venice, only seemed to direct the ceremonies in its own honor,
+      while it really ministered to the political glory of the oligarchy, which
+      knew how to manage its priests as well as its prince and people. Nay, it
+      happened in one case, at least, that a religious anniversary was selected
+      by the Republic as the day on which to put to shame before the populace
+      certain of the highest and reverendest dignitaries of the Church. In 1162,
+      Ulrich, the Patriarch of Aquileja, seized, by a treacherous stratagem, the
+      city of Grado, then subject to Venice. The Venetians immediately besieged
+      and took the city, with the patriarch and twelve of his canons in it, and
+      carried them prisoners to the lagoons. The turbulent patriarchs of
+      Aquileja had long been disturbers of the Republic&rsquo;s dominion, and the
+      people now determined to make an end of these displeasures. They refused,
+      therefore, to release the patriarch, except on condition that he should
+      bind himself to send them annually a bull and twelve fat hogs. It is not
+      known what meaning the patriarch attached to this singular ceremony; but
+      with the Venetians the bull was typical of himself, and the swine of his
+      canons, and they yearly suffered death in these animals, which were
+      slaughtered during Shrovetide in the Piazza San Marco amid a great
+      concourse of the people, in the presence of the Doge and Signory. The
+      locksmiths, and other workers in iron, had distinguished themselves in the
+      recapture of Grado, and to their guild was allotted the honor of putting
+      to death the bull and swine. Great art was shown in striking off the
+      bull&rsquo;s head at one blow, without suffering the sword to touch the ground
+      after passing through the animal&rsquo;s neck; the swine were slain with lances.
+      Athletic games among the people succeeded, and the Doge and his Senators
+      attacked and destroyed, with staves, several lightly built wooden castles,
+      to symbolize the abasement of the feudal power before the Republic. As the
+      centuries advanced this part of the ceremony, together with the slaughter
+      of the swine, was disused; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of a
+      corrupt disdain of simple and healthy allegory on the part of the proud
+      doges, but in which I think most people will discern only a natural wish
+      to discontinue in more civilized times a puerile barbarity. Mr. Ruskin
+      himself finds no evidence of &ldquo;state pride&rdquo; in the abolition of the
+      slaughter of the swine. The festival was very popular, and continued a
+      long time, though I believe not till the fall of the Republic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another tribute, equally humiliating to those who paid it, was imposed
+      upon the Paduans for an insult offered to St. Mark, and gave occasion for
+      a national holiday, some fifty years after the Patriarch of Aquileja began
+      atonement for his outrage. In the year 1214, the citizens of Treviso made
+      an entertainment to which they invited the noble youth of the surrounding
+      cities. In the chief piazza of the town a castle of wood exquisitely
+      decorated was held against all comers by a garrison of the fairest
+      Trevisan damsels. The weapons of defense were flowers, fruits, bonbons,
+      and the bright eyes of the besieged; while the missiles of attack were
+      much the same, with whatever added virtue might lie in tender prayers and
+      sugared supplications. Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and Venice sent their
+      gallantest youths, under their municipal banners, to take part in this
+      famous enterprise; and the attack was carried on by the leagued forces
+      with great vigor, but with no effect on the Castle of Love, as it was
+      called, till the Venetians made a breach at a weak point. These young men
+      were better skilled in the arts of war than their allies; they were
+      richer, and had come to Treviso decked in the spoils of the recent sack of
+      Constantinople, and at the moment they neared the castle it is reported
+      that they corrupted the besieged by throwing handfuls of gold into the
+      tower. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that the conduct of the
+      Venetians in some manner roused the Paduans to insult, and that the hot
+      youths came to blows. In an instant the standard of St. Mark was thrown
+      down and trampled under the feet of the furious Paduans; blood flowed, and
+      the indignant Trevisans drove the combatants out of their city. The spark
+      of war spreading to the rival cities, the Paduans were soon worsted, and
+      three hundred of their number were made prisoners. These they would
+      willingly have ransomed at any price, but their enemies would not release
+      them except on the payment of two white pullets for each warrior. The
+      shameful ransom was paid in the Piazza, to the inextinguishable delight of
+      the Venetians, who, never wanting in sharp and biting wit, abandoned
+      themselves to sarcastic exultation. They demanded that the Paduans should,
+      like the patriarch, repeat the tribute annually; but the prudent Doge
+      Ziani judged the single humiliation sufficient, and refused to establish a
+      yearly celebration of the feast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the most famous occasional festivals of Venice is described by
+      Petrarch in a Latin letter to his friend Pietro Bolognese. It was in
+      celebration of the reduction of the Greeks of Candia, an island which in
+      1361 had recently been ceded to the Republic. The Candiotes rose in
+      general rebellion, but were so promptly subdued that the news of the
+      outbreak scarcely anticipated the announcement of its suppression in
+      Venice. Petrarch was at this time the guest of the Republic, and from his
+      seat at the right of the Doge on the gallery of St. Mark&rsquo;s Church, in
+      front of the bronze horses, he witnessed the chivalric shows given in the
+      Piazza below, which was then unpaved, and admirably adapted for equestrian
+      feats of arms. It is curious to read the poet&rsquo;s account of these in a city
+      where there is now no four-footed beast larger than a dog. But in the age
+      of chivalry even the Venetians were mounted, and rode up and down their
+      narrow streets, and jousted in their great campos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Speaking of twenty-four noble and handsome youths, whose feats formed a
+      chief part of a show of which he &ldquo;does not know if in the whole world
+      there has been seen the equal,&rdquo; Petrarch says: &ldquo;It was a gentle sight to
+      see so many youths decked in purple and gold, as they ruled with the rein
+      and urged with the spur their coursers, moving in glittering harness, with
+      iron-shod feet which scarcely seemed to touch the ground.&rdquo; And it must
+      have been a noble sight, indeed, to behold all this before the &ldquo;golden
+      façade of the temple,&rdquo; in a place so packed with spectators &ldquo;that a grain
+      of barley could not have fallen to the ground. The great piazza, the
+      church itself, the towers, the roofs, the arcades, the windows, all were&mdash;I
+      will not say full, but running over, walled and paved with people.&rdquo; At the
+      right of the church was built a great platform, on which sat &ldquo;four hundred
+      honestest gentlewomen, chosen from the flower of the nobility, and
+      distinguished in their dress and bearing, who, amid the continual homage
+      offered them morning, noon, and night, presented the image of a celestial
+      congress.&rdquo; Some noblemen, come hither by chance, &ldquo;from the part of
+      Britain, comrades and kinsmen of their King, were present,&rdquo; and attracted
+      the notice of the poet. The feasts lasted many days, but on the third day
+      Petrarch excused himself to the Doge, pleading, he says, his &ldquo;ordinary
+      occupations, already known to all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Among remoter feasts in honor of national triumphs, was one on the Day of
+      the Annunciation, commemorative of the removal of the capital of the
+      Venetian isles to Rialto from Malamocco, after King Pepin had burnt the
+      latter city, and when, advancing on Venice, he was met in the lagoons and
+      beaten by the islanders and the tides: these by their recession stranding
+      his boats in the mud, and those falling upon his helpless host with the
+      fury of an insulted and imperiled people. The Doge annually assisted at
+      mass in St. Mark&rsquo;s in honor of the victory, but not long afterward the
+      celebration of it ceased, as did that of a precisely similar defeat of the
+      Hungarians, who had just descended from Asia into Europe. In 1339 there
+      were great rejoicings in the Piazza for the peace with Mastino della
+      Scala, who, beaten by the Republic, ceded his city of Treviso to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubtless the most splendid of all the occasional festivals was that held
+      for the Venetian share of the great Christian victory at Lepanto over the
+      Turks. All orders of the State took part in it; but the most remarkable
+      feature of the celebration was the roofing of the Merceria, all the way
+      from St. Mark&rsquo;s to Rialto, with fine blue cloth, studded with golden stars
+      to represent the firmament, as the shopkeepers imagined it. The pictures
+      of the famous painters of that day, Titian, Tintoretto, Palma, and the
+      rest, were exposed under this canopy, at the end near Rialto. Later, the
+      Venetian victories over the Turks at the Dardanelles were celebrated by a
+      regatta, in 1658; and Morosini&rsquo;s brilliant reconquest of the Morea, in
+      1688, was the occasion of other magnificent shows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole world has now adopted, with various modifications, the
+      picturesque and exciting pastime of the regatta, which, according to
+      Mutinelli, [Footnote: <i>Annali Urbani di Venezia</i>.] originated among
+      the lagoons at a very early period, from a peculiar feature in the
+      military discipline of the Republic. A target for practice with the bow
+      and cross-bow was set up every week on the beach at the Lido, and nobles
+      and plebeians rowed thither in barges of thirty oars, vying with each
+      other in the speed and skill with which the boats were driven. To divert
+      the popular discontent that followed the Serrar del Consiglio and the
+      suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo&rsquo;s conspiracy early in the fourteenth
+      century, the proficiency arising from this rivalry was turned to account,
+      and the spectacle of the regatta was instituted. Agreeably, however, to
+      the aristocratic spirit of the newly established oligarchy, the patricians
+      withdrew from the lists, and the regatta became the affair exclusively of
+      the gondoliers. In other Italian cities, where horse and donkey races were
+      the favorite amusement, the riders were of both sexes; and now at Venice
+      women also entered into the rivalry of the regatta. But in gallant
+      deference to their weakness, they were permitted to begin the course at
+      the mouth of the Grand Canal before the Doganna di Mare, while the men
+      were obliged to start from the Public Gardens. They followed the Grand
+      Canal to its opposite extremity, beyond the present railway station, and
+      there doubling a pole planted in the water near the Ponte della Croce,
+      returned to the common goal before the Palazzo Foscari. Here was erected
+      an ornate scaffolding to which the different prizes were attached. The
+      first boat carried off a red banner; the next received a green flag; the
+      third, a blue; and the fourth, a yellow one. With each of these was given
+      a purse, and with the last was added, by way of gibe, a live pig, a
+      picture of which was painted on the yellow banner. Every regatta included
+      five courses, in which single and double oared boats, and single and
+      double oared gondolas successively competed,&mdash;the fifth contest being
+      that in which the women participated with two-oared boats. Four prizes
+      like those described were awarded to the winners in each course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The regatta was celebrated with all the pomp which the superb city could
+      assume. As soon as the government announced that it was to take place, the
+      preparations of the champions began. &ldquo;From that time the gondolier ceased
+      to be a servant; he became almost an adoptive son;&rdquo; [Footnote: <i>Feste
+      Veneziane</i>.] his master giving him every possible assistance and
+      encouragement in the daily exercises by which he trained himself for the
+      contest, and his parish priest visiting him in his own house, to bless his
+      person, his boat, and the image of the Madonna or other saint attached to
+      the gondola. When the great day arrived the Canalazzo swarmed with boats
+      of every kind. &ldquo;All the trades and callings,&rdquo; says Giustina
+      Renier-Michiel, [Footnote: <i>Feste Veneziane</i>] with that pride in the
+      Venetian past which does not always pass from verbosity to eloquence, &ldquo;had
+      each its boats appropriately mounted and adorned; and private societies
+      filled an hundred more. The chief families among the nobility appeared in
+      their boats, on which they had lavished their taste and wealth.&rdquo; The
+      rowers were dressed with the most profuse and elaborate luxury, and the
+      barges were made to represent historical and mythological conceptions. &ldquo;To
+      this end the builders employed carving and sculpture, together with all
+      manner of costly stuffs of silk and velvet, gorgeous fringes and tassels
+      of silver and gold, flowers, fruits, shrubs, mirrors, furs, and plumage of
+      rare birds.... Young patricians, in fleet and narrow craft, propelled by
+      swift rowers, preceded the champions and cleared the way for them,
+      obliging the spectators to withdraw on either side.... They knelt on
+      sumptuous cushions in the prows of their gondolas, cross-bow in hand, and
+      launched little pellets of plaster at the directors of such obstinate
+      boats as failed to obey their orders to retire....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To augment the brilliancy of the regatta the nature of the place
+      concurred. Let us imagine that superb canal, flanked on either side by a
+      long line of edifices of every sort; with great numbers of marble palaces,&mdash;nearly
+      all of noble and majestic structure, some admirable for an antique and
+      Gothic taste, some for the richest Greek and Roman architecture,&mdash;their
+      windows and balconies decked with damasks, stuffs of the Levant,
+      tapestries, and velvets, the vivid colors of which were animated still
+      more by borders and fringes of gold, and on which leaned beautiful women
+      richly dressed and wearing tremulous and glittering jewels in their hair.
+      Wherever the eye turned, it beheld a vast multitude at doorways, on the
+      rivas, and even on the roofs. Some of the spectators occupied scaffoldings
+      erected at favorable points along the sides of the canal; and the
+      patrician ladies did not disdain to leave their palaces, and, entering
+      their gondolas, lose themselves among the infinite number of the boats....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The cannons give the signal of departure. The boats dart over the water
+      with the rapidity of lightning.... They advance and fall behind
+      alternately. One champion who seems to yield the way to a rival suddenly
+      leaves him in the rear. The shouts of his friends and kinsmen hail his
+      advantage, while others already passing him, force him to redouble his
+      efforts. Some weaker ones succumb midway, exhausted.... They withdraw, and
+      the kindly Venetian populace will not aggravate their shame with jeers;
+      the spectators glance at them compassionately, and turn again to those
+      still in the lists. Here and there they encourage them by waving
+      handkerchiefs, and the women toss their shawls in the air. Each patrician
+      following close upon his gondolier&rsquo;s boat, incites him with his voice,
+      salutes him by name, and flatters his pride and spirit.... The water foams
+      under the repeated strokes of the oars; it leaps up in spray and falls in
+      showers on the backs of the rowers already dripping with their own
+      sweat.... At last behold the dauntless mortal who seizes the red banner!
+      His rival had almost clutched it, but one mighty stroke of the oar gave
+      him the victory.... The air reverberates with a clapping of hands so loud
+      that at the remotest point on the canal the moment of triumph is known.
+      The victors plant on their agile boat the conquered flag, and instead of
+      thinking to rest their weary arms, take up the oars again and retrace
+      their course to receive congratulations and applause.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The regattas were by no means of frequent occurrence, for only forty-one
+      took place during some five centuries. The first was given in 1315, and
+      the last in 1857, in honor of the luckless Archduke Maximilian&rsquo;s marriage
+      with Princess Charlotte of Belgium. The most sumptuous and magnificent
+      regatta of all was that given to the city in the year 1686, by Duke Ernest
+      of Brunswick. This excellent prince having sold a great part of his
+      subjects to the Republic for use in its wars against the Turk, generously
+      spent their price in the costly and edifying entertainments of which
+      Venice had already become the scene. The Judgment of Paris, and the
+      Triumph of the Marine Goddesses had been represented at his expense on the
+      Grand Canal, with great acceptance. And now the Triumph of Neptune formed
+      a principal feature in the gayeties of his regatta. Nearly the whole of
+      the salt-water mythology was employed in the ceremony. An immense wooden
+      whale supporting a structure of dolphins and Tritons, surmounted by a
+      statue of Neptune, and drawn by sea-horses, moved from the Piazzetta to
+      the Palazzo Foscari, where numbers of Sirens sported about in every
+      direction till the Regatta began. The whole company of the deities, very
+      splendidly arrayed, then joined them as spectators, and behaved in the
+      manner affected by gods and goddesses on these occasions. Mutinelli
+      [Footnote: <i>Annali Urbani.</i>] recounts the story with many sighs and
+      sneers and great exactness; but it is not interesting. The miraculous
+      recovery of the body of St. Mark, in 1094, after it had been lost for
+      nearly two centuries, created a festive anniversary which was celebrated
+      for a while with great religious pomp; but the rejoicings were not
+      separately continued in after years. The festival was consolidated (if one
+      may so speak) with two others in honor of the same saint, and the triple
+      occasions were commemorated by a single holiday. The holidays annually
+      distinguished by civil or ecclesiastical displays were twenty-five in
+      number, of which only eleven were of religious origin, though all were of
+      partly religious observance. One of the most curious and interesting of
+      the former was of the earliest date, and was continued till the last years
+      of the Republic. In 596 Narses, the general of the Greek Emperor, was
+      furnished by the Venetians with means of transport by sea from Aquieja to
+      Ravenna for the army which he was leading against the Ostrogoths; and he
+      made a vow that if successful in his campaign, he would requite their
+      generosity by erecting two churches in Venice. Accordingly, when he had
+      beaten the Ostrogoths, he caused two votive churches to be built,&mdash;one
+      to St. Theodore, on the site of the present St. Mark&rsquo;s Church, and another
+      to San Geminiano, on the opposite bank of the canal which then flowed
+      there. In lapse of time the citizens, desiring to enlarge their Piazza,
+      removed the church of San Geminiano back as far as the present Fabbrica
+      Nuova, which Napoleon built on the site of the demolished temple, between
+      the western ends of the New and Old Procuratie. The removal was effected
+      without the pope&rsquo;s leave, which had been asked, but was refused in these
+      words,&mdash;&ldquo;The Holy Father cannot sanction the commission of a
+      sacrilege, though he can pardon it afterwards.&rdquo; The pontiff, therefore,
+      imposed on the Venetians for penance that the Doge should pay an annual
+      visit forever to the church. On the occasion of this visit the parish
+      priest met him at the door, and offered the holy water to him; and then
+      the Doge, having assisted at mass, marched with his Signory and the clergy
+      of the church to its original site, where the clergy demanded that it
+      should be rebuilt, and the Doge replied with the promise,&mdash;&ldquo;Next
+      year.&rdquo; A red stone was set in the pavement to mark the spot where the Doge
+      renewed this never-fulfilled promise. [Footnote: As the author of the <i>Feste
+      Veneziane</i> tells this story it is less dramatic and characteristic. The
+      clergy, she says, reminded the Doge of the occasion of his visit, and his
+      obligation to renew it the following year, which he promised to do. I
+      cling to the version in the text, for it seems to me that the Doge&rsquo;s
+      perpetual promise to rebuild the church was a return in kind for the
+      pope&rsquo;s astute answer to the petition asking him to allow its removal. So
+      good a thing ought to be history.] The old church was destroyed by fire,
+      and Sansovino built, in 1506, the temple thrown down by Napoleon to make
+      room for his palace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The 31st of January, on which day in 828 the body of St. Mark was brought
+      from Alexandria to Venice, is still observed, though the festival has lost
+      all the splendor which it received from civil intervention. For a thousand
+      years the day was hallowed by a solemn mass in St. Mark&rsquo;s, at which the
+      Doge and his Signory assisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief of the State annually paid a number of festive visits, which
+      were made the occasion of as many holidays. To the convent of San Zaccaria
+      he went in commemoration of the visit paid to that retreat by Pope
+      Benedict III., in 855, when the pontiff was so charmed by the piety and
+      goodness of the fair nuns, that, after his return to Rome, he sent them
+      great store of relics and indulgences. It thus became one of the most
+      popular of the holidays, and the people repaired in great multitude with
+      their Doge to the convent, on each recurrence of the day, that they might
+      see the relics and buy the indulgences. The nuns were of the richest and
+      noblest families of the city, and on the Doge&rsquo;s first visit, they
+      presented him with that bonnet which became the symbol of his sovereignty.
+      It was wrought of pure gold, and set with precious stones of marvelous
+      great beauty and value; and in order that the State might never seem
+      forgetful of the munificence which bestowed the gift, the bonnet was
+      annually taken from the treasury and shown by the Doge himself to the
+      Sisters of San Zaccaria. The Doge Pietro Tradonico, to whom the bonnet was
+      given, was killed in a popular tumult on this holiday, while going to the
+      convent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was likewise a vast concourse of people and traffic in indulgences
+      at the church of Santa Maria della Carita (now the Academy of Fine Arts),
+      on the anniversary of the day when Pope Alexander III., in 1177, flying
+      from the Emperor Barbarossa, found refuge in that monastery. [Footnote:
+      Selvatico and Lazari in their admirable <i>Guida Artistica e Storica di
+      Veneza</i>, say that the pope merely lodged in the monastery on the day
+      when he signed the treaty of peace with Barbarossa.] He bestowed great
+      privileges upon it, and the Venetians honored the event to the end of
+      their national existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the rare occasions during the year when the Doge appeared
+      officially in public after nightfall, was on St. Stephen&rsquo;s Day. He then
+      repaired at dusk in his gilded barge, with splendid attendance of nobles
+      and citizens, to the island church of San Giorgio Maggiore, whither, in
+      1009, the body of St. Stephen was brought from Constantinople. On the
+      first of May the Doge visited the Convent of the Virgins, (the convent
+      building now forms part of the Arsenal,) where the abbess presented him
+      with a bouquet, and graceful and pleasing ceremonies took place in
+      commemoration of the erection and endowment of the church. The head of the
+      State also annually assisted at mass in St. Mark&rsquo;s, to celebrate the
+      arrival in Venice of St. Isidore&rsquo;s body, which the Doge Domenico Michiel
+      brought with him from the East, at the end of twenty-six years&rsquo; war
+      against the infidels; and, finally, after the year 1485, when the
+      Venetians stole the bones of San Rocco from the Milanese, and deposited
+      them in the newly finished Scuola di San Rocco, a ducal visit was annually
+      paid to that edifice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two only of the national religious festivals yet survive the Republic,&mdash;that
+      of the church of the Redentore on the Giudecca, and that of the church of
+      the Salute on the Grand Canal,&mdash;both votive churches, built in
+      commemoration of the city&rsquo;s deliverances from the pest in 1578 and 1630.
+      In their general features the celebrations of the two holidays are much
+      alike; but that of the Salute is the less important of the two, and is
+      more entirely religious in its character. A bridge of boats is annually
+      thrown across the Canalazzo, and on the day of the Purification, the
+      people throng to the Virgin&rsquo;s shrine to express their gratitude for her
+      favor. This gratitude was so strong immediately after the cessation of the
+      pest in 1630, that the Senate, while the architects were preparing their
+      designs for the present church, caused a wooden one to be built on its
+      site, and consecrated with ceremonies of singular splendor. On the Festa
+      del Redentore (the third Sunday of July) a bridge of boats crosses the
+      great canal of the Giudecca, and vast throngs constantly pass it, day and
+      night. But though the small tradesmen who deal in fried cakes, and in
+      apples, peaches, pears, and other fruits, make intolerable uproar behind
+      their booths on the long quay before the church; though the venders of
+      mulberries (for which the gardens of the Giudecca are famous) fill the air
+      with their sweet jargoning (for their cries are like the shrill notes of
+      so many singing-birds); though thousands of people pace up and down, and
+      come and go upon the bridge, yet the Festa del Redentore has now none of
+      the old-time gayety it wore when the Venetians thronged the gardens, and
+      feasted, sang, danced, and flirted the night away, and at dawn went in
+      their fleets of many-lanterned boats, covering the lagoon with fairy
+      light, to behold the sunrise on the Adriatic Sea.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0328}.jpg" alt="{0328}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0328}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Besides the religious festivals mentioned, there were five banquets
+      annually given by the State on the several days of St. Mark, St. Vitus,
+      St. Jerome, and St. Stephen, and the Day of the Ascension, all of which
+      were attended with religious observances. Good Friday was especially
+      hallowed by church processions in each of the campos; and St. Martha&rsquo;s Day
+      was occasion for junketings on the Giudecca Canal, when a favorite fish,
+      being in season, was devotionally eaten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The civil and political holidays which lasted till the fall of the
+      Republic were eleven. One of the earliest was the anniversary of the
+      recapture of the Venetian Brides, who were snatched from their
+      bridegrooms, at the altar of San Pietro di Castello, by Triestine pirates.
+      The class of citizens most distinguished in the punishment of the
+      abductors was the trade of carpenters, who lived chiefly in the parish of
+      Santa Maria Formosa; and when the Doge in his gratitude bade them demand
+      any reasonable grace, the trade asked that he should pay their quarter an
+      annual visit. &ldquo;But if it rains?&rdquo; said the Doge. &ldquo;We will give you a hat to
+      cover you,&rdquo; answered the carpenters. &ldquo;And if I am hungry?&rdquo; &ldquo;We will give
+      you to eat and drink.&rdquo; So when the Doge made his visit on the day of the
+      Virgin&rsquo;s Purification, he was given a hat of gilded straw, a bottle of
+      wine, and loaves of bread. On this occasion the State bestowed dowers upon
+      twelve young girls among the fairest and best of Venice (chosen two from
+      each of the six sections of the city), who marched in procession to the
+      church of Santa Maria Formosa. But as time passed, the custom lost its
+      simplicity and purity: pretty girls were said to make eyes at handsome
+      youths in the crowd, and scandals occurred in public. Twelve wooden
+      figures were then substituted, but the procession in which they were
+      carried was followed by a disgusted and hooting populace, and assailed
+      with a shower of turnips. The festivities, which used to last eight days,
+      with incredible magnificence, fell into discredit, and were finally
+      abolished during the war when the Genoese took Chioggia and threatened
+      Venice, under Doria. This was the famous Festa delle Marie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 997 the Venetians beat the Narentines at sea, and annexed all Istria,
+      as far as Dalmatia, to the Republic. On the day of the Ascension, of the
+      same year, the Doge, for the first time, celebrated the dominion of Venice
+      over the Adriatic, though it was not till some two hundred years later
+      that the Pope Alexander III. blessed the famous espousals, and confirmed
+      the Republic in the possession of the sea forever. &ldquo;What,&rdquo; cries Giustina
+      Renier-Michiel, turning to speak of the holiday thus established, and
+      destined to be the proudest in the Venetian calendar,&mdash;&ldquo;what shall I
+      say of the greatest of all our solemnities, that of the Ascension? Alas! I
+      myself saw Frenchmen and Venetians, full of derision and insult, combine
+      to dismantle the Bucintoro and burn it for the gold upon it!&rdquo; [Footnote:
+      That which follows is a translation of the report given by Cesare Cantù,
+      in his <i>Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto</i>, of a conversation
+      with the author of <i>Feste Veneziane</i>. It is not necessary to remind
+      readers of Venetian history that Renier and Michiel were of the foremost
+      names in the Golden Book. She who bore them both was born before the fall
+      of the Republic which she so much loved and lamented, and no doubt felt
+      more than the grief she expresses for the fate of the last Bucintoro. It
+      was destroyed, as she describes, in 1796, by the French Republicans and
+      Venetian Democrats after the abdication of the oligarchy; but a fragment
+      of its mast yet remains, and is to be seen in the museum of the
+      Arsenal.].... (This was the nuptial-ship in which the Doge went to wed the
+      sea, and the patriotic lady tells us concerning the Bucintoro of her day):
+      &ldquo;It was in the form of a galley, and two hundred feet long, with two
+      decks. The first of these was occupied by an hundred and sixty rowers, the
+      handsomest and strongest of the fleet, who sat four men to each oar, and
+      there awaited their orders; forty other sailors completed the crew. The
+      upper deck was divided lengthwise by a partition, pierced with arched
+      doorways, ornamented with gilded figures, and covered with a roof
+      supported by caryatides&mdash;the whole surmounted by a canopy of crimson
+      velvet embroidered with gold. Under this were ninety seats, and at the
+      stern a still richer chamber for the Doge&rsquo;s throne, over which drooped the
+      banner of St. Mark. The prow was double-beaked, and the sides of the
+      vessel were enriched with figures of Justice, Peace, Sea, Land, and other
+      allegories and ornaments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me imagine those times&mdash;it is the habit of the old. At midday,
+      having heard mass in the chapel of the Collegio, the Doge descends the
+      Giant&rsquo;s Stairs, issues from the Porta della Carta, [Footnote: The gate of
+      the Ducal Palace which opens upon the Piazzetta next St. Mark&rsquo;s.] and
+      passes the booths of the mercers and glass-venders erected for the fair
+      beginning that evening. He is preceded by eight standard-bearers with the
+      flags of the Republic,&mdash;red, blue, white, and purple,&mdash;given by
+      Alexander III. to the Doge Ziani. Six trumpets of silver, borne by as many
+      boys, mix their notes with the clangor of the bells of the city. Behind
+      come the retinues of the ambassadors in sumptuous liveries, and the fifty
+      Comandadori in their flowing blue robes and red caps; then follow
+      musicians, and the squires of the Doge in black velvet; then the guards of
+      the Doge, two chancellors, the secretary of the Pregadi, a deacon clad in
+      purple and bearing a wax taper, six canons, three parish priests in their
+      sacerdotal robes, and the Doge&rsquo;s chaplain dressed in crimson. The grand
+      chancellor is known by his crimson vesture. Two squires bear the Doge&rsquo;s
+      chair and the cushion of cloth of gold. And the Doge&mdash;the
+      representative, and not the master of his country; the executor, and not
+      the maker of the laws; citizen and prince, revered and guarded, sovereign
+      of individuals, servant of the State&mdash;comes clad in a long mantle of
+      ermine, cassock of blue, and vest and hose of <i>tocca d&rsquo;oro</i>
+      [Footnote: A gauze of gold and silk.] with the golden bonnet on his head,
+      under the umbrella borne by a squire, and surrounded by the foreign
+      ambassadors and the papal nuncio, while his drawn sword is carried by a
+      patrician recently destined for some government of land or sea, and soon
+      to depart upon his mission. In the rear comes a throng of personages,&mdash;the
+      grand captain of the city, the judges, the three chiefs of the Forty, the
+      Avogodori, the three chiefs of the Council of Ten, the three censors, and
+      the sixty of the Senate with the sixty of the Aggiunta, all in robes of
+      crimson silk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the Bucintoro, each takes the post assigned him, and the prince
+      ascends the throne. The Admiral of the Arsenal and the Lido stands in
+      front as pilot; at the helm is the Admiral of Malamacco, and around him
+      the ship-carpenters of the Arsenal. The Bucintoro, amid redoubled clamor
+      of bells and roar of cannon, quits the riva and majestically plows the
+      lagoon, surrounded by innumerable boats of every form and size.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Patriarch, who had already sent several vases of flowers to do
+      courtesy to the company in the Bucintoro, joins them at the island of
+      Sant&rsquo; Elena, and sprinkles their course with holy water. So they reach the
+      port of Lido, whence they formerly issued out upon the open sea; but in my
+      time they paused there, turning the stern of the vessel to the sea. Then
+      the Doge, amid the thunders of the artillery of the fort, took the ring
+      blessed by the Patriarch,&mdash;who now emptied a cup of holy water into
+      the sea,&mdash;and, advancing into a little gallery behind his throne,
+      threw the ring into the waves, pronouncing the words, <i>Desponsamus te,
+      mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii</i>. Proceeding then to the
+      church of San Nicoletto, they listened to a solemn mass, and returned to
+      Venice, where the dignitaries were entertained at a banquet, while the
+      multitude peacefully dispersed among the labyrinths of the booths erected
+      for the fair.&rdquo; [Footnote: One of the sops thrown to the populace on this
+      occasion, as we learn from Mutinelli, was the admission to the train of
+      gilded barges following the Bucintoro of a boat bearing the chief of the
+      Nicolotti, one of the factions into which from time immemorial the lower
+      classes of Venice had been divided. The distinction between the two
+      parties seems to have been purely geographical; for there is no apparent
+      reason why a man should have belonged to the Castellani except that he
+      lived in the eastern quarter of the city, or to the Nicolotti, except that
+      he lived in the western quarter. The government encouraged a rivalry not
+      dangerous to itself, and for a long time the champions of the two sections
+      met annually and beat each other with rods. The form of contest was
+      afterwards modified, and became a struggle for the possession of certain
+      bridges, in which the defeated were merely thrown into the canals. I often
+      passed the scene of the fiercest of these curious battles at San Barnaba,
+      where the Ponte de Pugni is adorned with four feet of stone let into the
+      pavement, and defying each other from the four corners of the bridge.
+      Finally, even these contests were given up and the Castellani and
+      Nicolotti spent their rivalry in marvelous acrobatic feats.] This fair,
+      which was established as early as 1180, was an industrial exhibition of
+      the arts and trades peculiar to Venice, and was repeated annually, with
+      increasing ostentation, till the end, in 1796. Indeed, the feasts of the
+      Republic at last grew so numerous that it became necessary, as we have
+      seen before, to make a single holiday pay a double or triple debt of
+      rejoicing. When the Venetians recovered Chioggia after the terrible war of
+      1380, the Senate refused to yield them another <i>festa</i>, and merely
+      ordered that St. Mark&rsquo;s Day should be thereafter observed with some added
+      ceremony: there was already one festival commemorative of a triumph over
+      the Genoese (that of San Giovanni Decollate, on whose day, in 1358, the
+      Venetians beat the Genoese at Negroponte), and the Senate declared that
+      this was sufficient. A curious custom, however, on the Sunday after
+      Ascension, celebrated a remoter victory over the same enemies, to which it
+      is hard to attach any historic probability. It is not known exactly when
+      the Genoese in immense force penetrated to Poveglia (one of the small
+      islands of the lagoons), nor why being there they stopped to ask the
+      islanders the best way of getting to Venice. But tradition says that the
+      sly Povegliesi persuaded these silly Genoese that the best method of
+      navigating the lagoons was by means of rafts, which they constructed for
+      them, and on which they sent them afloat. About the time the Venetians
+      came out to meet the armada, the withes binding the members of the rafts
+      gave way, and the Genoese who were not drowned in the tides stuck in the
+      mud, and were cut in pieces like so many melons. No one will be surprised
+      to learn that not a soul of them escaped, and that only the Povegliesi
+      lived to tell the tale. Special and considerable privileges were conferred
+      on them for their part in this exploit, and were annually confirmed by the
+      Doge, when a deputation of the islanders called on him in his palace, and
+      hugged and kissed the devoted prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People who <i>will</i> sentimentalize over the pigeons of St. Mark&rsquo;s, may
+      like to know that they have been settled in the city ever since 877. After
+      the religious services on Palm Sunday, it was anciently the custom of the
+      sacristans of St. Mark&rsquo;s to release doves fettered with fragments of
+      paper, and thus partly disabled from flight, for the people to scramble
+      for in the Piazza. The people fatted such of the birds as they caught, and
+      ate them at Easter, but those pigeons which escaped took refuge in the
+      roof of the church, where they gradually assumed a certain sacredness of
+      character, and increased to enormous numbers. They were fed by provision
+      of the Republic, and being neglected at the time of its fall, many of them
+      were starved. But they now flourish on a bequest left by a pious lady for
+      their maintenance, and on the largess of grain and polenta constantly
+      bestowed by strangers. Besides the holidays mentioned, the 6th of December
+      was religiously observed in honor of the taking of Constantinople, the
+      Doge assisting at mass in the ducal chapel of St. Nicholas. He also
+      annually visited, with his Signory in the state barges, and with great
+      concourse of people, the church of San Vito on the 15th of June, in memory
+      of the change of the government from a democracy to an oligarchy, and of
+      the suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo&rsquo;s conspiracy. On St. Isidore&rsquo;s Day he
+      went with his Signory, and the religious confraternities, in torchlight
+      procession, to hear mass at St. Mark&rsquo;s in celebration of the failure of
+      Marin Falier&rsquo;s plot. On the 17th of January he visited by water the
+      hospital erected for invalid soldiers and sailors, and thus commemorated
+      the famous defence of Scutari against the Turks, in 1413. For the peace of
+      1516, concluded after the dissolution of the League of Cambray, he went in
+      his barge to the church of Santa Marina, who had potently exerted her
+      influence for the preservation of the Republic against allied France,
+      Austria, Spain, and Rome. On St. Jerome&rsquo;s Day, when the newly-elected
+      members of the Council of Ten took their seats, the Doge entertained them
+      with a banquet, and there were great popular rejoicings over an affair in
+      which the people had no interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is by a singular caprice of fortune that, while not only all the
+      Venetian holidays in anywise connected with the glory of the Republic, but
+      also those which peculiarly signalized her piety and gratitude, have
+      ceased to be, a festival common to the whole Catholic world should still
+      be observed in Venice with extraordinary display. On the day of Corpus
+      Christi there is a superb ecclesiastical procession in the Piazza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great splendor of the solemnization is said to date from the times
+      when Enrico Dandolo and his fellow-Crusaders so far forgot their purpose
+      of taking Palestine from the infidels as to take Constantinople from the
+      schismatics. Up to that period the day of Corpus Christi was honored by a
+      procession from what was then the Cathedral of San Pietro di Castello; but
+      now all the thirty parishes of the city, with their hundred churches, have
+      part in the procession, which is of such great length as to take some two
+      hours in its progress round the Piazza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several days before the holiday workmen begin to build, within the Place
+      of St. Mark, the colonnade through which the procession is to pass; they
+      roof it with blue cotton cloth, and adorn it with rolls of pasteboard
+      representing garlands of palm. At last, on the festive morning, the
+      dwellers on the Grand Canal are drawn to their balconies by the apparition
+      of boat-loads of facchini, gorgeous in scarlet robes, and bearing banners,
+      painted candles, and other movable elements of devotion, with which they
+      pass to the Piazzetta, and thence into St. Mark&rsquo;s. They re-appear
+      presently, and, with a guard of Austrian troops to clear the way before
+      them, begin their march under the canopy of the colonnade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When you have seen the Place of St. Mark by night your eye has tasted its
+      most delicate delight, but then it is the delight given by a memory only,
+      and it touches you with sadness. You must see the Piazza to-day,&mdash;every
+      window fluttering with rich stuffs and vivid colors; the three great flag
+      staffs [Footnote: Once bearing the standards of Cyprus, Candia, and
+      Venice.] hanging their heavy flags; the brilliant square alive with a
+      holiday population, with resplendent uniforms, with Italian gesture and
+      movement, and that long glittering procession, bearing slowly on the
+      august paraphernalia of the Church&mdash;you must see all this before you
+      can enter into the old heart of Venetian magnificence, and feel its life
+      about you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To-day, the ancient church of San Pietro di Castello comes first in the
+      procession, and, with a proud humility, the Basilica San Marco last.
+      Before each parochial division goes a banner displaying the picture or
+      distinctive device of its titular saint, under the shadow of which chants
+      a priest; there are the hosts of the different churches, and the gorgeous
+      canopies under which they are elevated; then come facchini dressed in
+      scarlet and bearing the painted candles, or the long carved and gilded
+      candlesticks; and again facchini delicately robed in vestments of the
+      purest white linen, with caps of azure, green, and purple, and shod with
+      sandals or white shoes, carrying other apparatus of worship. Each banner
+      and candlestick has a fluttering leaf of tinsel paper attached to it, and
+      the procession makes a soft rustling as it passes. The matter-of-fact
+      character of the external Church walks between those symbolists, the
+      candle-bearers,&mdash;in the form of persons who gather the dropping
+      fatness of the candles, and deposit it in a vase carried for that purpose.
+      Citizens march in the procession with candles; and there are
+      charity-schools which also take part, and sing in the harsh, shrill
+      manner, of which I think only little boys who have their heads closely
+      shorn are capable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On all this we looked down from a window of the Old Procuratie&mdash;of
+      course with that calm sense of superiority which people are apt to have in
+      regarding the solemnities of a religion different from their own. But that
+      did not altogether prevent us from enjoying what was really beautiful and
+      charming in the scene. I thought most of the priests, very good and gentle
+      looking,&mdash;and in all respects they were much pleasanter to the eye
+      than the monks of the Carmelite order, who, in shaving their heads to
+      simulate the Saviour&rsquo;s crown of thorns, produce a hideous burlesque of the
+      divine humiliation. Yet many even of these had earnest and sincere faces,
+      and I could not think so much as I ought, perhaps, of their idle life, and
+      the fleas in their coarse brown cloaks. I confess, indeed, I felt rather a
+      sadness than an indignation at all that self-sacrifice to an end of which
+      I could but dimly see the usefulness. With some things in this grand
+      spectacle we were wholly charmed, and doubtless had most delight in the
+      little child who personated John the Baptist, and who was quite naked, but
+      for a fleece folded about him: he bore the cross-headed staff in one small
+      hand, and led with the other a lamb much tied up with blue ribbon. Here
+      and there in the procession little girls, exquisitely dressed, and gifted
+      by fond mothers with wings and aureoles, walked, scattering flowers. I
+      likewise greatly relished the lively holiday air of a company of airy old
+      men, the pensioners of some charity, who, in their white linen trousers
+      and blue coats, formed a prominent feature of the display. Far from being
+      puffed up with their consequence, they gossiped cheerfully with the
+      spectators in the pauses of the march, and made jests to each other in
+      that light-hearted, careless way observable in old men taken care of, and
+      with nothing before them to do worth speaking of but to die. I must own
+      that the honest facchini who bore the candles were equally affable, and
+      even freer with their jokes. But in this they formed a fine contrast to
+      here and there a closely hooded devotee, who, with hidden face and silent
+      lips, was carrying a taper for religion, and not, like them, for money. I
+      liked the great good-natured crowd, so orderly and amiable; and I enjoyed
+      even that old citizen in the procession who, when the Patriarch gave his
+      blessing, found it inconvenient to kneel, and compromised by stretching
+      one leg a great way out behind him. These things, indeed, quite took my
+      mind off of the splendors; and I let the canopy of the Scuola di San Rocco
+      (worth 40,000 ducats) go by with scarce a glance, and did not bestow much
+      more attention upon the brilliant liveries of the Patriarch&rsquo;s servants,&mdash;though
+      the appearance of these ecclesiastical flunkies is far more impressive
+      than that of any of their secular brethren. They went gorgeously before
+      the Patriarch, who was surrounded by the richly dressed clergy of St.
+      Mark&rsquo;s, and by clouds of incense rising from the smoking censers. He
+      walked under the canopy in his cardinal&rsquo;s robes, and with his eye fixed
+      upon the Host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once the procession halted, and the Patriarch blessed the crowd,
+      which knelt in a profound silence. Then the military band before him
+      struck up an air from &ldquo;Un Ballo in Maschera;&rdquo; the procession moved on to
+      the cathedral, and the crowd melted away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The once-magnificent day of the Ascension the Venetians now honor by
+      closing all shop-doors behind them and putting all thought of labor out of
+      their minds, and going forth to enjoy themselves in the mild, inexplosive
+      fashion which seems to satisfy Italian nature. It is the same on all the
+      feast-days: then the city sinks into profounder quiet; only bells are
+      noisy, and where their clangor is so common as in Venice, it seems at last
+      to make friends with the general stillness, and disturbs none but people
+      of untranquil minds. We always go to the Piazza San Marco when we seek
+      pleasure, and now, for eight days only of all the year, we have there the
+      great spectacle of the Adoration of the Magi, performed every hour by
+      automata within the little golden-railed gallery on the facade of the
+      Giant&rsquo;s Clock Tower. There the Virgin sits above the azure circle of the
+      zodiac, all heavily gilded, and holding the Child, equally splendid.
+      Through the doors on either side, usually occupied by the illuminated
+      figures of the hours, appears the procession and disappears. The stately
+      giant on the summit of the tower, at the hither side of the great bell,
+      solemnly strikes the hour&mdash;as a giant should who has struck it for
+      centuries&mdash;with a grand, whole-arm movement, and a slow, muscular
+      pride. We look up&mdash;we tourists of the red-backed books; we
+      peasant-girls radiant with converging darts of silver piercing the masses
+      of our thick black hair; we Austrian soldiers in white coats and blue
+      tights; we voiceful sellers of the cherries of Padua, and we calm loafers
+      about the many-pillared base of the church&mdash;we look up and see the
+      Adoration. First, the trumpeter, blowing the world news of the act; then
+      the first king, turning softly to the Virgin, and bowing; then the second,
+      that enthusiastic devotee,&mdash;the second who lifts his crown quite from
+      his head; last the Ethiopian prince, gorgeous in green and gold, who, I am
+      sorry to say, burlesques the whole solemnity. His devotion may be equally
+      heart-felt, but it is more jerky than that of the others. He bows well and
+      adequately, but recovers his balance with a prodigious start, altogether
+      too suggestive of springs and wheels. Perhaps there is a touch of the
+      pathetic in this grotesque fatality of the black king, whose suffering
+      race has always held mankind between laughter and tears, and has seldom
+      done a fine thing without leaving somewhere the neutralizing absurdity;
+      but if there is, the sentimental may find it, not I. When the procession
+      has disappeared, we wait till the other giant has struck the hour, and
+      then we disperse.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0346}.jpg" alt="{0346}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0346}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      If it is six o&rsquo;clock, and the sea has begun to breathe cool across the
+      Basin of St. Mark, we find our account in strolling upon the long Riva
+      degli Schiavoni towards the Public Gardens. One would suppose, at first
+      thought, that here, on this magnificent quay, with its glorious lookout
+      over the lagoons, the patricians would have built their finest palaces;
+      whereas there is hardly any thing but architectural shabbiness from the
+      Ponte della Paglia at one end, to the Ponte Santa Marina at the other. But
+      there need be nothing surprising in the fact, after all. The feudal wealth
+      and nobility of other cities kept the base at a respectful distance by
+      means of lofty stone walls, and so shut in their palaces and gardens. Here
+      equal seclusion could only be achieved by building flush upon the water,
+      and therefore all the finest palaces rise sheer from the canals; and
+      caffè, shops, barracks, and puppet-shows occupy the Riva degli Schiavoni.
+      Nevertheless, it is the favorite promenade of the Venetians for the winter
+      sunshine, and at such times in the summer as when the sun&rsquo;s rage is
+      tempered. There is always variety in the throng on the Riva, but the
+      fashionable part of it is the least interesting: here and there a
+      magnificent Greek flashes through the crowd, in dazzling white petticoats
+      and gold-embroidered leggings and jacket; now and then a tall Dalmat or a
+      solemn Turk; even the fishermen and the peasants, and the lower orders of
+      the people, are picturesque; but polite Venice is hopelessly given to the
+      pride of the eyes, and commits all the excesses of the French modes. The
+      Venetian dandy, when dressed to his own satisfaction, is the worst-dressed
+      man in the world. His hat curls outrageously in brim and sides; his
+      coatsleeves are extremely full, and the garment pinches him at the waist;
+      his pantaloons flow forth from the hips, and contract narrowly at the
+      boot, which is square-toed and made too long. The whole effect is
+      something not to be seen elsewhere, and is well calculated to move the
+      beholder to desperation. [Footnote: These exaggerations of the fashions of
+      1862 have been succeeded by equal travesties of the present modes.] The
+      Venetian fine lady, also, is prone to be superfine. Her dress is as full
+      of color as a Paolo Veronese; in these narrow streets, where it is hard to
+      expand an umbrella, she exaggerates hoops to the utmost; and she fatally
+      hides her ankles in pantalets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the wide thoroughfare leading from the last bridge of the Riva to the
+      gate of the gardens there is always a clapping of wooden shoes on the
+      stones, a braying of hand-organs, a shrieking of people who sell fish and
+      fruit, at once insufferable and indescribable. The street is a <i>rio
+      terrà</i>,&mdash;a filled-up canal,&mdash;and, as always happens with <i>rii
+      terrai</i>, is abandoned to the poorest classes who manifest themselves,
+      as the poorest classes are apt to do always, in groups of frowzy women,
+      small girls carrying large babies, beggars, of course, and soldiers. I
+      spoke of fruit-sellers; but in this quarter the traffic in pumpkin-seeds
+      is the most popular,&mdash;the people finding these an inexpensive and
+      pleasant excess, when taken with a glass of water flavored with anise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Gardens were made by Napoleon, who demolished to that end some
+      monasteries once cumbering the ground. They are pleasant enough, and are
+      not gardens at all, but a park of formally-planted trees&mdash;sycamores,
+      chiefly. I do not remember to have seen here any Venetians of the better
+      class, except on the Mondays-of-the-Garden, in September. Usually the
+      promenaders are fishermen, Austrian corporals, loutish youth of low
+      degree, and women too old and too poor to have any thing to do. Strangers
+      go there, and the German visitors even drink the exceptionable beer which
+      is sold in the wooden cottage on the little hillock at the end of the
+      Gardens. There is also a stable&mdash;where are the only horses in Venice.
+      They are let at a florin an hour, and I do not know why the riders are
+      always persons of the Hebrew faith. In a word, nothing can be drearier
+      than the company in the Gardens, and nothing lovelier than the view they
+      command,&mdash;from the sunset on the dome of the church of the Salute,
+      all round the broad sweep of lagoon, to the tower at the port of San
+      Nicolò, where you catch a glimpse of the Adriatic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The company is commonly stupid, but one evening, as we strolled idly
+      through the walks, we came upon an interesting group&mdash;forty or fifty
+      sailors, soldiers, youth of the people, gray-haired fishermen and
+      contadini&mdash;sitting and lying on the grass, and listening with rapt
+      attention to an old man reclining against a tree. I never saw a manner of
+      sweeter or easier dignity than the speaker&rsquo;s. Nature is so lavish of her
+      grace to these people that grow near her heart&mdash;the sun! Infinite
+      study could not have taught one northern-born the charm of oratory as this
+      old man displayed it. I listened, and heard that he was speaking Tuscan.
+      Do you guess with what he was enchanting his simple auditors? Nothing less
+      than &ldquo;Orlando Furioso.&rdquo; They listened with the hungriest delight, and when
+      Ariosto&rsquo;s interpreter raised his finger and said, &ldquo;Disse l&rsquo;imperatore,&rdquo;
+       or, &ldquo;Orlando disse, Carlomano mio,&rdquo; they hardly breathed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the <i>Lunedì dei Giardini</i>, already mentioned, all orders of the
+      people flock thither, and promenade, and banquet on the grass. The trees
+      get back the voices of their dryads, and the children fill the aisles with
+      glancing movement and graceful sport.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, the hand-organ seeks here its proper element, the populace,&mdash;but
+      here it brays to a peculiarly beautiful purpose. For no sooner does it
+      sound than the young girls of the people wreathe themselves into dances,
+      and improvise the poetry of motion. Over the grass they whirl, and up and
+      down the broad avenues, and no one of all the gentle and peaceable crowd
+      molests or makes them afraid. It is a scene to make you believe in Miriam
+      dancing with Donatello there in that old garden at Rome, and reveals a
+      simple beauty in the nature of the Italian poor, which shall one day, I
+      hope, be counted in their favor when they are called to answer for lying
+      and swindling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It often happens, even after the cold has announced itself in Venice, that
+      the hesitating winter lingers in the Tyrol, and a mellow Indian-summer
+      weather has possession of the first weeks of December. There was nothing
+      in the December weather of 1863 to remind us Northerners that Christmas
+      was coming. The skies were as blue as those of June, the sun was warm, and
+      the air was bland, with only now and then a trenchant breath from the
+      Alps, coming like a delicate sarcasm from loveliness unwilling to be
+      thought insipidly amiable. But if there was no warning in the weather,
+      there were other signs of Christmas-time not to be mistaken: a certain
+      foolish leaping of the heart in one&rsquo;s own breast, as if the dead raptures
+      of childhood were stirred in their graves by the return of the happy
+      season; and in Venice, in weary, forlorn Venice, there was the
+      half-unconscious tumult, the expectant bustle which cities feel at the
+      approach of holidays. The little shops put on their gayest airs; there was
+      a great clapping and hammering on the stalls and booths which were
+      building in the campos; the street-cries were more shrill and resonant
+      than ever, and the air was shaken with the continual clangor of the church
+      bells. All this note of preparation is rather bewildering to strangers,
+      and is apt to disorder the best-disciplined intentions of seeing Christmas
+      as the Venetians keep it. The public observance of the holiday in the
+      churches and on the streets is evident and accessible to the most
+      transient sojourner; but it is curious proof of the difficulty of
+      knowledge concerning the in-door life and usages of the Italians, that I
+      had already spent two Christmases in Venice without learning any thing of
+      their home celebration of the day. Perhaps a degree of like difficulty
+      attends like inquiry everywhere, for the happiness of Christmas contracts
+      the family circle more exclusively than ever around the home hearth, or
+      the domestic scaldino, as the case may be. But, at any rate, I was quite
+      ready to say that the observance of Christmas in Venice was altogether
+      public, when I thought it a measure of far-sighted prudence to consult my
+      barber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all Latin countries the barber is a source of information, which,
+      skillfully tapped, pours forth in a stream of endless gossip and local
+      intelligence. Every man talks with his barber; and perhaps a lingering
+      dignity clings to this artist from his former profession of surgeon: it is
+      certain the barber here prattles on with a freedom and importance
+      perfectly admitted and respected by the interlocutory count under his
+      razor. Those who care to know how things passed in an Italian barber shop
+      three hundred years ago, may read it in Miss Evans&rsquo;s &ldquo;Romola;&rdquo; those who
+      are willing to see Nello alive and carrying on his art in Venice at this
+      day, must go to be shaved at his shop in the Frezzaria. Here there is a
+      continual exchange of gossip, and I have often listened with profit to the
+      sage and piquant remarks of the head barber and chief <i>ciarlone</i>, on
+      the different events of human life brought to his notice. His shop is well
+      known as a centre of scandal, and I have heard a fair Venetian declare
+      that she had cut from her list all acquaintance who go there, as persons
+      likely to become infected with the worst habits of gossip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this Nello, however, I used to go only when in the most brilliant humor
+      for listening, and my authority on Christmas observances is another and
+      humbler barber, but not less a babbler, than the first. By birth, I
+      believe, he is a Mantuan, and he prides himself on speaking Italian
+      instead of Venetian. He has a defective eye, which obliges him to tack
+      before bringing his razor to bear, but which is all the more favorable to
+      conversation. On the whole, he is flattered to be asked about Christmas in
+      Venice, and he first tells me that it is one of the chief holidays of the
+      year:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is then, Signore, that the Venetians have the custom to make three
+      sorts of peculiar presents: Mustard, Fish, and Mandorlato. You must have
+      seen the mustard in the shop windows: it is a thick conserve of fruits,
+      flavored with mustard; and the mandorlato is a candy made of honey, and
+      filled with almonds. Well, they buy fish, as many as they will, and a vase
+      of mustard, and a box of mandorlato, and make presents of them, one family
+      to another, the day before Christmas. It is not too much for a rich family
+      to present a hundred boxes of mandorlato and as many pots of mustard.
+      These are exchanged between friends in the city, and Venetians also send
+      them to acquaintance in the country, whence the gift is returned in cakes
+      and eggs at Easter. Christmas Eve people invite each other to great
+      dinners, and eat and drink, and make merry; but there are only fish and
+      vegetables, for it is a meagre day, and meats are forbidden. This dinner
+      lasts so long that, when it is over, it is almost time to so to midnight
+      mass, which all must attend, or else hear three masses on the morrow; and
+      no doubt it was some delinquent who made our saying,&mdash;&lsquo;Long as a
+      Christmas mass.&rsquo; On Christmas Day people dine at home, keeping the day
+      with family reunions. But the day after! Ah-heigh! That is the first of
+      Carnival, and all the theatres are opened, and there is no end to the
+      amusements&mdash;or was not, in the old time. Now, they never begin. A
+      week later comes the day of the Lord&rsquo;s Circumcision, and then the next
+      holiday is Easter. The Nativity, the Circumcision, and the Resurrection&mdash;behold!
+      these are the three mysteries of the Christian faith. Of what religion are
+      the Americans, Signore?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I think I was justified in answering that we were Christians. My barber
+      was politely surprised. &ldquo;But there are so many different religions,&rdquo; he
+      said, in excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the afternoon before Christmas I walked through the thronged Merceria
+      to the Rialto Bridge, where the tumultuous mart which opens at Piazza San
+      Marco culminates in a deafening uproar of bargains. At this time the
+      Merceria, or street of the shops, presents the aspect of a fair, and is
+      arranged with a tastefulness and a cunning ability to make the most of
+      every thing, which are seldom applied to the abundance of our fairs at
+      home. The shops in Venice are all very small, and the streets of lofty
+      houses are so narrow and dark, that whatever goods are not exposed in the
+      shop-windows are brought to the door to be clamored over by purchasers; so
+      that the Merceria is roused by unusual effort to produce a more pronounced
+      effect of traffic and noise than it always wears; but now the effort had
+      been made and the effect produced. The street was choked with the throngs,
+      through which all sorts of peddlers battled their way and cried their
+      wares. In Campo San Bartolomeo, into which the Merceria expands, at the
+      foot of Rialto Bridge, holiday traffic had built enormous barricades of
+      stalls, and entrenched itself behind booths, whence purchasers were
+      assailed with challenges to buy bargains. More than half the campo was
+      paved with crockery from Rovigo and glass-ware from Murano; clothing of
+      every sort, and all kinds of small household wares, were offered for sale;
+      and among the other booths, in the proportion of two to one, were stalls
+      of the inevitable Christmas mustard and mandorlato.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I cared rather for the crowd than what the crowd cared for. I had been
+      long ago obliged to throw aside my preconceived notions of the Italian
+      character, though they were not, I believe, more absurd than the
+      impressions of others who have never studied Italian character in Italy. I
+      hardly know what of bacchantic joyousness I had not attributed to them on
+      their holidays: a people living in a mild climate under such a lovely sky,
+      with wine cheap and abundant, might not unreasonably have been expected to
+      put on a show of the greatest jollity when enjoying themselves. Venetian
+      crowds are always perfectly gentle and kindly, but they are also as a
+      whole usually serious; and this Christmas procession, moving up and down
+      the Merceria, and to and fro between the markets of Rialto, was in the
+      fullest sense a solemnity. It is true that the scene was dramatic, but the
+      drama was not consciously comic. Whether these people bought or sold, or
+      talked together, or walked up and down in silence, they were all equally
+      in earnest. The crowd, in spite of its noisy bustle and passionate uproar,
+      did not seem to me a blithe or light-hearted crowd. Its sole activity was
+      that of traffic, for, far more dearly than any Yankee, a Venetian loves a
+      bargain, and puts his whole heart into upholding and beating down demands.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0360}.jpg" alt="{0360}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0360}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Across the Bridge began the vegetable and fruit market, where whole
+      Hollands of cabbage and Spains of onions opened on the view, with every
+      other succulent and toothsome growth; and beyond this we entered the glory
+      of Rialto, the fish-market, which is now more lavishly supplied than at
+      any other season. It was picturesque and full of gorgeous color for the
+      fish of Venice seem all to catch the rainbow hues of the lagoon. There is
+      a certain kind of red mullet, called <i>triglia</i>, which is as rich and
+      tender in its dyes as if it had never swam in water less glorious than
+      that which crimsons under October sunsets. But a fish-market, even at
+      Rialto, with fishermen in scarlet caps and <i>triglie</i> in sunset
+      splendors, is only a fish-market after all: it is wet and slimy under
+      foot, and the innumerable gigantic eels, writhing everywhere, set the soul
+      asquirm, and soon-sated curiosity slides willingly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had an appointment with a young Venetian lady to attend midnight mass
+      at the church of San Moisè, and thither about half-past eleven we went to
+      welcome in Christmas. The church of San Moisè is in the highest style of
+      the Renaissance art, which is, I believe, the lowest style of any other.
+      The richly sculptured façade is divided into stories; the fluted columns
+      are stilted upon pedestals, and their lines are broken by the bands which
+      encircle them like broad barrel-hoops. At every possible point theatrical
+      saints and angels, only sustained from falling to the ground by iron bars
+      let into their backs, start from the niches and cling to the sculpture.
+      The outside of the church is in every way detestable, and the inside is
+      consistently bad. All the side-altars have broken arches, and the high
+      altar is built of rough blocks of marble to represent Mount Sinai, on
+      which a melodramatic statue of Moses receives the tables of the law from
+      God the Father, with frescoed seraphim in the background. For the same
+      reason, I suppose, that the devout prefer a hideous Bambino and a Madonna
+      in crinoline to the most graceful artistic conception of those sacred
+      personages, San Moisè is the most popular church for the midnight mass in
+      Venice, and there is no mass at all in St. Mark&rsquo;s, where its magnificence
+      would be so peculiarly impressive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Christmas Eve, then, this church was crowded, and the door-ways were
+      constantly thronged with people passing in and out. I was puzzled to see
+      so many young men present, for Young Italy is not usually in great number
+      at church; but a friend explained the anomaly: &ldquo;After the guests at our
+      Christmas Eve dinners have well eaten and drunken, they all go to mass in
+      at least one church, and the younger offer a multiplied devotion by going
+      to all. It is a good thing in some ways, for by this means they manage to
+      see every pretty face in the city, which that night has specially prepared
+      itself to be seen;&rdquo; and from this slender text my friend began to
+      discourse at large about these Christmas Eve dinners, and chiefly how
+      jollily the priests fared, ending with the devout wish, &ldquo;Would God had
+      made me nephew of a canonico!&rdquo; The great dinners of the priests are a
+      favorite theme with Italian talkers; but I doubt it is after all only a
+      habit of speech. The priests are too numerous to feed sumptuously in most
+      cases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had a good place to see and hear, sitting in the middle of the main
+      aisle, directly over the dust of John Law, who alighted in Venice when his
+      great Mississippi bubble burst, and died here, and now sleeps peacefully
+      under a marble tablet in the ugly church of San Moisè. The thought of that
+      busy, ambitious life, come to this unscheming repose under our feet,&mdash;so
+      far from the scene of its hopes, successes, and defeats,&mdash;gave its
+      own touch of solemnity to the time and place, and helped the offended
+      sense of propriety through the bursts of operatic music, which
+      interspersed the mass. But on the whole, the music was good and the
+      function sufficiently impressive,&mdash;what with the gloom of the temple
+      everywhere starred with tapers, and the grand altar lighted to the
+      mountain-top. The singing of the priests also was here much better than I
+      had found it elsewhere in Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The equality of all classes in church is a noticeable thing always in
+      Italy, but on this Christmas Eve it was unusually evident. The rags of the
+      beggar brushed the silks of luxury, as the wearers knelt side by side on
+      the marble floor; and on the night when God was born to poverty on earth,
+      the rich seemed to feel that they drew nearer Him in the neighborhood of
+      the poor. In these costly temples of the eldest Christianity, the poor
+      seem to enter upon their inheritance of the future, for it is they who
+      frequent them most and possess them with the deepest sense of ownership.
+      The withered old woman, who creeps into St Mark&rsquo;s with her scaldino in her
+      hand, takes visible possession of its magnificence as God&rsquo;s and hers, and
+      Catholic wealth and rank would hardly, if challenged, dispute her claim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the longest mass comes to an end at last, and those of our party who
+      could credit themselves with no gain of masses against the morrow,
+      received the benediction at San Moisè with peculiar unction. We all issued
+      forth, and passing through the lines of young men who draw themselves up
+      on either side of the doors of public places in Venice, to look at the
+      young ladies as they come out, we entered the Place of St. Mark. The
+      Piazza was more gloriously beautiful than ever I saw it before, and the
+      church had a saintly loveliness. The moon was full, and snowed down the
+      mellowest light on the gray domes, which in their soft, elusive outlines,
+      and strange effect of far-withdrawal, rhymed like faint-heard refrains to
+      the bright and vivid arches of the façade. And if the bronze horses had
+      been minded to quit their station before the great window over the central
+      arch, they might have paced around the night&rsquo;s whole half-world, and found
+      no fairer resting-place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Christmas Day in Venice, it amounted to very little; every thing
+      was closed, and whatever merry-making went on was all within doors.
+      Although the shops and the places of amusement were opened the day
+      following, the city entered very sparingly on the pleasures of Carnival,
+      and Christmas week passed off in every-day fashion. It will be remembered
+      that on St. Stephen&rsquo;s Day&mdash;the first of Carnival&mdash;one of the
+      five annual banquets took place at the Ducal Palace in the time of the
+      Republic. A certain number of patricians received invitations to the
+      dinner, and those for whom there was no room were presented with fish and
+      poultry by the Doge. The populace were admitted to look on during the
+      first course, and then, having sated their appetites with this savory
+      observance, were invited to withdraw. The patriotic Giustina
+      Renier-Michiel of course makes much of the courtesy thus extended to the
+      people by the State, but I cannot help thinking it must have been hard to
+      bear. The banquet, however, has passed away with the Republic which gave
+      it, and the only savor of dinner which Venetian poverty now inhales on St.
+      Stephen&rsquo;s Day, is that which arises from its own proper pot of broth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      New Year&rsquo;s is the carnival of the beggars in Venice. Their business is
+      carried on briskly throughout the year, but on this day it is pursued with
+      an unusual degree of perseverance, and an enterprise worthy of all
+      disinterested admiration. At every corner, on every bridge, under every
+      door-way, hideous shapes of poverty, mutilation, and deformity stand
+      waiting, and thrust out palms, plates, and pans, and advance good wishes
+      and blessings to all who pass, It is an immemorial custom, and it is one
+      in which all but the quite comfortable classes participate. The facchini
+      in every square take up their collections; the gondoliers have their
+      plates prepared for contribution at every ferry; at every caffè and
+      restaurant begging-boxes appeal to charity. Whoever has lifted hand in
+      your service in any way during the past year expects a reward on New
+      Year&rsquo;s for the complaisance, and in some cases the shop-keepers send to
+      wish you a <i>bel capo d&rsquo;anno</i>, with the same practical end in view. On
+      New Year&rsquo;s Eve and morning bands of facchini and gondoliers go about
+      howling <i>vivas</i> under charitable windows till they open and drop
+      alms. The Piazza is invaded by the legions of beggary, and held in
+      overpowering numbers against all comers; and to traverse it is like a
+      progress through a lazar-house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond encouraging so gross an abuse as this, I do not know that Venice
+      celebrates New Year&rsquo;s in a peculiar manner. It is a <i>festa</i>, and
+      there are masses, of course. Presents are exchanged, which consist chiefly
+      of books&mdash;printed for the season, and brilliant outside and dull
+      within, like all annuals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING; BAPTISMS AND BURIALS.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians have had a practical and strictly business-like way of
+      arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has
+      always been made for the dower and for the good of the State; private and
+      public interest being consulted, the small matters of affections have been
+      left to the chances of association; and it does not seem that Venetian
+      society has ever dealt severely with husbands or wives whom
+      incompatibilities forced to seek consolation outside of matrimony.
+      Herodotus relates that the Illyrian Veneti sold their daughters at auction
+      to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably placed in life,
+      the hard-favored were given to whomsoever would take them, with such dower
+      as might be considered a reasonable compensation. The auction was
+      discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts still partook of
+      the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction. At a comparatively
+      late period Venetian fathers went with their daughters to a great annual
+      matrimonial fair at San Pietro di Castello Olivolo, and the youth of the
+      lagoons repaired thither to choose wives from the number of the maidens.
+      These were all dressed in white, with hair loose about the neck, and each
+      bore her dower in a little box, slung over her shoulder by a ribbon. It is
+      to be supposed that there was commonly a previous understanding between
+      each damsel and some youth in the crowd: as soon as all had paired off,
+      the bishop gave them a sermon and his benediction, and the young men
+      gathered up their brides and boxes, and went away wedded. It was on one of
+      these occasions, in the year 944, that the Triestine pirates stole the
+      Brides of Venice with their dowers, and gave occasion to the Festa delle
+      Marie, already described, and to Rogers&rsquo;s poem, which every body pretends
+      to have read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This going to San Pietro&rsquo;s, selecting a wife and marrying her on the spot,
+      out of hand, could only have been the contrivance of a straightforward,
+      practical race. Among the common people betrothals were managed with even
+      greater ease and dispatch, till a very late day in history; and in the
+      record of a certain trial which took place in 1443 there is an account of
+      one of these brief and unceremonious courtships. Donna Catarussa, who
+      gives evidence, and whom I take to have been a worthless, idle gossip, was
+      one day sitting at her door, when Piero di Trento passed, selling brooms,
+      and said to her, &ldquo;Madonna, find me some nice girl.&rdquo; To which Donna
+      Catarussa replied, &ldquo;Ugly fool! do you take me for a go-between?&rdquo; &ldquo;No,&rdquo;
+       said Piero, &ldquo;not that; I mean a girl to be my wife.&rdquo; And as Donna
+      Catarussa thought at once of a suitable match, she said, &ldquo;In faith of God,
+      I know one for you. Come again to-morrow.&rdquo; So they both met next day, and
+      the woman chosen by Donna Catarussa being asked, &ldquo;Wouldst thou like to
+      have Piero for thy husband, as God commands and holy Church?&rdquo; she
+      answered, &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; And Peter being asked the like question, answered, &ldquo;Why,
+      yes, certainly.&rdquo; And they went off and had the wedding feast. A number of
+      these betrothals takes place in the last scene of Goldoni&rsquo;s &ldquo;Baruffe
+      Chiozzotte,&rdquo; where the belligerent women and their lovers take hands in
+      the public streets, and saluting each other as man and wife, are
+      affianced, and get married as quickly as possible:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Checa</i> (to Tofolo). Take my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Tofolo</i>. Wife!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Checa</i>. Husband!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Tofolo</i>. Hurra!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The betrothals of the Venetian nobles were celebrated with as much pomp
+      and ceremony as could possibly distinguish them from those of the people,
+      and there was much more polite indifference to the inclinations of the
+      parties immediately concerned. The contract was often concluded before the
+      betrothed had seen each other, by means of a third person, when the amount
+      of the dower was fixed. The bridegroom elect having verbally agreed with
+      the parents of the bride, repaired at an early day to the court-yard of
+      the Ducal Palace, where the match was published, and where he shook hands
+      with his kinsmen and friends. On the day fixed for signing the contract
+      the bride&rsquo;s father invited to his house the bridegroom and all his
+      friends, and hither came the high officers of state to compliment the
+      future husband. He, with the father of his betrothed, met the guests at
+      the door of the palace, and conducted them to the grand saloon, which no
+      woman was allowed (<i>si figuri!</i>) at this time to enter. When the
+      company was seated, the bride, clad in white, was led from her rooms and
+      presented. She wore a crown of pearls and brilliants on her head, and her
+      hair, mixed with long threads of gold, fell loose about her shoulders, as
+      you may see it in Carpaccio&rsquo;s pictures of the Espousals of St. Ursula. Her
+      ear-rings were pendants of three pearls set in gold; her neck and throat
+      were bare but for a collar of lace and gems, from which slid a fine
+      jeweled chain into her bosom. Over her breast she wore a stomacher of
+      cloth of gold, to which were attached her sleeves, open from the elbow to
+      the hand. The formal words of espousal being pronounced, the bride paced
+      slowly round the hall to the music of fifes and trumpets, and made a
+      gentle inclination to each of the guests; and then returned to her
+      chamber, from which she issued again on the arrival of any tardy friend,
+      and repeated the ceremony. After all this, she descended to the courtyard,
+      where she was received by gentlewomen, her friends, and placed on a raised
+      seat (which was covered with rich stuffs) in an open gondola, and thus,
+      followed by a fleet of attendant gondolas, went to visit all the convents
+      in which there were kinspeople of herself or her betrothed. The excessive
+      publicity of these ceremonies was supposed to strengthen the validity of
+      the marriage contract. At an early day after the espousals the betrothed,
+      preceded by musicians and followed by relatives and friends, went at dawn
+      to be married in the church,&mdash;the bridegroom wearing a toga, and the
+      bride a dress of white silk or crimson velvet, with jewels in her hair,
+      and pearls embroidered on her robes. Visits of congratulation followed,
+      and on the same day a public feast was given in honor of the wedding, to
+      which at least three hundred persons were always invited, and at which the
+      number, quality, and cost of the dishes were carefully regulated by the
+      Republic&rsquo;s laws. On this occasion, one or more persons were chosen as
+      governors of the feast, and after the tables were removed, a mock-heroic
+      character appeared, and recounted with absurd exaggeration the deeds of
+      the ancestors of the bride and groom. The next morning <i>ristorativi</i>
+      of sweetmeats and confectionery were presented to the happy couple, by
+      whom the presents were returned in kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A splendor so exceptional, even in the most splendid age of the most
+      splendid city, as that which marked the nuptial feasts of the unhappy
+      Jacopo Foscari, could not be left unnoticed in this place. He espoused
+      Lucrezia, daughter of Lionardo Contarini, a noble as rich and magnificent
+      as Jacopo&rsquo;s own father, the Doge; and, on the 29th of January 1441, the
+      noble Eustachio Balbi being chosen lord of the feasts, the bridegroom, the
+      bride&rsquo;s brother and eighteen other patrician youths, assembled in the
+      Palazzo Balbi, whence they went on horseback to conduct Lucrezia to the
+      Ducal Palace. They were all sumptuously dressed in crimson velvet and
+      silver brocade of Alexandria, and rode chargers superbly caparisoned.
+      Other noble friends attended them; musicians went before; a troop of
+      soldiers brought up the rear. They thus proceeded to the court-yard of the
+      Ducal Palace, and then, returning, traversed the Piazza, and threading the
+      devious little streets to the Campo San Samuele, there crossed the Grand
+      Canal upon a bridge of boats, to San Barnaba opposite, where the Contarini
+      lived. On their arrival at this place the bride, supported by two
+      Procuratori di San Marco, and attended by sixty ladies, descended to the
+      church and heard mass, after which an oration was delivered in Campo San
+      Barnaba before the Doge, the ambassadors, and a multitude of nobles and
+      people, in praise of the spouses and their families. The bride then
+      returned to her father&rsquo;s house, and jousts took place in the campos of
+      Santa Maria Formosa and San Polo (the largest in the city), and in the
+      Piazza San Marco. The Doge gave a great banquet, and at its close one
+      hundred and fifty ladies proceeded to the bride&rsquo;s palace in the Bucintoro,
+      where one hundred other ladies joined them, together with Lucrezia, who,
+      seated between Francesco Sforza (then General-in-chief of the Republic&rsquo;s
+      armies) and the Florentine ambassador, was conducted, amid the shouts of
+      the people and the sound of trumpets, to the Ducal Palace. The Doge
+      received her at the riva of the Piazzetta, and, with Sforza and Balbi led
+      her to the foot of the palace stairs, where the Dogaressa, with sixty
+      ladies, welcomed her. A state supper ended this day&rsquo;s rejoicings, and on
+      the following day a tournament took place in the Piazza, for a prize of
+      cloth of gold, which was offered by Sforza. Forty knights contested the
+      prize and supped afterward with the Doge. On the next day there were
+      processions of boats with music on the Grand Canal; on the fourth and last
+      day there were other jousts for prizes offered by the jewelers and
+      Florentine merchants; and every night there were dancing and feasting in
+      the Ducal Palace. The Doge was himself the giver of the last tournament,
+      and with this the festivities came to an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have read an account by an old-fashioned English traveler of a Venetian
+      marriage which he saw, sixty or seventy years ago, at the church of San
+      Giorgio Maggiore: &ldquo;After a crowd of nobles,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;in their usual
+      black robes, had been some time in attendance, the gondolas appearing,
+      exhibited a fine show, though all of them were painted of a sable hue, in
+      consequence of a sumptuary law, which is very necessary in this place, to
+      prevent an expense which many who could not bear it would incur;
+      nevertheless the barcarioli, or boatmen, were dressed in handsome
+      liveries; the gondolas followed one another in a line, each carrying two
+      ladies, who were likewise dressed in black. As they landed they arranged
+      themselves in order, forming a line from the gate to the great altar. At
+      length the bride, arrayed in white as the symbol of innocence, led by the
+      bridesman, ascended the stairs of the landing-place. There she received
+      the compliments of the bridegroom, in his black toga, who walked at her
+      right hand to the altar, where they and all the company kneeled. I was
+      often afraid the poor young creature would have sunk upon the ground
+      before she arrived, for she trembled with great agitation, while she made
+      her low courtesies from side to side: however, the ceremony was no sooner
+      performed than she seemed to recover her spirits, and looked matrimony in
+      the face with a determined smile. Indeed, in all appearance she had
+      nothing to fear from her husband, whose age and aspect were not at all
+      formidable; accordingly she tripped back to the gondola with great
+      activity and resolution, and the procession ended as it began. Though
+      there was something attractive in this aquatic parade, the black hue of
+      the boats and the company presented to a stranger, like me, the idea of a
+      funeral rather than a wedding. My expectation was raised too high by the
+      previous description of the Italians, who are much given to hyperbole, who
+      gave me to understand that this procession would far exceed any thing I
+      had ever seen. When I reflect upon this rhodomontade,&rdquo; disdainfully adds
+      Mr. Drummond, &ldquo;I cannot help comparing, in my memory, the paltry
+      procession of the Venetian marriage with a very august occurrence of which
+      I was eyewitness in Sweden,&rdquo; and which being the reception of their
+      Swedish Majesties by the British fleet, I am sure the reader will not ask
+      me to quote. With change of government, changes of civilization following
+      the revolutions, and the decay of wealth among the Venetian nobles, almost
+      all their splendid customs have passed away, and the habit of making
+      wedding presents of sweetmeats and confectionery is perhaps the only relic
+      which has descended from the picturesque past to the present time. These
+      gifts are still exchanged not only by nobles, but by all commoners
+      according to their means, and are sometimes a source of very profuse
+      outlay. It is the habit to send the candies in the elegant and costly
+      paper caskets which the confectioners sell, and the sum of a thousand
+      florins scarcely suffices to pass the courtesy round a moderately large
+      circle of friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still greatly
+      a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to the
+      principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that they have
+      not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the poorest, who
+      cannot and do not seclude the youth of either sex from each other, and
+      with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and subterfuge would be
+      superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the <i>capa y espada</i>
+      comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried on with all the
+      cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and stolen interviews.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us take our nominal friends, Marco and Todaro, and attend them in
+      their solemn promenade under the arcades of the Procuratie, or upon the
+      Molo, whither they go every evening to taste the air and to look at the
+      ladies, while the Austrians and the other foreigners listen to the
+      military music in the Piazza. They are both young, our friends; they have
+      both glossy silk hats; they have both light canes and an innocent swagger.
+      Inconceivably mild are these youth, and in their talk indescribably small
+      and commonplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They look at the ladies, and suddenly Todaro feels the consuming ardors of
+      love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Todaro</i> (to Marco). Here, dear! Behold this beautiful blonde here!
+      Beautiful as an angel! But what loveliness!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Marco</i>. But where?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Todaro</i>. It is enough. Let us go. I follow her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the force of the passion in southern hearts. They follow that
+      beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of the gray-moustached
+      papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is electrically
+      conscious of pursuit. They follow her during the whole evening, and, at a
+      distance, softly follow her home, where the burning Todaro photographs the
+      number of the house upon the sensitized tablets of his soul.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0380}.jpg" alt="{0380}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0380}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      This is the first great step in love: he has seen his adored one, and he
+      knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardor. The next advance
+      is to be decided between himself and the faithful Marco, and is to be
+      debated over many cups of black coffee, not to name glasses of
+      sugar-and-water and the like exciting beverages. The friends may now find
+      out the caffè which the Biondina frequents with her parents, and to which
+      Todaro may go every evening and feast his eyes upon her loveliness, never
+      making his regard known by any word, till some night, when he has followed
+      her home, he steals speech with her as he stands in the street under her
+      balcony,&mdash;and looks sufficiently sheepish as people detect him on
+      their late return from the theatre. [Footnote: The love-making scenes in
+      Goldoni&rsquo;s comedy of <i>Il Bugiarda</i> are photographically faithful to
+      present usage in Venice.] Or, if the friends do not take this course in
+      their courtship (for they are both engaged in the wooing), they decide
+      that Todaro, after walking back and forth a sufficient number of times in
+      the street where the Biondina lives, shall write her a tender letter, to
+      demand if she be disposed to correspond his love. This billet must always
+      be conveyed to her by her serving-maid, who must be bribed by Marco for
+      the purpose. At every juncture Marco must be consulted, and acquainted
+      with every step of progress; and no doubt the Biondina has some lively
+      Moretta for her friend, to whom she confides her part of the love-affair
+      in all its intricacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may likewise happen that Todaro shall go to see the Biondina in church,
+      whither, but for her presence, he would hardly go, and that there, though
+      he may not have speech with her, he shall still fan the ardors of her
+      curiosity and pity by persistent sighs. It must be confessed that if the
+      Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his devotion must assume the
+      character of an intolerable bore to her; and that to see him everywhere at
+      her heels&mdash;to behold him leaning against the pillar near which she
+      kneels at church, the head of his stick in his mouth, and his attitude
+      carefully taken with a view to captivation&mdash;to be always in deadly
+      fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or, turning round at the caffè
+      encounter his pleading gaze&mdash;that all this must drive the Biondina to
+      a state bordering upon blasphemy and finger-nails. <i>Ma, come si fa? Ci
+      vuol pazienza!</i> This is the sole course open to ingenuous youth in
+      Venice, where confessed and unashamed acquaintance between young people is
+      extremely difficult; and so this blind pursuit must go on, till the
+      Biondina&rsquo;s inclinations are at last laboriously ascertained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose the Biondina consents to be loved? Then Todaro has just and proper
+      inquiries to make concerning her dower, and if her fortune is as pleasing
+      as herself, he has only to demand her in marriage of her father, and after
+      that to make her acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day a Venetian friend of mine, who spoke a little English, came to me
+      with a joyous air and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am in lofe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The recipient of repeated confidences of this kind from the same person, I
+      listened with tempered effusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a blonde again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you have right; blonde again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And pretty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but beautiful. I lofe her&mdash;<i>come si dice!&mdash;immensamente.&rdquo;</i>
+      &ldquo;And where did you see her? Where did you make her acquaintance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not make the acquaintance. I see her pass with his fazer every
+      night on Rialto Bridge We did not spoke yet&mdash;only with the eyes. The
+      lady is not of Venice. She has four thousand florins. It is not much&mdash;no.
+      But!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Is not this love at first sight almost idyllic? Is it not also a sublime
+      prudence to know the lady&rsquo;s fortune better than herself, before herself?
+      These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before
+      they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and
+      white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After that
+      may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of friendship,
+      and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating the auspicious
+      event. If he be rich, or can write <i>nobile</i> after his Christian name,
+      perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and alive to grateful
+      consequences, may publish a poem, elegantly printed by the matchless
+      printers at Rovigo, and send it to all the bridegroom&rsquo;s friends. It is not
+      the only event which the facile Venetian Muse shall sing for him. If his
+      child is brought happily through the measles by Dottor Cavasangue, the
+      Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any public honor or scholastic
+      degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and when he dies the mortuary
+      rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every occurrence&mdash;a boy&rsquo;s
+      success at school, an advocate&rsquo;s triumphal passage of the perils of
+      examination at Padua, a priest&rsquo;s first mass, a nun&rsquo;s novitiate, a birth,
+      an amputation&mdash;is the subject of tuneful effusion, and no less the
+      occasion of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring campo, who
+      assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of voices around the victim&rsquo;s
+      door, and proclaim his skill or good fortune, and break into <i>vivas</i>
+      that never end till he bribes their enthusiasm into silence. The naïve
+      commonplaceness of feeling in all matrimonial transactions, in spite of
+      the gloss which the operatic methods of courtship threw about them, was a
+      source of endless amusement, as it stole out in different ways. &ldquo;You know
+      my friend Marco?&rdquo; asked an acquaintance one day. &ldquo;Well, we are looking out
+      a wife for him. He doesn&rsquo;t want to marry, but his father insists; and he
+      has begged us to find somebody. There are three of us on the look-out. But
+      he hates women, and is very hard to suit. <i>Ben! Ci vuol pazienza!&rdquo;</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It rarely happens now that the religious part of the marriage ceremony is
+      not performed in church, though it may be performed at the house of the
+      bride. In this case, it usually takes place in the evening, and the
+      spouses attend five o&rsquo;clock mass next morning. But if the marriage takes
+      place at church, it must be between five and eleven in the morning, and
+      the blessing is commonly pronounced about six o&rsquo;clock. Civil marriage is
+      still unknown among the Venetians. It is entirely the affair of the
+      Church, in which the bans are published beforehand, and which exacts from
+      the candidates a preliminary visit to their parish priest, for examination
+      in their catechism, and for instruction in religion when they are
+      defective in knowledge of the kind. There is no longer any civil
+      publication of the betrothals, and the hand-shaking in the court of the
+      Ducal Palace has long been disused. I cannot help thinking that the
+      ceremony must have been a great affliction, and that, in the Republican
+      times at Venice, a bridegroom must have fared nearly as hard as a
+      President elect in our times at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a curious display on occasion of births among the nobility in
+      former times. The room of the young mother was decorated with a profusion
+      of paintings, sculpture, and jewelry; and, while yet in bed, she received
+      the congratulations of her friends, and regaled them with sweetmeats
+      served in vases of gold and silver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The child of noble parents had always at least two godfathers, and
+      sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty; but in order that the
+      relationship of godfather (which is the same according to the canonical
+      law as a tie of consanguinity) should not prevent desirable matrimony
+      between nobles, no patrician was allowed to be godfather to another&rsquo;s
+      child. Consequently the <i>compare</i> was usually a client of the noble
+      parent, and was not expected to make any present to the godchild, whose
+      father, on the day following the baptism, sent him a piece of marchpane,
+      in acknowledgment of their relationship. No women were present at the
+      baptism except those who had charge of the babe. After the fall of the
+      Republic the French custom of baptism in the parents&rsquo; house was
+      introduced, as well as the custom, on the godfather&rsquo;s part, of giving a
+      present,&mdash;usually of sugarplums and silver toys. But I think that
+      most baptisms still take place in church, if I may judge from the numbers
+      of tight little glass cases I have noticed,&mdash;half bed and half
+      coffin,&mdash;containing little eight-day-old Venetians, closely swathed
+      in mummy-like bandages, and borne to and from the churches by mysterious
+      old women. The ceremony of baptism itself does not apparently differ from
+      that in other Catholic countries, and is performed, like all religious
+      services in Italy, without a ray of religious feeling or solemnity of any
+      kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For many centuries funeral services in Venice have been conducted by the
+      <i>Scuole del Sacramento,</i> instituted for that purpose. To one of these
+      societies the friends of the defunct pay a certain sum, and the
+      association engages to inter the dead, and bear all the expenses of the
+      ceremony, the dignity of which is regulated by the priest of the parish in
+      which the deceased lived. The rite is now most generally undertaken by the
+      Scuola di San Rocco. The funeral train is of ten or twenty facchini,
+      wearing tunics of white, with caps and capes of red, and bearing the
+      society&rsquo;s long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted tapers. Priests
+      follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the bier,&mdash;with a gilt
+      crown lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to indicate the triumph
+      of innocence. Formerly, hired mourners attended, and a candle, weighing a
+      pound, was given to any one who chose to carry it in the procession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anciently there was great show of mourning in Venice for the dead, when,
+      according to Mutinelli, the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having
+      seen his body deposited in the church, &ldquo;fell to weeping and howling, tore
+      their hair and rent their clothes, and withdrew forever from that church,
+      thenceforth become for them a place of abomination.&rdquo; Decenter customs
+      prevailed in after-times, and there was a pathetic dignity in the ceremony
+      of condolence among patricians: the mourners, on the day following the
+      interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the court of the Ducal
+      Palace, and their friends came, one after one, and expressed their
+      sympathy by a mute pressure of the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible in modern Venice. The
+      corpse is hurried from the house of mourning to the parish church, where
+      the friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. Then it is
+      placed in a boat and carried to the burial-ground, where it is quickly
+      interred. I was fortunate, therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral at
+      which I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There was a church on
+      this island as early as the tenth century, and in the thirteenth century
+      it fell into the possession of the Comandulensen Friars. They built a
+      monastery on it, which became famous as a seat of learning, and gave much
+      erudite scholarship to the world. In later times Pope Gregory XVI. carried
+      his profound learning from San Michele to the Vatican. The present church
+      is in the Renaissance style, but not very offensively so, and has some
+      indifferent paintings. The arcades and the courts around which it is built
+      contain funeral monuments as unutterably ugly and tasteless as any thing
+      of the kind I ever saw at home; but the dead, for the most part, lie in
+      graves marked merely by little iron crosses in the narrow and roofless
+      space walled in from the lagoon, which laps sluggishly at the foot of the
+      masonry with the impulses of the tide. The old monastery was abolished in
+      1810, and there is now a convent of Reformed Benedictines on the island,
+      who perform the last service for the dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day of which I speak, I was taking a friend to see the objects of
+      interest at San Michele, which I had seen before, and the funeral
+      procession touched at the riva of the church just as we arrived. The
+      procession was of one gondola only, and the pallbearers were four pleasant
+      ruffians in scarlet robes of cotton, hooded, and girdled at the waist.
+      They were accompanied by a priest of a broad and jolly countenance, two
+      grinning boys, and finally the corpse itself, severely habited in an
+      under-dress of black box, but wearing an outer garment of red velvet,
+      bordered and tasseled gayly. The pleasant ruffians (who all wore
+      smoking-caps with some other name) placed this holiday corpse upon a bier,
+      and after a lively dispute with our gondolier, in which the compliments of
+      the day were passed in the usual terms of Venetian chaff, lifted the bier
+      on shore and set it down. The priest followed with the two boys, whom he
+      rebuked for levity, simultaneously tripping over the Latin of a prayer,
+      with his eyes fixed on our harmless little party as if we were a funeral,
+      and the dead in the black box an indifferent spectator Then he popped down
+      upon his knees, and made us a lively little supplication, while a blind
+      beggar scuffled for a lost soldo about his feet, and the gondoliers
+      quarreled volubly. After which, he threw off his surplice with the air of
+      one who should say his day&rsquo;s work was done, and preceded the coffin into
+      the church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had hardly deposited the bier upon the floor in the centre of the nave,
+      when two pale young friars appeared, throwing off their hooded cloaks of
+      coarse brown, as they passed to the sacristy, and reappearing in their
+      rope-girdled gowns. One of them bore a lighted taper in his right hand and
+      a book in his left; the other had also a taper, but a pot of holy water
+      instead of the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They are very handsome young men, these monks, with heavy, sad eyes, and
+      graceful, slender figures, which their monastic life will presently
+      overload with gross humanity full of coarse appetites. They go and stand
+      beside the bier, giving a curious touch of solemnity to a scene composed
+      of the four pleasant ruffians in the loaferish postures which they have
+      learned as facchini waiting for jobs; of the two boys with inattentive
+      grins, and of the priest with wandering eyes, kneeling behind them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A weak, thin-voiced organ pipes huskily from its damp loft: the monk
+      hurries rapidly over the Latin text of the service, while
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;His breath to heaven like vapor goes&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      on the chilly, humid air; and the other monk makes the responses, giving
+      and taking the sprinkler, which his chief shakes vaguely in the direction
+      of the coffin. They both bow their heads&mdash;shaven down to the temples,
+      to simulate His crown of thorns. Silence. The organ is still, the priest
+      has vanished; the tapers are blown out; the pall-bearers lay hold of the
+      bier, and raise it to their shoulders; the boys slouch into procession
+      behind them; the monks glide softly and dispiritedly away. The soul is
+      prepared for eternal life, and the body for the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ruffians are expansively gay on reaching the open air again. They
+      laugh, they call &ldquo;Ciò!&rdquo; [Footnote: Literally, <i>That</i> in Italian, and
+      meaning in Venetian, <i>You! Heigh!</i> To talk in <i>Ciò ciappa</i> is to
+      assume insolent familiarity or unbounded good fellowship with the person
+      addressed. A Venetian says <i>Ciò</i> a thousand times in a day, and hails
+      every one but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian
+      pronoun, but rather a contraction of <i>Veccio</i> (vecchio), <i>Old
+      fellow!</i> It is common with all classes of the people: parents use it in
+      speaking to their children, and brothers and sisters call one mother <i>Ciò</i>.
+      It is a salutation between friends, who cry out, <i>Ciò!</i> as they pass
+      in the street. Acquaintances, men who meet after separation, rush together
+      with <i>&ldquo;Ah Ciò!&rdquo;</i> Then they kiss on the right cheek <i>&ldquo;Ciò!&rdquo;</i> on
+      the left, <i>&ldquo;Ciò!&rdquo;</i> on the lips, <i>&ldquo;Ciò! Bon di Ciò!&rdquo;</i>]
+      continually, and banter each other as they trot to the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boys follow them, gamboling among the little iron crosses, and trying
+      if here and there one of them may not be overthrown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We two strangers follow the boys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here the pall-bearers become puzzled: on the right is an open trench,
+      on the left is an open trench.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Presence of the Devil! To which grave does this dead belong?&rdquo; They
+      discuss, they dispute, they quarrel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the side of the wall, as if he rose from the sea, appears the grave
+      digger, with his shovel on his shoulder&mdash;slouching toward us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah heigh! Ciò, the grave-digger! Where does this dead belong?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Body of Bacchus, what potatoes! Here, in this trench to the right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They set down the bier there, gladly. They strip away the coffin&rsquo;s gay
+      upper garment; they leave but the under-dress of black box, painted to
+      that favor with pitch. They shove it into the grave-digger&rsquo;s arms, where
+      he stands in the trench, in the soft earth, rich with bones. He lets it
+      slide swiftly to the ground&mdash;thump! <i>Ecco fatto!</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two boys pick up the empty bier, and dance merrily away with it to the
+      riva-gate, feigning a little play after the manner of children,&mdash;&ldquo;Oh,
+      what a beautiful dead!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The eldest of the pleasant ruffians is all the pleasanter for <i>sciampagnin</i>,
+      and can hardly be persuaded to go out at the right gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We strangers stay behind a little, to consult with mother spectator&mdash;
+      Venetian, this. &ldquo;Who is the dead man, signore?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a woman, poor little thing! Dead in child-bed. The baby is in there
+      with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been a cheerful funeral, and yet we are not in great spirits as we
+      go back to the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my part, I do not think the cry of sea-gulls on a gloomy day is a
+      joyous sound; and the sight of those theatrical angels, with their
+      shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo façade of
+      the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with
+      despondency and foreboding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      On a small canal, not far from the railroad station, the gondoliers show
+      you a house, by no means notable (except for the noble statue of a knight,
+      occupying a niche in one corner), as the house of Othello. It was once the
+      palace of the patrician family Moro, a name well known in the annals of
+      the Republic, and one which, it has been suggested, misled Shakespeare
+      into the invention of a Moor of Venice. Whether this is possibly the fact,
+      or whether there is any tradition of a tragic incident in the history of
+      the Moro family similar to that upon which the play is founded, I do not
+      know; but it is certain that the story of Othello, very nearly as
+      Shakespeare tells it, is popularly known in Venice; and the gondoliers
+      have fixed upon the Casa Moro in question as the edifice best calculated
+      to give satisfaction to strangers in search of the True and the Memorable.
+      The statue is happily darkened by time, and thus serves admirably to
+      represent Othello&rsquo;s complexion, and to place beyond the shadow of a doubt
+      the fact of his residence in the house. Indeed, what can you say to the
+      gondolier, who, in answer to your cavils, points to the knight, with the
+      convincing argument, &ldquo;There is his statue!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One day I was taken to see this house, in company with some friends, and
+      when it had been victoriously pointed out, as usual, we asked meekly, &ldquo;Who
+      was Othello?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Othello, Signori,&rdquo; answered the gondolier, &ldquo;was a general of the
+      Republic, in the old times. He was an African, and black; but nevertheless
+      the State valued him, and he beat the Turks in many battles. Well,
+      Signori, this general Othello had a very young and beautiful wife, and his
+      wife&rsquo;s cousin (<i>sic!</i>), Cassio was his major-domo, or, as some say,
+      his lieutenant. But after a while happens along (<i>capita</i>) another
+      soldier of Othello, who wants Cassio&rsquo;s employment, and so accuses him to
+      the general of corrupting his wife. Very well, Signori! Without thinking
+      an instant, Othello, being made so, flew into a passion (<i>si riscaldò là
+      tèsta</i>), and killed his wife; and then when her innocence came out, he
+      killed himself and that liar; and the State confiscated his goods, he
+      being a very rich man. There has been a tragedy written about all this,
+      you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how is it called? Who wrote it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! in regard to that, then, I don&rsquo;t know. Some Englishman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shakespeare?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, Signori. But if you doubt what I tell you, go to any
+      bookseller, and say, &lsquo;Favor me with the tragedy of &ldquo;Othello.&rdquo;&rsquo; He will
+      give it you, and there you will find it all written out just as I tell
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This gondolier confirmed the authenticity of his story, by showing us the
+      house of Cassio near the Rialto Bridge, and I have no doubt he would also
+      have pointed out that of Iago if we had wished it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as a general thing, the lore of the gondoliers is not rich nor very
+      great. They are a loquacious and a gossiping race, but they love better to
+      have a quiet chat at the tops of their voices, as they loaf idly at the
+      ferries, or to scream repartees across the Grand Canal, than to tell
+      stories. In all history that relates to localities they are sufficiently
+      versed to find the notable places for strangers, but beyond this they
+      trouble themselves as little with the past as with the future. Three
+      tragic legends, however, they know, and will tell with the most amusing
+      effect, namely: Biasio, <i>luganegher</i>; the Innocent Baker-Boy, and
+      Veneranda Porta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first of these legends is that of a sausage-maker who flourished in
+      Venice some centuries ago, and who improved the quality of the broth which
+      the <i>luganegheri</i> make of their scraps and sell to the gondoliers, by
+      cutting up into it now and then a child of some neighbor. He was finally
+      detected by a gondolier who discovered a little finger in his broth, and
+      being brought to justice, was dragged through the city at the heels of a
+      wild horse. This most uncomfortable character appears to be the first hero
+      in the romance of the gondoliers, and he certainly deserves to rank with
+      that long line of imaginary personages who have made childhood so wretched
+      and tractable. The second is the Innocent Baker-Boy already named, who was
+      put to death on suspicion of having murdered a noble, because in the dead
+      man&rsquo;s heart was found a dagger fitting a sheath which the baker had picked
+      up in the street, on the morning of the murder, and kept in his
+      possession. Many years afterwards, a malefactor who died in Padua
+      confessed the murder, and thereupon two lamps were lighted before a shrine
+      in the southern façade of St. Mark&rsquo;s Church,&mdash;one for the murdered
+      nobleman&rsquo;s soul, and the other for that of the innocent boy. Such is the
+      gondoliers&rsquo; story, and the lamps still burn every night before the shrine
+      from dark till dawn, in witness of its truth. The fact of the murder and
+      its guiltless expiation is an incident of Venetian history, and it is said
+      that the Council of the Ten never pronounced a sentence of death
+      thereafter, till they had been solemnly warned by one of their number with
+      <i>&ldquo;Ricordatevi del povero Fornaretto!&rdquo;</i> (Remember the poor Baker-Boy!)
+      The poet Dall &lsquo;Ongaro has woven the story into a beautiful and touching
+      tragedy; but I believe the poet is still to be born who shall take from
+      the gondoliers their Veneranda Porta, and place her historic figure in
+      dramatic literature. Veneranda Porta was a lady of the days of the
+      Republic, between whom and her husband existed an incompatibility. This
+      was increased by the course of Signora Porta in taking a lover, and it at
+      last led to the assassination of the husband by the paramours. The head of
+      the murdered man was found in one of the canals, and being exposed, as the
+      old custom was, upon the granite pedestal at the corner of St. Mark&rsquo;s
+      Church, it was recognized by his brother who found among the papers on
+      which the long hair was curled fragments of a letter he had written to the
+      deceased. The crime was traced to the paramours, and being brought before
+      the Ten, they were both condemned to be hanged between the columns of the
+      Piazzetta. The gondoliers relate that when the sentence was pronounced,
+      Veneranda said to the Chief of the Ten, &ldquo;But as for me this sentence will
+      never be carried out. You cannot hang a woman. Consider the impropriety!&rdquo;
+       The Venetian rulers were wise men in their generation, and far from being
+      balked by this question of delicacy, the Chief replied, solving it, &ldquo;My
+      dear, you shall be hanged in my breeches.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very coarse salt which keeps one of these stories; another is
+      remembered because it concerns one of the people; and another for its
+      abomination and horror. The incidents of Venetian history which take the
+      fancy and touch the sensibility of the world seem hardly known to the
+      gondoliers, the most intelligent and quick-witted of the populace, and
+      themselves the very stuff that some romantic dreams of Venice are made of.
+      However sad the fact, it is undeniable that the stories of the
+      sausage-maker whose broth was flavored with murder, and the baker-boy who
+      suffered guiltlessly, and that savage jest at the expense of the
+      murderess, interest these people more than the high-well-born sorrows of
+      the Foscari, the tragic fate of Carmagnola, or the story of Falier,&mdash;which
+      last they know partly, however, because of the scandal about Falier&rsquo;s
+      wife. Yet after all, though the gondoliers are not the gondoliers of
+      imaginative literature, they have qualities which recommended them to my
+      liking, and I look back upon my acquaintance with two or three of them in
+      a very friendly spirit. Compared with the truculent hackmen, who prey upon
+      the traveling public in all other cities of the civilized world, they are
+      eminently intelligent and amiable. Rogues they are, of course, for small
+      dishonesties are the breath in the nostrils of common carriers by land or
+      water, everywhere; but the trickery of the gondoliers is so good-natured
+      and simple that it can hardly offend. A very ordinary jocular sagacity
+      defeats their profoundest purposes of swindling, and no one enjoys their
+      exposure half so much as themselves, while a faint prospect of future
+      employment purifies them of every trait of dishonesty. I had only one
+      troublesome experience with them, and that was in the case of the old
+      gondolier who taught me to row. He, when I had no longer need of his
+      services, plunged into drunkenness, and came and dismissed me one day with
+      every mark of ignominy. But he afterwards forgave me, and saluted me
+      kindly when we met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate goal of every gondolier&rsquo;s ambition is to serve, no matter
+      for how short a time, an Inglese, by which generic title nearly all
+      foreigners except Germans are known to him. The Inglese, whether he be
+      English or American, is apt to make the tour of the whole city in a
+      gondola, and to give handsome drink money at the end, whereas your Tedesco
+      frugally walks to every place accessible by land, or when, in a party of
+      six or eight, he takes a gondola, plants himself upon the letter of the
+      tariff, and will give no more than the rate fixed by law. The gondolier is
+      therefore flowingly polite to the Inglese, and he is even civil to the
+      Tedesco; but he is not at all bound in courtesy to that provincial Italian
+      who comes from the country to Venice, bargains furiously for his boat, and
+      commonly pays under the tariff. The Venetian who does not himself keep a
+      gondola seldom hires one, and even on this rare occasion makes no lavish
+      demand such as &ldquo;How much do you want for taking me to the rail-way
+      station?&rdquo; Lest the fervid imagination of the gondolier rise to zwanzigers
+      and florins, and a tedious dispute ensue, he asks: &ldquo;How many centissimi do
+      you want?&rdquo; and the contract is made, for a number of soldi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The number of private gondolas owned in Venice is not very great. The
+      custom is rather to hire a gondolier with his boat. The exclusive use of
+      the gondola is thus secured, and the gondolier gives his services as a
+      domestic when off his special duty. He waits at table, goes marketing,
+      takes the children to school, and serves the ladies as footman, for five
+      francs a day, himself paying the proprietor of the gondola about a franc
+      daily for the boat. In former times, when Venice was rich and prosperous,
+      many noble families kept six or seven gondolas; and what with this
+      service, and the numerous gala-days of the Republic, when the whole city
+      took boat for the Lido, or the Giudecca, or Murano, and the gondoliers
+      were allowed to exact any pay they could, they were a numerous and
+      prosperous class. But these times have passed from Venice forever, and
+      though the gondoliers are still, counting the boatmen of the Giudecca and
+      Lido, some thousands in number, there are comparatively few young men
+      among them, and their gains are meagre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the little city of Venice, where the dialect spoken at Canareggio or
+      Castello is a different tongue from that heard under the Procuratie of St.
+      Mark&rsquo;s Place, the boatmen of the several quarters of the city of course
+      vary greatly in character and appearance; and the gondolier who lounges at
+      the base of the columns of the Piazzetta, and airily invites the Inglesi
+      to tours of the Grand Canal, is of quite a different type from the
+      weather-beaten <i>barcaiuolo</i>, who croaks <i>&ldquo;Barca!&rdquo;</i> at the
+      promenaders on the Zattere. But all, as I say, are simple and harmless
+      enough, and however loudly they quarrel among themselves, they never pass
+      from the defamation of their female relatives to blows. As for the game of
+      knives, as it is said to be played at Naples, and as About describes it at
+      Rome, I doubt if it is much known to the populace of Venice. Only the
+      doctors let blood there&mdash;though from their lancets it flows pretty
+      freely and constantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true that the gondolier loves best of everything a clamorous
+      quarrel, carried on with the canal between him and his antagonist; but
+      next to this, he loves to spend his leisure at the ferry in talking of
+      eating and of money, and he does not differ from many of his
+      fellow-citizens in choice of topics. I have seldom caught a casual
+      expression from passers in the streets of Venice which did not relate in
+      some way to gold Napoleons, zwanzigers, florins, or soldi, or else to wine
+      and polenta. I note this trait in the Venetians, which Goldoni observed in
+      the Milanese a hundred years ago, and which I incline to believe is common
+      to all Italians. The gondoliers talk a great deal in figure and hyperbole,
+      and their jocose chaff is quite inscrutable even to some classes of
+      Venetians. With foreigners, to whom the silence and easy progress of the
+      gondola gives them the opportunity to talk, they are fond of using a word
+      or two of French. They are quick at repartee, and have a clever answer
+      ready for most occasions. I was one day bargaining for a boat to the Lido,
+      whither I refused to be taken in a shabby gondola, or at a rate higher
+      than seventy-five soldi for the trip. At last the patience of the
+      gondoliers was exhausted, and one of them called out, &ldquo;Somebody fetch the
+      Bucintoro, and take this gentleman to the Lido for seventy-five soldi!&rdquo;
+       (The Bucintoro being the magnificent barge in which the Doge went to wed
+      the Adriatic.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The skill with which the gondoliers manage their graceful craft is always
+      admired by strangers, and is certainly remarkable. The gondola is very
+      long and slender, and rises high from the water at either end. Both bow
+      and stern are sharp, the former being ornamented with that deeply serrated
+      blade of steel, which it is the pride of the gondolier to keep bright is
+      silver, and the poop having a small platform, not far behind the cabin, on
+      which he stands when he rows. The danger of collision has always obliged
+      Venetian boatmen to face the bow, and the stroke with the oar (for the
+      gondolier uses only a single oar) is made by pushing, and not by pulling.
+      No small degree of art (as I learnt from experience) is thus required to
+      keep the gondola&rsquo;s head straight,&mdash;all the strokes being made on one
+      side,&mdash;and the sculling return of the oar-blade, preparatory for each
+      new stroke, is extremely difficult to effect. Under the hands of the
+      gondolier, however, the gondola seems a living thing, full of grace and
+      winning movement. The wood-work of the little cabin is elaborately carved,
+      and it is usually furnished with mirrors and seats luxuriously cushioned.
+      The sensation of the gondola&rsquo;s progress, felt by the occupant of the
+      cabin, as he falls back upon these cushions, may be described, to the
+      female apprehension at least, as &ldquo;<i>too</i> divine.&rdquo; The cabin is
+      removable at pleasure, and is generally taken off and replaced by awnings
+      in summer. But in the evening, when the fair Venetians go out in their
+      gondolas to take the air, even this awning is dispensed with, and the long
+      slender boat glides darkly down the Grand Canal, bearing its dazzling
+      freight of white <i>tulle</i>, pale-faced, black-eyed beauty, and flashing
+      jewels, in full view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the singing of the gondoliers, they are the only class of Venetians
+      who have not good voices, and I am scarcely inclined to regret the silence
+      which long ago fell upon them. I am quite satisfied with the peculiar note
+      of warning which they utter as they approach the corner of a canal, and
+      which meaning simply, &ldquo;To the Right,&rdquo; or &ldquo;To the Left,&rdquo; is the most
+      pathetic and melancholy sound in the world. If, putting aside my own
+      comfort, I have sometimes wished for the sake of a dear, sentimental old
+      friend at home, who loves such idle illusions with an ardor unbecoming his
+      years, that I might hear the voice
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;of Adria&rsquo;s gondolier,
+    By distance mellowed, o&rsquo;er the waters sweep,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      I must still confess that I never did hear it under similar circumstances,
+      except in conversation across half a mile of lagoon, when, as usual, the
+      burden of the lay was polenta or soldi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A recent Venetian writer, describing the character of the lower classes of
+      Venice, says: &ldquo;No one can deny that our populace is loquacious and
+      quickwitted; but, on the other hand, no one can deny that it is regardless
+      of improvement. Venice, a city exceptional in its construction, its
+      customs, and its habits, has also an exceptional populace. It still feels,
+      although sixty-eight years have passed, the influence of the system of the
+      fallen Republic, of that oligarchic government, which, affording almost
+      every day some amusement to the people, left them no time to think of
+      their offended rights.... Since 1859 Venice has resembled a sepulchre of
+      the living,&mdash;squalor and beggary gaining ground with each day, and
+      commerce, with few exceptions, converted into monopoly; yet the populace
+      remains attached to its old habits, and will have its pleasure. If the
+      earnings are little, what then? Must one die of ennui? The caffè is
+      depopulated: not so the drinking-house. The last day before the drawing of
+      the lottery, the offices are thronged with fathers and mothers of
+      families, who stint their children of bread to buy dearly a few hours of
+      golden illusion.... At the worst, there is the Monte di Pietà, as a last
+      resort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true, as this writer says, that the pleasure-loving populace still
+      looks back fondly to the old Republican times of feasting and holidays;
+      but there is certainly no truth any more in the old idea that any part of
+      Italy is a place where people may be &ldquo;idle with impunity,&rdquo; or make
+      amusement the serious business of life. I can remember that the book from
+      which I received my first impressions of geography was illuminated with a
+      picture professing to represent Italian customs. The spirit of inquiry had
+      long before caused me to doubt the exact fidelity of this representation;
+      but it cost me a pang to learn that the picture was utterly delusive. It
+      has been no part of my experience in Venice to see an Italian sitting upon
+      the ground, and strumming the guitar, while two gayly dressed peasants
+      danced to the music. Indeed, the indolence of Venetians is listless and
+      silent, not playful or joyous; and as I learned to know their life more
+      intimately, I came to understand that in many cases they are idle from
+      despair of finding work, and that indolence is as much their fate as their
+      fault. Any diligence of theirs is surprising to us of northern and free
+      lands, because their climate subdues and enervates us, and because we can
+      see before them no career open to intelligent industry. With the poorest,
+      work is necessarily a hand-to-hand struggle against hunger; with those who
+      would not absolutely starve without it, work is an inexplicable passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Partly because the ways of these people are so childlike and simple in
+      many things, and partly from one&rsquo;s own swindling tendency to take one&rsquo;s
+      self in (a tendency really fatal to all sincerity of judgment, and
+      incalculably mischievous to such downfallen peoples as have felt the
+      baleful effects of the world&rsquo;s sentimental, impotent sympathy), there is
+      something pathetic in the patient content with which Italians work. They
+      have naturally so large a capacity for enjoyment, that the degree of
+      selfdenial involved in labor seems exorbitant, and one feels that these
+      children, so loved of Nature, and so gifted by her, are harshly dealt with
+      by their stepmother Circumstance. No doubt there ought to be truth in the
+      silly old picture, if there is none, and I would willingly make-believe to
+      credit it, if I could. I am glad that they at least work in old-world,
+      awkward, picturesque ways, and not in commonplace, handy, modern fashion.
+      Neither the habits nor the implements of labor are changed since the
+      progress of the Republic ceased, and her heart began to die within her.
+      All sorts of mechanics&rsquo; tools are clumsy and inconvenient: the turner&rsquo;s
+      lathe moves by broken impulses; door-hinges are made to order, and lift
+      the door from the ground as it opens upon them; all nails and tacks we
+      hand-made; window-sashes are contrived to be glazed without putty, and the
+      panes are put in from the top, so that to repair a broken glass the whole
+      sash is taken apart; cooking-stoves are unknown to the native cooks, who
+      work at an open fire, with crane and dangling pot-hooks; furniture is put
+      together with wooden pegs instead of screws; you do not buy a door-lock at
+      a hardware store,&mdash;you get a <i>fabbro</i> to make it, and he comes
+      with a leathern satchel full of tools to fit and finish it on the door.
+      The wheelbarrow of this civilization is peculiarly wonderful in
+      construction, with a prodigious wooden wheel, and a ponderous, incapable
+      body. The canals are dredged with scoops mounted on long poles, and manned
+      each by three or four Chiozzotti. There never was a pile-driving machine
+      known in Venice; nor a steam-tug in all the channels of the lagoons,
+      through which the largest craft are towed to and from the ports by
+      row-boats. In the model of the sea-going vessels there has apparently been
+      little change from the first. Yet in spite of all this backwardness in
+      invention, the city is full of beautiful workmanship in every branch of
+      artificing, and the Venetians are still the best sailors in the Adriatic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not offer the idea as a contribution to statistics, but it seems to
+      me that the most active branch of industry in Venice is plucking fowls. In
+      summer the people all work on their thresholds, and in their windows, and
+      as nearly out of doors as the narrowness of the streets will let them,&mdash;and
+      it is hard to pass through any part of the city without coming to a
+      poulterer&rsquo;s shop, in the door of which inevitably sits a boy, tugging at
+      the plumage of some wretched bird. He is seldom to be seen except in that
+      crisis of plucking when he seems to have all but finished; yet he seems
+      never to accomplish the fact perfectly. Perhaps it is part of his hard
+      fate that the feathers shall grow again under his hand as fast as he
+      plucks them away: at the restaurants, I know, the quantity of plumage one
+      devours in consuming roast chicken is surprising&mdash;at first. The birds
+      are always very lean, too, and have but a languid and weary look, in spite
+      of the ardent manner in which the boy clasps them while at work. It may be
+      that the Venetians do not like fat poultry. Their turkeys, especially, are
+      of that emaciation which is attributed among ourselves only to the turkey
+      of Job; and as for the geese and ducks, they can only interest anatomists.
+      It is as if the long ages of incursion and oppression which have
+      impoverished and devastated Italy had at last taken effect upon the
+      poultry, and made it as poor as the population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not want to give too exclusive an impression of Venetian industry,
+      however, for now I remember the Venetian <i>lasagnoni</i>, whom I never
+      saw doing any thing, and who certainly abound in respectable numbers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lasagnone is a loafer, as an Italian can be a loafer, without the
+      admixture of ruffianism, which blemishes most loafers of northern race. He
+      may be quite worthless, and even impertinent, but he cannot be a rowdy,&mdash;that
+      pleasing blossom on the nose of our fast, high-fed, thick-blooded
+      civilization. In Venice he must not be confounded with other loiterers at
+      the caffè; not with the natty people who talk politics interminably over
+      little cups of black coffee; not with those old habitués, who sit forever
+      under the Procuratie, their hands folded upon the tops of their sticks,
+      and staring at the ladies who pass with a curious steadfastness and
+      knowing skepticism of gaze, not pleasing in the dim eyes of age;
+      certainly, the last persons who bear any likeness to the lasagnone are the
+      Germans, with their honest, heavy faces comically anglicized by
+      leg-of-mutton whiskers. The truth is, the lasagnone does not flourish in
+      the best caffè; he comes to perfection in cheaper resorts, for he is
+      commonly not rich. It often happens that a glass of water, flavored with a
+      little anisette, is the order over which he sits a whole evening. He knows
+      the waiter intimately, and does not call him &ldquo;Shop!&rdquo; (Bottega,) as less
+      familiar people do, but Gigi, or Beppi, as the waiter is pretty sure to be
+      named. &ldquo;Behold!&rdquo; he says, when the servant places his modest drink before
+      him, &ldquo;who is that loveliest blonde there?&rdquo; Or to his fellow-lasagnone:
+      &ldquo;She regards me! I have broken her the heart!&rdquo; This is his sole business
+      and mission, the cruel lasagnone&mdash;to break ladies the heart. He
+      spares no condition,&mdash;neither rank nor wealth is any defense against
+      him. I often wonder what is in that note he continually shows to his
+      friend. The confession of some broken heart, I think. When he has folded
+      it, and put it away, he chuckles <i>&ldquo;Ah, cara!&rdquo;</i> and sucks at his long,
+      slender Virginia cigar. It is unlighted, for fire consumes cigars. I never
+      see him read the papers,&mdash;neither the Italian papers nor the Parisian
+      journals, though if he can get &ldquo;Galignani&rdquo; he is glad, and he likes to
+      pretend to a knowledge of English, uttering upon occasion, with great
+      relish, such distinctively English words as &ldquo;Yes&rdquo; and &ldquo;Not,&rdquo; and to the
+      waiter, &ldquo;A-little-fire-if-you-please.&rdquo; He sits very late in the caffè, and
+      he touches his hat&mdash;his curly French hat&mdash;to the company as he
+      goes out with a mild swagger, his cane held lightly in his left hand, his
+      coat cut snugly to show his hips, and genteelly swaying with the motion of
+      his body. He is a dandy, of course,&mdash;all Italians are dandies,&mdash;but
+      his vanity is perfectly harmless, and his heart is not bad. He would go
+      half an hour out of his way to put you in the direction of the Piazza. A
+      little thing can make him happy,&mdash;to stand in the pit at the opera,
+      and gaze at the ladies in the lower boxes&mdash;to attend the Marionette,
+      or the Malibran Theatre, and imperil the peace of pretty seamstresses and
+      contadinas&mdash;to stand at the church doors and ogle the fair saints as
+      they pass out. Go, harmless lasagnone, to thy lodging in some mysterious
+      height, and break hearts if thou wilt. They are quickly mended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of other vagabonds in Venice, if I had my choice, I think I must select a
+      certain ruffian who deals in dog-flesh, as the nearest my ideal of what a
+      vagabond should be in all respects. He stands habitually under the Old
+      Procuratie, beside a basket of small puppies in that snuffling and
+      quivering state which appears to be the favorite condition of very young
+      dogs, and occupies himself in conversation with an adjacent dealer in
+      grapes and peaches, or sometimes fastidiously engages in trimming the hair
+      upon the closely shaven bodies of the dogs; for in Venice it is the
+      ambition of every dog to look as much like the Lion of St. Mark as the
+      nature of the case will permit. My vagabond at times makes expeditions to
+      the groups of travelers always seated in summer before the Caffè Florian,
+      appearing at such times with a very small puppy,&mdash;neatly poised upon
+      the palm of his hand, and winking pensively,&mdash;which he advertises to
+      the company as a &ldquo;Beautiful Beast,&rdquo; or a &ldquo;Lovely Babe,&rdquo; according to the
+      inspiration of his light and pleasant fancy. I think the latter term is
+      used generally as a means of ingratiation with the ladies, to whom my
+      vagabond always shows a demeanor of agreeable gallantry. I never saw him
+      sell any of these dogs, nor ever in the least cast down by his failure to
+      do so. His air is grave, but not severe; there is even, at times, a
+      certain playfulness in his manner, possibly attributable to sciampagnin.
+      His curling black locks, together with his velveteen jacket and
+      pantaloons, are oiled and glossy, and his beard is cut in the
+      French-imperial mode. His personal presence is unwholesome, and it is
+      chiefly his moral perfection as a vagabond that makes him fascinating. One
+      is so confident, however, of his fitness for his position and business,
+      and of his entire contentment with it, that it is impossible not to exult
+      in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is not without self-respect. I doubt, it would be hard to find any
+      Venetian of any vocation, however base, who forgets that he too is a man
+      and a brother. There is enough servility in the language,&mdash;it is the
+      fashion of the Italian tongue, with its <i>Tu</i> for inferiors, <i>Voi</i>
+      for intimates and friendly equals, and <i>Lei</i> for superiors,&mdash;but
+      in the manner there is none, and there is a sense of equality in the
+      ordinary intercourse of the Venetians, at once apparent to foreigners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All ranks are orderly; the spirit of aggression seems not to exist among
+      them, and the very boys and dogs in Venice are so well-behaved, that I
+      have never seen the slightest disposition in them to quarrel. Of course,
+      it is of the street-boy&mdash;the <i>biricchino</i>, the boy in his
+      natural, unreclaimed state&mdash;that I speak. This state is here, in
+      winter, marked by a clouded countenance, bare head, tatters, and
+      wooden-soled shoes open at the heels; in summer by a preternatural purity
+      of person, by abandon to the amphibious pleasure of leaping off the
+      bridges into the canals, and by an insatiable appetite for polenta, fried
+      minnows, and water-melons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When one of these boys takes to beggary, as a great many of them do, out
+      of a spirit of adventure and wish to pass the time, he carries out the
+      enterprise with splendid daring. A favorite artifice is to approach
+      Charity with a slice of polenta in one hand, and, with the other extended,
+      implore a soldo to buy cheese to eat with the polenta. The street-boys
+      also often perform the duties of the <i>gransieri</i>, who draw your
+      gondola to shore, and keep it firm with a hook. To this order of beggar I
+      usually gave; but one day at the railway station I had no soldi, and as I
+      did not wish to render my friend discontented with future alms by giving
+      silver, I deliberately apologized, praying him to excuse me, and promising
+      him for another time. I cannot forget the lofty courtesy with which he
+      returned,&mdash;&ldquo;<i>S&rsquo;accomodi pur, Signor!</i>&rdquo; They have sometimes a
+      sense of humor, these poor swindlers, and can enjoy the exposure of their
+      own enormities. An amiable rogue drew our gondola to land one evening when
+      we went too late to see the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. The sacristan
+      made us free of a perfectly dark church, and we rewarded him as if it had
+      been noonday. On our return to the gondola, the same beggar whom we had
+      just feed held out his hat for another alms. &ldquo;But we have just paid you,&rdquo;
+       we cried in an agony of grief and desperation. <i>&ldquo;Sì, signori!&rdquo;</i> he
+      admitted with an air of argument, <i>&ldquo;è vero. Ma, la chiesa!&rdquo;</i> (Yes,
+      gentlemen, it is true. But the church!) he added with confidential
+      insinuation, and a patronizing wave of the hand toward the edifice, as if
+      he had been San Giorgio himself, and held the church as a source of
+      revenue. This was too much, and we laughed him to scorn; at which,
+      beholding the amusing abomination of his conduct, he himself joined in our
+      laugh with a cheerfulness that won our hearts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beggary is attended by no disgrace in Italy, and it therefore comes that
+      no mendicant is without a proper degree of the self-respect common to all
+      classes. Indeed, the habit of taking gifts of money is so general and
+      shameless that the street beggars must be diffident souls indeed if they
+      hesitated to ask for it. A perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered man
+      will take ten soldi from you for a trifling service, and not consider
+      himself in the least abased. The detestable custom of largess, instead of
+      wages, still obtains in so great degree in Venice that a physician, when
+      asked for his account, replies: &ldquo;What you please to give.&rdquo; Knowing these
+      customs, I hope I have never acted discourteously to the street beggars of
+      Venice even when I gave them nothing, and I know that only one of them
+      ever so far forgot himself as to curse me for not giving. Him, however, I
+      think to have been out of his right mind at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were two mad beggars in the parish of San Stefano, whom I should be
+      sorry to leave unmentioned here. One, who presided chiefly over the Campo
+      San Stefano, professed to be also a facchino, but I never saw him
+      employed, except in addressing select circles of idlers whom a brawling
+      noise always draws together in Venice. He had been a soldier, and he
+      sometimes put himself at the head of a file of Croats passing through the
+      campo, and gave them the word of command, to the great amusement of those
+      swarthy barbarians. He was a good deal in drink, and when in this state
+      was proud to go before any ladies who might be passing, and clear away the
+      boys and idlers, to make room for them. When not occupied in any of these
+      ways, he commonly slept in the arcades of the old convent.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0414}.jpg" alt="{0414}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0414}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      But the mad beggar of Campo Sant&rsquo; Angelo seemed to have a finer sense of
+      what became him as a madman and a beggar, and never made himself obnoxious
+      by his noise. He was, in fact, very fat and amiable, and in the summer lay
+      asleep, for the most part, at a certain street corner which belonged to
+      him. When awake he was a man of extremely complaisant presence, and
+      suffered no lady to go by without a compliment to her complexion, her
+      blond hair, or her beautiful eyes, whichever it might be. He got money for
+      these attentions, and people paid him for any sort of witticism. One day
+      he said to the richest young dandy of the city,&mdash;&ldquo;Pah! you stomach me
+      with your perfumes and fine airs;&rdquo; for which he received half a florin.
+      His remarks to gentlemen had usually this sarcastic flavor. I am sorry to
+      say that so excellent a madman was often drunk and unable to fulfill his
+      duties to society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are, of course, laws against mendicancy in Venice, and they are, of
+      course, never enforced. Beggars abound everywhere, and nobody molests
+      them. There was long a troop of weird sisters in Campo San Stefano, who
+      picked up a livelihood from the foreigners passing to and from the Academy
+      of Fine Arts. They addressed people with the title of Count, and no doubt
+      gained something by this sort of heraldry, though there are counts in
+      Venice almost as poor as themselves, and titles are not distinctions. The
+      Venetian seldom gives to beggars; he says deliberately, &ldquo;<i>No go</i>&rdquo; (I
+      have nothing), or &ldquo;<i>Quando ritornerò</i>&rdquo; (when I return), and never
+      comes back that way. I noticed that professional hunger and cold took this
+      sort of denial very patiently, as they did every other; but I confess I
+      had never the heart to practice it. In my walks to the Public Gardens
+      there was a venerable old man, with the beard and bearing of a patriarch,
+      whom I encountered on the last bridge of the Riva, and who there asked
+      alms of me. When I gave him a soldo, he returned me a blessing which I
+      would be ashamed to take in the United States for half a dollar; and when
+      the soldo was in some inaccessible pocket, and I begged him to await my
+      coming back, he said sweetly,&mdash;&ldquo;Very well, Signor, I will be here.&rdquo;
+       And I must say, to his credit, that he never broke his promise, nor
+      suffered me, for shame&rsquo;s sake, to break mine. He was quite a treasure to
+      me in this respect, and assisted me to form habits of punctuality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That exuberance of manner which one notes, the first thing, in his
+      intercourse with Venetians, characterizes all classes, but is most
+      excessive and relishing in the poor. There is a vast deal of ceremony with
+      every order, and one hardly knows what to do with the numbers of
+      compliments it is necessary to respond to. A Venetian does not come to see
+      you, he comes to revere you; he not only asks if you be well when he meets
+      you, but he bids you remain well at parting, and desires you to salute for
+      him all common friends; he reverences you at leave-taking; he will
+      sometimes consent to incommode you with a visit; he will relieve you of
+      the disturbance when he rises to go. All spontaneous wishes which must,
+      with us, take original forms, for lack of the complimentary phrase, are
+      formally expressed by him,&mdash;good appetite to you, when you go to
+      dinner much enjoyment, when you go to the theatre; a pleasant walk, if you
+      meet in promenade. He is your servant at meeting and parting; he begs to
+      be commanded when he has misunderstood you. But courtesy takes its highest
+      flights, as I hinted, from the poorest company. Acquaintances of this
+      sort, when not on the <i>Ciò ciappa</i> footing, or that of the familiar
+      thee and thou, always address each other in <i>Lei</i> (lordship), or <i>Elo</i>,
+      as the Venetians have it; and their compliment-making at encounter and
+      separation is endless: I salute you! Remain well! Master! Mistress! (<i>Paron!
+      parona!</i>) being repeated as long as the polite persons are within
+      hearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, as we passed through the crowded Merceria, an old Venetian friend
+      of mine, who trod upon the dress of a young person before us, called out,
+      &ldquo;<i>Scusate, bella giovane</i>!&rdquo; (Pardon, beautiful girl!) She was not so
+      fair nor so young as I have seen women; but she half turned her face with
+      a forgiving smile, and seemed pleased with the accident that had won her
+      the amiable apology. The waiter of the caffè frequented by the people,
+      says to the ladies for whom he places seats,&mdash;&ldquo;Take this place,
+      beautiful blonde;&rdquo; or, &ldquo;Sit here, lovely brunette,&rdquo; as it happens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Venetian who enters or leaves any place of public resort touches his hat
+      to the company, and one day at the restaurant some ladies, who had been
+      dining there, said &ldquo;<i>Complimenti!</i>&rdquo; on going out, with a grace that
+      went near to make the beefsteak tender. It is this uncostly gentleness of
+      bearing which gives a winning impression of the whole people, whatever
+      selfishness or real discourtesy lie beneath it. At home it sometimes seems
+      that we are in such haste to live and be done with it, we have no time to
+      be polite. Or is popular politeness merely a vice of servile peoples? And
+      is it altogether better to be rude? I wish it were not. If you are lost in
+      his city (and you are pretty sure to be lost there, continually), a
+      Venetian will go with you wherever you wish. And he will do this amiable
+      little service out of what one may say old civilization has established in
+      place of goodness of heart, but which is perhaps not so different from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You hear people in the streets bless each other in the most dramatic
+      fashion. I once caught these parting words between an old man and a young
+      girl;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Giovanetta</i>. Revered sir! (<i>Patron riverito!</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Vecchio</i>. (With that peculiar backward wave and beneficent wag of
+      the hand, only possible to Italians.) Blessed child! (<i>Benedetta!</i>)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in a crowd, but no one turned round at the utterance of terms which
+      Anglo-Saxons would scarcely use in their most emotional moments. The old
+      gentleman who sells boxes for the theatre in the Old Procuratie always
+      gave me his benediction when I took a box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is equal exuberance of invective, and I have heard many fine
+      maledictions on the Venetian streets, but I recollect none more elaborate
+      than that of a gondolier who, after listening peacefully to a quarrel
+      between two other boatmen, suddenly took part against one of them, and
+      saluted him with,&mdash;&ldquo;Ah! baptized son of a dog! And if I had been
+      present at thy baptism, I would have dashed thy brains out against the
+      baptismal font!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the theatrical forms of passion were visible in a scene I witnessed in
+      a little street near San Samuele, where I found the neighborhood assembled
+      at doors and windows in honor of a wordy battle between two poor women.
+      One of these had been forced in-doors by her prudent husband, and the
+      other upbraided her across the marital barrier. The assailant was washing,
+      and twenty times she left her tub to revile the besieged, who thrust her
+      long arms out over those of her husband, and turned each reproach back
+      upon her who uttered it, thus:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Assailant</i>. Beast!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Besieged</i>. Thou!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>A</i>. Fool!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>B</i>. Thou!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>A</i>. Liar!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>B</i>. Thou!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>E via in seguito!</i> At last the assailant, beating her breast with
+      both hands, and tempestuously swaying her person back and forth, wreaked
+      her scorn in one wild outburst of vituperation, and returned finally to
+      her tub, wisely saying, on the purple verge of asphyxiation, &ldquo;<i>O, non
+      discorre più con gente</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I returned half an hour later, and she was laughing and playing sweetly
+      with her babe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It suits the passionate nature of the Italians to have incredible ado
+      about buying and selling, and a day&rsquo;s shopping is a sort of campaign, from
+      which the shopper returns plundered and discomfited, or laden with the
+      spoil of vanquished shopmen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The embattled commercial transaction is conducted in this wise:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopper enters, and prices a given article. The shopman names a sum of
+      which only the fervid imagination of the South could conceive as
+      corresponding to the value of the goods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The purchaser instantly starts back with a wail of horror and indignation,
+      and the shopman throws himself forward over the counter with a protest
+      that, far from being dear, the article is ruinously cheap at the price
+      stated, though they may nevertheless agree for something less.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What, then, is the very most ultimate price?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Properly, the very most ultimate price is so much. (Say, the smallest
+      trifle under the price first asked.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The purchaser moves toward the door. He comes back, and offers one third
+      of the very most ultimate price.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopman, with a gentle desperation, declares that the thing cost him
+      as much. He cannot really take the offer. He regrets, but he cannot. That
+      the gentleman would say something more! So much&mdash;for example. That he
+      regard the stuff, its quality, fashion, beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentleman laughs him to scorn. Ah, heigh! and, coming forward, he
+      picks up the article and reviles it. Out of the mode, old, fragile, ugly
+      of its kind. The shopman defends his wares. There is no such quantity and
+      quality elsewhere in Venice. But if the gentleman will give even so much
+      (still something preposterous), he may have it, though truly its sale for
+      that money is utter ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopper walks straight to the door. The shopman calls him back from
+      the threshold, or sends his boy to call him back from the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let him accommodate himself&mdash;which is to say, take the thing at his
+      own price.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He takes it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopman says cheerfully, &ldquo;Servo suo!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The purchaser responds, &ldquo;Bon dì! Patron!&rdquo; (Good day! my Master!)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus, as I said, every bargain is a battle, and every purchase a triumph
+      or a defeat. The whole thing is understood; the opposing forces know
+      perfectly well all that is to be done beforehand, and retire after the
+      contest, like the captured knights in &ldquo;<i>Morgante Maggiore</i>&rdquo; &ldquo;calm as
+      oil,&rdquo;&mdash;however furious and deadly their struggle may have appeared to
+      strangers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Foreigners soon discern, however, that there is no bloodshed in such
+      encounters, and enter into them with a zeal as great as that of natives,
+      though with less skill. I knew one American who prided himself on such
+      matters, and who haughtily closed a certain bargain without words, as he
+      called it. The shopman offered several articles, for which he demanded
+      prices amounting in all to ninety-three francs. His wary customer rapidly
+      computed the total and replied &ldquo;Without words, now, I&rsquo;ll give you a
+      hundred francs for the lot.&rdquo; With a pensive elevation of the eyebrows, and
+      a reluctant shrug of the shoulders, the shopman suffered him to take them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Your Venetian is <i>simpatico</i>, if he is any thing. He is always ready
+      to feel and to express the deepest concern, and I rather think he likes to
+      have his sensibilities appealed to, as a pleasant and healthful exercise
+      for them. His sympathy begins at home, and he generously pities himself as
+      the victim of a combination of misfortunes, which leave him citizen of a
+      country without liberty, without commerce, without money, without hope. He
+      next pities his fellow-citizens, who are as desperately situated as
+      himself. Then he pities the degradation, corruption, and despair into
+      which the city has fallen. And I think his compassion is the most hopeless
+      thing in his character. That alone is touched; that alone is moved; and
+      when its impulse ceases he and every thing about him remain just as
+      before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the poor, this sensibility is amusingly mischievous. They never speak
+      of one of their own class without adding some such ejaculation as &ldquo;Poor
+      fellow!&rdquo; or, &ldquo;Poor little creature!&rdquo; They pity all wretchedness, no matter
+      from what cause, and the greatest rogue has their compassion when under a
+      cloud. It is all but impossible to punish thieves in Venice, where they
+      are very bold and numerous for the police are too much occupied with
+      political surveillance to give due attention to mere cutpurses and
+      housebreakers, and even when they make an arrest, people can hardly be got
+      to bear witness against their unhappy prisoner. <i>Povareto anca lu!</i>
+      There is no work and no money; people must do something; so they steal. <i>Ci
+      vuol pazienza!</i> Bear witness against an ill-fated fellow-sufferer? God
+      forbid! Stop a thief? I think a burglar might run from Rialto to San
+      Marco, and not one compassionate soul in the Merceria would do aught to
+      arrest him&mdash;<i>povareto!</i> Thieves came to the house of a friend of
+      mine at noonday, when his servant was out. They tied their boat to his
+      landing, entered his house, filled their boat with plunder from it, and
+      rowed out into the canal. The neighbors on the floor above saw them, and
+      cried &ldquo;Thieves! thieves!&rdquo; It was in the most frequented part of the Grand
+      Canal, where scores of boats passed and repassed; but no one molested the
+      thieves, and these <i>povareti</i> escaped with their booty. [Footnote:
+      The rogues, it must be confessed, are often very polite. This same friend
+      of mine one day found a man in the act of getting down into a boat with
+      his favorite singing bird in its cage. &ldquo;What are you doing with that
+      bird?&rdquo; he thought himself authorized to inquire. The thief looked about
+      him a moment, and perceiving himself detected, handed back the cage with a
+      cool &ldquo;<i>La scusi!</i>&rdquo; (&ldquo;Beg pardon!&rdquo;) as if its removal had been a
+      trifling inadvertance.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night, in a little street through which we passed to our ferry, there
+      came a wild rush before us, of a woman screaming for help, and pursued by
+      her husband with a knife in his hand; their children, shrieking piteously,
+      came after them. The street was crowded with people and soldiers, but no
+      one put out his hand; and the man presently overtook his wife and stabbed
+      her in the back. We only knew of the rush, but what it all meant we could
+      not tell, till we saw the woman bleeding from the stab, which, happily,
+      was slight. Inquiry of the bystanders developed the facts, but, singularly
+      enough, scarcely a word of pity. It was entirely a family affair, it
+      seemed; the man, poor little fellow, had a mistress, and his wife had
+      maddened him with reproaches. <i>Come si fa</i>? He had to stab her. The
+      woman&rsquo;s case was not one that appealed to popular compassion, and the only
+      words of pity for her which I heard were expressed by the wife of a
+      fruiterer, whom her husband angrily silenced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      SOCIETY.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was natural that the Venetians, whose State lay upon the borders of the
+      Greek Empire, and whose greatest commerce was with the Orient, should be
+      influenced by the Constantinopolitan civilization. Mutinelli records that
+      in the twelfth century they had many religious offices and observances in
+      common with the Greeks, especially the homily or sermon, which formed a
+      very prominent part of the service of worship. At this time, also, when
+      the rupture of the Lombard League had left other Italian cities to fall
+      back into incessant local wars, and barbarized their customs, the people
+      of Venice dressed richly and delicately, after the Greek fashion. They
+      combed and dressed their hair, and wore the long, pointed Greek beard;
+      [Footnote: A. Foscarini, in 1687, was the last patrician who wore the
+      beard.] and though these Byzantine modes fell, for the most part, into
+      disuse, in after-time, there is still a peculiarity of dress among the
+      women of the Venetian poor which is said to have been inherited from the
+      oriental costumes of Constantinople; namely, that high-heeled, sharp-toed
+      slipper, or sandal, which covers the front of the foot, and drops from the
+      heel at every step, requiring no slight art in the wearer to keep it on at
+      all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The philosophic vision, accustomed to relate trifling particulars to
+      important generalities, may perhaps see another relic of Byzantine
+      civilization among the Venetians, in that jealous restraint which they put
+      upon all the social movements of young girls, and the great liberty which
+      they allow to married women. It is true that their damsels are now no
+      longer imprisoned under the parental roof, as they were in times when they
+      never left its shelter but to go, closely veiled, to communion in the
+      church, on Christmas and Easter; but it is still quite impossible that any
+      young lady should go out alone. Indeed, she would scarcely be secure from
+      insult in broad day if she did so. She goes out with her governess, and,
+      even with this protection, she cannot be too guarded and circumspect in
+      her bearing; for in Venice a woman has to encounter upon the public street
+      a rude license of glance, from men of all ages and conditions, which falls
+      little short of outrage. They stare at her as she approaches; and I have
+      seen them turn and contemplate ladies as they passed them, keeping a few
+      paces in advance, with a leisurely sidelong gait. Something of this
+      insolence might be forgiven to thoughtless, hot-blooded youth; but the
+      gross and knowing leer that the elders of the Piazza and the caffè put on
+      at the approach of a pretty girl is an ordeal which few women, not as
+      thoroughly inured to it as the Venetians, would care to encounter.
+      However, as I never heard the trial complained of by any but foreigners, I
+      suppose it is not regarded by Italians as intolerable; and it is certain
+      that an audible compliment, upon the street, to a pretty girl of the poor,
+      is by no means an affront.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The arts of pleasing and of coquetry come by nature to the gentler sex;
+      and if in Italy they add to them a habit of intrigue, I wonder how much
+      they are to blame, never being in anywise trusted? They do not differ from
+      persons of any age or sex in that country, if the world has been as
+      justly, as it has always been firmly, persuaded that the people of Italy
+      are effete in point of good faith. I have seen much to justify this
+      opinion, and something also to confute it; and as long as Garibaldi lives,
+      I shall not let myself believe that a race which could produce a man so
+      signally truthful and single-hearted is a race of liars and cheats. I
+      think the student of their character should also be slow to upbraid
+      Italians for their duplicity, without admitting, in palliation of the
+      fault, facts of long ages of alien and domestic oppression, in politics
+      and religion, which must account for a vast deal of every kind of evil in
+      Italy. Yet after exception and palliation has been duly made, it must be
+      confessed that in Italy it does not seem to be thought shameful to tell
+      lies, and that there the standard of sincerity, compared with that of the
+      English or American, is low, as the Italian standard of morality in ether
+      respects is also comparatively low. With the women, bred in idleness and
+      ignorance, the imputed national untruthfulness takes the form naturally to
+      be expected, and contributes to a state of things which must be examined
+      with the greatest caution and reservation by every one but the Italians
+      themselves. Goethe says that there is no society so corrupt that a man may
+      not live virtuously in it; and I think the immorality of any people will
+      not be directly and wholly seen by the stranger who does not seek it.
+      Certainly, the experience and acquaintance of a foreigner in Italy must
+      have been most unfortunate, if they confirm all the stories of corruption
+      told by Italians themselves. A little generous distrust is best in matters
+      of this kind; but while I strengthen my incredulity concerning the utter
+      depravation of Venetian society in one respect, I am not disposed to deal
+      so leniently with it in others. The state of things is bad in Venice, not
+      because all women in society are impure, but because the Italian theory of
+      morals does not admit the existence of opportunity without sin. It is by
+      rare chance that a young girl makes acquaintance with young men in
+      society; she seldom talks with them at the parties to which she is
+      sometimes taken by her mother, and they do not call upon her at her home;
+      while for her to walk alone with a young man would be vastly more
+      scandalous than much worse things, and is, consequently, unheard of. The
+      Italians say freely they cannot trust their women as northern women are
+      trusted; and some Italian women frankly confess that their sex would be
+      worse if it were trusted more. But the truth does not appear in this
+      shallow suspicion and this shallow self-conviction; and one who cares to
+      have a just estimate of this matter must by no means believe all the evil
+      he hears. There may be much corruption in society, but there is infinitely
+      more wrong in the habits of idle gossip and guilty scandal, which eat all
+      sense of shame and pity out of the heart of Venice. There is no parallel
+      to the prying, tattling, backbiting littleness of the place elsewhere in
+      the world. A small country village in America or England has its
+      meddlesomeness, but not its worldly, wicked sharpness. Figure the meanness
+      of a chimney-corner gossip, added to the bitter shrewdness and witty
+      penetration of a gifted roué, and you have some idea of Venetian scandal.
+      In that city, where all the nobler organs of expression are closed by
+      political conditions, the viler channels run continual filth and poison,
+      and the people, shut out from public and free discussion of religious and
+      political themes, occupy themselves with private slander, and rend each
+      other in their abject desperation. As it is part of the existing political
+      demonstration to avoid the opera and theatre, the Venetians are deprived
+      of these harmless distractions; balls and evening parties, at which
+      people, in other countries, do nothing worse than bore each other, are
+      almost unknown, for the same reason; and when persons meet in society, it
+      is too often to retail personalities, or Italian politics made as
+      unintelligible and as like local gossip as possible. The talk which is
+      small and noxious in private circles is the same thing at the caffè, when
+      the dread of spies does not reduce the talkers to a dreary silence. Not
+      permitted to feel the currents of literature and the great world&rsquo;s thought
+      in religion freshly and directly, they seldom speak of these things,
+      except in that tone of obsolete superiority which Italians are still prone
+      to affect, as the monopolists of culture. As to Art, the Venetians are
+      insensible to it and ignorant of it, here in the very atmosphere of Art,
+      to a degree absolutely amusing. I would as soon think of asking a fish&rsquo;s
+      opinion of water as of asking a Venetian&rsquo;s notion of architecture or
+      painting, unless he were himself a professed artist or critic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Admitting, however, that a great part of the corruption of society is
+      imputed, there still remains, no doubt, a great deal of real immorality to
+      be accounted for. This, I think, is often to be attributed to the bad
+      system of female education, and the habits of idleness in which women are
+      bred. Indeed, to Americans, the whole system of Italian education seems
+      calculated to reduce women to a state of imbecile captivity before
+      marriage; and I have no fault to find with the Italians that they are
+      jealous in guarding those whom they have unfitted to protect themselves,
+      but have rather to blame them that, after marriage, their women are thrown
+      at once upon society, when worse than helpless against its temptations.
+      Except with those people who attempt to maintain a certain appearance in
+      public upon insufficient means (and there are too many of these in Venice
+      as everywhere else), and who spare in every other way that they may spend
+      on dress, it does not often happen that Venetian ladies are housekeepers.
+      Servants are cheap and numerous, as they are uncleanly and untrustworthy,
+      and the Venetians prefer to keep them [Footnote: A clerk or employé with a
+      salary of fifty cents a day keeps a maid-servant, that his wife may
+      fulfill to society the important duty of doing nothing.] rather than take
+      part in housewifely duties; and, since they must lavish upon dress and
+      show, to suffer from cold and hunger in their fireless houses and at their
+      meagre boards. In this way the young girls, kept imprisoned from the
+      world, instead of learning cookery and other domestic arts, have the
+      grievous burden of idleness added to that of their solitary confinement,
+      not only among the rich and noble, but among that large class which is
+      neither and wishes to appear both. [Footnote: The poet Gray, genteelly
+      making the grand tour in 1740, wrote to his father from Florence: &ldquo;The
+      only thing the Italians shine in is their reception of strangers. At such
+      times every thing is magnificence: the more remarkable as in their
+      ordinary course of life they are parsimonious to a degree of nastiness. I
+      saw in one of the vastest palaces of Rome (that of the Prince Pamfilio),
+      the apartment which he himself inhabited, a bed that most servants in
+      England would disdain to lie in, and furniture much like that of a soph at
+      Cambridge. This man is worth 30,000<i>l</i>. a year.&rdquo; Italian nature has
+      changed so little in a century, that all this would hold admirably true of
+      Italian life at this time. The goodly outside in religion, in morals, in
+      every thing is too much the ambition of Italy; this achieved, she is
+      content to endure any pang of self-denial, and sell what little comfort
+      she knows&mdash;it is mostly imported, like the word, from England&mdash;to
+      strangers at fabulous prices. In Italy the luxuries of life are cheap, and
+      the conveniences unknown or excessively dear.] Their idle thoughts, not
+      drilled by study nor occupied with work, run upon the freedom which
+      marriage shall bring them, and form a distorted image of the world, of
+      which they know as little as of their own undisciplined selves. Denied the
+      just and wholesome amusements of society during their girlhood, it is
+      scarcely a matter of surprise that they should throw themselves into the
+      giddiest whirl of its excitement when marriage sets them free to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have said I do not think Venetians who give each other bad names are
+      always to be credited, and I have no doubt that many a reputation in
+      Venice is stained while the victim remains without guilt. A questioned
+      reputation is, however, no great social calamity. It forms no bar to
+      society, and few people are so cruel as to blame it, though all discuss
+      it. And it is here that the harshness of American and English society
+      toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but
+      half-justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad naïveté
+      and lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl is
+      accustomed to hear of things and speak of things which, with us, parents
+      strive in every way to keep from their daughters&rsquo; knowledge; and while her
+      sense of delicacy is thus early blunted, while she is thus used to know
+      good and evil, she hears her father and mother comment on the sinful
+      errors of a friend or neighbor, who visits them and meets them every day
+      in society. How can the impunity of the guilt which she believes to exist
+      around her but sometimes have its effect, and ripen, with opportunity,
+      into wrong? Nay, if the girl reveres her parents at all, how can she think
+      the sin, which they caress in the sinner, is so very bad? If, however, she
+      escape all these early influences of depravation; if her idleness, and
+      solitude and precocious knowledge leave her unvitiated, if, when she goes
+      into society, it is by marriage with a man who is neither a dotard nor a
+      fortune-seeker, and who remains constant and does not tempt her, by
+      neglect, to forbode offense and to inflict anticipative reprisals&mdash;yet
+      her purity goes uncredited, as her guilt would go unpunished; scandal
+      makes haste to blacken her name to the prevailing hue; and whether she has
+      sin or not, those with sin will cast, not the stone that breaks and kills,
+      but the filth that sticks and stinks. The wife must continue the long
+      social exile of her girlhood if she would not be the prey of scandal. The
+      <i>cavaliere servente</i> no longer exists, but gossip now attributes
+      often more than one lover in his place, and society has the cruel clemency
+      to wink at the license. Nothing is in worse taste than jealousy, and,
+      consequently, though intrigue sometimes causes stabbing, and the like,
+      among low people, it is rarely noticed by persons of good breeding. It
+      seems to me that in Venetian society the reform must begin, not with
+      dissolute life, but with the social toleration of the impure, and with the
+      wanton habits of scandal, which make all other life incredible, and deny
+      to virtue the triumph of fair fame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that what I saw of the innocent amusements of this society was
+      not enough to convince me of their brilliancy and attractiveness; but I
+      doubt if a foreigner can be a trustworthy judge of these things, and
+      perhaps a sketch drawn by an alien hand, in the best faith, might have an
+      air of caricature. I would not, therefore, like to trust my own impression
+      of social diversions. They were, very probably, much more lively and
+      brilliant than I thought them. But Italians assembled anywhere, except at
+      the theatre or the caffè, have a certain stiffness, all the more
+      surprising, because tradition has always led one to expect exactly the
+      reverse of them. I have seen nothing equal to the formality of this
+      people, who deride colder nations for inflexible manners; and I have
+      certainly never seen society in any small town in America so ill at ease
+      as I have seen society in Venice, writhing under self-imposed restraints.
+      At a musical soirée, attended by the class of people who at home would
+      have been chatty and sociable, given to making acquaintance and to keeping
+      up acquaintance,&mdash;the young men harmlessly talking and walking with
+      the young ladies, and the old people listening together, while constant
+      movement and intercourse kept life in the assembly, and there was some
+      real pleasure felt amidst a good deal of unavoidable suffering,&mdash;I
+      say, I found such a soirée in Venice to be a spectacle of ladies planted
+      in formal rows of low-necks and white dresses around the four sides of one
+      room, and of gentlemen restively imprisoned in dress-coats and white
+      gloves in another. During the music all these devoted people listened
+      attentively, and at the end, the ladies lapsed back into their chairs and
+      fanned themselves, while the gentlemen walked up and down the floor of
+      their cell, and stopped, two by two, at the door of the ladies&rsquo; room,
+      glanced mournfully athwart the moral barrier which divided them, and sadly
+      and dejectedly turned away. Amazed at this singular species of social
+      enjoyment, I inquired afterward, of a Venetian lady, if evening parties in
+      Venice were usually such ordeals, and was discouraged to learn that what I
+      had seen was scarcely an exaggeration of prevailing torments. Commonly
+      people do not know each other, and it is difficult for the younger to
+      procure introductions; and when there is previous acquaintance, the
+      presence of some commanding spirit is necessary to break the ice of
+      propriety, and substitute enjoyment for correctness of behavior. Even at
+      dancing parties, where it would seem that the poetry of motion might do
+      something to soften the rigid bosom of Venetian deportment, the poor young
+      people separate after each dance, and take each sex its appointed prison,
+      till the next quadrille offers them a temporary liberation. For my own
+      part, I cannot wonder that young men fly these virtuous scenes, and throng
+      the rooms of those pleasant women of the <i>demi-monde</i>, who only exact
+      from them that they shall be natural and agreeable; I cannot wonder that
+      their fair partners in wretchedness seize the first opportunity to revenge
+      themselves upon the propriety which has so cruelly used them. It is said
+      that the assemblies of the Jews, while quite as unexceptionable in
+      character, are far more sociable and lively than those of the Christians.
+      The young Hebrews are frequently intelligent, well-bred, and witty, with a
+      <i>savoir faire</i> which their Christian brethren lack. But, indeed, the
+      young Venetian is, at that age when all men are owlish, ignorant, and
+      vapid, the most owlish, ignorant, and vapid man in the world. He talks,
+      not milk-and-water, but warm water alone, a little sweetened; and, until
+      he has grown wicked, has very little good in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most ladies of fashion receive calls on a certain day of each week, when
+      it is made a matter of pride to receive as many calls as possible. The
+      number sometimes reaches three hundred, when nobody sits down, and few
+      exchange more than a word with the hostess. In winter, the stove is heated
+      on these reception days, and little cups of black coffee are passed round
+      to the company; in summer lemonade is substituted for the coffee; but in
+      all seasons a thin, waferish slice of toasted rusk (the Venetian <i>baicolo</i>)
+      is offered to each guest with the drink. At receptions where the sparsity
+      of the company permits the lady of the house to be seen, she is commonly
+      visible on a sofa, surrounded by visitors in a half-circle. Nobody stays
+      more than ten or fifteen minutes, and I have sometimes found even this
+      brief time of much greater apparent length, and apt to produce a low state
+      of nerves, from which one seldom recovers before dinner. Gentlemen,
+      however, do not much frequent these receptions; and I assert again the
+      diffidence I should feel in offering this glance at Venetian social
+      enjoyment as conveying a just and full idea of it. There is no doubt that
+      the Venetians find delight in their assemblies, where a stranger seeks it
+      in vain. I dare say they would not think our own reunions brilliant, and
+      that, looking obliquely (as a foreigner must) on the most sensible faces
+      at one of our evening parties, they might mistake the look of pathetic
+      dejection, visible in them, as the expression of people rather bored by
+      their pleasure than otherwise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the conversazioni of the rigid
+      proprietarians, where people sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at a
+      soldo the point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the <i>demi-monde</i>
+      where they say any thing. There are persons in Venice, as well as
+      everywhere else, of new-fashioned modes of thinking, and these strive to
+      give a greater life and ease to their assemblies, by attracting as many
+      young men as possible; and in their families, gentlemen are welcome to
+      visit, and to talk with the young ladies in the presence of their mothers.
+      But though such people are no more accused of impropriety than the
+      straitest of the old-fashioned, they are not regarded with the greatest
+      esteem, and their daughters do not so readily find husbands. The Italians
+      are fickle, the women say; they get soon tired of their wives after
+      marriage, and when they see much of ladies before marriage, they get tired
+      of them then, and never make them their wives. So it is much better to see
+      nothing of a possible husband till you actually have him. I do not think
+      conversazioni of any kind are popular with young men, however; they like
+      better to go to the caffè, and the people you meet at private houses are
+      none the less interesting for being old, or middle-aged. A great many of
+      the best families, at present, receive no company at all, and see their
+      friends only in the most private manner; though there are still cultivated
+      circles to which proper introduction gives the stranger (who has no
+      Austrian acquaintance) access. But unless he have thorough knowledge of
+      Italian politics localized to apply to Venice, an interest in the affairs,
+      fortunes, and misfortunes of his neighbors, and an acquaintance with the
+      Venetian dialect, I doubt if he will be able to enjoy himself in the
+      places so cautiously opened to him. Even in the most cultivated society,
+      the dialect is habitually spoken; and if Italian is used, it is only in
+      compliment to some foreigner present, for whose sake, also, topics of
+      general interest are sometimes chosen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The best society is now composed of the families of professional men, such
+      as the advocates, the physicians, and the richer sort of merchants. The
+      shopkeepers, master-artisans, and others, whom industry and thrift
+      distinguish from the populace, seem not to have any social life, in the
+      American sense. They are wholly devoted to affairs, and partly from
+      choice, and partly from necessity, are sordid and grasping. It is their
+      class which has to fight hardest for life in Europe, and they give no
+      quarter to those above or below them. The shop is their sole thought and
+      interest, and they never, never sink it. But, since they have habits of
+      diligence, and, as far as they are permitted, of enterprise, they seem to
+      be in great part the stuff from which a prosperous State is to be rebuilt
+      in Venice, if ever the fallen edifice rise again. They have sometimes a
+      certain independence of character, which a better condition of things, and
+      further education, would perhaps lift into honesty; though as yet they
+      seem not to scruple to take any unfair advantage, and not to know that
+      commercial success can never rest permanently on a system of bad faith.
+      Below this class is the populace, between which and the patrician order a
+      relation something like Roman clientage existed, contributing greatly to
+      the maintenance of exclusively aristocratic power in the State. The
+      greatest conspiracy (that of Marin Falier) which the commons ever moved
+      against the oligarchy was revealed to one of the nobility by his plebeian
+      creature, or client; and the government rewarded by every species of
+      indulgence a class in which it had extinguished even the desire of popular
+      liberty. The heirs of the servile baseness which such a system as this
+      must create are not yet extinct. There is still a helplessness in many of
+      the servant class, and a disposition to look for largess as well as wages,
+      which are the traits naturally resulting from a state of voluntary
+      submission to others. The nobles, as the government, enervated and
+      debauched the character of the poor by public shows and countless
+      holidays; as individuals, they taught them to depend upon patrician favor,
+      and not upon their own plebeian industry, for support. The lesson was an
+      evil one, hard to be unlearned, and it is yet to be forgotten in Venice.
+      Certain traits of soft and familiar dependence give great charm to the
+      populace; but their existence makes the student doubtful of a future to
+      which the plebeians themselves look forward with perfect hope and
+      confidence. It may be that they are right, and will really rise to the
+      dignity of men, when free government shall have taught them that the
+      laborer is worthy of his hire&mdash;after he has earned it. This has been
+      the result, to some degree, in the kingdom of Italy, where the people have
+      found that freedom, like happiness, means work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Undoubtedly the best people in the best society of Venice are the
+      advocates, an order of consequence even in the times of the Republic,
+      though then shut out from participation in public affairs by a native
+      government, as now by a foreign one. Acquaintance with several members of
+      this profession impressed me with a sense of its liberality of thought and
+      feeling, where all liberal thinking and feeling must be done by stealth,
+      and where the common intelligence of the world sheds its light through
+      multiplied barriers. Daniele Manin, the President of the Republic of 1848,
+      was of this class, which, by virtue of its learning, enlightenment, and
+      talent, occupies a place in the esteem and regard of the Venetian people
+      far above that held by the effete aristocracy. The better part of the
+      nobility, indeed, is merged in the professional class, and some of the
+      most historic names are now preceded by the learned titles of Doctor and
+      Advocate, rather than the cheap dignity of Count, offered by the Austrian
+      government to all the patricians who chose to ask for it, when Austrian
+      rule was extended over their country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physicians rank next to the advocates, and are usually men learned in
+      their profession, however erroneous and old-fashioned some of their
+      theories of practice may be. Like the advocates, they are often men of
+      letters: they write for the journals, and publish little pamphlets on
+      those topics of local history which it is so much the fashion to treat in
+      Venice. No one makes a profession of authorship. The returns of an
+      author&rsquo;s work would be too uncertain, and its restrictions and penalties
+      would be too vexatious and serious; and so literary topics are only
+      occasionally treated by those whose main energies are bent in another
+      direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctors are very numerous, and a considerable number of them are
+      Hebrews, who, even in the old jealous times, exercised the noble art of
+      medicine, and who now rank very highly among their professional brethren.
+      These physicians haunt the neat and tasteful apothecary shops, where they
+      sit upon the benching that passes round the interior, read the newspapers,
+      and discuss the politics of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, with all
+      the zest that you may observe to characterize their discussions in
+      Goldoni&rsquo;s plays. There they spend their evenings, and many hours of every
+      day, and thither the sick send to call them,&mdash;each physician
+      resorting to a particular apothecary&rsquo;s, and keeping his name inscribed on
+      a brass plate against the wall, above the head of the druggist, who
+      presides over the reunions of the doctors, while his apprentice pestles
+      away at their prescriptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1786 there were, what with priests, monks, and nuns, a multitude of
+      persons of ecclesiastical profession in Venice; and though many convents
+      and monasteries were abolished by Napoleon, the priests are still very
+      numerous, and some monastic establishments have been revived under
+      Austrian rule. The high officers of the Church are, of course, well paid,
+      but most of the priesthood live miserably enough. They receive from the
+      government a daily stipend of about thirty-five soldi, and they celebrate
+      mass when they can get something to do in that way, for forty soldi.
+      Unless, then, they have private income from their own family, or have pay
+      for the education of some rich man&rsquo;s son or daughter, they must fare
+      slenderly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is much said, in and out of Venice, about their influence in
+      society; but this is greatly modified, and I think is chiefly exercised
+      upon the women of the old-fashioned families. [Footnote: It is no longer
+      usual for girls to be educated in convents, and most young ladies of the
+      better classes, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen years, receive their
+      schooling in secular establishments, whither they go every day for study,
+      or where they sometimes live as in our boarding-schools, and where they
+      are taught the usual accomplishments, greater attention being paid to
+      French and music than to other things.] I need hardly repeat the wellknown
+      fact that all the moral power of the Roman Church over the younger men is
+      gone; these seldom attend mass, and almost never go to confession, and the
+      priests are their scorn and by-word. Their example, in some degree, must
+      be much followed also by women; and though women must everywhere make more
+      public professions of religion than men, in order to retain social
+      standing, I doubt if the priests have a very firm hold upon the fears or
+      reverence of the sisters and wives of liberal Venetians.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If, however, they contribute in anywise to keep down the people, they are
+      themselves enslaved to their superiors and to each other. No priest can
+      leave the city of Venice without permission of the Patriarch. He is cut
+      off as much as possible from his own kinspeople, and subjected to the
+      constant surveillance of his class. Obliged to maintain a respectable
+      appearance on twenty cents a day,&mdash;hampered and hindered from all
+      personal liberty and private friendship, and hated by the great mass of
+      the people,&mdash;I hardly think the Venetian priest is to be envied in
+      his life. For my own part, knowing these things, I was not able to cherish
+      toward the priests those feelings of scornful severity which swell many
+      Protestant bosoms; and so far as I made their acquaintance, I found them
+      kind and amiable. One ecclesiastic, at least, I may describe as one of the
+      most agreeable and cultivated gentlemen I ever met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those who fare best among the priests are the Jesuits, who returned from
+      repeated banishment with the Austrians in this century. Their influence is
+      very extended, and the confessional is their forte. Venetians say that
+      with the old and the old-fashioned these crafty priests suggest remorse
+      and impose penances; that with the young men and the latter-day thinkers
+      they are men of the world, and pass off pleasant sins as trifles. All the
+      students of the government schools are obliged by law to confess twice a
+      month, and are given printed certificates of confession, in blank, which
+      the confessor fills up and stamps with the seal of the Church. Most of
+      them go to confess at the church of the Jesuits, who are glad to hear the
+      cock-and-bull story invented by the student, and to cultivate his
+      friendship by an easy penance and a liberal tone. This ingenuous young man
+      of course despises the confessional. He goes to confess because the law
+      obliges him to do so; but the law cannot dictate what he must confess.
+      Therefore, he ventures as near downright burlesque as he dares, and (if
+      the account he gives of the matter be true) puts off his confessor with
+      some well-known fact, as that he has blasphemed. Of course he has
+      blasphemed, blasphemy being as common as the forms of salutation in
+      Venice. So the priest, who wishes him to come again, and to found some
+      sort of influence over him, says,&mdash;&ldquo;Oh dear, dear! This is very bad.
+      Blasphemy is deadly sin. If you <i>must</i> swear, swear by the heathen
+      gods: say Body of Diana, instead of Body of God; Presence of the Devil,
+      instead of Blood of Mary. Then there is no harm done.&rdquo; The students laugh
+      over the pleasant absurdity together, and usually agree upon the matter of
+      their semimonthly confessions beforehand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have hinted, the young men do not love the government or the Church,
+      and though I account for the loss of much high hope and generous sympathy
+      in growth from youth to middle age, I cannot see how, when they have
+      replaced their fathers, the present religious and political discontent is
+      to be modified. Nay, I believe it must become worse. The middle-aged men
+      of Venice grew up in times of comparative quiet, when she did not so much
+      care who ruled over her, and negatively, at least, they honored the
+      Church. They may now hate the foreign rule, but there are many
+      considerations of timidity, and many effects of education, to temper their
+      hate. They may dislike the priests, but they revere the Church. The young
+      men of to-day are bred in a different school, and all their thoughts are
+      of opposition to the government and of war upon the Church, which they
+      detest and ridicule. The fact that their education is still in the hands
+      of the priests in some measure, does not render them more tractable. They
+      have no fears to be wrought upon by their clerical professors, who seldom
+      have sought to act upon their nobler qualities. The influence of the
+      priesthood is again limited by the fact that the teachers in the free
+      schools of the city, to which the poor send their children, are generally
+      not priests; and ecclesiastics are no longer so commonly the private
+      tutors of the children of the rich, as they once were when they lived with
+      the family, and exercised a direct and important influence on it. Express
+      permission from the pope is now necessary to the maintenance of a family
+      chaplain, and the office is nearly disused. [Footnote: In early days every
+      noble Venetian family had its chaplain, who, on the occasion of great
+      dinners and suppers, remained in the kitchen, and received as one of his
+      perquisites the fragments that came back from the table.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Republic was extremely jealous of the political power of the priests,
+      who could not hold secular office in its time. A curious punishment was
+      inflicted upon the priest who proved false to his own vows of chastity,
+      and there is a most amusing old ballad&mdash;by no means cleanly in its
+      language&mdash;purporting to be the lament of a priest suspended in the
+      iron cage, appointed for the purpose, from the belfry of the Campanile San
+      Marco, and enduring the jeers and insults of the mob below. We may suppose
+      that with advancing corruption (if corruption has indeed advanced from
+      remote to later times) this punishment was disused for want of room to
+      hang out the delinquents. In the last century, especially, the nuns and
+      monks led a pleasant life. You may see in the old pictures of Pietro
+      Longhi and his school, how at the aristocratic and fashionable convent of
+      San Zaccaria, the lady nuns received their friends and acquaintances of
+      this world in the anteroom, where the dames and their cavaliers flirted
+      and drank coffee, and the gentlemen coquetted with the brides of heaven
+      through their grated windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among other privileges of the Church, abolished in Venice long ago, was
+      that ancient right of the monks of St. Anthony, Abbot, by which their
+      herds of swine were made free of the whole city. These animals, enveloped
+      in an odor of sanctity, wandered here and there, and were piously fed by
+      devout people, until the year 1409, when, being found dangerous to
+      children and inconvenient to every body, they were made the subject of a
+      special decree, which deprived them of their freedom of movement. The
+      Republic was always limiting the privileges of the Church! It is known how
+      when the holy inquisition was established in its dominions in 1249, the
+      State stipulated that great part of the process against heresy should be
+      conducted by secular functionaries, and that the sentence should rest with
+      the Doge and his councillors,&mdash;a kind of inquisition with claws
+      clipped and teeth filed, as one may say, and the only sort ever permitted
+      in Venice. At present there is no absolute disfavor shown to the clergy;
+      but, as we have seen, many a pleasant island, which the monks of old
+      reclaimed from the salty marshes, and planted with gardens and vineyards,
+      now bears only the ruins of their convents, or else, converted into a
+      fortress or government dépôt, is all thistly with bayonets. Anciently,
+      moreover, there were many little groves in different parts of the city,
+      where the pleasant clergy, of what Mr. Ruskin would have us believe the
+      pure and religious days of Venice, met and made merry so riotously
+      together by night that the higher officers of the Church were forced to
+      prohibit their little soirées.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An old custom of rejoicing over the installation of a new parish priest is
+      still to be seen in almost primitive quaintness. The people of each parish&mdash;nobles,
+      citizens, and plebeians alike&mdash;formerly elected their own priest,
+      and, till the year 1576, they used to perambulate the city to the sound of
+      drums, with banners flying, after an election, and proclaim the name of
+      their favorite. On the day of the <i>parroco</i>&rsquo;s induction his portrait
+      was placed over the church door and after the celebration of the morning
+      mass, a breakfast was given, which grew to be so splendid in time, that in
+      the fifteenth century a statute limited its profusion. In the afternoon
+      the new parroco, preceded by a band of military music, visited all the
+      streets and courts of his parish, and then, as now, all the windows of the
+      parish were decorated with brilliant tapestries, and other gay-colored
+      cloths and pictures. In those times as in these, there was an illumination
+      at night, throngs of people in the campo of the church, and booths for
+      traffic in cakes of flour and raisins,&mdash;fried in lard upon the spot,
+      and sold smoking hot, with immense uproar on the part of the merchant; and
+      for three days afterward the parish bells were sounded in concert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The difficulty of ascertaining any thing with certainty in Venice attends
+      in a degree peculiarly great the effort to learn exactly the present
+      influence and standing of the nobility as a class. One is tempted, on
+      observing the free and unembarrassed bearing of all ranks of people toward
+      each other, to say that no sense of difference exists,&mdash;and I do not
+      think there is ever shown, among Italians, either the aggressive pride or
+      the abject meanness which marks the intercourse of people and nobles
+      elsewhere in Europe, and I have not seen the distinction of rich and poor
+      made so brutally in Italy as sometimes in our own <i>soi-disant</i>
+      democratic society at home. There is, indeed, that equality in Italian
+      fibre which I believe fits the nation for democratic institutions better
+      than any other, and which is perhaps partly the result of their ancient
+      civilization. At any rate, it fascinates a stranger to see people so
+      mutually gentle and deferential; and must often be a matter of surprise to
+      the Anglo-Saxon, in whose race, reclaimed from barbarism more recently,
+      the native wild-beast is still so strong as to sometimes inform the
+      manner. The uneducated Anglo-Saxon is a savage; the Italian, though born
+      to utter ignorance, poverty, and depravity, is a civilized man. I do not
+      say that his civilization is of a high order, or that the civilization of
+      the most cultivated Italian is at all comparable to that of a gentleman
+      among ourselves. The Italian&rsquo;s education, however profound, has left his
+      passions undisciplined, while it has carefully polished his manner; he
+      yields lightly to temptation, he loses his self-control, he blasphemes
+      habitually; his gentleness is conventional, his civilization not
+      individual. With us the education of a gentleman (I do not mean a person
+      born to wealth or station, but any man who has trained himself in morals
+      or religion, in letters, and in the world) disciplines the impulses, and
+      leaves the good manner to grow naturally out of habits of self-command and
+      consequent habitual self-respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The natural equality of the Italians is visible in their community of good
+      looks as well as good manners. They have never, perhaps, that high beauty
+      of sensitive expression which is found among Englishmen and Americans
+      (preferably among the latter), but it very rarely happens that they are
+      brutally ugly; and the man of low rank and mean vocation has often a
+      beauty of as fine sort as the man of education and refinement. If they
+      changed clothes, and the poor man could be persuaded to wash himself, they
+      might successfully masquerade, one for another. The plebeian Italian,
+      inspired by the national vanity, bears himself as proudly as the noble,
+      without at all aggressing in his manner. His beauty, like that of the
+      women of his class, is world-old,&mdash;the beauty of the pictures and the
+      statues: the ideal types of loveliness are realized in Italy; the saints
+      and heroes, the madonnas and nymphs, come true to the stranger at every
+      encounter with living faces. In Venice, particularly, the carriage of the
+      women, of whatever rank, is very free and noble, and the servant is
+      sometimes to be distinguished from the mistress only by her dress and by
+      her labor-coarsened hands; certainly not always by her dirty finger-nails
+      and foul teeth, for though the clean shirt is now generally in Italy, some
+      lesser virtues are still unknown: the nail-brush and tooth-brush are of
+      but infrequent use; the four-pronged fork is still imperfectly understood,
+      and as a nation the Italians may be said to eat with their knives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetian, then, seeing so little difference between himself and
+      others, whatever his rank may be, has, as I said, little temptation to
+      arrogance or servility. The effects of the old relationship of patron and
+      client are amusingly noticeable in the superior as well as the inferior; a
+      rich man&rsquo;s dependents are perfectly free with advice and comment, and it
+      sometimes happens that he likes to hear their lively talk, and at home
+      secretly consorts with his servants. The former social differences between
+      commoners and patricians (which, I think, judging from the natural temper
+      of the race, must have been greatly modified at all times by concession
+      and exception) may be said to have quite disappeared in point of fact; the
+      nobility is now almost as effete socially as it is politically. There is
+      still a number of historic families, which are in a certain degree
+      exclusive; but rich <i>parvenus</i> have admission to their friendship,
+      and commoners in good circumstances are permitted their acquaintance; the
+      ladies of this patrician society visit ladies of less rank, and receive
+      them at their great parties, though not at more sacred assemblies, where
+      they see only each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians have a habit of saying their best families are in exile, but
+      this is not meant to be taken literally. Many of the best families are yet
+      in the city, living in perfect retirement, or very often merged in the
+      middle class, and become men of professions, and active, useful lives. Of
+      these nobles (they usually belong to the families which did not care to
+      ask nobility of Austria, and are therefore untitled) [Footnote: The only
+      title conferred on any patrician of Venice during the Republic was
+      Cavaliere, and this was conferred by a legislative act in reward of
+      distinguished service. The names of the nobility were written in the
+      Golden Book of the Republic, and they were addressed as Illustrissimo or
+      Eccellenza. They also signed themselves <i>nobile</i>, between the
+      Christian name and surname, as it is still the habit of the untitled
+      nobility to do.] the citizens are affectionately proud, while I have heard
+      from them nothing but contempt and ridicule of the patricians who, upon a
+      wretched pension or meagre government office, attempt to maintain
+      patrician distinction. Such nobles are usually Austriacanti in their
+      politics, and behind the age in every thing; while there are other
+      descendants of patrician families mingled at last with the very populace,
+      sharing their ignorance and degradation, and feeling with them. These
+      sometimes exercise the most menial employments: I knew one noble lord who
+      had been a facchino, and I heard of another who was a street-sweeper. <i>Conte
+      che non conta, non conta niente</i>, [Footnote: A count who doesn&rsquo;t count
+      (money) counts for nothing.] says the sneering Italian proverb; and it
+      would be little less than miraculous if a nobility like that of modern
+      Venice maintained superior state and regard in the eyes of the
+      quick-witted, intelligent, sarcastic commonalty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The few opulent patricians are by no means the most violent of
+      Italianissimi. They own lands and houses, and as property is unsafe when
+      revolutionary feeling is rife, their patriotism is tempered. The wealth
+      amassed in early times by the vast and enterprising commerce of the
+      country was, when not dissipated in riotous splendor, invested in real
+      estate upon the main-land as the Republic grew in territory, and the
+      income of the nobles is now from the rents of these lands. They reside
+      upon their estates during the season of the <i>villeggiatura</i>, which
+      includes the months of September and October, when every one who can
+      possibly leave the city goes into the country. Then the patricians betake
+      themselves to their villas near Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and Treviso, and
+      people the sad-colored, weather-worn stucco hermitages, where the
+      mutilated statues, swaggering above the gates, forlornly commemorate days
+      when it was a far finer thing to be a noble than it is now. I say the
+      villas look dreary and lonesome as places can be made to look in Italy,
+      what with their high garden walls, their long, low piles of stabling, and
+      the <i>passée</i> indecency of their nymphs and fauns, foolishly strutting
+      in the attitudes of the silly and sinful old Past; and it must be but a
+      dull life that the noble proprietors lead there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is better, no doubt, on the banks of the Brenta, where there are still
+      so many villas as to form a street of these seats of luxury, almost the
+      whole length of the canal, from Fusina to Padua. I am not certain that
+      they have a right to the place which they hold in literature and
+      sentiment, and yet there is something very charming about them, with their
+      gardens, and chapels, and statues, and shaded walks. We went to see them
+      one day early in October, and found them every one, when habitable,
+      inhabited, and wearing a cheerful look, that made their proximity to
+      Venice incredible. As we returned home after dark, we saw the ladies from
+      the villas walking unattended along the road, and giving the scene an air
+      of homelike peace and trustfulness which I had not found before in Italy;
+      while the windows of the houses were brilliantly lighted, as if people
+      lived in them; whereas, you seldom see a light in Venetian palaces. I am
+      not sure that I did not like better, however, the villas that were empty
+      and ruinous, and the gardens that had run wild, and the statues that had
+      lost legs and arms. Some of the ingenious proprietors had enterprisingly
+      whitewashed their statues, and there was a horrible primness about certain
+      of the well-kept gardens which offended me. Most of the houses were not
+      large, but there was here and there a palace as grand as any in the city.
+      Such was the great villa of the Contarini of the Lions, which was in every
+      way superb, with two great lions of stone guarding its portals, and a
+      gravel walk, over-arched with stately trees, stretching a quarter of a
+      mile before it. At the moment I was walking down this aisle I met a
+      cleanshaven old canonico, with red legs and red-tasseled hat, and with a
+      book under his arm, and a meditative look, whom I here thank for being so
+      venerably picturesque. The palace itself was shut up, and I wish I had
+      known, when I saw it, that it had a ghostly underground passage from its
+      cellar to the chapel,&mdash;wherein, when you get half way, your light
+      goes out, and you consequently never reach the chapel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is at Mira; but the greatest of all the villas is the magnificent
+      country-seat of the family Pisani at Stra, which now, with scarcely any
+      addition to its splendor, serves for the residence of the abdicated
+      Emperor of Austria. There is such pride in the vastness of this edifice
+      and its gardens as impresses you with the material greatness which found
+      expression in it, and never raises a regret that it has utterly passed
+      away. You wander around through the aisles of trim-cut lime-trees, bullied
+      and overborne by the insolent statues, and expect at every turn to come
+      upon intriguing spectres in bag-wigs, immense hoops and patches. How can
+      you feel sympathy for those dull and wicked ghosts of eighteenth-century
+      corruption? There is rottenness enough in the world without digging up old
+      putridity and sentimentalizing on it; and I doubt if you will care to know
+      much of the way in which the noble owner of such a villa ascended the
+      Brenta at the season of the <i>villeggiatura</i> in his great gilded
+      barge, all carven outside with the dumpling loves and loose nymphs of the
+      period, with fruits, and flowers, and what not; and within, luxuriously
+      cushioned and furnished, and stocked with good things for pleasure making
+      in the gross old fashion. [Footnote: Mutinelli, <i>Gli Ultimi Cinquant&rsquo;
+      Anni della Repubblica di Veneza</i>.] King Cole was not a merrier old soul
+      than Illustrissimo of that day; he outspent princes; and his agent, while
+      he harried the tenants to supply his master&rsquo;s demands, plundered
+      Illustrissimo frightfully. Illustrissimo never looked at accounts. He said
+      to his steward, &ldquo;<i>Caro veccio, fè vu. Mi remeto a quel che fè vu.</i>&rdquo;
+       (Old fellow, you attend to it. I shall be satisfied with what you do.) So
+      the poor agent had no other course but to swindle him, which he did; and
+      Illustrissimo, when he died, died poor, and left his lordly debts and
+      vices to his sons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Venice, the noble still lives sometimes in his ancestral palace, dimly
+      occupying the halls where his forefathers flourished in so much splendor.
+      I can conceive, indeed, of no state of things more flattering to human
+      pride than that which surrounded the patrician of the old aristocratic
+      Republic. The house in which he dwelt was the palace of a king, in luxury
+      of appointment and magnificence of size. Troops of servants that
+      ministered to his state peopled its vast extent; and the gondolas that
+      carried his grandeur abroad were moored in little fleets to the piles that
+      rose before his palace, painted with the family arms and colors. The
+      palace itself stood usually on the Grand Canal, and rose sheer from the
+      water, giving the noble that haughty inaccessibility which the lord of the
+      main-land achieved only by building lofty walls and multiplying gates. The
+      architecture was as costly in its ornament as wild Gothic fancy, or
+      Renaissance luxury of bad taste, could make it; and when the palace front
+      was not of sculptured marble, the painter&rsquo;s pencil filled it with the
+      delight of color. The main-land noble&rsquo;s house was half a fortress, and
+      formed his stronghold in times of popular tumult or family fray; but at
+      Venice the strong arm of St. Mark suppressed all turbulence in a city
+      secure from foreign war; and the peaceful arts rejoiced in undisturbed
+      possession of the palaces, which rose in the most delicate and fantastic
+      beauty, and mirrored in the brine a dream of sea-deep strangeness and
+      richness. You see much of the beauty yet, but the pride and opulence which
+      called it into being are gone forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most palaces, whether of the Gothic or classicistic period, have the same
+      internal arrangement of halls and chambers, and are commonly built of two
+      lofty and two low stories. On the ground floor, or water level, is a hall
+      running back from the gate to a bit of garden at the other side of the
+      palace; and on either side of this hall, which in old times was hung with
+      the family trophies of the chase and war, are the porter&rsquo;s lodge and
+      gondoliers&rsquo; rooms. On the first and second stories are the family
+      apartments, opening on either side from great halls, of the same extent as
+      that below, but with loftier roofs, of heavy rafters gilded or painted.
+      The fourth floor is of the same arrangement, but has a lower roof, and was
+      devoted to the better class of servants. Of the two stories used by the
+      family, the third is the loftier and airier, and was occupied in summer;
+      the second was the winter apartment. On either hand the rooms open in
+      suites.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0456}.jpg" alt="{0456}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0456}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      We have seen something of the ceremonies, public and private, which gave
+      peculiar gayety and brilliance to the life of the Venetians of former
+      days; but in his political character the noble had yet greater
+      consequence. He was part of the proudest, strongest, and securest system
+      of his time. He was a king with the fellowship of kings, flattered with
+      the equality of an aristocracy which was master of itself, and of its
+      nominal head. During the earlier times it was his office to go daily to
+      Rialto and instruct the people in their political rights and duties for
+      four hours; and even when the duties became every thing and the rights
+      nothing (after the Serrar del Consiglio), the friendly habit of daily
+      intercourse between patricians and citizens was still kept up at the same
+      place. Once each week, and on every holiday, the noble took his seat in
+      the Grand Council (the most august assembly in the world, without doubt),
+      or the Ten, or the Three, according to his office in the State,&mdash;holding
+      his place in the Council by right of birth, and in the other bodies by
+      election of his peers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although the patricians were kept as one family apart from the people, and
+      jealously guarded in their aristocratic purity by the State, they were
+      only equals of the poorest before the laws of their own creation, and
+      their condescension to the people was frequent and great. Indeed, the
+      Venetians of all classes are social creatures, loving talk and gossip, and
+      these constant habits of intercourse must have done much to produce that
+      equality of manner now observable in them. Their amusements were for a
+      long time the same, the nobles taking part in the public holidays, and in
+      the popular exercises of rowing and swimming. In the earlier times,
+      hunting in the lagoons was a favorite diversion; but as the decay of the
+      Republic advanced, and the patrician blossomed into the fine gentleman of
+      the last century, these hearty sports were relinquished, and every thing
+      was voted vulgar but masking in carnival, dancing and gaming at Ridotto,
+      and intriguing everywhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The accounts which Venetian writers give of Republican society in the
+      eighteenth century form a <i>chronique scandaleuse</i> which need not be
+      minutely copied here. Much may be learned of Venetian manners of this time
+      from the comedies of Goldoni; and the faithlessness of society may be
+      argued from the fact that in these plays, which contain nothing salacious
+      or indecent, there is scarcely a character of any rank who scruples to
+      tell lies; and the truth is not to be found in works intended to school
+      the public to virtue. The ingenious old playwright&rsquo;s memoirs are full of
+      gossip concerning that poor old Venice, which is now no more; and the
+      worthy autobiographer, Casanova, also gives much information about things
+      that had best not be known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the Republic drew near its fall, in 1797, there was little left in its
+      dominant class worth saving, if we may believe the testimony of Venetians
+      which Mutinelli brings to bear upon the point in his &ldquo;Annali Urbani,&rdquo; and
+      his &ldquo;History of the Last Fifty Years of the Republic.&rdquo; Long prosperity and
+      prodigious opulence had done their worst, and the patricians, and the
+      lowest orders of the people, their creatures and dependants, were
+      thoroughly corrupt; while the men of professions began to assume that
+      station which they now hold. The days of a fashionable patrician of those
+      times began at a little before sunset, and ended with the following dawn.
+      Rising from his bed, he dressed himself in dainty linen, and placed
+      himself in the hands of the hairdresser to be combed, oiled, perfumed, and
+      powdered; and then sallied forth for a stroll through the Merceria, where
+      this excellent husband and father made tasteful purchases to be carried to
+      the lady he served. At dinner, which he took about seven or eight, his
+      board was covered with the most tempting viands, and surrounded by needy
+      parasites, who detailed the spicy scandals of the day in payment of their
+      dinner, while the children of the host were confided to the care of the
+      corrupt and negligent servants. After dinner, the father went to the
+      theatre, or to the <i>casino</i>, and spent the night over cards and wine,
+      in the society of dissolute women; and renewed on the morrow the routine
+      of his useful existence. The education of the children of the man of
+      fashion was confided to a priest, who lived in his family, and called
+      himself an abbate, after the mode of the <i>abbés</i> of French society;
+      he had winning manners with the ladies, indulgent habits with his pupils,
+      and dressed his elegant person in silks of Lyons and English broadcloths.
+      In the pleasant old days he flitted from palace to villa, dining and
+      supping, and flattering the ladies, and tapping the lid of his jeweled
+      snuffbox in all fashionable companies. He was the cadet of a patrician
+      family (when not the ambitious son of a low family), with a polite taste
+      for idleness and intrigue, for whom no secular sinecure could be found in
+      the State, and who obliged the Church by accepting orders. Whether in the
+      palace on the Grand Canal, or the villa on the Brenta, this gentle and
+      engaging priest was surely the most agreeable person to be met, and the
+      most dangerous to ladies&rsquo; hearts,&mdash;with his rich suit of black, and
+      his smug, clean-shaven face, and his jeweled hands, and his sweet,
+      seducing manners. Alas! the world is changed! The priests whom you see
+      playing <i>tre-sette</i> now at the conversazioni are altogether different
+      men, and the delightful abbate is as much out of fashion as the bag-wig or
+      the queue. When in fashion he loved the theatre, and often showed himself
+      there at the side of his noble patron&rsquo;s wife. Nay, in that time the
+      theatre was so prized by the Church that a popular preacher thought it
+      becoming to declare from his pulpit that to compose well his hearers
+      should study the comedies of Goldoni,&mdash;and his hearers were the
+      posterity of that devout old aristocracy which never undertook a journey
+      without first receiving the holy sacrament; which had built the churches
+      and endowed them from private wealth!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ignorance, as well as vice, was the mode in those elegant days, and it is
+      related that a charming lady of good society once addressed a foreign <i>savant</i>
+      at her conversazione, and begged him to favor the company with a little
+      music, because, having heard that he was <i>virtuous</i>, she had no other
+      association with the word than its technical use in Italy to indicate a
+      professional singer as a <i>virtuoso</i>. A father of a family who kept no
+      abbate for the education of his children ingeniously taught them himself.
+      &ldquo;Father,&rdquo; asked one of his children, &ldquo;what are the stars?&rdquo; &ldquo;The stars are
+      stars, and little things that shine as thou seest.&rdquo; &ldquo;Then they are
+      candles, perhaps?&rdquo; &ldquo;Make thy account that they are candles exactly.&rdquo; &ldquo;Of
+      wax or tallow?&rdquo; pursues the boy. &ldquo;What! tallow-candles in heaven? No,
+      certainly&mdash;wax, wax!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These, and many other scandalous stories, the Venetian writers recount of
+      the last days of their Republic, and the picture they produce is one of
+      the most shameless ignorance, the most polite corruption, the most
+      unblushing baseness. I have no doubt that the picture is full of national
+      exaggeration. Indeed, the method of Mutinelli (who I believe intends to
+      tell the truth) in writing social history is altogether too credulous and
+      incautious. It is well enough to study contemporary comedy for light upon
+      past society, but satirical ballads and lampoons, and scurrilous letters,
+      cannot be accepted as historical authority. Still there is no question but
+      Venice was very corrupt. As you read of her people in the last century,
+      one by one the ideas of family faith and domestic purity fade away; one by
+      one the beliefs in public virtue are dissipated; until at last you are
+      glad to fly the study, close the filthy pages, and take refuge in doubt of
+      the writers, who declare that they must needs disgrace Venice with facts
+      since her children have dishonored her in their lives. &ldquo;Such as we see
+      them,&rdquo; they say, &ldquo;were the patricians, such the people of Venice, after
+      the middle of the eighteenth century. The Venetians might be considered as
+      extinguished; the marvelous city, the pomp only of the Venetians,
+      existed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Shall we believe this? Let each choose for himself. At that very time the
+      taste and wealth of a Venetian noble fostered the genius of Canova and
+      then, when their captains starved the ragged soldiers of the Republic to
+      feed their own idleness and vice,&mdash;when the soldiers dismantled her
+      forts to sell the guns to the Turk,&mdash;when her sailors rioted on shore
+      and her ships rotted in her ports, she had still military virtue enough to
+      produce that Emo, who beat back the Algerine corsairs from the commerce of
+      Christendom, and attacked them in their stronghold, as of old her galleys
+      beat back the Turks. Alas! there was not the virtue in her statesmen to
+      respond to this greatness in the hero. One of their last public acts was
+      to break his heart with insult, and to crave peace of the pirates whom he
+      had cowed. It remained for the helpless Doge and the abject patricians,
+      terrified at a threat of war, to declare the Republic at an end, and San
+      Marco was no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I love Republics too well to lament the fall of Venice. And yet, <i>Pax
+      tibi, Marce!</i> If I have been slow to praise, I shall not hasten to
+      condemn, a whole nation. Indeed, so much occurs to me to qualify with
+      contrary sense what I have written concerning Venice, that I wonder if,
+      after all, I have not been treating throughout less of the rule than of
+      the exception. It is a doubt which must force itself upon every fair and
+      temperate man who attempts to describe another people&rsquo;s life and
+      character; and I confess that it troubles me so sorely now, at the end of
+      my work, that I would fain pray the gentle reader to believe much more
+      good and much less evil of the Venetians than I have said. I am glad that
+      it remains for me to express a faith and hope in them for the future,
+      founded upon their present political feeling, which, however tainted with
+      self-interest in the case of many, is no doubt with the great majority a
+      high and true feeling of patriotism. And it is impossible to believe that
+      a people which can maintain the stern and unyielding attitude now
+      maintained by the Venetians toward an alien government disposed to make
+      them any concession short of freedom, in order to win them into voluntary
+      submission, can be wanting in the great qualities which distinguish living
+      peoples from those passed hopelessly into history and sentiment. In truth,
+      glancing back over the whole career of the nation, I can discern in it
+      nothing so admirable, so dignified, so steadfastly brave, as its present
+      sacrifice of all that makes life easy and joyous, to the attainment of a
+      good which shall make life noble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Venetians desire now, and first of all things, Liberty, knowing that
+      in slavery men can learn no virtues; and I think them fit, with all their
+      errors and defects, to be free now, because men are never fit to be
+      slaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      OUR LAST YEAR IN VENICE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>(As it seems Seven Years after.)</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last of four years which it was our fortune to live in the city of
+      Venice was passed under the roof of one of her most beautiful and
+      memorable palaces, namely, the Palazzo Giustiniani, whither we went, as
+      has been told in an earlier chapter of this book, to escape the
+      encroaching nepotism of Giovanna, the flower of serving-women. The
+      experience now, in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to consort with ordinary
+      remembrances, and has such a fantastic preference for the company of
+      rather vivid and circumstantial dreams, that it is with no very strong
+      hope of making it seem real that I shall venture to speak of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Giustiniani were a family of patricians very famous during the times
+      of a Republic that gave so many splendid names to history, and the race
+      was preserved to the honor and service of Saint Mark by one of the most
+      romantic facts of his annals. During a war with the Greek Emperor in the
+      twelfth century every known Giustiniani was slain, and the heroic strain
+      seemed lost forever. But the state that mourned them bethought itself of a
+      half forgotten monk of their house, who was wasting his life in the
+      Convent of San Nicolò; he was drawn forth from this seclusion, and, the
+      permission of Rome being won, he was married to the daughter of the
+      reigning doge. From them descended the Giustiniani of aftertimes, who
+      still exist; in deed, in the year 1865 there came one day a gentleman of
+      the family, and tried to buy from our landlord that part of the palace
+      which we so humbly and insufficiently inhabited. It is said that as the
+      unfrocked friar and his wife declined in life they separated, and, as if
+      in doubt of what had been done for the state through them, retired each
+      into a convent, Giustiniani going back to San Nicolò, and dying at last to
+      the murmur of the Adriatic waves along the Lido&rsquo;s sands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next after this Giustiniani I like best to think of that latest hero of
+      the family, who had the sad fortune to live when the ancient Republic fell
+      at a threat of Napoleon, and who alone among her nobles had the courage to
+      meet with a manly spirit the insolent menaces of the conqueror. The
+      Giustiniani governed Treviso for the Senate; he refused, when Napoleon
+      ordered him from his presence, to quit Treviso without the command of the
+      Senate; he flung back the taunts of bad faith cast upon the Venetians; and
+      when Napoleon changed his tone from that of disdain to one of compliment,
+      and promised that in the general disaster he was preparing for Venice,
+      Giustiniani should be spared, the latter generously replied that he had
+      been a friend of the French only because the Senate was so; as to the
+      immunity offered, all was lost to him in the loss of his country, and he
+      should blush for his wealth if it remained intact amidst the ruin of his
+      countrymen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The family grew in riches and renown from age to age, and, some four
+      centuries after the marriage of the monk, they reared the three beautiful
+      Gothic palaces, in the noblest site on the Grand Canal, whence on one hand
+      you can look down to the Rialto Bridge, and on the other far up towards
+      the church of the Salute, and the Basin of Saint Mark. The architects were
+      those Buoni, father and son, who did some of the most beautiful work on
+      the Ducal Palace, and who wrought in an equal inspiration upon these homes
+      of the Giustiniani, building the delicate Gothic arches of the windows,
+      with their slender columns and their graceful balconies, and crowning all
+      with the airy battlements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The largest of the three palaces became later the property of the Foscari
+      family, and here dwelt with his father that unhappy Jacopo Foscari, who
+      after thrice suffering torture by the state for a murder he never did, at
+      last died in exile; hither came the old Doge Foscari, who had consented to
+      this cruel error of the state, and who after a life spent in its service
+      was deposed and disgraced before his death; and whither when he lay dead,
+      came remorseful Venice, and claimed for sumptuous obsequies the dust which
+      his widow yielded with bitter reproaches. Here the family faded away
+      generation by generation, till, (according to the tale told us) early in
+      this century, when the ultimate male survivor of the line had died, under
+      a false name, in London, where he had been some sort of obscure actor,
+      there were but two old maiden sisters left, who, lapsing into imbecility,
+      were shown to strangers by the rascal servants as the last of the Foscari;
+      and here in our time was quartered a regiment of Austrian troops, whose
+      neatly pipe-clayed belts decorated the balconies on which the princely
+      ladies of the house had rested their jewelled arms in other days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Foscari added a story to the palace to distinguish it from the two
+      other palaces Giustiniani, but these remain to the present day as they
+      were originally planned. That in which we lived was called Palazzo
+      Giustiniani of the Bishops, because one of the family was the first
+      patriarch of Venice. After his death he was made a saint by the Pope; and
+      it is related that he was not only a very pious, but a very good man. In
+      his last hours he admitted his beloved people to his chamber, where he
+      meekly lay upon a pallet of straw, and at the moment he expired, two monks
+      in the solitude of their cloister, heard an angelical harmony in the air:
+      the clergy performed his obsequies not in black, funereal robes, but in
+      white garments, and crowned with laurel, and bearing gilded torches, and
+      although the patriarch had died of a malignant fever, his body was
+      miraculously preserved incorrupt during the sixty-five days that the
+      obsequies lasted. The other branch of the family was called the
+      Giustiniani of the Jewels, from the splendor of their dress; but neither
+      palace now shelters any of their magnificent race. The edifice on our
+      right was exclusively occupied by a noble Viennese lady, who as we heard,&mdash;vaguely,
+      in the right Venetian fashion,&mdash;had been a ballet-dancer in her
+      youth, and who now in her matronly days dwelt apart from her husband, the
+      Russian count, and had gondoliers in blue silk, and the finest gondola on
+      the Grand Canal, but was a plump, florid lady, looking long past beauty,
+      even as we saw her from our balcony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our own palace&mdash;as we absurdly grew to call it&mdash;was owned and
+      inhabited in a manner much more proper to modern Venice, the
+      proprietorship being about equally divided between our own landlord and a
+      very well known Venetian painter, son of a painter still more famous. This
+      artist was a very courteous old gentleman, who went with Italian and
+      clock-like regularity every evening in summer to a certain caffè, where he
+      seemed to make it a point of conscience to sip one sherbet, and to read
+      the &ldquo;Journal des Débats.&rdquo; In his coming and going we met him so often that
+      we became friends, and he asked us many times to visit him, and see his
+      father&rsquo;s pictures, and some famous frescos with which his part of the
+      palace was adorned. It was a characteristic trait of our life, that though
+      we constantly meant to avail ourselves of this kindness, we never did so.
+      But we continued in the enjoyment of the beautiful garden, which this
+      gentleman owned at the rear of the palace and on which our chamber windows
+      looked. It was full of oleanders and roses, and other bright and odorous
+      blooms, which we could enjoy perfectly well without knowing their names;
+      and I could hardly say whether the garden was more charming when it was in
+      its summer glory, or when, on some rare winter day, a breath from the
+      mountains had clothed its tender boughs and sprays with a light and
+      evanescent flowering of snow. At any season the lofty palace walls rose
+      over it, and shut it in a pensive seclusion which was loved by the old
+      mother of the painter and by his elderly maiden sister. These often walked
+      on its moss-grown paths, silent as the roses and oleanders to which one
+      could have fancied the blossom of their youth had flown; and sometimes
+      there came to them there, grave, black-gowned priests,&mdash;for the
+      painter&rsquo;s was a devout family,&mdash;and talked with them in tones almost
+      as tranquil as the silence was, save when one of the ecclesiastics
+      placidly took snuff,&mdash;it is a dogma of the Church for priests to take
+      snuff in Italy,&mdash;and thereafter, upon a prolonged search for his
+      handkerchief, blew a resounding nose. So far as we knew, the garden walls
+      circumscribed the whole life of these ladies; and I am afraid that such
+      topics of this world as they touched upon with their priests must have
+      been deplorably small.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0472}.jpg" alt="{0472}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0472}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Their kinsman owned part of the story under us, and both of the stories
+      above us; he had the advantage of the garden over our landlord; but he had
+      not so grand a gondola-gate as we, and in some other respects I incline to
+      think that our part of the edifice was the finer. It is certain that no
+      mention is made of any such beautiful hall in the property of the painter
+      as is noted in that of our landlord, by the historian of a &ldquo;Hundred
+      Palaces of Venice,&rdquo;&mdash;a work for which I subscribed, and then for my
+      merit was honored by a visit from the author, who read aloud to me in a
+      deep and sonorous voice the annals of our temporary home. This hall
+      occupied half the space of the whole floor; but it was altogether
+      surrounded by rooms of various shapes and sizes, except upon one side of
+      its length, where it gave through Gothic windows of vari-colored glass,
+      upon a small court below,&mdash;a green-mouldy little court, further
+      dampened by a cistern, which had the usual curb of a single carven block
+      of marble. The roof of this stately <i>sala</i> was traversed by a long
+      series of painted rafters, which in the halls of nearly all Venetian
+      palaces are left exposed, and painted or carved and gilded. A suite of
+      stately rooms closed the hall from the Grand Canal, and one of these
+      formed our parlor; on the side opposite the Gothic windows was a vast
+      aristocratic kitchen, which, with its rows of shining coppers, its great
+      chimney-place well advanced toward the middle of the floor, and its tall
+      gloomy windows, still affects my imagination as one of the most patrician
+      rooms which I ever saw; at the back of the hall were those chambers of
+      ours overlooking the garden of which I have already spoken, and another
+      kitchen, less noble than the first, but still sufficiently grandiose to
+      make most New World kitchens seem very meekly minute and unimpressive.
+      Between the two kitchens was another court, with another cistern, from
+      which the painter&rsquo;s family drew water with a bucket on a long rope, which,
+      when let down from the fourth story, appeared to be dropped from the
+      clouds, and descended with a noise little less alarming than thunder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altogether the most surprising object in the great <i>sala</i> was a
+      sewing-machine, and we should have been inconsolably outraged by its
+      presence there, amid so much that was merely venerable and beautiful, but
+      for the fact that it was in a state of harmonious and hopeless disrepair,
+      and, from its general contrivance, gave us the idea that it had never been
+      of any use. It was, in fact, kept as a sort of curiosity by the landlord,
+      who exhibited it to the admiration of his Venetian friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader will doubtless have imagined, from what I have been saying,
+      that the Palazzo Giustiniani had not all that machinery which we know in
+      our houses here as modern improvements. It had nothing of the kind, and
+      life there was, as in most houses in Italy, a kind of permanent camping
+      out. When I remember the small amount of carpeting, of furniture, and of
+      upholstery we enjoyed, it appears to me pathetic; and yet, I am not sure
+      that it was not the wisest way to live. I know that we had compensation in
+      things not purchasable here for money. If the furniture of the principal
+      bedroom was somewhat scanty, its dimensions were unstinted the ceiling was
+      fifteen feet high, and was divided into rich and heavy panels, adorned
+      each with a mighty rosette of carved and gilded wood, two feet across. The
+      parlor had not its original decorations in our time, but it had once had
+      so noble a carved ceiling that it was found worth while to take it down
+      and sell it into England; and it still had two grand Venetian mirrors, a
+      vast and very good painting of a miracle of St. Anthony, and
+      imitation-antique tables and arm-chairs. The last were frolicked all over
+      with carven nymphs and cupids; but they were of such frail construction
+      that they were not meant to be sat in, much less to be removed from the
+      wall against which they stood; and more than one of our American visitors
+      was dismayed at having these proud articles of furniture go to pieces upon
+      his attempt to use them like mere arm-chairs of ordinary life. Scarcely
+      less impressive or useless than these was a monumental plaster-stove,
+      surmounted by a bust of Æsculapius; when this was broken by accident, we
+      cheaply repaired the loss with a bust of Homer (the dealer in the next
+      campo being out of Æsculapiuses) which no one could have told from the
+      bust it replaced; and this and the other artistic glories of the room made
+      us quite forget all possible blemishes and defects. And will the reader
+      mention any house with modern improvements in America which has also
+      windows, with pointed arches of marble, opening upon balconies that
+      overhang the Grand Canal?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For our new apartment, which consisted of six rooms, furnished with every
+      article necessary for Venetian housekeeping, we paid one dollar a day
+      which, in the innocence of our hearts we thought rather dear, though we
+      were somewhat consoled by reflecting that this extravagant outlay secured
+      us the finest position on the Grand Canal. We did not mean to keep house
+      as we had in Casa Falier, and perhaps a sketch of our easier <i>ménage</i>
+      may not be out of place. Breakfast was prepared in the house, for in that
+      blessed climate all you care for in the morning is a cup of coffee, with a
+      little bread and butter, a musk-melon, and some clusters of white grapes,
+      more or less. Then we had our dinners sent in warm from a cook&rsquo;s who had
+      learned his noble art in France; he furnished a dinner of five courses for
+      three persons at a cost of about eighty cents; and they were dinners so
+      happily conceived and so justly executed, that I cannot accuse myself of
+      an excess of sentiment when I confess that I sigh for them to this day.
+      Then as for our immaterial tea, we always took that at the Caffè Florian
+      in the Piazza of Saint Mark, where we drank a cup of black coffee and ate
+      an ice, while all the world promenaded by, and the Austrian bands made
+      heavenly music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those bands no longer play in Venice, and I believe that they are not the
+      only charm which she has lost in exchanging Austrian servitude for Italian
+      freedom; though I should be sorry to think that freedom was not worth all
+      other charms. The poor Venetians used to be very rigorous (as I have
+      elsewhere related), about the music of their oppressors, and would not
+      come into the Piazza until it had ceased and the Austrian promenaders had
+      disappeared, when they sat down at Florian&rsquo;s, and listened to such bands
+      of strolling singers and minstrels as chose to give them a concord of
+      sweet sounds, without foreign admixture. We, in our neutrality, were wont
+      to sit out both entertainments, and then go home well toward midnight,
+      through the sleepy little streets, and over the bridges that spanned the
+      narrow canals, dreaming in the shadows of the palaces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We moved with half-conscious steps till we came to the silver expanse of
+      the Grand Canal, where, at the ferry, darkled a little brood of black
+      gondolas, into one of which we got, and were rowed noiselessly to the
+      thither side, where we took our way toward the land-gate of our palace
+      through the narrow streets of the parish of San Barnabà, and the campo
+      before the ugly façade of the church; or else we were rowed directly to
+      the water-gate, where we got out on the steps worn by the feet of the
+      Giustiniani of old, and wandered upward through the darkness of the
+      stairway, which gave them a far different welcome of servants and lights
+      when they returned from an evening&rsquo;s pleasure in the Piazza. It seemed
+      scarcely just; but then, those Giustiniani were dead, and we were alive,
+      and that was one advantage; and, besides, the loneliness and desolation of
+      the palace had a peculiar charm, and were at any rate cheaper than its
+      former splendor could have been. I am afraid that people who live abroad
+      in the palaces of extinct nobles do not keep this important fact
+      sufficiently in mind; and as the Palazzo Giustiniani is still let in
+      furnished lodgings, and it is quite possible that some of my readers may
+      be going to spend next summer in it, I venture to remind them that if they
+      have to draw somewhat upon their fancy for patrician accommodations there,
+      it will cost them far less in money than it did the original proprietors,
+      who contributed to our selfish pleasure by the very thought of their
+      romantic absence and picturesque decay. In fact, the Past is everywhere
+      like the cake of proverb: you cannot enjoy it and have it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And here I am reminded of another pleasure of modern dwellers in Venetian
+      palaces, which could hardly have been indulged by the patricians of old,
+      and which is hardly imaginable by people of this day, whose front doors
+      open upon dry land: I mean to say the privilege of sea-bathing from one&rsquo;s
+      own threshold. From the beginning of June till far into September all the
+      canals of Venice are populated by the amphibious boys, who clamor about in
+      the brine, or poise themselves for a leap from the tops of bridges, or
+      show their fine, statuesque figures, bronzed by the ardent sun, against
+      the façades of empty palaces, where they hover among the marble
+      sculptures, and meditate a headlong plunge. It is only the Venetian
+      ladies, in fact, who do not share this healthful amusement. Fathers of
+      families, like so many plump, domestic drakes, lead forth their aquatic
+      broods, teaching the little ones to swim by the aid of various floats, and
+      delighting in the gambols of the larger ducklings. When the tide comes in
+      fresh and strong from the sea the water in the Grand Canal is pure and
+      refreshing; and at these times it is a singular pleasure to leap from
+      one&rsquo;s door-step into the swift current, and spend a half-hour, very
+      informally, among one&rsquo;s neighbors there. The Venetian bathing-dress is a
+      mere sketch of the pantaloons of ordinary life; and when I used to stand
+      upon our balcony, and see some bearded head ducking me a polite salutation
+      from a pair of broad, brown shoulders that showed above the water, I was
+      not always able to recognize my acquaintance, deprived of his factitious
+      identity of clothes. But I always knew a certain stately consul-general by
+      a vast expanse of baldness upon the top of his head; and it must be owned,
+      I think, that this form of social assembly was, with all its
+      disadvantages, a novel and vivacious spectacle. The Venetian ladies, when
+      they bathed, went to the Lido, or else to the bath-houses in front of the
+      Ducal Palace, where they saturated themselves a good part of the day, and
+      drank coffee, and, possibly, gossiped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think that our balconies at Palazzo Giustiniani were even better places
+      to see the life of the Grand Canal from than the balcony of Casa Falier,
+      which we had just left. Here at least we had a greater stretch of the
+      Canal, looking, as we could, up either side of its angle. Here, too, we
+      had more gondola stations in sight, and as we were nearer the Rialto,
+      there was more picturesque passing of the market-boats. But if we saw more
+      of this life, we did not see it in greater variety, for I think we had
+      already exhausted this. There was a movement all night long. If I woke at
+      three or four o&rsquo;clock, and offered myself the novel spectacle of the Canal
+      at that hour, I saw the heavy-laden barges go by to the Rialto, with now
+      and then also a good-sized coasting schooner making lazily for the
+      lagoons, with its ruddy fire already kindled for cooking the morning&rsquo;s
+      meal, and looking very enviably cosey. After our own breakfast we began to
+      watch for the gondolas of the tourists of different nations, whom we came
+      to distinguish at a glance. Then the boats of the various artisans went
+      by, the carpenter&rsquo;s, the mason&rsquo;s, the plasterer&rsquo;s, with those that sold
+      fuel, and vegetables, and fruit, and fish, to any household that arrested
+      them. From noon till three or four o&rsquo;clock the Canal was comparatively
+      deserted; but before twilight it was thronged again by people riding out
+      in their open gondolas to take the air after the day&rsquo;s fervor. After
+      nightfall they ceased, till only at long intervals a solitary lamp,
+      stealing over the dark surface, gave token of the movement of some gondola
+      bent upon an errand that could not fail to seem mysterious or fail to be
+      matter of fact. We never wearied of this oft-repeated variety, nor of our
+      balcony in any way; and when the moon shone in through the lovely arched
+      window and sketched its exquisite outline on the floor, we were as happy
+      as moonshine could make us.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0484}.jpg" alt="{0484}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0484}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      Were we otherwise content? As concerns Venice, it is very hard to say, and
+      I do not know that I shall ever be able to say with certainty. For all the
+      entertainment it afforded us, it was a very lonely life, and we felt the
+      sadness of the city in many fine and not instantly recognizable ways.
+      Englishmen who lived there bade us beware of spending the whole year in
+      Venice, which they declared apt to result in a morbid depression of the
+      spirits. I believe they attributed this to the air of the place, but I
+      think it was more than half owing to her mood, to her old, ghostly,
+      aimless life. She was, indeed, a phantom of the past, haunting our modern
+      world,&mdash;serene, inexpressibly beautiful, yet inscrutably and
+      unspeakably sad. Remembering the charm that was in her, we often sigh for
+      the renewal of our own vague life there,&mdash;a shadow within the shadow;
+      but remembering also her deep melancholy, an involuntary shiver creeps
+      over us, and we are glad not to be there. Perhaps some of you who have
+      spent a summer day or a summer week in Venice do not recognize this
+      feeling; but if you will remain there, not four years as we did, but a
+      year or six months even, it will ever afterwards be only too plain. All
+      changes, all events, were affected by the inevitable local melancholy; the
+      day was as pensive amidst that populous silence as the night; the winter
+      not more pathetic than the long, tranquil, lovely summer. We rarely
+      sentimentalized consciously, and still more seldom openly, about the
+      present state of Venice as contrasted with her past glory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am glad to say that we despised the conventional poetastery about her;
+      but I believe that we had so far lived into sympathy with her, that,
+      whether we realized it or not, we took the tone of her dispiritedness, and
+      assumed a part of the common experience of loss and of hopelessness.
+      History, if you live where it was created, is a far subtler influence than
+      you suspect; and I would not say how much Venetian history, amidst the
+      monuments of her glory and the witnesses of her fall, had to do in secret
+      and tacit ways with the prevailing sentiment of existence, which I now
+      distinctly recognize to have been a melancholy one. No doubt this
+      sentiment was deepened by every freshly added association with memorable
+      places; and each fact, each great name and career, each strange tradition
+      as it rose out of the past for us and shed its pale lustre upon the
+      present, touched us with a pathos which we could neither trace nor
+      analyze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know how much the modern Venetians had to do with this
+      impression, but something I have no question. They were then under
+      Austrian rule; and in spite of much that was puerile and theatrical in it,
+      there was something very affecting in their attitude of what may best be
+      described as passive defiance. This alone made them heroic, but it also
+      made them tedious. They rarely talked of anything but politics; and as I
+      have elsewhere said, they were very jealous to have every one declare
+      himself of their opinion. Hemmed in by this jealousy on one side, and by a
+      heavy and rebellious sense of the wrongful presence of the Austrian troops
+      and the Austrian spies on the other, we forever felt dimly constrained by
+      something, we could not say precisely what, and we only knew what, when we
+      went sometimes on a journey into free Italy, and threw off the irksome
+      caution we had maintained both as to patriotic and alien tyrants. This
+      political misery circumscribed our acquaintance very much, and reduced the
+      circle of our friendship to three or four families, who were content to
+      know our sympathies without exacting constant expression of them. So we
+      learned to depend mainly upon passing Americans for our society; we hailed
+      with rapture the arrival of a gondola distinguished by the easy hats of
+      our countrymen and the pretty faces and pretty dresses of our
+      countrywomen. It was in the days of our war; and talking together over its
+      events, we felt a brotherhood with every other American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, in these circumstances, we made thorough acquaintance with the
+      people about us in the palace. The landlord had come somehow into a
+      profitable knowledge of Anglo-Saxon foibles and susceptibilities; but his
+      lodgings were charming, and I recognize the principle that it is not for
+      literature to make its prey of any possibly conscious object. For this
+      reason, I am likewise mostly silent concerning a certain <i>attaché</i> of
+      the palace, the right-hand man and intimate associate of the landlord. He
+      was the descendant of one of the most ancient and noble families of Italy,&mdash;a
+      family of popes and cardinals, of princes and ministers, which in him was
+      diminished and tarnished in an almost inexplicable degree. He was not at
+      all worldly-wise, but he was a man of great learning, and of a capacity
+      for acquiring knowledge that I have never seen surpassed. He possessed, I
+      think, not many shirts on earth; but he spoke three or four languages, and
+      wrote very pretty sonnets in Italian and German. He was one of the
+      friendliest and willingest souls living, and as generous as utter
+      destitution can make a man; yet he had a proper spirit, and valued himself
+      upon his name. Sometimes he brought his great-grandfather to the palace; a
+      brisk old gentleman in his nineties, who had seen the fall of the Republic
+      and three other revolutions in Venice, but had contrived to keep a
+      government pension through all, and now smiled with unabated cheerfulness
+      upon a world which he seemed likely never to leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The palace-servants were two, the gondolier and a sort of housekeeper,&mdash;a
+      handsome, swarthy woman, with beautiful white teeth and liquid black eyes.
+      She was the mother of a pretty little boy, who was going to bring himself
+      up for a priest, and whose chief amusement was saying mimic masses to an
+      imaginary congregation. She was perfectly statuesque and obliging, and we
+      had no right, as lovers of the beautiful or as lodgers, to complain of
+      her, whatever her faults might have been. As to the gondolier, who was a
+      very important personage in our palatial household, he was a handsome
+      bashful, well-mannered fellow, with a good-natured blue eye and a neatly
+      waxed mustache. He had been ten years a soldier in the Austrian army, and
+      was, from his own account and from all I saw of him, one of the least
+      courageous men in the world; but then no part of the Austrian system tends
+      to make men brave, and I could easily imagine that before it had done with
+      one it might give him reasons enough to be timid all the rest of his life.
+      Piero had not very much to do, and he spent the greater part of his
+      leisure in a sort of lazy flirtation with the women about the
+      kitchen-fire, or in the gondola, in which he sometimes gave them the air.
+      We always liked him; I should have trusted him in any sort of way, except
+      one that involved danger. It once happened that burglars attempted to
+      enter our rooms, and Piero declared to us that he knew the men; but before
+      the police, he swore that he knew nothing about them. Afterwards he
+      returned privately to his first assertion, and accounted for his conduct
+      by saying that if he had borne witness against the burglars, he was afraid
+      that their friends would jump on his back (<i>saltarmi adosso</i>), as he
+      phrased it, in the dark; for by this sort of terrorism the poor and the
+      wicked have long been bound together in Italy. Piero was a humorist in his
+      dry way, and made a jest of his own caution; but his favorite joke was,
+      when he dressed himself with particular care, to tell the women that he
+      was going to pay a visit to the Princess Clary, then the star of Austrian
+      society. This mild pleasantry was repeated indefinitely with never-failing
+      effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More interesting to us than all the rest was our own servant, Bettina, who
+      came to us from a village on the mainland. She was very dark, so dark and
+      so Southern in appearance as almost to verge upon the negro type; yet she
+      bore the English-sounding name of Scarbro, and how she ever came by it
+      remains a puzzle to this day, for she was one of the most pure and entire
+      of Italians. I mean this was her maiden name; she was married to a
+      trumpeter in the Austrian service, whose Bohemian name she was unable to
+      pronounce, and consequently never gave us. She was a woman of very few
+      ideas indeed, but perfectly honest and good-hearted. She was pious, in her
+      peasant fashion, and in her walks about the city did not fail to bless the
+      baby before every picture of the Madonna. She provided it with an engraved
+      portrait of that Holy Nail which was venerated in the neighboring church
+      of San Pantaleon; and she apparently aimed to supply it with playthings of
+      a religious and saving character like that piece of ivory, which resembled
+      a small torso, and which Bettina described as &ldquo;A bit of the Lord, Signor,&rdquo;&mdash;and
+      it was, in fact, a fragment of an ivory crucifix, which she had somewhere
+      picked up. To Bettina&rsquo;s mind, mankind broadly divided themselves into two
+      races, Italians and Germans, to which latter she held that we Americans in
+      some sort belonged. She believed that America lay a little to the south of
+      Vienna and in her heart I think she was persuaded that the real national
+      complexion was black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw at
+      our house were merely a multitude of exceptions. But with all her
+      ignorance, she had no superstitions of a gloomy kind: the only ghost she
+      seemed ever to have heard of was the spectre of an American ship captain
+      which a friend of Piero&rsquo;s had seen at the Lido. She was perfectly kind and
+      obedient, and was deeply attached in an inarticulate way to the baby,
+      which was indeed the pet of the whole palace. This young lady ruled
+      arbitrarily over them all, and was forever being kissed and adored. When
+      Piero went out to the wine-shop for a little temperate dissipation, he
+      took her with him on his shoulder, and exhibited her to the admiring
+      gondoliers of his acquaintance; there was no puppetshow, no church
+      festival, in that region to which she was not carried; and when Bettina,
+      and Giulia, and all the idle women of the neighborhood assembled on a
+      Saturday afternoon in the narrow alley behind the palace (where they
+      dressed one another&rsquo;s thick black hair in fine braids soaked in milk, and
+      built it up to last the whole of the next week), the baby was the cynosure
+      of all hearts and eyes. But her supremacy was yet more distinguished when,
+      late at night, the household gave itself a feast of snails stewed in oil
+      and garlic, in the vast kitchen. There her anxious parents have found her
+      seated in the middle of the table with the bowl of snails before her, and
+      armed with a great spoon, while her vassals sat round, and grinned their
+      fondness and delight in her small tyrannies; and the immense room, dimly
+      lit, with the mystical implements of cookery glimmering from the wall,
+      showed like some witch&rsquo;s cavern, where a particularly small sorceress was
+      presiding over the concoction of an evil potion or the weaving of a
+      powerful spell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From time to time we had fellow-lodgers, who were always more or less
+      interesting and mysterious. Among the rest there was once a French lady,
+      who languished, during her stay, under the disfavor of the police, and for
+      whose sake there was a sentinel with a fixed bayonet stationed day and
+      night at the palace gate. At last, one night, this French lady escaped by
+      a rope-ladder from her chamber window, and thus no doubt satisfied alike
+      the female instinct for intrigue and elopement and the political
+      agitator&rsquo;s love of a mysterious disappearance. It was understood dimly
+      that she was an author, and had written a book displeasing to the police.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there was the German baroness and her son and daughter, the last very
+      beautiful and much courted by handsome Austrian officers; the son rather
+      weak-minded, and a great care to his sister and mother, from his
+      propensity to fall in love and marry below his station; the mother very
+      red-faced and fat, a good-natured old creature who gambled the summer
+      months away at Hombourg and Baden and in the winter resorted to Venice to
+      make a match for her pretty daughter. Then, moreover, there was that
+      English family, between whom and ourselves there was the reluctance and
+      antipathy, personal and national, which exists between all right-minded
+      Englishmen and Americans. No Italian can understand this just and natural
+      condition, and it was the constant aim of our landlord to make us
+      acquainted. So one day when he found a member of each of these unfriendly
+      families on the neutral ground of the grand <i>sala</i>, he introduced
+      them. They had, happily, the piano-forte between them, and I flatter
+      myself that the insulting coldness and indifference with which they
+      received each other&rsquo;s names carried to our landlord&rsquo;s bosom a dismay never
+      before felt by a good-natured and well-meaning man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The piano-forte which I have mentioned belonged to the landlord, who was
+      fond of music and of all fine and beautiful things; and now and then he
+      gave a musical <i>soirée</i>, which was attended, more or less
+      surreptitiously, by the young people of his acquaintance. I do not think
+      he was always quite candid in giving his invitations, for on one occasion
+      a certain count, who had taken refuge from the glare of the <i>sala</i> in
+      our parlor for the purpose of concealing the very loud-plaided pantaloons
+      he wore, explained pathetically that he had no idea it was a party, and
+      that he had been so long out of society, for patriotic reasons, that he
+      had no longer a dress suit. But to us they were very delightful
+      entertainments, no less from the great variety of character they afforded
+      than from the really charming and excellent music which the different
+      amateurs made; for we had airs from all the famous operas, and the
+      instrumentation was by a gifted young composer. Besides, the gayety seemed
+      to recall in some degree the old, brilliant life of the palace, and at
+      least showed us how well it was adapted to social magnificence and
+      display.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We enjoyed our whole year in Palazzo Giustiniani, though some of the days
+      were too long and some too short, as everywhere. From heat we hardly
+      suffered at all, so perfectly did the vast and lofty rooms answer to the
+      purpose of their builders in this respect. A current of sea air drew
+      through to the painter&rsquo;s garden by day; and by night there was scarcely a
+      mosquito of the myriads that infested some parts of Venice. In winter it
+      was not so well. Then we shuffled about in wadded gowns and boots lined
+      with sheep-skin,&mdash;the woolly side in, as in the song. The passage of
+      the <i>sala</i>, was something to be dreaded, and we shivered as fleetly
+      through it as we could, and were all the colder for the deceitful warmth
+      of the colors which the sun cast upon the stone floor from the window
+      opening on the court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not remember any one event of our life more exciting than that
+      attempted burglary of which I have spoken. In a city where the police gave
+      their best attention to political offenders, there were naturally a great
+      many rogues, and the Venetian rogues, if not distinguished for the more
+      heroic crimes, were very skillful in what I may call the <i>genre</i>
+      branch of robbing rooms through open windows, and committing all kinds of
+      safe domestic depredations. It was judged best to acquaint Justice (as
+      they call law in Latin countries) with the attempt upon our property, and
+      I found her officers housed in a small room of the Doge&rsquo;s Palace, clerkly
+      men in velvet skull-caps, driving loath quills over the rough official
+      paper of those regions. After an exchange of diplomatic courtesies, the
+      commissary took my statement of the affair down in writing, pertinent to
+      which were my father&rsquo;s name, place, and business, with a full and
+      satisfactory personal history of myself down to the period of the
+      attempted burglary. This, I said, occurred one morning about daylight,
+      when I saw the head of the burglar peering above the window-sill, and the
+      hand of the burglar extended to prey upon my wardrobe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me, Signor Console,&rdquo; interrupted the commissary, &ldquo;how could you
+      see him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, there was nothing in the world to prevent me. The window was open.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The window was open!&rdquo; gasped the commissary. &ldquo;Do you mean that you sleep
+      with your windows open?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most certainly!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon!&rdquo; said the commissary, suspiciously. &ldquo;Do <i>all</i> Americans
+      sleep with their windows open?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I may venture to say that they all do, in summer,&rdquo; I answered; &ldquo;at least,
+      it&rsquo;s the general custom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a thing as this indulgence in fresh air seemed altogether foreign to
+      the commissary&rsquo;s experience; and but for my official dignity, I am sure
+      that I should have been effectually browbeaten by him. As it was, he threw
+      himself back in his armchair and stared at me fixedly for some moments.
+      Then he recovered himself with another &ldquo;Per-doni!&rdquo; and, turning to his
+      clerk, said, &ldquo;Write down that, <i>according to the American custom</i>,
+      they were sleeping with their windows open.&rdquo; But I know that the
+      commissary, for all his politeness, considered this habit a relic of the
+      times when we Americans all abode in wigwams; and I suppose it paralyzed
+      his energies in the effort to bring the burglars to justice, for I have
+      never heard anything of them from that day to this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth is, it was a very uneventful year; and I am the better satisfied
+      with it as an average Venetian year on that account. We sometimes varied
+      the pensive monotony by a short visit to the cities of the mainland; but
+      we always came back to it willingly, and I think we unconsciously abhorred
+      any interruption of it. The days, as they followed each other, were
+      wonderfully alike, in every respect. For eight months of summer they were
+      alike in their clear-skied, sweet-breathed loveliness; in the autumn,
+      there where the melancholy of the falling leaf could not spread its
+      contagion to the sculptured foliage of Gothic art, the days were alike in
+      their sentiment of tranquil oblivion and resignation which was as autumnal
+      as any aspect of woods or fields could have been; in the winter they were
+      alike in their dreariness and discomfort. As I remember, we spent by far
+      the greater part of our time in going to the Piazza, and we were devoted
+      Florianisti, as the Italians call those that lounge habitually at the
+      Caffè Florian. We went every evening to the Piazza as a matter of course;
+      if the morning was long, we went to the Piazza; if we did not know what to
+      do with the afternoon, we went to the Piazza; if we had friends with us,
+      we went to the Piazza; if we were alone, we went to the Piazza; and there
+      was no mood or circumstances in which it did not seem a natural and
+      fitting thing to go to the Piazza. There were all the prettiest shops;
+      there were all the finest caffès; there was the incomparable Church of St.
+      Mark; there was the whole world of Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, we had other devices besides going to the Piazza; and sometimes
+      we spent entire weeks in visiting the churches, one after another, and
+      studying their artistic treasures, down to the smallest scrap of an old
+      master in their darkest chapel; their history, their storied tombs, their
+      fictitious associations. Very few churches escaped, I believe, except such
+      as had been turned into barracks, and were guarded by an incorruptible
+      Austrian sentinel. For such churches as did escape, we have a kind of
+      envious longing to this day, and should find it hard to like anybody who
+      had succeeded better in visiting them. There is, for example, the church
+      of San Giobbe, the doors of which we haunted with more patience than that
+      of the titulary saint: now the sacristan was out; now the church was shut
+      up for repairs; now it was Holy Week and the pictures were veiled; we had
+      to leave Venice at last without a sight of San Giobbe&rsquo;s three Saints by
+      Bordone, and Madonna by Bellini, which, unseen, outvalue all the other
+      Saints and Madonnas that we looked at; and I am sure that life can never
+      become so aimless, but we shall still have the desire of some day going to
+      see the church of San Giobbe. If we read some famous episode of Venetian
+      history, we made it the immediate care of our lives to visit the scene of
+      its occurrence; if Ruskin told us of some recondite beauty of sculpture
+      hid away in some unthought-of palace court, we invaded that palace at
+      once; if in entirely purposeless strolls through the city, we came upon
+      anything that touched the fancy or piqued curiosity, there was no gate or
+      bar proof against our bribes. What strange old nests of ruin, what
+      marvellous homes of solitude and dilapidation, did we not wander into!
+      What boarded-up windows peer through, what gloomy recesses penetrate! I
+      have lumber enough in my memory stored from such rambles to load the
+      nightmares of a generation, and stuff for the dreams of a whole people.
+      Does any gentleman or lady wish to write a romance? Sir or madam, I know
+      just the mouldy and sunless alley for your villain to stalk his victim in,
+      the canal in which to plunge his body, the staircase and the hall for the
+      subsequent wanderings of his ghost; and all these scenes and localities I
+      will sell at half the cost price; as also, balconies for flirtation,
+      gondolas for intrigue and elopement, confessionals for the betrayal of
+      guilty secrets. I have an assortment of bad and beautiful faces and
+      picturesque attitudes and effective tones of voice; and a large stock of
+      sympathetic sculptures and furniture and dresses, with other articles too
+      numerous to mention, all warranted Venetian, and suitable to every style
+      of romance. Who bids? Nay, I cannot sell, nor you buy. Each memory, as I
+      hold it up for inspection, loses its subtle beauty and value, and turns
+      common and poor in my hawker&rsquo;s fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet I must needs try to fix here the remembrance of two or three palaces,
+      of which our fancy took the fondest hold, and to which it yet most fondly
+      clings. It cannot locate them all, and least of all can it place that vast
+      old palace, somewhere near Cannaregio, which faced upon a campo, with
+      lofty windows blinded by rough boards, and empty from top to bottom. It
+      was of the later Renaissance in style, and we imagined it built in the
+      Republic&rsquo;s declining years by some ruinous noble, whose extravagance
+      forbade his posterity to live in it, for it had that peculiarly forlorn
+      air which belongs to a thing decayed without being worn out. We entered
+      its coolness and dampness, and wandered up the wide marble staircase, past
+      the vacant niches of departed statuary, and came on the third floor to a
+      grand portal which was closed against us by a barrier of lumber. But this
+      could not hinder us from looking within, and we were aware that we stood
+      upon the threshold of our ruinous noble&rsquo;s great banqueting-hall, where he
+      used to give his magnificent <i>feste da ballo</i>. Lustrissimo was long
+      gone with all his guests; but there in the roof were the amazing frescos
+      of Tiepolo&rsquo;s school, which had smiled down on them, as now they smiled on
+      us, great piles of architecture, airy tops of palaces, swimming in summer
+      sky, and wantoned over by a joyous populace of divinities of the lovelier
+      sex that had nothing but their loveliness to clothe them and keep them
+      afloat; the whole grandiose and superb beyond the effect of words, and
+      luminous with delicious color. How it all rioted there with its
+      inextinguishable beauty in the solitude and silence, from day to day, from
+      year to year, while men died, and systems passed, and nothing remained
+      unchanged but the instincts of youth and love that inspired it! It was
+      music and wine and wit; it was so warm and glowing that it made the
+      sunlight cold; and it seemed ever after a secret of gladness and beauty
+      that the sad old palace was keeping in its heart against the time to which
+      Venice looks forward when her splendor and opulence shall be
+      indestructibly renewed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a ball-room in the Palazzo Pisani, which some of my readers may
+      have passed through on their way to the studio of the charming old
+      Prussian painter, Nerlÿ; the frescos of this are dim and faded and dusty,
+      and impress you with a sense of irreparable decay, but the noble
+      proportions and the princely air of the place are inalienable, while the
+      palace stands. Here might have danced that Contarini who, when his wife&rsquo;s
+      necklace of pearls fell upon the floor in the way of her partner, the King
+      of Denmark, advanced and ground it into powder with his foot that the king
+      might not be troubled to avoid treading on it; and here, doubtless, many a
+      gorgeous masquerade had been in the long Venetian carnival; and what
+      passion and intrigue and jealousy, who knows? Now the palace was let in
+      apartments, and was otherwise a barrack, and in the great court, steadfast
+      as any of the marble statues, stood the Austrian sentinel. One of the
+      statues was a figure veiled from head to foot, at the base of which it was
+      hard not to imagine lovers, masked and hooded, and forever hurriedly
+      whispering their secrets in the shadow cast in perpetual moonlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet another ball-room in yet another palace opens to memory, but this is
+      all bright and fresh with recent decoration. In the blue vaulted roof
+      shine stars of gold; the walls are gay with dainty frescos; a gallery
+      encircles the whole, and from this drops a light stairway, slim-railed,
+      and guarded at the foot by torch-bearing statues of swarthy Eastern girls;
+      through the glass doors at the other side glimmers the green and red of a
+      garden. It was a place to be young in, to dance in, dream in, make love
+      in; but it was no more a surprise than the whole palace to which it
+      belonged, and which there in that tattered and poverty-stricken old Venice
+      was a vision of untarnished splendor and prosperous fortune. It was richly
+      furnished throughout all its vast extent, adorned with every caprice and
+      delight of art, and appointed with every modern comfort The foot was
+      hushed by costly carpets, the eye was flattered by a thousand beauties and
+      prettinesses. In the grates the fires were laid and ready to be lighted;
+      the candles stood upon the mantles; the toilet-linen was arranged for
+      instant use in the luxurious chambers; but from basement to roof the
+      palace was a solitude; no guest came there, no one dwelt there save the
+      custodian; the eccentric lady of whose possessions it formed a part abode
+      in a little house behind the palace, and on her door-plate had written her
+      <i>vanitas vanitatum</i> in the sarcastic inscription, &ldquo;John Humdrum,
+      Esquire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course she was Inglese; and that other lady, who was selling off the
+      furniture of her palace, and was so amiable a guide to its wonders in her
+      curious broken English, was Hungarian. Her great pride and joy, amidst the
+      objects of <i>vertu</i> and the works of art, was a set of &ldquo;Punch,&rdquo; which
+      she made us admire, and which she prized the more because she had always
+      been allowed to receive it when the government prohibited it to everybody
+      else. But we were Americans, she said; and had we ever seen this book? She
+      held up the &ldquo;The Potiphar Papers,&rdquo; a volume which must have been
+      inexpressibly amused and bewildered to find itself there, in that curious
+      little old lady&rsquo;s hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shall I go on and tell of the palace in which our strange friend Padre L&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+      dwelt, and the rooms of which he had filled up with the fruits of his
+      passion for the arts and sciences; the anteroom he had frescoed to
+      represent a grape-arbor with a multitude of clusters overhead; the parlor
+      with his oil-paintings on the walls, and the piano and melodeon arranged
+      so that Padre L&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; could play upon them both at once;
+      the oratory turned forge, and harboring the most alchemic-looking
+      apparatus of all kinds; the other rooms in which he had stored his
+      inventions in portable furniture, steam-propulsion, rifled cannon, and
+      perpetual motion; the attic with the camera by which one could photograh
+      one&rsquo;s self,&mdash;shall I tell of this, and yet other palaces? I think
+      there is enough already; and I have begun to doubt somewhat the truth of
+      my reminiscences, as I advise the reader to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, I feel that the words fail to give all the truth that is in them;
+      and if I cannot make them serve my purpose as to the palaces, how should I
+      hope to impart through them my sense of the glory and loveliness of
+      Venetian art? I could not give the imagination and the power of Tintoretto
+      as we felt it, nor the serene beauty, the gracious luxury of Titian, nor
+      the opulence, the worldly magnificence of Paolo Veronese. There hang their
+      mighty works forever, high above the reach of any palaverer; they smile
+      their stately welcome from the altars and palace-walls, upon whoever
+      approaches them in the sincerity and love of beauty that produced them;
+      and thither you must thus go if you would know them. Like fragments of
+      dreams, like the fleeting
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Images of glimmering dawn,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      I am from time to time aware, amid the work-day world, of some happiness
+      from them, some face or form, some drift of a princely robe or ethereal
+      drapery, some august shape of painted architecture, some un-namable
+      delight of color; but to describe them more strictly and explicitly, how
+      should I undertake?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the exhaustion following every form of intense pleasure, in
+      their contemplation, such a wear of vision and thought, that I could not
+      call the life we led in looking at them an idle one, even if it had no
+      result in after times; so I will not say that it was to severer occupation
+      our minds turned more and more in our growing desire to return home. For
+      my own part personally I felt keenly the fictitious and transitory
+      character of official life. I knew that if I had become fit to serve the
+      government by four years&rsquo; residence in Venice, that was a good reason why
+      the government, according to our admirable system, should dismiss me, and
+      send some perfectly unqualified person to take my place; and in my heart
+      also I knew that there was almost nothing for me to do where I was, and I
+      dreaded the easily formed habit of receiving, a salary for no service
+      performed. I reminded myself that, soon or late, I must go back to the old
+      fashion of earning money, and that it had better be sooner than later.
+      Therefore, though for some reasons it was the saddest and strangest thing
+      in the world to do, I was on the whole rejoiced when a leave of absence
+      came, and we prepared to quit Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never had the city seemed so dream-like and unreal as in this light of
+      farewell,&mdash;this tearful glimmer which our love and regret cast upon
+      it. As in a maze, we haunted once more and for the last time the scenes we
+      had known so long, and spent our final, phantasmal evening in the Piazza;
+      looked, through the moonlight, our mute adieu to islands and lagoons, to
+      church and tower; and then returned to our own palace, and stood long upon
+      the balconies that overhung the Grand Canal. There the future became as
+      incredible and improbable as the past; and if we had often felt the
+      incongruity of our coming to live in such a place, now, with tenfold
+      force, we felt the cruel absurdity of proposing to live anywhere else. We
+      had become part of Venice; and how could such atoms of her fantastic
+      personality ever mingle with the alien and unsympathetic world?
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0508}.jpg" alt="{0508}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0508}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <p>
+      The next morning the whole palace household bestirred itself to accompany
+      us to the station: the landlord in his best hat and coat, our noble friend
+      in phenomenal linen, Giulia and her little boy, Bettina shedding bitter
+      tears over the baby, and Piero, sad but firm, bending over the oar and
+      driving us swiftly forward. The first turn of the Canal shut the Palazzo
+      Giustiniani from our lingering gaze, a few more curves and windings
+      brought us to the station. The tickets were bought, the baggage was
+      registered; the little oddly assorted company drew itself up in a line,
+      and received with tears our husky adieux. I feared there might be a remote
+      purpose in the hearts of the landlord and his retainer to embrace and kiss
+      me, after the Italian manner, but if there was, by a final inspiration
+      they spared me the ordeal. Piero turned away to his gondola; the two other
+      men moved aside; Bettina gave one long, hungering, devouring hug to the
+      baby; and as we hurried into the waiting-room, we saw her, as upon a
+      stage, standing without the barrier, supported and sobbing in the arms of
+      Giulia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was well to be gone, but I cannot say we were glad to be going.
+    </p>
+<div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> <img src="images/{0520}.jpg" alt="{0520}" width="100%" /><br /> </div> <h5> <a href="images/{0520}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> </h5>
+
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Venetian Life, by William  Dean Howells
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Venetian Life, by William  Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Venetian Life
+
+Author: William  Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7083]
+This file was first posted on March 8, 2003
+Last Updated: April 7, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VENETIAN LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, David Widger and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VENETIAN LIFE
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.
+
+In correcting this book for a second edition, I have sought to complete
+it without altering its original plan: I have given a new chapter
+sketching the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the present
+trade and industry of Venice; I have amplified somewhat the chapter on
+the national holidays, and have affixed an index to the chief historical
+persons, incidents, and places mentioned.
+
+Believing that such value as my book may have is in fidelity to what
+I actually saw and knew of Venice, I have not attempted to follow
+speculatively the grand and happy events of last summer in their effects
+upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that in the traits at which I loved most
+to look, the life of Venice is not so much changed as her fortunes; but
+at any rate I am content to remain true to what was fact one year ago.
+
+W. D. H.
+
+Cambridge, January 1, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+   I. Venice in Venice
+   II. Arrival and first Days in Venice
+   III. The Winter in Venice
+   IV. Comincia far Caldo
+   V. Opera and Theatres
+   VI. Venetian Dinners and Diners
+   VII. Housekeeping in Venice
+   VIII. The Balcony on the Grand Canal
+   IX. A Day-Break Ramble
+   X. The Mouse
+   XI. Churches and Pictures
+   XII. Some Islands of the Lagoons
+   XIII. The Armenians
+   XIV. The Ghetto and the Jews of Venice
+   XV. Some Memorable Places
+   XVI. Commerce
+   XVII. Venetian Holidays
+   XVIII. Christmas Holidays
+   XIX. Love-making and Marrying; Baptisms and Burials
+   XX. Venetian Traits and Characters
+   XXI. Society
+   XXII. Our Last Year in Venice
+   Index
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+VENICE IN VENICE.
+
+
+One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the
+stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and
+the byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief
+part in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian
+theatre), and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters.
+We could not help seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the
+villain of the piece, pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all
+tears and desperation, upon the stage; and we were dismayed to behold
+the injured husband and his abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the
+scenes. All the shabbiness of the theatre was perfectly apparent to
+us; we saw the grossness of the painting and the unreality of the
+properties. And yet I cannot say that the play lost one whit of its
+charm for me, or that the working of the machinery and its inevitable
+clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the least. There was so much truth
+and beauty in the playing, that I did not care for the sham of the ropes
+and gilding, and presently ceased to take any note of them. The illusion
+which I had thought an essential in the dramatic spectacle, turned out
+to be a condition of small importance.
+
+It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box
+at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this
+VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the
+theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that
+melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place
+without learning to know it differently from those writers who have
+described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help
+seeing from my point of observation the sham and cheapness with which
+Venice is usually brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the
+same time, it has never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise
+and regard, nor the fascination of its excellent beauty, its peerless
+picturesqueness, its sole and wondrous grandeur. It is true that the
+streets in Venice are canals; and yet you can walk to any part of the
+city, and need not take boat whenever you go out of doors, as I once
+fondly thought you must. But after all, though I find dry land enough
+in it, I do not find the place less unique, less a mystery, or less a
+charm. By day, the canals are still the main thoroughfares; and if
+these avenues are not so full of light and color as some would have us
+believe, they, at least, do not smell so offensively as others pretend.
+And by night, they are still as dark and silent as when the secret
+vengeance of the Republic plunged its victims into the ungossiping
+depths of the Canalazzo!
+
+Did the vengeance of the Republic ever do any such thing?
+
+Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to question that reputation
+for vindictive and gloomy cruelty alien historians have given to a
+government which endured so many centuries in the willing obedience
+of its subjects; but to think that the careful student of the old
+Republican system will condemn it for faults far different from those
+for which it is chiefly blamed. At all events, I find it hard to
+understand why, if the Republic was an oligarchy utterly selfish and
+despotic, it has left to all classes of Venetians so much regret and
+sorrow for its fall.
+
+So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will
+hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams--the
+Venice of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his
+prejudices--the merciless Venice of Daru, and of the historians who
+follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he
+sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion
+removed; and--to take leave of our theatrical metaphor--I promise to
+fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to them may
+go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer no
+annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often
+get from travelers' beds into their books.
+
+Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors
+concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves
+hereafter, but which no doubt form a large part of every one's
+associations with the name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that
+pathetic swindle, the Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will
+hear it mentioned without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the
+taciturn justice of the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the
+Serenest Republic's policy. When I entered it the first time I was at
+the pains to call about me the sad company of those who had passed its
+corridors from imprisonment to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent
+tourists have done the same. I was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward
+that I had, on this occasion, been in very low society, and that the
+melancholy assemblage which I then conjured up was composed entirely
+of honest rogues, who might indeed have given as graceful and ingenious
+excuses for being in misfortune as the galley-slaves rescued by Don
+Quixote,--who might even have been very picturesque,--but who were not
+at all the material with which a well-regulated imagination would deal.
+The Bridge of Sighs was not built till the end of the sixteenth century,
+and no romantic episode of political imprisonment and punishment (except
+that of Antonio Foscarini) occurs in Venetian history later than that
+period. But the Bridge of Sighs could have nowise a savor of sentiment
+from any such episode, being, as it was, merely a means of communication
+between the Criminal Courts sitting in the Ducal Palace, and the
+Criminal Prison across the little canal. Housebreakers, cut-purse
+knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a poetic interest to places
+which have known them; and yet these are the only sufferers on whose
+Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has looked with pathetic
+sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The name of the bridge
+was given by the people from that opulence of compassion which enables
+the Italians to pity even rascality in difficulties. [Footnote: The
+reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said in a few words, much
+better than I have said in many, the same thing of sentimental errors
+about Venice:--
+
+"The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere
+efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of daylight
+must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth remembering,
+or whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs,
+which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant
+of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with
+breathless interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address at one
+of his great ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred
+and fifty years after Faliero's death."--_Stories of Venice_.]
+
+Political offenders were not confined in the "prison on each hand" of
+the poet, but in the famous _pozzi_ (literally, wells) or dungeons under
+the Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been
+uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for
+their exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom
+some foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to
+be afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say
+now that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with
+prison-life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped.
+They are not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants
+could have suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden
+casing of the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the
+state to inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.
+
+But on whose account had I to be interested in the _pozzi_? It was
+difficult to learn, unless I took the word of sentimental hearsay.
+I began with Marin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to
+languish in these dungeons for a moment. He was imprisoned in the
+apartments of state, and during one night only. His fellow-conspirators
+were hanged nearly as fast as taken.
+
+Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several other political
+prisoners of sad and famous memory with scarcely better effect. To a
+man, they struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and
+escaped from the _pozzi_ by every artifice of fact and figure.
+
+The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their
+story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history. But it
+was not the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed their cruel
+taking-off: they were strangled in the prison formerly existing at
+the top of the palace, called the Torresella. [Footnote: Galliciolli,
+_Memorie Venete_.] It is possible, however, that Jacopo Foscari may have
+been confined in the _pozzi_ at different times about the middle of the
+fifteenth century. With his fate alone, then, can the horror of these
+cells be satisfactorily associated by those who relish the dark romance
+of Venetian annals; for it is not to be expected that the less tragic
+fortunes of Carlo Zeno and Vittore Pisani, who may also have been
+imprisoned in the _pozzi_, can move the true sentimentalizer. Certainly,
+there has been anguish enough in the prisons of the Ducal Palace, but we
+know little of it by name, and cannot confidently relate it to any great
+historic presence.
+
+Touching the Giant's Stairs in the court of the palace, the inexorable
+dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin
+Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground--at the
+end of Lord Byron's tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of
+the Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed
+the traitor's death to the people from between the two red columns in
+the southern gallery of the palace;--that facade was not built till
+nearly a century later.
+
+I suppose,--always judging by my own average experience,--that besides
+these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up scenes of
+brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the brightest
+picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight, romantic
+adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old
+merry-making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this
+way, the conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is become
+as gross a fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of which
+I have but spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social
+dullness and sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.
+
+The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the
+whole world's civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the
+city, doomed four hundred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly
+(the Venetians would be apt to tell you wholly) in the implacable anger,
+the inconsolable discontent, with which the people regard their present
+political condition.
+
+If there be more than one opinion among men elsewhere concerning the
+means by which Austria acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she
+holds the province, there would certainly seem to be no division on the
+question in Venice. To the stranger first inquiring into public feeling,
+there is something almost sublime in the unanimity with which the
+Venetians appear to believe that these means were iniquitous, and that
+this tenure is abominable; and though shrewder study and carefuler
+observation will develop some interested attachment to the present
+government, and some interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge
+will discover, in the hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness,
+and selfish ignorance to take off its sublimity, the hatred is still
+found marvelously unanimous and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no
+disposition to discuss the question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising
+at Venice official functions by permission and trust of the Austrian
+government, I cannot regard the cessation of those functions as release
+from obligations both to that government and my own, which render it
+improper for me, so long as the Austrians remain in Venice, to criticize
+their rule, or contribute, by comment on existing things, to embitter
+the feeling against them elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, speak
+dispassionately of facts of the abnormal social and political state of
+the place; and I can certainly do this, for the present situation is
+so disagreeable in many ways to the stranger forced to live there,--the
+inappeasable hatred of the Austrians by the Italians is so illiberal in
+application to those in any wise consorting with them, and so stupid and
+puerile in many respects, that I think the annoyance which it gives
+the foreigner might well damp any passion with which he was disposed to
+speak of its cause.
+
+This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity from the defeat of
+patriotic hopes of union with Italy in 1859, when Napoleon found the
+Adriatic at Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was concluded. But
+it is not to be supposed that a feeling so general, and so thoroughly
+interwoven with Venetian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to
+the Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the subjection into which she
+fell a second time after Napoleon's ruin, by the treaties of the Holy
+Alliance, defeated in several attempts to throw off her yoke, and loaded
+with heavier servitude after the fall of the short-lived Republic of
+1849,--Venice has always hated her masters with an exasperation deepened
+by each remove from the hope of independence, and she now detests them
+with a rancor which no concession short of absolute relinquishment of
+dominion would appease.
+
+Instead, therefore, of finding that public gayety and private
+hospitality in Venice for which the city was once famous, the stranger
+finds himself planted between two hostile camps, with merely the choice
+of sides open to him. Neutrality is solitude and friendship with neither
+party; society is exclusive association with the Austrians or with the
+Italians. The latter do not spare one of their own number if he
+consorts with their masters, and though a foreigner might expect greater
+allowance, it is seldom shown to him. To be seen in the company of
+officers is enmity to Venetian freedom, and in the case of Italians it
+is treason to country and to race. Of course, in a city where there is
+a large garrison and a great many officers who have nothing else to
+do, there is inevitably some international love-making, although
+the Austrian officers are rigidly excluded from association with the
+citizens. But the Italian who marries an Austrian severs the dearest
+ties that bind her to life, and remains an exile in the heart of her
+country. Her friends mercilessly cast her off, as they cast off every
+body who associates with the dominant race. In rare cases I have known
+Italians to receive foreigners who had Austrian friends, but this with
+the explicit understanding that there was to be no sign of recognition
+if they met them in the company of these detested acquaintance.
+
+There are all degrees of intensity in Venetian hatred, and after hearing
+certain persons pour out the gall of bitterness upon the Austrians, you
+may chance to hear these persons spoken of as tepid in their patriotism
+by yet more fiery haters. Yet it must not be supposed that the Italians
+hate the Austrians as individuals. On the contrary, they have rather
+a liking for them--rather a contemptuous liking, for they think them
+somewhat slow and dull-witted--and individually the Austrians are
+amiable people, and try not to give offence. The government is also very
+strict in its control of the military. I have never seen the slightest
+affront offered by a soldier to a citizen; and there is evidently no
+personal ill-will engendered. The Austrians are simply hated as the
+means by which an alien and despotic government is imposed upon a people
+believing themselves born for freedom and independence. This hatred,
+then, is a feeling purely political, and there is political machinery by
+which it is kept in a state of perpetual tension.
+
+The Comitato Veneto is a body of Venetians residing within the province
+and abroad, who have charge of the Italian interests, and who work in
+every way to promote union with the dominions of Victor Emanuel. They
+live for the most part in Venice, where they have a secret press for the
+publication of their addresses and proclamations, and where they remain
+unknown to the police, upon whose spies they maintain an espionage. On
+every occasion of interest, the Committee is sure to make its presence
+felt; and from time to time persons find themselves in the possession
+of its printed circulars, stamped with the Committee's seal; but no one
+knows how or whence they came. Constant arrests of suspected persons are
+made, but no member of the Committee has yet been identified; and it is
+said that the mysterious body has its agents in every department of the
+government, who keep it informed of inimical action. The functions of
+the Committee are multiplied and various. It takes care that on all
+patriotic anniversaries (such as that of the establishment of the
+Republic in 1848, and that of the union of the Italian States under
+Victor Emanuel in 1860) salutes shall be fired in Venice, and a
+proper number of red, white, and green lights displayed. It inscribes
+revolutionary sentiments on the walls; and all attempts on the part
+of the Austrians to revive popular festivities are frustrated by the
+Committee, which causes petards to be exploded in the Place of St. Mark,
+and on the different promenades. Even the churches are not exempt from
+these demonstrations: I was present at the Te Deum performed on the
+Emperor's birthday, in St. Mark's, when the moment of elevating the
+host was signalized by the bursting of a petard in the centre of the
+cathedral. All this, which seems of questionable utility, and worse than
+questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of the Italianissimi, and
+though possibly the strictness of the patriotic discipline in which the
+members of the Committee keep their fellow-citizens may gall some of
+them, yet any public demonstration of content, such as going to the
+opera, or to the Piazza while the Austrian band plays, is promptly
+discontinued at a warning from the Committee. It is, of course, the
+Committee's business to keep the world informed of public feeling
+in Venice, and of each new act of Austrian severity. Its members are
+inflexible men, whose ability has been as frequently manifested as their
+patriotism.
+
+The Venetians are now, therefore, a nation in mourning, and have, as I
+said, disused all their former pleasures and merry-makings. Every class,
+except a small part of the resident _titled_ nobility (a great part
+of the nobility is in either forced or voluntary exile), seems to be
+comprehended by this feeling of despondency and suspense. The poor of
+the city formerly found their respite and diversion in the numerous
+holidays which fell in different parts of the year, and which, though
+religious in their general character, were still inseparably bound up in
+their origin with ideas of patriotism and national glory. Such of these
+holidays as related to the victories and pride of the Republic naturally
+ended with her fall. Many others, however, survived this event in all
+their splendor, but there is not one celebrated now as in other days. It
+is true that the churches still parade their pomps in the Piazza on the
+day of Corpus Christi; it is true that the bridges of boats are still
+built across the Canalazzo to the church of Our Lady of Salvation, and
+across the Canal of the Giudecca to the temple of the Redeemer, on the
+respective festivals of these churches; but the concourse is always
+meagre, and the mirth is forced and ghastly. The Italianissimi have
+so far imbued the people with their own ideas and feelings, that
+the recurrence of the famous holidays now merely awakens them to
+lamentations over the past and vague longings for the future.
+
+As for the carnival, which once lasted six months of the year, charming
+hither all the idlers of the world by its peculiar splendor and variety
+of pleasure, it does not, as I said, any longer exist. It is dead, and
+its shabby, wretched ghost is a party of beggars, hideously dressed
+out with masks and horns and women's habits, who go from shop to shop
+droning forth a stupid song, and levying tribute upon the shopkeepers.
+The crowd through which these melancholy jesters pass, regards them with
+a pensive scorn, and goes about its business untempted by the delights
+of carnival.
+
+All other social amusements have shared in greater or less degree the
+fate of the carnival. At some houses conversazioni are still held,
+and it is impossible that balls and parties should not now and then
+be given. But the greater number of the nobles and the richer of
+the professional classes lead for the most part a life of listless
+seclusion, and attempts to lighten the general gloom and heaviness
+in any way are not looked upon with favor. By no sort of chance are
+Austrians, or Austriacanti ever invited to participate in the pleasures
+of Venetian society.
+
+As the social life of Italy, and especially of Venice, was in great
+part to be once enjoyed at the theatres, at the caffe, and at the other
+places of public resort, so is its absence now to be chiefly noted in
+those places. No lady of perfect standing among her people goes to
+the opera, and the men never go in the boxes, but if they frequent the
+theatre at all, they take places in the pit, in order that the house may
+wear as empty and dispirited a look as possible. Occasionally a bomb is
+exploded in the theatre, as a note of reminder, and as means of keeping
+away such of the nobles as are not enemies of the government. As it is
+less easy for the Austrians to participate in the diversion of comedy,
+it is a less offence to attend the comedy, though even this is not good
+Italianissimism. In regard to the caffe there is a perfectly understood
+system by which the Austrians go to one, and the Italians to another;
+and Florian's, in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground in the
+city on which the hostile forces consent to meet. This is because it is
+thronged with foreigners of all nations, and to go there is not thought
+a demonstration of any kind. But the other caffe in the Piazza do not
+enjoy Florian's cosmopolitan immunity, and nothing would create more
+wonder in Venice than to see an Austrian officer at the Specchi, unless,
+indeed, it were the presence of a good Italian at the Quadri.
+
+It is in the Piazza that the tacit demonstration of hatred and
+discontent chiefly takes place. Here, thrice a week, in winter and
+summer, the military band plays that exquisite music for which the
+Austrians are famous. The selections are usually from Italian operas,
+and the attraction is the hardest of all others for the music-loving
+Italian to resist. But he does resist it. There are some noble ladies
+who have not entered the Piazza while the band was playing there,
+since the fall of the Republic of 1849; and none of good standing for
+patriotism has attended the concerts since the treaty of Villafranca in
+'59. Until very lately, the promenaders in the Piazza were exclusively
+foreigners, or else the families of such government officials as were
+obliged to show themselves there. Last summer, however, before the
+Franco-Italian convention for the evacuation of Rome revived the
+drooping hopes of the Venetians, they had begun visibly to falter
+in their long endurance. But this was, after all, only a slight and
+transient weakness. As a general thing, now, they pass from the Piazza
+when the music begins, and walk upon the long quay at the sea-side of
+the Ducal Palace; or if they remain in the Piazza they pace up and
+down under the arcades on either side; for Venetian patriotism makes
+a delicate distinction between listening to the Austrian band in the
+Piazza and hearing it under the Procuratie, forbidding the first
+and permitting the last. As soon as the music ceases the Austrians
+disappear, and the Italians return to the Piazza.
+
+But since the catalogue of demonstrations cannot be made full, it need
+not be made any longer. The political feeling in Venice affects her
+prosperity in a far greater degree than may appear to those who do not
+understand how large an income the city formerly derived from making
+merry. The poor have to lament not merely the loss of their holidays,
+but also of the fat employments and bountiful largess which these
+occasions threw into their hands. With the exile or the seclusion of the
+richer families, and the reluctance of foreigners to make a residence
+of the gloomy and dejected city, the trade of the shopkeepers has fallen
+off; the larger commerce of the place has also languished and dwindled
+year by year; while the cost of living has constantly increased, and
+heavier burdens of taxation have been laid upon the impoverished and
+despondent people. And in all this, Venice is but a type of the whole
+province of Venetia.
+
+The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely worth noting. The
+Austrians have a _casino_, and they give balls and parties, and now and
+then make some public manifestation of gayety. But they detest Venice as
+a place of residence, being naturally averse to living in the midst of a
+people who shun them like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are
+obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, and it is amusing
+enough to find the few English residents divided into Austriacanti and
+Italianissimi. [Footnote: Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics,
+though not of Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union
+with Italy at any cost.]
+
+Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in every way bound to
+neutrality and indifference, are popularly reputed to be of one party or
+the other, and my predecessor, whose unhappy knowledge of German threw
+him on his arrival among people of that race, was always regarded as the
+enemy of Venetian freedom, though I believe his principles were of the
+most vivid republican tint in the United States.
+
+The present situation has now endured five years, with only slight
+modifications by time, and only faint murmurs from some of the more
+impatient, that _bisogna, una volta o l'altra, romper il chiodo_,
+(sooner or later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are a people
+of indomitable perseverance, long schooled to obstinacy by oppression,
+I suppose they will hold out till their union with the kingdom of Italy.
+They can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content to wait forever
+in their present gloom. How deeply their attitude affects their national
+character I shall inquire hereafter, when I come to look somewhat more
+closely at the spirit of their demonstration.
+
+For the present, it is certain that the discontent of the people has its
+peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a
+glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving
+it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing
+that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be
+faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
+
+
+I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday
+and to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five
+o'clock, and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer
+weather. Yet I was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the
+large, many-seated boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for
+myself and my luggage. The porter who seized my valise in the station,
+inferred from some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of
+my wish, and ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into a
+gondola. I followed, lighted to my seat by a beggar in picturesque and
+desultory costume. He was one of a class of mendicants whom I came, for
+my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I dare say every traveler
+recollects,--the merciless tribe who hold your gondola to shore, and
+affect to do you a service and not a displeasure, and pretend not to
+be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call them _gransieri_, or
+crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the name or the purpose of this
+_poverino_ [Footnote: _Poverino_ is the compassionate generic for all
+unhappy persons who work for a living in Venice, as well as many who
+decline to do so.] at the station, but merely saw that he had the
+Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and arrangement of his
+fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous effects of red, and
+he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend of brigands would
+like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab me and sink
+my body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I felt that
+he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly know now
+whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and left him
+empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings which he
+had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard nothing,
+for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my nether-spirit, so
+to speak, was dulled and jaded by the long, cold, railway journey
+from Vienna, while every surface-sense was taken and tangled in the
+bewildering brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think there can be
+nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite surprise,
+as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches as he
+issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon her peerless
+strangeness. There is something in the blessed breath of Italy (how
+quickly, coming south, you know it, and how bland it is, after the
+harsh, transalpine air!) which prepares you for your nocturnal advent
+into the place; and O you! whoever you are, that journey toward this
+enchanted city for the first time, let me tell you how happy I count
+you! There lies before you for your pleasure, the spectacle of
+such singular beauty as no picture can ever show you nor book tell
+you,--beauty which you shall feel perfectly but once, and regret
+forever.
+
+For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze and bustle
+of the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot
+that I had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment
+very cold and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that
+beautiful silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars.
+Then on either hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the
+dark waters, holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which
+brought balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief,
+and threw long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that
+uncertain glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so,
+unhaunted by any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the
+forlorn beauty of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper
+time to think all the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them;
+but they passed vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the
+sensations of sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there,
+and the moral and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty
+and surprise. The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and
+unlooked-for events gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and
+safely around sharp corners of life. And all the while I knew that this
+was a progress through narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles
+of palaces. But I did not know then that this fine confusion of sense
+and spirit was the first faint impression of the charm of life in
+Venice.
+
+Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had
+warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the
+lines of balconied palaces had never ended;--here and there at
+their doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving
+uncertainly about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the
+Grand Canal into one of the smaller channels, and from comparative light
+into a darkness only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner
+lamp. But always the pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven
+with its trembling stars above, and the dark water with its trembling
+stars below; but now innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness,
+and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could not resist a vague
+feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary passages, which was
+part of the strange enjoyment of the time, and which was referable to
+the novelty, the hush, the darkness, and the piratical appearance and
+unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not
+Venice forever associated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts?
+That valise of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the uncultivated
+imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts of the
+Situation--(as we say in the journals)? To move on was relief; to pause
+was regret for past transgressions mingled with good resolutions for the
+future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of all these emotions, when,
+slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola suddenly rested at the
+foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door. The gondoliers rang and
+rang again, while their passenger
+
+    "Divided the swift mind,"
+
+in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could
+possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles
+and service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest
+swindling countenance of a hotel _portier_, he felt secure against every
+thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and conjecture at
+once faded from his thought, when the _portier_ suffered the gondoliers
+to make him pay a florin too much.
+
+So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that
+complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most
+alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any
+fragment of her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had
+been penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had
+been touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
+presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
+occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
+
+I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my
+arrival need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I
+would not wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and
+alien to the place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the
+first. I believe it was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the
+beautiful that I here found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full
+of society and friendship, speaking a language which, even in its
+unfamiliar forms, I could partly understand, and at once making me
+citizen of that Venice from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in
+the presence of the great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt
+at home--indeed, I could as yet understand their excellence and grandeur
+only very imperfectly--but wherever I wandered through the quaint and
+marvelous city, I found the good company of
+
+    "The fair, the old;"
+
+and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and
+I learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of
+relief.
+
+My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
+locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or
+destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest,
+crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left
+me cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible
+from the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for
+my blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to
+surrender by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden
+brinks of canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable
+churches of the city were equally victorious, and continually took me
+prisoner. But all places had something rare and worthy to be seen:
+if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture, at least interesting
+squalor and picturesque wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight
+in proper Objects of Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that
+reeked with unwholesome winter damps below, and peered curiously out
+with frowzy heads and beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered
+casements above. Every court had its carven well to show me, in the
+noisy keeping of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque
+gossips of the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic
+with empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the
+sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched the
+lofty windows with obsolete hats.
+
+I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
+the brilliancy of St. Mark's and the glittering streets of shops that
+branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
+courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little
+oil-lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines
+of the Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole
+means of street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and
+deepening the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches.
+I remember distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft
+night of late winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from
+the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli
+Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I
+turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a
+solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its
+moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the
+vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the
+Piazzetta to the Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and
+casting deep into the water under them a crimson glory that sank also
+down and down in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty
+and delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and
+palace; the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the gondola
+drifted away to the northward; the islands of the lagoons seemed to rise
+and sink with the light palpitations of the waves like pictures on the
+undulating fields of banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black
+against the sky, the Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore
+had composed itself to sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music
+of the surge that gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of
+the trees above me stirred themselves together, and out of one of those
+trembling towers in the lagoons, one rich, full sob burst from the heart
+of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the scene, and suffused
+the languid night with the murmur of luxurious, ineffable sadness.
+
+But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful, and
+whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how
+low its origin or humble its composition; and the magnificence of that
+moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I won from the fine spectacle
+of an old man whom I saw burning coffee one night in the little
+court behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as one of the most
+interesting people I saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the
+air of that neighbourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant
+berry, and all day long this patient old man--sage, let me call him--had
+turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over an open
+fire after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. Now
+that the night had fallen, and the stars shone down upon him, and
+the red of the flame luridly illumined him, he showed more grand and
+venerable than ever. Simple, abstract humanity, has its own grandeur
+in Italy; and it is not hard here for the artist to find the primitive
+types with which genius loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had
+the beard of a saint, and the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the
+squalor of a beggar, superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious
+grandeur of humanity. A vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to
+do with burning coffee, dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had
+been some dread supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and
+doing men, instead of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly
+and weirdly impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and
+lifted the cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after
+it, and he shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and
+glorified him--then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond
+art, and turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless
+magnificence.
+
+At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the
+aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked
+Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and
+whom I often noted from the windows of the little caffe there, where you
+get an excellent _caffe bianco_ (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and one
+to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly
+with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of
+the sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than
+olive; and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of
+lustrous black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket
+and pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity
+of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes.
+Habitually came a barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and
+
+    "Took the soul
+    Of that waste place with joy;"
+
+and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw
+his whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved
+ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus
+embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of figures, in which there
+was something grotesquely rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric
+magnificence, spiritualized into a grace of movement superior to the
+energy of the North and the extravagant fervor of the East. It was
+coffee and not wine that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw
+reflected in this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of
+dancing in that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that
+combated and vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea-washed
+sands in marble structures of airy and stately splendor, and gave to
+architecture new glories full of eternal surprise.
+
+So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with Venice, and
+being newly from a land where every thing, morally and materially, was
+in good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the
+pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of every thing about me here. It
+was not yet the season to behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door
+life of the place; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that great
+part of the people, both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do,
+and that nobody seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse.
+When, however, I ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a spectator of
+this idleness, and learned that I too must assume my share of the common
+indolence, I found it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old habits
+of hope, made my endless leisure irksome to me, and almost intolerable
+when I ascertained fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill
+long-cherished, but, after all, merely general designs of literary
+study, I had forsaken wholesome struggle in the currents where I felt
+the motion of the age, only to drift into a lifeless eddy of the world,
+remote from incentive and sensation.
+
+For such is Venice, and the will must be strong and the faith
+indomitable in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her
+stagnant quiet, a practical belief in God's purpose of a great moving,
+anxious, toiling, aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as
+after a while I yielded, to these influences, a gentle incredulity
+possesses you, and if you consent that such a thing is as earnest and
+useful life, you cannot help wondering why it need be. The charm of
+the place sweetens your temper, but corrupts you; and I found it a sad
+condition of my perception of the beauty of Venice and friendship with
+it, that I came in some unconscious way to regard her fate as my own;
+and when I began to write the sketches which go to form this book, it
+was as hard to speak of any ugliness in her, or of the doom written
+against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of her crumbling
+masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine. I do not so greatly
+blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so many sins of
+omission concerning her, and made her all light, color, canals,
+and palaces. One's conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant
+elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is
+more virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the
+city, and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there
+might have been some incentive to keep one's thoughts and words from
+lapsing into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the
+whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But
+now, what matter?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE WINTER IN VENICE
+
+
+It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my
+experiences of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was,
+indeed, an every-day roughness and discomfort in the weather, which
+travelers passing their first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile
+with the habitual ideas of the season's clemency in the South. But
+winter is apt to be very severe in mild climates. People do not
+acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense that it is summer only a
+little out of humor.
+
+The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much
+favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure
+a degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the
+winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd
+prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer
+equally with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the
+cold, objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the
+effort to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It
+is not a pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the
+affliction among people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh
+you out sugar, by no means reconciles the Northern stomach to its
+prevalence. I have observed that priests, and those who have much to do
+in the frigid churches, are the worst sufferers in this way; and I
+think no one can help noting in the harsh, raw winter-complexion (for
+in summer the tone is quite different) of the women of all classes, the
+protest of systems cruelly starved of the warmth which health demands.
+
+The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight
+months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in
+summer, and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very
+large, lofty, and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of
+apartments--the smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the
+winter, and the grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for
+defence against the insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most
+part, people must occupy the same room summer and winter, the sole
+change being in the strip of carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during
+the latter season. In the comparatively few houses where carpets are
+the rule and not the exception, they are always removed during the
+summer--for the triple purpose of sparing them some months' wear,
+banishing fleas and other domestic insects, and showing off the beauty
+of the oiled and shining pavement, which in the meanest houses is
+tasteful, and in many of the better sort is often in-wrought with
+figures and designs of mosaic work.
+
+All the floors in Venice are of stone, and whether of marble flags, or
+of that species of composition formed of dark cement, with fragments of
+colored marble imbedded and smoothed and polished to the most glassy
+and even surface, and the general effect and complexion of petrified
+plum-pudding, all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with
+their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded
+gowns. When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too
+heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian
+sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the
+only legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous
+prices to such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.
+
+It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the
+utmost rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as
+possible in the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm
+afternoon sun in its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders
+of every class, condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines
+in the Piazza, shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men
+crowd the close little caffe, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration,
+and animal heat, and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and
+beguile the time with solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself,
+throughout this book, the use of the expressive American words
+_loaf_ and _loafer_, as the only terms adequate to the description of
+professional idling in Venice] and the perusal of dingy little
+journals, drinking small cups of black coffee, and playing long games of
+chess,--an evening that seemed to me as torpid and lifeless as a Lap's,
+and intolerable when I remembered the bright, social winter evenings of
+another and happier land and civilization.
+
+Sometimes you find a heated stove--that is to say, one in which there
+has been a fire during the day--in a Venetian house; but the stove seems
+usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged
+only in diffusing a very acrid smoke,--as if the Venetian preferred to
+take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove
+itself is a curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and
+plastering,--whitewashed and painted outside. It is a great consumer
+of fuel, and radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wooding
+I contrived to warm mine; but my Italian friends always avoided its
+vicinity when they came to see me, and most amusingly regarded my
+determination to be comfortable as part of the eccentricity inseparable
+from the Anglo-Saxon character.
+
+I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in
+his northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his
+severity is the _scaldino_, and this is made chiefly by the yielding
+sex, who are denied the warmth of the caffe. The use of the scaldino
+is known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are
+most addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware,
+having an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and
+the pot full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana's defense against cold
+is complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room
+to room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been
+my fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting
+over the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while
+she sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with
+religion, baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino.
+In one of the public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the
+walls, intended to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea
+of the four seasons. There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization
+of Spring, Summer, and Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by
+a fine lady dressed in furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned
+foot-stool, and a scaldino in her lap! When we talk of being invaded in
+the north, we poetize the idea of defense by the figure of defending our
+hearthstones. Alas! _could_ we fight for our sacred _scaldini_?
+
+Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell hot pumpkins and pears,
+for they can unite pleasure and profit. There are some degrees of
+poverty below the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars and the
+wretcheder poor keep themselves warm, I think, by sultry recollections
+of summer, as Don Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remembrances,
+during one of his periods of fast. One mendicant whom I know, and who
+always sits upon the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe,
+as the season advances, in heating the marble beneath him by firm and
+unswerving adhesion, and establishes a reciprocity of warmth with it.
+I have no reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a moment
+during the whole winter; and indeed, it would be a vicious waste of
+comfort to do so.
+
+In the winter, the whole city _sniffs_, and if the Pipchin theory of the
+effect of sniffing upon the eternal interests of the soul be true,
+few people go to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly wondered if
+Desdemona, in _her_ time, sniffed, and found little comfort in the
+reflection that Shylock must have had a cold in his head. There is
+comparative warmth in the broad squares before the churches, but the
+narrow streets are bitter thorough-draughts, and fell influenza lies in
+wait for its prey in all those picturesque, seducing little courts of
+which I have spoken.
+
+It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twilight and airy height one
+finds so grateful in summer, that the sharpest malice of the winter
+is felt; and having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, I
+deferred the remaining seventy-five or eighty, together with the gallery
+of the Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have
+mitigated the severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination
+affected me, I thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the
+temples of Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge
+marbles, and their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their
+frescoed roofs and broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of
+Palladio's architecture was especially grievous to the sense in cold
+weather; and I warn the traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of
+Bellini to beware how he trusts himself in winter to the gusty, arctic
+magnificence of the church of the Redentore. But by all means the
+coldest church in the city is that of the Jesuits, which those who
+have seen it will remember for its famous marble drapery. This base,
+mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not art) is effected by
+inlaying the white marble of columns and pulpits and altars with
+a certain pattern of verd-antique. The workmanship is marvelously
+skillful, and the material costly, but it only gives the church the
+effect of being draped in damask linen; and even where the marble is
+carven in vast and heavy folds over a pulpit to simulate a curtain, or
+wrought in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent a carpet,
+it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a coldness, a harshness
+indescribably table-clothy. I think all this has tended to chill the
+soul of the sacristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan
+conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his temples quite incapable
+of thawing. In this dreary sanctuary is one of Titian's great paintings,
+The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly
+disposed as to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once)
+you turn involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on
+his gridiron amid all that frigidity.
+
+The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much
+severer than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less
+support in fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to claim that
+such weather as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen
+before. In fine, the winter climate of north Italy is really very harsh,
+and though the season is not so severe in Venice as in Milan, or even
+Florence, it is still so sharp as to make foreigners regret the generous
+fires and warmly-built houses of the north. There was snow but once
+during my first Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none
+at all; but the third, which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to
+considerable depth, and lay unmelted for many weeks in the shade. The
+lagoons were frozen for miles in every direction; and under our windows
+on the Grand Canal, great sheets of ice went up and down with the
+rising and the falling tide for nearly a whole month. The visible misery
+throughout the fireless city was great; and it was a problem I never
+could solve, whether people in-doors were greater sufferers from the
+cold than those who weathered the cruel winds sweeping the squares and
+the canals, and whistling through the streets of stone and brine. The
+boys had an unwonted season of sliding on the frozen lagoons, though
+a good deal persecuted by the police, who must have looked upon such a
+tremendous innovation as little better than revolution; and it was said
+that there were card-parties on the ice; but the only creatures which
+seemed really to enjoy the weather were the seagulls. These birds, which
+flock into the city in vast numbers at the first approach of cold,
+and, sailing up and down the canals between the palaces, bring to
+the dwellers in the city a full sense of mid-ocean forlornness and
+desolation, now rioted on the savage winds, with harsh cries, and
+danced upon the waves of the bitter brine, with a clamorous joy that had
+something eldritch and unearthly in it.
+
+A place so much given to gossip as Venice did not fail to produce many
+memorable incidents of the cold; but the most singular adventure was
+that of the old man employed at the Armenian Convent to bring milk from
+the island of San Lazzaro to the city. One night, shortly after the
+coldest weather set in, he lost his oar as he was returning to the
+island. The wind, which is particularly furious in that part of the
+lagoon, blew his boat away into the night, and the good brothers at the
+convent naturally gave up their milkman for lost. The winds and waters
+drifted him eight miles from the city into the northern lagoon, and
+there lodged his boat in the marshes, where it froze fast in the
+stiffening mud. The luckless occupant had nothing to eat or drink in his
+boat, where he remained five days and nights, exposed to the inclemency
+of cold many degrees below friendship in severity. He made continual
+signs of distress, but no boat came near enough to discover him. At
+last, when the whole marsh was frozen solid, he was taken off by some
+fishermen, and carried to the convent, where he remains in perfectly
+recovered health, and where no doubt he will be preserved alive many
+years in an atmosphere which renders dying a San Lazzaro a matter of
+no small difficulty. During the whole time of his imprisonment, he
+sustained life against hunger and cold by smoking. I suppose no one will
+be surprised to learn that he was rescued by the fishermen through the
+miraculous interposition of the Madonna--as any one might have seen by
+the votive picture hung up at her shrine on a bridge of the Riva degli
+Schiavoni, wherein the Virgin was represented breaking through the
+clouds in one corner of the sky, and unmistakably directing the
+operations of the fishermen.
+
+It is said that no such winter as that of 1863-4 has been known in
+Venice since the famous _Anno del Ghiaccio_ (Year of the Ice), which
+fell about the beginning of the last century. This year is celebrated in
+the local literature; the play which commemorates it always draws full
+houses at the people's theatre, Malibran; and the often-copied picture,
+by a painter of the time, representing Lustrissime and Lustrissimi in
+hoops and bag-wigs on the ice, never fails to block up the street before
+the shop-window in which it is exposed. The King of Denmark was then the
+guest of the Republic, and as the unprecedented cold defeated all the
+plans arranged for his diversion, the pleasure-loving government
+turned the cold itself to account, and made the ice occasion of novel
+brilliancy in its festivities. The duties on commerce between the city
+and the mainland were suspended for as long time as the lagoon should
+remain frozen, and the ice became a scene of the liveliest traffic, and
+was everywhere covered with sledges, bringing the produce of the country
+to the capital, and carrying away its stuffs in return. The Venetians
+of every class amused themselves in visiting this free mart, and the
+gentler and more delicate sex pressed eagerly forward to traverse
+with their feet a space hitherto passable only in gondolas. [Footnote:
+_Origine delle Feste Veneziane_, di Giustina Renier-Michiel] The lagoon
+remained frozen, and these pleasures lasted eighteen days, a period of
+cold unequaled till last winter. A popular song now declares that the
+present generation has known a winter quite as marvelous as that of the
+Year of the Ice, and celebrates the wonder of walking on the water:--
+
+    Che bell' affar!
+    Che patetico affar!
+    Che immenso affar!
+    Sora l'acqua camminar!
+
+But after all the disagreeable winter, which hardly commences before
+Christmas, and which ends about the middle of March, is but a small part
+of the glorious Venetian year; and even this ungracious season has a
+loveliness, at times, which it can have nowhere but in Venice. What
+summer-delight of other lands could match the beauty of the first
+Venetian snow-fall which I saw? It had snowed overnight, and in the
+morning when I woke it was still snowing. The flakes fell softly and
+vertically through the motionless air, and all the senses were full
+of languor and repose. It was rapture to lie still, and after a faint
+glimpse of the golden-winged angel on the bell-tower of St. Mark's,
+to give indolent eye solely to the contemplation of the roof opposite,
+where the snow lay half an inch deep upon the brown tiles. The
+little scene--a few square yards of roof, a chimney-pot, and a
+dormer-window--was all that the most covetous spirit could demand; and I
+lazily lorded it over that domain of pleasure, while the lingering mists
+of a dream of new-world events blent themselves with the luxurious humor
+of the moment and the calm of the snow-fall, and made my reverie one of
+the perfectest things in the world. When I was lost the deepest in it, I
+was inexpressibly touched and gratified by the appearance of a black
+cat at the dormer-window. In Venice, roofs commanding pleasant exposures
+seem to be chiefly devoted to the cultivation of this animal, and there
+are many cats in Venice. My black cat looked wonderingly upon the snow
+for a moment, and then ran across the roof. Nothing could have been
+better. Any creature less silent, or in point of movement less soothing
+to the eye than a cat, would have been torture of the spirit. As it
+was, this little piece of action contented me so well, that I left every
+thing else out of my reverie, and could only think how deliciously the
+cat harmonized with the snow-covered tiles, the chimney-pot, and the
+dormer-window. I began to long for her reappearance, but when she did
+come forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased to have the slightest
+interest in the matter, and experienced only the disgust of satiety. I
+had felt _ennui_--nothing remained but to get up and change my relations
+with the world.
+
+In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at
+once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked _facchini_;
+[Footnote: The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve
+long seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters
+and day-laborers.] and now in St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable
+shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as
+it engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the
+Piazza. But the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the
+descending flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary
+kind of effort in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only
+to renew the task. The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the
+folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon
+its summit. But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of
+St. Mark's Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting
+threads of the snow-fall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment
+around a structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its
+fantastic loveliness to be any thing but the creation of magic. The
+tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs
+of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as
+if just from the hand of the builder--or, better said, just from the
+brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of
+the mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious
+harmony into which the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy
+exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred
+times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting
+flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble like
+peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white;
+it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work, as if
+exulting in its beauty--beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish
+yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer
+of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless
+shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.
+
+Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the
+granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is,
+and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so mild
+and gentle he looked by the tender light of the storm. [Footnote: St.
+Theodore was the first patron of Venice, but he was deposed and St. Mark
+adopted, when the bones of the latter were brought from Alexandria. The
+Venetians seem to have felt some compunctions for this desertion of an
+early friend, and they have given St. Theodore a place on one of the
+granite pillars, while the other is surmounted by the Lion, representing
+St. Mark. _Fra Marco e Todaro_, is a Venetian proverb expressing the
+state of perplexity which we indicate by the figure of an ass between
+two bundles of hay.] The towers of the island churches loomed faint and
+far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships that
+lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas
+stole in and out of the opaque distance more noiselessly and dreamily
+than ever; and a silence, almost palpable, lay upon the mutest city in
+the world.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+COMINCIA FAR CALDO.
+
+
+The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and from this beats her
+life in every direction through an intricate system of streets and
+canals that bring it back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest
+uneasiness had attended the frequency with which I lost my way in the
+city at first, there would always have been this comfort: that the place
+was very small in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I must
+reach the Piazza sooner or later. There is a crowd constantly tending to
+and from it, and you have but to take this tide, and be drifted to St.
+Mark's--or to the Rialto Bridge, whence it is directly accessible.
+
+Of all the open spaces in the city, that before the Church of St. Mark
+alone bears the name of Piazza, and the rest are called merely _campi_,
+or fields. But if the company of the noblest architecture can give
+honor, the Piazza San Marco merits its distinction, not in Venice only,
+but in the whole world; for I fancy that no other place in the world
+is set in such goodly bounds. Its westward length is terminated by
+the Imperial Palace; its lateral borders are formed by lines of palace
+called the New Procuratie on the right, and the Old Procuratie on the
+left; [Footnote: In Republican days the palaces of the _Procuratori di
+San Marco_.] and the Church of St. Mark fills up almost its whole width
+upon the east, leaving space enough, however, for a glimpse of the
+Gothic perfection of the Ducal Palace. The place then opens southward
+with the name of Piazzetta, between the eastern facade of the Ducal
+Palace and the classic front of the Libreria Vecchia, and expands and
+ends at last on the mole, where stand the pillars of St. Mark and St.
+Theodore; and then this mole, passing the southern facade of the Doge's
+Palace, stretches away to the Public Gardens at the eastern extremity
+of the city, over half a score of bridges, between lines of houses and
+shipping--stone and wooden walls--in the long, crescent-shaped quay
+called Riva degli Schiavoni. Looking northward up the Piazzetta from the
+Molo, the vision traverses the eastern breadth of the Piazza, and rests
+upon the Clock Tower, gleaming with blue and gold, on which the bronze
+Giants beat the hours; or it climbs the great mass of the Campanile
+San Marco, standing apart from the church at the corner of the New
+Procuratie, and rising four hundred feet toward the sky--the sky where
+the Venetian might well place his heaven, as the Moors bounded Paradise
+in the celestial expanse that roofed Granada.
+
+My first lodging was but a step out of the Piazza, and this vicinity
+brought me early into familiar acquaintance with its beauty. But I
+never, during three years, passed through it in my daily walks, without
+feeling as freshly as at first the greatness of this beauty. The church,
+which the mighty bell-tower and the lofty height of the palace-lines
+make to look low, is in nowise humbled by the contrast, but is like
+a queen enthroned amid upright reverence. The religious sentiment is
+deeply appealed to, I think, in the interior of St. Mark's; but if its
+interior is heaven's, its exterior, like a good man's daily life, is
+earth's; and it is this winning loveliness of earth that first attracts
+you to it, and when you emerge from its portals, you enter upon
+spaces of such sunny length and breadth, set round with such exquisite
+architecture, that it makes you glad to be living in this world. Before
+you expands the great Piazza, peopled with its various life; on your
+left, between the Pillars of the Piazzetta, swims the blue lagoon, and
+overhead climb the arches, one above another, in excesses of fantastic
+grace.
+
+Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to have brought hither and
+made part of his Piazza, that it might remain forever the city's supreme
+grace; and so, though there are public gardens and several pleasant
+walks in the city, the great resort in summer and winter, by day and by
+night, is the Piazza San Marco. Its ground-level, under the Procuratie,
+is belted with a glittering line of shops and caffe, the most tasteful
+and brilliant in the world, and the arcades that pass round three of its
+sides are filled with loungers and shoppers, even when there is music
+by the Austrian bands; for, as we have seen, the purest patriot may then
+walk under the Procuratie, without stain to the principles which would
+be hopelessly blackened if he set foot in the Piazza. The absence of
+dust and noisy hoofs and wheels tempts social life out of doors in
+Venice more than in any other Italian city, though the tendency to this
+sort of expansion is common throughout Italy. Beginning with the warm
+days of early May, and continuing till the _villeggiatura_ (the period
+spent at the country seat) interrupts it late in September, all Venice
+goes by a single impulse of _dolce far niente_, and sits gossiping at
+the doors of the innumerable caffe on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the
+Piazza San Marco, and in the different squares in every part of the
+city. But, of course, the most brilliant scene of this kind is in St.
+Mark's Place, which has a night-time glory indescribable, won from
+the light of uncounted lamps upon its architectural groups. The superb
+Imperial Palace--the sculptured, arcaded, and pillared Procuratie--the
+Byzantine magic and splendor of the church--will it all be there when
+you come again to-morrow night? The unfathomable heaven above seems part
+of the place, for I think it is never so tenderly blue over any other
+spot of earth. And when the sky is blurred with clouds, shall not the
+Piazza vanish with the azure?--People, I say, come to drink coffee, and
+eat ices here in the summer evenings, and then, what with the promenades
+in the arcades and in the Piazza, the music, the sound of feet, and the
+hum of voices, unbroken by the ruder uproar of cities where there are
+horses and wheels--the effect is that of a large evening party, and in
+this aspect the Piazza, is like a vast drawing-room.
+
+I liked well to see that strange life, which even the stout,
+dead-in-earnest little Bohemian musicians, piping in the centre of the
+Piazza, could not altogether substantialize, and which constantly took
+immateriality from the loveliness of its environment. In the winter the
+scene was the most purely Venetian, and in my first winter, when I had
+abandoned all thought of churches till spring, I settled down to steady
+habits of idleness and coffee, and contemplated the life of the Piazza.
+
+By all odds, the loungers at Florian's were the most interesting,
+because they were the most various. People of all shades of politics met
+in the dainty little saloons, though there were shades of division
+even there, and they did not mingle. The Italians carefully assorted
+themselves in a room furnished with green velvet, and the Austrians and
+the Austriacanti frequented a red-velvet room. They were curious to look
+at, those tranquil, indolent, Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon
+relish for them. They seldom spoke together, and when they did speak,
+they burst from silence into tumultuous controversy, and then lapsed
+again into perfect silence. The elder among them sat with their hands
+carefully folded on the heads of their sticks, gazing upon the ground,
+or else buried themselves in the perusal of the French journals. The
+younger stood a good deal about the doorways, and now and then passed
+a gentle, gentle jest with the elegant waiters in black coats and white
+cravats, who hurried to and fro with the orders, and called them out in
+strident tones to the accountant at his little table; or sometimes these
+young idlers make a journey to the room devoted to ladies and forbidden
+to smokers, looked long and deliberately in upon its loveliness, and
+then returned to the bosom of their taciturn companions. By chance I
+found them playing chess, but very rarely. They were all well-dressed,
+handsome men, with beards carefully cut, brilliant hats and boots, and
+conspicuously clean linen. I used to wonder who they were, to what order
+of society they belonged, and whether they, like my worthless self, had
+never any thing else but lounging at Florian's to do; but I really know
+none of these things to this day. Some men in Venice spend their noble,
+useful lives in this way, and it was the proud reply of a Venetian
+father, when asked of what profession his son was, "_E in Piazza!_"
+That was, he bore a cane, wore light gloves, and stared from Florian's
+windows at the ladies who went by.
+
+At the Caffe Quadri, immediately across the Piazza, there was a scene
+of equal hopefulness. But there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and
+the idling was carried on with a great noise of conversation in
+Austrian-German. Heaven knows what it was all about, but I presume the
+talk was upon topics of mutual improvement, calculated to advance the
+interests of self-government and mankind. These officers were very
+comely, intelligent-looking people with the most good-natured faces.
+They came and went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel
+scabbards against the tables, or rising and straddling off with their
+long swords kicking against their legs. They are the most stylish
+soldiers in the world, and one has no notion how ill they can dress when
+left to themselves, till one sees them in civil clothes.
+
+Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the Imperial Palace is called),
+under the Procuratie Vecchie, is the Caffe Specchi, frequented only by
+young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those who go to Florian's.
+Across from this caffe is that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to
+chiefly by non-commissioned officers, and civilian officials of lower
+grade. You know the latter, at a glance, by their beard, which in Venice
+is an index to every man's politics: no Austriacante wears the imperial,
+no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caffe Suttil, rather Austrian,
+and frequented by Italian _codini_, or old fogies, in politics: gray old
+fellows, who caress their sticks with more constant zeal than even the
+elders at Florian's. Quite at the other end of the Procuratie Nuove is
+the Caffe of the Greeks, a nation which I have commonly seen represented
+there by two or three Albanians with an Albanian boy, who, being dressed
+exactly like his father, curiously impressed me, as if he were the young
+of some Oriental animal--say a boy-elephant or infant camel.
+
+I hope that the reader adds to this sketch, even in the winter time,
+occasional tourists under the Procuratie, at the caffe, and in the
+shops, where the shop-keepers are devouring them with the keenness of
+an appetite unsated by the hordes of summer visitors. I hope that the
+reader also groups me fishermen, gondoliers, beggars, and loutish boys
+about the base of St. Mark's, and at the feet of the three flag-staffs
+before the church; that he passes me a slatternly woman and a frowzy
+girl or two through the Piazza occasionally; and that he calls down the
+flocks of pigeons hovering near. I fancy the latter half ashamed to
+show themselves, as being aware that they are a great humbug, and
+unrightfully in the guide-books.
+
+Meantime, while I sit at Florian's, sharing and studying the universal
+worthlessness about me, the brief winter passes, and the spring of the
+south--so unlike the ardent season of the north, where it burns full
+summer before the snows are dried upon the fields--descends upon the
+city and the sea. But except in the little gardens of the palaces, and
+where here and there a fig-tree lifts its head to peer over a lofty
+stone wall, the spring finds no response of swelling bud and unfolding
+leaf, and it is human nature alone which welcomes it. Perhaps it is for
+this reason that the welcome is more visible in Venice than elsewhere,
+and that here, where the effect of the season is narrowed and limited
+to men's hearts, the joy it brings is all the keener and deeper. It is
+certain at least that the rapture is more demonstrative. The city at all
+times voiceful, seems to burst into song with the advent of these
+golden days and silver nights. Bands of young men go singing through the
+moonlit streets, and the Grand Canal reechoes the music of the parties
+of young girls as they drift along in the scarcely moving boats,
+and sing the glories of the lagoons and the loves of fishermen and
+gondoliers. In the Public Gardens they walk and sing; and wandering
+minstrels come forth before the caffe, and it is hard to get beyond the
+tinkling of guitars and the scraping of fiddles. It is as if the city
+had put off its winter humor with its winter dress; and as Venice in
+winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the world, so in spring
+it is the fullest of joy and light. There is a pleasant bustle in the
+streets, a ceaseless clatter of feet over the stones of the squares, and
+a constant movement of boats upon the canals.
+
+We say, in a cheap and careless way, that the southern peoples have no
+_homes_. But this is true only in a restricted sense, for the Italian,
+and the Venetian especially, makes the whole city his home in pleasant
+weather. No one remains under a roof who can help it; and now, as I said
+before, the fascinating out-door life begins. All day long the people
+sit and drink coffee and eat ices and gossip together before the caffe,
+and the soft midnight sees the same diligent idlers in their places. The
+promenade is at all seasons the favorite Italian amusement; it has its
+rigidly fixed hours, and its limits are also fixed: but now, in spring,
+even the promenade is a little lawless, and the crowds upon the Riva
+sometimes walk as far as the Public Gardens, and throng all the wider
+avenues and the Piazza; while young Venice comes to take the sun at St.
+Mark's in the arms of its high-breasted nurses,--mighty country-women,
+who, in their bright costumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses
+of gold and silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high,
+free-stepping movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some
+elder race of barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had
+passed away from our puny, dull-clad times.
+
+    "_E la stagion che ognuno s'innamora;_"
+
+and now young girls steal to their balconies, and linger there for
+hours, subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and
+looking up at them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the
+Venetian housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their
+heads and gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers,
+filling their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their
+work. Every street down which you look is likewise vocal with gossip;
+and if the picturesque projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys,
+of which the vista is full, hide the heads of the gossipers, be sure
+there is a face looking out of every window for all that, and the
+social, expansive presence of the season is felt there.
+
+The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish the spring upon
+themselves unsparingly. They come forth from their dark dens in
+crumbling palaces and damp basements, and live in the sunlight and the
+welcome air. They work, they eat, they sleep out of doors. Mothers of
+families sit about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down
+with other slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while
+their raven-haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the
+covert insects that haunt the tangles of the children's locks. Within
+doors shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases
+talking for an instant.
+
+Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near
+the Piazza, to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the
+busiest street in Venice passes, from St. Mark's to the Rialto Bridge.
+It is one of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest,
+and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms
+early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a
+cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke, and
+the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society.
+
+Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.
+Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the
+burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's
+shop, a mercer's and draper's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop,
+a caffe more or less brilliant, a green-grocer's and fruiterer's, a
+family grocery--nay, there is also a second-hand merchant's shop where
+you buy and sell every kind of worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of
+course there is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly
+a wood-carver's and gilder's, while without a barber's shop no campo
+could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and
+political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle
+and disturbance, San Bartolomeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with
+the bargains of the Rialto market.
+
+Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamor for the absence of
+quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an
+almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper
+of hair-pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils.
+Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays
+of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back
+and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who
+advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of
+toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples
+of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets
+of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the
+crowd;--these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and
+friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolomeo.
+
+Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and I spent much time in
+the study of the vociferous life under my windows, trying to make out
+the meaning of the different cries, and to trace them back to their
+sources. There was one which puzzled me for a long time--a sharp,
+pealing cry that ended in a wail of angry despair, and, rising high
+above all other sounds, impressed the spirit like the cry of that bird
+in the tropic forests which the terrified Spaniards called the _alma
+perdida_. After many days of listening and trembling, I found that it
+proceeded from a wretched, sun-burnt girl, who carried about some
+dozens of knotty pears, and whose hair hung disheveled round her eyes,
+bloodshot with the strain of her incessant shrieks.
+
+In San Bartolomeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above
+and shops below. The ground-floor is devoted to the small commerce of
+various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied
+by tradesmen's families; and on the third or fourth floor is the
+_appartamento signorile_. From the balconies of these stories hung the
+cages of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots,
+which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the
+crowd. All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the
+casements was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite
+was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By
+all odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant
+serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief,
+and a bright-colored gown, and wearing long dangling ear-rings of
+yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over
+the balcony-rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made
+love at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in
+the crowd. On another balcony, a lady sat and knitted with crimson yarn;
+and at the window of still another house, a damsel now looked out
+upon the square, and now gave a glance into the room, in the evident
+direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbors have the amiable custom of
+studying one another's features through opera-glasses; but I could not
+persuade myself to use this means of learning the mirror's response to
+the damsel's constant "Fair or not?" being a believer in every woman's
+right to look well a little way off. I shunned whatever trifling
+temptation there was in the case, and turned again to the campo
+beneath--to the placid dandies about the door of the caffe; to the tide
+of passers from the Merceria; the smooth-shaven Venetians of other days,
+and the bearded Venetians of these; the dark-eyed, white-faced Venetian
+girls, hooped in cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly
+clad, and moving with southern grace; the files of heavily burdened
+soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily about with their swords
+at their sides, and in their spotless Austrian uniforms.
+
+As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat increases, the expansive
+delight with which the city hails its coming passes into a tranquiler
+humor, as if the joy of the beautiful season had sunk too deeply into
+the city's heart for utterance. I, too, felt this longing for quiet,
+and as San Bartolomeo continued untouched by it, and all day roared
+and thundered under my windows, and all night long gave itself up to
+sleepless youths who there melodiously bayed the moon in chorus, I was
+obliged to abandon San Bartolomeo, and seek calmer quarters where I
+might enjoy the last luxurious sensations of the spring-time in peace.
+
+Now, with the city's lapse into this tranquiler humor, the promenades
+cease. The facchino gives all his leisure to sleeping in the sun; and
+in the mellow afternoons there is scarcely a space of six feet square on
+the Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its brown-cloaked peasant,
+basking face-downward in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are
+by right the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in
+their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated
+by the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamors
+at the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard
+of _valets de place_. Even the play of the children ceases, except in
+the Public Gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games,
+and sport as noiselessly as the lizards that slide from shadow to shadow
+and glitter in the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses
+you,--the stranger in it,--not with sadness, not with melancholy, but
+with a deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference
+to all purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on
+men's tongues, behold! that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise
+would strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a
+wild and frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her
+inmost heart, and you learn her secrets--arcana unintelligible to you in
+the new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win
+new color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once
+charmed away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your
+motion. Now, at last, you know _why_
+
+    "It was an Abyssinian maid"
+
+who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu? It is the land in which you
+were born!
+
+The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail
+faints into the white distance; the gondola slides athwart the sheeted
+silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes
+at his post.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+OPERA AND THEATRES.
+
+
+With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the
+existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The
+Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private
+persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were
+intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor
+Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly
+not so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and
+tasteful theatre. The best opera was formerly given in it, and now that
+it is closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. The Italians seldom
+go to it, and as there is not a sufficient number of foreign residents
+to support it in good style, the opera commonly conforms to the
+character of the theatre San Benedetto, in which it is given, and is
+second-rate. It is nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of
+several thousand florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this
+account, of supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in
+the little German cities. A box does not cost a great deal; but as the
+theatre is carried on in Italy by two different managements,--one of
+which receives the money for the boxes and seats, and the other the fee
+of admission to the theatre,--there is always the demand of the latter
+to be satisfied with nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before
+you can reach your place. The pit is fitted up with seats, of course,
+but you do not sit down there without paying. So, most Italians (who
+if they go at all go without ladies) and the poorer sort of government
+officials stand; the orchestra seats are reserved for the officers of
+the garrison. The first row of boxes, which is on a level with the
+heads of people in the pit, is well enough, but rank and fashion take a
+loftier flight, and sit in the second tier.
+
+You look about in vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which
+once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety,--the visits from box to
+box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations.
+The people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the
+beauty is the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter
+being the fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the
+opera, some of the Venetian ladies yielded to it, but went plainly
+dressed, and sat far back in boxes of the third tier, and when they
+issued forth after the opera were veiled beyond recognition. The
+audience usually takes its enjoyment quietly; hissing now and then for
+silence in the house, and clapping hands for applause, without calling
+_bravo_,--an Italian custom which I have noted to be chiefly habitual
+with foreigners: with Germans, for instance; who spell it with a _p_ and
+_f_.
+
+I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must seek it somewhere out
+of Italy,--at London, or Paris, or New York,--though possibly it might
+be chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in Naples. The cause
+of the decay of the musical art in Venice must be looked for among the
+events which seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing; certainly
+it cannot be discerned in any indifference of the people to music. The
+_dimostrazione_ keeps the better class of citizens from the opera,
+but the passion for it still exists in every order; and God's gift of
+beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race by any Situation. You
+hear the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as
+our own colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has
+an inborn sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the
+cultivated tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth--
+
+    "That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole."
+
+In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that
+theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now
+an imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her
+stages, and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so
+famous, have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular
+in Venice as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the
+care of the state for the drama existed from the first. The government,
+which always piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as
+the theatre advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the
+Old or New Testament, began about the close of the century to protect
+and encourage the instruction of music in the different foundling
+hospitals and public refuges in the city. The young girls in these
+institutions were taught to play on instruments, and to sing,--at first
+for the alleviation of their own dull and solitary life, and afterward
+for the delight of the public. In the merry days that passed just before
+the fall of the Republic, the Latin oratorios which they performed in
+the churches attached to the hospitals were among the most fashionable
+diversions in Venice. The singers were instructed by the best masters
+of the time; and at the close of the last century, the conservatories
+of the Incurables, the Foundlings, and the Mendicants were famous
+throughout Europe for their dramatic concerts, and for those pupils who
+found the transition from sacred to profane opera natural and easy.
+
+With increasing knowledge of the language, I learned to enjoy best the
+unmusical theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It
+is hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen
+excellent acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian
+comedy, which is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of
+Goldoni--compositions deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where
+alone their admirable fidelity of drawing and coloring can be perfectly
+appreciated. The best comedy is usually given to the educated classes at
+the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a bloodier and louder drama is offered
+to the populace at Teatro Malibran, where on a Sunday night you may
+see the plebeian life of the city in one of its most entertaining and
+characteristic phases. The sparings of the whole week which have not
+been laid out for chances in the lottery, are spent for this evening's
+amusement; and in the vast pit you see, besides the families of
+comfortable artisans who can evidently afford it, a multitude of the
+ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low rate of eight or ten soldi
+[Footnote: The soldo is the hundredth part of the Austrian florin, which
+is worth about forty-nine cents of American money.] apiece, it is hard
+to account for. It is very peremptory, this audience, in its likes and
+dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great vehemence. It likes best
+the sanguinary local spectacular drama; it cheers and cheers again
+every allusion to Venice; and when the curtain rises on some well-known
+Venetian scene, it has out the scene-painter by name three times--which
+is all the police permits. The auditors wear their hats in the pit, but
+deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, and raise stormy and
+wrathful cries of _cappello!_ till these uncover. Between acts, they
+indulge in excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go to the
+extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are hawked about the theatre,
+and sold for two soldi the stick,--with the tooth-pick on which they are
+spitted thrown into the bargain.
+
+The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday night, but the one
+entertainment which never fails of drawing and delighting full houses is
+the theatre of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like best
+to go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of
+these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a
+frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude
+delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and
+traditionary tricks of the stage.
+
+The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street
+opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and
+simplest appointments. There are no boxes--the whole theatre is scarcely
+larger than a stage-box--and you pay ten soldi to go into the pit, where
+you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have paid fifteen
+for places in the dress-circle above. The stage is very small, and the
+scenery a kind of coarse miniature painting. But it is very complete,
+and every thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and to
+produce an illusion of magnitude in their figures. They are very
+artlessly introduced, and are maneuvered, according to the exigencies of
+the scene, by means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs
+to the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all
+the vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to
+mention a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral.
+
+The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated and ambitious tone
+than that of the Burattini, which exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse
+assassinations in little punch-shows on the Riva, and in the larger
+squares; but the standard characters are nearly the same with both, and
+are all descended from the _commedia a braccio_ [Footnote: Comedy by the
+yard.] which flourished on the Italian stage before the time of Goldoni.
+And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have great and
+peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing the
+most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the
+Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have
+such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only
+remember to have made out one of their comedies,--a play in which an
+ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested
+for lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other
+was raging in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic
+audiences; but for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini
+appears to be a sardonic farce, in which the chief character--a puppet
+ten inches high, with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean
+good-nature and wickedness--deludes other and weak-minded puppets into
+trusting him, and then beats them with a club upon the back of the head
+until they die. The murders of this infamous creature, which are always
+executed in a spirit of jocose _sang-froid_, and accompanied by humorous
+remarks, are received with the keenest relish by the spectators and,
+indeed, the action is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit
+of the Italian race seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they
+perform their parts with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is
+wonderful. I have witnessed death agonies on these little stages which
+the great American tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could
+not surpass in degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the
+greater credit because they are agitated by the legs from below the
+scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette
+Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and
+comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size;
+then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then
+Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat
+sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced,
+statuesque, with the drapery of their cloaks thrown over their
+shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick black hair; old women,
+all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with hooded cloaks of coarse
+brown; then boys--and boys. They all enjoy the spectacle with approval,
+and take the drama _au grand serieux_, uttering none of the gibes which
+sometimes attend efforts to please in our own country. Even when the
+hat, or other instrument of extortion, is passed round, and they give
+nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of fury and disappointment,
+calls out, "Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to you!" and closes the
+theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse. Though, indeed, _fioi
+de cani_ means no great reproach in Venetian parlance; and parents of
+the lower classes caressingly address their children in these terms.
+Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak upon him the deadliest
+insult which can be put into words.
+
+In the _commedia a braccio_, before mentioned as the inheritance of the
+Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline of
+the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any
+people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must
+have been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till
+the middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris
+he furnished his Italian players with the _commedia a braccio_. I
+have heard some very passable _gags_ at the Marionette, but the real
+_commedia a braccio_ no longer exists, and its familiar and invariable
+characters perform written plays.
+
+Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of _dramatis personae_,
+and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice. He is
+always, like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always a
+merchant, Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands.
+He is a dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of
+black knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black
+coat, and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in
+all his characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a
+glutton and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins
+the heart. To tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he
+has no part and I have learned to think a certain trick of his--lifting
+his leg rigidly to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying,
+"Capisse la?" or "Sa la?" (You understand? You know?)--one of the finest
+things in the world.
+
+In nearly all of Goldoni's Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote
+in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa,--Arlecchino, il
+Dottore. Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first
+puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni's witty
+management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete _commedia
+a braccio_, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by
+immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and
+commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son,
+figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The
+second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the
+University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a
+sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and
+foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley--a gibe at the poverty
+of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and
+cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion in
+Italy.
+
+The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are
+much shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace,
+however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce,
+as you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes
+for any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed
+to have been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the
+Sleeping King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna,
+with Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated
+several nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can
+fancy people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying
+it with the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward
+realizing to yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will
+also suppose great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own
+part, I find few things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never
+tired of their bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their
+irresistible touches of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the
+relenting parent (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while
+Arlecchino, as the large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of
+the erring son when the prodigal was about to be cast into the street,
+looked on and rubbed his hands with amiable satisfaction and the
+conventional delight in benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed
+the base terrors of Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the
+keen spiritual agonies of the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of
+Sebastopol. Not many passages of real life have affected me as deeply
+as the atrocious behavior of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when
+he responds to the expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,--a
+puppet of shaky and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:
+
+"Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she
+is thy brother's wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the
+sacred name of virtue." (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and
+gesticulations toward the pit.)
+
+To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh,
+"Honor?--I know it not! Virtue?--I detest it!" and attempting to
+pass the knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his
+sister-in-law, he yields to the natural infirmities of rags and
+pasteboard, and topples against him.
+
+Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous.
+You discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and
+reading his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets
+when they cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly
+noises in the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the
+dark corners of the room, and to look under the bed. When at last
+the spectral head appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a
+miserable cry under the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically
+the scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a
+spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible.
+
+The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is
+extremely funny. The _prima ballerina_ has all the difficult grace and
+far-fetched arts of the _prima ballerina_ of flesh and blood; and when
+the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is humanly
+delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike _empressement_.
+I have no doubt the _corps de ballet_ have their private jealousies
+and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all
+positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and
+legs. The puppets are great in _pirouette_ and _pas seul_; but I think
+the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall of
+Carthage, is their strong point.
+
+The people who witness their performances are of all ages and
+conditions--I remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some
+German countesses in the pit--but the greater number of spectators are
+young men of the middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and
+their wives and children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place
+for lovers in humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama
+going on between the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of
+the Venetian populace take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and
+Facanapa of the stage. I one day discovered a letter at the bottom of
+the Canal of the Giudecca, to which watery resting-place some recreant,
+addressed as "Caro Antonio," had consigned it; and from this letter I
+came to know certainly of at least one love affair at the Marionette.
+"Caro Antonio" was humbly besought, "if his heart still felt the force
+of love," to meet the writer (who softly reproached him with neglect) at
+the Marionette the night of date, at six o'clock; and I would not like
+to believe he could resist so tender a prayer, though perhaps it fell
+out so. I fished up through the lucent water this despairing little
+epistle,--it was full of womanly sweetness and bad spelling,--and dried
+away its briny tears on the blade of my oar. If ever I thought to
+keep it, with some vague purpose of offering it to any particularly
+anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as to the probable writer--its
+unaccountable loss spared me the delicate office. Still, however, when
+I go to see the puppets, it is with an interest divided between the
+drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence of expectation somewhere
+among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who wear such immense hoops
+under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at one side, and call
+each other "Cio!" Where art thou, O fickle and cruel, yet ever dear
+Antonio? All unconscious, I think,--gallantly posed against the wall,
+thy slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long cigar, the arms
+of thy velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy ear-rings softly
+twinkling in the light.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.
+
+
+When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men
+on the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the
+restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to
+conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while
+the restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy,
+for every bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the
+restaurants are very dirty--if you wipe your plate and glass carefully
+before using them, they need not stomach you; it is not because the
+rooms are cold--if you sit near the great vase of smoldering embers in
+the centre of each room you may suffocate in comparative comfort; it is
+not because the prices are great--they are really very reasonable; it
+is not for any very tangible fault that I object to life at the
+restaurants, and yet I cannot think of its hopeless homelessness without
+rebellion against the whole system it implies, as something unnatural
+and insufferable.
+
+But before we come to look closely at this aspect of Italian
+civilization, it is better to look first at a very noticeable trait of
+Italian character,--temperance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer
+classes, one observes without great surprise how slenderly they fare,
+and how with a great habit of talking of meat and drink, the verb
+_mangiare_ remains in fact for the most part inactive with them. But
+it is only just to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be not
+wholly the result of necessity, for it prevails with other classes which
+could well afford the opposite vice. Meat and drink do not form the
+substance of conviviality with Venetians, as with the Germans and the
+English, and in degree with ourselves; and I have often noticed on the
+Mondays-at-the-Gardens, and other social festivals of the people,
+how the crowd amused itself with any thing--music, dancing, walking,
+talking--any thing but the great northern pastime of gluttony. Knowing
+the life of the place, I make quite sure that Venetian gayety is on few
+occasions connected with repletion; and I am ashamed to confess that I
+have not always been able to repress a feeling of stupid scorn for the
+empty stomachs everywhere, which do not even ask to be filled, or, at
+least, do not insist upon it. The truth is, the North has a gloomy
+pride in gastronomic excess, which unfits her children to appreciate the
+cheerful prudence of the South.
+
+Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. They breakfast on
+a piece of bread with coffee and milk; supper is a little cup of black
+coffee, or an ice, taken at a caffe. The coffee, however, is repeated
+frequently throughout the day, and in the summertime fruit is eaten, but
+eaten sparingly, like everything else. As to the nature of the dinner,
+it of course varies somewhat according to the nature of the diner; but
+in most families of the middle class a dinner at home consists of a
+piece of boiled beef, a _minestra_ (a soup thickened with vegetables,
+tripe, and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the wine of the
+country. The failings of the repast among all classes lean to the
+side of simplicity, and the abstemious character of the Venetian finds
+sufficient comment in his familiar invitation to dinner: "_Venga a
+mangiar quattro risi con me_." (Come eat four grains of rice with me.)
+
+But invitations to dinner have never formed a prime element of
+hospitality in Venice. Goldoni notices this fact in his memoirs, and
+speaking of the city in the early half of the last century, he says
+that the number and excellence of the eating-houses in the city made
+invitations to dinner at private houses rare, and superfluous among the
+courtesies offered to strangers.
+
+The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place his house at your
+disposition, and, having extended this splendid invitation, consider the
+duties of hospitality fulfilled; he does not appear to think you want to
+make use of his house for social purposes, preferring himself the caffe,
+and finding home and comfort there, rather than under his own roof.
+"What caffe do you frequent? Ah! so do I. We shall meet often there."
+This is frequently your new acquaintance's promise of friendship. And
+one may even learn to like the social footing on which people meet at
+the caffe, as well as that of the parlor or drawing-room. I could not
+help thinking one evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some
+pleasant Paduans in one of the magnificent saloons of the Caffe
+Pedrocchi, that I should like to go there for society, if I could always
+find it there, much better than to private houses. There is far greater
+ease and freedom, more elegance and luxury, and not the slightest weight
+of obligation laid upon you for the gratification your friend's company
+has given you. One has not to be a debtor in the sum of a friend's
+outlay for house, servants, refreshments, and the like. Nowhere in
+Europe is the senseless and wasteful American custom of _treating_
+known; and nothing could be more especially foreign to the frugal
+instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a party of friends at a
+caffe eat or drink, each one pays for what he takes, and pecuniarily,
+the enjoyment of the evening is uncostly or not, according as each
+prefers. Of course no one sits down in such a place without calling for
+something; but I have frequently seen people respond to this demand of
+custom by ordering a glass of water with anise, at the expense of two
+soldi. A cup of black coffee, for five soldi, secures a chair, a table,
+and as many journals as you like, for as long time as you like.
+
+I say, a stranger may learn to like the life of the caffe,--that of the
+restaurant never; though the habit of frequenting the restaurants, to
+which Goldoni somewhat vaingloriously refers, seems to have grown upon
+the Venetians with the lapse of time. The eating-houses are almost
+without number, and are of every degree, from the shop of the
+sausage-maker, who supplies gondoliers and facchini with bowls of
+_sguassetto_, to the Caffe Florian. They all have names which are not
+strange to European ears, but which ape sufficiently amusing to people
+who come from a land where nearly every public thing is named from
+some inspiration of patriotism or local pride. In Venice the principal
+restaurants are called The Steamboat, The Savage, The Little Horse, The
+Black Hat, and The Pictures; and I do not know that any one of them is
+more uncomfortable, uncleanly, or noisy than another, or that any one of
+them suffers from the fact that all are bad.
+
+You do not get breakfast at the restaurant for the reason, before
+stated, of the breakfast's unsubstantiality. The dining commences about
+three o'clock in the afternoon, and continues till nine o'clock, most
+people dining at five or six. As a rule the attendance is insufficient,
+and no guest is served until he has made a savage clapping on the
+tables, or clinking on his glass or plate. Then a hard-pushed waiter
+appears, and calls out, dramatically, "Behold me!" takes the order,
+shrieks it to the cook, and returning with the dinner, cries out again,
+more dramatically than ever, "Behold it ready!" and arrays it with a
+great flourish on the table. I have dined in an hotel at Niagara, to the
+music of a brass band; but I did not find that so utterly bewildering,
+so destructive of the individual savor of the dishes, and so conducive
+to absent-minded gluttony, as I at first found the constant rush and
+clamor of the waiters in the Venetian restaurants. The guests are,
+for the most part, patient and quiet enough, eating their minestra and
+boiled beef in such peace as the surrounding uproar permits them, and
+seldom making acquaintance with each other. It is a mistake, I think,
+to expect much talk from any people at dinner. The ingenious English
+tourists who visit the United States from time to time, find us silent
+over our meat, and I have noticed the like trait among people of divers
+races in Europe.
+
+As I have said, the greater part of the diners at the restaurants are
+single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill
+of the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals,
+is rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a
+drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,--no, not at evening
+parties,--and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the caffe and
+the restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the higher
+privileges of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once the
+most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the
+world. Our boarding-house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as
+it often is, seems to me infinitely better than the restaurant life
+of young Italy. It is creditable to Latin Europe that, with all this
+homelessness and domestic outlawry, its young men still preserve the
+gentleness of civilization.
+
+The families that share the exile of the eating-houses sometimes make
+together a feeble buzz of conversation, but the unfriendly spirit of
+the place seems soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent the
+restaurant for economy's sake. Fuel is costly, and the restaurant is
+cheap, and its cooking better than they could perhaps otherwise afford
+to have. Indeed, so cheap is the restaurant that actual experience
+proved the cost of a dinner there to be little more than the cost of
+the raw material in the market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the
+custom, which is common, of sending home to purchasers meals from the
+eating-houses.
+
+As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, the difference is not
+so noticeable in the prices of the same dishes, as in the substitution
+of cheaper varieties of food. At the best eating-houses, the Gallic
+traditions bear sway more or less, but in the poorer sort the cooking
+is done entirely by native artists, deriving their inspirations from
+the unsophisticated tastes of exclusively native diners. It is perhaps
+needless to say that they grow characteristic and picturesque as they
+grow dirty and cheap, until at last the cook-shop perfects the descent
+with a triumph of raciness and local coloring. The cook-shop in Venice
+opens upon you at almost every turn,--everywhere, in fact, but in the
+Piazza and the Merceria,--and looking in, you see its vast heaps of
+frying fish, and its huge caldrons of ever-boiling broth which smell
+to heaven with garlic and onions. In the seducing windows smoke golden
+mountains of _polenta_ (a thicker kind of mush or hasty-pudding, made
+of Indian meal, and universally eaten in North Italy), platters of crisp
+minnows, bowls of rice, roast poultry, dishes of snails and liver; and
+around the fascinating walls hang huge plates of bronzed earthenware
+for a lavish and a hospitable show, and for the representation of those
+scenes of Venetian story which are modeled upon them in bass-relief.
+Here I like to take my unknown friend--my scoundrel facchino or rascal
+gondolier--as he comes to buy his dinner, and bargains eloquently with
+the cook, who stands with a huge ladle in his hand capable of skimming
+mysterious things from vasty depths. I am spell-bound by the drama which
+ensues, and in which all the chords of the human heart are touched, from
+those that tremble at high tragedy, to those that are shaken by broad
+farce. When the diner has bought his dinner, and issues forth with
+his polenta in one hand, and his fried minnows or stewed snails in the
+other, my fancy fondly follows him to his gondola-station, where he eats
+it, and quarrels volubly with other gondoliers across the Grand Canal.
+
+A simpler and less ambitious sort of cook-shop abounds in the region
+of Rialto, where on market mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious
+business with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more limited
+resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, polenta, and
+_sguassetto_. The latter is a true _roba veneziana_, and is a
+loud-flavored broth, made of those desperate scraps of meat which
+are found impracticable even by the sausage-makers. Another, but more
+delicate dish, peculiar to the place, is the clotted blood of poultry,
+fried in slices with onions. A great number of the families of the poor
+breakfast at these shops very abundantly, for three soldi each person.
+
+In Venice every holiday has its appropriate viand. During carnival all
+the butter and cheese shop-windows are whitened with the snow of
+beaten cream--_panamontata_. At San Martino the bakers parade troops of
+gingerbread warriors. Later, for Christmas, comes _mandorlato_, which is
+a candy made of honey and enriched with almonds. In its season only can
+any of these devotional delicacies be had; but there is a species
+of cruller, fried in oil, which has all seasons for its own. On the
+occasion of every _festa_, and of every _sagra_ (which is the holiday of
+one parish only), stalls are erected in the squares for the cooking and
+sale of these crullers, between which and the religious sentiment proper
+to the whole year there seems to be some occult relation.
+
+In the winter, the whole city appears to abandon herself to cooking for
+the public, till she threatens to hopelessly disorder the law of demand
+and supply. There are, to begin with, the caffe and restaurants of
+every class. Then there are the cook-shops, and the poulterers', and the
+sausage-makers'. Then, also, every fruit-stall is misty and odorous with
+roast apples, boiled beans, cabbage, and potatoes. The chestnut-roasters
+infest every corner, and men women, and children cry roast pumpkin at
+every turn--till, at last, hunger seems an absurd and foolish vice,
+and the ubiquitous beggars, no less than the habitual abstemiousness of
+every class of the population, become the most perplexing and maddening
+of anomalies.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.
+
+
+I hope that it is by a not unnatural progress I pass from speaking of
+dinners and diners to the kindred subject of the present chapter, and I
+trust the reader will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this
+mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I
+had found most books of travel very slow to tell,--as much as possible
+of the everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our
+own; endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not only
+from the show-traits which strangers are most likely to see, but also
+from experience of such things as strangers are most likely to miss.
+
+The absolute want of society of my own nation in Venice would have
+thrown me upon study of the people for my amusement, even if I had cared
+to learn nothing of them; and the necessity of economical housekeeping
+would have caused me to live in the frugal Venetian fashion, even if
+I had been disposed to remain a foreigner in every thing. Of bachelor
+lodgings I had sufficient experience during my first year; but as most
+prudent travelers who visit the city for a week take lodgings, I need
+not describe my own particularly. You can tell the houses in which
+there are rooms to let, by the squares of white paper fastened to the
+window-shutters; and a casual glance as you pass through the streets,
+gives you the idea that the chief income of the place is derived from
+letting lodgings. Carpetless, dreary barracks the rooms usually are,
+with an uncompromising squareness of prints upon the wall, an appalling
+breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of wash-bowl, and an obduracy of
+sofa, never, never to be dissociated in their victim's mind from the
+idea of the villanous hard bread of Venice on which the gloomy landlady
+sustains her life with its immutable purposes of plunder. Flabbiness
+without softness is the tone of these discouraging chambers, which are
+dear or not according to the season and the situation. On the sunlit
+Riva during winter, and on the Grand Canal in summer, they are costly
+enough, but they are to be found on nearly all the squares at reasonable
+rates. On the narrow streets, where most native bachelors have them,
+they are absurdly cheap.
+
+As in nearly all places on the Continent, a house in Venice means a
+number of rooms, including a whole story in a building, or part of it
+only, but always completely separated from the story above and below, or
+from the other rooms on the same floor. Every house has its own entrance
+from the street, or by a common hall and stairway from the ground-floor,
+where are the cellars or store-rooms, while each kitchen is usually on
+a level with the other rooms of the house to which it belongs. The
+isolation of the different families is secured (as perfectly as where
+a building is solely appropriated to each), either by the exclusive
+possession of a streetdoor, [Footnote: Where the street entrance is in
+common, every floor has its bell, which being sounded, summons a servant
+to some upper window with the demand, most formidable to strangers,
+"_Chi xe?_" (Who is it?) But you do not answer with your name. You
+reply, "_Amici!_" (Friends!) on which comforting reassurance, the
+servant draws the latch of the door by a wire running upward to her
+hand, and permits you to enter and wander about at your leisure till you
+reach her secret height. This is, supposing the master or mistress of
+the house to be at home. If they are not in, she answers your "_Amici!_"
+with "_No ghe ne xe!_" (Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a
+string outside the window, and fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial
+domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give good-day to the people whom
+you meet in the common hall and on the common stairway, but you rarely
+know more of them than their names, and you certainly care nothing about
+them. The sociability of Europe, and more especially of Southern Europe,
+is shown abroad; under the domestic roof it dwindles and disappears. And
+indeed it is no wonder, considering how dispiriting and comfortless most
+of the houses are. The lower windows are heavily barred with iron; the
+wood-work is rude, even in many palaces in Venice; the rest is stone
+and stucco; the walls are not often papered, though they are sometimes
+painted: the most pleasing and inviting feature of the interior is the
+frescoed ceiling of the better rooms. The windows shut imperfectly,
+the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth while to observe that
+there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?); the doors lift slantingly from
+the floor, in which their lower hinges are imbedded; the stoves are of
+plaster, and consume fuel without just return of heat; the balconies
+alone are always charming, whether they hang high over the streets, or
+look out upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted ceilings, go far
+to make the houses habitable.
+
+It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly every thing else in
+Italy, that you pay about the same price for half the comfort that you
+get in America. In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on the
+Grand Canal; but here the rents are something absurdly high, when taken
+in consideration with the fact that the city is not made a place of
+residence by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial
+activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these
+circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment
+to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a
+tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with
+coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls
+like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all
+recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa is at present occupying
+these pleasant apartments, and you only gain admission to them after
+an embassy to procure her permission. Madama la Baronessa receives
+you courteously, and you pass through her rooms, which are a little
+in disorder, the Baronessa being on the point of removal. Madama la
+Baronessa's hoop-skirts prevail upon the floors; and at the side of the
+couch which her form lately pressed in slumber, you observe a French
+novel and a wasted candle in the society of a half-bottle of the wine of
+the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the whole suite, and through the
+open window comes a curious stench explained as the odor of Madama la
+Baronessa's guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that she has had their
+sty placed immediately under her window in the garden. It is this garden
+which has first taken your heart, with a glimpse caught through the
+great open door of the palace. It is disordered and wild, but so much
+the better; its firs are very thick and dark, and there are certain
+statues, fauns and nymphs, which weather stains and mosses have made
+much decenter than the sculptor intended. You think that for this
+garden's sake you could put up with the house, which must be very cheap.
+What is the price of the rooms? you ask of the smiling landlord. He
+answers, without winking, "If taken for several years, a thousand
+florins a year." At which you suppress the whistle of disdainful
+surprise, and say you think it will not suit. He calls your attention to
+the sun, which comes in at every side, which will roast you in summer,
+and will not (as he would have you think) warm you in winter. "But there
+is another apartment,"--through which you drag languidly. It is empty
+now, being last inhabited by an English Ledi,--and her stove-pipes
+went out of the windows, and blackened the shabby stucco front of the
+villanous old palace.
+
+In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the
+curiously frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which
+has a lady and gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony
+to balcony, on the facade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of
+leaping from the second to the third story, promises something. Promises
+something, but does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh,
+clean, and new, and cold and dark as a cellar. This house--that is to
+say, a floor of the house--you may have for four hundred florins a year;
+and then farewell the world and the light of the sun! for neither will
+ever find you in that back court, and you will never see any body but
+the neighboring laundresses and their children, who cannot enough admire
+the front of your house.
+
+_E via in seguito!_ This is of house keeping, not house-hunting. There
+are pleasant and habitable houses in Venice--but they are not cheap, as
+many of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, discomfort and ruin
+have their price, and the tumble-down is patched up and sold at rates
+astonishing to innocent strangers who come from countries in good
+repair, where the tumble-down is worth nothing. If I were not ashamed
+of the idle and foolish old superstitions in which I once believed
+concerning life in Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect
+very little for a great deal; and how a knowledge of many houses to let,
+made me more and more contented with the house we had taken.
+
+It was in one corner of an old palace on the Grand Canal, and the window
+of the little parlor looked down upon the water, which had made friends
+with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, golden smiles upon
+it when the sun shone. The dining-room was not so much favored by the
+water, but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling tree-tops,
+that rose to it from a tiny garden-ground, no bigger than a pocket
+handkerchief. Through this window, also, we could see the quaint,
+picturesque life of the canal; and from another room we could reach
+a little terrace above the water. We were not in the _appartamento
+signorile_, [Footnote: The noble floor--as the second or third story
+of the palace is called.]--that was above,--but we were more snugly
+quartered on the first story from the ground-floor, commonly used as a
+winter apartment in the old times. But it had been cut up, and suites of
+rooms had been broken according to the caprice of successive landlords,
+till it was not at all palatial any more. The upper stories still
+retained something of former grandeur, and had acquired with time more
+than former discomfort. We were not envious of them, for they were
+humbly let at a price less than we paid; though we could not quite
+repress a covetous yearning for their arched and carven windows, which
+we saw sometimes from the canal, above the tops of the garden trees.
+
+The gondoliers used always to point out our palace (which was called
+Casa Falier) as the house in which Marino Faliero was born; and for a
+long time we clung to the hope that it might be so. But however
+pleasant it was, we were forced, on reading up the subject a little, to
+relinquish our illusion, and accredit an old palace at Santi Apostoli
+with the distinction we would fain have claimed for ours. I am rather at
+a loss to explain how it made our lives in Casa Falier any pleasanter to
+think that a beheaded traitor had been born in it, but we relished the
+superstition amazingly as long as we could possibly believe in it. What
+went far to confirm us at first in our credulity was the residence, in
+another part of the palace, of the Canonico Falier, a lineal descendant
+of the unhappy doge. He was a very mild-faced old priest, with a white
+head, which he carried downcast, and crimson legs, on which he moved but
+feebly. He owned the rooms in which he lived, and the apartment in the
+front of the palace just above our own. The rest of the house belonged
+to another, for in Venice many of the palaces are divided up and sold
+among different purchasers, floor by floor, and sometimes even room by
+room.
+
+But the tenantry of Casa Falier was far more various than its
+proprietorship. Over our heads dwelt a Dalmatian family; below our feet
+a Frenchwoman; at our right, upon the same floor, an English gentleman;
+under him a French family; and over him the family of a marquis in exile
+from Modena. Except with Mr. ----, the Englishman, who was at once our
+friend and landlord (impossible as this may appear to those who know
+any thing of landlords in Italy), we had no acquaintance, beyond that of
+salutation, with the many nations represented in our house. We could not
+help holding the French people in some sort responsible for the
+invasion of Mexico; and, though opportunity offered for cultivating the
+acquaintance of the Modenese, we did not improve it.
+
+As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and bowed to them a great
+deal, and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving
+noise as of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal
+on their balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed
+seeing them admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling.
+The father of this family was a little man of a solemn and impressive
+demeanor, who had no other occupation but to walk up and down the city
+and view its monuments, for which purpose he one day informed us he had
+left his native place in Dalmatia, after forty years' study of Venetian
+history. He further told us that this was by no means worth the time
+given it; that whereas the streets of Venice were sepulchres in point
+of narrowness and obscurity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows
+of which you might see for miles uninterruptedly! This little gentleman
+wore a black hat, in the last vivid polish of respectability, and I
+think fortune was not his friend. The hat was too large for him, as the
+hats of Italians always are; it came down to his eyes, and he carried a
+cane. Every evening he marched solemnly at the head of a procession of
+his handsome young children, who went to hear the military music in St.
+Mark's Square.
+
+The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians--we never knew their
+names--gave access also to a house in the story above them, which
+belonged to some mysterious person described on his door-plate as "Co.
+Prata." I think we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance
+some members of his family when they came back from their summer in the
+country to spend the winter in the city. Prata's "Co.," we gradually
+learnt, meant "Conte," and the little counts and countesses, his
+children, immediately on their arrival took an active part in the
+exercises of the Dalmatian cavalry. Later in the fall, certain of the
+count's vassals came to the _riva_ [Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs
+which descend to the water before palace-doors and at the ends of
+streets.] in one of the great boats of the Po, with a load of brush and
+corncobs for fuel--and this is all we ever knew of our neighbors on the
+fourth floor. As long as he remained "Co." we yearned to know who and
+what he was; being interpreted as Conte Prata, he ceased to interest us.
+
+Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little
+people, just married, came to live in Venice.
+
+They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence,
+tempering the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.
+
+The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with
+it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and "This is my wife, the
+new mistress," said the young _Paron_ [Footnote: _Padrone_ in Italian.
+A salutation with Venetian friends, and the title by which Venetian
+servants always designate their employers.] with the bashful pride
+proper to the time and place. Giovanna glowed welcome, and said, with
+adventurous politeness, she was very glad of it.
+
+"_Serva sua!_"
+
+The _Parona_, not knowing Italian, laughed in English.
+
+So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting upon the great truth that
+handsome is that handsome does, began at once to make herself a thing of
+beauty.
+
+As a measure of convenience and of deference to her feelings, we
+immediately resolved to call her G., merely, when speaking of her
+in English, instead of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with
+conjecture concerning what was said of her. And as G. thus became the
+centre around which our domestic life revolved, she must be somewhat
+particularly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. I suppose
+that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances, this would
+have been much like keeping play-house anywhere; in Venice it had, but
+for the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious property of unreality
+and impermanency. It is sufficiently bad to live in a rented house; in
+a house which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till your life
+takes root, and Home blossoms up in the alien place. For a great while
+we regarded our house merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were slow
+to form any relations which could take from our residence its temporary
+character. Had we but thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker,
+and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish ourselves at once;
+but we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us
+to our fellow-creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by housekeepers
+on a scale surprisingly small to one accustomed to wholesale American
+ways, and G., having the purse, made our little purchases in cash,
+never buying more than enough for one meal at a time. Every morning,
+the fruits and vegetables are distributed from the great market at the
+Rialto among a hundred greengrocers' stalls in all parts of the city;
+bread (which is never made at home) is found fresh at the baker's; there
+is a butcher's stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are
+therefore resorted to for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay
+in provisions there in portions graduated to a soldo of their ready
+means. A great Bostonian whom I remember to have heard speculate on the
+superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents'
+worth of beef to that in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable,
+would find the system perfected here, where you can buy half a cent's
+worth. It is a system friendly to poverty, and the small retail prices
+approximate very closely the real value of the stuff sold, as we
+sometimes proved by offering to purchase in quantity. Usually no
+reduction would be made from the retail rate, and it was sufficiently
+amusing to have the dealer figure up the cost of the quantity we
+proposed to buy, and then exhibit an exact multiplication of his retail
+rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is worth a soldo: you get no
+more than a hundred for a florin, though the dealer will cheerfully go
+under that number if he can cheat you in the count. So in most things
+we found it better to let G. do the marketing in her own small Venetian
+fashion, and "guard our strangeness."
+
+But there were some things which must be brought to the house by the
+dealers, such as water for drinking and cooking, which is drawn from
+public cisterns in the squares, and carried by stout young girls to all
+the houses. These _bigolanti_ all come from the mountains of Friuli;
+they all have rosy cheeks, white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists
+whatever (in the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The cisterns
+are opened about eight o'clock in the morning, and then their day's
+work begins with chatter, and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the
+wells; and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots off under a burden
+of two buckets,--one appended from either end of a bow resting upon the
+right shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain which
+falls on the shelving surface of the campo, and soaks through a bed of
+sea-sand around the cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante
+comes every morning and empties her brazen buckets into the great
+picturesque jars of porous earthenware which ornament Venetian kitchens;
+and the daily supply of water costs a moderate family about a florin a
+month.
+
+Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this arrives in boats. It is
+cut upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small
+coasting vessels, each of which has a plump captain in command, whose
+red face is so cunningly blended with his cap of scarlet flannel that it
+is hard on a breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other ends.
+These vessels anchor off the Custom House in the Guidecca Canal in the
+fall, and lie there all winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a
+great part of the time under the charge solely of a small yellow dog of
+the irascible breed common to the boats of the Po. Thither the smaller
+dealers in firewood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all
+parts of the city, melodiously crying their wares up and down the
+canals, and penetrating the land on foot with specimen bundles of fagots
+in their arms. They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think--their
+fancy seldom rising beyond the invention that their fagots are beautiful
+and sound and dry. But our particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted
+man. Long before I had dealings with him, I knew him by the superb song,
+or rather incantation, with which he announced his coming on the Grand
+Canal. The purport of this was merely that his bark was called the
+Beautiful Caroline, and that his fagots were fine; but he so dwelt upon
+the hidden beauties of this idea, and so prolonged their effect upon the
+mind by artful repetition, and the full, round, and resonant roar with
+which he closed his triumphal hymn, that the spirit was taken with the
+charm, and held in breathless admiration. By all odds, this woodman's
+cry was the most impressive of all the street cries of Venice. There
+may have been an exquisite sadness and sweetness in the wail of the
+chimney-sweep; a winning pathos in the voice of the vender of roast
+pumpkin; an oriental fancy and splendor in the fruiterers who cried
+"Melons with hearts of fire!" and "Juicy pears that bathe your
+beard!"--there may have been something peculiarly effective in the song
+of the chestnut-man who shouted "Fat chestnuts," and added, after a
+lapse in which you got almost beyond hearing, "and well cooked!"--I do
+not deny that there was a seductive sincerity in the proclamation of
+one whose peaches could _not_ be called beautiful to look upon, and were
+consequently advertised as "Ugly, but good!"--I say nothing to detract
+from the merits of harmonious chair-menders;--to my ears the shout
+of the melodious fisherman was delectable music, and all the birds of
+summer sang in the voices of the countrymen who sold finches and larks
+in cages, and roses and pinks in pots;--but I say, after all, none
+of these people combined the vocal power, the sonorous movement, the
+delicate grace, and the vast compass of our woodman. Yet this man, as
+far as virtue went, was _vox et praeterea nihil_. He was a vagabond of
+the most abandoned; he was habitually in drink, and I think his sins
+had gone near to make him mad--at any rate he was of a most lunatical
+deportment. In other lands, the man of whom you are a regular purchaser,
+serves you well; in Italy he conceives that his long service gives him
+the right to plunder you if possible. I felt in every fibre that this
+woodman invariably cheated me in measurement, and, indeed, he
+scarcely denied it on accusation. But my single experience of the
+more magnificent scoundrels of whom _he_ bought the wood originally,
+contented me with the swindle with which I had become familiarized. On
+this occasion I took a boat and went to the Custom House, to get my fuel
+at first hand. The captain of the ship which I boarded wished me to pay
+more than I gave for fuel delivered at my door, and thereupon ensued the
+tragic scene of bargaining, as these things are conducted in Italy. We
+stood up and bargained, we sat down and bargained; the captain turned
+his back upon me in indignation; I parted from him and took to my boat
+in scorn; he called me back and displayed the wood--good, sound, dryer
+than bones; he pointed to the threatening heavens, and declared that it
+would snow that night, and on the morrow I could not get wood for twice
+the present price; but I laughed incredulously. Then my captain took
+another tack, and tried to make the contract in obsolete currencies, in
+Austrian pounds, in Venetian pounds, but as I inexorably reduced these
+into familiar money, he paused desperately, and made me an offer which
+I accepted with mistaken exultation. For my captain was shrewder than I,
+and held arts of measurement in reserve against me. He agreed that
+the measurement and transportation should not cost me the value of his
+tooth-pick--quite an old and worthless one--which he showed me. Yet I
+was surprised into the payment of a youth whom this man called to assist
+at the measurement, and I had to give the boatman drink-money at the
+end. He promised that the measure should be just: yet if I lifted my eye
+from the work he placed the logs slantingly on the measure, and threw
+in knotty chunks that crowded wholesome fuel out, and let the daylight
+through and through the pile. I protested, and he admitted the wrong
+when I pointed it out: "_Ga razon, lu!_" (He's right!) he said to
+his fellows in infamy, and throwing aside the objectionable pieces,
+proceeded to evade justice by new artifices. When I had this memorable
+load of wood housed at home, I found that it had cost just what I paid
+my woodman, and that I had additionally lost my self-respect in being
+plundered before my face, and I resolved thereafter to be cheated
+in quiet dignity behind my back. The woodman exulted in his restored
+sovereignty, and I lost nothing in penalty for my revolt.
+
+Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice, are those
+ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed
+in baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares
+by the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their
+general stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to
+their own comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling
+ear-rings of yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning
+streets of Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of
+the country's clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great
+cream-colored cows.
+
+Fishermen, also, come down the little _calli_--with shallow baskets
+of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles and
+mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to
+bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling
+drama proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser's own
+price. "Beautiful and all alive!" is the engaging cry with which they
+hawk their fish.
+
+Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come
+to exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely,
+but glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all,
+chair-menders,--who bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a
+sign, with pieces of white wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a
+hammer, and a sheaf of rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait
+the rush bottoms of your kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant
+whittlings with their knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.
+
+But in the mean time our own serving-woman Giovanna, the great central
+principle of our housekeeping, is waiting to be personally presented to
+the company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, that it is hard
+not to believe them created just as crooked, and foul, and full of fluff
+and years as you behold them, and you cannot understand how so much
+frowziness and so little hair, so great show of fangs and so few teeth,
+are growths from any ordinary human birth. G. is no longer young, but
+she is not after the likeness of these old women. It is of a middle age,
+unbeginning, interminable, of which she gives you the impression.
+She has brown apple-cheeks, just touched with frost; her nose is of a
+strawberry formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly
+shrunken effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned.
+A tough, pleasant, indestructible woman--for use, we thought, not
+ornament--the mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower of
+serving-women.
+
+I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a class, given to
+pilfering; but knowing ourselves subject by nature to pillage, we cannot
+repress a feeling of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. She
+strictly accounts for all money given her at the close of each week, and
+to this end keeps a kind of account-book, which I cannot help regarding
+as in some sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, confirmed
+by her own confession, that G. is not good for reading and writing. On
+settling with her I have been permitted to look into this book, which is
+all in capital letters,--each the evident result of serious labor,--with
+figures representing combinations of the pot-hook according to bold
+and original conceptions. The spelling is also a remarkable effort of
+creative genius. The only difficulty under which the author labors in
+regard to the book is the confusion naturally resulting from the effort
+to get literature right side up when it has got upside down. The writing
+is a kind of pugilism--the strokes being made straight out from the
+shoulder. The account-book is always carried about with her in a
+fathomless pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a housekeeper
+who can throw nothing away, to wit: matchboxes, now appointed to hold
+buttons and hooks-and-eyes; beeswax in the lump; the door-key (which
+in Venice takes a formidable size, and impresses you at first sight as
+ordnance); a patch-bag; a porte-monnaie; many lead-pencils in the stump;
+scissors, pincushions, and the Beata Vergine in a frame. Indeed, this
+incapability of throwing things away is made to bear rather severely
+upon us in some things, such as the continual reappearance of familiar
+dishes at table--particularly veteran _bifsteca_. But we fancy that the
+same frugal instinct is exercised to our advantage and comfort in other
+things, for G. makes a great show and merit of denying our charity to
+those bold and adventurous children of sorrow, who do not scruple to
+ring your door-bell, and demand alms. It is true that with G., as
+with every Italian, almsgiving enters into the theory and practice of
+Christian life, but she will not suffer misery to abuse its privileges.
+She has no hesitation, however, in bringing certain objects of
+compassion to our notice, and she procures small services to be done for
+us by many lame and halt of her acquaintance. Having bought my boat (I
+come, in time, to be willing to sell it again for half its cost to me),
+I require a menial to clean it now and then, and Giovanna first calls
+me a youthful Gobbo for the work,--a festive hunchback, a bright-hearted
+whistler of comic opera. Whether this blithe humor is not considered
+decent, I do not know, but though the Gobbo serves me faithfully, I find
+him one day replaced by a venerable old man, whom--from his personal
+resemblance to Time--I should think much better occupied with an
+hourglass, or engaged with a scythe in mowing me and other mortals down,
+than in cleaning my boat. But all day long he sits on my riva in the
+sun, when it shines, gazing fixedly at my boat; and when the day is
+dark, he lurks about the street, accessible to my slightest boating
+impulse. He salutes my going out and coming in with grave reverence,
+and I think he has no work to do but that which G.'s wise compassion has
+given him from me. Suddenly, like the Gobbo, the Veccio also disappears,
+and I hear vaguely--for in Venice you never know any thing with
+precision--that he has found a regular employment in Padua, and again
+that he is dead. While he lasts, G. has a pleasant, even a sportive
+manner with this poor old man, calculated to cheer his declining years;
+but, as I say, cases of insolent and aggressive misery fail to touch
+her. The kind of wretchedness that comes breathing woe and _sciampagnin_
+[Footnote: Little champagne,--the name which the Venetian populace gave
+to a fierce and deadly kind of brandy drunk during the scarcity of wine.
+After the introduction of coal-oil this liquor came to be jocosely known
+as _petrolio_.] under our window, and there spends a leisure hour in the
+rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim either upon her pity or her
+weakness. She is deaf to the voice of that sorrow, and the monotonous
+whine of that dolor cannot move her to the purchase of a guilty
+tranquillity. I imagine, however, that she is afraid to deny charity to
+the fat Capuchin friar in spectacles and bare feet, who comes twice a
+month to levy contributions of bread and fuel for his convent, for
+we hear her declare from the window that the master is not at home,
+whenever the good brother rings; and at last, as this excuse gives out,
+she ceases to respond to his ring at all.
+
+Sometimes, during the summer weather, comes down our street a certain
+tremulous old troubadour with an aged cithern, on which he strums
+feebly with bones which remain to him from former fingers, and in a thin
+quivering voice pipes worn-out ditties of youth and love. Sadder music
+I have never heard, but though it has at times drawn from me the sigh of
+sensibility without referring sympathy to my pocket, I always hear the
+compassionate soldo of Giovanna clink reproof to me upon the pavement.
+Perhaps that slender note touches something finer than habitual charity
+in her middle-aged bosom, for these were songs she says that they used
+to sing when she was a girl, and Venice was gay and glad, and different
+from now--_veramente, tutt' altro, signor!_
+
+It is through Giovanna's charitable disposition that we make the
+acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle
+Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures--_creatura_
+being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being
+somewhat more pitiable than a _poveretta_. Our Creatures are both well
+stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which
+frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with
+the invalid's husband,--a mild, pleasant-faced man, a tailor by trade,
+and of batlike habits, who hovers about their dusky doorway in the
+summer twilight. These people have but one room, and a little nook of
+kitchen at the side; and not only does the sun never find his way into
+their habitation, but even the daylight cannot penetrate it. They pay
+about four florins a month for the place, and I hope their landlord is
+as happy as his tenants. For though one is sick, and all are wretchedly
+poor, they are far from being discontented. They are opulent in the
+possession of a small dog, which they have raised from the cradle, as it
+were, and adopted into the family. They are never tired of playing
+with their dog,--the poor old children,--and every slight display of
+intelligence on his part delights them. They think it fine in him to
+follow us as we go by, but pretend to beat him; and then they excuse
+him, and call him ill names, and catch him up, and hug him and kiss him.
+He feeds upon their slender means and the pickings that G. carefully
+carries him from our kitchen, and gives to him on our doorstep in spite
+of us, while she gossips with his mistresses, who chorus our appearance
+at such times with "_I miei rispetti, signori!_" We often see them in
+the street, and at a distance from home, carrying mysterious bundles of
+clothes; and at last we learn their vocation, which is one not known
+out of Italian cities, I think. There the state is Uncle to the
+hard-pressed, and instead of many pawnbrokers' shops there is one large
+municipal spout, which is called the Monte di Pieta, where the needy
+pawn their goods. The system is centuries old in Italy, but there are
+people who to this day cannot summon courage to repair in person to the
+Mount of Pity, and, to meet their wants, there has grown up a class of
+frowzy old women who transact the business for them, and receive a small
+percentage for their trouble. Our poor old Creatures were of this class,
+and as there were many persons in impoverished, decaying Venice who had
+need of the succor they procured, they made out to earn a living when
+both were well, and to eke out existence by charity when one was ill.
+They were harmless neighbors, and I believe they regretted our removal,
+when this took place, for they used to sit down under an arcade
+opposite our new house, and spend the duller intervals of trade in the
+contemplation of our windows.
+
+The alarming spirit of nepotism which Giovanna developed at a later
+day was, I fear, a growth from the encouragement we gave her charitable
+disposition. But for several months it was merely from the fact of a boy
+who came and whistled at the door until Giovanna opened it and reproved
+him in the name of all the saints and powers of darkness, that we knew
+her to be a mother; and we merely had her word for the existence of
+a husband, who dealt in poultry. Without seeing Giovanna's husband, I
+nevertheless knew him to be a man of downy exterior, wearing a canvas
+apron, thickly crusted with the gore of fowls, who sat at the door of
+his shop and plucked chickens forever, as with the tireless hand of
+Fate. I divined that he lived in an atmosphere of scalded pullet;
+that three earthen cups of clotted chickens' blood, placed upon his
+window-shelf, formed his idea of an attractive display, and that he
+shadowed forth his conceptions of the beautiful in symmetrical rows of
+plucked chickens, presenting to the public eye rear views embellished
+with a single feather erect in the tail of each bird; that he must be,
+through the ethics of competition, the sworn foe of those illogical
+peasants who bring dead poultry to town in cages, like singing birds,
+and equally the friend of those restaurateurs who furnish you a meal of
+victuals and a feather-bed in the same _mezzo-polio arrosto_. He turned
+out on actual appearance to be all I had prefigured him, with the
+additional merit of having a large red nose, a sidelong, fugitive gait,
+and a hangdog countenance. He furnished us poultry at rates slightly
+advanced, I think.
+
+As for the boy, he turned up after a while as a constant guest, and
+took possession of the kitchen. He came near banishment at one time for
+catching a large number of sea-crabs in the canal, and confining them in
+a basket in the kitchen, which they left at the dead hour of night, to
+wander all over our house,--making a mysterious and alarming sound of
+snapping, like an army of death-watches, and eluding the cunningest
+efforts at capture. On another occasion, he fell into the canal before
+our house, and terrified us by going under twice before the arrival of
+the old gondolier, who called out to him "_Petta! petta!_" (Wait!
+wait!) as he placidly pushed his boat to the spot. Developing other
+disagreeable traits, Beppi was finally driven into exile, from which he
+nevertheless furtively returned on holidays.
+
+The family of Giovanna thus gradually encroaching upon us, we came
+also to know her mother,--a dread and loathly old lady, whom we would
+willingly have seen burned at the stake for a witch. She was commonly
+encountered at nightfall in our street, where she lay in wait, as it
+were, to prey upon the fragrance of dinner drifting from the kitchen
+windows of our neighbor, the Duchess of Parma. Here was heard the voice
+of cooks and of scullions, and the ecstasies of helpless voracity in
+which we sometimes beheld this old lady were fearful to witness. Nor did
+we find her more comfortable in our own kitchen, where we often saw
+her. The place itself is weird and terrible--low ceiled, with the stone
+hearth built far out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of
+Venetian cookery dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day
+cheerfulness of cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the
+bristling embers, and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it.
+When Giovanna's mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to
+do us reverence from the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her
+good wishes for our long life, continued health, and endless happiness,
+it has the effect upon our spirits of the darkest malediction.
+
+Not more pleasing, though altogether lighter and cheerfuler, was
+Giovanna's sister-in-law, whom we knew only as the Cognata. Making her
+appearance first upon the occasion of Giovanna's sickness, she slowly
+but surely established herself as an habitual presence, and threatened
+at one time, as we fancied, to become our paid servant. But a happy
+calamity which one night carried off a carpet and the window curtains
+of an unoccupied room, cast an evil suspicion upon the Cognata, and she
+never appeared after the discovery of the theft. We suspected her of
+having invented some dishes of which we were very fond, and we hated
+her for oppressing us with a sense of many surreptitious favors.
+Objectively, she was a slim, hoopless little woman, with a tendency to
+be always at the street-door when we opened it. She had a narrow, narrow
+face, with eyes of terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a demeanor
+of slavish patronage. Our kitchen, after her addition to the household,
+became the banqueting-hall of Giovanna's family, who dined there every
+day upon dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the house the general
+savor of a low cook-shop.
+
+As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural tendency of excellent
+people to place others in subjection. Our servitude at first was
+not hard, and consisted chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to
+extraordinary efforts when G. had attempted to please us with some
+novelty in cooking. She held us to a strict account in this respect; but
+indeed our applause was for the most part willing enough. Her culinary
+execution, first revealing itself in a noble rendering of our ideas of
+roast potatoes,--a delicacy foreign to the Venetian kitchen,--culminated
+at last in the same style of _polpetti_ [Footnote: I confess a
+tenderness for this dish, which is a delicater kind of hash skillfully
+flavored and baked in rolls of a mellow complexion and fascinating
+appearance.] which furnished forth the table of our neighbor, the
+Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph with us.
+
+But G.'s spirit was not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in
+her the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a
+great babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things,
+when there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions
+of bad weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The
+crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as
+springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian
+abuse is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of
+opprobrium with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ends with the
+attribution of doggishness.) The conscription was held in the campo near
+us, and G. declared the place to have become unendurable--"_proprio un
+campo di sospiri!_" (Really a field of sighs.) "_Staga comodo!_" she
+said to a guest of ours who would have moved his chair to let her pass
+between him and the wall. "Don't move; the way to Paradise is not wider
+than this." We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did not sleep in
+the house, should come to us so late in the morning, but we could not
+deal harshly with her on that account, met, as we always were, with
+plentiful and admirable excuses. Who were we, indeed, to place our
+wishes in the balance against the welfare of the sick neighbor with whom
+Giovanna passed so many nights of vigil? Should we reproach her with
+tardiness when she had not closed the eye all night for a headache
+properly of the devil? If she came late in the morning, she stayed late
+at night; and it sometimes happened that when the Paron and Parona,
+supposing her gone, made a stealthy expedition to the kitchen for cold
+chicken, they found her there at midnight in the fell company of the
+Cognata, bibbing the wine of the country and holding a mild Italian
+revel with that vinegar and the stony bread of Venice.
+
+I have said G. was the flower of serving-women; and so at first
+she seemed, and it was long till we doubted her perfection. We knew
+ourselves to be very young, and weak, and unworthy. The Parona had the
+rare gift of learning to speak less and less Italian every day, and fell
+inevitably into subjection. The Paron in a domestic point of view was
+naturally nothing. It had been strange indeed if Giovanna, beholding the
+great contrast we presented to herself in many respects, had forborne to
+abuse her advantage over us. But we trusted her implicitly, and I hardly
+know how or when it was that we began to waver in our confidence. It is
+certain that with the lapse of time we came gradually to have breakfast
+at twelve o'clock, instead of nine, as we had originally appointed it,
+and that G. grew to consume the greater part of the day in making our
+small purchases, and to give us our belated dinners at seven o'clock.
+We protested, and temporary reforms ensued, only to be succeeded by more
+hopeless lapses; but it was not till all entreaties and threats failed
+that we began to think seriously it would be well to have done with
+Giovanna, as an unprofitable servant. I give the result, not all the
+nice causes from which it came. But the question was, How to get rid of
+a poor woman and a civil, and the mother of a family dependent in great
+part upon her labor? We solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss
+G., and we shrink a hundred times from inflicting the blow. At last,
+somewhat in the spirit of Charles Lamb's Chinaman who invented roast
+pig, and discovered that the sole method of roasting it was to burn
+down a house in order to consume the adjacent pig-sty, and thus cook
+the roaster in the flames,--we hit upon an artifice by which we could
+dispense with Giovanna, and keep an easy conscience. We had long ceased
+to dine at home, in despair; and now we resolved to take another
+house, in which there were other servants. But even then, it was a sore
+struggle to part with the flower of serving-women, who was set over the
+vacated house to put it in order after our flitting, and with whom
+the imprudent Paron settled the last account in the familiar little
+dining-room, surrounded by the depressing influences of the empty
+chambers. The place was peopled after all, though we had left it, and
+I think the tenants who come after us will be haunted by our spectres,
+crowding them on the pleasant little balcony, and sitting down with
+them at table. G. stood there, the genius of the place, and wept six
+regretful tears, each one of which drew a florin from the purse of the
+Paron. She had hoped to remain with us always while we lived in Venice;
+but now that she could no longer look to us for support, the Lord must
+take care of her. The gush of grief was transient: it relieved her,
+and she came out sunnily a moment after. The Paron went his way more
+sorrowfully, taking leave at last with the fine burst of Christian
+philosophy: "We are none of us masters of ourselves in this world, and
+cannot do what we wish. _Ma! Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!_" Yet he was
+undeniably lightened in heart. He had cut adrift from old moorings, and
+had crossed the Grand Canal. G. did not follow him, nor any of the
+long line of pensioners who used to come on certain feast-days to levy
+tribute of eggs at the old house. (The postman was among these, on
+Christmas and New Year's, and as he received eggs at every house, it was
+a problem with us, unsolved to this hour, how he carried them all,
+and what he did with them.) Not the least among the Paron's causes for
+self-gratulation was the non-appearance at his new abode of two
+local newspapers, for which in an evil hour he subscribed, which were
+delivered with unsparing regularity, and which, being never read, formed
+the keenest reproach of his imprudent outlay and his idle neglect of
+their contents.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.
+
+
+The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic
+vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some
+morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that
+there never was any such city. There our race seems to be in earnest in
+nothing. People sometimes work, but as if without any aim; they suffer,
+and you fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark,
+standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its
+innumerable pillars, is not in the least gray with time--no grayer than
+a Greek lyric.
+
+    "All has suffered a sea-change
+    Into something rich and strange,"
+
+in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its
+baptism in the sea.
+
+And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes for a little while
+forget how marvelous she is, at any moment you may be startled into
+vivid remembrance. The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and
+step by step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads
+high up to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine
+green and purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching
+their heads to look into the lofty windows,--blind long ago to their
+leafy tenderness,--while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well,
+with the beauty of the sculptor's soul wrought forever into the stone.
+Or Venice lures you in a gondola into one of her remote canals, where
+you glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under
+our work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates
+of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise, where the innumerable
+balconies are full of the Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames,
+gossiping and making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if
+the city's mood is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very
+places where you think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of
+your forgetfulness, dares a wilder beauty, and enthralls with a yet
+more unearthly and incredible enchantment. It is in the Piazza, and the
+Austrian band is playing, and the promenaders pace solemnly up and down
+to the music, and the gentle Italian loafers at Florian's brood vacantly
+over their little cups of coffee, and nothing can be more stupid; when
+suddenly every thing is changed, and a memorable tournament flashes up
+in many-glittering action upon the scene, and there upon the gallery of
+the church, before the horses of bronze, sit the Senators, bright-robed,
+and in the midst the bonneted Doge with his guest Petrarch at his side.
+Or the old Carnival, which had six months of every year to riot in,
+comes back and throngs the place with motley company,--dominoes,
+harlequins, pantaloni, illustrissimi and illustrissime, and perhaps even
+the Doge himself, who has the right of incognito when he wears a little
+mask of wax at his button-hole. Or may be the grander day revisits
+Venice when Doria has sent word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia
+that he will listen to the Senate when he has bridled the horses of
+Saint Mark,--and the whole Republic of rich and poor crowds the square,
+demanding the release of Pisani, who comes forth from his prison to
+create victory from the dust of the crumbling commonwealth.
+
+But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for
+your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay,
+what potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she
+will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal? Launched upon this
+great S have I not seen hardened travelers grow sentimental, and has not
+this prodigious sybillant, in my hearing, inspired white-haired Puritan
+ministers of the gospel to attempt to quote out of the guide-book "that
+line from Byron"? Upon my word, I have sat beside wandering editors in
+their gondolas, and witnessed the expulsion of the newspaper from
+their nature, while, lulled by the fascination of the place, they were
+powerless to take their own journals from their pockets, and instead of
+politics talked some bewildered nonsense about coming back with their
+families next summer. For myself, I must count as half-lost the year
+spent in Venice before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There
+alone can existence have the perfect local flavor. But by what witchery
+touched one's being suffers the common sea-change, till life at last
+seems to ebb and flow with the tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it
+would be idle to attempt to tell. I can only take you to our dear little
+balcony at Casa Falier, and comment not very coherently on the scene
+upon the water under us.
+
+And I am sure (since it is either in the spring or the fall) you will
+not be surprised to see, the first thing, a boat-load of those English,
+who go by from the station to their hotels, every day, in well-freighted
+gondolas. These parties of traveling Englishry are all singularly alike,
+from the "Pa'ty" traveling alone with his opera-glass and satchel, to
+the party which fills a gondola with well-cushioned English middle age,
+ruddy English youth, and substantial English baggage. We have learnt
+to know them all very well: the father and the mother sit upon the back
+seat, and their comely girls at the sides and front. These girls all
+have the honest cabbage-roses of English health upon their cheeks; they
+all wear little rowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls of hair
+tumble upon their broad English backs. They are coming from Switzerland
+and Germany, and they are going south to Rome and to Naples, and they
+always pause at Venice a few days. To-morrow we shall see them in the
+Piazza, and at Florian's, and St. Mark's, and the Ducal Palace; and the
+young ladies will cross the Bridge of Sighs, and will sentimentally feed
+the vagabond pigeons of St. Mark which loaf about the Piazza and defile
+the sculptures. But now our travelers are themselves very hungry, and
+are more anxious than Americans can understand about the table-d'hote of
+their hotel. It is perfectly certain that if they fall into talk there
+with any of our nation, the respectable English father will remark that
+this war in America is a very sad war, and will ask to know when it will
+all end. The truth is, Americans do not like these people, and I believe
+there is no love lost on the other side. But, in many things, they
+are travelers to be honored, if not liked: they voyage through all
+countries, and without awaking fervent affection in any land through
+which they pass; but their sterling honesty and truth have made the
+English tongue a draft upon the unlimited confidence of the continental
+peoples, and French, Germans, and Italians trust and respect private
+English faith as cordially as they hate public English perfidy.
+
+They come to Venice chiefly in the autumn, and October is the month of
+the Sunsets and the English. The former are best seen from the Public
+Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind
+the domes and towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the
+Redentore. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon
+is a fine thing; for then the sun goes down into the water with a broad
+trail of bloody red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had
+dragged himself landward across the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and
+died as he reached the land. But we (upon whom the idleness of Venice
+grows daily, and from whom the Gardens, therefore, grow farther and
+farther) are commonly content to take our bit of sunset as we get
+it from our balcony, through the avenue opened by the narrow canal
+opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a little rainy,
+when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate beauty--all
+tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little palace on the
+corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the Canalazzo, and
+from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an airy balcony.
+When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that pathetic and
+angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves rich in the
+neighborhood of that part of the "Palace of Art," whereon
+
+    "The light aerial gallery, golden railed,
+    Burnt like a fringe of fire."
+
+And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in
+not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists
+are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is
+splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga.
+
+It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon
+the Grand Canal during the day. But in the hours just before the summer
+twilight the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then you may see
+whatever is left of Venetian gayety and looking down upon the groups
+in the open gondolas may witness something of the home-life of the
+Italians, who live out-of-doors.
+
+The groups do not vary a great deal one from another: inevitably the
+pale-faced papa, the fat mamma, the over-dressed handsome young girls.
+We learned to look for certain gondolas, and grew to feel a fond
+interest in a very mild young man who took the air in company and
+contrast with a ferocious bull-dog--boule-dogue he called him, I
+suppose. He was always smoking languidly, that mild young man, and I
+fancied I could read in his countenance a gentle, gentle antagonism
+to life--the proportionate Byronic misanthropy, which might arise from
+sugar and water taken instead of gin. But we really knew nothing about
+him, and our conjecture was conjecture. Officers went by in their
+brilliant uniforms, and gave the scene an alien splendor. Among these we
+enjoyed best the spectacle of an old major, or perhaps general, in
+whom the arrogance of youth had stiffened into a chill hauteur, and who
+frowned above his gray overwhelming moustache upon the passers, like
+a citadel grim with battle and age. We used to fancy, with a certain
+luxurious sense of our own safety, that one broadside from those
+fortressed eyes could blow from the water the slight pleasure-boats in
+which the young Venetian idlers were innocently disporting. But again
+this was merely conjecture. The general's glance may have had no such
+power. Indeed, the furniture of our apartment sustained no damage from
+it, even when concentrated through an opera-glass, by which means the
+brave officer at times perused our humble lodging from the balcony of
+his own over against us. He may have been no more dangerous in his way
+than two aged sisters (whom we saw every evening) were in theirs. They
+represented Beauty in its most implacable and persevering form, and
+perhaps they had one day been belles and could not forget it. They were
+very old indeed, but their dresses were new and their paint fresh, and
+as they glided by in the good-natured twilight, one had no heart to
+smile at them. We gave our smiles, and now and then our soldi, to the
+swarthy beggar, who, being short of legs, rowed up and down the canal
+in a boat, and overhauled Charity in the gondolas. He was a singular
+compromise, in his vocation and his equipment, between the mendicant
+and corsair: I fear he would not have hesitated to assume the
+pirate altogether in lonelier waters; and had I been a heavily laden
+oyster-boat returning by night through some remote and dark canal, I
+would have steered clear of that truculent-looking craft, of which the
+crew must have fought with a desperation proportioned to the lack of
+legs and the difficulty of running away, in case of defeat.
+
+About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market,
+bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the main-land; and far into
+the night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the
+boats was company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out
+again, we found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily
+happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved
+Venice, kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet
+seemed to rest.
+
+At night sometimes we saw from our balcony one of those _freschi_, which
+once formed the chief splendor of festive occasions in Venice, and are
+peculiar to the city, where alone their fine effects are possible.
+The fresco is a procession of boats with music and lights. Two immense
+barges, illumined with hundreds of paper lanterns, carry the military
+bands; the boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, and
+then the gondolas of such citizens as choose to take part in the
+display,--though since 1859 no Italian, unless a government official,
+has been seen in the procession. No gondola has less than two lanterns,
+and many have eight or ten, shedding mellow lights of blue, and red,
+and purple, over uniforms and silken robes. The soldiers of the bands
+breathe from their instruments music the most perfect and exquisite
+of its kind in the world; and as the procession takes the width of the
+Grand Canal in its magnificent course, soft crimson flushes play upon
+the old, weather-darkened palaces, and die tenderly away, giving to
+light and then to shadow the opulent sculptures of pillar, and arch, and
+spandrel, and weirdly illuminating the grim and bearded visages of stone
+that peer down from doorway and window. It is a sight more gracious and
+fairy than ever poet dreamed; and I feel that the lights and the music
+have only got into my description by name, and that you would not know
+them when you saw and heard them, from any thing I say. In other days,
+people tell you, the fresco was much more impressive than now. At
+intervals, rockets used to be sent up, and the Bengal lights, burned
+during the progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers' spectral
+shadows, giant-huge, on the palace-walls. But, for my part, I do not
+care to have the fresco other than I know it: indeed, for my own selfish
+pleasure, I should be sorry to have Venice in any way less fallen and
+forlorn than she is.
+
+Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever seen on the Grand Canal
+are the great boats of the river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from
+Chioggia, come up to the city with the swelling sea. They are built with
+a pointed stern and bow rising with the sweep of a short curve from the
+water high above the cabin roof, which is always covered with a straw
+matting. Black is not the color of the gondolas alone, but of all boats
+in Venetia; and these of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any
+one of them might be sent to take King Arthur and bear him to Avilon,
+whither I think most of them are bound. A path runs along either
+gunwale, on which the men pace as they pole the boat up the canal,--her
+great sail folded and lying with the prostrate mast upon the deck. The
+rudder is a prodigious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly kind
+enough to wear a red cap with a blue tassel, and to smoke. The other
+persons on board are no less obliging and picturesque, from the
+dark-eyed young mother who sits with her child in her arms at the
+cabin-door, to the bronze boy who figures in play at her feet with a
+small yellow dog of the race already noticed in charge of the fuel-boats
+from Dalmatia. The father of the family, whom we take to be the
+commander of the vessel, occupies himself gracefully in sitting down and
+gazing at the babe and its mother. It is an old habit of mine, formed in
+childhood from looking at rafts upon the Ohio, to attribute, with a kind
+of heart-ache, supreme earthly happiness to the navigators of lazy
+river craft; and as we glance down upon these people from our balcony,
+I choose to think them immensely contented, and try, in a feeble, tacit
+way, to make friends with so much bliss. But I am always repelled
+in these advances by the small yellow dog, who is rendered extremely
+irascible by my contemplation of the boat under his care, and who,
+ruffling his hair as a hen ruffles her feathers, never fails to bark
+furious resentment of my longing.
+
+Far different from the picture presented by this boat's progress--the
+peacefulness of which even the bad temper of the small yellow dog could
+not mar--was another scene which we witnessed upon the Grand Canal, when
+one morning we were roused from our breakfast by a wild and lamentable
+outcry. Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal opposite
+at the same time, had struck together with a violence that shook the
+boatmen to their inmost souls. One barge was laden with lime, and
+belonged to a plasterer of the city; the other was full of fuel, and
+commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival captains advanced toward the
+bows of their boats, with murderous looks,
+
+    "Con la test'alta e con rabbiosa fame,
+    Si che parea che l'aer ne temesse,"
+
+and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with hands of deathful
+challenge, while I looked on with that noble interest which the
+enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other's
+heads.
+
+But the storm burst in words.
+
+"Figure of a pig!" shrieked the Venetian, "you have ruined my boat
+forever!"
+
+"Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog!" returned the countryman, "and it
+was my right to enter the canal first."
+
+They then, after this exchange of insult, abandoned the main subject of
+dispute, and took up the quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally
+questioning the reputation of all their female relatives to the third
+and fourth cousins, they defied each other as the offspring of assassins
+and prostitutes. As the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats
+asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and forth and hurled
+opprobrium with a foamy volubility that quite left my powers of
+comprehension behind. At last the townsman, executing a _pas seul_
+of uncommon violence, stooped and picked up a bit of lime, while the
+countryman, taking shelter at the stern of his boat, there attended
+the shot. To my infinite disappointment it was not fired. The
+Venetian seemed to have touched the climax of his passion in the mere
+demonstration of hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the
+countryman the right of way. The courage of the latter rose as the
+danger passed, and as far as he could be heard, he continued to exult
+in the wildest excesses of insult: "Ah-heigh! brutal executioner!
+Ah, hideous headsman!" _Da capo._ I now know that these people never
+intended to do more than quarrel, and no doubt they parted as well
+pleased as if they had actually carried broken heads from the encounter.
+But at the time I felt affronted and trifled with by the result, for my
+disappointments arising out of the dramatic manner of the Italians had
+not yet been frequent enough to teach me to expect nothing from it.
+
+There was some compensation for me--coming, like all compensation, a
+long while after the loss--in the spectacle of a funeral procession
+on the Grand Canal, which had a singular and imposing solemnity only
+possible to the place. It was the funeral of an Austrian general, whose
+coffin, mounted on a sable catafalco, was borne upon the middle boat of
+three that moved abreast. The barges on either side bristled with the
+bayonets of soldiery, but the dead man was alone in his boat, except for
+one strange figure that stood at the head of the coffin, and rested its
+glittering hand upon the black fall of the drapery. This was a man clad
+cap-a-pie in a perfect suit of gleaming mail, with his visor down, and
+his shoulders swept by the heavy raven plumes of his helm. As at times
+he moved from side to side, and glanced upward at the old palaces, sad
+in the yellow morning light, he put out of sight, for me, every thing
+else upon the Canal, and seemed the ghost of some crusader come back to
+Venice, in wonder if this city, lying dead under the hoofs of the Croat,
+were indeed that same haughty Lady of the Sea who had once sent her
+blind old Doge to beat down the pride of an empire and disdain its
+crown.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE.
+
+
+One summer morning the mosquitoes played for me with sleep, and won. It
+was half-past four, and as it had often been my humor to see Venice at
+that hour, I got up and sallied forth for a stroll through the city.
+
+This morning walk did not lay the foundation of a habit of early rising
+in me, but I nevertheless advise people always to get up at half-past
+four, if they wish to receive the most vivid impressions, and to take
+the most absorbing interest in every thing in the world. It was with a
+feeling absolutely novel that I looked about me that morning, and
+there was a breezy freshness and clearness in my perceptions altogether
+delightful, and I fraternized so cordially with Nature that I do not
+think, if I had sat down immediately after to write out the experience,
+I should have at all patronized her, as I am afraid scribbling people
+have sometimes the custom to do. I know that my feeling of brotherhood
+in the case of two sparrows, which obliged me by hopping down from a
+garden wall at the end of Calle Falier and promenading on the pavement,
+was quite humble and sincere; and that I resented the ill-nature of a
+cat,
+
+    "Whom love kept wakeful and the muse,"
+
+and who at that hour was spitefully reviling the morn from a window
+grating. As I went by the gate of the Canonico's little garden,
+the flowers saluted me with a breath of perfume,--I think the white
+honey-suckle was first to offer me this politeness,--and the dumpy
+little statues looked far more engaging than usual.
+
+After passing the bridge, the first thing to do was to drink a cup of
+coffee at the Caffe Ponte di Ferro, where the eyebrows of the waiter
+expressed a mild surprise at my early presence. There was no one else
+in the place but an old gentleman talking thoughtfully to himself on
+the subject of two florins, while he poured his coffee into a glass of
+water, before drinking it. As I lingered a moment over my cup, I was
+reinforced by the appearance of a company of soldiers, marching to
+parade in the Campo di Marte. Their officers went at their head,
+laughing and chatting, and one of the lieutenants smoking a long pipe,
+gave me a feeling of satisfaction only comparable to that which I
+experienced shortly afterward in beholding a stoutly built small dog on
+the Ponte di San Moise. The creature was only a few inches high, and it
+must have been through some mist of dreams yet hanging about me that
+he impressed me as having something elephantine in his manner. When I
+stooped down and patted him on the head, I felt colossal.
+
+On my way to the Piazza, I stopped in the church of Saint Mary of the
+Lily, where, in company with one other sinner, I found a relish in
+the early sacristan's deliberate manner of lighting the candles on the
+altar. Saint Mary of the Lily has a facade in the taste of the declining
+Renaissance. The interior is in perfect keeping, and all is hideous,
+abominable, and abandoned. My fellow-sinner was kneeling, and repeating
+his prayers. He now and then tapped himself absent-mindedly on the
+breast and forehead, and gave a good deal of his attention to me as I
+stood at the door, hat in hand. The hour and the place invested him with
+so much interest, that I parted from him with emotion. My feelings were
+next involved by an abrupt separation from a young English East-Indian,
+whom I overheard asking the keeper of a caffe his way to the Campo di
+Marte. He was a claret-colored young fellow, tall, and wearing folds
+of white muslin around his hat. In another world I trust to know how he
+liked the parade that morning.
+
+I discovered that Piazza San Marco is every morning swept by troops
+of ragged facchini, who gossip noisily and quarrelsomely together over
+their work. Boot-blacks, also, were in attendance, and several followed
+my progress through the square, in the vague hope that I would relent
+and have my boots blacked. One peerless waiter stood alone amid the
+desert elegance of Caffe Florian, which is never shut, day or night,
+from year to year. At the Caffe of the Greeks, two individuals of the
+Greek nation were drinking coffee.
+
+I went upon the Molo, passing between the pillars of the Lion and the
+Saint, and walked freely back and forth, taking in the glory of that
+prospect of water and of vague islands breaking the silver of the
+lagoons, like those scenes cunningly wrought in apparent relief on old
+Venetian mirrors. I walked there freely, for though there were already
+many gondoliers at the station, not one took me for a foreigner or
+offered me a boat. At that hour, I was in myself so improbable, that if
+they saw me at all, I must have appeared to them as a dream. My sense
+of security was sweet, but it was false, for on going into the church
+of St. Mark, the keener eye of the sacristan detected me. He instantly
+offered to show me the Zeno Chapel; but I declined, preferring the
+church, where I found the space before the high altar filled with
+market-people come to hear the early mass. As I passed out of the
+church, I witnessed the partial awaking of a Venetian gentleman who had
+spent the night in a sitting posture, between the columns of the main
+entrance. He looked puffy, scornful, and uncomfortable, and at
+the moment of falling back to slumber, tried to smoke an unlighted
+cigarette, which he held between his lips. I found none of the shops
+open as I passed through the Merceria, and but for myself, and here and
+there a laborer going to work, the busy thoroughfare seemed deserted. In
+the mere wantonness of power, and the security of solitude, I indulged
+myself in snapping several door-latches, which gave me a pleasure as
+keen as that enjoyed in boyhood from passing a stick along the pickets
+of a fence. I was in nowise abashed to be discovered in this amusement
+by an old peasant-woman, bearing at either end of a yoke the usual
+basket with bottles of milk packed in straw.
+
+Entering Campo San Bartolomeo, I found trade already astir in that noisy
+place; the voice of cheap bargains, which by noonday swells into an
+intolerable uproar, was beginning to be heard. Having lived in Campo San
+Bartolomeo, I recognized several familiar faces there, and particularly
+noted among them that of a certain fruit-vender, who frequently swindled
+me in my small dealings with him. He now sat before his stand, and for a
+man of a fat and greasy presence, looked very fresh and brisk, and as if
+he had passed a pleasant night.
+
+On the other side of the Rialto Bridge, the market was preparing for
+the purchasers. Butchers were arranging their shops; fruit-stands, and
+stands for the sale of crockery, and--as I must say for want of a better
+word, if there is any--notions, were in a state of tasteful readiness.
+The person on the steps of the bridge who had exposed his stock of cheap
+clothing and coarse felt hats on the parapet, had so far completed his
+preparations as to have leisure to be talking himself hot and hoarse
+with the neighboring barber. He was in a perfectly good humor, and was
+merely giving a dramatic flavor to some question of six soldi.
+
+At the landings of the market-place squadrons of boats loaded with
+vegetables were arriving and unloading. Peasants were building
+cabbages into pyramids; collective squashes and cucumbers were taking a
+picturesque shape; wreaths of garlic and garlands of onions graced the
+scene. All the people were clamoring at the tops of their voices; and
+in the midst of the tumult and confusion, resting on heaps of
+cabbage-leaves and garbage, men lay on their bellies sweetly sleeping.
+Numbers of eating-houses were sending forth a savory smell, and
+everywhere were breakfasters with bowls of sguassetto. In one of the
+shops, somewhat prouder than the rest, a heated brunette was turning
+sections of eel on a gridiron, and hurriedly coqueting with the
+purchasers. Singularly calm amid all this bustle was the countenance
+of the statue called the Gobbo, as I looked at it in the centre of the
+market-place. The Gobbo (who is not a hunchback, either) was patiently
+supporting his burden, and looking with a quiet, thoughtful frown upon
+the ground, as if pondering some dream of change that had come to him
+since the statutes of the haughty Republic were read aloud to the people
+from the stone tribune on his shoulders.
+
+Indeed, it was a morning for thoughtful meditation; and as I sat at the
+feet of the four granite kings shortly after, waiting for the gate of
+the ducal palace to be opened, that I might see the girls drawing the
+water, I studied the group of the Judgment of Solomon, on the corner of
+the palace, and arrived at an entirely new interpretation of that Bible
+story, which I have now wholly forgotten.
+
+The gate remained closed too long for my patience, and I turned away
+from a scene momently losing its interest. The brilliant little shops
+opened like hollyhocks as I went home; the swelling tide of life filled
+the streets, and brought Venice back to my day-time remembrance, robbing
+her of that keen, delightful charm with which she greeted my early
+morning sense.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE MOUSE.
+
+
+Wishing to tell the story of our Mouse, because I think it illustrates
+some amusing traits of character in a certain class of Italians, I
+explain at once that he was not a mouse, but a man so called from his
+wretched, trembling little manner, his fugitive expression, and peaked
+visage.
+
+He first appeared to us on the driver's seat of that carriage in which
+we posted so splendidly one spring-time from Padua to Ponte Lagoscuro.
+But though he mounted to his place just outside the city gate, we did
+not regard him much, nor, indeed, observe what a mouse he was, until
+the driver stopped to water his horses near Battaglia, and the Mouse got
+down to stretch his forlorn little legs. Then I got down too, and bade
+him good-day, and told him it was a very hot day--for he was a mouse
+apparently so plunged in wretchedness that I doubted if he knew what
+kind of day it was.
+
+When I had spoken, he began to praise (in the wary manner of the
+Venetians when they find themselves in the company of a foreigner who
+does not look like an Englishman) the Castle of the Obiza near by, which
+is now the country-seat of the ex-Duke of Modena; and he presently said
+something to imply that he thought me a German.
+
+"But I am not a German," said I.
+
+"As many excuses," said the Mouse sadly, but with evident relief; and
+then began to talk more freely, and of the evil times.
+
+"Are you going all the way with us to Florence?" I asked.
+
+"No, signor, to Bologna; from there to Ancona."
+
+"Have you ever been in Venice? We are just coming from there."
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"It is a beautiful place. Do you like it?"
+
+"Sufficiently. But one does not enjoy himself very well there."
+
+"But I thought Venice interesting."
+
+"Sufficiently, signor. _Ma!_" said the Mouse, shrugging his shoulders,
+and putting on the air of being luxuriously fastidious in his choice of
+cities, "the water is so bad in Venice."
+
+The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter overcoat, and has no garment to
+form a compromise with his shirt-sleeves, if he should wish to render
+the weather more endurable by throwing off the surtout. In spite of his
+momentary assumption of consequence, I suspect that his coat is in the
+Monte di Pieta. It comes out directly that he is a ship-carpenter who
+has worked in the Arsenal of Venice, and at the ship-yards in Trieste.
+
+But there is no work any more. He went to Trieste lately to get a job on
+the three frigates which the Sultan had ordered to be built there. _Ma!_
+After all, the frigates are to be built in Marseilles instead. There is
+nothing. And every thing is so dear. In Venetia you spend much and gain
+little. Perhaps there is work at Ancona.
+
+By this time the horses are watered; the Mouse regains his seat, and we
+almost forget him, till he jumps from his place, just before we reach
+the hotel in Rovigo, and disappears--down the first hole in the side of
+a house, perhaps. He might have done much worse, and spent the night at
+the hotel, as we did.
+
+The next morning at four o'clock, when we start, he is on the box again,
+nibbling bread and cheese, and glancing furtively back at us to say good
+morning. He has little twinkling black eyes, just like a mouse, and a
+sharp moustache, and sharp tuft on his chin--as like Victor Emanuel's as
+a mouse's tuft can be.
+
+The cold morning air seems to shrivel him, and he crouches into a little
+gelid ball on the seat beside the driver, while we wind along the Po on
+the smooth gray road; while the twilight lifts slowly from the distances
+of field and vineyard; while the black boats of the Po, with their gaunt
+white sails, show spectrally through the mists; while the trees and the
+bushes break into innumerable voice, and the birds are glad of another
+day in Italy; while the peasant drives his mellow-eyed, dun oxen
+afield; while his wife comes in her scarlet bodice to the door, and
+the children's faces peer out from behind her skirts; while the air
+freshens, the east flushes, and the great miracle is wrought anew.
+
+Once again, before we reach the ferry of the Po, the Mouse leaps down
+and disappears as mysteriously as at Rovigo. We see him no more till we
+meet in the station on the other side of the river, where we hear him
+bargaining long and earnestly with the ticket-seller for a third-class
+passage to Bologna. He fails to get it, I think, at less than the usual
+rate, for he retires from the contest more shrunken and forlorn than
+ever, and walks up and down the station, startled at a word, shocked at
+any sudden noise.
+
+For curiosity, I ask how much he paid for crossing the river, mentioning
+the fabulous sum it had cost us.
+
+It appears that he paid sixteen soldi only. "What could they do when a
+man was in misery? I had nothing else."
+
+Even while thus betraying his poverty, the Mouse did not beg, and we
+began to respect his poverty. In a little while we pitied it, witnessing
+the manner in which he sat down on the edge of a chair, with a smile of
+meek desperation.
+
+It is a more serious case when an artisan is out of work in the Old
+World than one can understand in the New. There the struggle for bread
+is so fierce and the competition so great; and, then, a man bred to one
+trade cannot turn his hand to another as in America. Even the rudest and
+least skilled labor has more to do it than are wanted. The Italians
+are very good to the poor, but the tradesman out of work must become a
+beggar before charity can help him.
+
+We, who are poor enough to be wise, consult foolishly together
+concerning the Mouse. It blesses him that gives, and him that
+takes--this business of charity. And then, there is something
+irresistibly relishing and splendid in the consciousness of being the
+instrument of a special providence! Have I all my life admired those
+beneficent characters in novels and comedies who rescue innocence,
+succor distress, and go about pressing gold into the palm of poverty,
+and telling it to take it and be happy; and now shall I reject an
+occasion, made to my hand, for emulating them in real life?
+
+"I think I will give the Mouse five francs," I say.
+
+"Yes, certainly."
+
+"But I will be prudent," I continue. "I will not give him this money.
+I will tell him it is a loan which he may pay me back again whenever he
+can. In this way I shall relieve him now, and furnish him an incentive
+to economy."
+
+I call to the Mouse, and he runs tremulously toward me.
+
+"Have you friends in Ancona?"
+
+"No, signor."
+
+"How much money have you left?"
+
+He shows me three soldi. "Enough for a coffee."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"God knows."
+
+So I give him the five francs, and explain my little scheme of making it
+a loan, and not a gift; and then I give him my address.
+
+He does not appear to understand the scheme of the loan; but he takes
+the money, and is quite stunned by his good fortune. He thanks me
+absently, and goes and shows the piece to the guards, with a smile that
+illumines and transfigures his whole person. At Bologna, he has come
+to his senses; he loads me with blessings, he is ready to weep; he
+reverences me, he wishes me a good voyage, endless prosperity, and
+innumerable days; and takes the train for Ancona.
+
+"Ah, ah!" I congratulate myself,--"is it not a fine thing to be the
+instrument of a special providence?"
+
+It is pleasant to think of the Mouse during all that journey, and if we
+are never so tired, it rests us to say, "I wonder where the Mouse is
+by this time?" When we get home, and coldly count up our expenses, we
+rejoice in the five francs lent to the Mouse. "And I know he will pay it
+back if ever he can," I say. "That was a Mouse of integrity."
+
+Two weeks later comes a comely young woman, with a young child--a child
+strong on its legs, a child which tries to open every thing in the room,
+which wants to pull the cloth off the table, to throw itself out of
+the open window--a child of which I have never seen the peer for
+restlessness and curiosity. This young woman has been directed to call
+on me as a person likely to pay her way to Ferrara. "But who sent you?
+But, in fine, why should I pay your way to Ferrara? I have never seen
+you before."
+
+"My husband, whom you benefited on his way to Ancona, sent me. Here is
+his letter and the card you gave him."
+
+I call out to my fellow-victim,--"My dear, here is news of the Mouse!"
+
+"Don't _tell_ me he's sent you that money already!"
+
+"Not at all. He has sent me his wife and child, that I may forward them
+to him at Ferrara, out of my goodness, and the boundless prosperity
+which has followed his good wishes--I, who am a great signor in his
+eyes, and an insatiable giver of five-franc pieces--the instrument of a
+perpetual special providence. The Mouse has found work at Ferrara, and
+his wife comes here from Trieste. As for the rest, I am to send her to
+him, as I said."
+
+"You are deceived," I say solemnly to the Mouse's wife. "I am not a rich
+man. I lent your husband five francs because he had nothing. I am sorry
+but I cannot spare twenty florins to send you to Ferrara. If _one_ will
+help you?"
+
+"Thanks the same," said the young woman, who was well dressed enough;
+and blessed me, and gathered up her child, and went her way.
+
+But her blessing did not lighten my heart, depressed and troubled by
+so strange an end to my little scheme of a beneficent loan. After all,
+perhaps the Mouse may have been as keenly disappointed as myself. With
+the ineradicable idea of the Italians, that persons who speak English
+are wealthy by nature, and _tutti originali_, it was not such an absurd
+conception of the case to suppose that if I had lent him five francs
+once, I should like to do it continually. Perhaps he may yet pay back
+the loan with usury. But I doubt it. In the mean time, I am far from
+blaming the Mouse. I merely feel that there is a misunderstanding, which
+I can pardon if he can.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+CHURCHES AND PICTURES.
+
+
+One day in the gallery of the Venetian Academy a family party of the
+English, whom we had often seen from our balcony in their gondolas, were
+kind enough to pause before Titian's John the Baptist. It was attention
+that the picture could scarcely demand in strict justice, for it hangs
+at the end of a suite of smaller rooms through which visitors usually
+return from the great halls, spent with looking at much larger
+paintings. As these people stood gazing at the sublime figure of the
+Baptist,--one of the most impressive, if not the most religious,
+that the master has painted,--and the wild and singular beauty of
+the landscape made itself felt through the infinite depths of their
+respectability, the father of the family and the head of the group
+uttered approval of the painter's conception: "Quite my idea of the
+party's character," he said; and then silently and awfully led his
+domestic train away.
+
+I am so far from deriding the criticism of this honest gentleman that
+I would wish to have equal sincerity and boldness in saying what I
+thought--if I really thought any thing at all--concerning the art which
+I spent so great a share of my time at Venice in looking at. But I fear
+I should fall short of the terseness as well as the candor I applaud,
+and should presently find myself tediously rehearsing criticisms which
+I neither respect for their honesty, nor regard for their justice. It is
+the sad fortune of him who desires to arrive at full perception of the
+true and beautiful in art, to find that critics have no agreement except
+upon a few loose general principles; and that among the artists, to whom
+he turns in his despair, no two think alike concerning the same master,
+while his own little learning has made him distrust his natural likings
+and mislikings. Ruskin is undoubtedly the best guide you can have
+in your study of the Venetian painters; and after reading him, and
+suffering confusion and ignominy from his theories and egotisms, the
+exercises by which you are chastised into admission that he has taught
+you any thing cannot fail to end in a humility very favorable to your
+future as a Christian. But even in this subdued state you must distrust
+the methods by which he pretends to relate the aesthetic truths you
+perceive to certain civil and religious conditions: you scarcely
+understand how Tintoretto, who genteelly disdains (on one page) to paint
+well any person baser than a saint or senator, and with whom "exactly
+in proportion to the dignity of the character is the beauty of the
+painting,"--comes (on the next page) to paint a very "weak, mean, and
+painful" figure of Christ; and knowing a little the loose lives of the
+great Venetian painters, you must reject, with several other humorous
+postulates, the idea that good colorists are better men than bad
+colorists. Without any guide, I think, these painters may be studied and
+understood, up to a certain point, by one who lives in the atmosphere
+of their art at Venice, and who, insensibly breathing in its influence,
+acquires a feeling for it which all the critics in the world could not
+impart where the works themselves are not to be seen. I am sure that no
+one strange to the profession of artist ever received a just notion of
+any picture by reading the most accurate and faithful description of
+it: stated dimensions fail to convey ideas of size; adjectives are not
+adequate to the ideas of movement; and the names of the colors, however
+artfully and vividly introduced and repeated, cannot tell the reader
+of a painter's coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian's
+"Assumption" is like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any
+one who has seen it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning
+critic describe intelligibly the difference between the styles of
+Titian, of Tintoretto, and of Paolo Veronese,--that difference which no
+one with the slightest feeling for art can fail to discern after looking
+thrice at their works? It results from all this that I must believe
+special criticisms on art to have their small use only in the presence
+of the works they discuss. This is my sincere belief, and I could not,
+in any honesty, lumber my pages with descriptions or speculations which
+would be idle to most readers, even if I were a far wiser judge of art
+than I affect to be. As it is, doubting if I be gifted in that way at
+all, I think I may better devote myself to discussion of such things in
+Venice as can be understood by comparison with things elsewhere, and so
+rest happy in the thought that I have thrown no additional darkness on
+any of the pictures half obscured now by the religious dimness of the
+Venetian churches.
+
+Doubt, analogous to that expressed, has already made me hesitate to
+spend the reader's patience upon many well-known wonders of Venice;
+and, looking back over the preceding chapters, I find that some of the
+principal edifices of the city have scarcely got into my book even by
+name. It is possible that the reader, after all, loses nothing by this;
+but I should regret it, if it seemed ingratitude to that expression of
+the beautiful which beguiled many dull hours for me, and kept me company
+in many lonesome ones. For kindnesses of this sort, indeed, I am under
+obligations to edifices in every part of the city; and there is hardly
+a bit of sculptured stone in the Ducal Palace to which I do not owe some
+pleasant thought or harmless fancy. Yet I am shy of endeavoring in
+my gratitude to transmute the substance of the Ducal Palace into some
+substance that shall be sensible to the eyes that look on this print;
+and I forgive myself the reluctance the more readily when I remember
+how, just after reading Mr. Ruskin's description of St. Mark's Church,
+I, who had seen it every day for three years, began to have dreadful
+doubts of its existence.
+
+To be sure, this was only for a moment, and I do not think all the
+descriptive talent in the world could make me again doubt St. Mark's,
+which I remember with no less love than veneration. This church indeed
+has a beauty which touches and wins all hearts, while it appeals
+profoundly to the religious sentiment. It is as if there were a
+sheltering friendliness in its low-hovering domes and arches, which
+lures and caresses while it awes; as if here, where the meekest soul
+feels welcome and protection, the spirit oppressed with the heaviest
+load of sin might creep nearest to forgiveness, hiding the anguish of
+its repentance in the temple's dim cavernous recesses, faintly starred
+with mosaic, and twilighted by twinkling altar-lamps. Though the temple
+is enriched with incalculable value of stone and sculpture, I
+cannot remember at any time to have been struck by its mere opulence
+Preciousness of material has been sanctified to the highest uses, and
+there is such unity and justness in the solemn splendor, that wonder is
+scarcely appealed to. Even the priceless and rarely seen treasures of
+the church--such as the famous golden altarpiece, whose costly blaze
+of gems and gold was lighted in Constantinople six hundred years
+ago--failed to impress me with their pecuniary worth, though I
+
+    "Value the giddy pleasure of the eyes,"
+
+and like to marvel at precious things. The jewels of other churches are
+conspicuous and silly heaps of treasure; but St. Mark's, where every
+line of space shows delicate labor in rich material, subdues the jewels
+to their place of subordinate adornment. So, too, the magnificence
+of the Romish service seems less vainly ostentatious there. In other
+churches the ceremonies may sometimes impress you with a sense of
+their grandeur, and even spirituality, but they all need the effect of
+twilight upon them. You want a foreground of kneeling figures, and faces
+half visible through heavy bars of shadow; little lamps must tremble
+before the shrines; and in the background must rise the high altar, all
+ablaze with candles from vault to pavement, while a hidden choir pours
+music from behind, and the organ shakes the heart with its heavy tones.
+But with the daylight on its splendors even the grand function of the
+_Te Deum_ fails to awe, and wearies by its length, except in St. Mark's
+alone, which is given grace to spiritualize what elsewhere would be
+mere theatric pomp. [Footnote: The cardinal-patriarch officiates in the
+Basilica San Marco with some ceremonies which I believe are peculiar to
+the patriarchate of Venice, and which consist of an unusual number of
+robings and disrobings, and putting on and off of shoes. All this
+is performed with great gravity, and has, I suppose, some peculiar
+spiritual significance. The shoes are brought by a priest to the foot
+of the patriarchal throne, when a canon removes the profane, out-of-door
+_chaussure_, and places the sacred shoes on the patriarch's feet. A like
+ceremony replaces the patriarch's every-day gaiters, and the pious rite
+ends.] The basilica, however, is not in every thing the edifice best
+adapted to the Romish worship; for the incense, which is a main element
+of the function, is gathered and held there in choking clouds under the
+low wagon-roofs of the cross-naves.--Yet I do not know if I would
+banish incense from the formula of worship even in St. Mark's. There is
+certainly a poetic if not a religious grace in the swinging censer and
+its curling fumes; and I think the perfume, as it steals mitigated to
+your nostrils, out of the open church door, is the reverendest smell in
+the world.
+
+The music in Venetian churches is not commonly very good: the best is
+to be heard at St. Mark's, though the director of the choir always
+contrives to make so odious a slapping with his _baton_ as nearly
+to spoil your enjoyment. The great musical event of the year is the
+performance (immediately after the _Festa del Redentore_) of the Soldini
+Masses. These are offered for the repose of one Guiseppe Soldini of
+Verona, who, dying possessed of about a million francs, bequeathed a
+part (some six thousand francs) annually to the church of St. Mark,
+on conditions named in his will. The terms are, that during three
+successive days, every year, there shall be said for the peace of his
+soul a certain number of masses,--all to be done in the richest and
+costliest manner. In case of delinquency, the bequest passes to the
+Philharmonic Society of Milan; but the priesthood of the basilica so
+strictly regard the wishes of the deceased that they never say less
+than four masses over and above the prescribed number. [Footnote: After
+hearing these masses, curiosity led me to visit the _Casa di Ricovero_,
+in order to look at Soldini'a will, and there I had the pleasure of
+recognizing the constantly recurring fact, that beneficent humanity
+is of all countries and religions. The Casa di Ricovero is an immense
+edifice dedicated to the shelter and support of the decrepit and
+helpless of either sex, who are collected there to the number of five
+hundred. The more modern quarter was erected from a bequest by Soldini;
+and eternal provision is also made by his will for ninety of the
+inmates. The Secretary of the Casa went through all the wards and
+infirmaries with me, and everywhere I saw cleanliness and comfort (and
+such content as is possible to sickness and old age), without surprise;
+for I had before seen the Civil Hospital of Venice, and knew something
+of the perfection of Venetian charities.
+
+At last we came to the wardrobe, where the clothes of the pensioners are
+made and kept. Here we were attended by a little, slender, pallid young
+nun, who exhibited the dresses with a simple pride altogether pathetic.
+She was a woman still, poor thing, though a nun, and she could not help
+loving new clothes. They called her Madre, who would never be it except
+in name and motherly tenderness. When we had seen all, she stood a
+moment before us, and as one of the coarse woolen lappets of her cape
+had hidden it, she drew out a heavy crucifix of gold, and placed it in
+sight, with a heavenly little ostentation, over her heart. Sweet and
+beautiful vanity! An angel could have done it without harm, but she
+blushed repentance, and glided away with downcast eyes Poor little
+mother!]
+
+As there is so little in St. Mark's of the paltry or revolting character
+of modern Romanism, one would form too exalted an idea of the dignity of
+Catholic worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the sincerity
+and nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown to the Romish faith of these
+times, are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell
+upon the present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith
+honors the superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition
+in all its proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the
+Renaissance churches,--fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming
+spirit which has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of
+religion; which has made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has
+rendered the population ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its
+friendship to tyranny and its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life
+of the Church that it may sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of
+this superstition are the foolish and hideous dolls which people bow to
+in most of the Venetian temples, and of which the most abominable is in
+the church of the Carmelites. It represents the Madonna with the Child,
+elevated breast-high to the worshipers. She is crowned with tinsel and
+garlanded with paper flowers; she has a blue ribbon about her tightly
+corseted waist; and she wears an immense spreading hoop. On her painted,
+silly face of wood, with its staring eyes shadowed by a wig, is figured
+a pert smile; and people come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs
+by a chain from her girdle, and utter their prayers to her; while the
+column near which she sits is hung over with pictures celebrating the
+miracles she has performed.
+
+These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on most altars of the
+Virgin, and are no less interesting as works of art than as expressions
+of hopeless superstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is
+dressed in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited,
+is the Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and
+hopeless sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her
+interference. You behold a carriage overturned and dragged along the
+ground by frantic horses, and the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman
+in the carriage about to be dashed into millions of pieces, when the
+havoc is instantly arrested by this Madonna who breaks the clouds,
+leaving them with jagged and shattered edges, like broken panes of
+glass, and visibly holds back the fashionable lady and gentleman from
+destruction. It is the fashionable lady and gentleman who have thus
+recorded their obligation; and it is the mother, doubtless, of the
+little boy miraculously preserved from death in his fall from the
+second-floor balcony, who has gratefully caused the miracle to be
+painted and hung at the Madonna's shrine. Now and then you also find
+offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in acknowledgment of good
+crops which the Madonna has made to grow; and again you find rows of
+silver hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her intercession has
+caused to be purged. The greatest number of these, at any one shrine,
+is to be seen in the church of San Nicolo dei Tolentini, where I should
+think there were three hundred.
+
+Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna della Salute in pestilent
+times, I do not take it to be very great when the health of the city is
+good, if I may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in the church
+of her name: it is true that on the annual holiday commemorative of
+her interposition to save Venice from the plague, there is an immense
+concourse of people there; but at other times I found the masses and
+vespers slenderly attended, and I did not observe a great number of
+votive offerings in the temple,--though the great silver lamp placed
+there by the city, in memory of the Madonna's goodness during the
+visitation of the cholera in 1849, may be counted, perhaps, as
+representative of much collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb
+church, lording it over the noblest breadth of the Grand Canal; and I do
+not know what it is saves it from being as hateful to the eye as other
+temples of the Renaissance architecture. But it has certainly a fine
+effect, with its twin belltowers and single massive dome, its majestic
+breadth of steps rising from the water's edge, and the many-statued
+sculpture of its facade. Strangers go there to see the splendor of its
+high altar (where the melodramatic Madonna, as the centre of a marble
+group, responds to the prayer of the operatic Venezia, and drives away
+the haggard, theatrical Pest), and the excellent Titians and the grand
+Tintoretto in the sacristy.
+
+The Salute is one of the great show-churches, like that of San Giovanni
+e Paolo, which the common poverty of imagination has decided to call the
+Venetian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many famous tombs and
+monuments. But there is only one Westminster Abbey; and I am so far a
+believer in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose that vergers
+are nowhere possible but in England. There would be nothing to say,
+after Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San
+Giovanni e Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them; I only wonder that,
+in speaking of the bad art which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he
+failed to mention the successful approach to its depraved feeling, made
+by the single figure sitting on the case of a slender shaft, at the side
+of the first altar on the right of the main entrance. I suppose this
+figure typifies Grief, but it really represents a drunken woman, whose
+drapery has fallen, as if in some vile debauch, to her waist, and
+who broods, with a horrible, heavy stupor and chopfallen vacancy, on
+something which she supports with her left hand upon her knee. It is a
+round of marble, and if you have the daring to peer under the arm of
+the debauchee, and look at it as she does, you find that it contains the
+bass-relief of a skull in bronze. Nothing more ghastly and abominable
+than the whole thing can be conceived, and it seemed to me the fit type
+of the abandoned Venice which produced it; for one even less Ruskinian
+than I might have fancied that in the sculptured countenance could be
+seen the dismay of the pleasure-wasted harlot of the sea when, from time
+to time, death confronted her amid her revels.
+
+People go into the Chapel of the Rosary here to see the painting of
+Titian, representing The Death of Peter Martyr. Behind it stands a
+painting of equal size by John Bellini,--the Madonna, Child, and Saints,
+of course,--and it is curious to study in the two pictures those points
+in which Titian excelled and fell short of his master. The treatment
+of the sky in the landscape is singularly alike in both, but where the
+greater painter has gained in breadth and freedom, he has lost in that
+indefinable charm which belonged chiefly to Bellini, and only to that
+brief age of transition, of which his genius was the fairest flower and
+ripest fruit. I have looked again and again at nearly every painting of
+note in Venice, having a foolish shame to miss a single one, and having
+also a better wish to learn something of the beautiful from them; but
+at last I must say, that, while I wondered at the greatness of some,
+and tried to wonder at the greatness of others, the only paintings which
+gave me genuine and hearty pleasure were those of Bellini, Carpaccio,
+and a few others of that school and time.
+
+Every day we used to pass through the court of the old Augustinian
+convent adjoining the church of San Stefano. It is a long time since
+the monks were driven out of their snug hold; and the convent is now
+the headquarters of the Austrian engineer corps, and the colonnade
+surrounding the court is become a public thoroughfare. On one wall of
+this court are remains--very shadowy remains indeed--of frescos painted
+by Pordenone at the period of his fiercest rivalry with Titian; and it
+is said that Pordenone, while he wrought upon the scenes of scriptural
+story here represented, wore his sword and buckler, in readiness to
+repel an attack which he feared from his competitor. The story is very
+vague, and I hunted it down in divers authorities only to find it grow
+more and more intangible and uncertain. But it gave a singular relish
+to our daily walk through the old cloister, and I added, for my own
+pleasure (and chiefly out of my own fancy, I am afraid, for I can
+nowhere localize the fable on which I built), that the rivalry between
+the painters was partly a love-jealousy, and that the disputed object of
+their passion was that fair Violante, daughter of the elder Palma, who
+is to be seen in so many pictures painted by her father, and by her
+lover, Titian. No doubt there are readers will care less for this
+idleness of mine than for the fact that the hard-headed German monk,
+Martin Luther, once said mass in the adjoining church of San Stefano,
+and lodged in the convent, on his way to Rome. The unhappy Francesco
+Carrara, last Lord of Padua, is buried in this church; but Venetians
+are chiefly interested there now by the homilies of those fervent
+preacher-monks, who deliver powerful sermons during Lent. The monks are
+gifted men, with a most earnest and graceful eloquence, and they attract
+immense audiences, like popular and eccentric ministers among ourselves.
+It is a fashion to hear them, and although the atmosphere of the
+churches in the season of Lent is raw, damp, and most uncomfortable,
+the Venetians then throng the churches where they preach. After Lent
+the sermons and church-going cease, and the sanctuaries are once more
+abandoned to the possession of the priests, droning from the altars to
+the scattered kneelers on the floor,--the foul old women and the young
+girls of the poor, the old-fashioned old gentlemen and devout ladies
+of the better class, and that singular race of poverty-stricken old men
+proper to Italian churches, who, having dabbled themselves with holy
+water, wander forlornly and aimlessly about, and seem to consort with
+the foreigners looking at the objects of interest. Lounging young
+fellows of low degree appear with their caps in their hands, long enough
+to tap themselves upon the breast and nod recognition to the high-altar;
+and lounging young fellows of high degree step in to glance at the faces
+of the pretty girls, and then vanish. The droning ends, presently,
+and the devotees disappear, the last to go being that thin old woman,
+kneeling before a shrine, with a grease-gray shawl falling from her
+head to the ground. The sacristan, in his perennial enthusiasm about
+the great picture of the church, almost treads upon her as he brings
+the strangers to see it, and she gets meekly up and begs of them in
+a whispering whimper. The sacristan gradually expels her with the
+visitors, and at one o'clock locks the door and goes home.
+
+By chance I have got a fine effect in churches at the five o'clock mass
+in the morning, when the worshipers are nearly all peasants who have
+come to market, and who are pretty sure, each one, to have a bundle
+or basket. At this hour the sacristan is heavy with sleep; he dodges
+uncertainly at the tapers as he lights and extinguishes them; and his
+manner to the congregation, as he passes through it to the altar, is
+altogether rasped and nervous. I think it is best to be one's self a
+little sleepy,--when the barefooted friar at the altar (if it is in the
+church of the Scalzi, say) has a habit of getting several centuries
+back from you, and of saying mass to the patrician ghosts from the
+tombs under your feet and there is nothing at all impossible in the
+Renaissance angels and cherubs in marble, floating and fatly tumbling
+about on the broken arches of the altars.
+
+I have sometimes been puzzled in Venice to know why churches should keep
+cats, church-mice being proverbially so poor, and so little capable of
+sustaining a cat in good condition; yet I have repeatedly found sleek
+and portly cats in the churches, where they seem to be on terms of
+perfect understanding with the priests, and to have no quarrel even with
+the little boys who assist at mass. There is, for instance, a cat in the
+sacristy of the Frari, which I have often seen in familiar association
+with the ecclesiastics there, when they came into his room to robe
+or disrobe, or warm their hands, numb with supplication, at the great
+brazier in the middle of the floor. I do not think this cat has the
+slightest interest in the lovely Madonna of Bellini which hangs in the
+sacristy; but I suspect him of dreadful knowledge concerning the tombs
+in the church. I have no doubt he has passed through the open door
+of Canova's monument, and that he sees some coherence and meaning in
+Titian's; he has been all over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro,
+and he knows whether the griffins descend from their perches at the
+midnight hour to bite the naked knees of the ragged black caryatides.
+This profound and awful animal I take to be a blood relation of the
+cat in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, who sleeps like a Christian
+during divine service, and loves a certain glorious bed on the top of a
+bench, where the sun strikes upon him through the great painted window,
+and dapples his tawny coat with lovely purples and crimsons.
+
+The church cats are apparently the friends of the sacristans, with whom
+their amity is maintained probably by entire cession of the spoils of
+visitors. In these, therefore, they seldom take any interest, merely
+opening a lazy eye now and then to wink at the sacristans as they drag
+the deluded strangers from altar to altar, with intense enjoyment of
+the absurdity, and a wicked satisfaction in the incredible stories
+rehearsed. I fancy, being Italian cats, they feel something like a
+national antipathy toward those troops of German tourists, who always
+seek the Sehenswuerdigkeiten in companies of ten or twenty,--the men
+wearing their beards, and the women their hoops and hats, to look as
+much like English people as possible; while their valet marshals them
+forward with a stream of guttural information, unbroken by a single
+punctuation point. These wise cats know the real English by their
+"Murrays;" and I think they make a shrewd guess at the nationality of us
+Americans by the speed with which we pass from one thing to another, and
+by our national ignorance of all languages but English. They must also
+hear us vaunt the superiority of our own land in unpleasant comparisons,
+and I do not think they believe us, or like us, for our boastings. I
+am sure they would say to us, if they could, "_Quando finira mai quella
+guerra? Che sangue! che orrore_!" [Footnote: "When will this war ever be
+ended? what blood! what horror!" I have often heard the question and the
+comment from many Italians who were not cats.] The French tourist they
+distinguish by his evident skepticism concerning his own wisdom in
+quitting Paris for the present purpose; and the traveling Italian, by
+his attention to his badly dressed, handsome wife, with whom he is now
+making his wedding trip.
+
+I have found churches undergoing repairs (as most of them always are in
+Venice) rather interesting. Under these circumstances, the sacristan is
+obliged to take you into all sorts of secret places and odd corners,
+to show you the objects of interest; and you may often get glimpses of
+pictures which, if not removed from their proper places, it would be
+impossible to see. The carpenters and masons work most deliberately, as
+if in a place so set against progress that speedy workmanship would be
+a kind of impiety. Besides the mechanics, there are always idle priests
+standing about, and vagabond boys clambering over the scaffolding.
+In San Giovanni e Paolo I remember we one day saw a small boy appear
+through an opening in the roof, and descend by means of some hundred
+feet of dangling rope. The spectacle, which made us ache with fear,
+delighted his companions so much that their applause was scarcely
+subdued by the sacred character of the place. As soon as he reached the
+ground in safety, a gentle, good-natured looking priest took him by the
+arm and cuffed his ears. It was a scene for a painter.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS.
+
+
+Nothing can be fairer to the eye than these "summer isles of Eden" lying
+all about Venice, far and near. The water forever trembles and changes,
+with every change of light, from one rainbow glory to another, as with
+the restless hues of an opal; and even when the splendid tides recede,
+and go down with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the
+empurpled mud of the shallows, all strewn with green, disheveled
+sea-weed. The lagoons have almost as wide a bound as your vision. On the
+east and west you can see their borders of sea-shore and main-land; but
+looking north and south, there seems no end to the charm of their vast,
+smooth, all-but melancholy expanses. Beyond their southern limit rise
+the blue Euganean Hills, where Petrarch died; on the north loom
+the Alps, white with snow. Dotting the stretches of lagoon in every
+direction lie the islands--now piles of airy architecture that the water
+seems to float under and bear upon its breast, now
+
+    "Sunny spots of greenery,"
+
+with the bell-towers of demolished cloisters shadowily showing above
+their trees;--for in the days of the Republic nearly every one of the
+islands had its monastery and its church. At present the greater
+number have been fortified by the Austrians, whose sentinel paces the
+once-peaceful shores, and challenges all passers with his sharp "_Halt!
+Wer da_!" and warns them not to approach too closely. Other islands have
+been devoted to different utilitarian purposes, and few are able to keep
+their distant promises of loveliness. One of the more faithful is the
+island of San Clemente, on which the old convent church is yet standing,
+empty and forlorn within, but without all draped in glossy ivy. After
+I had learned to row in the gondolier fashion, I voyaged much in the
+lagoon with my boat, and often stopped at this church. It has a curious
+feature in the chapel of the Madonna di Loreto, which is built in the
+middle of the nave, faced with marble, roofed, and isolated from the
+walls of the main edifice on all sides. On the back of this there is
+a bass-relief in bronze, representing the Nativity--a work much in
+the spirit of the bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo; and one of
+the chapels has an exquisite little altar, with gleaming columns of
+porphyry. There has been no service in the church for many years;
+and this altar had a strangely pathetic effect, won from the black
+four-cornered cap of a priest that lay before it, like an offering. I
+wondered who the priest was that wore it, and why he had left it there,
+as if he had fled away in haste. I might have thought it looked like the
+signal of the abdication of a system; the gondolier who was with me took
+it up and reviled it as representative of _birbanti matricolati_, who
+fed upon the poor, and in whose expulsion from that island he rejoiced.
+But he had little reason to do so, since the last use of the place was
+for the imprisonment of refractory ecclesiastics. Some of the tombs
+of the Morosini are in San Clemente--villanous monuments, with bronze
+Deaths popping out of apertures, and holding marble scrolls inscribed
+with undying deeds. Indeed, nearly all the decorations of the poor old
+church are horrible, and there is one statue in it meant for an angel,
+with absolutely the most lascivious face I ever saw in marble.
+
+The islands near Venice are all small, except the Giudecca (which is
+properly a part of the city), the Lido, and Murano. The Giudecca,
+from being anciently the bounds in which certain factious nobles were
+confined, was later laid out in pleasure-gardens, and built up with
+summer-palaces. The gardens still remain to some extent; but they are
+now chiefly turned to practical account in raising vegetables and
+fruits for the Venetian market, and the palaces have been converted into
+warehouses and factories. This island produces a variety of beggar, the
+most truculent and tenacious in all Venice, and it has a convent of lazy
+Capuchin friars, who are likewise beggars. To them belongs the church of
+the Redentore, which only the Madonnas of Bellini in the sacristy make
+worthy to be seen,--though the island is hardly less famed for this
+church than for the difficult etymology of its name.
+
+At the eastern extremity of the Giudecca lies the Island of San Giorgio
+Maggiore, with Palladio's church of that name. There are some great
+Tintorettos in the church, and I like the beautiful wood-carvings in
+the choir. The island has a sad interest from the political prison into
+which part of the old convent has been perverted; and the next island
+eastward is the scarcely sadder abode of the mad. Then comes the fair
+and happy seat of Armenian learning and piety, San Lazzaro, and then the
+Lido.
+
+The Lido is the sea-shore, and thither in more cheerful days the
+Venetians used to resort in great numbers on certain holidays, called
+the Mondays of the Lido, to enjoy the sea-breeze and the country
+scenery, and to lunch upon the flat tombs of the Hebrews, buried there
+in exile from the consecrated Christian ground. On a summer's day there
+the sun glares down upon the sand and flat gravestones, and it seems
+the most desolate place where one's bones might be laid. The Protestants
+were once also interred on the Lido, but now they rest (apart from the
+Catholics, however) in the cemetery of San Michele.
+
+The island is long and narrow: it stretches between the lagoons and the
+sea, with a village at either end, and with bath-houses on the beach,
+which is everywhere faced with forts. There are some poor little trees
+there, and grass,--things which we were thrice a week grateful for, when
+we went thither to bathe. I do not know whether it will give the place
+further interest to say, that it was among the tombs of the Hebrews
+Cooper's ingenious Bravo had the incredible good luck to hide himself
+from the _sbirri_ of the Republic; or to relate that it was the habit of
+Lord Byron to gallop up and down the Lido in search of that conspicuous
+solitude of which the sincere bard was fond.
+
+One day of the first summer I spent in Venice (three years of Venetian
+life afterward removed it back into times of the remotest antiquity), a
+friend and I had the now-incredible enterprise to walk from one end of
+the Lido to the other,--from the port of San Nicolo (through which the
+Bucintoro passed when the Doges went to espouse the Adriatic) to the
+port of Malamocco, at the southern extremity.
+
+We began with that delicious bath which you may have in the Adriatic,
+where the light surf breaks with a pensive cadence on the soft sand, all
+strewn with brilliant shells. The Adriatic is the bluest water I have
+ever seen; and it is an ineffable, lazy delight to lie and watch the
+fishing sails of purple and yellow dotting its surface, and the greater
+ships dipping down its utmost rim. It was particularly good to do this
+after coming out of the water; but our American blood could not brook
+much repose, and we got up presently, and started on our walk to the
+little village of Malamocco, some three miles away. The double-headed
+eagle keeps watch and ward from a continuous line of forts along the
+shore, and the white-coated sentinels never cease to pace the bastions,
+night or day. Their vision of the sea must not be interrupted by even so
+much as the form of a stray passer; and as we went by the forts, we had
+to descend from the sea-wall, and walk under it, until we got beyond the
+sentry's beat. The crimson poppies grow everywhere on this sandy little
+isle, and they fringe the edges of the bastions with their bloom, as
+if the "blood-red blossoms of war" had there sprung from the seeds of
+battle sown in old forgotten fights. But otherwise the forts were not
+very engaging in appearance. A sentry-box of yellow and black, a sentry,
+a row of seaward frowning cannon--there was not much in all this to
+interest us; and so we walked idly along, and looked either to the city
+rising from the lagoons on one hand, or the ships going down the sea on
+the other. In the fields, along the road, were vines and Indian corn;
+but instead of those effigies of humanity, doubly fearful from their
+wide unlikeness to any thing human, which we contrive to scare away
+the birds, the devout peasant-folks had here displayed on poles the
+instruments of the Passion of the Lord--the hammer, the cords, the
+nails--which at once protected and blessed the fields. But I doubt if
+even these would save them from the New-World pigs, and certainly the
+fences here would not turn pork, for they are made of a matting of
+reeds, woven together, and feebly secured to tremulous posts. The
+fields were well cultivated, and the vines and garden vegetables looked
+flourishing; but the corn was spindling, and had, I thought, a homesick
+look, as if it dreamed vainly of wide ancestral bottom-lands, on
+the mighty streams that run through the heart of the Great West. The
+Italians call our corn _gran turco_, but I knew that it was for the West
+that it yearned, and not for the East.
+
+No doubt there were once finer dwellings than the peasants' houses which
+are now the only habitations on the Lido; and I suspect that a genteel
+villa must formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we found
+surmounted by broken statues of Venus and Diana. The poor goddesses were
+both headless, and some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and
+they looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering attitudes of the absurd
+period of art to which they belonged: they extended their mutilated arms
+toward the sea for pity, but it regarded them not; and we passed before
+them scoffing at their bad taste, for we were hungry, and it was yet
+some distance to Malamocco.
+
+This dirty little village was the capital of the Venetian islands before
+King Pepin and his Franks burned it, and the shifting sands of empire
+gathered solidly about the Rialto in Venice. It is a thousand years
+since that time, and Malamocco has long been given over to fishermen's
+families and the soldiers of the forts. We found the latter lounging
+about the unwholesome streets; and the former seated at their
+thresholds, engaged in those pursuits of the chase which the use of a
+fine-tooth comb would undignify to mere slaughter.
+
+There is a church at Malamocco, but it was closed, and we could not find
+the sacristan; so we went to the little restaurant, as the next best
+place, and demanded something to eat. What had the padrone? He answered
+pretty much to the same effect as the innkeeper in "Don Quixote," who
+told his guests that they could have any thing that walked on the earth,
+or swam in the sea, or flew in the air. We would take, then, some fish,
+or a bit of veal, or some mutton chops. The padrone sweetly shrugged the
+shoulders of apology. There was nothing of all this, but what would we
+say to some liver or gizzards of chickens, fried upon the instant and
+ready the next breath? No, we did not want them; so we compromised on
+some ham fried in a batter of eggs, and reeking with its own fatness.
+The truth is, it was a very bad little lunch we made, and nothing
+redeemed it but the amiability of the smiling padrone and the bustling
+padrona, who served us as kings and princes. It was a clean hostelry,
+though, and that was a merit in Malamocco, of which the chief modern
+virtue is that it cannot hold you long. No doubt it was more interesting
+in other times. In the days when the Venetians chose it for their
+capital, it was a walled town, and fortified with towers. It has been
+more than once inundated by the sea, and it might again be washed out
+with advantage.
+
+In the spring, two years after my visit to Malamocco, we people in Casa
+Falier made a long-intended expedition to the island of Torcello, which
+is perhaps the most interesting of the islands of the lagoons. We had
+talked of it all winter, and had acquired enough property there to put
+up some light Spanish castles on the desolate site of the ancient city,
+that, so many years ago, sickened of the swamp air and died. A Count
+from Torcello is the title which Venetian persiflage gives to improbable
+noblemen; and thus even the pride of the dead Republic of Torcello has
+passed into matter of scornful jest, as that of the dead Republic of
+Venice may likewise in its day.
+
+When we leave the riva of Casa Falier, we pass down the Grand Canal,
+cross the Basin of St. Mark, and enter one of the narrow canals
+that intersect the Riva degli Schiavoni, whence we wind and deviate
+southwestward till we emerge near the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on
+the Fondamenta Nuove. On our way we notice that a tree, hanging over the
+water from a little garden, is in full leaf, and at Murano we see the
+tender bloom of peaches and the drifted blossom of cherry-trees.
+
+As we go by the Cemetery of San Michele, Piero the gondolier and
+Giovanna improve us with a little solemn pleasantry.
+
+"It is a small place," says Piero, "but there is room enough for all
+Venice in it."
+
+"It is true," assents Giovanna, "and here we poor folks become
+landholders at last."
+
+At Murano we stop a moment to look at the old Duomo, and to enjoy its
+quaint mosaics within, and the fine and graceful spirit of the _apsis_
+without. It is very old, this architecture; but the eternal youth of the
+beautiful belongs to it, and there is scarce a stone fallen from it that
+I would replace.
+
+The manufacture of glass at Murano, of which the origin is so remote,
+may be said to form the only branch of industry which still flourishes
+in the lagoons. Muranese beads are exported to all quarters in vast
+quantities, and the process of making them is one of the things that
+strangers feel they must see when visiting Venice. The famous mirrors
+are no longer made, and the glass has deteriorated in quality, as well
+as in the beauty of the thousand curious forms it took. The test of the
+old glass, which is now imitated a great deal, is its extreme lightness.
+I suppose the charming notion that glass was once wrought at Murano of
+such fineness that it burst into fragments if poison were poured into
+it, must be fabulous. And yet it would have been an excellent thing in
+the good old toxicological days of Italy; and people of noble family
+would have found a sensitive goblet of this sort as sovereign against
+the arts of venomers as an exclusive diet of boiled eggs. The city of
+Murano has dwindled from thirty to five thousand in population. It is
+intersected by a system of canals like Venice, and has a Grand Canal of
+its own, of as stately breadth as that of the capital. The finer houses
+are built on this canal; but the beautiful palaces, once occupied in
+_villeggiatura_ by the noble Venetians, are now inhabited by herds of
+poor, or converted into glass-works. The famous Cardinal Bembo and other
+literati made the island their retreat, and beautified it with gardens
+and fountains. Casa Priuli in that day was, according to Venetian ideas,
+"a terrestrial Paradise," and a proper haunt of "nymphs and demi-gods."
+But the wealth, the learning, and the elegance of former times, which
+planted "groves of Academe" at Murano, have passed away, and the fair
+pleasure-gardens are now weed-grown wastes, or turned into honest
+cabbage and potato patches. It is a poor, dreary little town, with an
+inexplicable charm in its decay. The city arms are still displayed upon
+the public buildings (for Murano was ruled, independently of Venice, by
+its own council); and the heraldic cock, with a snake in its beak, has
+yet a lusty and haughty air amid the ruin of the place.
+
+The way in which the spring made itself felt upon the lagoon was full of
+curious delight. It was not so early in the season that we should know
+the spring by the first raw warmth in the air, and there was as yet
+no assurance of her presence in the growth--later so luxuriant--of the
+coarse grasses of the shallows. But somehow the spring was there, giving
+us new life with every breath. There were fewer gulls than usual, and
+those we saw sailed far overhead, debating departure. There was deeper
+languor in the laziness of the soldiers of finance, as they lounged and
+slept upon their floating custom houses in every channel of the lagoons;
+and the hollow voices of the boatmen, yelling to each other as their
+wont is, had an uncommon tendency to diffuse themselves in echo. Over
+all, the heavens had put on their summer blue, in promise of that
+delicious weather which in the lagoons lasts half the year, and which
+makes every other climate seem niggard of sunshine and azure skies.
+I know we have beautiful days at home--days of which the sumptuous
+splendor used to take my memory with unspeakable longing and regret even
+in Italy;--but we do not have, week after week, month after month, that
+
+    "Blue, unclouded weather,"
+
+which, at Venice, contents all your senses, and makes you exult to be
+alive with the inarticulate gladness of children, or of the swallows
+that there all day wheel and dart through the air, and shriek out a
+delight too intense and precipitate for song.
+
+The island of Torcello is some five miles away from Venice, in the
+northern lagoon. The city was founded far back in the troubled morning
+of Christian civilization, by refugees from barbarian invasion, and
+built with stones quarried from the ruins of old Altinum, over which
+Attila had passed desolating. During the first ages of its existence
+Torcello enjoyed the doubtful advantage of protection from the Greek
+emperors, but fell afterward under the domination of Venice. In the
+thirteenth century the _debris_ of the river that emptied into the
+lagoon there began to choke up the wholesome salt canals, and to poison
+the air with swampy malaria; and in the seventeenth century the city had
+so dwindled that the Venetian _podesta_ removed his residence from
+the depopulated island to Burano,--though the bishopric established
+immediately after the settlement of the refugees at Torcello continued
+there till 1814, to the satisfaction, no doubt, of the frogs and
+mosquitoes that had long inherited the former citizens.
+
+I confess that I know little more of the history of Torcello than I
+found in my guide-book. There I read that the city had once stately
+civic and religious edifices, and that in the tenth century the Emperor
+Porphorygenitus called it "_magnum emporium Torcellanorum_." The
+much-restored cathedral of the seventh century, a little church, a
+building supposed to have been the public palace, and other edifices so
+ruinous and so old that their exact use in other days is not now known,
+are all that remain of the _magnum emporium_, except some lines of
+moldering wall that wander along the canals, and through pastures and
+vineyards, in the last imbecile stages of dilapidation and decay. There
+is a lofty bell-tower, also, from which, no doubt, the Torcellani
+used to descry afar off the devouring hordes of the barbarians on the
+main-land, and prepare for defense. As their city was never actually
+invaded, I am at a loss to account for the so-called Throne of Attila,
+which stands in the grass-grown piazza before the cathedral; and I fear
+that it may really have been after all only the seat which the ancient
+Tribunes of Torcello occupied on public occasions. It is a stone
+arm-chair, of a rude stateliness, and though I questioned its
+authenticity, I went and sat down in it a little while, to give myself
+the benefit of a doubt in case Attila had really pressed the same seat.
+
+As soon as our gondola touched the grassy shores at Torcello, Giovanna's
+children, Beppi and Nina, whom we had brought with us to give a first
+experience of trees and flowers and mother earth, leaped from the boat
+and took possession of land and water. By a curious fatality the little
+girl, who was bred safely amid the hundred canals of Venice, signalized
+her absence from their perils by presently falling into the only
+canal in Torcello, whence she was taken dripping, to be confined at
+a farm-house during the rest of our stay. The children were wild with
+pleasure, being absolutely new to the country, and ran over the island,
+plucking bouquets of weeds and flowers by armsful. A rake, borne afield
+upon the shoulder of a peasant, afterwhile fascinated the Venetian
+Beppi, and drew him away to study its strange and wonderful uses.
+
+The simple inhabitants of Torcello came forth with gifts, or rather
+bargains, of flowers, to meet their discoverers, and, in a little while,
+exhausted our soldi. They also attended us in full force when we sat
+down to lunch,--the old, the young men and maidens, and the little
+children, all alike sallow, tattered, and dirty. Under these
+circumstances, a sense of the idyllic and the patriarchal gave zest to
+our collation, and moved us to bestow, in a splendid manner, fragments
+of the feast among the poor Torcellani. Knowing the abstemiousness
+of Italians everywhere, and seeing the hungry fashion in which the
+islanders clutched our gifts and devoured them, it was our doubt whether
+any one of them had ever experienced perfect repletion. I incline to
+think that a chronic famine gnawed their entrails, and that they never
+filled their bellies but with draughts of the east wind disdained of
+Job. The smaller among them even scrambled with the dog for the bones,
+until a little girl was bitten, when a terrific tumult arose, and the
+dog was driven home by the whole multitude. The children presently
+returned. They all had that gift of beauty which Nature seldom denies to
+the children of their race; but being, as I said, so dirty, their
+beauty shone forth chiefly from their large soft eyes. They had a very
+graceful, bashful archness of manner, and they insinuated beggary so
+winningly, that it would have been impossible for hungry people to deny
+them. As for us, having lunched, we gave them every thing that remained,
+and went off to feast our enthusiasm for art and antiquity in the
+cathedral.
+
+Of course, I have not the least intention of describing it. I remember
+best among its wonders the bearing of certain impenitents in one of
+the mosaics on the walls, whom the earnest early artist had meant to
+represent as suffering in the flames of torment. I think, however, I
+have never seen complacence equal to that of these sinners, unless it
+was in the countenances of the seven fat kine, which, as represented in
+the vestibule of St. Mark's, wear an air of the sleepiest and laziest
+enjoyment, while the seven lean kine, having just come up from the
+river, devour steaks from their bleeding haunches. There are other
+mosaics in the Torcello cathedral, especially those in the _apsis_ and
+in one of the side chapels, which are in a beautiful spirit of art, and
+form the widest possible contrast to the eighteenth-century high altar,
+with its insane and ribald angels flying off at the sides, and poising
+themselves in the rope-dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly
+persons in the decline of the Renaissance. The choir is peculiarly
+built, in the form of a half-circle, with seats rising one above
+another, as in an amphitheatre, and a flight of steps ascending to the
+bishop's seat above all,--after the manner of the earliest Christian
+churches. The partition parapet before the high altar is of almost
+transparent marble, delicately and quaintly sculptured with peacocks and
+lions, as the Byzantines loved to carve them; and the capitals of the
+columns dividing the naves are of infinite richness. Part of the marble
+pulpit has a curious bass-relief, said to be representative of the
+worship of Mercury; and indeed the Torcellani owe much of the beauty of
+their Duomo to unrequited antiquity. (They came to be robbed in their
+turn: for the opulence of their churches was so great that in the
+fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the severest penalties had to be
+enacted against those who stole from them. No one will be surprised to
+learn that the clergy themselves participated in these spoliations; but
+I believe no ecclesiastic was ever lashed in the piazza, or deprived of
+an eye or a hand for his offense.) The Duomo has the peculiar Catholic
+interest, and the horrible fascination, of a dead saint's mortal part in
+a glass case.
+
+An arcade runs along the facade of the cathedral, and around the side
+and front of the adjoining church of Santa Fosca, which is likewise very
+old. But we found nothing in it but a dusty, cadaverous stench, and so
+we came away and ascended the campanile. From the top of this you have
+a view of the lagoon, in all its iridescent hues, and of the heaven-blue
+sea. Here, looking toward the main-land, I would have been glad to
+experience the feelings of the Torcellani of old, as they descried the
+smoking advance of Huns or Vandals. But the finer emotions are like
+gifted children, and are seldom equal to occasions. I am ashamed to say
+that mine got no further than Castle Bluebeard, with Lady Bluebeard's
+sister looking out for her brothers, and tearfully responding to Lady
+B.'s repeated and agonized entreaty, "O sister, do you see them yet?"
+
+The old woman who had opened the door of the campanile was surprised
+into hospitality by the sum of money we gave her, and took us through
+her house (which was certainly very neat and clean) into her garden,
+where she explained the nature of many familiar trees and shrubs to us
+poor Venetians.
+
+We went back home over the twilight lagoon, and Giovanna expressed the
+general feeling when she said: "_Torsello xe beo--no si pol negar--la
+campagna xe bea; ma, benedetta la mia Venezia!_"
+
+(The country is beautiful--it can't be denied--Torcello is beautiful;
+but blessed be my Venice!)
+
+The panorama of the southern lagoon is best seen in a voyage to
+Chioggia, or Ciozza, the quaint and historic little city that lies
+twenty miles away from Venice, at one of the ports of the harbor. The
+Giant Sea-wall, built there by the Republic in her decline, is a work of
+Roman grandeur, which impresses you more deeply than any other monument
+of the past with a sense of her former industrial and commercial
+greatness. Strips of village border the narrow Littorale all the way
+to Chioggia, and on the right lie the islands of the lagoon. Chioggia
+itself is hardly more than a village,--a Venice in miniature, like
+Murano, with canals and boats and bridges. But here the character of
+life is more amphibious than in brine-bound Venice; and though there is
+no horse to be seen in the central streets of Chioggia, peasants' teams
+penetrate her borders by means of a long bridge from the main-land.
+
+Of course Chioggia has passed through the customary vicissitudes of
+Italian towns, and has been depopulated at divers times by pestilence,
+famine, and war. It suffered cruelly in the war with the Genoese in
+1380, when it was taken by those enemies of St. Mark; and its people
+were so wasted by the struggle that the Venetians, on regaining it, were
+obliged to invite immigration to repopulate its emptiness. I do not know
+how great comfort the Chiozzotti of that unhappy day took in the fact
+that some of the earliest experiments with cannon were made in the
+contest that destroyed them, but I can hardly offer them less tribute
+than to mention it here. At present the place is peopled almost entirely
+by sailors and fishermen, whose wives are more famous for their beauty
+than their amiability. Goldoni's "Baruffe Chiozzotte" is an amusing and
+vivid picture of the daily battles which the high-spirited ladies of
+the city fought in the dramatist's [Footnote: Goldoni's family went from
+Venice to Chioggia when the dramatist was very young. The description
+of his life there form some of the most interesting chapters of his
+Memoirs.] time, and which are said to be of frequent occurrence at this
+day. The Chiozzotte are the only women of this part of Italy who still
+preserve a semblance of national costume; and this remnant of more
+picturesque times consists merely of a skirt of white, which, being open
+in front, is drawn from the waist over the head and gathered in the hand
+under the chin, giving to the flashing black eyes and swarthy features
+of the youthful wearer a look of very dangerous slyness and cunning.
+The dialect of the Chiozzotti is said to be that of the early Venetians,
+with an admixture of Greek, and it is infinitely more sweet and musical
+than the dialect now spoken in Venice. "Whether derived," says the
+author of the "Fiore di Venezia," alluding to the speech of these
+peculiar people, "from those who first settled these shores, or
+resulting from other physical and moral causes, it is certain that the
+tone of the voice is here more varied and powerful: the mouth is thrown
+wide open in speaking; a passion, a lament mingles with laughter itself,
+and there is a continual _ritornello_ of words previously spoken. But
+this speech is full of energy; whoever would study brief and strong
+modes of expression should come here."
+
+Chioggia was once the residence of noble and distinguished persons,
+among whom was the painter Rosalba Carrera, famed throughout Europe for
+her crayon miniatures; and the place produced in the sixteenth century
+the great maestro Giuseppe Zarlino, "who passes," says Cantu, "for the
+restorer of modern music," and "whose 'Orfeo' heralded the invention
+of the musical drama." This composer claimed for his birthplace the
+doubtful honor of the institution of the order of the Capuchins, which
+he declared to have been founded by Fra Paolo (Giovanni Sambi) of
+Chioggia. There is not much now to see in poor little Chioggia except
+its common people, who, after a few minutes' contemplation, can hardly
+interest any one but the artist. There are no dwellings in the town
+which approach palatial grandeur, and nothing in the Renaissance
+churches to claim attention, unless it be an attributive Bellini in
+one of them. Yet if you have the courage to climb the bell-tower of
+the cathedral, you get from its summit the loveliest imaginable view of
+many-purpled lagoon and silver-flashing sea; and if you are sufficiently
+acquainted with Italy and Italians to observe a curious fact, and care
+to study the subject, you may note the great difference between the
+inhabitants of Chioggia and those of Palestrina,--an island divided from
+Chioggia by a half mile of lagoon, and by quite different costume, type
+of face, and accent.
+
+Just between Chioggia and the sea lies the lazy town of Sottomarina, and
+I should say that the population of Sottomarina chiefly spent its time
+in lounging up and down the Sea-wall; while that of Chioggia, when not
+professionally engaged with the net, gave its leisure to playing _mora_
+[Footnote: Mora is the game which the Italians play with their fingers,
+one throwing out two, three, or four fingers, as the case may be, and
+calling the number at the same instant. If (so I understood the game)
+the player mistakes the number of fingers he throws out, he loses; if he
+hits the number with both voice and fingers he wins. It is played with
+tempestuous interest, and is altogether fiendish in appearance.] in the
+shade, or pitilessly pursuing strangers, and offering them boats. For my
+own part, I refused the subtlest advances of this kind which were made
+me in Chiozzotto, but fell a helpless prey to a boatman who addressed me
+in some words of wonderful English, and then rowed me to the Sea-wall at
+about thrice the usual fare.
+
+These primitive people are bent, in their out-of-the-world, remote way,
+upon fleecing the passing stranger quite as earnestly as other Italians,
+and they naively improve every occasion for plunder. As we passed up the
+shady side of their wide street, we came upon a plump little blond boy,
+lying asleep on the stones, with his head upon his arm; and as no
+one was near, the artist of our party stopped to sketch the sleeper.
+Atmospheric knowledge of the fact spread rapidly, and in a few minutes
+we were the centre of a general assembly of the people of Chioggia,
+who discussed us, and the artist's treatment of her subject, in open
+congress. They handed round the airy chaff as usual, but were very
+orderly and respectful, nevertheless,--one father of the place quelling
+every tendency to tumult by kicking his next neighbor, who passed on the
+penalty till, by this simple and ingenious process, the guilty cause of
+the trouble was infallibly reached and kicked at last. I placed a number
+of soldi in the boy's hand, to the visible sensation of the crowd, and
+then we moved away and left him, heading, as we went, a procession of
+Chiozzotti, who could not make up their minds to relinquish us till
+we took refuge in a church. When we came out the procession had
+disappeared, but all round the church door, and picturesquely scattered
+upon the pavement in every direction, lay boys asleep, with their
+heads upon their arms. As we passed laughing through the midst of these
+slumberers, they rose and followed us with cries of "_Mi tiri zu! Mi
+tiri zu!_" (Take me down! Take me down!) They ran ahead, and fell asleep
+again in our path, and round every corner we came upon a sleeping boy;
+and, indeed, we never got out of that atmosphere of slumber till we
+returned to the steamer for Venice, when Chioggia shook off her drowsy
+stupor, and began to tempt us to throw soldi into the water, to be dived
+for by her awakened children.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE ARMENIANS.
+
+
+Among the pleasantest friends we made in Venice were the monks of the
+Armenian Convent, whose cloistral buildings rise from the glassy lagoon,
+upon the south of the city, near a mile away. This bulk
+
+    "Of mellow brick-work on an isle of bowers"
+
+is walled in with solid masonry from the sea, and encloses a
+garden-court, filled with all beautiful flowers, and with the memorable
+trees of the East; while another garden encompasses the monastery
+itself, and yields those honest fruits and vegetables which supply the
+wants of the well-cared-for mortal part of the good brothers. The island
+is called San Lazzaro, and the convent was established in 1717 by a
+learned and devoted Armenian priest named Mechithar, from whom the
+present order of monks is called Mechitharist. He was the first who
+formed the idea of educating a class of priests to act as missionaries
+among the Armenian nation in the East, and infuse into its civil and
+religious decay the life of European piety and learning. He founded at
+Sebaste, therefore, a religious order of which the seat was presently
+removed to Constantinople, where the friars met with so much persecution
+from Armenian heterodoxy that it was again transferred, and fixed at
+Modone in Morea. That territory falling into the hands of the Turks,
+the Mechitharists fled with their leader to Venice, where the Republic
+bestowed upon them a waste and desolate island, which had formerly
+been used as a place of refuge for lepers; and the monks made it the
+loveliest spot in all the lagoons.
+
+The little island has such a celebrity in travel and romance, that I
+feel my pen catching in the tatters of a threadbare theme. And yet I
+love the place and its people so well, that I could scarcely pass it
+without mention. Every tourist who spends a week in Venice goes to see
+the convent, and every one is charmed with it and the courteous welcome
+of the fathers. Its best interest is the intrinsic interest attaching
+to it as a seat of Armenian culture; but persons who relish the
+cheap sentimentalism of Byron's life, find the convent all the more
+entertaining from the fact that he did the Armenian language the favor
+to study it there, a little. The monks show his autograph, together with
+those of other distinguished persons, and the Armenian Bible which
+he used to read. I understood from one of the friars, Padre Giacomo
+Issaverdanz, that the brothers knew little or nothing of Byron's
+celebrity as a poet while he studied with them, and that his proficiency
+as an Armenian scholar was not such as to win high regard from them.
+
+I think most readers who have visited the convent will recall the
+pleasant face and manners of the young father mentioned, who shows the
+place to English-speaking travelers, and will care to know that Padre
+Giacomo was born at Smyrna, and dwelt there in the family of an English
+lady, till he came to Venice, and entered on his monastic life at San
+Lazzaro.
+
+He came one morning to breakfast with us, bringing with him Padre
+Alessio, a teacher in the Armenian College in the city. As for the
+latter, it was not without a certain shock that I heard Mesopotamia
+mentioned as his birthplace, having somehow in childhood learned to
+regard that formidable name as little better than a kind of profane
+swearing. But I soon came to know Padre Alessio apart from his
+birthplace, and to find him very interesting as a scholar and an artist.
+He threw a little grace of poetry around our simple feast, by repeating
+some Armenian verses,--grace all the more ethereal from our entire
+ignorance of what the verses meant. Our breakfast-table talk wrought to
+friendship the acquaintance made some time before, and the next morning
+we received the photograph of Padre Giacomo, and the compliments of the
+Orient, in a heaped basket of ripe and luscious figs from the garden
+of the Convent San Lazzaro. When, in turn, we went to visit him at
+the convent, we had experience of a more curious oriental hospitality.
+Refreshments were offered to us as to friends, and we lunched fairily
+upon little dishes of rose leaves, delicately preserved, with all
+their fragrance, in a "lucent sirup." It seemed that this was a common
+conserve in the East; but we could hardly divest ourselves of the notion
+of sacrilege, as we thus fed upon the very most luxurious sweetness
+and perfume of the soul of summer. Pleasant talk accompanied the dainty
+repast,--Padre Giacomo recounting for us some of his adventures with
+the people whom he had to show about the convent, and of whom many
+were disappointed at not finding a gallery or museum, and went away in
+extreme disgust; and relating with a sly, sarcastic relish that blent
+curiously with his sweetness and gentleness of spirit, how some English
+people once came with the notion that Lord Byron was an Armenian; how an
+unhappy French gentleman, who had been robbed in Southern Italy, would
+not be parted a moment from a huge bludgeon which he carried in
+his hand, and (probably disordered by his troubles) could hardly be
+persuaded from attacking the mummy which is in one of the halls; how
+a sharp, bustling, go-ahead Yankee rushed in one morning, rubbing his
+hands, and demanding, "Show me all you can in five minutes."
+
+As a seat of learning, San Lazzaro is famed throughout the Armenian
+world, and gathers under its roof the best scholars and poets of that
+nation. In the printing-office of the convent books are printed in
+some thirty different languages; and a number of the fathers employ
+themselves constantly in works of translation. The most distinguished of
+the Armenian literati now living at San Lazzaro is the Reverend Father
+Gomidas Pakraduni, who has published an Armenian version of "Paradise
+Lost," and whose great labor the translation of Homer, has been recently
+issued from the convent press. He was born at Constantinople of an
+ancient and illustrious family, and took religious orders at San
+Lazzaro, where he was educated, and where for twenty-five years after
+his consecration he held the professorship of his native tongue. He
+devoted himself especially to the culture of the ancient Armenian, and
+developed it for the expression of modern ideas, he made exhaustive
+study of the vast collection of old manuscripts at San Lazzaro, and then
+went to Paris in pursuance of his purpose, and acquainted himself with
+all the treasures of Armenian learning in the Bibliotheque Royale.
+He became the first scholar of the age in his national language, and
+acquired at the same time a profound knowledge of Latin and Greek.
+
+Returning to Constantinople, Father Pakraduni, whose fame had preceded
+him, took up his residence in the family of a noble Armenian, high in
+the service of the Turkish government; and while assuming the care of
+educating his friend's children, began those labors of translation
+which have since so largely employed him. He made an Armenian version
+of Pindar, and wrote a work on Rhetoric, both of which were destroyed
+by fire while yet in the manuscript. He labored, meanwhile, on his
+translation of the Iliad,--a youthful purpose which he did not see
+fulfilled till the year 1860, when he had already touched the Psalmist's
+limit of life. In this translation he revived with admirable success
+an ancient species of Armenian verse, which bears, in flexibility and
+strength, comparison with the original Greek. Another of his great
+labors was the production of an Armenian Grammar, in which he reduced
+to rule and order the numerous forms of his native tongue, never before
+presented by one work in all its eastern variety.
+
+Padre Giacomo, to whose great kindness I am indebted for a biographic
+and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic
+poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological
+treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed,
+this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar
+and the Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began his work anew, and after
+eight years gave his epic of twenty books and twenty-two thousand verses
+to the press. The hero of the poem is Haik, the first Armenian patriarch
+after the flood, and the founder of a kingly dynasty. Nimrod, the great
+hunter, drunk with his victories, declares himself a god, and ordains
+his own worship throughout the Orient. Haik refuses to obey the commands
+of the tyrant, takes up arms against him, and finally kills him in
+battle. "In the style of this poem," writes Padre Giacomo, "it is hard
+to tell whether to admire most its richness, its energy, its sweetness,
+its melancholy, its freedom, its dignity, or its harmony, for it has
+all these virtues in turn. The descriptive parts are depicted with the
+faithfulest pencil: the battle scenes can only be matched in the Iliad."
+
+Father Pakraduni returned, after twenty-five years' sojourn at
+Constantinople, to publish his epic at San Lazzaro, where he still
+lives, a tranquil, gentle old man, with a patriarchal beauty and
+goodness of face. In 1861 he printed his translation of Milton, with
+a dedication to Queen Victoria. His other works bear witness to the
+genuineness of his inspiration and piety, and the diligence of his
+study: they are poems, poetic translations from the Italian, religious
+essays, and grammatical treatises.
+
+Indeed, the existence of all the friars at San Lazzaro is one of close
+and earnest study; and life grows so fond of these quiet monks that it
+will hardly part with them at last. One of them is ninety-five years
+old, and, until 1863, there was a lay-brother among them whose years
+numbered a hundred and eight, and who died of old age, on the 17th
+of September, after passing fifty-eight years at San Lazzaro. From
+biographic memoranda furnished me by Padre Giacomo, I learn that the
+name of this patriarch was George Karabagiak, and that he was a native
+of Kutaieh in Asia Minor. He was for a long time the disciple of Dede
+Vartabied, a renowned preacher of the Armenian faith, and he afterward
+taught the doctrines of his master in the Armenian schools. Failing
+in his desire to enter upon the sacerdotal life at Constantinople, he
+procured his admission as lay-brother at San Lazzaro, where all his
+remaining days were spent. He was but little learned; but he had great
+passion for poetry, and he was the author of some thirty small works
+on different subjects. During the course of his long and diligent life,
+which was chiefly spent in learning and teaching, he may be said to have
+hardly known a day's sickness. And at last he died of no perceptible
+disorder. The years tired him to death. He had a trifling illness in
+August, and as he convalesced, he grew impatient of the tenacious life
+which held him to earth. Slowly pacing up and down the corridors of
+the convent, he used to crave the prayers of the brothers whom he met,
+beseeching them to intercede with Heaven that he might be suffered to
+die. One day he said to the archbishop, "I fear that God has abandoned
+me, and I shall live." Only a little while before his death he wrote
+some verses, as Padre Giacomo's memorandum witnesses, "with a firm and
+steady hand," and the manner of his death was this,--as recorded in the
+grave and simple words of my friend's note:--"Finally, on the 17th of
+September, very early in the morning, a brother entering his chamber,
+asked him how he was. 'Well,' he replied, turning his face to the wall,
+and spoke no more. He had passed to a better life."
+
+It seems to me there is a pathos in the close of this old man's
+life,--which I hope has not been lost by my way of describing it,--and
+there is certainly a moral. I have read of an unlucky sage who
+discovered the Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renewing his
+existence, at last voluntarily resigned himself to death, because he had
+exhausted all that life had to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew
+all its vicissitudes but the very last. Brother Karabagiak seems to have
+had no humor to take even a second ease of life. It is perhaps as well
+that most men die before reaching the over-ripeness of a hundred
+and eight years; and, doubtless, with all our human willfulness and
+ignorance, we would readily consent, if we could fix the time, to go
+sooner--say, at a hundred and seven years, friends?
+
+Besides the Convent of San Lazzaro, where Armenian boys from all parts
+of the East are educated for the priesthood, the nation has a college
+in the city in which boys intended for secular careers receive their
+schooling. The Palazzo Zenobia is devoted to the use of this college,
+where, besides room for study, the boys have abundant space and
+apparatus for gymnastics, and ample grounds for gardening. We once
+passed a pleasant summer evening there, strolling through the fragrant
+alleys of the garden, in talk with the father-professors, and looking
+on at the gymnastic feats of the boys; and when the annual exhibition of
+the school took place in the fall, we were invited to be present.
+
+The room appointed for the exhibition was the great hall of the palace,
+which in other days had evidently been a ball-room. The ceiling was
+frescoed in the manner of the last century, with Cupids and Venuses,
+Vices and Virtues, fruits and fiddles, dwarfs and blackamoors; and the
+painted faces looked down on a scene of as curious interest as ever the
+extravagant loves and graces of Tiepolo might hope to see, when the boys
+of the college, after assisting at _Te Deum_ in the chapel, entered the
+room, and took their places.
+
+At the head of the hall sat the archbishop in his dark robes, with
+his heavy gold chain about his neck--a figure and a countenance in all
+things spiritual, gracious, and reverend. There is small difference, I
+believe, between the creeds of the Armenians and the Roman Catholics,
+but a very great disparity in the looks of the two priesthoods, which is
+all in favor of the former. The Armenian wears his beard, and the
+Latin shaves--which may have a great deal to do with the holiness of
+appearance. Perhaps, also, the gentle and mild nature of the
+oriental yields more sweetly and entirely to the self-denials of the
+ecclesiastical vocation, and thus wins a fairer grace from them. At any
+rate, I have not seen any thing but content and calm in the visages of
+the Armenian fathers, among whom the priest-face, as a type, does not
+exist, though it would mark the Romish ecclesiastic in whatever dress he
+wore. There is, moreover, a look of such entire confidence and unworldly
+sincerity in their eyes, that I could not help thinking, as I turned
+from the portly young fathers to the dark-faced, grave, old-fashioned
+school-boys, that an exchange of beard only was needed to effect an
+exchange of character between those youthful elders and their pupils.
+The gray-haired archbishop is a tall and slender man; but nearly all the
+fathers take kindly to curves and circles, and glancing down a row of
+these amiable priests I could scarcely repress a smile at the constant
+recurrence of the line of beauty in their well-rounded persons.
+
+On the right and left of the archbishop were the few invited guests,
+and at the other end of the saloon sat one of the fathers, the plump
+key-stone of an arch of comfortable young students expanding toward
+us. Most of the boys are from Turkey (the Armenians of Venice, though
+acknowledging the Pope as their spiritual head, are the subjects of the
+Sultan), others are of Asiatic birth, and two are Egyptians.
+
+As to the last, I think the Sphinx and the Pyramid could hardly have
+impressed me more than their dark faces, that seemed to look vaguely
+on our modern world from the remote twilights of old, and in their very
+infancy to be reverend through the antiquity of their race. The mother
+of these boys--a black-eyed, olive-cheeked lady, very handsome and
+stylish--was present with their younger brother. I hardly know whether
+to be ashamed of having been awed by hearing of the little Egyptian that
+his native tongue was Arabic, and that he spoke nothing more occidental
+than Turkish. But, indeed, was it wholly absurd to offer a tacit homage
+to this favored boy, who must know the "Arabian Nights" in the original?
+
+The exercises began with a theme in Armenian--a language which, but for
+its English abundance of sibilants, and a certain German rhythm, was
+wholly outlandish to our ears. Themes in Italian, German, and French
+succeeded, and then came one in English. We afterward had speech with
+the author of this essay, who expressed the liveliest passion for
+English, in the philosophy and poetry of which it seemed he particularly
+delighted. He told us that he was a Constantinopolitan, and that in
+six months more he would complete his collegiate course, when he would
+return to his native city, and take employment in the service of the
+Turkish Government. Many others of the Armenian students here also find
+this career open to them in the East.
+
+The literary exercises closed with another essay in Armenian; and then
+the archbishop delivered, very gracefully and impressively, an address
+to the boys. After this, the distribution of the premiums--medals of
+silver and bronze, and books--took place at the desk of the archbishop.
+Each boy, as he advanced to receive his premium, knelt and touched the
+hand of the priest with his lips and forehead,--a quaint and pleasing
+ceremony which had preceded and followed the reading of all the themes.
+
+The social greetings and congratulations that now took place ended
+an entertainment throughout which every body was pleased, and the
+goodnatured fathers seemed to be moved with a delight no less hearty
+than that of the boys themselves. Indeed, the ground of affection and
+confidence on which the lads and their teachers seemed to meet, was
+something very novel and attractive. We shook hands with our smiling
+friends among the padri, took leave of the archbishop, and then visited
+the studio of Padre Alessio, who had just finished a faithful and
+spirited portrait of monsignore. Adieux to the artist and to Padre
+Giacomo brought our visit to an end; and so, from that scene of oriental
+learning, simplicity, and kindliness, we walked into our western life
+once more, and resumed our citizenship and burden in the Venetian
+world--out of the waters of which, like a hydra or other water beast, a
+bathing boy instantly issued and begged of us.
+
+A few days later our good Armenians went to pass a month on the
+main-land near Padua, where they have comfortable possessions. Peace
+followed them, and they came back as plump as they went.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE.
+
+
+As I think it extremely questionable whether I could get through a
+chapter on this subject without some feeble pleasantry about Shylock,
+and whether, if I did, the reader would be at all satisfied that I had
+treated the matter fully and fairly, I say at the beginning that Shylock
+is dead; that if he lived, Antonio would hardly spit upon his gorgeous
+pantaloons or his Parisian coat, as he met him on the Rialto; that
+he would far rather call out to him, "_Cio Shylock! Bon di! Go piaser
+vederla;_" [Footnote: "Shylock, old fellow, good-day. Glad to see you."]
+that if Shylock by any chance entrapped Antonio into a foolish promise
+to pay him a pound of his flesh on certain conditions, the honest
+commissary of police before whom they brought their affair would dismiss
+them both to the madhouse at San Servolo. In a word, the present social
+relations of Jew and Christian in this city render the "Merchant of
+Venice" quite impossible; and the reader, though he will find the Ghetto
+sufficiently noisome and dirty, will not find an oppressed people there,
+nor be edified by any of those insults or beatings which it was once a
+large share of Christian duty to inflict upon the enemies of our
+faith. The Catholic Venetian certainly understands that his Jewish
+fellow-citizen is destined to some very unpleasant experiences in the
+next world, but _Corpo di Bacco_! that is no reason why he should not
+be friends with him in this. He meets him daily on exchange and at the
+Casino, and he partakes of the hospitality of his conversazioni. If he
+still despises him--and I think he does, a little--he keeps his contempt
+to himself, for the Jew is gathering into his own hands great part of
+the trade of the city, and has the power that belongs to wealth. He is
+educated, liberal, and enlightened, and the last great name in Venetian
+literature is that of the Jewish historian of the Republic, Romanin.
+The Jew's political sympathies are invariably patriotic, and he calls
+himself, not Ebreo, but Veneziano. He lives, when rich, in a palace or a
+fine house on the Grand Canal, and he furnishes and lets many others (I
+must say at rates which savor of the loan secured by the pound of flesh)
+in which he does not live. The famous and beautiful Ca' Doro now belongs
+to a Jewish family; and an Israelite, the most distinguished physician
+in Venice, occupies the _appartamento signorile_ in the palace of the
+famous Cardinal Bembo. The Jew is a physician, a banker, a manufacturer,
+a merchant; and he makes himself respected for his intelligence and
+his probity,--which perhaps does not infringe more than that of Italian
+Catholics. He dresses well,--with that indefinable difference, however,
+which distinguishes him in every thing from a Christian,--and his wife
+and daughter are fashionable and stylish, They are sometimes, also, very
+pretty; and I have seen one Jewish lady who might have stepped out
+of the sacred page, down from the patriarchal age, and been known for
+Rebecca, with her oriental grace, and delicate, sensitive, high-bred
+look and bearing--no more western and modern than a lily of Palestine.
+
+But it is to the Ghetto I want to take you now (by the way we went one
+sunny day late last fall), that I may show you something of the Jewish
+past, which has survived to the nineteenth century in much of the
+discomfort and rank savor of the dark ages.
+
+In the fifteenth century all the riches of the Orient had been poured
+into the lap of Venice, and a spirit of reckless profusion took
+possession of her citizens. The money, hastily and easily amassed, went
+as rapidly as it came. It went chiefly for dress, in which the Venetian
+still indulges very often to the stint of his stomach; and the ladies of
+that bright-colored, showy day bore fortunes on their delicate persons
+in the shape of costly vestments of scarlet, black, green, white,
+maroon, or violet, covered with gems, glittering with silver buttons,
+and ringing with silver bells. The fine gentlemen of the period were not
+behind them in extravagance; and the priests were peculiarly luxurious
+in dress, wearing gay silken robes, with cowls of fur, and girdles
+of gold and silver. Sumptuary laws were vainly passed to repress the
+general license, and fortunes were wasted, and wealthy families reduced
+to beggary. [Footnote: Galliciolli, _Memorie Venete_.] At this time,
+when so many worthy gentlemen and ladies had need of the Uncle to whom
+hard-pressed nephews fly to pledge the wrecks of prosperity, there
+was yet no Monte di Pieta, and the demand for pawnbrokers becoming
+imperative, the Republic was obliged to recall the Hebrews from the
+exile into which they had been driven some time before, that they might
+set up pawnshops and succor necessity. They came back, however, only for
+a limited time, and were obliged to wear a badge of yellow color upon
+the breast, to distinguish them from the Christians, and later a yellow
+cap, then a red hat, and then a hat of oil-cloth. They could not acquire
+houses or lands in Venice, nor practice any trade, nor exercise any
+noble art but medicine. They were assigned a dwelling-place in the
+vilest and unhealthiest part of the city, and their quarter was
+called Ghetto, from the Hebrew _nghedah_, a congregation. [Footnote:
+Mutinelli.] They were obliged to pay their landlords a third more rent
+than Christians paid; the Ghetto was walled in, and its gates were kept
+by Christian guards, who every day opened them at dawn and closed them
+at dark, and who were paid by the Jews. They were not allowed to issue
+at all from the Ghetto on holidays; and two barges, with armed men,
+watched over them night and day, while a special magistracy had
+charge of their affairs. Their synagogues were built at Mestre, on the
+main-land; and their dead were buried in the sand upon the seashore,
+whither, on the Mondays of September, the baser sort of Venetians went
+to make merry, and drunken men and women danced above their desecrated
+tombs. These unhappy people were forced also to pay tribute to the state
+at first every third year, then every fifth year, and then every tenth
+year, the privilege of residence being ingeniously renewed to them at
+these periods for a round sum; but, in spite of all, they flourished
+upon the waste and wickedness of their oppressors, waxed rich as these
+waxed poor, and were not again expelled from the city. [Footnote: _Del
+Commercia del Veneziani_. Mutinelli.]
+
+There never was any attempt to disturb the Hebrews by violence, except
+on one occasion, about the close of the fifteenth century, when a tumult
+was raised against them for child-murder. This, however, was promptly
+quelled by the Republic before any harm was done them; and they dwelt
+peacefully in their Ghetto till the lofty gates of their prison caught
+the sunlight of modern civilization, and crumbled beneath it. Then many
+of the Jews came forth and fixed their habitations in different parts
+of the city, but many others clung to the spot where their temples still
+remain, and which was hallowed by long suffering, and soaked with the
+blood of innumerable generations of geese. So, although you find Jews
+everywhere in Venice, you never find a Christian in the Ghetto, which is
+held to this day by a large Hebrew population.
+
+We had not started purposely to see the Ghetto, and for this reason it
+had that purely incidental relish, which is the keenest possible savor
+of the object of interest. We were on an expedition to find Sior Antonio
+Rioba, who has been, from time immemorial, the means of ponderous
+practical jokes in Venice. Sior Antonio is a rough-hewn statue set in
+the corner of an ordinary grocery, near the Ghetto. He has a pack on
+his back and a staff in his hand; his face is painted, and is habitually
+dishonored with dirt thrown upon it by boys. On the wall near him is
+painted a bell-pull, with the legend, _Sior Antonio Rioba_. Rustics,
+raw apprentices, and honest Germans new to the city, are furnished with
+packages to be carried to Sior Antonio Rioba, who is very hard to find,
+and not able to receive the messages when found, though there is always
+a crowd of loafers near to receive the unlucky simpleton who brings
+them. _"E poi, che commedia vederli arrabiarsi! Che ridere_!" That is
+the Venetian notion of fun, and no doubt the scene is amusing. I was
+curious to see Sior Antonio, because a comic journal bearing his name
+had been published during the time of the Republic of 1848, and from the
+fact that he was then a sort of Venetian Pasquino. But I question now
+if he was worth seeing, except as something that brought me into the
+neighborhood of the Ghetto, and suggested to me the idea of visiting
+that quarter.
+
+As we left him and passed up the canal in our gondola, we came unawares
+upon the church of Santa Maria dell' Orto, one of the most graceful
+Gothic churches in the city. The facade is exquisite, and has two Gothic
+windows of that religious and heavenly beauty which pains the heart
+with its inexhaustible richness. One longed to fall down on the space
+of green turf before the church, now bathed in the soft golden October
+sunshine, and recant these happy, commonplace centuries of heresy,
+and have back again the good old believing days of bigotry, and
+superstition, and roasting, and racking, if only to have once more the
+men who dreamed those windows out of their faith and piety (if they did,
+which I doubt), and made them with their patient, reverent hands (if
+their hands _were_ reverent, which I doubt). The church is called Santa
+Maria dell' Orto, from the miraculous image of Our Lady which was
+found in an orchard where the temple now stands. We saw this miraculous
+sculpture, and thought it reflected little credit upon the supernatural
+artist. The church is properly that of Saint Christopher, but the
+saint has been titularly vanquished by the Madonna, though he comes out
+gigantically triumphant in a fresco above the high altar, and leads to
+confused and puzzling reminiscences of Bluebeard and Morgante Maggiore,
+to both of which characters he bears a bewildering personal resemblance.
+
+There were once many fine paintings by Tintoretto and Bellini in
+this church; but as the interior is now in course of restoration, the
+paintings have been removed to the Academy, and we only saw one, which
+was by the former master, and had all his striking imagination in the
+conception, all his strength in the drawing and all his lampblack in the
+faded coloring. In the centre of the church, the sacristan scraped the
+carpenter's rubbish away from a flat tablet in the floor, and said that
+it was Tintoretto's tomb. It is a sad thing to doubt even a sacristan,
+but I pointed out that the tomb bore any name in the world rather than
+Robusti. "Ah!" said the sacristan, "it is just that which makes it so
+very curious,--that Tintoretto should wish to be buried under another
+name!" [Footnote: Members of the family of Tintoretto are actually
+buried in this church; and no sacristan of right feeling could do less
+than point out some tomb as that of the great painter himself.]
+
+It was a warm, sunny day in the fall, as I said; yet as we drew near the
+Ghetto, we noticed in the air many white, floating particles, like lazy,
+straggling flakes of snow. These we afterward found to be the down of
+multitudes of geese, which are forever plucked by the whole apparent
+force of the populace,--the fat of the devoted birds being substituted
+for lard in the kitchens of the Ghetto, and their flesh for pork. As
+we approached the obscene little riva at which we landed, a blond young
+Israelite, lavishly adorned with feathers, came running to know if we
+wished to see the church--by which name he put the synagogue to the
+Gentile comprehension. The street through which we passed had shops
+on either hand, and at the doors groups of jocular Hebrew youth sat
+plucking geese; while within, long files of all that was mortal of geese
+hung from the rafters and the walls. The ground was webbed with the feet
+of geese, and certain loutish boys, who paused to look at us, had each
+a goose dragging at his heels, in the forlorn and elongated manner
+peculiar to dead poultry. The ground was stained with the blood of
+geese, and the smell of roasting geese came out of the windows of the
+grim and lofty houses.
+
+Our guide was picturesque, but the most helpless and inconclusive
+cicerone I ever knew; and while his long, hooked Hebrew nose caught my
+idle fancy, and his soft blue eyes excused a great deal of inefficiency,
+the aimless fashion in which he mounted dirty staircases for the keys
+of the synagogue, and came down without them, and the manner in which
+he shouted to the heads of unctuous Jessicas thrust out of windows, and
+never gained the slightest information by his efforts, were imbecilities
+that we presently found insupportable, and we gladly cast him off for a
+dark-faced Hebrew boy who brought us at once to the door of the Spanish
+synagogue.
+
+Of seven synagogues in the Ghetto, the principal was built in 1655, by
+the Spanish Jews who had fled to Venice from the terrors of the Holy
+Office. Its exterior has nothing to distinguish it as a place of
+worship, and we reached the interior of the temple by means of some dark
+and narrow stairs. In the floor and on the walls of the passage-way
+were set tablets to the memory of rich and pious Israelites who had
+bequeathed their substance for the behoof of the sanctuary; and the
+sacristan informed us that the synagogue was also endowed with a fund by
+rich descendants of Spanish Jews in Amsterdam. These moneys are kept to
+furnish indigent Israelitish couples with the means of marrying, and
+who claim the benefit of the fund are entitled to it. The sacristan--a
+little wiry man, with bead-black eyes, and of a shoemakerish
+presence--told us with evident pride that he was himself a descendant of
+the Spanish Jews. Howbeit, he was now many centuries from speaking the
+Castilian, which, I had read, was still used in the families of the
+Jewish fugitives from Spain to the Levant. He spoke, instead, the
+abominable Venetian of Cannaregio, with that Jewish thickness which
+distinguishes the race's utterance, no matter what language its children
+are born to. It is a curious philological fact, which I have heard
+repeatedly alleged by Venetians, and which is perhaps worth noting
+here, that Jews speaking their dialect, have not only this thickness of
+accent, but also a peculiarity of construction which marks them at once.
+
+We found the contracted interior of the synagogue hardly worth
+looking at. Instead of having any thing oriental or peculiar in its
+architecture, it was in a bad spirit of Renaissance art. A gallery
+encircled the inside, and here the women, during worship, sat apart
+from the men, who had seats below, running back from either side of the
+altar. I had no right, coming from a Protestant land of pews, to indulge
+in that sentimentality; but I could not help being offended to see that
+each of these seats might be lifted up and locked into the upright back
+and thus placed beyond question at the disposal of the owner: I like the
+freedom and equality in the Catholic churches much better. The sacristan
+brought a ponderous silver key, and unlocking the door behind the
+pulpit, showed us the Hebrew Scriptures used during the service by the
+Rabbi. They formed an immense parchment volume, and were rolled in
+silk upon a wooden staff. This was the sole object of interest in the
+synagogue, and its inspection concluded our visit.
+
+We descended the narrow stairs and emerged upon the piazza which we
+had left. It was only partly paved with brick, and was very dirty. The
+houses which surrounded it were on the outside old and shabby, and,
+even in this Venice of lofty edifices, remarkably high. A wooden bridge
+crossed a vile canal to another open space, where once congregated
+the merchants who sell antique furniture, old pictures, and objects of
+vertu. They are now, however, found everywhere in the city, and most
+of them are on the Grand Canal, where they heap together marvelous
+collections, and establish authenticities beyond cavil. "Is it an
+original?" asked a young lady who was visiting one of their shops, as
+she paused before an attributive Veronese, or--what know I?--perhaps a
+Titian. "_Si, signora, originalissimo_!"
+
+I do not understand why any class of Jews should still remain in the
+Ghetto, but it is certain, as I said, that they do remain there in great
+numbers. It may be that the impurity of the place and the atmosphere is
+conducive to purity of race; but I question if the Jews buried on the
+sandy slope of the Lido, and blown over by the sweet sea wind--it must
+needs blow many centuries to cleanse them of the Ghetto--are not rather
+to be envied by the inhabitants of those high dirty houses and low dirty
+lanes. There was not a touch of any thing wholesome, or pleasant, or
+attractive, to relieve the noisomeness of the Ghetto to its visitors;
+and they applauded, with a common voice, the neatness which had prompted
+Andrea the gondolier to roll up the carpet from the floor of his
+gondola, and not to spread it again within the limits of that quarter.
+
+In the good old times, when pestilence avenged the poor and oppressed
+upon their oppressors, what grim and dismal plagues may not have stalked
+by night and noonday out of those hideous streets, and passed the marble
+bounds of patrician palaces, and brought to the bedsides of the rich and
+proud the filthy misery of the Ghetto turned to poison! Thank God that
+the good old times are gone and going. One learns in these aged lands to
+hate and execrate the past.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+SOME MEMORABLE PLACES.
+
+
+We came away from the Ghetto, as we had arrived, in a gentle fall of
+goose-down, and winding crookedly through a dirty canal, glided into
+purer air and cleaner waters. I cannot well say how it was we came
+upon the old Servite Convent, which I had often looked for in vain, and
+which, associated with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of
+the most memorable places in Venice. We reached it, after passing by
+that old, old palace, which was appointed in the early ages of Venetian
+commerce for the reception of oriental traffic and traffickers, and
+where it is said the Moorish merchants resided till the later time of
+the Fondaco dei Turchi on the Grand Canal. The facade of the palace is
+richly sculptured; and near one corner is the bass-relief of a camel
+and his turbaned driver,--in token, perhaps, that man and beast (as
+orientals would understand them) were here entertained.
+
+We had lived long enough in Venice to know that it was by no means worth
+while to explore the interior of this old palace because the outside was
+attractive, and so we left it; and turning a corner, found ourselves
+in a shallow canal, with houses on one side, and a grassy bank on the
+other. The bank sloped gently from the water up to the walls of some
+edifice, on which ruin seemed to have fastened soon after the architect
+had begun his work. The vast walls, embracing several acres in their
+close, rose only some thirty or forty feet from the ground--only high
+enough, indeed, to join over the top of the great Gothic gates, which
+pierced them on two facades. There must have been barracks near; for on
+the sward, under the walls, muskets were stacked, and Austrian soldiers
+were practicing the bayonet-exercise with long poles padded at the
+point. "_Ein, zwei, drei,--vorwaerts! Ein, zwei, drei,--ruckwaerts_!"
+snarled the drill-sergeant, and the dark-faced Hungarian soldiers--who
+may have soon afterward prodded their Danish fellow-beings all the
+more effectively for that day's training--stooped, writhed, and leaped
+obedient. I, who had already caught sight of a little tablet in the wall
+bearing the name of Paolo Sarpi, could not feel the propriety of the
+military performance on that scene; yet I was very glad, dismounting
+from the gondola, to get by the soldiers without being forced back at
+the padded point of a pole, and offered no audible objection to their
+presence.
+
+So passing to the other side, I found entrance through a disused chapel
+to the interior of the convent. The gates on the outside were richly
+sculptured, and were reverend and clean; tufts of harsh grass grew
+from their arches, and hung down like the "overwhelming brows" of age.
+Within, at first light, I saw nothing but heaps of rubbish, piles of
+stone, and here and there a mutilated statue. I remember two pathetic
+caryatides, that seemed to have broken and sunk under too heavy a weight
+for their gentle beauty--and everywhere the unnamable filth with which
+ruin is always dishonored in Italy, and which makes the most picturesque
+and historic places inaccessible to the foot, and intolerable to the
+senses and the soul. I was thinking with a savage indignation on this
+incurable _porcheria_, of the Italian poor (who are guilty of such
+desecrations), when my eye fell upon an enclosed space in one corner,
+where some odd-looking boulders were heaped together. It was a space
+about six feet in depth, and twenty feet square; and the boulders, on
+closer inspection, turned out to be human skulls, nestling on piles of
+human bones. In any other land than Italy I think I should have turned
+from the grisly sight with a cowardly sickness and shuddering;
+but here!--Why, heaven and earth seem to take the loss of men so
+good-naturedly,--so many men have died and passed away with their
+difficult, ambitious, and troublesome little schemes,--and the great
+mass of mankind is taken so small account of in the course of destiny,
+that the idea of death does not appear so alien and repulsive as
+elsewhere, and the presence of such evidences of our poor mortality can
+scarcely offend sensibility. These were doubtless the bones of the good
+Servite friars who had been buried in their convent, and had been digged
+up to make way for certain improvements now taking place within its
+walls. I have no doubt that their deaths were a rest to their bodies,
+to say nothing of their souls. If they were at all in their lives
+like those who have come after them, the sun baked their bald brows in
+Summer, and their naked feet--poor feet! clapping round in wooden-soled
+sandals over the frozen stones of Venice--were swollen and gnawed with
+chilblains in winter; and no doubt some fat friar of their number,
+looking all the droller in his bare feet for the spectacles on his nose,
+came down Calle Falier then, as now, to collect the charity of bread and
+fuel, far oftener than the dwellers in that aristocratic precinct wished
+to see him.
+
+The friars' skulls looked contented enough, and smiled after the hearty
+manner of skulls; and some of the leg-bones were thrust through the
+enclosing fence, and hung rakishly over the top. As to their spirits,
+I suppose they must have found out by this time that these confused
+and shattered tabernacles which they left behind them are not nearly so
+corrupt and dead as the monastic system which still cumbers the earth.
+People are building on the site of the old convent a hospital for
+indigent and decrepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have care
+of the inmates. It is a good end enough, but I think it would be the
+true compensation if all the rubbish of the old cloister were cleared
+from the area of those walls, and a great garden planted in the space,
+where lovers might whisper their wise nonsense, and children might
+romp and frolic, till the crumbling, masonry forgot its old office of
+imprisonment and the memory of its prisoners. For here, one could only
+think of the moping and mumming herd of monks, who were certainly not
+worth remembering, while the fame of Paolo Sarpi, and the good which
+he did, refused to be localized. That good is an inheritance which has
+enriched the world; but the share of Venice has been comparatively
+small in it, and that of this old convent ground still less. I rather
+wondered, indeed, that I should have taken the trouble to look up the
+place; but it is a harmless, if even a very foolish, pastime to go
+seeking for the sublime secret of the glory of the palm in the earth
+where it struck root and flourished. So far as the lifelong presence and
+the death of a man of clear brain and true heart could hallow any scene,
+this ground was holy; for here Sarpi lived, and here in his cell
+he died, a simple Servite friar--he who had caught the bolts of
+excommunication launched against the Republic from Rome, and broken
+them in his hand,--who had breathed upon the mighty arm of the temporal
+power, and withered it to the juiceless stock it now remains. And yet I
+could not feel that the ground _was_ holy, and it did not make me think
+of Sarpi; and I believe that only those travelers who invent in cold
+blood their impressions of memorable places ever have remarkable
+impressions to record.
+
+Once, before the time of Sarpi, an excommunication was pronounced
+against the Republic with a result as terrible as that of the later
+interdict was absurd. Venice took possession, early in the fourteenth
+century, of Ferrara, by virtue of a bargain which the high contracting
+parties--the Republic and an exiled claimant to the ducal crown of
+Ferrara--had no right to make. The father of the banished prince had
+displeased him by marrying late in life, when the thoughts of a good
+man should be turned on other things, and the son compassed the sire's
+death. For this the Ferrarese drove him away, and as they would not take
+him back to reign over them at the suggestion of Venice, he resigned his
+rights in favor of the Republic, and the Republic at once annexed the
+city to its territories. The Ferrarese appealed to the pope for his
+protection, and Clement V., supporting an ancient but long quiescent
+claim to Ferrara on the part of the Church, called upon the Venetians
+to surrender the city, and, on their refusal, excommunicated them. All
+Christian peoples were commanded "to arm against the Venetians, to spoil
+them of their goods, as separated from the union of Christians, and as
+enemies of the Roman Church." They were driven out of Ferrara, but
+their troubles did not end with their loss of the city. Giustina
+Renier-Michiel says the nations, under the shelter of the pope's
+permission and command, "exercised against them every species of
+cruelty; there was no wrong or violence of which they were not victims.
+All the rich merchandise which they had in France, in Flanders, and
+in other places, was confiscated; their merchants were arrested,
+maltreated, and some of them killed. Woe to us, if the Saracens had been
+baptized Christians! our nation would have been utterly destroyed." Such
+was the ruin brought upon us by this excommunication that to this day it
+is a popular saying, concerning a man of gloomy aspect, "_He looks as if
+he were bringing the excommunication of Ferrara_."
+
+No proverb, sprung from the popular terror, commemorates the interdict
+of the Republic which took place in 1606, and which, I believe, does not
+survive in popular recollection at Venice. It was at first a collision
+of the Venetian and Papal authorities at Ferrara, and then an
+interference of the pope to prevent the execution of secular justice
+upon certain ecclesiastical offenders in Venetia, which resulted in the
+excommunication of the Republic, and finally in the defeat of St. Peter
+and the triumph of St. Mark. Chief among the ecclesiastical offenders
+mentioned were the worthy Abbate Brandolino of Narvesa, who was accused,
+among other things, of poisoning his own father; and the good Canonico
+Saraceni of Vicenza, who was repulsed in overtures made to his beautiful
+cousin, and who revenged himself by defaming her character, and
+"filthily defacing" the doors of her palace. The abbate was arrested,
+and the canon, on this lady's complaint to the Ten at Venice, was thrown
+into prison, and the weak and furious Pope Paul V., being refused their
+release by the Ten, excommunicated the whole Republic.
+
+In the same year, that is to say 1552, the bane and antidote, Paul the
+Pope and Paul Sarpi the friar, were sent into the world. The latter
+grew in piety, fame, and learning, and at the time the former began his
+quarrel with the Republic, there was none in Venice so fit and prompt
+as Sarpi to stand forth in her defense. He was at once taken into the
+service of St. Mark, and his clear, acute mind fashioned the spiritual
+weapons of the Republic, and helped to shape the secular measures taken
+to annul the interdict. As soon as the bull of excommunication was
+issued, the Republic instructed her officers to stop every copy of it
+at the frontier, and it was never read in any church in the Venetian
+dominions. The Senate refused to receive it from the Papal Nuncio. All
+priests, monks, and other servants of the Church, as well as all secular
+persons, were commanded to disregard it; and refractory ecclesiastics
+were forced to open their churches on pain of death. The Jesuits and
+Capuchins were banished; and clerical intriguers, whom Rome sent in
+swarms to corrupt social and family relations, by declaring an end of
+civil government in Venice, and preaching among women disobedience to
+patriotic husbands and fathers, were severely punished. With internal
+safety thus provided for, the Republic intrusted her moral, religious,
+and political defense entirely to Sarpi, who devoted himself to his
+trust with fidelity, zeal, and power.
+
+It might have been expected that the friend of Galileo, and the most
+learned and enlightened man of his country, would have taken the short
+and decisive method of discarding all allegiance to Rome as the most
+logical resistance to the unjust interdict. But the Venetians have ever
+been faithful Catholics, [Footnote: It is convenient here to attest
+the truth of certain views of religious sentiment in Italy, which Mr.
+Trollope, in his _Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar_, quotes from an
+"Italian author, by no means friendly to Catholicism, and very well
+qualified to speak of the progress of opinions and tendencies among his
+fellow-countrymen."
+
+This author is Bianchi Giovini, who, speaking of modern Catholicism as
+the heir of the old materialistic paganism, says: "The Italians have
+identified themselves with this mode of religion. Cultivated men find
+in it the truth there is in it, and the people find what is agreeable
+to them. But both the former and the latter approve it as conformable to
+the national character. And whatever may be the religious system which
+shall govern our descendants twenty centuries hence, I venture to affirm
+that the exterior forms of it will be pretty nearly the same as those
+which prevail at present, and which did prevail twenty centuries ago."
+Mr. Trollope generously dissents from the "_pessimism_" of these views.
+The views are discouraging for some reasons; but, with considerable
+disposition and fair opportunity to observe Italian character in this
+respect, I had arrived at precisely these conclusions. I wish here to
+state that in my slight sketch of Sarpi and his times I have availed
+myself freely of Mr. Trollope's delightful book--it is near being too
+much of a good thing--named above.] and Sarpi was (or, according to
+the papal writers, seemed to be) a sincere and obedient Servite friar,
+believing in the spiritual supremacy of the pope, and revering the
+religion of Rome. He therefore fought Paul inside of the Church, and his
+writings on the interdict remain the monument of his polemical success.
+He was the heart and brain of the Republic's whole resistance,--he
+supplied her with inexhaustible reasons and answers,--and, though
+tempted, accused, and threatened, he never swerved from his fidelity to
+her.
+
+As he was the means of her triumph, [Footnote: The triumph was such only
+so far as the successful resistance to the interdict was concerned;
+for at the intercession of the Catholic powers the Republic gave up the
+ecclesiastical prisoners, and he allowed all the banished priests except
+the Jesuits to return. The Venetians utterly refused to perform any
+act of humiliation or penance. The interdict had been defied, and it
+remained despised.] remained the object of her love. He could never be
+persuaded to desert his cell in the Minorite Convent for the apartments
+appointed him by the State; and even when his busy days were spent in
+council at the Ducal Palace, he returned each night to sleep in the
+cloister. After the harmless interdict had been removed by Paul, and the
+unyielding Republic forgiven, the wrath of Rome remained kindled against
+the friar whose logic had been too keen for the last reason of popes. He
+had been tried for heresy in his youth at Milan, and acquitted; again,
+during the progress of St. Mark's quarrel with Rome, his orthodoxy had
+been questioned; and now that all was over, and Rome could turn
+her attention to one particular offender, he was entreated, coaxed,
+commanded to come to her, and put her heart at rest concerning these old
+accusations. But Sarpi was very well in Venice. He had been appointed
+Consultor in Theology to the Republic, and had received free admission
+to the secret archives of the State,--a favor, till then, never bestowed
+on any. So he would not go to Rome, and Rome sent assassins to take his
+life. One evening, as he was returning from the Ducal Palace in company
+with a lay-brother of the convent, and an old patrician, very infirm and
+helpless, he was attacked by these _nuncios_ of the papal court: one of
+them seized the lay-brother, and another the patrician, while a third
+dealt Sarpi innumerable dagger thrusts. He fell as if dead, and the
+ruffians made off in the confusion.
+
+Sarpi had been fearfully wounded, but he recovered. The action of the
+Republic in this affair is a comforting refutation of the saying
+that Republics are ungrateful, and the common belief that Venice was
+particularly so. The most strenuous and unprecedented efforts were made
+to take the assassins, and the most terrific penalties were denounced
+against them. What was much better, new honors were showered upon Sarpi,
+and extraordinary and affectionate measures were taken to provide for
+his safety.
+
+And, in fine, he lived in the service of the Republic, revered and
+beloved, till his seventieth year, when he died with zeal for her good
+shaping his last utterance: "I must go to St. Mark, for it is late, and
+I have much to do."
+
+Brave Sarpi, and brave Republic! Men cannot honor them enough. For
+though the terrors of the interdict were doubted to be harmless even
+at that time, it had remained for them to prove the interdict, then and
+forever, an instrument as obsolete as the catapult.
+
+I was so curious as to make some inquiry among the workmen on the old
+convent ground, whether any stone or other record commemorative of Sarpi
+had been found in the demolished cells. I hoped, not very confidently,
+to gather some trace of his presence there--to have, perhaps, the spot
+on which he died shown me. To a man, they were utterly ignorant of
+Sarpi, while affecting, in the Italian manner, to be perfectly informed
+on the subject. I was passed, with my curiosity, from one to another,
+till I fell into the hands of a kind of foreman, to whom I put my
+questions anew. He was a man of Napoleonic beard, and such fair
+red-and-white complexion that he impressed me as having escaped from
+a show of wax-works, and I was not at all surprised to find him a wax
+figure in point of intelligence. He seemed to think my questions the
+greatest misfortunes which had ever befallen him, and to regard each
+suggestion of Sarpi--_tempo della Repubblica--scomunica di Paolo
+Quinto_--as an intolerable oppression. He could only tell me that on
+a certain spot (which he pointed out with his foot) in the demolished
+church, there had been found a stone with Sarpi's name upon it.
+The padrone, who had the contract for building the new convent, had
+said,--"Truly, I have heard speak of this Sarpi;" but the stone had been
+broken, and he did not know what had become of it.
+
+And, in fact, the only thing that remembered Sarpi, on the site of the
+convent where he spent his life, died, and was buried, was the little
+tablet on the outside of the wall, of which the abbreviated Latin
+announced that he had been Theologue to the Republic, and that his dust
+was now removed to the island of San Michele. After this failure, I
+had no humor to make researches for the bridge on which the friar
+was attacked by his assassins. But, indeed, why should I look for it?
+Finding it, could I have kept in my mind the fine dramatic picture I now
+have, of Sarpi returning to his convent on a mild October evening, weary
+with his long walk from St. Mark's, and pacing with downcast eyes,--the
+old patrician and the lay-brother at his side, and the masked and
+stealthy assassins, with uplifted daggers, behind him? Nay, I fear I
+should have found the bridge with some scene of modern life upon it,
+and brought away in my remembrance an old woman with an oil-bottle, or a
+straggling boy with a tumbler, and a very little wine in it.
+
+On our way home from the Servite Convent, we stopped again near the
+corner and bridge of Sior Antonio Rioba,--this time to go into the house
+of Tintoretto, which stands close at the right hand, on the same quay.
+The house, indeed, might make some pretensions to be called a palace: it
+is large, and has a carved and balconied front, in which are set a
+now illegible tablet describing it as the painter's dwelling, and
+a medallion portrait of Robusti. It would have been well if I had
+contented myself with this goodly outside; for penetrating, by a long
+narrow passage and complicated stairway, to the interior of the house,
+I found that it had nothing to offer me but the usual number of
+commonplace rooms in the usual blighting state of restoration. I must
+say that the people of the house, considering they had nothing in
+the world to show me, were kind and patient under the intrusion, and
+answered with very polite affirmation my discouraged inquiry if this
+were really Tintoretto's house.
+
+Their conduct was different from that of the present inmates of Titian's
+house, near the Fondamenta Nuove, in a little court at the left of
+the church of the Jesuits. These unreasonable persons think it an
+intolerable bore that the enlightened traveling public should break in
+upon their privacy. They put their heads out of the upper windows, and
+assure the strangers that the house is as utterly restored within as
+they behold it without (and it _is_ extremely restored), that it merely
+occupies the site of the painter's dwelling, and that there is nothing
+whatever to see in it. I never myself had the heart to force an entrance
+after these protests; but an acquaintance of the more obdurate sex, whom
+I had the honor to accompany thither, once did so, and came out with a
+story of rafters of the original Titianic kitchen being still visible in
+the new one. After a lapse of two years I revisited the house, and found
+that so far from having learned patience by frequent trial, the inmates
+had been apparently goaded into madness during the interval. They seemed
+to know of our approach by instinct, and thrust their heads out, ready
+for protest, before we were near enough to speak. The lazy, frowzy
+women, the worthless men, and idle, loafing boys of the neighborhood,
+gathered round to witness the encounter; but though repeatedly commanded
+to ring (I was again in company with ladies), and try to force the
+place, I refused decidedly to do so. The garrison were strengthening
+their position by plastering and renewed renovation, and I doubt that by
+this time the original rafters are no longer to be seen. A plasterer's
+boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood clapping his trowel on his board,
+inside the house, while we debated retreat, and derisively invited us
+to enter: _"Suoni pure, O signore! Questa e la famosa casa del gran
+pittore, l'immortale Tiziano,--suoni, signore!_" (Ring, by all means,
+sir. This is the famous house of the great painter, the immortal Titian.
+Ring!) _Da capo_. We retired amid the scorn of the populace. But
+indeed I could not blame the inhabitants of Titian's house; and were
+I condemned to live in a place so famous as to attract idle curiosity,
+flushed and insolent with travel, I should go to the verge of man-traps
+and shot-guns to protect myself.
+
+This house, which is now hemmed in by larger buildings of later date,
+had in the painter's time an incomparably "lovely and delightful
+situation." Standing near the northern boundary of the city, it
+looked out over the lagoon,--across the quiet isle of sepulchres, San
+Michele,--across the smoking chimneys of the Murano glass-works, and the
+bell-towers of her churches,--to the long line of the sea-shore on the
+right and to the mainland on the left; and beyond the nearer lagoon
+islands and the faintly penciled outlines of Torcello and Burano in
+front, to the sublime distance of the Alps, shining in silver and
+purple, and resting their snowy heads against the clouds. It had a
+pleasant garden of flowers and trees, into which the painter descended
+by an open stairway, and in which he is said to have studied the famous
+tree in The Death of Peter Martyr. Here he entertained the great and
+noble of his day, and here he feasted and made merry with the gentle
+sculptor Sansovino, and with their common friend, the rascal-poet
+Aretino. The painter's and the sculptor's wives knew each other, and
+Sansovino's Paola was often in the house of Cecilia Vecellio; [Footnote:
+The wife of Titian's youth was, according to Ticozzi, named Lucia. It is
+in Mutinelli that I find allusion to Cecilia. The author of the _Annali
+Urbani_, speaking of the friendship and frequent meetings of Titian and
+Sansovino, says,--"Vivevano ... allora ambedue di un amore fatto sacro
+dalle leggi divine, essendo moglie di Tiziano una Cecilia." I would not
+advise the reader to place too fond a trust in any thing concerning the
+house of Titian. Mutinelli refers to but one house of the painter, while
+Ticozzi makes him proprietor of two.] and any one who is wise enough not
+to visit the place, can easily think of those ladies there, talking at
+an open window that gives upon the pleasant garden, where their husbands
+walk up and down together in the purple evening light.
+
+In the palace where Goldoni was born a servant showed me an entirely new
+room near the roof, in which he said the great dramatist had composed
+his immortal comedies. As I knew, however, that Goldoni had left the
+house when a child, I could scarcely believe what the cicerone said,
+though I was glad he said it, and that he knew any thing at all of
+Goldoni. It is a fine old Gothic palace on a small canal near the Frari,
+and on the Calle del Nomboli, just across from a shop of indigestible
+pastry. It is known by an inscription, and by the medallion of the
+dramatist above the land-door; and there is no harm in looking in at the
+court on the ground-floor, where you may be pleased with the picturesque
+old stairway, wandering upward I hardly know how high, and adorned with
+many little heads of lions.
+
+Several palaces dispute the honor of being Bianca Cappello's birthplace,
+but Mutinelli awards the distinction to the palace at Sant' Appollinare
+near the Ponte Storto. One day a gondolier vaingloriously rowed us to
+the water-gate of the edifice through a very narrow, damp, and uncleanly
+canal, pretending that there was a beautiful staircase in its court. At
+the moment of our arrival, however, Bianca happened to be hanging out
+clothes from a window, and shrilly disclaimed the staircase, attributing
+this merit to another Palazzo Cappello. We were less pleased with her
+appearance here, than with that portrait of her which we saw on another
+occasion in the palace of a lady of her name and blood. This lady has
+since been married, and the name of Cappello is now extinct.
+
+The Palazzo Mocenigo, in which Byron lived, is galvanized into ghastly
+newness by recent repairs, and as it is one of the ugliest palaces on
+the Grand Canal, it has less claim than ever upon one's interest. The
+custodian shows people the rooms where the poet wrote, dined, and slept,
+and I suppose it was from the hideous basket-balcony over the main door
+that one of his mistresses threw herself into the canal. Another of
+these interesting relicts is pointed out in the small butter-and-cheese
+shop which she keeps in the street leading from Campo Sant' Angelo to
+San Paterinan: she is a fat sinner, long past beauty, bald, and somewhat
+melancholy to behold. Indeed, Byron's memory is not a presence which I
+approach with pleasure, and I had most enjoyment in his palace when
+I thought of good-natured little Thomas Moore, who once visited his
+lordship there. Byron himself hated the recollection of his life in
+Venice, and I am sure no one else need like it. But he is become a _cosa
+di Venezia_, and you cannot pass his palace without having it pointed
+out to you by the gondoliers. Early after my arrival in the city I made
+the acquaintance of an old smooth-shaven, smooth-mannered Venetian, who
+said he had known Byron, and who told me that he once swam with him from
+the Port of San Nicolo to his palace-door. The distance is something
+over three miles, but if the swimmers came in with the sea the feat
+was not so great as it seems, for the tide is as swift and strong as a
+mill-race. I think it would be impossible to make the distance against
+the tide.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+COMMERCE.
+
+
+To make an annual report in September upon the Commercial Transactions
+of the port, was an official duty to which I looked forward at Venice
+with a vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted
+tranquillity. It was not because the preparation of the report was an
+affair of so great labor that I shrank from it; but because the material
+was wanting with which to make a respectable show among my consular
+peers in the large and handsomely misprinted volume of Commercial
+Relations annually issued by the enterprising Congressional publishers.
+It grieved me that upstart ports like Marseilles, Liverpool, and Bremen,
+should occupy so much larger space in this important volume than my
+beloved Venice; and it was with a feeling of profound mortification that
+I used to post my meagre account of a commerce that once was greater
+than all the rest of the world's together. I sometimes desperately eked
+out the material furnished me in the statistics of the Venetian Chamber
+of Commerce by an agricultural essay on the disease of the grapes and
+its cure, or by a few wretched figures representative of a very slender
+mining interest in the province. But at last I determined to end these
+displeasures, and to make such researches into the history of her
+Commerce as should furnish me forth material for a report worthy of the
+high place Venice held in my reverence.
+
+Indeed, it seemed to be by a sort of anachronism that I had ever
+mentioned contemporary Venetian Commerce; and I turned with exultation
+from the phantom transactions of the present to that solid and
+magnificent prosperity of the past, of which the long-enduring
+foundations were laid in the earliest Christian times. For the new
+cities formed by the fugitives from barbarian invasion of the main-land,
+during the fifth century, had hardly settled around a common democratic
+government on the islands of the lagoons, when they began to develop
+maritime energies and resources; and long before this government was
+finally established at Rialto, (the ancient sea-port of Padua,) or
+Venice had become the capital of the young Republic, the Veneti had
+thriftily begun to turn the wild invaders of the main-land to account,
+to traffic with them, and to make treaties of commerce with their
+rulers. Theodoric, the king of the Goths, had fixed his capital at
+Ravenna, in the sixth century, and would have been glad to introduce
+Italian civilization among his people; but this warlike race were not
+prepared to practice the useful arts, and although they inhabited one of
+the most fruitful parts of Italy, with ample borders of sea, they were
+neither sailors nor tillers of the ground. The Venetians supplied them
+(at a fine profit, no doubt,) with the salt made in the lagoons, and
+with wines brought from Istria. The Goths viewed with especial amazement
+their skill in the management of their river-craft, by means of which
+the dauntless traders ascended the shallowest streams to penetrate the
+main-land, "running on the grass of the meadows, and between the stalks
+of the harvest field,"--just as in this day our own western steamers are
+known to run in a heavy dew.
+
+The Venetians continued to extend and confirm their commerce with those
+helpless and hungry warriors, and were ready also to open a lucrative
+trade with the Longobards when they descended into Italy about the year
+570. They had, in fact, abetted the Longobards in their war with the
+Greek Emperor Justinian, (who had opposed their incursion,) and in
+return the barbarians gave them the right to hold great free marts or
+fairs on the shores of the lagoons, whither the people resorted from
+every part of the Longobard kingdom to buy the salt of the lagoons,
+grain from Istria and Dalmatia, and slaves from every country.
+
+The slave-trade, indeed, formed then one of the most lucrative branches
+of Venetian commerce, as now it forms the greatest stain upon the annals
+of that commerce. The islanders, however, were not alone guilty of this
+infamous trade in men; other Italian states made profit of it, and it
+may be said to have been all but universal. But the Venetians were the
+most deeply involved in it, they pursued it the most unscrupulously,
+and they relinquished it the last. The pope forbade and execrated their
+commerce, and they sailed from the papal ports with cargoes of slaves
+for the infidels in Africa. In spite of the prohibitions of their own
+government, they bought Christians of kidnappers throughout Europe, and
+purchased the captives of the pirates on the seas, to sell them again to
+the Saracens. Nay, being an ingenious people, they turned their honest
+penny over and over again: they sold the Christians to the Saracens,
+and then for certain sums ransomed them and restored them to their
+countries; they sold Saracens to the Christians, and plundered the
+infidels in similar transactions of ransom and restoration. It is not
+easy to fix the dates of the rise or fall of this slave-trade; but
+slavery continued in Venice as late as the fifteenth century, and in
+earlier ages was so common that every prosperous person had two or
+three slaves. [Footnote: Mutinelli, _Del Costume Veneziano_. The present
+sketch of the history of Venetian commerce is based upon facts
+chiefly drawn from Mutinelli's delightful treatise, _Del Commercio dei
+Veneziani_.] The corruption of the citizens at this time is properly
+attributed in part to the existence of slavery among them; and Mutinelli
+goes so far as to declare that the institution impressed permanent
+traits on the populace, rendering them idle and indisposed to honest
+labor, by degrading labor and making it the office of bondmen.
+
+While this hateful and enormous traffic in man was growing up,
+the Venetians enriched themselves by many other more blameless and
+legitimate forms of commerce, and gradually gathered into their grasp
+that whole trade of the East with Europe which passed through their
+hands for so many ages. After the dominion of the Franks was established
+in Italy in the eighth century, they began to supply that people, more
+luxurious than the Lombards, with the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry,
+and the perfumes of Byzantium; and held a great annual fair at the
+imperial city of Pavia, where they sold the Franks the manufactures of
+the polished and effeminate Greeks, and whence in return they carried
+back to the East the grain, wine, wool, iron, lumber, and excellent
+armor of Lombardy.
+
+From the time when they had assisted the Longobards against the Greeks,
+the Venetians found it to their interest to cultivate the friendship of
+the latter, until, in the twelfth century, they mastered the people
+so long caressed, and took their capital, under Enrico Dandolo. The
+privileges conceded to the wily and thrifty republican traders by the
+Greek Emperors, were extraordinary in their extent and value. Otho, the
+western Caesar, having succeeded the Franks in the dominion of Italy,
+had already absolved the Venetians from the annual tribute paid the
+Italian kings for the liberty of traffic, and had declared their
+commerce free throughout the Peninsula. In the mean time they had
+attacked and beaten the pirates of Dalmatia, and the Greeks now
+recognized their rule all over Dalmatia, thus securing to the Republic
+every port on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Then, as they aided
+the Greeks to repel the aggressions of the Saracens and Normans, their
+commerce was declared free in all the ports of the empire, and they were
+allowed to trade without restriction in all the cities, and to build
+warehouses and depots throughout the dominions of the Greeks, wherever
+they chose. The harvest they reaped from the vast field thus opened to
+their enterprise, must have more than compensated them for their losses
+in the barbarization of the Italian continent by the incessant civil
+wars which followed the disruption of the Lombard League, when trade and
+industry languished throughout Italy. When the Crusaders had taken the
+Holy Land, the king of Jerusalem bestowed upon the Venetians, in return
+for important services against the infidel, the same privileges conceded
+them by the Greek Emperor; and when, finally, Constantinople fell into
+the hands of the Crusaders, (whom they had skillfully diverted from the
+reconquest of Palestine to the siege of the Greek metropolis,) nearly
+all the Greek islands fell to the share of Venice; and the Latin
+emperors, who succeeded the Greeks in dominion, gave her such privileges
+as made her complete mistress of the commerce of the Levant.
+
+From this opulent traffic the insatiable enterprise of the Republic
+turned, without relinquishing the old, to new gains in the farthest
+Orient. Against her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the
+Egyptian ports, but she did not scruple to coax the barbarous prince of
+the Scythian Tartars, newly descended upon the shores of the Black Sea;
+and having secured his friendship, she proceeded, without imparting
+her design to her Latin allies at Constantinople, to plant a commercial
+colony at the mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands. Through
+this entrepot, thenceforward, Venetian energy, with Tartar favor,
+directed the entire commerce of Asia with Europe, and incredibly
+enriched the Republic. The vastness and importance of such a trade, even
+at that day, when the wants of men were far simpler and fewer than now,
+could hardly be over-stated; and one nation then monopolized the traffic
+which is now free to the whole world. The Venetians bought their wares
+at the great marts of Samarcand, and crossed the country of Tartary
+in caravans to the shores of the Caspian Sea, where they set sail and
+voyaged to the River Volga, which they ascended to the point of its
+closest proximity to the Don. Their goods were then transported overland
+to the Don, and were again carried by water down to their mercantile
+colony at its mouth. Their ships, having free access to the Black Sea,
+could, after receiving their cargoes, return direct to Venice. The
+products of every country of Asia were carried into Europe by these
+dauntless traffickers, who, enlightened and animated by the travels and
+discoveries of Matteo, Nicolo, and Marco Polo, penetrated the remotest
+regions, and brought away the treasures which the prevalent fears and
+superstitions of other nations would have deterred them from seeking,
+even if they had possessed the means of access to them.
+
+The partial civilization of the age of chivalry had now reached its
+climax, and the class which had felt its refining effects was that
+best able to gratify the tastes still unknown to the great mass of the
+ignorant and impoverished people. It was a splendid time, and the robber
+counts and barons of the continent, newly tamed and Christianized into
+knights, spent splendidly, as became magnificent cavaliers serving noble
+ladies. The Venetians, who seldom did merely heroic things, who turned
+the Crusades to their own account and made money out of the Holy Land,
+and whom one always fancies as having a half scorn of the noisy grandeur
+of chivalry, were very glad to supply the knights and ladies with the
+gorgeous stuffs, precious stones, and costly perfumes of the East; and
+they now also began to establish manufactories, and to practice the
+industrial arts at home. Their jewelers and workers in precious metals
+soon became famous throughout Europe; the glass-works of Murano rose
+into celebrity and importance which they have never since lost (for they
+still supply the world with beads); and they began to weave stuffs of
+gold tissue at Venice, and silks so exquisitely dyed that no cavalier
+or dame of perfect fashion was content with any other. Besides this they
+gilded leather for lining walls, wove carpets, and wrought miracles of
+ornament in wax,--a material that modern taste is apt to disdain,--while
+Venetian candles in chandeliers of Venetian glass lighted up the palaces
+of the whole civilized world.
+
+The private enterprise of citizens was in every way protected and
+encouraged by the State, which did not, however, fail to make due and
+just profit out of it. The ships of the merchants always sailed to
+and from Venice in fleets, at stated seasons, seven fleets departing
+annually,--one for the Greek dominions, a second for Azof, a third for
+Trebizond, a fourth for Cyprus, a fifth for Armenia, a sixth for Spain,
+France, the Low Countries, and England, and a seventh for Africa. Each
+squadron of traders was accompanied and guarded from attacks of corsairs
+and other enemies, by a certain number of the state galleys, let
+severally to the highest bidders for the voyage, at a price never less
+than about five hundred dollars of our money. The galleys were all
+manned and armed by the State, and the crew of each amounted to three
+hundred persons; including a captain, four supercargoes, eight pilots,
+two carpenters, two calkers, a master of the oars, fifty cross-bowmen,
+three drummers, and two hundred rowers. The State also appointed a
+commandant of the whole squadron, with absolute authority to hear
+complaints, decide controversies, and punish offences.
+
+While the Republic was thus careful in the protection and discipline of
+its citizens in their commerce upon the seas, it was no less zealous for
+their security and its own dignity in their traffic with the continent
+of Europe. In that rude day, neither the life nor the property of the
+merchant who visited the ultramontane countries was safe; for the sorry
+device which he practiced, of taking with him a train of apes, buffoons,
+dancers, and singers, in order to divert his ferocious patrons from
+robbery and murder, was not always successful. The Venetians, therefore,
+were forbidden by the State to trade in those parts; and the Bohemians,
+Germans, and Hungarians, who wished to buy their wares, were obliged to
+come to the lagoons and buy them at the great marts which were held in
+different parts of the city, and on the neighboring main-land. A triple
+purpose was thus served,--the Venetian merchants were protected in their
+lives and goods, the national honor was saved from insult, and many an
+honest zecchino was turned by the innkeepers and others who lodged and
+entertained the customers of the merchants.
+
+Five of these great fairs were held every week, the chief market being
+at Rialto; and the transactions in trade were carefully supervised by
+the servants of the State. Among the magistracies especially appointed
+for the orderly conduct of the foreign and domestic commerce were the
+so-called Mercantile Consuls (_Ufficio dei Consoli dei Mercanti_), whose
+special duty it was to see that the traffic of the nation received
+no hurt from the schemes of any citizen or foreigner, and to punish
+offenses of this kind with banishment and even graver penalties. They
+measured every ship about to depart, to learn if her cargo exceeded the
+lawful amount; they guarded creditors against debtors and protected
+poor debtors against the rapacity of creditors, and they punished thefts
+sustained by the merchants. It is curious to find contemporary with
+this beneficent magistracy, a charge of equal dignity exercised by
+the College of Reprisals. A citizen offended in his person or property
+abroad, demanded justice of the government of the country in which the
+offense was committed. If the demand was refused, it was repeated by the
+Republic; if still refused, then the Republic, although at peace with
+the nation from which the offense came, seized any citizen of that
+country whom it could find, and, through its College of Reprisals,
+spoiled him of sufficient property to pay the damage done to its
+citizen. Finally, besides several other magistracies resident in Venice,
+the Republic appointed Consuls in its colonies and some foreign ports,
+to superintend the traffic of its citizens, and to compose their
+controversies. The Consuls were paid out of duties levied on the
+merchandise; they were usually nobles, and acted with the advice and
+consent of twelve other Venetian nobles or merchants.
+
+At this time, and, indeed, throughout its existence, the great lucrative
+monopoly of the Republic was the salt manufactured in the lagoons, and
+forced into every market, at rates that no other salt could compete
+with. Wherever alien enterprise attempted rivalry, it was instantly
+discouraged by Venice. There were troublesome salt mines, for example,
+in Croatia; and in 1381 the Republic caused them to be closed by paying
+the King of Hungary an annual pension of seven thousand crowns of gold.
+The exact income of the State, however, from the monopoly of salt, or
+from the various imposts and duties levied upon merchandise, it is now
+difficult to know, and it is impossible to compute accurately the value
+or extent of Venetian commerce at any one time. It reached the acme of
+its prosperity under Tommaso Mocenigo, who was Doge from 1414 to
+1423. There were then three thousand and three hundred vessels of the
+mercantile marine, giving employment to thirty-three thousand seamen,
+and netting to their owners a profit of forty per cent, on the capital
+invested. How great has been the decline of this trade may be understood
+from the fact that in 1863 it amounted, according to the careful
+statistics of the Chamber of Commerce, to only $60,229,740, and that the
+number of vessels now owned in Venice is one hundred and fifty. As the
+total tonnage of these is but 26,000, it may be inferred that they are
+small craft, and in fact they are nearly all coasting vessels. They no
+longer bring to Venice the drugs and spices and silks of Samarcand, or
+carry her own rare manufactures to the ports of western Europe; but they
+sail to and from her canals with humble freights of grain, lumber, and
+hemp. Almost as many Greek as Venetian ships now visit the old queen,
+who once levied a tax upon every foreign vessel in her Adriatic; and the
+shipping from the cities of the kingdom of Italy exceeds hers by ninety
+sail, while the tonnage of Great Britain is vastly greater. Her commerce
+has not only wasted to the shadow of its former magnitude, but it has
+also almost entirely lost its distinctive character. Glass of Murano is
+still exported to a value of about two millions of dollars annually; but
+in this industry, as in nearly all others of the lagoons, there is
+an annual decline. The trade of the port falls off from one to three
+millions of dollars yearly, and the manufacturing interests of the
+province have dwindled in the same proportion. So far as silk is
+concerned, there has been an immediate cause for the decrease in the
+disease which has afflicted the cocoons for several years past. Wine and
+oil are at present articles of import solely,--the former because of a
+malady of the grape, the latter because of negligent cultivation of the
+olive.
+
+A considerable number of persons are still employed in the manufacture
+of objects of taste and ornament; and in the Ruga Vecchia at Rialto they
+yet make the famous Venetian gold chain, which few visitors to the city
+can have failed to notice hanging in strands and wound upon spools, in
+the shop windows of the Old Procuratie and the Bridge of Rialto. It is
+wrought of all degrees of fineness, and is always so flexile that it
+may be folded and wound in any shape. It is now no longer made in great
+quantity, and is chiefly worn by contadine (as a safe investment of
+their ready money), [Footnote: Certain foreigners living in Venice were
+one day astonished to find their maid-servant in possession of a mass of
+this chain, and thought it their business to reprove her extravagance.
+"Signori," she explained paradoxically, "if I keep my money, I spend
+it; if I buy this chain, it is always money (_e sempre soldi_)."] and
+old-fashioned people of the city, who display the finer sort in
+skeins or strands. At Chioggia, I remember to have seen a babe at its
+christening in church literally manacled and shackled with Venetian
+chain; and the little girl who came to us one day, to show us the
+splendors in which she had appeared at a _disputa_ (examination of
+children in doctrine), was loaded with it. Formerly, in the luxurious
+days of the Republic, it is said the chain was made as fine as
+sewing-silk, and worn embroidered on Genoa velvet by the patrician
+dames. It had then a cruel interest from the fact that its manufacture,
+after a time, cost the artisans their eyesight, so nice and subtle was
+the work. I could not help noticing that the workmen at the shops in the
+Ruga Vecchia still suffer in their eyes, even though the work is much
+coarser. I do not hope to describe the chain, except by saying that the
+links are horseshoe and oval shaped, and are connected by twos,--an
+oval being welded crosswise into a horseshoe, and so on, each two being
+linked loosely into the next.
+
+An infinitely more important art, in which Venice was distinguished a
+thousand years ago, has recently been revived there by Signor Salviati,
+an enthusiast in mosaic painting. His establishment is on the Grand
+Canal, not far from the Academy, and you might go by the old palace
+quite unsuspicious of the ancient art stirring with new life in its
+breast. "A. Salviati, Avvocato," is the legend of the bell-pull, and you
+do not by any means take this legal style for that of the restorer of a
+neglected art, and a possessor of forgotten secrets in gilded glass and
+"smalts," as they term the small delicate rods of vitreous substance,
+with which the wonders of the art are achieved. But inside of the palace
+are some two hundred artisans at work,--cutting the smalts and glass
+into the minute fragments of which the mosaics are made, grinding
+and smoothing these fragments, polishing the completed works, and
+reproducing, with incredible patience and skill, the lights and shadows
+of the pictures to be copied.
+
+You first enter the rooms of those whose talent distinguishes them as
+artists, and in whose work all the wonderful neatness and finish and
+long-suffering toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original
+life and inspiration alike impossible and profane to the elder
+mosaicists. Each artist has at hand a great variety of the slender stems
+of smalts already mentioned, and breaking these into minute fragments
+as he proceeds, he inserts them in the bed of cement prepared to receive
+his picture, and thus counterfeits in enduring mineral the perishable
+work of the painter.
+
+In other rooms artisans are at work upon various tasks of
+_marqueterie_,--table-tops, album-covers, paper-weights, brooches, pins
+and the like,--and in others they are sawing the smalts and glass into
+strips, and grinding the edges. Passing through yet another room, where
+the finished mosaic-works--of course not the pictorial mosaics--are
+polished by machinery, we enter the store-room, where the crowded
+shelves display blocks of smalts and glass of endless variety of
+color. By far the greater number of these colors are discoveries or
+improvements of the venerable mosaicist Lorenzo Radi, who has found
+again the Byzantine secrets of counterfeiting, in vitreous paste,
+aventurine (gold stone), onyx, chalcedony, malachite, and other natural
+stones, and who has been praised by the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice
+for producing mosaics even more durable in tint and workmanship than
+those of the Byzantine artists.
+
+In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart for the exhibition
+of the many beautiful and costly things which the art of the
+establishment produces. Here, besides pictures in mosaic, there are
+cunningly inlaid tables and cabinets, caskets, rich vases of chalcedony
+mounted in silver, and delicately wrought jewelry, while the floor is
+covered with a mosaic pavement ordered for the Viceroy of Egypt. There
+are here, moreover, to be seen the designs furnished by the Crown
+Princess of Prussia for the mosaics of the Queen's Chapel at Windsor.
+These, like all other pictures and decorations in mosaic, are completed
+in the establishment on the Grand Canal, and are afterward put up as
+wholes in the places intended for them.
+
+In Venice nothing in decay is strange. But it is startling to find her
+in her old age nourishing into fresh life an art that, after feebly
+preserving the memory of painting for so many centuries, had decorated
+her prime only with the glories of its decline;--for Kugler ascribes the
+completion of the mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to
+the year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark's to the tenth or
+eleventh centuries, when the Greek Church had already laid her ascetic
+hand on Byzantine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed its
+motives, and forbidden its inspirations. I think, however, one would
+look about him in vain for other evidences of a returning prosperity in
+the lagoons. The old prosperity of Venice, was based upon her monopoly
+of the most lucrative traffic in the world, as we have already
+seen,--upon her exclusive privileges in foreign countries, upon the
+enlightened zeal of her government, and upon men's imperfect knowledge
+of geography, and the barbarism of the rest of Europe, as well as upon
+the indefatigable industry and intelligent enterprise of her citizens.
+America was still undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only
+one known; the people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty
+serfs, ruled and ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world's ignorance,
+pride, and sloth were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions
+of the day, which, gross as they were, embodied perhaps its noblest
+and most hopeful sentiment, were a source of incalculable profit to
+the sharp-witted mistress of the Adriatic. It was the age of penances,
+pilgrimages, and relic-hunting, and the wealth which she wrung from the
+devotion of others was exceedingly great. Her ships carried the pilgrims
+to and from the Holy Land; her adventurers ransacked Palestine and
+the whole Orient for the bones and memorials of the saints; and her
+merchants sold the precious relics throughout Europe at an immense
+advance upon first cost.
+
+But the foundations of this prosperity were at last tapped by the tide
+of wealth which poured into Venice from every quarter of the world. Her
+citizens brought back the vices as well as the luxuries of the debauched
+Orient, and the city became that seat of splendid idleness and proud
+corruption which it continued till the Republic fell. It is needless
+here to rehearse the story of her magnificence and decay. At the time
+when the hardy, hungry people of other nations were opening paths to
+prosperity by land and sea, the Venetians, gorged with the spoils of
+ages, relinquished their old habits of daring enterprise, and dropped
+back into luxury and indolence. Their incessant wars with the Genoese
+began, and though they signally defeated the rival Republic in battle,
+Genoa finally excelled in commerce. A Greek prince had arisen to dispute
+the sovereignty of the Latin Emperors, whom the Venetians had helped
+to place upon the Byzantine throne; the Genoese, seeing the favorable
+fortunes of the Greek, threw the influence of their arms and intrigues
+in his favor, and the Latins were expelled from Constantinople in 1271.
+The new Greek Emperor had promised to give the sole navigation of the
+Black Sea to his allies, together with the church and palaces possessed
+by the Venetians in his capital, and he bestowed also upon the Genoese
+the city of Smyrna. It does not seem that he fulfilled literally all his
+promises, for the Venetians still continued to sail to and from their
+colony of Tana, at the head of the Sea of Azof, though it is certain
+that they had no longer the sovereignty of those waters; and the Genoese
+now planted on the shores of the Black Sea three large and important
+colonies to serve as entrepots for the trade taken from their rivals.
+The oriental traffic of the latter was maintained through Tana, however,
+for nearly two centuries later, when, in 1410, the Mongol Tartars,
+under Tamerlane, fell upon the devoted colony, took, sacked, burnt,
+and utterly destroyed it. This was the first terrible blow to the
+most magnificent commerce which the world had ever seen, and which had
+endured for ages. No wonder that, on the day of Tana's fall, terrible
+portents of woe were seen at Venice,--that meteors appeared, that demons
+rode the air, that the winds and waters rose and blew down houses and
+swallowed ships! A thousand persons are said to have perished in the
+calamities which commemorated a stroke so mortally disastrous to the
+national grandeur. After that the Venetians humbly divided with their
+ancient foes the possession and maintenance of the Genoese colony of
+Caffa, and continued, with greatly diminished glory, their traffic
+in the Black Sea; till the Turks having taken Constantinople, and the
+Greeks having acquired under their alien masters a zeal for commerce
+unknown to them during the times of their native princes, the Venetians
+were finally, on the first pretext of war, expelled from those waters in
+which they had latterly maintained themselves only by payment of heavy
+tribute to the Turks.
+
+In the mean time the industrial arts, in which Venice had heretofore
+excelled, began to be practiced elsewhere, and the Florentines and
+the English took that lead in the manufactures of the world, which the
+latter still retain. The league of the Hanseatic cities was established
+and rose daily in importance. At London, at Bruges, at Bergen, and
+Novogorod banks were opened under the protection and special favor of
+the Hanseatic League; its ships were preferred to any other, and the
+tide of commerce setting northward, the cities of the League persecuted
+the foreigners who would have traded in their ports. On the
+west, Barcelona began to dispute the preeminence of Venice in the
+Mediterranean, and Spanish salt was brought to Italy itself and sold
+by the enterprising Catalonians. Their corsairs vexed Venetian commerce
+everywhere; and in that day, as in our own, private English enterprise
+was employed in piratical depredations on the traffic of a friendly
+power.
+
+The Portuguese also began to extend their commerce, once so important,
+and catching the rage for discovery then prevalent, infested every sea
+in search of unknown land. One of their navigators, sailing by a chart
+which a monk named Fra Mauro, in his convent on the island of San
+Michele, had put together from the stories of travelers, and his own
+guesses at geography, discovered the Cape of Good Hope, and the trade
+of India with Europe was turned in that direction, and the old over-land
+traffic perished. The Venetian monopoly of this traffic had long been
+gone; had its recovery been possible, it would now have been useless to
+the declining prosperity of the Republic.
+
+It remained for Christopher Columbus, born of that Genoese nation which
+had hated the Venetians so long and so bitterly, to make the discovery
+of America, and thus to give the death-blow to the supremacy of Venice.
+While all these discoveries were taking place, the old queen of the seas
+had been weighed down with many and unequal wars. Her naval power
+had been everywhere crippled; her revenues had been reduced; her
+possessions, one after one, had been lopped away; and at the time
+Columbus was on his way to America half Europe, united in the League of
+Cambray, was attempting to crush the Republic of Venice.
+
+The whole world was now changed. Commerce sought new channels; fortune
+smiled on other nations. How Venice dragged onward from the end of
+her commercial greatness, and tottered with a delusive splendor to her
+political death, is surely one of the saddest of stories if not the
+sternest of lessons.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+VENETIAN HOLIDAYS.
+
+
+The national character of the Venetians was so largely influenced by the
+display and dissipation of the frequent festivals of the Republic, that
+it cannot be fairly estimated without taking them into consideration,
+nor can the disuse of these holidays (of which I have heretofore spoken)
+be appreciated in all its import, without particular allusion to their
+number and nature. They formed part of the aristocratic polity of the
+old commonwealth, which substituted popular indulgence for popular
+liberty, and gave the people costly pleasures in return for the
+priceless rights of which they had been robbed, set up national pride in
+the place of patriotism, and was as well satisfied with a drunken joy in
+its subjects as if they had possessed a true content.
+
+Full notice of these holidays would be history [Footnote: "Siccome,"
+says the editor of Giustina Renier-Michiel's _Origine delle Feste
+Veneziane_,--"Siccome l'illustre Autrice ha voluto applicare al suo
+lavoro il modesto titolo di _Origins delle Feste Veneziane_, e siccome
+questo potrebbe porgere un' idea assai diversa dell' opera a chi non ne
+ha alcuna cognizione, da quello che e sostanzialmente, si espone questo
+Epitome, perche ognun regga almeno in parte, che quest' opera sarebbe
+del titolo di _storia_ condegna, giacche essa non e che una costante
+descrizione degli avvenimenti piu importanti e luminosi della Repubblica
+di Venezia." The work in question is one of much research and small
+philosophy, like most books which Venetians have written upon Venice;
+but it has admirably served my purpose, and I am indebted to it for most
+of the information contained in this chapter.] of Venice, for each one
+had its origin in some great event of her existence, and they were so
+numerous as to commemorate nearly every notable incident in her annals.
+Though, as has been before observed, they had nearly all a general
+religious character, the Church, as usual in Venice, only seemed to
+direct the ceremonies in its own honor, while it really ministered
+to the political glory of the oligarchy, which knew how to manage its
+priests as well as its prince and people. Nay, it happened in one case,
+at least, that a religious anniversary was selected by the Republic
+as the day on which to put to shame before the populace certain of the
+highest and reverendest dignitaries of the Church. In 1162, Ulrich, the
+Patriarch of Aquileja, seized, by a treacherous stratagem, the city of
+Grado, then subject to Venice. The Venetians immediately besieged and
+took the city, with the patriarch and twelve of his canons in it, and
+carried them prisoners to the lagoons. The turbulent patriarchs of
+Aquileja had long been disturbers of the Republic's dominion, and
+the people now determined to make an end of these displeasures. They
+refused, therefore, to release the patriarch, except on condition that
+he should bind himself to send them annually a bull and twelve fat hogs.
+It is not known what meaning the patriarch attached to this singular
+ceremony; but with the Venetians the bull was typical of himself,
+and the swine of his canons, and they yearly suffered death in these
+animals, which were slaughtered during Shrovetide in the Piazza San
+Marco amid a great concourse of the people, in the presence of the
+Doge and Signory. The locksmiths, and other workers in iron, had
+distinguished themselves in the recapture of Grado, and to their guild
+was allotted the honor of putting to death the bull and swine. Great art
+was shown in striking off the bull's head at one blow, without suffering
+the sword to touch the ground after passing through the animal's neck;
+the swine were slain with lances. Athletic games among the people
+succeeded, and the Doge and his Senators attacked and destroyed, with
+staves, several lightly built wooden castles, to symbolize the abasement
+of the feudal power before the Republic. As the centuries advanced this
+part of the ceremony, together with the slaughter of the swine, was
+disused; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of a corrupt disdain of
+simple and healthy allegory on the part of the proud doges, but in which
+I think most people will discern only a natural wish to discontinue in
+more civilized times a puerile barbarity. Mr. Ruskin himself finds
+no evidence of "state pride" in the abolition of the slaughter of the
+swine. The festival was very popular, and continued a long time, though
+I believe not till the fall of the Republic.
+
+Another tribute, equally humiliating to those who paid it, was imposed
+upon the Paduans for an insult offered to St. Mark, and gave occasion
+for a national holiday, some fifty years after the Patriarch of Aquileja
+began atonement for his outrage. In the year 1214, the citizens of
+Treviso made an entertainment to which they invited the noble youth of
+the surrounding cities. In the chief piazza of the town a castle of wood
+exquisitely decorated was held against all comers by a garrison of the
+fairest Trevisan damsels. The weapons of defense were flowers, fruits,
+bonbons, and the bright eyes of the besieged; while the missiles of
+attack were much the same, with whatever added virtue might lie in
+tender prayers and sugared supplications. Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and
+Venice sent their gallantest youths, under their municipal banners, to
+take part in this famous enterprise; and the attack was carried on by
+the leagued forces with great vigor, but with no effect on the Castle
+of Love, as it was called, till the Venetians made a breach at a weak
+point. These young men were better skilled in the arts of war than their
+allies; they were richer, and had come to Treviso decked in the spoils
+of the recent sack of Constantinople, and at the moment they neared
+the castle it is reported that they corrupted the besieged by throwing
+handfuls of gold into the tower. Whether this be true or not, it is
+certain that the conduct of the Venetians in some manner roused the
+Paduans to insult, and that the hot youths came to blows. In an instant
+the standard of St. Mark was thrown down and trampled under the feet of
+the furious Paduans; blood flowed, and the indignant Trevisans drove the
+combatants out of their city. The spark of war spreading to the rival
+cities, the Paduans were soon worsted, and three hundred of their number
+were made prisoners. These they would willingly have ransomed at any
+price, but their enemies would not release them except on the payment of
+two white pullets for each warrior. The shameful ransom was paid in the
+Piazza, to the inextinguishable delight of the Venetians, who, never
+wanting in sharp and biting wit, abandoned themselves to sarcastic
+exultation. They demanded that the Paduans should, like the patriarch,
+repeat the tribute annually; but the prudent Doge Ziani judged the
+single humiliation sufficient, and refused to establish a yearly
+celebration of the feast.
+
+One of the most famous occasional festivals of Venice is described by
+Petrarch in a Latin letter to his friend Pietro Bolognese. It was in
+celebration of the reduction of the Greeks of Candia, an island which
+in 1361 had recently been ceded to the Republic. The Candiotes rose in
+general rebellion, but were so promptly subdued that the news of the
+outbreak scarcely anticipated the announcement of its suppression in
+Venice. Petrarch was at this time the guest of the Republic, and from
+his seat at the right of the Doge on the gallery of St. Mark's Church,
+in front of the bronze horses, he witnessed the chivalric shows given
+in the Piazza below, which was then unpaved, and admirably adapted for
+equestrian feats of arms. It is curious to read the poet's account of
+these in a city where there is now no four-footed beast larger than a
+dog. But in the age of chivalry even the Venetians were mounted, and
+rode up and down their narrow streets, and jousted in their great
+campos.
+
+Speaking of twenty-four noble and handsome youths, whose feats formed
+a chief part of a show of which he "does not know if in the whole world
+there has been seen the equal," Petrarch says: "It was a gentle sight
+to see so many youths decked in purple and gold, as they ruled with
+the rein and urged with the spur their coursers, moving in glittering
+harness, with iron-shod feet which scarcely seemed to touch the ground."
+And it must have been a noble sight, indeed, to behold all this before
+the "golden facade of the temple," in a place so packed with spectators
+"that a grain of barley could not have fallen to the ground. The great
+piazza, the church itself, the towers, the roofs, the arcades, the
+windows, all were--I will not say full, but running over, walled
+and paved with people." At the right of the church was built a great
+platform, on which sat "four hundred honestest gentlewomen, chosen
+from the flower of the nobility, and distinguished in their dress and
+bearing, who, amid the continual homage offered them morning, noon, and
+night, presented the image of a celestial congress." Some noblemen, come
+hither by chance, "from the part of Britain, comrades and kinsmen of
+their King, were present," and attracted the notice of the poet. The
+feasts lasted many days, but on the third day Petrarch excused himself
+to the Doge, pleading, he says, his "ordinary occupations, already known
+to all."
+
+Among remoter feasts in honor of national triumphs, was one on the Day
+of the Annunciation, commemorative of the removal of the capital of the
+Venetian isles to Rialto from Malamocco, after King Pepin had burnt the
+latter city, and when, advancing on Venice, he was met in the lagoons
+and beaten by the islanders and the tides: these by their recession
+stranding his boats in the mud, and those falling upon his helpless host
+with the fury of an insulted and imperiled people. The Doge annually
+assisted at mass in St. Mark's in honor of the victory, but not long
+afterward the celebration of it ceased, as did that of a precisely
+similar defeat of the Hungarians, who had just descended from Asia into
+Europe. In 1339 there were great rejoicings in the Piazza for the peace
+with Mastino della Scala, who, beaten by the Republic, ceded his city of
+Treviso to her.
+
+Doubtless the most splendid of all the occasional festivals was that
+held for the Venetian share of the great Christian victory at Lepanto
+over the Turks. All orders of the State took part in it; but the most
+remarkable feature of the celebration was the roofing of the Merceria,
+all the way from St. Mark's to Rialto, with fine blue cloth, studded
+with golden stars to represent the firmament, as the shopkeepers
+imagined it. The pictures of the famous painters of that day, Titian,
+Tintoretto, Palma, and the rest, were exposed under this canopy, at the
+end near Rialto. Later, the Venetian victories over the Turks at the
+Dardanelles were celebrated by a regatta, in 1658; and Morosini's
+brilliant reconquest of the Morea, in 1688, was the occasion of other
+magnificent shows.
+
+The whole world has now adopted, with various modifications, the
+picturesque and exciting pastime of the regatta, which, according to
+Mutinelli, [Footnote: _Annali Urbani di Venezia_.] originated among the
+lagoons at a very early period, from a peculiar feature in the military
+discipline of the Republic. A target for practice with the bow and
+cross-bow was set up every week on the beach at the Lido, and nobles and
+plebeians rowed thither in barges of thirty oars, vying with each other
+in the speed and skill with which the boats were driven. To divert
+the popular discontent that followed the Serrar del Consiglio and the
+suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo's conspiracy early in the fourteenth
+century, the proficiency arising from this rivalry was turned to
+account, and the spectacle of the regatta was instituted. Agreeably,
+however, to the aristocratic spirit of the newly established oligarchy,
+the patricians withdrew from the lists, and the regatta became the
+affair exclusively of the gondoliers. In other Italian cities, where
+horse and donkey races were the favorite amusement, the riders were of
+both sexes; and now at Venice women also entered into the rivalry of the
+regatta. But in gallant deference to their weakness, they were permitted
+to begin the course at the mouth of the Grand Canal before the Doganna
+di Mare, while the men were obliged to start from the Public Gardens.
+They followed the Grand Canal to its opposite extremity, beyond the
+present railway station, and there doubling a pole planted in the water
+near the Ponte della Croce, returned to the common goal before the
+Palazzo Foscari. Here was erected an ornate scaffolding to which the
+different prizes were attached. The first boat carried off a red banner;
+the next received a green flag; the third, a blue; and the fourth, a
+yellow one. With each of these was given a purse, and with the last was
+added, by way of gibe, a live pig, a picture of which was painted on the
+yellow banner. Every regatta included five courses, in which single and
+double oared boats, and single and double oared gondolas successively
+competed,--the fifth contest being that in which the women participated
+with two-oared boats. Four prizes like those described were awarded to
+the winners in each course.
+
+The regatta was celebrated with all the pomp which the superb city could
+assume. As soon as the government announced that it was to take place,
+the preparations of the champions began. "From that time the gondolier
+ceased to be a servant; he became almost an adoptive son;" [Footnote:
+_Feste Veneziane_.] his master giving him every possible assistance and
+encouragement in the daily exercises by which he trained himself for the
+contest, and his parish priest visiting him in his own house, to bless
+his person, his boat, and the image of the Madonna or other saint
+attached to the gondola. When the great day arrived the Canalazzo
+swarmed with boats of every kind. "All the trades and callings," says
+Giustina Renier-Michiel, [Footnote: _Feste Veneziane_] with that pride
+in the Venetian past which does not always pass from verbosity to
+eloquence, "had each its boats appropriately mounted and adorned; and
+private societies filled an hundred more. The chief families among the
+nobility appeared in their boats, on which they had lavished their taste
+and wealth." The rowers were dressed with the most profuse and
+elaborate luxury, and the barges were made to represent historical and
+mythological conceptions. "To this end the builders employed carving and
+sculpture, together with all manner of costly stuffs of silk and velvet,
+gorgeous fringes and tassels of silver and gold, flowers, fruits,
+shrubs, mirrors, furs, and plumage of rare birds.... Young patricians,
+in fleet and narrow craft, propelled by swift rowers, preceded the
+champions and cleared the way for them, obliging the spectators to
+withdraw on either side.... They knelt on sumptuous cushions in the
+prows of their gondolas, cross-bow in hand, and launched little pellets
+of plaster at the directors of such obstinate boats as failed to obey
+their orders to retire....
+
+"To augment the brilliancy of the regatta the nature of the place
+concurred. Let us imagine that superb canal, flanked on either side by
+a long line of edifices of every sort; with great numbers of marble
+palaces,--nearly all of noble and majestic structure, some admirable
+for an antique and Gothic taste, some for the richest Greek and Roman
+architecture,--their windows and balconies decked with damasks, stuffs
+of the Levant, tapestries, and velvets, the vivid colors of which were
+animated still more by borders and fringes of gold, and on which leaned
+beautiful women richly dressed and wearing tremulous and glittering
+jewels in their hair. Wherever the eye turned, it beheld a vast
+multitude at doorways, on the rivas, and even on the roofs. Some of the
+spectators occupied scaffoldings erected at favorable points along the
+sides of the canal; and the patrician ladies did not disdain to leave
+their palaces, and, entering their gondolas, lose themselves among the
+infinite number of the boats....
+
+"The cannons give the signal of departure. The boats dart over the
+water with the rapidity of lightning.... They advance and fall behind
+alternately. One champion who seems to yield the way to a rival suddenly
+leaves him in the rear. The shouts of his friends and kinsmen hail his
+advantage, while others already passing him, force him to redouble his
+efforts. Some weaker ones succumb midway, exhausted.... They withdraw,
+and the kindly Venetian populace will not aggravate their shame with
+jeers; the spectators glance at them compassionately, and turn again to
+those still in the lists. Here and there they encourage them by
+waving handkerchiefs, and the women toss their shawls in the air. Each
+patrician following close upon his gondolier's boat, incites him with
+his voice, salutes him by name, and flatters his pride and spirit....
+The water foams under the repeated strokes of the oars; it leaps up in
+spray and falls in showers on the backs of the rowers already dripping
+with their own sweat.... At last behold the dauntless mortal who seizes
+the red banner! His rival had almost clutched it, but one mighty stroke
+of the oar gave him the victory.... The air reverberates with a clapping
+of hands so loud that at the remotest point on the canal the moment of
+triumph is known. The victors plant on their agile boat the conquered
+flag, and instead of thinking to rest their weary arms, take up the oars
+again and retrace their course to receive congratulations and applause."
+
+The regattas were by no means of frequent occurrence, for only forty-one
+took place during some five centuries. The first was given in 1315,
+and the last in 1857, in honor of the luckless Archduke Maximilian's
+marriage with Princess Charlotte of Belgium. The most sumptuous and
+magnificent regatta of all was that given to the city in the year 1686,
+by Duke Ernest of Brunswick. This excellent prince having sold a great
+part of his subjects to the Republic for use in its wars against
+the Turk, generously spent their price in the costly and edifying
+entertainments of which Venice had already become the scene. The
+Judgment of Paris, and the Triumph of the Marine Goddesses had been
+represented at his expense on the Grand Canal, with great acceptance.
+And now the Triumph of Neptune formed a principal feature in the
+gayeties of his regatta. Nearly the whole of the salt-water mythology
+was employed in the ceremony. An immense wooden whale supporting a
+structure of dolphins and Tritons, surmounted by a statue of Neptune,
+and drawn by sea-horses, moved from the Piazzetta to the Palazzo
+Foscari, where numbers of Sirens sported about in every direction till
+the Regatta began. The whole company of the deities, very splendidly
+arrayed, then joined them as spectators, and behaved in the manner
+affected by gods and goddesses on these occasions. Mutinelli [Footnote:
+_Annali Urbani._] recounts the story with many sighs and sneers and
+great exactness; but it is not interesting. The miraculous recovery of
+the body of St. Mark, in 1094, after it had been lost for nearly two
+centuries, created a festive anniversary which was celebrated for a
+while with great religious pomp; but the rejoicings were not separately
+continued in after years. The festival was consolidated (if one may
+so speak) with two others in honor of the same saint, and the triple
+occasions were commemorated by a single holiday. The holidays annually
+distinguished by civil or ecclesiastical displays were twenty-five in
+number, of which only eleven were of religious origin, though all were
+of partly religious observance. One of the most curious and interesting
+of the former was of the earliest date, and was continued till the last
+years of the Republic. In 596 Narses, the general of the Greek Emperor,
+was furnished by the Venetians with means of transport by sea from
+Aquieja to Ravenna for the army which he was leading against the
+Ostrogoths; and he made a vow that if successful in his campaign, he
+would requite their generosity by erecting two churches in Venice.
+Accordingly, when he had beaten the Ostrogoths, he caused two votive
+churches to be built,--one to St. Theodore, on the site of the present
+St. Mark's Church, and another to San Geminiano, on the opposite bank
+of the canal which then flowed there. In lapse of time the citizens,
+desiring to enlarge their Piazza, removed the church of San Geminiano
+back as far as the present Fabbrica Nuova, which Napoleon built on the
+site of the demolished temple, between the western ends of the New and
+Old Procuratie. The removal was effected without the pope's leave, which
+had been asked, but was refused in these words,--"The Holy Father
+cannot sanction the commission of a sacrilege, though he can pardon
+it afterwards." The pontiff, therefore, imposed on the Venetians for
+penance that the Doge should pay an annual visit forever to the church.
+On the occasion of this visit the parish priest met him at the door,
+and offered the holy water to him; and then the Doge, having assisted
+at mass, marched with his Signory and the clergy of the church to its
+original site, where the clergy demanded that it should be rebuilt, and
+the Doge replied with the promise,--"Next year." A red stone was set
+in the pavement to mark the spot where the Doge renewed this
+never-fulfilled promise. [Footnote: As the author of the _Feste
+Veneziane_ tells this story it is less dramatic and characteristic. The
+clergy, she says, reminded the Doge of the occasion of his visit, and
+his obligation to renew it the following year, which he promised to do.
+I cling to the version in the text, for it seems to me that the Doge's
+perpetual promise to rebuild the church was a return in kind for the
+pope's astute answer to the petition asking him to allow its removal. So
+good a thing ought to be history.] The old church was destroyed by fire,
+and Sansovino built, in 1506, the temple thrown down by Napoleon to make
+room for his palace.
+
+The 31st of January, on which day in 828 the body of St. Mark was
+brought from Alexandria to Venice, is still observed, though the
+festival has lost all the splendor which it received from civil
+intervention. For a thousand years the day was hallowed by a solemn mass
+in St. Mark's, at which the Doge and his Signory assisted.
+
+The chief of the State annually paid a number of festive visits, which
+were made the occasion of as many holidays. To the convent of San
+Zaccaria he went in commemoration of the visit paid to that retreat by
+Pope Benedict III., in 855, when the pontiff was so charmed by the piety
+and goodness of the fair nuns, that, after his return to Rome, he sent
+them great store of relics and indulgences. It thus became one of the
+most popular of the holidays, and the people repaired in great multitude
+with their Doge to the convent, on each recurrence of the day, that
+they might see the relics and buy the indulgences. The nuns were of the
+richest and noblest families of the city, and on the Doge's first visit,
+they presented him with that bonnet which became the symbol of his
+sovereignty. It was wrought of pure gold, and set with precious stones
+of marvelous great beauty and value; and in order that the State might
+never seem forgetful of the munificence which bestowed the gift, the
+bonnet was annually taken from the treasury and shown by the Doge
+himself to the Sisters of San Zaccaria. The Doge Pietro Tradonico,
+to whom the bonnet was given, was killed in a popular tumult on this
+holiday, while going to the convent.
+
+There was likewise a vast concourse of people and traffic in indulgences
+at the church of Santa Maria della Carita (now the Academy of Fine
+Arts), on the anniversary of the day when Pope Alexander III., in 1177,
+flying from the Emperor Barbarossa, found refuge in that monastery.
+[Footnote: Selvatico and Lazari in their admirable _Guida Artistica e
+Storica di Veneza_, say that the pope merely lodged in the monastery on
+the day when he signed the treaty of peace with Barbarossa.] He bestowed
+great privileges upon it, and the Venetians honored the event to the end
+of their national existence.
+
+One of the rare occasions during the year when the Doge appeared
+officially in public after nightfall, was on St. Stephen's Day. He then
+repaired at dusk in his gilded barge, with splendid attendance of nobles
+and citizens, to the island church of San Giorgio Maggiore, whither, in
+1009, the body of St. Stephen was brought from Constantinople. On the
+first of May the Doge visited the Convent of the Virgins, (the convent
+building now forms part of the Arsenal,) where the abbess presented
+him with a bouquet, and graceful and pleasing ceremonies took place in
+commemoration of the erection and endowment of the church. The head of
+the State also annually assisted at mass in St. Mark's, to celebrate the
+arrival in Venice of St. Isidore's body, which the Doge Domenico Michiel
+brought with him from the East, at the end of twenty-six years' war
+against the infidels; and, finally, after the year 1485, when the
+Venetians stole the bones of San Rocco from the Milanese, and deposited
+them in the newly finished Scuola di San Rocco, a ducal visit was
+annually paid to that edifice.
+
+Two only of the national religious festivals yet survive the
+Republic,--that of the church of the Redentore on the Giudecca, and that
+of the church of the Salute on the Grand Canal,--both votive churches,
+built in commemoration of the city's deliverances from the pest in 1578
+and 1630. In their general features the celebrations of the two holidays
+are much alike; but that of the Salute is the less important of the two,
+and is more entirely religious in its character. A bridge of boats
+is annually thrown across the Canalazzo, and on the day of the
+Purification, the people throng to the Virgin's shrine to express their
+gratitude for her favor. This gratitude was so strong immediately after
+the cessation of the pest in 1630, that the Senate, while the architects
+were preparing their designs for the present church, caused a wooden
+one to be built on its site, and consecrated with ceremonies of singular
+splendor. On the Festa del Redentore (the third Sunday of July) a bridge
+of boats crosses the great canal of the Giudecca, and vast throngs
+constantly pass it, day and night. But though the small tradesmen who
+deal in fried cakes, and in apples, peaches, pears, and other fruits,
+make intolerable uproar behind their booths on the long quay before the
+church; though the venders of mulberries (for which the gardens of the
+Giudecca are famous) fill the air with their sweet jargoning (for
+their cries are like the shrill notes of so many singing-birds); though
+thousands of people pace up and down, and come and go upon the bridge,
+yet the Festa del Redentore has now none of the old-time gayety it wore
+when the Venetians thronged the gardens, and feasted, sang, danced,
+and flirted the night away, and at dawn went in their fleets of
+many-lanterned boats, covering the lagoon with fairy light, to behold
+the sunrise on the Adriatic Sea.
+
+Besides the religious festivals mentioned, there were five banquets
+annually given by the State on the several days of St. Mark, St. Vitus,
+St. Jerome, and St. Stephen, and the Day of the Ascension, all of which
+were attended with religious observances. Good Friday was especially
+hallowed by church processions in each of the campos; and St. Martha's
+Day was occasion for junketings on the Giudecca Canal, when a favorite
+fish, being in season, was devotionally eaten.
+
+The civil and political holidays which lasted till the fall of the
+Republic were eleven. One of the earliest was the anniversary of
+the recapture of the Venetian Brides, who were snatched from their
+bridegrooms, at the altar of San Pietro di Castello, by Triestine
+pirates. The class of citizens most distinguished in the punishment
+of the abductors was the trade of carpenters, who lived chiefly in the
+parish of Santa Maria Formosa; and when the Doge in his gratitude bade
+them demand any reasonable grace, the trade asked that he should pay
+their quarter an annual visit. "But if it rains?" said the Doge. "We
+will give you a hat to cover you," answered the carpenters. "And if I am
+hungry?" "We will give you to eat and drink." So when the Doge made his
+visit on the day of the Virgin's Purification, he was given a hat of
+gilded straw, a bottle of wine, and loaves of bread. On this occasion
+the State bestowed dowers upon twelve young girls among the fairest and
+best of Venice (chosen two from each of the six sections of the city),
+who marched in procession to the church of Santa Maria Formosa. But as
+time passed, the custom lost its simplicity and purity: pretty girls
+were said to make eyes at handsome youths in the crowd, and scandals
+occurred in public. Twelve wooden figures were then substituted, but the
+procession in which they were carried was followed by a disgusted
+and hooting populace, and assailed with a shower of turnips.
+The festivities, which used to last eight days, with incredible
+magnificence, fell into discredit, and were finally abolished during the
+war when the Genoese took Chioggia and threatened Venice, under Doria.
+This was the famous Festa delle Marie.
+
+In 997 the Venetians beat the Narentines at sea, and annexed all Istria,
+as far as Dalmatia, to the Republic. On the day of the Ascension, of
+the same year, the Doge, for the first time, celebrated the dominion of
+Venice over the Adriatic, though it was not till some two hundred years
+later that the Pope Alexander III. blessed the famous espousals, and
+confirmed the Republic in the possession of the sea forever. "What,"
+cries Giustina Renier-Michiel, turning to speak of the holiday
+thus established, and destined to be the proudest in the Venetian
+calendar,--"what shall I say of the greatest of all our solemnities,
+that of the Ascension? Alas! I myself saw Frenchmen and Venetians, full
+of derision and insult, combine to dismantle the Bucintoro and burn it
+for the gold upon it!" [Footnote: That which follows is a translation
+of the report given by Cesare Cantu, in his _Grande Illustrazione
+del Lombardo-Veneto_, of a conversation with the author of _Feste
+Veneziane_. It is not necessary to remind readers of Venetian history
+that Renier and Michiel were of the foremost names in the Golden Book.
+She who bore them both was born before the fall of the Republic which
+she so much loved and lamented, and no doubt felt more than the grief
+she expresses for the fate of the last Bucintoro. It was destroyed, as
+she describes, in 1796, by the French Republicans and Venetian Democrats
+after the abdication of the oligarchy; but a fragment of its mast yet
+remains, and is to be seen in the museum of the Arsenal.].... (This
+was the nuptial-ship in which the Doge went to wed the sea, and the
+patriotic lady tells us concerning the Bucintoro of her day): "It was
+in the form of a galley, and two hundred feet long, with two decks.
+The first of these was occupied by an hundred and sixty rowers, the
+handsomest and strongest of the fleet, who sat four men to each oar, and
+there awaited their orders; forty other sailors completed the crew. The
+upper deck was divided lengthwise by a partition, pierced with arched
+doorways, ornamented with gilded figures, and covered with a roof
+supported by caryatides--the whole surmounted by a canopy of crimson
+velvet embroidered with gold. Under this were ninety seats, and at the
+stern a still richer chamber for the Doge's throne, over which drooped
+the banner of St. Mark. The prow was double-beaked, and the sides of
+the vessel were enriched with figures of Justice, Peace, Sea, Land, and
+other allegories and ornaments.
+
+"Let me imagine those times--it is the habit of the old. At midday,
+having heard mass in the chapel of the Collegio, the Doge descends the
+Giant's Stairs, issues from the Porta della Carta, [Footnote: The gate
+of the Ducal Palace which opens upon the Piazzetta next St. Mark's.] and
+passes the booths of the mercers and glass-venders erected for the fair
+beginning that evening. He is preceded by eight standard-bearers with
+the flags of the Republic,--red, blue, white, and purple,--given by
+Alexander III. to the Doge Ziani. Six trumpets of silver, borne by as
+many boys, mix their notes with the clangor of the bells of the city.
+Behind come the retinues of the ambassadors in sumptuous liveries, and
+the fifty Comandadori in their flowing blue robes and red caps; then
+follow musicians, and the squires of the Doge in black velvet; then the
+guards of the Doge, two chancellors, the secretary of the Pregadi, a
+deacon clad in purple and bearing a wax taper, six canons, three parish
+priests in their sacerdotal robes, and the Doge's chaplain dressed
+in crimson. The grand chancellor is known by his crimson vesture. Two
+squires bear the Doge's chair and the cushion of cloth of gold. And
+the Doge--the representative, and not the master of his country; the
+executor, and not the maker of the laws; citizen and prince, revered and
+guarded, sovereign of individuals, servant of the State--comes clad in
+a long mantle of ermine, cassock of blue, and vest and hose of _tocca
+d'oro_ [Footnote: A gauze of gold and silk.] with the golden bonnet on
+his head, under the umbrella borne by a squire, and surrounded by the
+foreign ambassadors and the papal nuncio, while his drawn sword is
+carried by a patrician recently destined for some government of land or
+sea, and soon to depart upon his mission. In the rear comes a throng of
+personages,--the grand captain of the city, the judges, the three chiefs
+of the Forty, the Avogodori, the three chiefs of the Council of Ten,
+the three censors, and the sixty of the Senate with the sixty of the
+Aggiunta, all in robes of crimson silk.
+
+"On the Bucintoro, each takes the post assigned him, and the prince
+ascends the throne. The Admiral of the Arsenal and the Lido stands in
+front as pilot; at the helm is the Admiral of Malamacco, and around him
+the ship-carpenters of the Arsenal. The Bucintoro, amid redoubled clamor
+of bells and roar of cannon, quits the riva and majestically plows the
+lagoon, surrounded by innumerable boats of every form and size.
+
+"The Patriarch, who had already sent several vases of flowers to do
+courtesy to the company in the Bucintoro, joins them at the island of
+Sant' Elena, and sprinkles their course with holy water. So they reach
+the port of Lido, whence they formerly issued out upon the open sea;
+but in my time they paused there, turning the stern of the vessel to the
+sea. Then the Doge, amid the thunders of the artillery of the fort, took
+the ring blessed by the Patriarch,--who now emptied a cup of holy water
+into the sea,--and, advancing into a little gallery behind his throne,
+threw the ring into the waves, pronouncing the words, _Desponsamus te,
+mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii_. Proceeding then to the
+church of San Nicoletto, they listened to a solemn mass, and returned to
+Venice, where the dignitaries were entertained at a banquet, while
+the multitude peacefully dispersed among the labyrinths of the booths
+erected for the fair." [Footnote: One of the sops thrown to the populace
+on this occasion, as we learn from Mutinelli, was the admission to the
+train of gilded barges following the Bucintoro of a boat bearing
+the chief of the Nicolotti, one of the factions into which from time
+immemorial the lower classes of Venice had been divided. The distinction
+between the two parties seems to have been purely geographical; for
+there is no apparent reason why a man should have belonged to the
+Castellani except that he lived in the eastern quarter of the city,
+or to the Nicolotti, except that he lived in the western quarter. The
+government encouraged a rivalry not dangerous to itself, and for a long
+time the champions of the two sections met annually and beat each other
+with rods. The form of contest was afterwards modified, and became a
+struggle for the possession of certain bridges, in which the defeated
+were merely thrown into the canals. I often passed the scene of the
+fiercest of these curious battles at San Barnaba, where the Ponte de
+Pugni is adorned with four feet of stone let into the pavement, and
+defying each other from the four corners of the bridge. Finally, even
+these contests were given up and the Castellani and Nicolotti spent
+their rivalry in marvelous acrobatic feats.] This fair, which was
+established as early as 1180, was an industrial exhibition of the
+arts and trades peculiar to Venice, and was repeated annually, with
+increasing ostentation, till the end, in 1796. Indeed, the feasts of the
+Republic at last grew so numerous that it became necessary, as we have
+seen before, to make a single holiday pay a double or triple debt of
+rejoicing. When the Venetians recovered Chioggia after the terrible war
+of 1380, the Senate refused to yield them another _festa_, and merely
+ordered that St. Mark's Day should be thereafter observed with some
+added ceremony: there was already one festival commemorative of a
+triumph over the Genoese (that of San Giovanni Decollate, on whose day,
+in 1358, the Venetians beat the Genoese at Negroponte), and the Senate
+declared that this was sufficient. A curious custom, however, on the
+Sunday after Ascension, celebrated a remoter victory over the same
+enemies, to which it is hard to attach any historic probability. It
+is not known exactly when the Genoese in immense force penetrated to
+Poveglia (one of the small islands of the lagoons), nor why being there
+they stopped to ask the islanders the best way of getting to Venice.
+But tradition says that the sly Povegliesi persuaded these silly Genoese
+that the best method of navigating the lagoons was by means of rafts,
+which they constructed for them, and on which they sent them afloat.
+About the time the Venetians came out to meet the armada, the withes
+binding the members of the rafts gave way, and the Genoese who were not
+drowned in the tides stuck in the mud, and were cut in pieces like so
+many melons. No one will be surprised to learn that not a soul of them
+escaped, and that only the Povegliesi lived to tell the tale. Special
+and considerable privileges were conferred on them for their part in
+this exploit, and were annually confirmed by the Doge, when a deputation
+of the islanders called on him in his palace, and hugged and kissed the
+devoted prince.
+
+People who _will_ sentimentalize over the pigeons of St. Mark's, may
+like to know that they have been settled in the city ever since 877.
+After the religious services on Palm Sunday, it was anciently the custom
+of the sacristans of St. Mark's to release doves fettered with fragments
+of paper, and thus partly disabled from flight, for the people to
+scramble for in the Piazza. The people fatted such of the birds as they
+caught, and ate them at Easter, but those pigeons which escaped took
+refuge in the roof of the church, where they gradually assumed a certain
+sacredness of character, and increased to enormous numbers. They were
+fed by provision of the Republic, and being neglected at the time of its
+fall, many of them were starved. But they now flourish on a bequest left
+by a pious lady for their maintenance, and on the largess of grain
+and polenta constantly bestowed by strangers. Besides the holidays
+mentioned, the 6th of December was religiously observed in honor of the
+taking of Constantinople, the Doge assisting at mass in the ducal chapel
+of St. Nicholas. He also annually visited, with his Signory in the state
+barges, and with great concourse of people, the church of San Vito
+on the 15th of June, in memory of the change of the government from a
+democracy to an oligarchy, and of the suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo's
+conspiracy. On St. Isidore's Day he went with his Signory, and the
+religious confraternities, in torchlight procession, to hear mass at St.
+Mark's in celebration of the failure of Marin Falier's plot. On the 17th
+of January he visited by water the hospital erected for invalid soldiers
+and sailors, and thus commemorated the famous defence of Scutari
+against the Turks, in 1413. For the peace of 1516, concluded after the
+dissolution of the League of Cambray, he went in his barge to the
+church of Santa Marina, who had potently exerted her influence for the
+preservation of the Republic against allied France, Austria, Spain, and
+Rome. On St. Jerome's Day, when the newly-elected members of the Council
+of Ten took their seats, the Doge entertained them with a banquet, and
+there were great popular rejoicings over an affair in which the people
+had no interest.
+
+It is by a singular caprice of fortune that, while not only all the
+Venetian holidays in anywise connected with the glory of the Republic,
+but also those which peculiarly signalized her piety and gratitude, have
+ceased to be, a festival common to the whole Catholic world should still
+be observed in Venice with extraordinary display. On the day of Corpus
+Christi there is a superb ecclesiastical procession in the Piazza.
+
+The great splendor of the solemnization is said to date from the times
+when Enrico Dandolo and his fellow-Crusaders so far forgot their purpose
+of taking Palestine from the infidels as to take Constantinople from the
+schismatics. Up to that period the day of Corpus Christi was honored by
+a procession from what was then the Cathedral of San Pietro di Castello;
+but now all the thirty parishes of the city, with their hundred
+churches, have part in the procession, which is of such great length as
+to take some two hours in its progress round the Piazza.
+
+Several days before the holiday workmen begin to build, within the Place
+of St. Mark, the colonnade through which the procession is to pass; they
+roof it with blue cotton cloth, and adorn it with rolls of pasteboard
+representing garlands of palm. At last, on the festive morning,
+the dwellers on the Grand Canal are drawn to their balconies by the
+apparition of boat-loads of facchini, gorgeous in scarlet robes,
+and bearing banners, painted candles, and other movable elements of
+devotion, with which they pass to the Piazzetta, and thence into St.
+Mark's. They re-appear presently, and, with a guard of Austrian troops
+to clear the way before them, begin their march under the canopy of the
+colonnade.
+
+When you have seen the Place of St. Mark by night your eye has tasted
+its most delicate delight, but then it is the delight given by a
+memory only, and it touches you with sadness. You must see the Piazza
+to-day,--every window fluttering with rich stuffs and vivid colors; the
+three great flag staffs [Footnote: Once bearing the standards of Cyprus,
+Candia, and Venice.] hanging their heavy flags; the brilliant square
+alive with a holiday population, with resplendent uniforms, with Italian
+gesture and movement, and that long glittering procession, bearing
+slowly on the august paraphernalia of the Church--you must see all this
+before you can enter into the old heart of Venetian magnificence, and
+feel its life about you.
+
+To-day, the ancient church of San Pietro di Castello comes first in the
+procession, and, with a proud humility, the Basilica San Marco last.
+Before each parochial division goes a banner displaying the picture
+or distinctive device of its titular saint, under the shadow of which
+chants a priest; there are the hosts of the different churches, and
+the gorgeous canopies under which they are elevated; then come facchini
+dressed in scarlet and bearing the painted candles, or the long
+carved and gilded candlesticks; and again facchini delicately robed
+in vestments of the purest white linen, with caps of azure, green, and
+purple, and shod with sandals or white shoes, carrying other apparatus
+of worship. Each banner and candlestick has a fluttering leaf of tinsel
+paper attached to it, and the procession makes a soft rustling as
+it passes. The matter-of-fact character of the external Church walks
+between those symbolists, the candle-bearers,--in the form of persons
+who gather the dropping fatness of the candles, and deposit it in a vase
+carried for that purpose. Citizens march in the procession with candles;
+and there are charity-schools which also take part, and sing in the
+harsh, shrill manner, of which I think only little boys who have their
+heads closely shorn are capable.
+
+On all this we looked down from a window of the Old Procuratie--of
+course with that calm sense of superiority which people are apt to have
+in regarding the solemnities of a religion different from their own.
+But that did not altogether prevent us from enjoying what was really
+beautiful and charming in the scene. I thought most of the priests, very
+good and gentle looking,--and in all respects they were much pleasanter
+to the eye than the monks of the Carmelite order, who, in shaving their
+heads to simulate the Saviour's crown of thorns, produce a hideous
+burlesque of the divine humiliation. Yet many even of these had earnest
+and sincere faces, and I could not think so much as I ought, perhaps, of
+their idle life, and the fleas in their coarse brown cloaks. I confess,
+indeed, I felt rather a sadness than an indignation at all that
+self-sacrifice to an end of which I could but dimly see the usefulness.
+With some things in this grand spectacle we were wholly charmed, and
+doubtless had most delight in the little child who personated John the
+Baptist, and who was quite naked, but for a fleece folded about him: he
+bore the cross-headed staff in one small hand, and led with the other
+a lamb much tied up with blue ribbon. Here and there in the procession
+little girls, exquisitely dressed, and gifted by fond mothers with wings
+and aureoles, walked, scattering flowers. I likewise greatly relished
+the lively holiday air of a company of airy old men, the pensioners of
+some charity, who, in their white linen trousers and blue coats, formed
+a prominent feature of the display. Far from being puffed up with their
+consequence, they gossiped cheerfully with the spectators in the pauses
+of the march, and made jests to each other in that light-hearted,
+careless way observable in old men taken care of, and with nothing
+before them to do worth speaking of but to die. I must own that the
+honest facchini who bore the candles were equally affable, and even
+freer with their jokes. But in this they formed a fine contrast to here
+and there a closely hooded devotee, who, with hidden face and silent
+lips, was carrying a taper for religion, and not, like them, for money.
+I liked the great good-natured crowd, so orderly and amiable; and I
+enjoyed even that old citizen in the procession who, when the Patriarch
+gave his blessing, found it inconvenient to kneel, and compromised by
+stretching one leg a great way out behind him. These things, indeed,
+quite took my mind off of the splendors; and I let the canopy of the
+Scuola di San Rocco (worth 40,000 ducats) go by with scarce a glance,
+and did not bestow much more attention upon the brilliant liveries of
+the Patriarch's servants,--though the appearance of these ecclesiastical
+flunkies is far more impressive than that of any of their secular
+brethren. They went gorgeously before the Patriarch, who was surrounded
+by the richly dressed clergy of St. Mark's, and by clouds of incense
+rising from the smoking censers. He walked under the canopy in his
+cardinal's robes, and with his eye fixed upon the Host.
+
+All at once the procession halted, and the Patriarch blessed the crowd,
+which knelt in a profound silence. Then the military band before him
+struck up an air from "Un Ballo in Maschera;" the procession moved on to
+the cathedral, and the crowd melted away.
+
+The once-magnificent day of the Ascension the Venetians now honor by
+closing all shop-doors behind them and putting all thought of labor
+out of their minds, and going forth to enjoy themselves in the mild,
+inexplosive fashion which seems to satisfy Italian nature. It is the
+same on all the feast-days: then the city sinks into profounder quiet;
+only bells are noisy, and where their clangor is so common as in
+Venice, it seems at last to make friends with the general stillness, and
+disturbs none but people of untranquil minds. We always go to the Piazza
+San Marco when we seek pleasure, and now, for eight days only of all the
+year, we have there the great spectacle of the Adoration of the Magi,
+performed every hour by automata within the little golden-railed gallery
+on the facade of the Giant's Clock Tower. There the Virgin sits above
+the azure circle of the zodiac, all heavily gilded, and holding the
+Child, equally splendid. Through the doors on either side, usually
+occupied by the illuminated figures of the hours, appears the procession
+and disappears. The stately giant on the summit of the tower, at the
+hither side of the great bell, solemnly strikes the hour--as a giant
+should who has struck it for centuries--with a grand, whole-arm
+movement, and a slow, muscular pride. We look up--we tourists of the
+red-backed books; we peasant-girls radiant with converging darts of
+silver piercing the masses of our thick black hair; we Austrian soldiers
+in white coats and blue tights; we voiceful sellers of the cherries
+of Padua, and we calm loafers about the many-pillared base of the
+church--we look up and see the Adoration. First, the trumpeter, blowing
+the world news of the act; then the first king, turning softly to the
+Virgin, and bowing; then the second, that enthusiastic devotee,--the
+second who lifts his crown quite from his head; last the Ethiopian
+prince, gorgeous in green and gold, who, I am sorry to say, burlesques
+the whole solemnity. His devotion may be equally heart-felt, but it is
+more jerky than that of the others. He bows well and adequately, but
+recovers his balance with a prodigious start, altogether too suggestive
+of springs and wheels. Perhaps there is a touch of the pathetic in this
+grotesque fatality of the black king, whose suffering race has always
+held mankind between laughter and tears, and has seldom done a fine
+thing without leaving somewhere the neutralizing absurdity; but if
+there is, the sentimental may find it, not I. When the procession has
+disappeared, we wait till the other giant has struck the hour, and then
+we disperse.
+
+If it is six o'clock, and the sea has begun to breathe cool across the
+Basin of St. Mark, we find our account in strolling upon the long Riva
+degli Schiavoni towards the Public Gardens. One would suppose, at first
+thought, that here, on this magnificent quay, with its glorious lookout
+over the lagoons, the patricians would have built their finest palaces;
+whereas there is hardly any thing but architectural shabbiness from the
+Ponte della Paglia at one end, to the Ponte Santa Marina at the other.
+But there need be nothing surprising in the fact, after all. The feudal
+wealth and nobility of other cities kept the base at a respectful
+distance by means of lofty stone walls, and so shut in their palaces and
+gardens. Here equal seclusion could only be achieved by building flush
+upon the water, and therefore all the finest palaces rise sheer from
+the canals; and caffe, shops, barracks, and puppet-shows occupy the
+Riva degli Schiavoni. Nevertheless, it is the favorite promenade of the
+Venetians for the winter sunshine, and at such times in the summer as
+when the sun's rage is tempered. There is always variety in the throng
+on the Riva, but the fashionable part of it is the least interesting:
+here and there a magnificent Greek flashes through the crowd, in
+dazzling white petticoats and gold-embroidered leggings and jacket;
+now and then a tall Dalmat or a solemn Turk; even the fishermen and
+the peasants, and the lower orders of the people, are picturesque; but
+polite Venice is hopelessly given to the pride of the eyes, and commits
+all the excesses of the French modes. The Venetian dandy, when dressed
+to his own satisfaction, is the worst-dressed man in the world. His
+hat curls outrageously in brim and sides; his coatsleeves are extremely
+full, and the garment pinches him at the waist; his pantaloons flow
+forth from the hips, and contract narrowly at the boot, which is
+square-toed and made too long. The whole effect is something not to
+be seen elsewhere, and is well calculated to move the beholder to
+desperation. [Footnote: These exaggerations of the fashions of 1862 have
+been succeeded by equal travesties of the present modes.] The Venetian
+fine lady, also, is prone to be superfine. Her dress is as full of color
+as a Paolo Veronese; in these narrow streets, where it is hard to expand
+an umbrella, she exaggerates hoops to the utmost; and she fatally hides
+her ankles in pantalets.
+
+In the wide thoroughfare leading from the last bridge of the Riva to the
+gate of the gardens there is always a clapping of wooden shoes on the
+stones, a braying of hand-organs, a shrieking of people who sell fish
+and fruit, at once insufferable and indescribable. The street is a _rio
+terra_,--a filled-up canal,--and, as always happens with _rii terrai_,
+is abandoned to the poorest classes who manifest themselves, as the
+poorest classes are apt to do always, in groups of frowzy women, small
+girls carrying large babies, beggars, of course, and soldiers. I spoke
+of fruit-sellers; but in this quarter the traffic in pumpkin-seeds is
+the most popular,--the people finding these an inexpensive and pleasant
+excess, when taken with a glass of water flavored with anise.
+
+The Gardens were made by Napoleon, who demolished to that end some
+monasteries once cumbering the ground. They are pleasant enough, and
+are not gardens at all, but a park of formally-planted trees--sycamores,
+chiefly. I do not remember to have seen here any Venetians of the better
+class, except on the Mondays-of-the-Garden, in September. Usually the
+promenaders are fishermen, Austrian corporals, loutish youth of
+low degree, and women too old and too poor to have any thing to do.
+Strangers go there, and the German visitors even drink the exceptionable
+beer which is sold in the wooden cottage on the little hillock at the
+end of the Gardens. There is also a stable--where are the only horses
+in Venice. They are let at a florin an hour, and I do not know why the
+riders are always persons of the Hebrew faith. In a word, nothing can be
+drearier than the company in the Gardens, and nothing lovelier than the
+view they command,--from the sunset on the dome of the church of the
+Salute, all round the broad sweep of lagoon, to the tower at the port of
+San Nicolo, where you catch a glimpse of the Adriatic.
+
+The company is commonly stupid, but one evening, as we strolled idly
+through the walks, we came upon an interesting group--forty or fifty
+sailors, soldiers, youth of the people, gray-haired fishermen and
+contadini--sitting and lying on the grass, and listening with rapt
+attention to an old man reclining against a tree. I never saw a manner
+of sweeter or easier dignity than the speaker's. Nature is so lavish of
+her grace to these people that grow near her heart--the sun! Infinite
+study could not have taught one northern-born the charm of oratory as
+this old man displayed it. I listened, and heard that he was speaking
+Tuscan. Do you guess with what he was enchanting his simple auditors?
+Nothing less than "Orlando Furioso." They listened with the hungriest
+delight, and when Ariosto's interpreter raised his finger and said,
+"Disse l'imperatore," or, "Orlando disse, Carlomano mio," they hardly
+breathed.
+
+On the _Lunedi dei Giardini_, already mentioned, all orders of the
+people flock thither, and promenade, and banquet on the grass. The trees
+get back the voices of their dryads, and the children fill the aisles
+with glancing movement and graceful sport.
+
+Of course, the hand-organ seeks here its proper element, the
+populace,--but here it brays to a peculiarly beautiful purpose. For
+no sooner does it sound than the young girls of the people wreathe
+themselves into dances, and improvise the poetry of motion. Over the
+grass they whirl, and up and down the broad avenues, and no one of all
+the gentle and peaceable crowd molests or makes them afraid. It is a
+scene to make you believe in Miriam dancing with Donatello there in that
+old garden at Rome, and reveals a simple beauty in the nature of the
+Italian poor, which shall one day, I hope, be counted in their favor
+when they are called to answer for lying and swindling.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.
+
+
+It often happens, even after the cold has announced itself in
+Venice, that the hesitating winter lingers in the Tyrol, and a mellow
+Indian-summer weather has possession of the first weeks of December.
+There was nothing in the December weather of 1863 to remind us
+Northerners that Christmas was coming. The skies were as blue as those
+of June, the sun was warm, and the air was bland, with only now and then
+a trenchant breath from the Alps, coming like a delicate sarcasm from
+loveliness unwilling to be thought insipidly amiable. But if there was
+no warning in the weather, there were other signs of Christmas-time
+not to be mistaken: a certain foolish leaping of the heart in one's
+own breast, as if the dead raptures of childhood were stirred in their
+graves by the return of the happy season; and in Venice, in weary,
+forlorn Venice, there was the half-unconscious tumult, the expectant
+bustle which cities feel at the approach of holidays. The little shops
+put on their gayest airs; there was a great clapping and hammering
+on the stalls and booths which were building in the campos; the
+street-cries were more shrill and resonant than ever, and the air was
+shaken with the continual clangor of the church bells. All this note of
+preparation is rather bewildering to strangers, and is apt to disorder
+the best-disciplined intentions of seeing Christmas as the Venetians
+keep it. The public observance of the holiday in the churches and on the
+streets is evident and accessible to the most transient sojourner;
+but it is curious proof of the difficulty of knowledge concerning the
+in-door life and usages of the Italians, that I had already spent
+two Christmases in Venice without learning any thing of their home
+celebration of the day. Perhaps a degree of like difficulty attends like
+inquiry everywhere, for the happiness of Christmas contracts the
+family circle more exclusively than ever around the home hearth, or the
+domestic scaldino, as the case may be. But, at any rate, I was quite
+ready to say that the observance of Christmas in Venice was altogether
+public, when I thought it a measure of far-sighted prudence to consult
+my barber.
+
+In all Latin countries the barber is a source of information, which,
+skillfully tapped, pours forth in a stream of endless gossip and local
+intelligence. Every man talks with his barber; and perhaps a lingering
+dignity clings to this artist from his former profession of surgeon:
+it is certain the barber here prattles on with a freedom and importance
+perfectly admitted and respected by the interlocutory count under his
+razor. Those who care to know how things passed in an Italian barber
+shop three hundred years ago, may read it in Miss Evans's "Romola;"
+those who are willing to see Nello alive and carrying on his art in
+Venice at this day, must go to be shaved at his shop in the Frezzaria.
+Here there is a continual exchange of gossip, and I have often listened
+with profit to the sage and piquant remarks of the head barber and chief
+_ciarlone_, on the different events of human life brought to his notice.
+His shop is well known as a centre of scandal, and I have heard a fair
+Venetian declare that she had cut from her list all acquaintance who
+go there, as persons likely to become infected with the worst habits of
+gossip.
+
+To this Nello, however, I used to go only when in the most brilliant
+humor for listening, and my authority on Christmas observances is
+another and humbler barber, but not less a babbler, than the first. By
+birth, I believe, he is a Mantuan, and he prides himself on speaking
+Italian instead of Venetian. He has a defective eye, which obliges him
+to tack before bringing his razor to bear, but which is all the more
+favorable to conversation. On the whole, he is flattered to be asked
+about Christmas in Venice, and he first tells me that it is one of the
+chief holidays of the year:--
+
+"It is then, Signore, that the Venetians have the custom to make three
+sorts of peculiar presents: Mustard, Fish, and Mandorlato. You must have
+seen the mustard in the shop windows: it is a thick conserve of fruits,
+flavored with mustard; and the mandorlato is a candy made of honey, and
+filled with almonds. Well, they buy fish, as many as they will, and a
+vase of mustard, and a box of mandorlato, and make presents of them, one
+family to another, the day before Christmas. It is not too much for a
+rich family to present a hundred boxes of mandorlato and as many pots of
+mustard. These are exchanged between friends in the city, and Venetians
+also send them to acquaintance in the country, whence the gift is
+returned in cakes and eggs at Easter. Christmas Eve people invite each
+other to great dinners, and eat and drink, and make merry; but there
+are only fish and vegetables, for it is a meagre day, and meats are
+forbidden. This dinner lasts so long that, when it is over, it is almost
+time to so to midnight mass, which all must attend, or else hear three
+masses on the morrow; and no doubt it was some delinquent who made our
+saying,--'Long as a Christmas mass.' On Christmas Day people dine at
+home, keeping the day with family reunions. But the day after! Ah-heigh!
+That is the first of Carnival, and all the theatres are opened, and
+there is no end to the amusements--or was not, in the old time. Now,
+they never begin. A week later comes the day of the Lord's Circumcision,
+and then the next holiday is Easter. The Nativity, the Circumcision, and
+the Resurrection--behold! these are the three mysteries of the Christian
+faith. Of what religion are the Americans, Signore?"
+
+I think I was justified in answering that we were Christians. My barber
+was politely surprised. "But there are so many different religions," he
+said, in excuse.
+
+On the afternoon before Christmas I walked through the thronged Merceria
+to the Rialto Bridge, where the tumultuous mart which opens at Piazza
+San Marco culminates in a deafening uproar of bargains. At this time the
+Merceria, or street of the shops, presents the aspect of a fair, and is
+arranged with a tastefulness and a cunning ability to make the most of
+every thing, which are seldom applied to the abundance of our fairs at
+home. The shops in Venice are all very small, and the streets of lofty
+houses are so narrow and dark, that whatever goods are not exposed
+in the shop-windows are brought to the door to be clamored over by
+purchasers; so that the Merceria is roused by unusual effort to produce
+a more pronounced effect of traffic and noise than it always wears; but
+now the effort had been made and the effect produced. The street was
+choked with the throngs, through which all sorts of peddlers battled
+their way and cried their wares. In Campo San Bartolomeo, into which
+the Merceria expands, at the foot of Rialto Bridge, holiday traffic
+had built enormous barricades of stalls, and entrenched itself behind
+booths, whence purchasers were assailed with challenges to buy bargains.
+More than half the campo was paved with crockery from Rovigo and
+glass-ware from Murano; clothing of every sort, and all kinds of small
+household wares, were offered for sale; and among the other booths, in
+the proportion of two to one, were stalls of the inevitable Christmas
+mustard and mandorlato.
+
+But I cared rather for the crowd than what the crowd cared for. I had
+been long ago obliged to throw aside my preconceived notions of the
+Italian character, though they were not, I believe, more absurd than the
+impressions of others who have never studied Italian character in Italy.
+I hardly know what of bacchantic joyousness I had not attributed to them
+on their holidays: a people living in a mild climate under such a lovely
+sky, with wine cheap and abundant, might not unreasonably have been
+expected to put on a show of the greatest jollity when enjoying
+themselves. Venetian crowds are always perfectly gentle and kindly, but
+they are also as a whole usually serious; and this Christmas procession,
+moving up and down the Merceria, and to and fro between the markets of
+Rialto, was in the fullest sense a solemnity. It is true that the scene
+was dramatic, but the drama was not consciously comic. Whether these
+people bought or sold, or talked together, or walked up and down in
+silence, they were all equally in earnest. The crowd, in spite of its
+noisy bustle and passionate uproar, did not seem to me a blithe or
+light-hearted crowd. Its sole activity was that of traffic, for, far
+more dearly than any Yankee, a Venetian loves a bargain, and puts his
+whole heart into upholding and beating down demands.
+
+Across the Bridge began the vegetable and fruit market, where whole
+Hollands of cabbage and Spains of onions opened on the view, with every
+other succulent and toothsome growth; and beyond this we entered the
+glory of Rialto, the fish-market, which is now more lavishly supplied
+than at any other season. It was picturesque and full of gorgeous color
+for the fish of Venice seem all to catch the rainbow hues of the lagoon.
+There is a certain kind of red mullet, called _triglia_, which is
+as rich and tender in its dyes as if it had never swam in water
+less glorious than that which crimsons under October sunsets. But
+a fish-market, even at Rialto, with fishermen in scarlet caps and
+_triglie_ in sunset splendors, is only a fish-market after all: it is
+wet and slimy under foot, and the innumerable gigantic eels, writhing
+everywhere, set the soul asquirm, and soon-sated curiosity slides
+willingly away.
+
+We had an appointment with a young Venetian lady to attend midnight mass
+at the church of San Moise, and thither about half-past eleven we went
+to welcome in Christmas. The church of San Moise is in the highest style
+of the Renaissance art, which is, I believe, the lowest style of any
+other. The richly sculptured facade is divided into stories; the fluted
+columns are stilted upon pedestals, and their lines are broken by the
+bands which encircle them like broad barrel-hoops. At every possible
+point theatrical saints and angels, only sustained from falling to the
+ground by iron bars let into their backs, start from the niches and
+cling to the sculpture. The outside of the church is in every way
+detestable, and the inside is consistently bad. All the side-altars have
+broken arches, and the high altar is built of rough blocks of marble to
+represent Mount Sinai, on which a melodramatic statue of Moses receives
+the tables of the law from God the Father, with frescoed seraphim in
+the background. For the same reason, I suppose, that the devout prefer a
+hideous Bambino and a Madonna in crinoline to the most graceful artistic
+conception of those sacred personages, San Moise is the most popular
+church for the midnight mass in Venice, and there is no mass at all in
+St. Mark's, where its magnificence would be so peculiarly impressive.
+
+On Christmas Eve, then, this church was crowded, and the door-ways were
+constantly thronged with people passing in and out. I was puzzled to
+see so many young men present, for Young Italy is not usually in great
+number at church; but a friend explained the anomaly: "After the guests
+at our Christmas Eve dinners have well eaten and drunken, they all go to
+mass in at least one church, and the younger offer a multiplied devotion
+by going to all. It is a good thing in some ways, for by this means
+they manage to see every pretty face in the city, which that night has
+specially prepared itself to be seen;" and from this slender text my
+friend began to discourse at large about these Christmas Eve dinners,
+and chiefly how jollily the priests fared, ending with the devout wish,
+"Would God had made me nephew of a canonico!" The great dinners of the
+priests are a favorite theme with Italian talkers; but I doubt it is
+after all only a habit of speech. The priests are too numerous to feed
+sumptuously in most cases.
+
+We had a good place to see and hear, sitting in the middle of the main
+aisle, directly over the dust of John Law, who alighted in Venice
+when his great Mississippi bubble burst, and died here, and now sleeps
+peacefully under a marble tablet in the ugly church of San Moise. The
+thought of that busy, ambitious life, come to this unscheming repose
+under our feet,--so far from the scene of its hopes, successes, and
+defeats,--gave its own touch of solemnity to the time and place, and
+helped the offended sense of propriety through the bursts of operatic
+music, which interspersed the mass. But on the whole, the music was good
+and the function sufficiently impressive,--what with the gloom of the
+temple everywhere starred with tapers, and the grand altar lighted to
+the mountain-top. The singing of the priests also was here much better
+than I had found it elsewhere in Venice.
+
+The equality of all classes in church is a noticeable thing always in
+Italy, but on this Christmas Eve it was unusually evident. The rags of
+the beggar brushed the silks of luxury, as the wearers knelt side by
+side on the marble floor; and on the night when God was born to poverty
+on earth, the rich seemed to feel that they drew nearer Him in the
+neighborhood of the poor. In these costly temples of the eldest
+Christianity, the poor seem to enter upon their inheritance of the
+future, for it is they who frequent them most and possess them with the
+deepest sense of ownership. The withered old woman, who creeps into St
+Mark's with her scaldino in her hand, takes visible possession of its
+magnificence as God's and hers, and Catholic wealth and rank would
+hardly, if challenged, dispute her claim.
+
+Even the longest mass comes to an end at last, and those of our party
+who could credit themselves with no gain of masses against the morrow,
+received the benediction at San Moise with peculiar unction. We all
+issued forth, and passing through the lines of young men who draw
+themselves up on either side of the doors of public places in Venice, to
+look at the young ladies as they come out, we entered the Place of
+St. Mark. The Piazza was more gloriously beautiful than ever I saw it
+before, and the church had a saintly loveliness. The moon was full, and
+snowed down the mellowest light on the gray domes, which in their soft,
+elusive outlines, and strange effect of far-withdrawal, rhymed like
+faint-heard refrains to the bright and vivid arches of the facade. And
+if the bronze horses had been minded to quit their station before the
+great window over the central arch, they might have paced around the
+night's whole half-world, and found no fairer resting-place.
+
+As for Christmas Day in Venice, it amounted to very little; every thing
+was closed, and whatever merry-making went on was all within doors.
+Although the shops and the places of amusement were opened the day
+following, the city entered very sparingly on the pleasures of
+Carnival, and Christmas week passed off in every-day fashion. It will be
+remembered that on St. Stephen's Day--the first of Carnival--one of the
+five annual banquets took place at the Ducal Palace in the time of the
+Republic. A certain number of patricians received invitations to the
+dinner, and those for whom there was no room were presented with fish
+and poultry by the Doge. The populace were admitted to look on during
+the first course, and then, having sated their appetites with this
+savory observance, were invited to withdraw. The patriotic Giustina
+Renier-Michiel of course makes much of the courtesy thus extended to the
+people by the State, but I cannot help thinking it must have been hard
+to bear. The banquet, however, has passed away with the Republic which
+gave it, and the only savor of dinner which Venetian poverty now inhales
+on St. Stephen's Day, is that which arises from its own proper pot of
+broth.
+
+New Year's is the carnival of the beggars in Venice. Their business is
+carried on briskly throughout the year, but on this day it is pursued
+with an unusual degree of perseverance, and an enterprise worthy of all
+disinterested admiration. At every corner, on every bridge, under every
+door-way, hideous shapes of poverty, mutilation, and deformity stand
+waiting, and thrust out palms, plates, and pans, and advance good wishes
+and blessings to all who pass, It is an immemorial custom, and it is one
+in which all but the quite comfortable classes participate. The facchini
+in every square take up their collections; the gondoliers have their
+plates prepared for contribution at every ferry; at every caffe and
+restaurant begging-boxes appeal to charity. Whoever has lifted hand in
+your service in any way during the past year expects a reward on New
+Year's for the complaisance, and in some cases the shop-keepers send to
+wish you a _bel capo d'anno_, with the same practical end in view. On
+New Year's Eve and morning bands of facchini and gondoliers go about
+howling _vivas_ under charitable windows till they open and drop
+alms. The Piazza is invaded by the legions of beggary, and held in
+overpowering numbers against all comers; and to traverse it is like a
+progress through a lazar-house.
+
+Beyond encouraging so gross an abuse as this, I do not know that Venice
+celebrates New Year's in a peculiar manner. It is a _festa_, and there
+are masses, of course. Presents are exchanged, which consist chiefly of
+books--printed for the season, and brilliant outside and dull within,
+like all annuals.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING; BAPTISMS AND BURIALS.
+
+
+The Venetians have had a practical and strictly business-like way of
+arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has
+always been made for the dower and for the good of the State; private
+and public interest being consulted, the small matters of affections
+have been left to the chances of association; and it does not seem that
+Venetian society has ever dealt severely with husbands or wives whom
+incompatibilities forced to seek consolation outside of matrimony.
+Herodotus relates that the Illyrian Veneti sold their daughters at
+auction to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably
+placed in life, the hard-favored were given to whomsoever would take
+them, with such dower as might be considered a reasonable compensation.
+The auction was discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts
+still partook of the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction.
+At a comparatively late period Venetian fathers went with their
+daughters to a great annual matrimonial fair at San Pietro di Castello
+Olivolo, and the youth of the lagoons repaired thither to choose wives
+from the number of the maidens. These were all dressed in white, with
+hair loose about the neck, and each bore her dower in a little box,
+slung over her shoulder by a ribbon. It is to be supposed that there was
+commonly a previous understanding between each damsel and some youth in
+the crowd: as soon as all had paired off, the bishop gave them a sermon
+and his benediction, and the young men gathered up their brides and
+boxes, and went away wedded. It was on one of these occasions, in the
+year 944, that the Triestine pirates stole the Brides of Venice with
+their dowers, and gave occasion to the Festa delle Marie, already
+described, and to Rogers's poem, which every body pretends to have read.
+
+This going to San Pietro's, selecting a wife and marrying her on
+the spot, out of hand, could only have been the contrivance of a
+straightforward, practical race. Among the common people betrothals were
+managed with even greater ease and dispatch, till a very late day in
+history; and in the record of a certain trial which took place in 1443
+there is an account of one of these brief and unceremonious courtships.
+Donna Catarussa, who gives evidence, and whom I take to have been a
+worthless, idle gossip, was one day sitting at her door, when Piero di
+Trento passed, selling brooms, and said to her, "Madonna, find me some
+nice girl." To which Donna Catarussa replied, "Ugly fool! do you take me
+for a go-between?" "No," said Piero, "not that; I mean a girl to be my
+wife." And as Donna Catarussa thought at once of a suitable match, she
+said, "In faith of God, I know one for you. Come again to-morrow." So
+they both met next day, and the woman chosen by Donna Catarussa being
+asked, "Wouldst thou like to have Piero for thy husband, as God commands
+and holy Church?" she answered, "Yes." And Peter being asked the like
+question, answered, "Why, yes, certainly." And they went off and had
+the wedding feast. A number of these betrothals takes place in the last
+scene of Goldoni's "Baruffe Chiozzotte," where the belligerent women and
+their lovers take hands in the public streets, and saluting each
+other as man and wife, are affianced, and get married as quickly as
+possible:--
+
+"_Checa_ (to Tofolo). Take my hand.
+
+"_Tofolo_. Wife!
+
+"_Checa_. Husband!
+
+"_Tofolo_. Hurra!"
+
+The betrothals of the Venetian nobles were celebrated with as much
+pomp and ceremony as could possibly distinguish them from those of the
+people, and there was much more polite indifference to the inclinations
+of the parties immediately concerned. The contract was often concluded
+before the betrothed had seen each other, by means of a third person,
+when the amount of the dower was fixed. The bridegroom elect having
+verbally agreed with the parents of the bride, repaired at an early day
+to the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, where the match was published,
+and where he shook hands with his kinsmen and friends. On the day fixed
+for signing the contract the bride's father invited to his house the
+bridegroom and all his friends, and hither came the high officers of
+state to compliment the future husband. He, with the father of his
+betrothed, met the guests at the door of the palace, and conducted them
+to the grand saloon, which no woman was allowed (_si figuri!_) at this
+time to enter. When the company was seated, the bride, clad in white,
+was led from her rooms and presented. She wore a crown of pearls and
+brilliants on her head, and her hair, mixed with long threads of
+gold, fell loose about her shoulders, as you may see it in Carpaccio's
+pictures of the Espousals of St. Ursula. Her ear-rings were pendants of
+three pearls set in gold; her neck and throat were bare but for a collar
+of lace and gems, from which slid a fine jeweled chain into her bosom.
+Over her breast she wore a stomacher of cloth of gold, to which were
+attached her sleeves, open from the elbow to the hand. The formal words
+of espousal being pronounced, the bride paced slowly round the hall to
+the music of fifes and trumpets, and made a gentle inclination to each
+of the guests; and then returned to her chamber, from which she issued
+again on the arrival of any tardy friend, and repeated the ceremony.
+After all this, she descended to the courtyard, where she was received
+by gentlewomen, her friends, and placed on a raised seat (which was
+covered with rich stuffs) in an open gondola, and thus, followed by a
+fleet of attendant gondolas, went to visit all the convents in which
+there were kinspeople of herself or her betrothed. The excessive
+publicity of these ceremonies was supposed to strengthen the validity
+of the marriage contract. At an early day after the espousals the
+betrothed, preceded by musicians and followed by relatives and friends,
+went at dawn to be married in the church,--the bridegroom wearing a
+toga, and the bride a dress of white silk or crimson velvet, with
+jewels in her hair, and pearls embroidered on her robes. Visits of
+congratulation followed, and on the same day a public feast was given
+in honor of the wedding, to which at least three hundred persons were
+always invited, and at which the number, quality, and cost of the dishes
+were carefully regulated by the Republic's laws. On this occasion, one
+or more persons were chosen as governors of the feast, and after the
+tables were removed, a mock-heroic character appeared, and recounted
+with absurd exaggeration the deeds of the ancestors of the bride and
+groom. The next morning _ristorativi_ of sweetmeats and confectionery
+were presented to the happy couple, by whom the presents were returned
+in kind.
+
+A splendor so exceptional, even in the most splendid age of the most
+splendid city, as that which marked the nuptial feasts of the unhappy
+Jacopo Foscari, could not be left unnoticed in this place. He
+espoused Lucrezia, daughter of Lionardo Contarini, a noble as rich
+and magnificent as Jacopo's own father, the Doge; and, on the 29th of
+January 1441, the noble Eustachio Balbi being chosen lord of the feasts,
+the bridegroom, the bride's brother and eighteen other patrician youths,
+assembled in the Palazzo Balbi, whence they went on horseback to conduct
+Lucrezia to the Ducal Palace. They were all sumptuously dressed in
+crimson velvet and silver brocade of Alexandria, and rode chargers
+superbly caparisoned. Other noble friends attended them; musicians went
+before; a troop of soldiers brought up the rear. They thus proceeded to
+the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, and then, returning, traversed
+the Piazza, and threading the devious little streets to the Campo San
+Samuele, there crossed the Grand Canal upon a bridge of boats, to San
+Barnaba opposite, where the Contarini lived. On their arrival at this
+place the bride, supported by two Procuratori di San Marco, and attended
+by sixty ladies, descended to the church and heard mass, after which
+an oration was delivered in Campo San Barnaba before the Doge, the
+ambassadors, and a multitude of nobles and people, in praise of the
+spouses and their families. The bride then returned to her father's
+house, and jousts took place in the campos of Santa Maria Formosa and
+San Polo (the largest in the city), and in the Piazza San Marco. The
+Doge gave a great banquet, and at its close one hundred and fifty ladies
+proceeded to the bride's palace in the Bucintoro, where one hundred
+other ladies joined them, together with Lucrezia, who, seated between
+Francesco Sforza (then General-in-chief of the Republic's armies) and
+the Florentine ambassador, was conducted, amid the shouts of the people
+and the sound of trumpets, to the Ducal Palace. The Doge received her
+at the riva of the Piazzetta, and, with Sforza and Balbi led her to
+the foot of the palace stairs, where the Dogaressa, with sixty ladies,
+welcomed her. A state supper ended this day's rejoicings, and on the
+following day a tournament took place in the Piazza, for a prize of
+cloth of gold, which was offered by Sforza. Forty knights contested the
+prize and supped afterward with the Doge. On the next day there were
+processions of boats with music on the Grand Canal; on the fourth and
+last day there were other jousts for prizes offered by the jewelers and
+Florentine merchants; and every night there were dancing and feasting in
+the Ducal Palace. The Doge was himself the giver of the last tournament,
+and with this the festivities came to an end.
+
+I have read an account by an old-fashioned English traveler of a
+Venetian marriage which he saw, sixty or seventy years ago, at the
+church of San Giorgio Maggiore: "After a crowd of nobles," he says, "in
+their usual black robes, had been some time in attendance, the gondolas
+appearing, exhibited a fine show, though all of them were painted of a
+sable hue, in consequence of a sumptuary law, which is very necessary in
+this place, to prevent an expense which many who could not bear it would
+incur; nevertheless the barcarioli, or boatmen, were dressed in handsome
+liveries; the gondolas followed one another in a line, each carrying two
+ladies, who were likewise dressed in black. As they landed they arranged
+themselves in order, forming a line from the gate to the great altar.
+At length the bride, arrayed in white as the symbol of innocence, led
+by the bridesman, ascended the stairs of the landing-place. There she
+received the compliments of the bridegroom, in his black toga, who
+walked at her right hand to the altar, where they and all the company
+kneeled. I was often afraid the poor young creature would have sunk upon
+the ground before she arrived, for she trembled with great agitation,
+while she made her low courtesies from side to side: however, the
+ceremony was no sooner performed than she seemed to recover her spirits,
+and looked matrimony in the face with a determined smile. Indeed, in
+all appearance she had nothing to fear from her husband, whose age and
+aspect were not at all formidable; accordingly she tripped back to the
+gondola with great activity and resolution, and the procession ended as
+it began. Though there was something attractive in this aquatic parade,
+the black hue of the boats and the company presented to a stranger,
+like me, the idea of a funeral rather than a wedding. My expectation
+was raised too high by the previous description of the Italians, who are
+much given to hyperbole, who gave me to understand that this procession
+would far exceed any thing I had ever seen. When I reflect upon this
+rhodomontade," disdainfully adds Mr. Drummond, "I cannot help comparing,
+in my memory, the paltry procession of the Venetian marriage with a very
+august occurrence of which I was eyewitness in Sweden," and which being
+the reception of their Swedish Majesties by the British fleet, I am sure
+the reader will not ask me to quote. With change of government, changes
+of civilization following the revolutions, and the decay of wealth among
+the Venetian nobles, almost all their splendid customs have passed away,
+and the habit of making wedding presents of sweetmeats and confectionery
+is perhaps the only relic which has descended from the picturesque past
+to the present time. These gifts are still exchanged not only by nobles,
+but by all commoners according to their means, and are sometimes a
+source of very profuse outlay. It is the habit to send the candies in
+the elegant and costly paper caskets which the confectioners sell, and
+the sum of a thousand florins scarcely suffices to pass the courtesy
+round a moderately large circle of friends.
+
+With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still
+greatly a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to
+the principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that
+they have not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the
+poorest, who cannot and do not seclude the youth of either sex from each
+other, and with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and subterfuge
+would be superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the _capa y
+espada_ comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried on with
+all the cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and stolen
+interviews.
+
+Let us take our nominal friends, Marco and Todaro, and attend them in
+their solemn promenade under the arcades of the Procuratie, or upon the
+Molo, whither they go every evening to taste the air and to look at
+the ladies, while the Austrians and the other foreigners listen to the
+military music in the Piazza. They are both young, our friends; they
+have both glossy silk hats; they have both light canes and an innocent
+swagger. Inconceivably mild are these youth, and in their talk
+indescribably small and commonplace.
+
+They look at the ladies, and suddenly Todaro feels the consuming ardors
+of love.
+
+_Todaro_ (to Marco). Here, dear! Behold this beautiful blonde here!
+Beautiful as an angel! But what loveliness!
+
+_Marco_. But where?
+
+_Todaro_. It is enough. Let us go. I follow her.
+
+Such is the force of the passion in southern hearts. They follow that
+beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of the gray-moustached
+papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is electrically
+conscious of pursuit. They follow her during the whole evening, and, at
+a distance, softly follow her home, where the burning Todaro photographs
+the number of the house upon the sensitized tablets of his soul.
+
+This is the first great step in love: he has seen his adored one, and he
+knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardor. The next advance
+is to be decided between himself and the faithful Marco, and is to
+be debated over many cups of black coffee, not to name glasses of
+sugar-and-water and the like exciting beverages. The friends may now
+find out the caffe which the Biondina frequents with her parents, and
+to which Todaro may go every evening and feast his eyes upon her
+loveliness, never making his regard known by any word, till some night,
+when he has followed her home, he steals speech with her as he stands in
+the street under her balcony,--and looks sufficiently sheepish as
+people detect him on their late return from the theatre. [Footnote:
+The love-making scenes in Goldoni's comedy of _Il Bugiarda_ are
+photographically faithful to present usage in Venice.] Or, if the
+friends do not take this course in their courtship (for they are both
+engaged in the wooing), they decide that Todaro, after walking back
+and forth a sufficient number of times in the street where the Biondina
+lives, shall write her a tender letter, to demand if she be disposed to
+correspond his love. This billet must always be conveyed to her by her
+serving-maid, who must be bribed by Marco for the purpose. At every
+juncture Marco must be consulted, and acquainted with every step of
+progress; and no doubt the Biondina has some lively Moretta for her
+friend, to whom she confides her part of the love-affair in all its
+intricacy.
+
+It may likewise happen that Todaro shall go to see the Biondina in
+church, whither, but for her presence, he would hardly go, and that
+there, though he may not have speech with her, he shall still fan
+the ardors of her curiosity and pity by persistent sighs. It must
+be confessed that if the Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his
+devotion must assume the character of an intolerable bore to her; and
+that to see him everywhere at her heels--to behold him leaning against
+the pillar near which she kneels at church, the head of his stick in his
+mouth, and his attitude carefully taken with a view to captivation--to
+be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or,
+turning round at the caffe encounter his pleading gaze--that all
+this must drive the Biondina to a state bordering upon blasphemy and
+finger-nails. _Ma, come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!_ This is the sole
+course open to ingenuous youth in Venice, where confessed and unashamed
+acquaintance between young people is extremely difficult; and so this
+blind pursuit must go on, till the Biondina's inclinations are at last
+laboriously ascertained.
+
+Suppose the Biondina consents to be loved? Then Todaro has just and
+proper inquiries to make concerning her dower, and if her fortune is
+as pleasing as herself, he has only to demand her in marriage of her
+father, and after that to make her acquaintance.
+
+One day a Venetian friend of mine, who spoke a little English, came to
+me with a joyous air and said:
+
+"I am in lofe."
+
+The recipient of repeated confidences of this kind from the same person,
+I listened with tempered effusion.
+
+"It is a blonde again?"
+
+"Yes, you have right; blonde again."
+
+"And pretty?"
+
+"Oh, but beautiful. I lofe her--_come si dice!--immensamente."_ "And
+where did you see her? Where did you make her acquaintance?"
+
+"I have not make the acquaintance. I see her pass with his fazer every
+night on Rialto Bridge We did not spoke yet--only with the eyes.
+The lady is not of Venice. She has four thousand florins. It is not
+much--no. But!"
+
+Is not this love at first sight almost idyllic? Is it not also a sublime
+prudence to know the lady's fortune better than herself, before herself?
+These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before
+they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and
+white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After
+that may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of
+friendship, and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating
+the auspicious event. If he be rich, or can write _nobile_ after his
+Christian name, perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and
+alive to grateful consequences, may publish a poem, elegantly printed
+by the matchless printers at Rovigo, and send it to all the bridegroom's
+friends. It is not the only event which the facile Venetian Muse shall
+sing for him. If his child is brought happily through the measles by
+Dottor Cavasangue, the Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any
+public honor or scholastic degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and
+when he dies the mortuary rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every
+occurrence--a boy's success at school, an advocate's triumphal passage
+of the perils of examination at Padua, a priest's first mass, a nun's
+novitiate, a birth, an amputation--is the subject of tuneful effusion,
+and no less the occasion of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring
+campo, who assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of voices around
+the victim's door, and proclaim his skill or good fortune, and break
+into _vivas_ that never end till he bribes their enthusiasm into
+silence. The naive commonplaceness of feeling in all matrimonial
+transactions, in spite of the gloss which the operatic methods of
+courtship threw about them, was a source of endless amusement, as
+it stole out in different ways. "You know my friend Marco?" asked an
+acquaintance one day. "Well, we are looking out a wife for him. He
+doesn't want to marry, but his father insists; and he has begged us
+to find somebody. There are three of us on the look-out. But he hates
+women, and is very hard to suit. _Ben! Ci vuol pazienza!"_
+
+It rarely happens now that the religious part of the marriage ceremony
+is not performed in church, though it may be performed at the house of
+the bride. In this case, it usually takes place in the evening, and the
+spouses attend five o'clock mass next morning. But if the marriage takes
+place at church, it must be between five and eleven in the morning, and
+the blessing is commonly pronounced about six o'clock. Civil marriage
+is still unknown among the Venetians. It is entirely the affair of the
+Church, in which the bans are published beforehand, and which exacts
+from the candidates a preliminary visit to their parish priest, for
+examination in their catechism, and for instruction in religion when
+they are defective in knowledge of the kind. There is no longer any
+civil publication of the betrothals, and the hand-shaking in the court
+of the Ducal Palace has long been disused. I cannot help thinking
+that the ceremony must have been a great affliction, and that, in the
+Republican times at Venice, a bridegroom must have fared nearly as hard
+as a President elect in our times at home.
+
+There was a curious display on occasion of births among the nobility
+in former times. The room of the young mother was decorated with a
+profusion of paintings, sculpture, and jewelry; and, while yet in bed,
+she received the congratulations of her friends, and regaled them with
+sweetmeats served in vases of gold and silver.
+
+The child of noble parents had always at least two godfathers, and
+sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty; but in order that the
+relationship of godfather (which is the same according to the canonical
+law as a tie of consanguinity) should not prevent desirable matrimony
+between nobles, no patrician was allowed to be godfather to another's
+child. Consequently the _compare_ was usually a client of the noble
+parent, and was not expected to make any present to the godchild, whose
+father, on the day following the baptism, sent him a piece of marchpane,
+in acknowledgment of their relationship. No women were present at the
+baptism except those who had charge of the babe. After the fall of
+the Republic the French custom of baptism in the parents' house was
+introduced, as well as the custom, on the godfather's part, of giving a
+present,--usually of sugarplums and silver toys. But I think that most
+baptisms still take place in church, if I may judge from the numbers
+of tight little glass cases I have noticed,--half bed and half
+coffin,--containing little eight-day-old Venetians, closely swathed in
+mummy-like bandages, and borne to and from the churches by mysterious
+old women. The ceremony of baptism itself does not apparently differ
+from that in other Catholic countries, and is performed, like all
+religious services in Italy, without a ray of religious feeling or
+solemnity of any kind.
+
+For many centuries funeral services in Venice have been conducted by the
+_Scuole del Sacramento,_ instituted for that purpose. To one of
+these societies the friends of the defunct pay a certain sum, and the
+association engages to inter the dead, and bear all the expenses of the
+ceremony, the dignity of which is regulated by the priest of the parish
+in which the deceased lived. The rite is now most generally undertaken
+by the Scuola di San Rocco. The funeral train is of ten or twenty
+facchini, wearing tunics of white, with caps and capes of red, and
+bearing the society's long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted
+tapers. Priests follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the
+bier,--with a gilt crown lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to
+indicate the triumph of innocence. Formerly, hired mourners attended,
+and a candle, weighing a pound, was given to any one who chose to carry
+it in the procession.
+
+Anciently there was great show of mourning in Venice for the dead, when,
+according to Mutinelli, the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having
+seen his body deposited in the church, "fell to weeping and howling,
+tore their hair and rent their clothes, and withdrew forever from that
+church, thenceforth become for them a place of abomination." Decenter
+customs prevailed in after-times, and there was a pathetic dignity in
+the ceremony of condolence among patricians: the mourners, on the day
+following the interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the
+court of the Ducal Palace, and their friends came, one after one, and
+expressed their sympathy by a mute pressure of the hand.
+
+Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible in modern Venice. The
+corpse is hurried from the house of mourning to the parish church, where
+the friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. Then it is
+placed in a boat and carried to the burial-ground, where it is quickly
+interred. I was fortunate, therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral
+at which I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There was a church
+on this island as early as the tenth century, and in the thirteenth
+century it fell into the possession of the Comandulensen Friars. They
+built a monastery on it, which became famous as a seat of learning, and
+gave much erudite scholarship to the world. In later times Pope Gregory
+XVI. carried his profound learning from San Michele to the Vatican. The
+present church is in the Renaissance style, but not very offensively so,
+and has some indifferent paintings. The arcades and the courts around
+which it is built contain funeral monuments as unutterably ugly and
+tasteless as any thing of the kind I ever saw at home; but the dead, for
+the most part, lie in graves marked merely by little iron crosses in
+the narrow and roofless space walled in from the lagoon, which laps
+sluggishly at the foot of the masonry with the impulses of the tide.
+The old monastery was abolished in 1810, and there is now a convent of
+Reformed Benedictines on the island, who perform the last service for
+the dead.
+
+On the day of which I speak, I was taking a friend to see the objects
+of interest at San Michele, which I had seen before, and the funeral
+procession touched at the riva of the church just as we arrived. The
+procession was of one gondola only, and the pallbearers were four
+pleasant ruffians in scarlet robes of cotton, hooded, and girdled at
+the waist. They were accompanied by a priest of a broad and jolly
+countenance, two grinning boys, and finally the corpse itself, severely
+habited in an under-dress of black box, but wearing an outer garment of
+red velvet, bordered and tasseled gayly. The pleasant ruffians (who all
+wore smoking-caps with some other name) placed this holiday corpse upon
+a bier, and after a lively dispute with our gondolier, in which the
+compliments of the day were passed in the usual terms of Venetian chaff,
+lifted the bier on shore and set it down. The priest followed with the
+two boys, whom he rebuked for levity, simultaneously tripping over the
+Latin of a prayer, with his eyes fixed on our harmless little party
+as if we were a funeral, and the dead in the black box an indifferent
+spectator Then he popped down upon his knees, and made us a lively
+little supplication, while a blind beggar scuffled for a lost soldo
+about his feet, and the gondoliers quarreled volubly. After which, he
+threw off his surplice with the air of one who should say his day's work
+was done, and preceded the coffin into the church.
+
+We had hardly deposited the bier upon the floor in the centre of the
+nave, when two pale young friars appeared, throwing off their hooded
+cloaks of coarse brown, as they passed to the sacristy, and reappearing
+in their rope-girdled gowns. One of them bore a lighted taper in his
+right hand and a book in his left; the other had also a taper, but a pot
+of holy water instead of the book.
+
+They are very handsome young men, these monks, with heavy, sad eyes,
+and graceful, slender figures, which their monastic life will presently
+overload with gross humanity full of coarse appetites. They go and stand
+beside the bier, giving a curious touch of solemnity to a scene composed
+of the four pleasant ruffians in the loaferish postures which they have
+learned as facchini waiting for jobs; of the two boys with inattentive
+grins, and of the priest with wandering eyes, kneeling behind them.
+
+A weak, thin-voiced organ pipes huskily from its damp loft: the monk
+hurries rapidly over the Latin text of the service, while
+
+    "His breath to heaven like vapor goes"
+
+on the chilly, humid air; and the other monk makes the responses,
+giving and taking the sprinkler, which his chief shakes vaguely in the
+direction of the coffin. They both bow their heads--shaven down to the
+temples, to simulate His crown of thorns. Silence. The organ is still,
+the priest has vanished; the tapers are blown out; the pall-bearers lay
+hold of the bier, and raise it to their shoulders; the boys slouch into
+procession behind them; the monks glide softly and dispiritedly away.
+The soul is prepared for eternal life, and the body for the grave.
+
+The ruffians are expansively gay on reaching the open air again. They
+laugh, they call "Cio!" [Footnote: Literally, _That_ in Italian, and
+meaning in Venetian, _You! Heigh!_ To talk in _Cio ciappa_ is to assume
+insolent familiarity or unbounded good fellowship with the person
+addressed. A Venetian says _Cio_ a thousand times in a day, and hails
+every one but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian
+pronoun, but rather a contraction of _Veccio_ (vecchio), _Old fellow!_
+It is common with all classes of the people: parents use it in speaking
+to their children, and brothers and sisters call one mother _Cio_. It
+is a salutation between friends, who cry out, _Cio!_ as they pass in the
+street. Acquaintances, men who meet after separation, rush together
+with _"Ah Cio!"_ Then they kiss on the right cheek _"Cio!"_ on the left,
+_"Cio!"_ on the lips, _"Cio! Bon di Cio!"_] continually, and banter each
+other as they trot to the grave.
+
+The boys follow them, gamboling among the little iron crosses, and
+trying if here and there one of them may not be overthrown.
+
+We two strangers follow the boys.
+
+But here the pall-bearers become puzzled: on the right is an open
+trench, on the left is an open trench.
+
+"Presence of the Devil! To which grave does this dead belong?" They
+discuss, they dispute, they quarrel.
+
+From the side of the wall, as if he rose from the sea, appears the grave
+digger, with his shovel on his shoulder--slouching toward us.
+
+"Ah heigh! Cio, the grave-digger! Where does this dead belong?"
+
+"Body of Bacchus, what potatoes! Here, in this trench to the right."
+
+They set down the bier there, gladly. They strip away the coffin's gay
+upper garment; they leave but the under-dress of black box, painted to
+that favor with pitch. They shove it into the grave-digger's arms, where
+he stands in the trench, in the soft earth, rich with bones. He lets it
+slide swiftly to the ground--thump! _Ecco fatto!_
+
+The two boys pick up the empty bier, and dance merrily away with it
+to the riva-gate, feigning a little play after the manner of
+children,--"Oh, what a beautiful dead!"
+
+The eldest of the pleasant ruffians is all the pleasanter for
+_sciampagnin_, and can hardly be persuaded to go out at the right gate.
+
+We strangers stay behind a little, to consult with mother spectator--
+Venetian, this. "Who is the dead man, signore?"
+
+"It is a woman, poor little thing! Dead in child-bed. The baby is in
+there with her."
+
+It has been a cheerful funeral, and yet we are not in great spirits as
+we go back to the city.
+
+For my part, I do not think the cry of sea-gulls on a gloomy day is
+a joyous sound; and the sight of those theatrical angels, with their
+shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo facade of
+the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with
+despondency and foreboding.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.
+
+
+On a small canal, not far from the railroad station, the gondoliers
+show you a house, by no means notable (except for the noble statue of
+a knight, occupying a niche in one corner), as the house of Othello. It
+was once the palace of the patrician family Moro, a name well known in
+the annals of the Republic, and one which, it has been suggested, misled
+Shakespeare into the invention of a Moor of Venice. Whether this
+is possibly the fact, or whether there is any tradition of a tragic
+incident in the history of the Moro family similar to that upon which
+the play is founded, I do not know; but it is certain that the story
+of Othello, very nearly as Shakespeare tells it, is popularly known in
+Venice; and the gondoliers have fixed upon the Casa Moro in question as
+the edifice best calculated to give satisfaction to strangers in search
+of the True and the Memorable. The statue is happily darkened by time,
+and thus serves admirably to represent Othello's complexion, and to
+place beyond the shadow of a doubt the fact of his residence in the
+house. Indeed, what can you say to the gondolier, who, in answer to your
+cavils, points to the knight, with the convincing argument, "There is
+his statue!"
+
+One day I was taken to see this house, in company with some friends, and
+when it had been victoriously pointed out, as usual, we asked meekly,
+"Who was Othello?"
+
+"Othello, Signori," answered the gondolier, "was a general of
+the Republic, in the old times. He was an African, and black; but
+nevertheless the State valued him, and he beat the Turks in many
+battles. Well, Signori, this general Othello had a very young and
+beautiful wife, and his wife's cousin (_sic!_), Cassio was his
+major-domo, or, as some say, his lieutenant. But after a while happens
+along (_capita_) another soldier of Othello, who wants Cassio's
+employment, and so accuses him to the general of corrupting his wife.
+Very well, Signori! Without thinking an instant, Othello, being made so,
+flew into a passion (_si riscaldo la testa_), and killed his wife; and
+then when her innocence came out, he killed himself and that liar; and
+the State confiscated his goods, he being a very rich man. There has
+been a tragedy written about all this, you know."
+
+"But how is it called? Who wrote it?"
+
+"Oh! in regard to that, then, I don't know. Some Englishman."
+
+"Shakespeare?"
+
+"I don't know, Signori. But if you doubt what I tell you, go to any
+bookseller, and say, 'Favor me with the tragedy of "Othello."' He will
+give it you, and there you will find it all written out just as I tell
+it."
+
+This gondolier confirmed the authenticity of his story, by showing us
+the house of Cassio near the Rialto Bridge, and I have no doubt he would
+also have pointed out that of Iago if we had wished it.
+
+But as a general thing, the lore of the gondoliers is not rich nor very
+great. They are a loquacious and a gossiping race, but they love better
+to have a quiet chat at the tops of their voices, as they loaf idly at
+the ferries, or to scream repartees across the Grand Canal, than to tell
+stories. In all history that relates to localities they are sufficiently
+versed to find the notable places for strangers, but beyond this they
+trouble themselves as little with the past as with the future. Three
+tragic legends, however, they know, and will tell with the most amusing
+effect, namely: Biasio, _luganegher_; the Innocent Baker-Boy, and
+Veneranda Porta.
+
+The first of these legends is that of a sausage-maker who flourished
+in Venice some centuries ago, and who improved the quality of the broth
+which the _luganegheri_ make of their scraps and sell to the gondoliers,
+by cutting up into it now and then a child of some neighbor. He was
+finally detected by a gondolier who discovered a little finger in his
+broth, and being brought to justice, was dragged through the city at the
+heels of a wild horse. This most uncomfortable character appears to
+be the first hero in the romance of the gondoliers, and he certainly
+deserves to rank with that long line of imaginary personages who have
+made childhood so wretched and tractable. The second is the Innocent
+Baker-Boy already named, who was put to death on suspicion of having
+murdered a noble, because in the dead man's heart was found a dagger
+fitting a sheath which the baker had picked up in the street, on
+the morning of the murder, and kept in his possession. Many years
+afterwards, a malefactor who died in Padua confessed the murder, and
+thereupon two lamps were lighted before a shrine in the southern facade
+of St. Mark's Church,--one for the murdered nobleman's soul, and the
+other for that of the innocent boy. Such is the gondoliers' story, and
+the lamps still burn every night before the shrine from dark till
+dawn, in witness of its truth. The fact of the murder and its guiltless
+expiation is an incident of Venetian history, and it is said that the
+Council of the Ten never pronounced a sentence of death thereafter, till
+they had been solemnly warned by one of their number with _"Ricordatevi
+del povero Fornaretto!"_ (Remember the poor Baker-Boy!) The poet Dall
+'Ongaro has woven the story into a beautiful and touching tragedy; but I
+believe the poet is still to be born who shall take from the gondoliers
+their Veneranda Porta, and place her historic figure in dramatic
+literature. Veneranda Porta was a lady of the days of the Republic,
+between whom and her husband existed an incompatibility. This was
+increased by the course of Signora Porta in taking a lover, and it at
+last led to the assassination of the husband by the paramours. The head
+of the murdered man was found in one of the canals, and being exposed,
+as the old custom was, upon the granite pedestal at the corner of St.
+Mark's Church, it was recognized by his brother who found among the
+papers on which the long hair was curled fragments of a letter he had
+written to the deceased. The crime was traced to the paramours, and
+being brought before the Ten, they were both condemned to be hanged
+between the columns of the Piazzetta. The gondoliers relate that when
+the sentence was pronounced, Veneranda said to the Chief of the Ten,
+"But as for me this sentence will never be carried out. You cannot hang
+a woman. Consider the impropriety!" The Venetian rulers were wise men
+in their generation, and far from being balked by this question of
+delicacy, the Chief replied, solving it, "My dear, you shall be hanged
+in my breeches."
+
+It is very coarse salt which keeps one of these stories; another is
+remembered because it concerns one of the people; and another for its
+abomination and horror. The incidents of Venetian history which take the
+fancy and touch the sensibility of the world seem hardly known to the
+gondoliers, the most intelligent and quick-witted of the populace, and
+themselves the very stuff that some romantic dreams of Venice are made
+of. However sad the fact, it is undeniable that the stories of the
+sausage-maker whose broth was flavored with murder, and the baker-boy
+who suffered guiltlessly, and that savage jest at the expense of the
+murderess, interest these people more than the high-well-born sorrows
+of the Foscari, the tragic fate of Carmagnola, or the story of
+Falier,--which last they know partly, however, because of the scandal
+about Falier's wife. Yet after all, though the gondoliers are not
+the gondoliers of imaginative literature, they have qualities which
+recommended them to my liking, and I look back upon my acquaintance
+with two or three of them in a very friendly spirit. Compared with
+the truculent hackmen, who prey upon the traveling public in all other
+cities of the civilized world, they are eminently intelligent and
+amiable. Rogues they are, of course, for small dishonesties are the
+breath in the nostrils of common carriers by land or water, everywhere;
+but the trickery of the gondoliers is so good-natured and simple that
+it can hardly offend. A very ordinary jocular sagacity defeats their
+profoundest purposes of swindling, and no one enjoys their exposure
+half so much as themselves, while a faint prospect of future employment
+purifies them of every trait of dishonesty. I had only one troublesome
+experience with them, and that was in the case of the old gondolier who
+taught me to row. He, when I had no longer need of his services, plunged
+into drunkenness, and came and dismissed me one day with every mark of
+ignominy. But he afterwards forgave me, and saluted me kindly when we
+met.
+
+The immediate goal of every gondolier's ambition is to serve, no matter
+for how short a time, an Inglese, by which generic title nearly all
+foreigners except Germans are known to him. The Inglese, whether he
+be English or American, is apt to make the tour of the whole city in
+a gondola, and to give handsome drink money at the end, whereas your
+Tedesco frugally walks to every place accessible by land, or when, in
+a party of six or eight, he takes a gondola, plants himself upon the
+letter of the tariff, and will give no more than the rate fixed by law.
+The gondolier is therefore flowingly polite to the Inglese, and he is
+even civil to the Tedesco; but he is not at all bound in courtesy to
+that provincial Italian who comes from the country to Venice, bargains
+furiously for his boat, and commonly pays under the tariff. The Venetian
+who does not himself keep a gondola seldom hires one, and even on this
+rare occasion makes no lavish demand such as "How much do you want for
+taking me to the rail-way station?" Lest the fervid imagination of the
+gondolier rise to zwanzigers and florins, and a tedious dispute ensue,
+he asks: "How many centissimi do you want?" and the contract is made,
+for a number of soldi.
+
+The number of private gondolas owned in Venice is not very great. The
+custom is rather to hire a gondolier with his boat. The exclusive use of
+the gondola is thus secured, and the gondolier gives his services as a
+domestic when off his special duty. He waits at table, goes marketing,
+takes the children to school, and serves the ladies as footman, for five
+francs a day, himself paying the proprietor of the gondola about a
+franc daily for the boat. In former times, when Venice was rich and
+prosperous, many noble families kept six or seven gondolas; and what
+with this service, and the numerous gala-days of the Republic, when the
+whole city took boat for the Lido, or the Giudecca, or Murano, and
+the gondoliers were allowed to exact any pay they could, they were a
+numerous and prosperous class. But these times have passed from Venice
+forever, and though the gondoliers are still, counting the boatmen of
+the Giudecca and Lido, some thousands in number, there are comparatively
+few young men among them, and their gains are meagre.
+
+In the little city of Venice, where the dialect spoken at Canareggio or
+Castello is a different tongue from that heard under the Procuratie of
+St. Mark's Place, the boatmen of the several quarters of the city of
+course vary greatly in character and appearance; and the gondolier who
+lounges at the base of the columns of the Piazzetta, and airily invites
+the Inglesi to tours of the Grand Canal, is of quite a different type
+from the weather-beaten _barcaiuolo_, who croaks _"Barca!"_ at the
+promenaders on the Zattere. But all, as I say, are simple and harmless
+enough, and however loudly they quarrel among themselves, they never
+pass from the defamation of their female relatives to blows. As for
+the game of knives, as it is said to be played at Naples, and as About
+describes it at Rome, I doubt if it is much known to the populace of
+Venice. Only the doctors let blood there--though from their lancets it
+flows pretty freely and constantly.
+
+It is true that the gondolier loves best of everything a clamorous
+quarrel, carried on with the canal between him and his antagonist; but
+next to this, he loves to spend his leisure at the ferry in talking
+of eating and of money, and he does not differ from many of his
+fellow-citizens in choice of topics. I have seldom caught a casual
+expression from passers in the streets of Venice which did not relate
+in some way to gold Napoleons, zwanzigers, florins, or soldi, or else
+to wine and polenta. I note this trait in the Venetians, which Goldoni
+observed in the Milanese a hundred years ago, and which I incline to
+believe is common to all Italians. The gondoliers talk a great deal in
+figure and hyperbole, and their jocose chaff is quite inscrutable even
+to some classes of Venetians. With foreigners, to whom the silence and
+easy progress of the gondola gives them the opportunity to talk, they
+are fond of using a word or two of French. They are quick at repartee,
+and have a clever answer ready for most occasions. I was one day
+bargaining for a boat to the Lido, whither I refused to be taken in
+a shabby gondola, or at a rate higher than seventy-five soldi for the
+trip. At last the patience of the gondoliers was exhausted, and one of
+them called out, "Somebody fetch the Bucintoro, and take this
+gentleman to the Lido for seventy-five soldi!" (The Bucintoro being the
+magnificent barge in which the Doge went to wed the Adriatic.)
+
+The skill with which the gondoliers manage their graceful craft is
+always admired by strangers, and is certainly remarkable. The gondola is
+very long and slender, and rises high from the water at either end. Both
+bow and stern are sharp, the former being ornamented with that deeply
+serrated blade of steel, which it is the pride of the gondolier to keep
+bright is silver, and the poop having a small platform, not far behind
+the cabin, on which he stands when he rows. The danger of collision has
+always obliged Venetian boatmen to face the bow, and the stroke with the
+oar (for the gondolier uses only a single oar) is made by pushing, and
+not by pulling. No small degree of art (as I learnt from experience)
+is thus required to keep the gondola's head straight,--all the strokes
+being made on one side,--and the sculling return of the oar-blade,
+preparatory for each new stroke, is extremely difficult to effect. Under
+the hands of the gondolier, however, the gondola seems a living thing,
+full of grace and winning movement. The wood-work of the little cabin is
+elaborately carved, and it is usually furnished with mirrors and seats
+luxuriously cushioned. The sensation of the gondola's progress, felt by
+the occupant of the cabin, as he falls back upon these cushions, may be
+described, to the female apprehension at least, as "_too_ divine." The
+cabin is removable at pleasure, and is generally taken off and replaced
+by awnings in summer. But in the evening, when the fair Venetians go out
+in their gondolas to take the air, even this awning is dispensed with,
+and the long slender boat glides darkly down the Grand Canal, bearing
+its dazzling freight of white _tulle_, pale-faced, black-eyed beauty,
+and flashing jewels, in full view.
+
+As for the singing of the gondoliers, they are the only class of
+Venetians who have not good voices, and I am scarcely inclined to regret
+the silence which long ago fell upon them. I am quite satisfied with the
+peculiar note of warning which they utter as they approach the corner of
+a canal, and which meaning simply, "To the Right," or "To the Left," is
+the most pathetic and melancholy sound in the world. If, putting
+aside my own comfort, I have sometimes wished for the sake of a dear,
+sentimental old friend at home, who loves such idle illusions with an
+ardor unbecoming his years, that I might hear the voice
+
+    "of Adria's gondolier,
+    By distance mellowed, o'er the waters sweep,"
+
+I must still confess that I never did hear it under similar
+circumstances, except in conversation across half a mile of lagoon,
+when, as usual, the burden of the lay was polenta or soldi.
+
+A recent Venetian writer, describing the character of the lower classes
+of Venice, says: "No one can deny that our populace is loquacious
+and quickwitted; but, on the other hand, no one can deny that it
+is regardless of improvement. Venice, a city exceptional in its
+construction, its customs, and its habits, has also an exceptional
+populace. It still feels, although sixty-eight years have passed, the
+influence of the system of the fallen Republic, of that oligarchic
+government, which, affording almost every day some amusement to the
+people, left them no time to think of their offended rights.... Since
+1859 Venice has resembled a sepulchre of the living,--squalor and
+beggary gaining ground with each day, and commerce, with few exceptions,
+converted into monopoly; yet the populace remains attached to its old
+habits, and will have its pleasure. If the earnings are little, what
+then? Must one die of ennui? The caffe is depopulated: not so the
+drinking-house. The last day before the drawing of the lottery, the
+offices are thronged with fathers and mothers of families, who stint
+their children of bread to buy dearly a few hours of golden illusion....
+At the worst, there is the Monte di Pieta, as a last resort."
+
+It is true, as this writer says, that the pleasure-loving populace still
+looks back fondly to the old Republican times of feasting and holidays;
+but there is certainly no truth any more in the old idea that any part
+of Italy is a place where people may be "idle with impunity," or make
+amusement the serious business of life. I can remember that the book
+from which I received my first impressions of geography was illuminated
+with a picture professing to represent Italian customs. The spirit of
+inquiry had long before caused me to doubt the exact fidelity of this
+representation; but it cost me a pang to learn that the picture was
+utterly delusive. It has been no part of my experience in Venice to see
+an Italian sitting upon the ground, and strumming the guitar, while two
+gayly dressed peasants danced to the music. Indeed, the indolence
+of Venetians is listless and silent, not playful or joyous; and as I
+learned to know their life more intimately, I came to understand that
+in many cases they are idle from despair of finding work, and that
+indolence is as much their fate as their fault. Any diligence of theirs
+is surprising to us of northern and free lands, because their climate
+subdues and enervates us, and because we can see before them no career
+open to intelligent industry. With the poorest, work is necessarily
+a hand-to-hand struggle against hunger; with those who would not
+absolutely starve without it, work is an inexplicable passion.
+
+Partly because the ways of these people are so childlike and simple in
+many things, and partly from one's own swindling tendency to take one's
+self in (a tendency really fatal to all sincerity of judgment, and
+incalculably mischievous to such downfallen peoples as have felt the
+baleful effects of the world's sentimental, impotent sympathy), there is
+something pathetic in the patient content with which Italians work. They
+have naturally so large a capacity for enjoyment, that the degree of
+selfdenial involved in labor seems exorbitant, and one feels that these
+children, so loved of Nature, and so gifted by her, are harshly dealt
+with by their stepmother Circumstance. No doubt there ought to be
+truth in the silly old picture, if there is none, and I would willingly
+make-believe to credit it, if I could. I am glad that they at least work
+in old-world, awkward, picturesque ways, and not in commonplace, handy,
+modern fashion. Neither the habits nor the implements of labor are
+changed since the progress of the Republic ceased, and her heart
+began to die within her. All sorts of mechanics' tools are clumsy and
+inconvenient: the turner's lathe moves by broken impulses; door-hinges
+are made to order, and lift the door from the ground as it opens upon
+them; all nails and tacks we hand-made; window-sashes are contrived to
+be glazed without putty, and the panes are put in from the top, so that
+to repair a broken glass the whole sash is taken apart; cooking-stoves
+are unknown to the native cooks, who work at an open fire, with crane
+and dangling pot-hooks; furniture is put together with wooden pegs
+instead of screws; you do not buy a door-lock at a hardware store,--you
+get a _fabbro_ to make it, and he comes with a leathern satchel full
+of tools to fit and finish it on the door. The wheelbarrow of this
+civilization is peculiarly wonderful in construction, with a prodigious
+wooden wheel, and a ponderous, incapable body. The canals are dredged
+with scoops mounted on long poles, and manned each by three or four
+Chiozzotti. There never was a pile-driving machine known in Venice;
+nor a steam-tug in all the channels of the lagoons, through which the
+largest craft are towed to and from the ports by row-boats. In the model
+of the sea-going vessels there has apparently been little change from
+the first. Yet in spite of all this backwardness in invention, the city
+is full of beautiful workmanship in every branch of artificing, and the
+Venetians are still the best sailors in the Adriatic.
+
+I do not offer the idea as a contribution to statistics, but it seems to
+me that the most active branch of industry in Venice is plucking fowls.
+In summer the people all work on their thresholds, and in their windows,
+and as nearly out of doors as the narrowness of the streets will let
+them,--and it is hard to pass through any part of the city without
+coming to a poulterer's shop, in the door of which inevitably sits a
+boy, tugging at the plumage of some wretched bird. He is seldom to be
+seen except in that crisis of plucking when he seems to have all but
+finished; yet he seems never to accomplish the fact perfectly. Perhaps
+it is part of his hard fate that the feathers shall grow again under
+his hand as fast as he plucks them away: at the restaurants, I know,
+the quantity of plumage one devours in consuming roast chicken is
+surprising--at first. The birds are always very lean, too, and have but
+a languid and weary look, in spite of the ardent manner in which the boy
+clasps them while at work. It may be that the Venetians do not like
+fat poultry. Their turkeys, especially, are of that emaciation which
+is attributed among ourselves only to the turkey of Job; and as for the
+geese and ducks, they can only interest anatomists. It is as if the long
+ages of incursion and oppression which have impoverished and devastated
+Italy had at last taken effect upon the poultry, and made it as poor as
+the population.
+
+I do not want to give too exclusive an impression of Venetian industry,
+however, for now I remember the Venetian _lasagnoni_, whom I never saw
+doing any thing, and who certainly abound in respectable numbers.
+
+The lasagnone is a loafer, as an Italian can be a loafer, without the
+admixture of ruffianism, which blemishes most loafers of northern race.
+He may be quite worthless, and even impertinent, but he cannot be
+a rowdy,--that pleasing blossom on the nose of our fast, high-fed,
+thick-blooded civilization. In Venice he must not be confounded with
+other loiterers at the caffe; not with the natty people who talk
+politics interminably over little cups of black coffee; not with those
+old habitues, who sit forever under the Procuratie, their hands folded
+upon the tops of their sticks, and staring at the ladies who pass with
+a curious steadfastness and knowing skepticism of gaze, not pleasing in
+the dim eyes of age; certainly, the last persons who bear any likeness
+to the lasagnone are the Germans, with their honest, heavy faces
+comically anglicized by leg-of-mutton whiskers. The truth is, the
+lasagnone does not flourish in the best caffe; he comes to perfection
+in cheaper resorts, for he is commonly not rich. It often happens that a
+glass of water, flavored with a little anisette, is the order over which
+he sits a whole evening. He knows the waiter intimately, and does not
+call him "Shop!" (Bottega,) as less familiar people do, but Gigi, or
+Beppi, as the waiter is pretty sure to be named. "Behold!" he says, when
+the servant places his modest drink before him, "who is that loveliest
+blonde there?" Or to his fellow-lasagnone: "She regards me! I have
+broken her the heart!" This is his sole business and mission, the cruel
+lasagnone--to break ladies the heart. He spares no condition,--neither
+rank nor wealth is any defense against him. I often wonder what is in
+that note he continually shows to his friend. The confession of some
+broken heart, I think. When he has folded it, and put it away, he
+chuckles _"Ah, cara!"_ and sucks at his long, slender Virginia cigar.
+It is unlighted, for fire consumes cigars. I never see him read the
+papers,--neither the Italian papers nor the Parisian journals, though
+if he can get "Galignani" he is glad, and he likes to pretend to a
+knowledge of English, uttering upon occasion, with great relish, such
+distinctively English words as "Yes" and "Not," and to the waiter,
+"A-little-fire-if-you-please." He sits very late in the caffe, and he
+touches his hat--his curly French hat--to the company as he goes out
+with a mild swagger, his cane held lightly in his left hand, his coat
+cut snugly to show his hips, and genteelly swaying with the motion of
+his body. He is a dandy, of course,--all Italians are dandies,--but his
+vanity is perfectly harmless, and his heart is not bad. He would go
+half an hour out of his way to put you in the direction of the Piazza. A
+little thing can make him happy,--to stand in the pit at the opera, and
+gaze at the ladies in the lower boxes--to attend the Marionette, or
+the Malibran Theatre, and imperil the peace of pretty seamstresses and
+contadinas--to stand at the church doors and ogle the fair saints as
+they pass out. Go, harmless lasagnone, to thy lodging in some mysterious
+height, and break hearts if thou wilt. They are quickly mended.
+
+Of other vagabonds in Venice, if I had my choice, I think I must select
+a certain ruffian who deals in dog-flesh, as the nearest my ideal of
+what a vagabond should be in all respects. He stands habitually under
+the Old Procuratie, beside a basket of small puppies in that snuffling
+and quivering state which appears to be the favorite condition of very
+young dogs, and occupies himself in conversation with an adjacent dealer
+in grapes and peaches, or sometimes fastidiously engages in trimming the
+hair upon the closely shaven bodies of the dogs; for in Venice it is the
+ambition of every dog to look as much like the Lion of St. Mark as the
+nature of the case will permit. My vagabond at times makes expeditions
+to the groups of travelers always seated in summer before the Caffe
+Florian, appearing at such times with a very small puppy,--neatly poised
+upon the palm of his hand, and winking pensively,--which he advertises
+to the company as a "Beautiful Beast," or a "Lovely Babe," according to
+the inspiration of his light and pleasant fancy. I think the latter term
+is used generally as a means of ingratiation with the ladies, to whom my
+vagabond always shows a demeanor of agreeable gallantry. I never saw him
+sell any of these dogs, nor ever in the least cast down by his failure
+to do so. His air is grave, but not severe; there is even, at times, a
+certain playfulness in his manner, possibly attributable to sciampagnin.
+His curling black locks, together with his velveteen jacket and
+pantaloons, are oiled and glossy, and his beard is cut in the
+French-imperial mode. His personal presence is unwholesome, and it is
+chiefly his moral perfection as a vagabond that makes him fascinating.
+One is so confident, however, of his fitness for his position and
+business, and of his entire contentment with it, that it is impossible
+not to exult in him.
+
+He is not without self-respect. I doubt, it would be hard to find any
+Venetian of any vocation, however base, who forgets that he too is a
+man and a brother. There is enough servility in the language,--it is the
+fashion of the Italian tongue, with its _Tu_ for inferiors, _Voi_ for
+intimates and friendly equals, and _Lei_ for superiors,--but in the
+manner there is none, and there is a sense of equality in the ordinary
+intercourse of the Venetians, at once apparent to foreigners.
+
+All ranks are orderly; the spirit of aggression seems not to exist among
+them, and the very boys and dogs in Venice are so well-behaved, that I
+have never seen the slightest disposition in them to quarrel. Of course,
+it is of the street-boy--the _biricchino_, the boy in his natural,
+unreclaimed state--that I speak. This state is here, in winter, marked
+by a clouded countenance, bare head, tatters, and wooden-soled shoes
+open at the heels; in summer by a preternatural purity of person, by
+abandon to the amphibious pleasure of leaping off the bridges into the
+canals, and by an insatiable appetite for polenta, fried minnows, and
+water-melons.
+
+When one of these boys takes to beggary, as a great many of them do, out
+of a spirit of adventure and wish to pass the time, he carries out the
+enterprise with splendid daring. A favorite artifice is to approach
+Charity with a slice of polenta in one hand, and, with the other
+extended, implore a soldo to buy cheese to eat with the polenta. The
+street-boys also often perform the duties of the _gransieri_, who draw
+your gondola to shore, and keep it firm with a hook. To this order
+of beggar I usually gave; but one day at the railway station I had
+no soldi, and as I did not wish to render my friend discontented with
+future alms by giving silver, I deliberately apologized, praying him to
+excuse me, and promising him for another time. I cannot forget the lofty
+courtesy with which he returned,--"_S'accomodi pur, Signor!_" They have
+sometimes a sense of humor, these poor swindlers, and can enjoy the
+exposure of their own enormities. An amiable rogue drew our gondola to
+land one evening when we went too late to see the church of San Giorgio
+Maggiore. The sacristan made us free of a perfectly dark church, and we
+rewarded him as if it had been noonday. On our return to the gondola,
+the same beggar whom we had just feed held out his hat for another
+alms. "But we have just paid you," we cried in an agony of grief and
+desperation. _"Si, signori!"_ he admitted with an air of argument, _"e
+vero. Ma, la chiesa!"_ (Yes, gentlemen, it is true. But the church!) he
+added with confidential insinuation, and a patronizing wave of the hand
+toward the edifice, as if he had been San Giorgio himself, and held the
+church as a source of revenue. This was too much, and we laughed him to
+scorn; at which, beholding the amusing abomination of his conduct, he
+himself joined in our laugh with a cheerfulness that won our hearts.
+
+Beggary is attended by no disgrace in Italy, and it therefore comes that
+no mendicant is without a proper degree of the self-respect common to
+all classes. Indeed, the habit of taking gifts of money is so general
+and shameless that the street beggars must be diffident souls indeed if
+they hesitated to ask for it. A perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered
+man will take ten soldi from you for a trifling service, and not
+consider himself in the least abased. The detestable custom of largess,
+instead of wages, still obtains in so great degree in Venice that a
+physician, when asked for his account, replies: "What you please to
+give." Knowing these customs, I hope I have never acted discourteously
+to the street beggars of Venice even when I gave them nothing, and I
+know that only one of them ever so far forgot himself as to curse me for
+not giving. Him, however, I think to have been out of his right mind at
+the time.
+
+There were two mad beggars in the parish of San Stefano, whom I should
+be sorry to leave unmentioned here. One, who presided chiefly over the
+Campo San Stefano, professed to be also a facchino, but I never saw him
+employed, except in addressing select circles of idlers whom a brawling
+noise always draws together in Venice. He had been a soldier, and he
+sometimes put himself at the head of a file of Croats passing through
+the campo, and gave them the word of command, to the great amusement of
+those swarthy barbarians. He was a good deal in drink, and when in this
+state was proud to go before any ladies who might be passing, and clear
+away the boys and idlers, to make room for them. When not occupied in
+any of these ways, he commonly slept in the arcades of the old convent.
+
+But the mad beggar of Campo Sant' Angelo seemed to have a finer sense
+of what became him as a madman and a beggar, and never made himself
+obnoxious by his noise. He was, in fact, very fat and amiable, and in
+the summer lay asleep, for the most part, at a certain street corner
+which belonged to him. When awake he was a man of extremely complaisant
+presence, and suffered no lady to go by without a compliment to her
+complexion, her blond hair, or her beautiful eyes, whichever it might
+be. He got money for these attentions, and people paid him for any
+sort of witticism. One day he said to the richest young dandy of the
+city,--"Pah! you stomach me with your perfumes and fine airs;" for which
+he received half a florin. His remarks to gentlemen had usually this
+sarcastic flavor. I am sorry to say that so excellent a madman was often
+drunk and unable to fulfill his duties to society.
+
+There are, of course, laws against mendicancy in Venice, and they are,
+of course, never enforced. Beggars abound everywhere, and nobody molests
+them. There was long a troop of weird sisters in Campo San Stefano,
+who picked up a livelihood from the foreigners passing to and from the
+Academy of Fine Arts. They addressed people with the title of Count,
+and no doubt gained something by this sort of heraldry, though there
+are counts in Venice almost as poor as themselves, and titles are
+not distinctions. The Venetian seldom gives to beggars; he says
+deliberately, "_No go_" (I have nothing), or "_Quando ritornero_" (when
+I return), and never comes back that way. I noticed that professional
+hunger and cold took this sort of denial very patiently, as they did
+every other; but I confess I had never the heart to practice it. In
+my walks to the Public Gardens there was a venerable old man, with the
+beard and bearing of a patriarch, whom I encountered on the last bridge
+of the Riva, and who there asked alms of me. When I gave him a soldo,
+he returned me a blessing which I would be ashamed to take in the United
+States for half a dollar; and when the soldo was in some inaccessible
+pocket, and I begged him to await my coming back, he said
+sweetly,--"Very well, Signor, I will be here." And I must say, to his
+credit, that he never broke his promise, nor suffered me, for shame's
+sake, to break mine. He was quite a treasure to me in this respect, and
+assisted me to form habits of punctuality.
+
+That exuberance of manner which one notes, the first thing, in his
+intercourse with Venetians, characterizes all classes, but is most
+excessive and relishing in the poor. There is a vast deal of ceremony
+with every order, and one hardly knows what to do with the numbers of
+compliments it is necessary to respond to. A Venetian does not come to
+see you, he comes to revere you; he not only asks if you be well when
+he meets you, but he bids you remain well at parting, and desires you to
+salute for him all common friends; he reverences you at leave-taking;
+he will sometimes consent to incommode you with a visit; he will relieve
+you of the disturbance when he rises to go. All spontaneous wishes
+which must, with us, take original forms, for lack of the complimentary
+phrase, are formally expressed by him,--good appetite to you, when you
+go to dinner much enjoyment, when you go to the theatre; a pleasant
+walk, if you meet in promenade. He is your servant at meeting and
+parting; he begs to be commanded when he has misunderstood you. But
+courtesy takes its highest flights, as I hinted, from the poorest
+company. Acquaintances of this sort, when not on the _Cio ciappa_
+footing, or that of the familiar thee and thou, always address each
+other in _Lei_ (lordship), or _Elo_, as the Venetians have it; and their
+compliment-making at encounter and separation is endless: I salute you!
+Remain well! Master! Mistress! (_Paron! parona!_) being repeated as long
+as the polite persons are within hearing.
+
+One day, as we passed through the crowded Merceria, an old Venetian
+friend of mine, who trod upon the dress of a young person before us,
+called out, "_Scusate, bella giovane_!" (Pardon, beautiful girl!) She
+was not so fair nor so young as I have seen women; but she half turned
+her face with a forgiving smile, and seemed pleased with the accident
+that had won her the amiable apology. The waiter of the caffe frequented
+by the people, says to the ladies for whom he places seats,--"Take
+this place, beautiful blonde;" or, "Sit here, lovely brunette," as it
+happens.
+
+A Venetian who enters or leaves any place of public resort touches his
+hat to the company, and one day at the restaurant some ladies, who had
+been dining there, said "_Complimenti!_" on going out, with a grace that
+went near to make the beefsteak tender. It is this uncostly gentleness
+of bearing which gives a winning impression of the whole people,
+whatever selfishness or real discourtesy lie beneath it. At home it
+sometimes seems that we are in such haste to live and be done with it,
+we have no time to be polite. Or is popular politeness merely a vice of
+servile peoples? And is it altogether better to be rude? I wish it were
+not. If you are lost in his city (and you are pretty sure to be lost
+there, continually), a Venetian will go with you wherever you wish.
+And he will do this amiable little service out of what one may say old
+civilization has established in place of goodness of heart, but which is
+perhaps not so different from it.
+
+You hear people in the streets bless each other in the most dramatic
+fashion. I once caught these parting words between an old man and a
+young girl;
+
+_Giovanetta_. Revered sir! (_Patron riverito!_)
+
+_Vecchio_. (With that peculiar backward wave and beneficent wag of the
+hand, only possible to Italians.) Blessed child! (_Benedetta!_)
+
+It was in a crowd, but no one turned round at the utterance of terms
+which Anglo-Saxons would scarcely use in their most emotional moments.
+The old gentleman who sells boxes for the theatre in the Old Procuratie
+always gave me his benediction when I took a box.
+
+There is equal exuberance of invective, and I have heard many fine
+maledictions on the Venetian streets, but I recollect none more
+elaborate than that of a gondolier who, after listening peacefully to
+a quarrel between two other boatmen, suddenly took part against one of
+them, and saluted him with,--"Ah! baptized son of a dog! And if I had
+been present at thy baptism, I would have dashed thy brains out against
+the baptismal font!"
+
+All the theatrical forms of passion were visible in a scene I witnessed
+in a little street near San Samuele, where I found the neighborhood
+assembled at doors and windows in honor of a wordy battle between
+two poor women. One of these had been forced in-doors by her prudent
+husband, and the other upbraided her across the marital barrier. The
+assailant was washing, and twenty times she left her tub to revile the
+besieged, who thrust her long arms out over those of her husband, and
+turned each reproach back upon her who uttered it, thus:--
+
+_Assailant_. Beast!
+
+_Besieged_. Thou!
+
+_A_. Fool!
+
+_B_. Thou!
+
+_A_. Liar!
+
+_B_. Thou!
+
+_E via in seguito!_ At last the assailant, beating her breast with both
+hands, and tempestuously swaying her person back and forth, wreaked her
+scorn in one wild outburst of vituperation, and returned finally to
+her tub, wisely saying, on the purple verge of asphyxiation, "_O, non
+discorre piu con gente_."
+
+I returned half an hour later, and she was laughing and playing sweetly
+with her babe.
+
+It suits the passionate nature of the Italians to have incredible ado
+about buying and selling, and a day's shopping is a sort of campaign,
+from which the shopper returns plundered and discomfited, or laden with
+the spoil of vanquished shopmen.
+
+The embattled commercial transaction is conducted in this wise:
+
+The shopper enters, and prices a given article. The shopman names a
+sum of which only the fervid imagination of the South could conceive as
+corresponding to the value of the goods.
+
+The purchaser instantly starts back with a wail of horror and
+indignation, and the shopman throws himself forward over the counter
+with a protest that, far from being dear, the article is ruinously cheap
+at the price stated, though they may nevertheless agree for something
+less.
+
+What, then, is the very most ultimate price?
+
+Properly, the very most ultimate price is so much. (Say, the smallest
+trifle under the price first asked.)
+
+The purchaser moves toward the door. He comes back, and offers one third
+of the very most ultimate price.
+
+The shopman, with a gentle desperation, declares that the thing cost
+him as much. He cannot really take the offer. He regrets, but he cannot.
+That the gentleman would say something more! So much--for example. That
+he regard the stuff, its quality, fashion, beauty.
+
+The gentleman laughs him to scorn. Ah, heigh! and, coming forward, he
+picks up the article and reviles it. Out of the mode, old, fragile, ugly
+of its kind. The shopman defends his wares. There is no such quantity
+and quality elsewhere in Venice. But if the gentleman will give even so
+much (still something preposterous), he may have it, though truly its
+sale for that money is utter ruin.
+
+The shopper walks straight to the door. The shopman calls him back from
+the threshold, or sends his boy to call him back from the street.
+
+Let him accommodate himself--which is to say, take the thing at his own
+price.
+
+He takes it.
+
+The shopman says cheerfully, "Servo suo!"
+
+The purchaser responds, "Bon di! Patron!" (Good day! my Master!)
+
+Thus, as I said, every bargain is a battle, and every purchase a triumph
+or a defeat. The whole thing is understood; the opposing forces know
+perfectly well all that is to be done beforehand, and retire after the
+contest, like the captured knights in "_Morgante Maggiore_" "calm as
+oil,"--however furious and deadly their struggle may have appeared to
+strangers.
+
+Foreigners soon discern, however, that there is no bloodshed in such
+encounters, and enter into them with a zeal as great as that of natives,
+though with less skill. I knew one American who prided himself on such
+matters, and who haughtily closed a certain bargain without words, as he
+called it. The shopman offered several articles, for which he demanded
+prices amounting in all to ninety-three francs. His wary customer
+rapidly computed the total and replied "Without words, now, I'll give
+you a hundred francs for the lot." With a pensive elevation of the
+eyebrows, and a reluctant shrug of the shoulders, the shopman suffered
+him to take them.
+
+Your Venetian is _simpatico_, if he is any thing. He is always ready to
+feel and to express the deepest concern, and I rather think he likes to
+have his sensibilities appealed to, as a pleasant and healthful exercise
+for them. His sympathy begins at home, and he generously pities himself
+as the victim of a combination of misfortunes, which leave him citizen
+of a country without liberty, without commerce, without money, without
+hope. He next pities his fellow-citizens, who are as desperately
+situated as himself. Then he pities the degradation, corruption, and
+despair into which the city has fallen. And I think his compassion is
+the most hopeless thing in his character. That alone is touched; that
+alone is moved; and when its impulse ceases he and every thing about him
+remain just as before.
+
+With the poor, this sensibility is amusingly mischievous. They never
+speak of one of their own class without adding some such ejaculation as
+"Poor fellow!" or, "Poor little creature!" They pity all wretchedness,
+no matter from what cause, and the greatest rogue has their compassion
+when under a cloud. It is all but impossible to punish thieves in
+Venice, where they are very bold and numerous for the police are too
+much occupied with political surveillance to give due attention to mere
+cutpurses and housebreakers, and even when they make an arrest, people
+can hardly be got to bear witness against their unhappy prisoner.
+_Povareto anca lu!_ There is no work and no money; people must do
+something; so they steal. _Ci vuol pazienza!_ Bear witness against an
+ill-fated fellow-sufferer? God forbid! Stop a thief? I think a burglar
+might run from Rialto to San Marco, and not one compassionate soul in
+the Merceria would do aught to arrest him--_povareto!_ Thieves came to
+the house of a friend of mine at noonday, when his servant was out. They
+tied their boat to his landing, entered his house, filled their boat
+with plunder from it, and rowed out into the canal. The neighbors on the
+floor above saw them, and cried "Thieves! thieves!" It was in the most
+frequented part of the Grand Canal, where scores of boats passed and
+repassed; but no one molested the thieves, and these _povareti_ escaped
+with their booty. [Footnote: The rogues, it must be confessed, are often
+very polite. This same friend of mine one day found a man in the act
+of getting down into a boat with his favorite singing bird in its cage.
+"What are you doing with that bird?" he thought himself authorized to
+inquire. The thief looked about him a moment, and perceiving himself
+detected, handed back the cage with a cool "_La scusi!_" ("Beg pardon!")
+as if its removal had been a trifling inadvertance.]
+
+One night, in a little street through which we passed to our ferry,
+there came a wild rush before us, of a woman screaming for help,
+and pursued by her husband with a knife in his hand; their children,
+shrieking piteously, came after them. The street was crowded with
+people and soldiers, but no one put out his hand; and the man presently
+overtook his wife and stabbed her in the back. We only knew of the rush,
+but what it all meant we could not tell, till we saw the woman bleeding
+from the stab, which, happily, was slight. Inquiry of the bystanders
+developed the facts, but, singularly enough, scarcely a word of pity.
+It was entirely a family affair, it seemed; the man, poor little fellow,
+had a mistress, and his wife had maddened him with reproaches. _Come si
+fa_? He had to stab her. The woman's case was not one that appealed to
+popular compassion, and the only words of pity for her which I heard
+were expressed by the wife of a fruiterer, whom her husband angrily
+silenced.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+SOCIETY.
+
+
+It was natural that the Venetians, whose State lay upon the borders
+of the Greek Empire, and whose greatest commerce was with the Orient,
+should be influenced by the Constantinopolitan civilization. Mutinelli
+records that in the twelfth century they had many religious offices and
+observances in common with the Greeks, especially the homily or sermon,
+which formed a very prominent part of the service of worship. At this
+time, also, when the rupture of the Lombard League had left other
+Italian cities to fall back into incessant local wars, and barbarized
+their customs, the people of Venice dressed richly and delicately, after
+the Greek fashion. They combed and dressed their hair, and wore the
+long, pointed Greek beard; [Footnote: A. Foscarini, in 1687, was the
+last patrician who wore the beard.] and though these Byzantine modes
+fell, for the most part, into disuse, in after-time, there is still a
+peculiarity of dress among the women of the Venetian poor which is said
+to have been inherited from the oriental costumes of Constantinople;
+namely, that high-heeled, sharp-toed slipper, or sandal, which covers
+the front of the foot, and drops from the heel at every step, requiring
+no slight art in the wearer to keep it on at all.
+
+The philosophic vision, accustomed to relate trifling particulars to
+important generalities, may perhaps see another relic of Byzantine
+civilization among the Venetians, in that jealous restraint which they
+put upon all the social movements of young girls, and the great liberty
+which they allow to married women. It is true that their damsels are now
+no longer imprisoned under the parental roof, as they were in times when
+they never left its shelter but to go, closely veiled, to communion in
+the church, on Christmas and Easter; but it is still quite impossible
+that any young lady should go out alone. Indeed, she would scarcely be
+secure from insult in broad day if she did so. She goes out with her
+governess, and, even with this protection, she cannot be too guarded and
+circumspect in her bearing; for in Venice a woman has to encounter upon
+the public street a rude license of glance, from men of all ages and
+conditions, which falls little short of outrage. They stare at her as
+she approaches; and I have seen them turn and contemplate ladies as they
+passed them, keeping a few paces in advance, with a leisurely sidelong
+gait. Something of this insolence might be forgiven to thoughtless,
+hot-blooded youth; but the gross and knowing leer that the elders of
+the Piazza and the caffe put on at the approach of a pretty girl is an
+ordeal which few women, not as thoroughly inured to it as the Venetians,
+would care to encounter. However, as I never heard the trial complained
+of by any but foreigners, I suppose it is not regarded by Italians as
+intolerable; and it is certain that an audible compliment, upon the
+street, to a pretty girl of the poor, is by no means an affront.
+
+The arts of pleasing and of coquetry come by nature to the gentler sex;
+and if in Italy they add to them a habit of intrigue, I wonder how much
+they are to blame, never being in anywise trusted? They do not differ
+from persons of any age or sex in that country, if the world has been as
+justly, as it has always been firmly, persuaded that the people of Italy
+are effete in point of good faith. I have seen much to justify this
+opinion, and something also to confute it; and as long as Garibaldi
+lives, I shall not let myself believe that a race which could produce
+a man so signally truthful and single-hearted is a race of liars and
+cheats. I think the student of their character should also be slow to
+upbraid Italians for their duplicity, without admitting, in palliation
+of the fault, facts of long ages of alien and domestic oppression, in
+politics and religion, which must account for a vast deal of every kind
+of evil in Italy. Yet after exception and palliation has been duly
+made, it must be confessed that in Italy it does not seem to be thought
+shameful to tell lies, and that there the standard of sincerity,
+compared with that of the English or American, is low, as the Italian
+standard of morality in ether respects is also comparatively low.
+With the women, bred in idleness and ignorance, the imputed national
+untruthfulness takes the form naturally to be expected, and contributes
+to a state of things which must be examined with the greatest caution
+and reservation by every one but the Italians themselves. Goethe says
+that there is no society so corrupt that a man may not live virtuously
+in it; and I think the immorality of any people will not be directly
+and wholly seen by the stranger who does not seek it. Certainly, the
+experience and acquaintance of a foreigner in Italy must have been
+most unfortunate, if they confirm all the stories of corruption told by
+Italians themselves. A little generous distrust is best in matters of
+this kind; but while I strengthen my incredulity concerning the utter
+depravation of Venetian society in one respect, I am not disposed to
+deal so leniently with it in others. The state of things is bad in
+Venice, not because all women in society are impure, but because the
+Italian theory of morals does not admit the existence of opportunity
+without sin. It is by rare chance that a young girl makes acquaintance
+with young men in society; she seldom talks with them at the parties to
+which she is sometimes taken by her mother, and they do not call upon
+her at her home; while for her to walk alone with a young man would be
+vastly more scandalous than much worse things, and is, consequently,
+unheard of. The Italians say freely they cannot trust their women as
+northern women are trusted; and some Italian women frankly confess that
+their sex would be worse if it were trusted more. But the truth does not
+appear in this shallow suspicion and this shallow self-conviction; and
+one who cares to have a just estimate of this matter must by no means
+believe all the evil he hears. There may be much corruption in society,
+but there is infinitely more wrong in the habits of idle gossip and
+guilty scandal, which eat all sense of shame and pity out of the heart
+of Venice. There is no parallel to the prying, tattling, backbiting
+littleness of the place elsewhere in the world. A small country village
+in America or England has its meddlesomeness, but not its worldly,
+wicked sharpness. Figure the meanness of a chimney-corner gossip, added
+to the bitter shrewdness and witty penetration of a gifted roue, and you
+have some idea of Venetian scandal. In that city, where all the nobler
+organs of expression are closed by political conditions, the viler
+channels run continual filth and poison, and the people, shut out from
+public and free discussion of religious and political themes, occupy
+themselves with private slander, and rend each other in their abject
+desperation. As it is part of the existing political demonstration
+to avoid the opera and theatre, the Venetians are deprived of these
+harmless distractions; balls and evening parties, at which people,
+in other countries, do nothing worse than bore each other, are almost
+unknown, for the same reason; and when persons meet in society, it
+is too often to retail personalities, or Italian politics made as
+unintelligible and as like local gossip as possible. The talk which is
+small and noxious in private circles is the same thing at the caffe,
+when the dread of spies does not reduce the talkers to a dreary silence.
+Not permitted to feel the currents of literature and the great world's
+thought in religion freshly and directly, they seldom speak of these
+things, except in that tone of obsolete superiority which Italians are
+still prone to affect, as the monopolists of culture. As to Art, the
+Venetians are insensible to it and ignorant of it, here in the very
+atmosphere of Art, to a degree absolutely amusing. I would as soon think
+of asking a fish's opinion of water as of asking a Venetian's notion of
+architecture or painting, unless he were himself a professed artist or
+critic.
+
+Admitting, however, that a great part of the corruption of society is
+imputed, there still remains, no doubt, a great deal of real immorality
+to be accounted for. This, I think, is often to be attributed to the bad
+system of female education, and the habits of idleness in which women
+are bred. Indeed, to Americans, the whole system of Italian education
+seems calculated to reduce women to a state of imbecile captivity before
+marriage; and I have no fault to find with the Italians that they are
+jealous in guarding those whom they have unfitted to protect themselves,
+but have rather to blame them that, after marriage, their women are
+thrown at once upon society, when worse than helpless against its
+temptations. Except with those people who attempt to maintain a certain
+appearance in public upon insufficient means (and there are too many of
+these in Venice as everywhere else), and who spare in every other way
+that they may spend on dress, it does not often happen that Venetian
+ladies are housekeepers. Servants are cheap and numerous, as they are
+uncleanly and untrustworthy, and the Venetians prefer to keep them
+[Footnote: A clerk or employe with a salary of fifty cents a day keeps a
+maid-servant, that his wife may fulfill to society the important duty of
+doing nothing.] rather than take part in housewifely duties; and, since
+they must lavish upon dress and show, to suffer from cold and hunger in
+their fireless houses and at their meagre boards. In this way the young
+girls, kept imprisoned from the world, instead of learning cookery and
+other domestic arts, have the grievous burden of idleness added to that
+of their solitary confinement, not only among the rich and noble, but
+among that large class which is neither and wishes to appear both.
+[Footnote: The poet Gray, genteelly making the grand tour in 1740, wrote
+to his father from Florence: "The only thing the Italians shine in is
+their reception of strangers. At such times every thing is magnificence:
+the more remarkable as in their ordinary course of life they are
+parsimonious to a degree of nastiness. I saw in one of the vastest
+palaces of Rome (that of the Prince Pamfilio), the apartment which he
+himself inhabited, a bed that most servants in England would disdain to
+lie in, and furniture much like that of a soph at Cambridge. This man
+is worth 30,000_l_. a year." Italian nature has changed so little in a
+century, that all this would hold admirably true of Italian life at this
+time. The goodly outside in religion, in morals, in every thing is too
+much the ambition of Italy; this achieved, she is content to endure
+any pang of self-denial, and sell what little comfort she knows--it is
+mostly imported, like the word, from England--to strangers at fabulous
+prices. In Italy the luxuries of life are cheap, and the conveniences
+unknown or excessively dear.] Their idle thoughts, not drilled by study
+nor occupied with work, run upon the freedom which marriage shall bring
+them, and form a distorted image of the world, of which they know
+as little as of their own undisciplined selves. Denied the just and
+wholesome amusements of society during their girlhood, it is scarcely a
+matter of surprise that they should throw themselves into the giddiest
+whirl of its excitement when marriage sets them free to do so.
+
+I have said I do not think Venetians who give each other bad names are
+always to be credited, and I have no doubt that many a reputation in
+Venice is stained while the victim remains without guilt. A questioned
+reputation is, however, no great social calamity. It forms no bar to
+society, and few people are so cruel as to blame it, though all discuss
+it. And it is here that the harshness of American and English society
+toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but
+half-justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad
+naivete and lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl
+is accustomed to hear of things and speak of things which, with us,
+parents strive in every way to keep from their daughters' knowledge;
+and while her sense of delicacy is thus early blunted, while she is thus
+used to know good and evil, she hears her father and mother comment on
+the sinful errors of a friend or neighbor, who visits them and meets
+them every day in society. How can the impunity of the guilt which she
+believes to exist around her but sometimes have its effect, and ripen,
+with opportunity, into wrong? Nay, if the girl reveres her parents at
+all, how can she think the sin, which they caress in the sinner, is
+so very bad? If, however, she escape all these early influences of
+depravation; if her idleness, and solitude and precocious knowledge
+leave her unvitiated, if, when she goes into society, it is by marriage
+with a man who is neither a dotard nor a fortune-seeker, and who remains
+constant and does not tempt her, by neglect, to forbode offense and to
+inflict anticipative reprisals--yet her purity goes uncredited, as her
+guilt would go unpunished; scandal makes haste to blacken her name to
+the prevailing hue; and whether she has sin or not, those with sin will
+cast, not the stone that breaks and kills, but the filth that sticks and
+stinks. The wife must continue the long social exile of her girlhood if
+she would not be the prey of scandal. The _cavaliere servente_ no longer
+exists, but gossip now attributes often more than one lover in his
+place, and society has the cruel clemency to wink at the license.
+Nothing is in worse taste than jealousy, and, consequently, though
+intrigue sometimes causes stabbing, and the like, among low people, it
+is rarely noticed by persons of good breeding. It seems to me that in
+Venetian society the reform must begin, not with dissolute life, but
+with the social toleration of the impure, and with the wanton habits of
+scandal, which make all other life incredible, and deny to virtue the
+triumph of fair fame.
+
+I confess that what I saw of the innocent amusements of this society was
+not enough to convince me of their brilliancy and attractiveness; but
+I doubt if a foreigner can be a trustworthy judge of these things, and
+perhaps a sketch drawn by an alien hand, in the best faith, might have
+an air of caricature. I would not, therefore, like to trust my own
+impression of social diversions. They were, very probably, much more
+lively and brilliant than I thought them. But Italians assembled
+anywhere, except at the theatre or the caffe, have a certain stiffness,
+all the more surprising, because tradition has always led one to expect
+exactly the reverse of them. I have seen nothing equal to the formality
+of this people, who deride colder nations for inflexible manners; and I
+have certainly never seen society in any small town in America so ill
+at ease as I have seen society in Venice, writhing under self-imposed
+restraints. At a musical soiree, attended by the class of people who at
+home would have been chatty and sociable, given to making acquaintance
+and to keeping up acquaintance,--the young men harmlessly talking and
+walking with the young ladies, and the old people listening together,
+while constant movement and intercourse kept life in the assembly, and
+there was some real pleasure felt amidst a good deal of unavoidable
+suffering,--I say, I found such a soiree in Venice to be a spectacle of
+ladies planted in formal rows of low-necks and white dresses around
+the four sides of one room, and of gentlemen restively imprisoned in
+dress-coats and white gloves in another. During the music all these
+devoted people listened attentively, and at the end, the ladies lapsed
+back into their chairs and fanned themselves, while the gentlemen walked
+up and down the floor of their cell, and stopped, two by two, at the
+door of the ladies' room, glanced mournfully athwart the moral barrier
+which divided them, and sadly and dejectedly turned away. Amazed at
+this singular species of social enjoyment, I inquired afterward, of a
+Venetian lady, if evening parties in Venice were usually such ordeals,
+and was discouraged to learn that what I had seen was scarcely an
+exaggeration of prevailing torments. Commonly people do not know each
+other, and it is difficult for the younger to procure introductions;
+and when there is previous acquaintance, the presence of some commanding
+spirit is necessary to break the ice of propriety, and substitute
+enjoyment for correctness of behavior. Even at dancing parties, where
+it would seem that the poetry of motion might do something to soften the
+rigid bosom of Venetian deportment, the poor young people separate
+after each dance, and take each sex its appointed prison, till the next
+quadrille offers them a temporary liberation. For my own part, I cannot
+wonder that young men fly these virtuous scenes, and throng the rooms of
+those pleasant women of the _demi-monde_, who only exact from them that
+they shall be natural and agreeable; I cannot wonder that their
+fair partners in wretchedness seize the first opportunity to revenge
+themselves upon the propriety which has so cruelly used them. It is
+said that the assemblies of the Jews, while quite as unexceptionable
+in character, are far more sociable and lively than those of the
+Christians. The young Hebrews are frequently intelligent, well-bred, and
+witty, with a _savoir faire_ which their Christian brethren lack. But,
+indeed, the young Venetian is, at that age when all men are owlish,
+ignorant, and vapid, the most owlish, ignorant, and vapid man in the
+world. He talks, not milk-and-water, but warm water alone, a little
+sweetened; and, until he has grown wicked, has very little good in him.
+
+Most ladies of fashion receive calls on a certain day of each week, when
+it is made a matter of pride to receive as many calls as possible. The
+number sometimes reaches three hundred, when nobody sits down, and few
+exchange more than a word with the hostess. In winter, the stove is
+heated on these reception days, and little cups of black coffee are
+passed round to the company; in summer lemonade is substituted for the
+coffee; but in all seasons a thin, waferish slice of toasted rusk
+(the Venetian _baicolo_) is offered to each guest with the drink. At
+receptions where the sparsity of the company permits the lady of the
+house to be seen, she is commonly visible on a sofa, surrounded by
+visitors in a half-circle. Nobody stays more than ten or fifteen
+minutes, and I have sometimes found even this brief time of much greater
+apparent length, and apt to produce a low state of nerves, from which
+one seldom recovers before dinner. Gentlemen, however, do not much
+frequent these receptions; and I assert again the diffidence I should
+feel in offering this glance at Venetian social enjoyment as conveying
+a just and full idea of it. There is no doubt that the Venetians find
+delight in their assemblies, where a stranger seeks it in vain. I dare
+say they would not think our own reunions brilliant, and that, looking
+obliquely (as a foreigner must) on the most sensible faces at one of
+our evening parties, they might mistake the look of pathetic dejection,
+visible in them, as the expression of people rather bored by their
+pleasure than otherwise.
+
+The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the conversazioni of the rigid
+proprietarians, where people sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at
+a soldo the point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the
+_demi-monde_ where they say any thing. There are persons in Venice, as
+well as everywhere else, of new-fashioned modes of thinking, and
+these strive to give a greater life and ease to their assemblies,
+by attracting as many young men as possible; and in their families,
+gentlemen are welcome to visit, and to talk with the young ladies in the
+presence of their mothers. But though such people are no more accused
+of impropriety than the straitest of the old-fashioned, they are not
+regarded with the greatest esteem, and their daughters do not so readily
+find husbands. The Italians are fickle, the women say; they get soon
+tired of their wives after marriage, and when they see much of ladies
+before marriage, they get tired of them then, and never make them their
+wives. So it is much better to see nothing of a possible husband till
+you actually have him. I do not think conversazioni of any kind are
+popular with young men, however; they like better to go to the caffe,
+and the people you meet at private houses are none the less interesting
+for being old, or middle-aged. A great many of the best families, at
+present, receive no company at all, and see their friends only in the
+most private manner; though there are still cultivated circles to
+which proper introduction gives the stranger (who has no Austrian
+acquaintance) access. But unless he have thorough knowledge of Italian
+politics localized to apply to Venice, an interest in the affairs,
+fortunes, and misfortunes of his neighbors, and an acquaintance with
+the Venetian dialect, I doubt if he will be able to enjoy himself in the
+places so cautiously opened to him. Even in the most cultivated society,
+the dialect is habitually spoken; and if Italian is used, it is only in
+compliment to some foreigner present, for whose sake, also, topics of
+general interest are sometimes chosen.
+
+The best society is now composed of the families of professional men,
+such as the advocates, the physicians, and the richer sort of merchants.
+The shopkeepers, master-artisans, and others, whom industry and thrift
+distinguish from the populace, seem not to have any social life, in
+the American sense. They are wholly devoted to affairs, and partly from
+choice, and partly from necessity, are sordid and grasping. It is their
+class which has to fight hardest for life in Europe, and they give no
+quarter to those above or below them. The shop is their sole thought and
+interest, and they never, never sink it. But, since they have habits of
+diligence, and, as far as they are permitted, of enterprise, they seem
+to be in great part the stuff from which a prosperous State is to be
+rebuilt in Venice, if ever the fallen edifice rise again. They have
+sometimes a certain independence of character, which a better condition
+of things, and further education, would perhaps lift into honesty;
+though as yet they seem not to scruple to take any unfair advantage,
+and not to know that commercial success can never rest permanently on a
+system of bad faith. Below this class is the populace, between which and
+the patrician order a relation something like Roman clientage existed,
+contributing greatly to the maintenance of exclusively aristocratic
+power in the State. The greatest conspiracy (that of Marin Falier) which
+the commons ever moved against the oligarchy was revealed to one of
+the nobility by his plebeian creature, or client; and the government
+rewarded by every species of indulgence a class in which it had
+extinguished even the desire of popular liberty. The heirs of the
+servile baseness which such a system as this must create are not yet
+extinct. There is still a helplessness in many of the servant class, and
+a disposition to look for largess as well as wages, which are the traits
+naturally resulting from a state of voluntary submission to others. The
+nobles, as the government, enervated and debauched the character of the
+poor by public shows and countless holidays; as individuals, they taught
+them to depend upon patrician favor, and not upon their own plebeian
+industry, for support. The lesson was an evil one, hard to be unlearned,
+and it is yet to be forgotten in Venice. Certain traits of soft
+and familiar dependence give great charm to the populace; but their
+existence makes the student doubtful of a future to which the plebeians
+themselves look forward with perfect hope and confidence. It may be that
+they are right, and will really rise to the dignity of men, when free
+government shall have taught them that the laborer is worthy of his
+hire--after he has earned it. This has been the result, to some degree,
+in the kingdom of Italy, where the people have found that freedom, like
+happiness, means work.
+
+Undoubtedly the best people in the best society of Venice are the
+advocates, an order of consequence even in the times of the Republic,
+though then shut out from participation in public affairs by a native
+government, as now by a foreign one. Acquaintance with several members
+of this profession impressed me with a sense of its liberality of
+thought and feeling, where all liberal thinking and feeling must be done
+by stealth, and where the common intelligence of the world sheds its
+light through multiplied barriers. Daniele Manin, the President of the
+Republic of 1848, was of this class, which, by virtue of its learning,
+enlightenment, and talent, occupies a place in the esteem and regard of
+the Venetian people far above that held by the effete aristocracy.
+The better part of the nobility, indeed, is merged in the professional
+class, and some of the most historic names are now preceded by the
+learned titles of Doctor and Advocate, rather than the cheap dignity
+of Count, offered by the Austrian government to all the patricians who
+chose to ask for it, when Austrian rule was extended over their country.
+
+The physicians rank next to the advocates, and are usually men learned
+in their profession, however erroneous and old-fashioned some of their
+theories of practice may be. Like the advocates, they are often men of
+letters: they write for the journals, and publish little pamphlets on
+those topics of local history which it is so much the fashion to treat
+in Venice. No one makes a profession of authorship. The returns of an
+author's work would be too uncertain, and its restrictions and penalties
+would be too vexatious and serious; and so literary topics are only
+occasionally treated by those whose main energies are bent in another
+direction.
+
+The doctors are very numerous, and a considerable number of them are
+Hebrews, who, even in the old jealous times, exercised the noble art
+of medicine, and who now rank very highly among their professional
+brethren. These physicians haunt the neat and tasteful apothecary shops,
+where they sit upon the benching that passes round the interior, read
+the newspapers, and discuss the politics of Europe, Asia, Africa, and
+America, with all the zest that you may observe to characterize their
+discussions in Goldoni's plays. There they spend their evenings, and
+many hours of every day, and thither the sick send to call them,--each
+physician resorting to a particular apothecary's, and keeping his name
+inscribed on a brass plate against the wall, above the head of the
+druggist, who presides over the reunions of the doctors, while his
+apprentice pestles away at their prescriptions.
+
+In 1786 there were, what with priests, monks, and nuns, a multitude of
+persons of ecclesiastical profession in Venice; and though many convents
+and monasteries were abolished by Napoleon, the priests are still very
+numerous, and some monastic establishments have been revived under
+Austrian rule. The high officers of the Church are, of course, well
+paid, but most of the priesthood live miserably enough. They receive
+from the government a daily stipend of about thirty-five soldi, and they
+celebrate mass when they can get something to do in that way, for forty
+soldi. Unless, then, they have private income from their own family, or
+have pay for the education of some rich man's son or daughter, they must
+fare slenderly.
+
+There is much said, in and out of Venice, about their influence in
+society; but this is greatly modified, and I think is chiefly exercised
+upon the women of the old-fashioned families. [Footnote: It is no longer
+usual for girls to be educated in convents, and most young ladies of
+the better classes, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen years, receive
+their schooling in secular establishments, whither they go every day
+for study, or where they sometimes live as in our boarding-schools, and
+where they are taught the usual accomplishments, greater attention being
+paid to French and music than to other things.] I need hardly repeat
+the wellknown fact that all the moral power of the Roman Church over the
+younger men is gone; these seldom attend mass, and almost never go to
+confession, and the priests are their scorn and by-word. Their example,
+in some degree, must be much followed also by women; and though women
+must everywhere make more public professions of religion than men, in
+order to retain social standing, I doubt if the priests have a very firm
+hold upon the fears or reverence of the sisters and wives of liberal
+Venetians.
+
+If, however, they contribute in anywise to keep down the people, they
+are themselves enslaved to their superiors and to each other. No priest
+can leave the city of Venice without permission of the Patriarch. He is
+cut off as much as possible from his own kinspeople, and subjected
+to the constant surveillance of his class. Obliged to maintain a
+respectable appearance on twenty cents a day,--hampered and hindered
+from all personal liberty and private friendship, and hated by the great
+mass of the people,--I hardly think the Venetian priest is to be envied
+in his life. For my own part, knowing these things, I was not able to
+cherish toward the priests those feelings of scornful severity which
+swell many Protestant bosoms; and so far as I made their acquaintance, I
+found them kind and amiable. One ecclesiastic, at least, I may describe
+as one of the most agreeable and cultivated gentlemen I ever met.
+
+Those who fare best among the priests are the Jesuits, who returned from
+repeated banishment with the Austrians in this century. Their influence
+is very extended, and the confessional is their forte. Venetians say
+that with the old and the old-fashioned these crafty priests suggest
+remorse and impose penances; that with the young men and the latter-day
+thinkers they are men of the world, and pass off pleasant sins as
+trifles. All the students of the government schools are obliged by
+law to confess twice a month, and are given printed certificates of
+confession, in blank, which the confessor fills up and stamps with the
+seal of the Church. Most of them go to confess at the church of the
+Jesuits, who are glad to hear the cock-and-bull story invented by
+the student, and to cultivate his friendship by an easy penance and
+a liberal tone. This ingenuous young man of course despises the
+confessional. He goes to confess because the law obliges him to do so;
+but the law cannot dictate what he must confess. Therefore, he ventures
+as near downright burlesque as he dares, and (if the account he gives of
+the matter be true) puts off his confessor with some well-known fact, as
+that he has blasphemed. Of course he has blasphemed, blasphemy being as
+common as the forms of salutation in Venice. So the priest, who wishes
+him to come again, and to found some sort of influence over him,
+says,--"Oh dear, dear! This is very bad. Blasphemy is deadly sin. If you
+_must_ swear, swear by the heathen gods: say Body of Diana, instead of
+Body of God; Presence of the Devil, instead of Blood of Mary. Then
+there is no harm done." The students laugh over the pleasant absurdity
+together, and usually agree upon the matter of their semimonthly
+confessions beforehand.
+
+As I have hinted, the young men do not love the government or the
+Church, and though I account for the loss of much high hope and generous
+sympathy in growth from youth to middle age, I cannot see how, when
+they have replaced their fathers, the present religious and political
+discontent is to be modified. Nay, I believe it must become worse. The
+middle-aged men of Venice grew up in times of comparative quiet, when
+she did not so much care who ruled over her, and negatively, at least,
+they honored the Church. They may now hate the foreign rule, but there
+are many considerations of timidity, and many effects of education, to
+temper their hate. They may dislike the priests, but they revere the
+Church. The young men of to-day are bred in a different school, and all
+their thoughts are of opposition to the government and of war upon the
+Church, which they detest and ridicule. The fact that their education is
+still in the hands of the priests in some measure, does not render them
+more tractable. They have no fears to be wrought upon by their clerical
+professors, who seldom have sought to act upon their nobler qualities.
+The influence of the priesthood is again limited by the fact that the
+teachers in the free schools of the city, to which the poor send their
+children, are generally not priests; and ecclesiastics are no longer so
+commonly the private tutors of the children of the rich, as they
+once were when they lived with the family, and exercised a direct and
+important influence on it. Express permission from the pope is now
+necessary to the maintenance of a family chaplain, and the office is
+nearly disused. [Footnote: In early days every noble Venetian family
+had its chaplain, who, on the occasion of great dinners and suppers,
+remained in the kitchen, and received as one of his perquisites the
+fragments that came back from the table.]
+
+The Republic was extremely jealous of the political power of the
+priests, who could not hold secular office in its time. A curious
+punishment was inflicted upon the priest who proved false to his own
+vows of chastity, and there is a most amusing old ballad--by no means
+cleanly in its language--purporting to be the lament of a priest
+suspended in the iron cage, appointed for the purpose, from the belfry
+of the Campanile San Marco, and enduring the jeers and insults of the
+mob below. We may suppose that with advancing corruption (if corruption
+has indeed advanced from remote to later times) this punishment was
+disused for want of room to hang out the delinquents. In the last
+century, especially, the nuns and monks led a pleasant life. You may
+see in the old pictures of Pietro Longhi and his school, how at the
+aristocratic and fashionable convent of San Zaccaria, the lady nuns
+received their friends and acquaintances of this world in the anteroom,
+where the dames and their cavaliers flirted and drank coffee, and the
+gentlemen coquetted with the brides of heaven through their grated
+windows.
+
+Among other privileges of the Church, abolished in Venice long ago, was
+that ancient right of the monks of St. Anthony, Abbot, by which
+their herds of swine were made free of the whole city. These animals,
+enveloped in an odor of sanctity, wandered here and there, and were
+piously fed by devout people, until the year 1409, when, being found
+dangerous to children and inconvenient to every body, they were made
+the subject of a special decree, which deprived them of their freedom of
+movement. The Republic was always limiting the privileges of the
+Church! It is known how when the holy inquisition was established in its
+dominions in 1249, the State stipulated that great part of the process
+against heresy should be conducted by secular functionaries, and that
+the sentence should rest with the Doge and his councillors,--a kind of
+inquisition with claws clipped and teeth filed, as one may say, and
+the only sort ever permitted in Venice. At present there is no absolute
+disfavor shown to the clergy; but, as we have seen, many a pleasant
+island, which the monks of old reclaimed from the salty marshes, and
+planted with gardens and vineyards, now bears only the ruins of their
+convents, or else, converted into a fortress or government depot, is
+all thistly with bayonets. Anciently, moreover, there were many little
+groves in different parts of the city, where the pleasant clergy, of
+what Mr. Ruskin would have us believe the pure and religious days of
+Venice, met and made merry so riotously together by night that the
+higher officers of the Church were forced to prohibit their little
+soirees.
+
+An old custom of rejoicing over the installation of a new parish priest
+is still to be seen in almost primitive quaintness. The people of each
+parish--nobles, citizens, and plebeians alike--formerly elected their
+own priest, and, till the year 1576, they used to perambulate the city
+to the sound of drums, with banners flying, after an election, and
+proclaim the name of their favorite. On the day of the _parroco_'s
+induction his portrait was placed over the church door and after the
+celebration of the morning mass, a breakfast was given, which grew to be
+so splendid in time, that in the fifteenth century a statute limited
+its profusion. In the afternoon the new parroco, preceded by a band of
+military music, visited all the streets and courts of his parish,
+and then, as now, all the windows of the parish were decorated with
+brilliant tapestries, and other gay-colored cloths and pictures. In
+those times as in these, there was an illumination at night, throngs of
+people in the campo of the church, and booths for traffic in cakes of
+flour and raisins,--fried in lard upon the spot, and sold smoking hot,
+with immense uproar on the part of the merchant; and for three days
+afterward the parish bells were sounded in concert.
+
+The difficulty of ascertaining any thing with certainty in Venice
+attends in a degree peculiarly great the effort to learn exactly the
+present influence and standing of the nobility as a class. One is
+tempted, on observing the free and unembarrassed bearing of all ranks
+of people toward each other, to say that no sense of difference
+exists,--and I do not think there is ever shown, among Italians, either
+the aggressive pride or the abject meanness which marks the intercourse
+of people and nobles elsewhere in Europe, and I have not seen the
+distinction of rich and poor made so brutally in Italy as sometimes in
+our own _soi-disant_ democratic society at home. There is, indeed, that
+equality in Italian fibre which I believe fits the nation for democratic
+institutions better than any other, and which is perhaps partly the
+result of their ancient civilization. At any rate, it fascinates a
+stranger to see people so mutually gentle and deferential; and must
+often be a matter of surprise to the Anglo-Saxon, in whose race,
+reclaimed from barbarism more recently, the native wild-beast is still
+so strong as to sometimes inform the manner. The uneducated Anglo-Saxon
+is a savage; the Italian, though born to utter ignorance, poverty, and
+depravity, is a civilized man. I do not say that his civilization is of
+a high order, or that the civilization of the most cultivated Italian is
+at all comparable to that of a gentleman among ourselves. The Italian's
+education, however profound, has left his passions undisciplined, while
+it has carefully polished his manner; he yields lightly to temptation,
+he loses his self-control, he blasphemes habitually; his gentleness is
+conventional, his civilization not individual. With us the education of
+a gentleman (I do not mean a person born to wealth or station, but any
+man who has trained himself in morals or religion, in letters, and in
+the world) disciplines the impulses, and leaves the good manner to
+grow naturally out of habits of self-command and consequent habitual
+self-respect.
+
+The natural equality of the Italians is visible in their community of
+good looks as well as good manners. They have never, perhaps, that
+high beauty of sensitive expression which is found among Englishmen and
+Americans (preferably among the latter), but it very rarely happens that
+they are brutally ugly; and the man of low rank and mean vocation has
+often a beauty of as fine sort as the man of education and refinement.
+If they changed clothes, and the poor man could be persuaded to wash
+himself, they might successfully masquerade, one for another. The
+plebeian Italian, inspired by the national vanity, bears himself as
+proudly as the noble, without at all aggressing in his manner. His
+beauty, like that of the women of his class, is world-old,--the beauty
+of the pictures and the statues: the ideal types of loveliness are
+realized in Italy; the saints and heroes, the madonnas and nymphs, come
+true to the stranger at every encounter with living faces. In Venice,
+particularly, the carriage of the women, of whatever rank, is very free
+and noble, and the servant is sometimes to be distinguished from the
+mistress only by her dress and by her labor-coarsened hands; certainly
+not always by her dirty finger-nails and foul teeth, for though the
+clean shirt is now generally in Italy, some lesser virtues are still
+unknown: the nail-brush and tooth-brush are of but infrequent use; the
+four-pronged fork is still imperfectly understood, and as a nation the
+Italians may be said to eat with their knives.
+
+The Venetian, then, seeing so little difference between himself and
+others, whatever his rank may be, has, as I said, little temptation to
+arrogance or servility. The effects of the old relationship of patron
+and client are amusingly noticeable in the superior as well as the
+inferior; a rich man's dependents are perfectly free with advice and
+comment, and it sometimes happens that he likes to hear their lively
+talk, and at home secretly consorts with his servants. The former social
+differences between commoners and patricians (which, I think, judging
+from the natural temper of the race, must have been greatly modified
+at all times by concession and exception) may be said to have quite
+disappeared in point of fact; the nobility is now almost as effete
+socially as it is politically. There is still a number of historic
+families, which are in a certain degree exclusive; but rich _parvenus_
+have admission to their friendship, and commoners in good circumstances
+are permitted their acquaintance; the ladies of this patrician society
+visit ladies of less rank, and receive them at their great parties,
+though not at more sacred assemblies, where they see only each other.
+
+The Venetians have a habit of saying their best families are in exile,
+but this is not meant to be taken literally. Many of the best families
+are yet in the city, living in perfect retirement, or very often merged
+in the middle class, and become men of professions, and active, useful
+lives. Of these nobles (they usually belong to the families which
+did not care to ask nobility of Austria, and are therefore untitled)
+[Footnote: The only title conferred on any patrician of Venice during
+the Republic was Cavaliere, and this was conferred by a legislative
+act in reward of distinguished service. The names of the nobility were
+written in the Golden Book of the Republic, and they were addressed
+as Illustrissimo or Eccellenza. They also signed themselves _nobile_,
+between the Christian name and surname, as it is still the habit of the
+untitled nobility to do.] the citizens are affectionately proud, while I
+have heard from them nothing but contempt and ridicule of the patricians
+who, upon a wretched pension or meagre government office, attempt to
+maintain patrician distinction. Such nobles are usually Austriacanti in
+their politics, and behind the age in every thing; while there are
+other descendants of patrician families mingled at last with the very
+populace, sharing their ignorance and degradation, and feeling with
+them. These sometimes exercise the most menial employments: I knew one
+noble lord who had been a facchino, and I heard of another who was a
+street-sweeper. _Conte che non conta, non conta niente_, [Footnote: A
+count who doesn't count (money) counts for nothing.] says the sneering
+Italian proverb; and it would be little less than miraculous if a
+nobility like that of modern Venice maintained superior state and regard
+in the eyes of the quick-witted, intelligent, sarcastic commonalty.
+
+The few opulent patricians are by no means the most violent of
+Italianissimi. They own lands and houses, and as property is unsafe when
+revolutionary feeling is rife, their patriotism is tempered. The wealth
+amassed in early times by the vast and enterprising commerce of the
+country was, when not dissipated in riotous splendor, invested in real
+estate upon the main-land as the Republic grew in territory, and the
+income of the nobles is now from the rents of these lands. They reside
+upon their estates during the season of the _villeggiatura_, which
+includes the months of September and October, when every one who can
+possibly leave the city goes into the country. Then the patricians
+betake themselves to their villas near Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and
+Treviso, and people the sad-colored, weather-worn stucco hermitages,
+where the mutilated statues, swaggering above the gates, forlornly
+commemorate days when it was a far finer thing to be a noble than it is
+now. I say the villas look dreary and lonesome as places can be made to
+look in Italy, what with their high garden walls, their long, low piles
+of stabling, and the _passee_ indecency of their nymphs and fauns,
+foolishly strutting in the attitudes of the silly and sinful old Past;
+and it must be but a dull life that the noble proprietors lead there.
+
+It is better, no doubt, on the banks of the Brenta, where there are
+still so many villas as to form a street of these seats of luxury,
+almost the whole length of the canal, from Fusina to Padua. I am
+not certain that they have a right to the place which they hold in
+literature and sentiment, and yet there is something very charming about
+them, with their gardens, and chapels, and statues, and shaded walks.
+We went to see them one day early in October, and found them every one,
+when habitable, inhabited, and wearing a cheerful look, that made their
+proximity to Venice incredible. As we returned home after dark, we saw
+the ladies from the villas walking unattended along the road, and giving
+the scene an air of homelike peace and trustfulness which I had not
+found before in Italy; while the windows of the houses were brilliantly
+lighted, as if people lived in them; whereas, you seldom see a light in
+Venetian palaces. I am not sure that I did not like better, however, the
+villas that were empty and ruinous, and the gardens that had run wild,
+and the statues that had lost legs and arms. Some of the ingenious
+proprietors had enterprisingly whitewashed their statues, and there
+was a horrible primness about certain of the well-kept gardens which
+offended me. Most of the houses were not large, but there was here and
+there a palace as grand as any in the city. Such was the great villa
+of the Contarini of the Lions, which was in every way superb, with
+two great lions of stone guarding its portals, and a gravel walk,
+over-arched with stately trees, stretching a quarter of a mile before
+it. At the moment I was walking down this aisle I met a cleanshaven old
+canonico, with red legs and red-tasseled hat, and with a book under his
+arm, and a meditative look, whom I here thank for being so venerably
+picturesque. The palace itself was shut up, and I wish I had known, when
+I saw it, that it had a ghostly underground passage from its cellar to
+the chapel,--wherein, when you get half way, your light goes out, and
+you consequently never reach the chapel.
+
+This is at Mira; but the greatest of all the villas is the magnificent
+country-seat of the family Pisani at Stra, which now, with scarcely
+any addition to its splendor, serves for the residence of the abdicated
+Emperor of Austria. There is such pride in the vastness of this edifice
+and its gardens as impresses you with the material greatness which found
+expression in it, and never raises a regret that it has utterly passed
+away. You wander around through the aisles of trim-cut lime-trees,
+bullied and overborne by the insolent statues, and expect at every turn
+to come upon intriguing spectres in bag-wigs, immense hoops and
+patches. How can you feel sympathy for those dull and wicked ghosts of
+eighteenth-century corruption? There is rottenness enough in the world
+without digging up old putridity and sentimentalizing on it; and I doubt
+if you will care to know much of the way in which the noble owner of
+such a villa ascended the Brenta at the season of the _villeggiatura_ in
+his great gilded barge, all carven outside with the dumpling loves and
+loose nymphs of the period, with fruits, and flowers, and what not;
+and within, luxuriously cushioned and furnished, and stocked with
+good things for pleasure making in the gross old fashion. [Footnote:
+Mutinelli, _Gli Ultimi Cinquant' Anni della Repubblica di Veneza_.]
+King Cole was not a merrier old soul than Illustrissimo of that day; he
+outspent princes; and his agent, while he harried the tenants to supply
+his master's demands, plundered Illustrissimo frightfully. Illustrissimo
+never looked at accounts. He said to his steward, "_Caro veccio, fe vu.
+Mi remeto a quel che fe vu._" (Old fellow, you attend to it. I shall be
+satisfied with what you do.) So the poor agent had no other course but
+to swindle him, which he did; and Illustrissimo, when he died, died
+poor, and left his lordly debts and vices to his sons.
+
+In Venice, the noble still lives sometimes in his ancestral palace,
+dimly occupying the halls where his forefathers flourished in so much
+splendor. I can conceive, indeed, of no state of things more flattering
+to human pride than that which surrounded the patrician of the old
+aristocratic Republic. The house in which he dwelt was the palace of
+a king, in luxury of appointment and magnificence of size. Troops of
+servants that ministered to his state peopled its vast extent; and the
+gondolas that carried his grandeur abroad were moored in little fleets
+to the piles that rose before his palace, painted with the family arms
+and colors. The palace itself stood usually on the Grand Canal, and
+rose sheer from the water, giving the noble that haughty inaccessibility
+which the lord of the main-land achieved only by building lofty walls
+and multiplying gates. The architecture was as costly in its ornament
+as wild Gothic fancy, or Renaissance luxury of bad taste, could make it;
+and when the palace front was not of sculptured marble, the painter's
+pencil filled it with the delight of color. The main-land noble's house
+was half a fortress, and formed his stronghold in times of popular
+tumult or family fray; but at Venice the strong arm of St. Mark
+suppressed all turbulence in a city secure from foreign war; and the
+peaceful arts rejoiced in undisturbed possession of the palaces, which
+rose in the most delicate and fantastic beauty, and mirrored in the
+brine a dream of sea-deep strangeness and richness. You see much of the
+beauty yet, but the pride and opulence which called it into being are
+gone forever.
+
+Most palaces, whether of the Gothic or classicistic period, have the
+same internal arrangement of halls and chambers, and are commonly built
+of two lofty and two low stories. On the ground floor, or water level,
+is a hall running back from the gate to a bit of garden at the other
+side of the palace; and on either side of this hall, which in old times
+was hung with the family trophies of the chase and war, are the porter's
+lodge and gondoliers' rooms. On the first and second stories are the
+family apartments, opening on either side from great halls, of the same
+extent as that below, but with loftier roofs, of heavy rafters gilded
+or painted. The fourth floor is of the same arrangement, but has a
+lower roof, and was devoted to the better class of servants. Of the two
+stories used by the family, the third is the loftier and airier, and was
+occupied in summer; the second was the winter apartment. On either hand
+the rooms open in suites.
+
+We have seen something of the ceremonies, public and private, which gave
+peculiar gayety and brilliance to the life of the Venetians of
+former days; but in his political character the noble had yet greater
+consequence. He was part of the proudest, strongest, and securest system
+of his time. He was a king with the fellowship of kings, flattered with
+the equality of an aristocracy which was master of itself, and of its
+nominal head. During the earlier times it was his office to go daily to
+Rialto and instruct the people in their political rights and duties for
+four hours; and even when the duties became every thing and the rights
+nothing (after the Serrar del Consiglio), the friendly habit of daily
+intercourse between patricians and citizens was still kept up at the
+same place. Once each week, and on every holiday, the noble took his
+seat in the Grand Council (the most august assembly in the world,
+without doubt), or the Ten, or the Three, according to his office in the
+State,--holding his place in the Council by right of birth, and in the
+other bodies by election of his peers.
+
+Although the patricians were kept as one family apart from the people,
+and jealously guarded in their aristocratic purity by the State, they
+were only equals of the poorest before the laws of their own creation,
+and their condescension to the people was frequent and great. Indeed,
+the Venetians of all classes are social creatures, loving talk and
+gossip, and these constant habits of intercourse must have done much to
+produce that equality of manner now observable in them. Their amusements
+were for a long time the same, the nobles taking part in the public
+holidays, and in the popular exercises of rowing and swimming. In the
+earlier times, hunting in the lagoons was a favorite diversion; but as
+the decay of the Republic advanced, and the patrician blossomed into
+the fine gentleman of the last century, these hearty sports were
+relinquished, and every thing was voted vulgar but masking in carnival,
+dancing and gaming at Ridotto, and intriguing everywhere.
+
+The accounts which Venetian writers give of Republican society in the
+eighteenth century form a _chronique scandaleuse_ which need not be
+minutely copied here. Much may be learned of Venetian manners of this
+time from the comedies of Goldoni; and the faithlessness of society
+may be argued from the fact that in these plays, which contain nothing
+salacious or indecent, there is scarcely a character of any rank
+who scruples to tell lies; and the truth is not to be found in works
+intended to school the public to virtue. The ingenious old playwright's
+memoirs are full of gossip concerning that poor old Venice, which is
+now no more; and the worthy autobiographer, Casanova, also gives much
+information about things that had best not be known.
+
+As the Republic drew near its fall, in 1797, there was little left in
+its dominant class worth saving, if we may believe the testimony of
+Venetians which Mutinelli brings to bear upon the point in his "Annali
+Urbani," and his "History of the Last Fifty Years of the Republic."
+Long prosperity and prodigious opulence had done their worst, and the
+patricians, and the lowest orders of the people, their creatures and
+dependants, were thoroughly corrupt; while the men of professions began
+to assume that station which they now hold. The days of a fashionable
+patrician of those times began at a little before sunset, and ended with
+the following dawn. Rising from his bed, he dressed himself in dainty
+linen, and placed himself in the hands of the hairdresser to be combed,
+oiled, perfumed, and powdered; and then sallied forth for a stroll
+through the Merceria, where this excellent husband and father made
+tasteful purchases to be carried to the lady he served. At dinner,
+which he took about seven or eight, his board was covered with the most
+tempting viands, and surrounded by needy parasites, who detailed the
+spicy scandals of the day in payment of their dinner, while the children
+of the host were confided to the care of the corrupt and negligent
+servants. After dinner, the father went to the theatre, or to the
+_casino_, and spent the night over cards and wine, in the society of
+dissolute women; and renewed on the morrow the routine of his useful
+existence. The education of the children of the man of fashion was
+confided to a priest, who lived in his family, and called himself an
+abbate, after the mode of the _abbes_ of French society; he had winning
+manners with the ladies, indulgent habits with his pupils, and dressed
+his elegant person in silks of Lyons and English broadcloths. In the
+pleasant old days he flitted from palace to villa, dining and supping,
+and flattering the ladies, and tapping the lid of his jeweled snuffbox
+in all fashionable companies. He was the cadet of a patrician family
+(when not the ambitious son of a low family), with a polite taste for
+idleness and intrigue, for whom no secular sinecure could be found in
+the State, and who obliged the Church by accepting orders. Whether in
+the palace on the Grand Canal, or the villa on the Brenta, this gentle
+and engaging priest was surely the most agreeable person to be met, and
+the most dangerous to ladies' hearts,--with his rich suit of black,
+and his smug, clean-shaven face, and his jeweled hands, and his sweet,
+seducing manners. Alas! the world is changed! The priests whom you see
+playing _tre-sette_ now at the conversazioni are altogether different
+men, and the delightful abbate is as much out of fashion as the bag-wig
+or the queue. When in fashion he loved the theatre, and often showed
+himself there at the side of his noble patron's wife. Nay, in that time
+the theatre was so prized by the Church that a popular preacher thought
+it becoming to declare from his pulpit that to compose well his
+hearers should study the comedies of Goldoni,--and his hearers were the
+posterity of that devout old aristocracy which never undertook a journey
+without first receiving the holy sacrament; which had built the churches
+and endowed them from private wealth!
+
+Ignorance, as well as vice, was the mode in those elegant days, and it
+is related that a charming lady of good society once addressed a foreign
+_savant_ at her conversazione, and begged him to favor the company with
+a little music, because, having heard that he was _virtuous_, she had
+no other association with the word than its technical use in Italy to
+indicate a professional singer as a _virtuoso_. A father of a family who
+kept no abbate for the education of his children ingeniously taught them
+himself. "Father," asked one of his children, "what are the stars?" "The
+stars are stars, and little things that shine as thou seest." "Then they
+are candles, perhaps?" "Make thy account that they are candles exactly."
+"Of wax or tallow?" pursues the boy. "What! tallow-candles in heaven?
+No, certainly--wax, wax!"
+
+These, and many other scandalous stories, the Venetian writers recount
+of the last days of their Republic, and the picture they produce is one
+of the most shameless ignorance, the most polite corruption, the
+most unblushing baseness. I have no doubt that the picture is full of
+national exaggeration. Indeed, the method of Mutinelli (who I believe
+intends to tell the truth) in writing social history is altogether too
+credulous and incautious. It is well enough to study contemporary comedy
+for light upon past society, but satirical ballads and lampoons, and
+scurrilous letters, cannot be accepted as historical authority. Still
+there is no question but Venice was very corrupt. As you read of her
+people in the last century, one by one the ideas of family faith and
+domestic purity fade away; one by one the beliefs in public virtue
+are dissipated; until at last you are glad to fly the study, close the
+filthy pages, and take refuge in doubt of the writers, who declare
+that they must needs disgrace Venice with facts since her children have
+dishonored her in their lives. "Such as we see them," they say, "were
+the patricians, such the people of Venice, after the middle of the
+eighteenth century. The Venetians might be considered as extinguished;
+the marvelous city, the pomp only of the Venetians, existed."
+
+Shall we believe this? Let each choose for himself. At that very time
+the taste and wealth of a Venetian noble fostered the genius of Canova
+and then, when their captains starved the ragged soldiers of the
+Republic to feed their own idleness and vice,--when the soldiers
+dismantled her forts to sell the guns to the Turk,--when her sailors
+rioted on shore and her ships rotted in her ports, she had still
+military virtue enough to produce that Emo, who beat back the Algerine
+corsairs from the commerce of Christendom, and attacked them in their
+stronghold, as of old her galleys beat back the Turks. Alas! there was
+not the virtue in her statesmen to respond to this greatness in the
+hero. One of their last public acts was to break his heart with insult,
+and to crave peace of the pirates whom he had cowed. It remained for the
+helpless Doge and the abject patricians, terrified at a threat of war,
+to declare the Republic at an end, and San Marco was no more.
+
+I love Republics too well to lament the fall of Venice. And yet, _Pax
+tibi, Marce!_ If I have been slow to praise, I shall not hasten to
+condemn, a whole nation. Indeed, so much occurs to me to qualify with
+contrary sense what I have written concerning Venice, that I wonder if,
+after all, I have not been treating throughout less of the rule than of
+the exception. It is a doubt which must force itself upon every fair
+and temperate man who attempts to describe another people's life and
+character; and I confess that it troubles me so sorely now, at the end
+of my work, that I would fain pray the gentle reader to believe much
+more good and much less evil of the Venetians than I have said. I am
+glad that it remains for me to express a faith and hope in them for the
+future, founded upon their present political feeling, which, however
+tainted with self-interest in the case of many, is no doubt with
+the great majority a high and true feeling of patriotism. And it is
+impossible to believe that a people which can maintain the stern and
+unyielding attitude now maintained by the Venetians toward an alien
+government disposed to make them any concession short of freedom, in
+order to win them into voluntary submission, can be wanting in the great
+qualities which distinguish living peoples from those passed hopelessly
+into history and sentiment. In truth, glancing back over the whole
+career of the nation, I can discern in it nothing so admirable, so
+dignified, so steadfastly brave, as its present sacrifice of all that
+makes life easy and joyous, to the attainment of a good which shall make
+life noble.
+
+The Venetians desire now, and first of all things, Liberty, knowing
+that in slavery men can learn no virtues; and I think them fit, with all
+their errors and defects, to be free now, because men are never fit to
+be slaves.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+OUR LAST YEAR IN VENICE.
+
+_(As it seems Seven Years after.)_
+
+
+The last of four years which it was our fortune to live in the city
+of Venice was passed under the roof of one of her most beautiful and
+memorable palaces, namely, the Palazzo Giustiniani, whither we went,
+as has been told in an earlier chapter of this book, to escape the
+encroaching nepotism of Giovanna, the flower of serving-women. The
+experience now, in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to consort with ordinary
+remembrances, and has such a fantastic preference for the company of
+rather vivid and circumstantial dreams, that it is with no very strong
+hope of making it seem real that I shall venture to speak of it.
+
+The Giustiniani were a family of patricians very famous during the times
+of a Republic that gave so many splendid names to history, and the race
+was preserved to the honor and service of Saint Mark by one of the most
+romantic facts of his annals. During a war with the Greek Emperor in the
+twelfth century every known Giustiniani was slain, and the heroic strain
+seemed lost forever. But the state that mourned them bethought itself
+of a half forgotten monk of their house, who was wasting his life in the
+Convent of San Nicolo; he was drawn forth from this seclusion, and,
+the permission of Rome being won, he was married to the daughter of the
+reigning doge. From them descended the Giustiniani of aftertimes, who
+still exist; in deed, in the year 1865 there came one day a gentleman of
+the family, and tried to buy from our landlord that part of the palace
+which we so humbly and insufficiently inhabited. It is said that as the
+unfrocked friar and his wife declined in life they separated, and, as if
+in doubt of what had been done for the state through them, retired each
+into a convent, Giustiniani going back to San Nicolo, and dying at last
+to the murmur of the Adriatic waves along the Lido's sands.
+
+Next after this Giustiniani I like best to think of that latest hero of
+the family, who had the sad fortune to live when the ancient Republic
+fell at a threat of Napoleon, and who alone among her nobles had
+the courage to meet with a manly spirit the insolent menaces of the
+conqueror. The Giustiniani governed Treviso for the Senate; he refused,
+when Napoleon ordered him from his presence, to quit Treviso without the
+command of the Senate; he flung back the taunts of bad faith cast upon
+the Venetians; and when Napoleon changed his tone from that of disdain
+to one of compliment, and promised that in the general disaster he
+was preparing for Venice, Giustiniani should be spared, the latter
+generously replied that he had been a friend of the French only because
+the Senate was so; as to the immunity offered, all was lost to him
+in the loss of his country, and he should blush for his wealth if it
+remained intact amidst the ruin of his countrymen.
+
+The family grew in riches and renown from age to age, and, some
+four centuries after the marriage of the monk, they reared the three
+beautiful Gothic palaces, in the noblest site on the Grand Canal, whence
+on one hand you can look down to the Rialto Bridge, and on the other far
+up towards the church of the Salute, and the Basin of Saint Mark. The
+architects were those Buoni, father and son, who did some of the
+most beautiful work on the Ducal Palace, and who wrought in an equal
+inspiration upon these homes of the Giustiniani, building the delicate
+Gothic arches of the windows, with their slender columns and their
+graceful balconies, and crowning all with the airy battlements.
+
+The largest of the three palaces became later the property of the
+Foscari family, and here dwelt with his father that unhappy Jacopo
+Foscari, who after thrice suffering torture by the state for a murder he
+never did, at last died in exile; hither came the old Doge Foscari, who
+had consented to this cruel error of the state, and who after a life
+spent in its service was deposed and disgraced before his death; and
+whither when he lay dead, came remorseful Venice, and claimed for
+sumptuous obsequies the dust which his widow yielded with bitter
+reproaches. Here the family faded away generation by generation, till,
+(according to the tale told us) early in this century, when the ultimate
+male survivor of the line had died, under a false name, in London, where
+he had been some sort of obscure actor, there were but two old maiden
+sisters left, who, lapsing into imbecility, were shown to strangers by
+the rascal servants as the last of the Foscari; and here in our time was
+quartered a regiment of Austrian troops, whose neatly pipe-clayed belts
+decorated the balconies on which the princely ladies of the house had
+rested their jewelled arms in other days.
+
+The Foscari added a story to the palace to distinguish it from the two
+other palaces Giustiniani, but these remain to the present day as they
+were originally planned. That in which we lived was called Palazzo
+Giustiniani of the Bishops, because one of the family was the first
+patriarch of Venice. After his death he was made a saint by the Pope;
+and it is related that he was not only a very pious, but a very good
+man. In his last hours he admitted his beloved people to his chamber,
+where he meekly lay upon a pallet of straw, and at the moment he
+expired, two monks in the solitude of their cloister, heard an angelical
+harmony in the air: the clergy performed his obsequies not in black,
+funereal robes, but in white garments, and crowned with laurel, and
+bearing gilded torches, and although the patriarch had died of a
+malignant fever, his body was miraculously preserved incorrupt during
+the sixty-five days that the obsequies lasted. The other branch of the
+family was called the Giustiniani of the Jewels, from the splendor of
+their dress; but neither palace now shelters any of their magnificent
+race. The edifice on our right was exclusively occupied by a noble
+Viennese lady, who as we heard,--vaguely, in the right Venetian
+fashion,--had been a ballet-dancer in her youth, and who now in her
+matronly days dwelt apart from her husband, the Russian count, and had
+gondoliers in blue silk, and the finest gondola on the Grand Canal, but
+was a plump, florid lady, looking long past beauty, even as we saw her
+from our balcony.
+
+Our own palace--as we absurdly grew to call it--was owned and inhabited
+in a manner much more proper to modern Venice, the proprietorship being
+about equally divided between our own landlord and a very well known
+Venetian painter, son of a painter still more famous. This artist was
+a very courteous old gentleman, who went with Italian and clock-like
+regularity every evening in summer to a certain caffe, where he seemed
+to make it a point of conscience to sip one sherbet, and to read the
+"Journal des Debats." In his coming and going we met him so often that
+we became friends, and he asked us many times to visit him, and see his
+father's pictures, and some famous frescos with which his part of the
+palace was adorned. It was a characteristic trait of our life, that
+though we constantly meant to avail ourselves of this kindness, we never
+did so. But we continued in the enjoyment of the beautiful garden, which
+this gentleman owned at the rear of the palace and on which our chamber
+windows looked. It was full of oleanders and roses, and other bright
+and odorous blooms, which we could enjoy perfectly well without knowing
+their names; and I could hardly say whether the garden was more charming
+when it was in its summer glory, or when, on some rare winter day, a
+breath from the mountains had clothed its tender boughs and sprays with
+a light and evanescent flowering of snow. At any season the lofty palace
+walls rose over it, and shut it in a pensive seclusion which was loved
+by the old mother of the painter and by his elderly maiden sister. These
+often walked on its moss-grown paths, silent as the roses and oleanders
+to which one could have fancied the blossom of their youth had
+flown; and sometimes there came to them there, grave, black-gowned
+priests,--for the painter's was a devout family,--and talked with them
+in tones almost as tranquil as the silence was, save when one of the
+ecclesiastics placidly took snuff,--it is a dogma of the Church for
+priests to take snuff in Italy,--and thereafter, upon a prolonged search
+for his handkerchief, blew a resounding nose. So far as we knew, the
+garden walls circumscribed the whole life of these ladies; and I am
+afraid that such topics of this world as they touched upon with their
+priests must have been deplorably small.
+
+Their kinsman owned part of the story under us, and both of the stories
+above us; he had the advantage of the garden over our landlord; but
+he had not so grand a gondola-gate as we, and in some other respects
+I incline to think that our part of the edifice was the finer. It
+is certain that no mention is made of any such beautiful hall in the
+property of the painter as is noted in that of our landlord, by
+the historian of a "Hundred Palaces of Venice,"--a work for which
+I subscribed, and then for my merit was honored by a visit from the
+author, who read aloud to me in a deep and sonorous voice the annals
+of our temporary home. This hall occupied half the space of the whole
+floor; but it was altogether surrounded by rooms of various shapes and
+sizes, except upon one side of its length, where it gave through Gothic
+windows of vari-colored glass, upon a small court below,--a green-mouldy
+little court, further dampened by a cistern, which had the usual curb
+of a single carven block of marble. The roof of this stately _sala_ was
+traversed by a long series of painted rafters, which in the halls of
+nearly all Venetian palaces are left exposed, and painted or carved and
+gilded. A suite of stately rooms closed the hall from the Grand Canal,
+and one of these formed our parlor; on the side opposite the Gothic
+windows was a vast aristocratic kitchen, which, with its rows of shining
+coppers, its great chimney-place well advanced toward the middle of the
+floor, and its tall gloomy windows, still affects my imagination as one
+of the most patrician rooms which I ever saw; at the back of the hall
+were those chambers of ours overlooking the garden of which I have
+already spoken, and another kitchen, less noble than the first, but
+still sufficiently grandiose to make most New World kitchens seem very
+meekly minute and unimpressive. Between the two kitchens was another
+court, with another cistern, from which the painter's family drew water
+with a bucket on a long rope, which, when let down from the fourth
+story, appeared to be dropped from the clouds, and descended with a
+noise little less alarming than thunder.
+
+Altogether the most surprising object in the great _sala_ was a
+sewing-machine, and we should have been inconsolably outraged by its
+presence there, amid so much that was merely venerable and beautiful,
+but for the fact that it was in a state of harmonious and hopeless
+disrepair, and, from its general contrivance, gave us the idea that it
+had never been of any use. It was, in fact, kept as a sort of curiosity
+by the landlord, who exhibited it to the admiration of his Venetian
+friends.
+
+The reader will doubtless have imagined, from what I have been saying,
+that the Palazzo Giustiniani had not all that machinery which we know in
+our houses here as modern improvements. It had nothing of the kind, and
+life there was, as in most houses in Italy, a kind of permanent camping
+out. When I remember the small amount of carpeting, of furniture, and of
+upholstery we enjoyed, it appears to me pathetic; and yet, I am not sure
+that it was not the wisest way to live. I know that we had compensation
+in things not purchasable here for money. If the furniture of the
+principal bedroom was somewhat scanty, its dimensions were unstinted
+the ceiling was fifteen feet high, and was divided into rich and heavy
+panels, adorned each with a mighty rosette of carved and gilded wood,
+two feet across. The parlor had not its original decorations in our
+time, but it had once had so noble a carved ceiling that it was found
+worth while to take it down and sell it into England; and it still had
+two grand Venetian mirrors, a vast and very good painting of a miracle
+of St. Anthony, and imitation-antique tables and arm-chairs. The last
+were frolicked all over with carven nymphs and cupids; but they were of
+such frail construction that they were not meant to be sat in, much less
+to be removed from the wall against which they stood; and more than one
+of our American visitors was dismayed at having these proud articles of
+furniture go to pieces upon his attempt to use them like mere arm-chairs
+of ordinary life. Scarcely less impressive or useless than these was a
+monumental plaster-stove, surmounted by a bust of AEsculapius; when this
+was broken by accident, we cheaply repaired the loss with a bust of
+Homer (the dealer in the next campo being out of AEsculapiuses) which no
+one could have told from the bust it replaced; and this and the other
+artistic glories of the room made us quite forget all possible
+blemishes and defects. And will the reader mention any house with modern
+improvements in America which has also windows, with pointed arches of
+marble, opening upon balconies that overhang the Grand Canal?
+
+For our new apartment, which consisted of six rooms, furnished with
+every article necessary for Venetian housekeeping, we paid one dollar a
+day which, in the innocence of our hearts we thought rather dear, though
+we were somewhat consoled by reflecting that this extravagant outlay
+secured us the finest position on the Grand Canal. We did not mean to
+keep house as we had in Casa Falier, and perhaps a sketch of our easier
+_menage_ may not be out of place. Breakfast was prepared in the house,
+for in that blessed climate all you care for in the morning is a cup of
+coffee, with a little bread and butter, a musk-melon, and some clusters
+of white grapes, more or less. Then we had our dinners sent in warm from
+a cook's who had learned his noble art in France; he furnished a dinner
+of five courses for three persons at a cost of about eighty cents; and
+they were dinners so happily conceived and so justly executed, that I
+cannot accuse myself of an excess of sentiment when I confess that I
+sigh for them to this day. Then as for our immaterial tea, we always
+took that at the Caffe Florian in the Piazza of Saint Mark, where
+we drank a cup of black coffee and ate an ice, while all the world
+promenaded by, and the Austrian bands made heavenly music.
+
+Those bands no longer play in Venice, and I believe that they are not
+the only charm which she has lost in exchanging Austrian servitude for
+Italian freedom; though I should be sorry to think that freedom was not
+worth all other charms. The poor Venetians used to be very rigorous
+(as I have elsewhere related), about the music of their oppressors,
+and would not come into the Piazza until it had ceased and the Austrian
+promenaders had disappeared, when they sat down at Florian's, and
+listened to such bands of strolling singers and minstrels as chose to
+give them a concord of sweet sounds, without foreign admixture. We, in
+our neutrality, were wont to sit out both entertainments, and then go
+home well toward midnight, through the sleepy little streets, and over
+the bridges that spanned the narrow canals, dreaming in the shadows of
+the palaces.
+
+We moved with half-conscious steps till we came to the silver expanse
+of the Grand Canal, where, at the ferry, darkled a little brood of black
+gondolas, into one of which we got, and were rowed noiselessly to the
+thither side, where we took our way toward the land-gate of our palace
+through the narrow streets of the parish of San Barnaba, and the campo
+before the ugly facade of the church; or else we were rowed directly to
+the water-gate, where we got out on the steps worn by the feet of the
+Giustiniani of old, and wandered upward through the darkness of the
+stairway, which gave them a far different welcome of servants and lights
+when they returned from an evening's pleasure in the Piazza. It seemed
+scarcely just; but then, those Giustiniani were dead, and we were alive,
+and that was one advantage; and, besides, the loneliness and desolation
+of the palace had a peculiar charm, and were at any rate cheaper than
+its former splendor could have been. I am afraid that people who live
+abroad in the palaces of extinct nobles do not keep this important fact
+sufficiently in mind; and as the Palazzo Giustiniani is still let in
+furnished lodgings, and it is quite possible that some of my readers may
+be going to spend next summer in it, I venture to remind them that if
+they have to draw somewhat upon their fancy for patrician accommodations
+there, it will cost them far less in money than it did the original
+proprietors, who contributed to our selfish pleasure by the very thought
+of their romantic absence and picturesque decay. In fact, the Past is
+everywhere like the cake of proverb: you cannot enjoy it and have it.
+
+And here I am reminded of another pleasure of modern dwellers in
+Venetian palaces, which could hardly have been indulged by the
+patricians of old, and which is hardly imaginable by people of this day,
+whose front doors open upon dry land: I mean to say the privilege of
+sea-bathing from one's own threshold. From the beginning of June
+till far into September all the canals of Venice are populated by the
+amphibious boys, who clamor about in the brine, or poise themselves for
+a leap from the tops of bridges, or show their fine, statuesque figures,
+bronzed by the ardent sun, against the facades of empty palaces, where
+they hover among the marble sculptures, and meditate a headlong plunge.
+It is only the Venetian ladies, in fact, who do not share this healthful
+amusement. Fathers of families, like so many plump, domestic drakes,
+lead forth their aquatic broods, teaching the little ones to swim by
+the aid of various floats, and delighting in the gambols of the larger
+ducklings. When the tide comes in fresh and strong from the sea the
+water in the Grand Canal is pure and refreshing; and at these times
+it is a singular pleasure to leap from one's door-step into the swift
+current, and spend a half-hour, very informally, among one's neighbors
+there. The Venetian bathing-dress is a mere sketch of the pantaloons of
+ordinary life; and when I used to stand upon our balcony, and see some
+bearded head ducking me a polite salutation from a pair of broad,
+brown shoulders that showed above the water, I was not always able
+to recognize my acquaintance, deprived of his factitious identity of
+clothes. But I always knew a certain stately consul-general by a vast
+expanse of baldness upon the top of his head; and it must be owned,
+I think, that this form of social assembly was, with all its
+disadvantages, a novel and vivacious spectacle. The Venetian ladies,
+when they bathed, went to the Lido, or else to the bath-houses in front
+of the Ducal Palace, where they saturated themselves a good part of the
+day, and drank coffee, and, possibly, gossiped.
+
+I think that our balconies at Palazzo Giustiniani were even better
+places to see the life of the Grand Canal from than the balcony of Casa
+Falier, which we had just left. Here at least we had a greater stretch
+of the Canal, looking, as we could, up either side of its angle. Here,
+too, we had more gondola stations in sight, and as we were nearer the
+Rialto, there was more picturesque passing of the market-boats. But if
+we saw more of this life, we did not see it in greater variety, for
+I think we had already exhausted this. There was a movement all night
+long. If I woke at three or four o'clock, and offered myself the novel
+spectacle of the Canal at that hour, I saw the heavy-laden barges go
+by to the Rialto, with now and then also a good-sized coasting schooner
+making lazily for the lagoons, with its ruddy fire already kindled for
+cooking the morning's meal, and looking very enviably cosey. After our
+own breakfast we began to watch for the gondolas of the tourists of
+different nations, whom we came to distinguish at a glance. Then the
+boats of the various artisans went by, the carpenter's, the mason's, the
+plasterer's, with those that sold fuel, and vegetables, and fruit, and
+fish, to any household that arrested them. From noon till three or four
+o'clock the Canal was comparatively deserted; but before twilight it was
+thronged again by people riding out in their open gondolas to take the
+air after the day's fervor. After nightfall they ceased, till only at
+long intervals a solitary lamp, stealing over the dark surface, gave
+token of the movement of some gondola bent upon an errand that could not
+fail to seem mysterious or fail to be matter of fact. We never wearied
+of this oft-repeated variety, nor of our balcony in any way; and when
+the moon shone in through the lovely arched window and sketched its
+exquisite outline on the floor, we were as happy as moonshine could make
+us.
+
+Were we otherwise content? As concerns Venice, it is very hard to say,
+and I do not know that I shall ever be able to say with certainty. For
+all the entertainment it afforded us, it was a very lonely life, and we
+felt the sadness of the city in many fine and not instantly recognizable
+ways. Englishmen who lived there bade us beware of spending the whole
+year in Venice, which they declared apt to result in a morbid depression
+of the spirits. I believe they attributed this to the air of the
+place, but I think it was more than half owing to her mood, to her old,
+ghostly, aimless life. She was, indeed, a phantom of the past, haunting
+our modern world,--serene, inexpressibly beautiful, yet inscrutably and
+unspeakably sad. Remembering the charm that was in her, we often sigh
+for the renewal of our own vague life there,--a shadow within the
+shadow; but remembering also her deep melancholy, an involuntary shiver
+creeps over us, and we are glad not to be there. Perhaps some of you who
+have spent a summer day or a summer week in Venice do not recognize this
+feeling; but if you will remain there, not four years as we did, but a
+year or six months even, it will ever afterwards be only too plain. All
+changes, all events, were affected by the inevitable local melancholy;
+the day was as pensive amidst that populous silence as the night; the
+winter not more pathetic than the long, tranquil, lovely summer. We
+rarely sentimentalized consciously, and still more seldom openly, about
+the present state of Venice as contrasted with her past glory.
+
+I am glad to say that we despised the conventional poetastery about her;
+but I believe that we had so far lived into sympathy with her, that,
+whether we realized it or not, we took the tone of her dispiritedness,
+and assumed a part of the common experience of loss and of hopelessness.
+History, if you live where it was created, is a far subtler influence
+than you suspect; and I would not say how much Venetian history, amidst
+the monuments of her glory and the witnesses of her fall, had to do in
+secret and tacit ways with the prevailing sentiment of existence, which
+I now distinctly recognize to have been a melancholy one. No doubt this
+sentiment was deepened by every freshly added association with memorable
+places; and each fact, each great name and career, each strange
+tradition as it rose out of the past for us and shed its pale lustre
+upon the present, touched us with a pathos which we could neither trace
+nor analyze.
+
+I do not know how much the modern Venetians had to do with this
+impression, but something I have no question. They were then under
+Austrian rule; and in spite of much that was puerile and theatrical in
+it, there was something very affecting in their attitude of what may
+best be described as passive defiance. This alone made them heroic, but
+it also made them tedious. They rarely talked of anything but politics;
+and as I have elsewhere said, they were very jealous to have every one
+declare himself of their opinion. Hemmed in by this jealousy on one
+side, and by a heavy and rebellious sense of the wrongful presence of
+the Austrian troops and the Austrian spies on the other, we forever felt
+dimly constrained by something, we could not say precisely what, and we
+only knew what, when we went sometimes on a journey into free Italy, and
+threw off the irksome caution we had maintained both as to patriotic and
+alien tyrants. This political misery circumscribed our acquaintance
+very much, and reduced the circle of our friendship to three or four
+families, who were content to know our sympathies without exacting
+constant expression of them. So we learned to depend mainly upon passing
+Americans for our society; we hailed with rapture the arrival of a
+gondola distinguished by the easy hats of our countrymen and the pretty
+faces and pretty dresses of our countrywomen. It was in the days of our
+war; and talking together over its events, we felt a brotherhood with
+every other American.
+
+Of course, in these circumstances, we made thorough acquaintance with
+the people about us in the palace. The landlord had come somehow into
+a profitable knowledge of Anglo-Saxon foibles and susceptibilities; but
+his lodgings were charming, and I recognize the principle that it is not
+for literature to make its prey of any possibly conscious object. For
+this reason, I am likewise mostly silent concerning a certain _attache_
+of the palace, the right-hand man and intimate associate of the
+landlord. He was the descendant of one of the most ancient and noble
+families of Italy,--a family of popes and cardinals, of princes and
+ministers, which in him was diminished and tarnished in an almost
+inexplicable degree. He was not at all worldly-wise, but he was a man
+of great learning, and of a capacity for acquiring knowledge that I have
+never seen surpassed. He possessed, I think, not many shirts on earth;
+but he spoke three or four languages, and wrote very pretty sonnets in
+Italian and German. He was one of the friendliest and willingest souls
+living, and as generous as utter destitution can make a man; yet he had
+a proper spirit, and valued himself upon his name. Sometimes he brought
+his great-grandfather to the palace; a brisk old gentleman in his
+nineties, who had seen the fall of the Republic and three other
+revolutions in Venice, but had contrived to keep a government pension
+through all, and now smiled with unabated cheerfulness upon a world
+which he seemed likely never to leave.
+
+The palace-servants were two, the gondolier and a sort of
+housekeeper,--a handsome, swarthy woman, with beautiful white teeth and
+liquid black eyes. She was the mother of a pretty little boy, who was
+going to bring himself up for a priest, and whose chief amusement was
+saying mimic masses to an imaginary congregation. She was perfectly
+statuesque and obliging, and we had no right, as lovers of the beautiful
+or as lodgers, to complain of her, whatever her faults might have been.
+As to the gondolier, who was a very important personage in our palatial
+household, he was a handsome bashful, well-mannered fellow, with a
+good-natured blue eye and a neatly waxed mustache. He had been ten years
+a soldier in the Austrian army, and was, from his own account and from
+all I saw of him, one of the least courageous men in the world; but
+then no part of the Austrian system tends to make men brave, and I
+could easily imagine that before it had done with one it might give him
+reasons enough to be timid all the rest of his life. Piero had not very
+much to do, and he spent the greater part of his leisure in a sort
+of lazy flirtation with the women about the kitchen-fire, or in the
+gondola, in which he sometimes gave them the air. We always liked him;
+I should have trusted him in any sort of way, except one that involved
+danger. It once happened that burglars attempted to enter our rooms,
+and Piero declared to us that he knew the men; but before the police, he
+swore that he knew nothing about them. Afterwards he returned privately
+to his first assertion, and accounted for his conduct by saying that
+if he had borne witness against the burglars, he was afraid that their
+friends would jump on his back (_saltarmi adosso_), as he phrased it,
+in the dark; for by this sort of terrorism the poor and the wicked have
+long been bound together in Italy. Piero was a humorist in his dry way,
+and made a jest of his own caution; but his favorite joke was, when
+he dressed himself with particular care, to tell the women that he was
+going to pay a visit to the Princess Clary, then the star of
+Austrian society. This mild pleasantry was repeated indefinitely with
+never-failing effect.
+
+More interesting to us than all the rest was our own servant, Bettina,
+who came to us from a village on the mainland. She was very dark, so
+dark and so Southern in appearance as almost to verge upon the negro
+type; yet she bore the English-sounding name of Scarbro, and how she
+ever came by it remains a puzzle to this day, for she was one of the
+most pure and entire of Italians. I mean this was her maiden name; she
+was married to a trumpeter in the Austrian service, whose Bohemian name
+she was unable to pronounce, and consequently never gave us. She was a
+woman of very few ideas indeed, but perfectly honest and good-hearted.
+She was pious, in her peasant fashion, and in her walks about the city
+did not fail to bless the baby before every picture of the Madonna.
+She provided it with an engraved portrait of that Holy Nail which was
+venerated in the neighboring church of San Pantaleon; and she apparently
+aimed to supply it with playthings of a religious and saving character
+like that piece of ivory, which resembled a small torso, and which
+Bettina described as "A bit of the Lord, Signor,"--and it was, in fact,
+a fragment of an ivory crucifix, which she had somewhere picked up.
+To Bettina's mind, mankind broadly divided themselves into two races,
+Italians and Germans, to which latter she held that we Americans in some
+sort belonged. She believed that America lay a little to the south of
+Vienna and in her heart I think she was persuaded that the real national
+complexion was black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw
+at our house were merely a multitude of exceptions. But with all her
+ignorance, she had no superstitions of a gloomy kind: the only ghost she
+seemed ever to have heard of was the spectre of an American ship captain
+which a friend of Piero's had seen at the Lido. She was perfectly kind
+and obedient, and was deeply attached in an inarticulate way to the
+baby, which was indeed the pet of the whole palace. This young lady
+ruled arbitrarily over them all, and was forever being kissed and
+adored. When Piero went out to the wine-shop for a little temperate
+dissipation, he took her with him on his shoulder, and exhibited her to
+the admiring gondoliers of his acquaintance; there was no puppetshow, no
+church festival, in that region to which she was not carried; and
+when Bettina, and Giulia, and all the idle women of the neighborhood
+assembled on a Saturday afternoon in the narrow alley behind the palace
+(where they dressed one another's thick black hair in fine braids soaked
+in milk, and built it up to last the whole of the next week), the baby
+was the cynosure of all hearts and eyes. But her supremacy was yet more
+distinguished when, late at night, the household gave itself a feast of
+snails stewed in oil and garlic, in the vast kitchen. There her anxious
+parents have found her seated in the middle of the table with the bowl
+of snails before her, and armed with a great spoon, while her vassals
+sat round, and grinned their fondness and delight in her small
+tyrannies; and the immense room, dimly lit, with the mystical implements
+of cookery glimmering from the wall, showed like some witch's cavern,
+where a particularly small sorceress was presiding over the concoction
+of an evil potion or the weaving of a powerful spell.
+
+From time to time we had fellow-lodgers, who were always more or less
+interesting and mysterious. Among the rest there was once a French lady,
+who languished, during her stay, under the disfavor of the police, and
+for whose sake there was a sentinel with a fixed bayonet stationed
+day and night at the palace gate. At last, one night, this French lady
+escaped by a rope-ladder from her chamber window, and thus no doubt
+satisfied alike the female instinct for intrigue and elopement and
+the political agitator's love of a mysterious disappearance. It
+was understood dimly that she was an author, and had written a book
+displeasing to the police.
+
+Then there was the German baroness and her son and daughter, the last
+very beautiful and much courted by handsome Austrian officers; the son
+rather weak-minded, and a great care to his sister and mother, from his
+propensity to fall in love and marry below his station; the mother very
+red-faced and fat, a good-natured old creature who gambled the summer
+months away at Hombourg and Baden and in the winter resorted to Venice
+to make a match for her pretty daughter. Then, moreover, there was that
+English family, between whom and ourselves there was the reluctance and
+antipathy, personal and national, which exists between all right-minded
+Englishmen and Americans. No Italian can understand this just and
+natural condition, and it was the constant aim of our landlord to
+make us acquainted. So one day when he found a member of each of these
+unfriendly families on the neutral ground of the grand _sala_, he
+introduced them. They had, happily, the piano-forte between them, and I
+flatter myself that the insulting coldness and indifference with which
+they received each other's names carried to our landlord's bosom a
+dismay never before felt by a good-natured and well-meaning man.
+
+The piano-forte which I have mentioned belonged to the landlord, who was
+fond of music and of all fine and beautiful things; and now and then
+he gave a musical _soiree_, which was attended, more or less
+surreptitiously, by the young people of his acquaintance. I do not
+think he was always quite candid in giving his invitations, for on one
+occasion a certain count, who had taken refuge from the glare of the
+_sala_ in our parlor for the purpose of concealing the very loud-plaided
+pantaloons he wore, explained pathetically that he had no idea it was
+a party, and that he had been so long out of society, for patriotic
+reasons, that he had no longer a dress suit. But to us they were very
+delightful entertainments, no less from the great variety of character
+they afforded than from the really charming and excellent music which
+the different amateurs made; for we had airs from all the famous operas,
+and the instrumentation was by a gifted young composer. Besides, the
+gayety seemed to recall in some degree the old, brilliant life of
+the palace, and at least showed us how well it was adapted to social
+magnificence and display.
+
+We enjoyed our whole year in Palazzo Giustiniani, though some of the
+days were too long and some too short, as everywhere. From heat we
+hardly suffered at all, so perfectly did the vast and lofty rooms answer
+to the purpose of their builders in this respect. A current of sea air
+drew through to the painter's garden by day; and by night there was
+scarcely a mosquito of the myriads that infested some parts of Venice.
+In winter it was not so well. Then we shuffled about in wadded gowns and
+boots lined with sheep-skin,--the woolly side in, as in the song. The
+passage of the _sala_, was something to be dreaded, and we shivered
+as fleetly through it as we could, and were all the colder for the
+deceitful warmth of the colors which the sun cast upon the stone floor
+from the window opening on the court.
+
+I do not remember any one event of our life more exciting than that
+attempted burglary of which I have spoken. In a city where the police
+gave their best attention to political offenders, there were naturally a
+great many rogues, and the Venetian rogues, if not distinguished for the
+more heroic crimes, were very skillful in what I may call the _genre_
+branch of robbing rooms through open windows, and committing all kinds
+of safe domestic depredations. It was judged best to acquaint Justice
+(as they call law in Latin countries) with the attempt upon our
+property, and I found her officers housed in a small room of the Doge's
+Palace, clerkly men in velvet skull-caps, driving loath quills over the
+rough official paper of those regions. After an exchange of diplomatic
+courtesies, the commissary took my statement of the affair down in
+writing, pertinent to which were my father's name, place, and business,
+with a full and satisfactory personal history of myself down to the
+period of the attempted burglary. This, I said, occurred one morning
+about daylight, when I saw the head of the burglar peering above the
+window-sill, and the hand of the burglar extended to prey upon my
+wardrobe.
+
+"Excuse me, Signor Console," interrupted the commissary, "how could you
+see him?"
+
+"Why, there was nothing in the world to prevent me. The window was
+open."
+
+"The window was open!" gasped the commissary. "Do you mean that you
+sleep with your windows open?"
+
+"Most certainly!"
+
+"Pardon!" said the commissary, suspiciously. "Do _all_ Americans sleep
+with their windows open?"
+
+"I may venture to say that they all do, in summer," I answered; "at
+least, it's the general custom."
+
+Such a thing as this indulgence in fresh air seemed altogether foreign
+to the commissary's experience; and but for my official dignity, I am
+sure that I should have been effectually browbeaten by him. As it was,
+he threw himself back in his armchair and stared at me fixedly for some
+moments. Then he recovered himself with another "Per-doni!" and,
+turning to his clerk, said, "Write down that, _according to the American
+custom_, they were sleeping with their windows open." But I know that
+the commissary, for all his politeness, considered this habit a relic
+of the times when we Americans all abode in wigwams; and I suppose it
+paralyzed his energies in the effort to bring the burglars to justice,
+for I have never heard anything of them from that day to this.
+
+The truth is, it was a very uneventful year; and I am the better
+satisfied with it as an average Venetian year on that account. We
+sometimes varied the pensive monotony by a short visit to the cities of
+the mainland; but we always came back to it willingly, and I think
+we unconsciously abhorred any interruption of it. The days, as they
+followed each other, were wonderfully alike, in every respect. For eight
+months of summer they were alike in their clear-skied, sweet-breathed
+loveliness; in the autumn, there where the melancholy of the falling
+leaf could not spread its contagion to the sculptured foliage of Gothic
+art, the days were alike in their sentiment of tranquil oblivion and
+resignation which was as autumnal as any aspect of woods or fields
+could have been; in the winter they were alike in their dreariness and
+discomfort. As I remember, we spent by far the greater part of our time
+in going to the Piazza, and we were devoted Florianisti, as the Italians
+call those that lounge habitually at the Caffe Florian. We went every
+evening to the Piazza as a matter of course; if the morning was long, we
+went to the Piazza; if we did not know what to do with the afternoon, we
+went to the Piazza; if we had friends with us, we went to the Piazza;
+if we were alone, we went to the Piazza; and there was no mood or
+circumstances in which it did not seem a natural and fitting thing to
+go to the Piazza. There were all the prettiest shops; there were all the
+finest caffes; there was the incomparable Church of St. Mark; there was
+the whole world of Venice.
+
+Of course, we had other devices besides going to the Piazza; and
+sometimes we spent entire weeks in visiting the churches, one after
+another, and studying their artistic treasures, down to the smallest
+scrap of an old master in their darkest chapel; their history, their
+storied tombs, their fictitious associations. Very few churches escaped,
+I believe, except such as had been turned into barracks, and were
+guarded by an incorruptible Austrian sentinel. For such churches as did
+escape, we have a kind of envious longing to this day, and should find
+it hard to like anybody who had succeeded better in visiting them. There
+is, for example, the church of San Giobbe, the doors of which we haunted
+with more patience than that of the titulary saint: now the sacristan
+was out; now the church was shut up for repairs; now it was Holy Week
+and the pictures were veiled; we had to leave Venice at last without a
+sight of San Giobbe's three Saints by Bordone, and Madonna by Bellini,
+which, unseen, outvalue all the other Saints and Madonnas that we looked
+at; and I am sure that life can never become so aimless, but we shall
+still have the desire of some day going to see the church of San Giobbe.
+If we read some famous episode of Venetian history, we made it the
+immediate care of our lives to visit the scene of its occurrence; if
+Ruskin told us of some recondite beauty of sculpture hid away in
+some unthought-of palace court, we invaded that palace at once; if in
+entirely purposeless strolls through the city, we came upon anything
+that touched the fancy or piqued curiosity, there was no gate or
+bar proof against our bribes. What strange old nests of ruin, what
+marvellous homes of solitude and dilapidation, did we not wander into!
+What boarded-up windows peer through, what gloomy recesses penetrate!
+I have lumber enough in my memory stored from such rambles to load the
+nightmares of a generation, and stuff for the dreams of a whole people.
+Does any gentleman or lady wish to write a romance? Sir or madam, I know
+just the mouldy and sunless alley for your villain to stalk his victim
+in, the canal in which to plunge his body, the staircase and the hall
+for the subsequent wanderings of his ghost; and all these scenes and
+localities I will sell at half the cost price; as also, balconies for
+flirtation, gondolas for intrigue and elopement, confessionals for the
+betrayal of guilty secrets. I have an assortment of bad and beautiful
+faces and picturesque attitudes and effective tones of voice; and a
+large stock of sympathetic sculptures and furniture and dresses, with
+other articles too numerous to mention, all warranted Venetian, and
+suitable to every style of romance. Who bids? Nay, I cannot sell, nor
+you buy. Each memory, as I hold it up for inspection, loses its subtle
+beauty and value, and turns common and poor in my hawker's fingers.
+
+Yet I must needs try to fix here the remembrance of two or three
+palaces, of which our fancy took the fondest hold, and to which it yet
+most fondly clings. It cannot locate them all, and least of all can it
+place that vast old palace, somewhere near Cannaregio, which faced upon
+a campo, with lofty windows blinded by rough boards, and empty from top
+to bottom. It was of the later Renaissance in style, and we imagined
+it built in the Republic's declining years by some ruinous noble,
+whose extravagance forbade his posterity to live in it, for it had that
+peculiarly forlorn air which belongs to a thing decayed without being
+worn out. We entered its coolness and dampness, and wandered up the wide
+marble staircase, past the vacant niches of departed statuary, and came
+on the third floor to a grand portal which was closed against us by a
+barrier of lumber. But this could not hinder us from looking within, and
+we were aware that we stood upon the threshold of our ruinous noble's
+great banqueting-hall, where he used to give his magnificent _feste da
+ballo_. Lustrissimo was long gone with all his guests; but there in the
+roof were the amazing frescos of Tiepolo's school, which had smiled down
+on them, as now they smiled on us, great piles of architecture, airy
+tops of palaces, swimming in summer sky, and wantoned over by a joyous
+populace of divinities of the lovelier sex that had nothing but their
+loveliness to clothe them and keep them afloat; the whole grandiose and
+superb beyond the effect of words, and luminous with delicious color.
+How it all rioted there with its inextinguishable beauty in the solitude
+and silence, from day to day, from year to year, while men died, and
+systems passed, and nothing remained unchanged but the instincts of
+youth and love that inspired it! It was music and wine and wit; it was
+so warm and glowing that it made the sunlight cold; and it seemed
+ever after a secret of gladness and beauty that the sad old palace was
+keeping in its heart against the time to which Venice looks forward when
+her splendor and opulence shall be indestructibly renewed.
+
+There is a ball-room in the Palazzo Pisani, which some of my readers
+may have passed through on their way to the studio of the charming
+old Prussian painter, Nerly; the frescos of this are dim and faded and
+dusty, and impress you with a sense of irreparable decay, but the noble
+proportions and the princely air of the place are inalienable, while
+the palace stands. Here might have danced that Contarini who, when his
+wife's necklace of pearls fell upon the floor in the way of her partner,
+the King of Denmark, advanced and ground it into powder with his foot
+that the king might not be troubled to avoid treading on it; and here,
+doubtless, many a gorgeous masquerade had been in the long Venetian
+carnival; and what passion and intrigue and jealousy, who knows? Now the
+palace was let in apartments, and was otherwise a barrack, and in the
+great court, steadfast as any of the marble statues, stood the Austrian
+sentinel. One of the statues was a figure veiled from head to foot, at
+the base of which it was hard not to imagine lovers, masked and hooded,
+and forever hurriedly whispering their secrets in the shadow cast in
+perpetual moonlight.
+
+Yet another ball-room in yet another palace opens to memory, but this
+is all bright and fresh with recent decoration. In the blue vaulted roof
+shine stars of gold; the walls are gay with dainty frescos; a gallery
+encircles the whole, and from this drops a light stairway, slim-railed,
+and guarded at the foot by torch-bearing statues of swarthy Eastern
+girls; through the glass doors at the other side glimmers the green and
+red of a garden. It was a place to be young in, to dance in, dream in,
+make love in; but it was no more a surprise than the whole palace to
+which it belonged, and which there in that tattered and poverty-stricken
+old Venice was a vision of untarnished splendor and prosperous fortune.
+It was richly furnished throughout all its vast extent, adorned with
+every caprice and delight of art, and appointed with every modern
+comfort The foot was hushed by costly carpets, the eye was flattered by
+a thousand beauties and prettinesses. In the grates the fires were
+laid and ready to be lighted; the candles stood upon the mantles; the
+toilet-linen was arranged for instant use in the luxurious chambers; but
+from basement to roof the palace was a solitude; no guest came there,
+no one dwelt there save the custodian; the eccentric lady of whose
+possessions it formed a part abode in a little house behind the palace,
+and on her door-plate had written her _vanitas vanitatum_ in the
+sarcastic inscription, "John Humdrum, Esquire."
+
+Of course she was Inglese; and that other lady, who was selling off the
+furniture of her palace, and was so amiable a guide to its wonders in
+her curious broken English, was Hungarian. Her great pride and joy,
+amidst the objects of _vertu_ and the works of art, was a set of
+"Punch," which she made us admire, and which she prized the more because
+she had always been allowed to receive it when the government prohibited
+it to everybody else. But we were Americans, she said; and had we ever
+seen this book? She held up the "The Potiphar Papers," a volume which
+must have been inexpressibly amused and bewildered to find itself there,
+in that curious little old lady's hand.
+
+Shall I go on and tell of the palace in which our strange friend Padre
+L------ dwelt, and the rooms of which he had filled up with the fruits
+of his passion for the arts and sciences; the anteroom he had frescoed
+to represent a grape-arbor with a multitude of clusters overhead; the
+parlor with his oil-paintings on the walls, and the piano and melodeon
+arranged so that Padre L------ could play upon them both at once; the
+oratory turned forge, and harboring the most alchemic-looking apparatus
+of all kinds; the other rooms in which he had stored his inventions
+in portable furniture, steam-propulsion, rifled cannon, and perpetual
+motion; the attic with the camera by which one could photograh one's
+self,--shall I tell of this, and yet other palaces? I think there is
+enough already; and I have begun to doubt somewhat the truth of my
+reminiscences, as I advise the reader to do.
+
+Besides, I feel that the words fail to give all the truth that is in
+them; and if I cannot make them serve my purpose as to the palaces,
+how should I hope to impart through them my sense of the glory and
+loveliness of Venetian art? I could not give the imagination and the
+power of Tintoretto as we felt it, nor the serene beauty, the gracious
+luxury of Titian, nor the opulence, the worldly magnificence of Paolo
+Veronese. There hang their mighty works forever, high above the reach
+of any palaverer; they smile their stately welcome from the altars and
+palace-walls, upon whoever approaches them in the sincerity and love
+of beauty that produced them; and thither you must thus go if you would
+know them. Like fragments of dreams, like the fleeting
+
+
+     "Images of glimmering dawn,"
+
+I am from time to time aware, amid the work-day world, of some happiness
+from them, some face or form, some drift of a princely robe or ethereal
+drapery, some august shape of painted architecture, some un-namable
+delight of color; but to describe them more strictly and explicitly, how
+should I undertake?
+
+There was the exhaustion following every form of intense pleasure, in
+their contemplation, such a wear of vision and thought, that I could not
+call the life we led in looking at them an idle one, even if it had
+no result in after times; so I will not say that it was to severer
+occupation our minds turned more and more in our growing desire to
+return home. For my own part personally I felt keenly the fictitious and
+transitory character of official life. I knew that if I had become fit
+to serve the government by four years' residence in Venice, that was
+a good reason why the government, according to our admirable system,
+should dismiss me, and send some perfectly unqualified person to take my
+place; and in my heart also I knew that there was almost nothing for me
+to do where I was, and I dreaded the easily formed habit of receiving, a
+salary for no service performed. I reminded myself that, soon or late, I
+must go back to the old fashion of earning money, and that it had better
+be sooner than later. Therefore, though for some reasons it was the
+saddest and strangest thing in the world to do, I was on the whole
+rejoiced when a leave of absence came, and we prepared to quit Venice.
+
+Never had the city seemed so dream-like and unreal as in this light of
+farewell,--this tearful glimmer which our love and regret cast upon it.
+As in a maze, we haunted once more and for the last time the scenes
+we had known so long, and spent our final, phantasmal evening in the
+Piazza; looked, through the moonlight, our mute adieu to islands and
+lagoons, to church and tower; and then returned to our own palace, and
+stood long upon the balconies that overhung the Grand Canal. There the
+future became as incredible and improbable as the past; and if we had
+often felt the incongruity of our coming to live in such a place, now,
+with tenfold force, we felt the cruel absurdity of proposing to live
+anywhere else. We had become part of Venice; and how could such atoms of
+her fantastic personality ever mingle with the alien and unsympathetic
+world?
+
+The next morning the whole palace household bestirred itself to
+accompany us to the station: the landlord in his best hat and coat, our
+noble friend in phenomenal linen, Giulia and her little boy, Bettina
+shedding bitter tears over the baby, and Piero, sad but firm, bending
+over the oar and driving us swiftly forward. The first turn of the Canal
+shut the Palazzo Giustiniani from our lingering gaze, a few more curves
+and windings brought us to the station. The tickets were bought, the
+baggage was registered; the little oddly assorted company drew itself
+up in a line, and received with tears our husky adieux. I feared there
+might be a remote purpose in the hearts of the landlord and his retainer
+to embrace and kiss me, after the Italian manner, but if there was, by
+a final inspiration they spared me the ordeal. Piero turned away to
+his gondola; the two other men moved aside; Bettina gave one long,
+hungering, devouring hug to the baby; and as we hurried into the
+waiting-room, we saw her, as upon a stage, standing without the barrier,
+supported and sobbing in the arms of Giulia.
+
+It was well to be gone, but I cannot say we were glad to be going.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Venetian Life, by William  Dean Howells
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