meagre mess of maize pottage for dinner to-day,
but he will say to them, 'Rejoice, my children.
To-morrow we devour an Englishman!' He is
waiting for me, I am certain, in St. Mark's
Place, calmly confident that I cannot do without
him. It is only a question of time. I have a
shivering foreknowledge of what he will show
me, and what he will tell me about the Golden
Staircase, and the Hall of the Ambassadors,
and the veiled niche where Marino Faliero's
picture should be, and the Dogana, and the
Bridge of Sighs. Not to-day, oh, valet de
place! I ask for but twenty-four hours' grace,
and then I will go into leading-strings with the
alacrity of a fool going to the correction of the
stocks. Let me have but this one day with the
poodle at the prow, and let us 'do' VENICE for
ourselves."

In this city of a hundred and seventy-five
thousand inhabitants I did not know one living
soul. Does it matter, when every instant you.
can commune with millions of the mighty dead?
In a churchyard you seldom feel lonely. You can
almost dispense with the clergyman's white
pony, quietly browsing on parishioners that have
sprouted up into salad. The dead by daylight are
no such very bad company. If their tombstones
lie, you can gird at them for their fibbing, and
they have never a word to answer. You can pick
out simple truthful tombs now and then, of good
old dames and yeomen who in their livestime you
feel sure were friendly, and merry, and single-
hearted. Beyond a poodle, you require nothing
more that has life in it, during your first day in
Venice. For a season turn away from the quick.
This place belongs to the dead. The dead alive,
the modern Venetians, have buried their dead-
departed—their history, their wealth, their
happiness, their love, in stately mausoleums of many-
coloured marbles. These sepulchres are not
whited. They have the reverent hue of age.
Time has beaten upon them with his wing, and
the strong pinion has worn down the sharp edges
and blunted the chisel's fine tracery; but the
marble is, after all, too hard for his scythe, and
Time hacks at the palaces in vain.

I lighted a cigarette, and was lazy, and not
ashamed of myself; activity would be almost a
crime in this voiceless city. Industry—where
was the use of being industrious? People don't
come here to work, but to idle. From the loom
there hangs a gorgeous piece of Venice stuff,
cunningly 'broidered, shot with gold and silver
thread. But it is a fragment, rent and frayed.
Warp and woof are tarnished and faded. And
the loom is motionless, and the shuttle flies no
more, aud the weaver has sickened and died.

Thus having comfortably settled myself, and
in reply to the boatman's inquiry as to whither
I wished to be conducted, having informed him
that my view did not extend beyond a "piccolo
giro" of an hour's duration, in other words,
that he might go anywhere he liked about
Venice, which he construed into a stroll from
the Palazzo Corner to the Rialto and back again
—I had full leisure to inspect the apartment of
which I had become a denizen. The worst of the
matter is, that in presuming to say anything about
Venice, you can scarcely, if you have any modesty
left about you, avoid a sensation of nervous
shame lest what you are saying should have been
said by ten thousand persons in terms analogous,
if not identical, ten thousand times before. For
instance, is there, can there be, anything new in
the way of description to be written about the
interior of a gondola? The gondola is your first
acquaintance in Venice, and it is your last. It
brings you from the railway terminus to your
hotel on your arrival, and it takes you to the rail
or the steamer when you depart; consequently
the tourist is usually as minute in his notes of its
appearance and peculiarities as of that of the
packet-ship which conveys him across the
Atlantic. The only healing salve I can put to my
conscience is this. When you have had a
remarkably good dinner—say at Vefour's, or the
Four Seasons at Munich—there is, I conceive,
no social law against your expatiating on the
perfection of the bill of fare and the wine card
on the morrow, although good dinners are given,
and good gourmets dine, in the Palais Royal and
the Maximilian Strasse every day in the year.
A gondola is the first and most delightful dish in
the intellectual banquet spread out, in
permanence, on the Adriatic Sea; why then should not
I descant on its aspect, just as I might lovingly
dwell on the Charlotte or the Suprême I tasted
yesterday?

The outward gondola—the boat itself—it
would be impertinent to describe. See Turner,
see Roberts, see Stanfield,see Cooke,see Holland,
see Pyne, see Carl Haag, see Finden's tableaux,
see Heath's Landscape Annual, see the delightful
pictures of Mr. John Rogers Herbert, before
he took to painting St. Lawrence on the
gridiron, and St. Bartholomew being flayed alive.
For the gondolas of the past, see Canaletto.
The only quarrel I have with the admirable
artists just named—always excepting Antonio
da Canal, who never gave vent to his imagination,
and if he saw dirt and ugliness in Venice,
painted the dirty and the ugly in rude
juxtaposition to the pure and beautiful—is in the
persistency with which they strive to make stay-
at-home Englishmen believe that gay-coloured
gondolas are at all common in Venice. There
never was a greater error. Mr. Turner's
gondolas were of all the colours of the rainbow. It
is true that he might have excused himself on
the score that their sides are generally of
polished wood, and that his radiant hues were
merely the reflexion of the sunrise and the
sunset. But the tourist, who looks for truth, knows
that the pervading hue of the Venetian
gondola is deep funereal black; and that the
mortuary appearance of the craft is heightened by
the ebony-like carvings, by the metal prow
and rullocks, which have an odd guise of being
made of coffin-plates beaten out, by the brazen
knobs and beads and plates on the door, and
by the serried rows of black tufts, like sable
ostrich plumes stunted in their growth on the
housing over the tilt. Among five hundred
gondolas—there are, it is said, over four thousand