does the purple satin lover whom he is
conducting to a rendezvous, and who sits jauntily
at the prow, sweeping the strings of his guitar
with an agile hand, and calling up echoes from
the distant lagunes— little does that cavalier
reck that the treacherous boatman has
betrayed him to his enemy—that at this
very moment, behind the waterspout of the
Palazza Boffi, the wicked Cavaliere Lazaro di
Hardoppari is waiting for him with two bravi
and three poignards, and that at the moment
when his white satin enchantress, the Lady
Bianca, is descending the marble staircase to
meet him, and before even he has time to
invoke his patron saint, San Giacomo Robinsino,
he will be laid at length on the Boffi
terrace, his guitar shattered, his head towards
the stairs, and his toes turned up. Woeful
history! followed by the despair, madness
(in white satin), and death of the Lady
Bianca, the tragical end of Hardoppari
(poisoned by his brother the Cardinal in a
venison pasty), and the remorse of Sproggino,
the gondolier; who, after performing amazing
feats of piracy in the Grecian archipelago,
founded a convent and asylum for dissolute
boatmen, died in the odour of sanctity, and
was canonised. (His picture winked only last
Pentecost.) Such is Venice, please your
ladyship;" and the whole army of poets, engravers,
sentimentalists, and young ladies break forth
into such a strumming of guitars and bleating
of "Beautiful Venice, city of sunshine!" "The
merry gondolier," the engravers accompanying
them with such force with their burins on
their steel plates— that I am fain to stop my
ears, the din is so great.

Can this city, so brave in purple velvet and
white satin, condescend ever to wear plain
clothes? Ay, that she can— very plain
clothes: rags, dirty, greasy, unmitigated rags.
Study the pictures of an artist, whose plain
clothes' name was Antonio da Canal, whose
gala name is Canaletti, and who painted what
he saw and knew— and you will discover these
rags, sweltering too on the palsied, ulcerated
limbs of beggars in the gay Piazza di San
Marco. Not confining yourself to Canaletti,
consult a certain Goldoni, one Gozzi, and
one known as Filippante. They will show
you Venice in plain clothes in the last century:
—mud in the canals, griping poverty in the
palaces, impudent intolerance in the churches,
rapacious waiters in the coffee-houses (waiters
in Venice!), and oh, realism of realisms! oh,
quietus of romance! the Doge of Venice in a
bag-wig, powdered, and a cocked hat! The
Carnival, they will tell you, was merely a
harvest-time for theatrical managers, silly
Venetian "gents," who had a difficulty to
play the fool with a mask on with any greater
degree of completeness than they were in the
habit of doing with uncovered faces; and
other classes, not here to be mentioned. They
will inform you that no inconsiderable portion
of the Venetian nobility lived by selling
counterfeits of their pictures to amateurs;
by farming gaming-tables, and by trafficking
in the honour of their daughters.
They will show you that the race of
Jaffiers, Pierres, and Belvideras is quite
extinct; that the lion's mouth is grown rusty;
and that poignards are not more in use than
they are now in every wine shop in the
Levant, when foreign sailors fall a quarrelling,
As for the gondolas, instead of the arabesques
and the tapestry you will see shabby little
boats with an awning like a carrier's cart,
painted with funereal black, and rowed by a
swarthy varlet, who has preserved at least
the traditions of Venetian mosaic work in the
darning and patching of his garments, who
talks a patois unintelligible to many Italians,
and who is egregiously extortionate. Such is
"beautiful Venice." Not that I am for
denying the claims of the Bride of the Adriatic
for romance in toto; but I stand for the
existence of the plain clothes as well as the
masquerade suit, for the existence of such
homely things as Venice turpentine and
Venetian blinds, as well as Venetian Doges and
Venetian Brides. There is plenty of
sustenance for the romantic minds in Venice even
to-day, when the Austrian "autograph," as
Professor Dandolo expressed it, has planted
his banners on its towers. There is romance
in that strange fantastic basilica, which brings
old Rome, Byzantium, Greece, and modern
Italy to the mind at once; in the hot summer
nights, when the Venetians lounge outside
the cafés, and listen to Donizetti's music
played by a Croat or Sclavonian band, and
watch the padded Austrian officers twirling
their tawny moustachios; in the stones of
that dreary Prison-palace, where so many
true men have chafed to death beneath the
burning piombi, for daring to think or to
write that man has a heritage of freedom,
which all the Autocrats in the universe cannot
wholly waste or alienate.

And, ere I leave Italy, one glance at the
wardrobe of another Italian city— Naples. She
has her court dress: Cardinals in red stockings,
Virgins in jewelled petticoats, the bay,
Vesuvius and Pompeii. But what a suit of
plain clothes! what squalid tatters! what
looped and windowed raggedness! Those
walking rag-shops in monkish garb, those
dismal scarecrows, the romantic lazzaroni,
those fetters and felon dresses, those hideous
dungeons by the blue sea! Imagination
incorrigible, in three vols. 8vo, just out (see
Evening paper) persists in seeing only Naples
the sunny, the romantic, the beautiful "Vedi
Napoli e poi morire." "See Naples and die,"
says Imagination. "See Naples," says Reality
sternly in the shape of Mr. Gladstone, "see
St. Januarius' sham blood, and Poerio's fetters,
and Ferdinand's Shrapnel shells, and then die
with shame and horror."

Paris during the Regency of Gaston of
Orleans. An escape from plain clothes, at
least here:—we know all about that dear
delightful period. The free, jovial Regent,