and monastery of San Grazia. This murder-hole of the Adriatic is called Marani, and to this day it is forbidden to fish in its accursed depth. To-day it looks not only innocent, but gloriously bright."

According to Lord Byron, this communication by a gloomy bridge, or covered gallery, is divided by a stone wall into a passage and a cell. The state dungeons, called pozzi, or wells, were sunk in the thick walls of the palace; and the prisoner, when taken out to die, was conducted across the gallery to the other side, and being then led back into the other compartment, or cell, upon the bridge, was there strangled. The low portal through which the criminal was taken into this cell is now walled up, but the passage is still open. The pozzi are under the flooring of the chamber at the foot of the bridge. There were formerly twelve; but on the first arrival of the French, the Venetians hastily blocked or broke up the deeper of these dungeons. "You may still, however, descend by a trap-door, and crawl down through holes, half choked by rubbish," continues his lordship, "to the depth of two stairs below the first range. If you are in want of consolation for the extinction of patrician power, perhaps you may find it there; scarcely a ray of light glimmers into the narrow gallery which leads to the cells, and the places of confinement themselves are totally dark. A small hole in the wall admitted the damp air of the passages, and served for the introduction of the prisoner's food. A wooden pallet, raised a foot from the ground, was the only furniture. The conductors tell you that a light was not allowed. The cells are about five paces in length, two and a half in width, and seven in height. They are directly beneath one another, and respiration is somewhat difficult in the lower holes. Only one person was found when the republicans descended into these hideous recesses, and he is said to have been confined sixteen years.

'But the inmates of the dungeons beneath had left traces of their repentance, or of their despair, which are still visible, and may, perhaps, owe something to recent ingenuity. Some of the detained appear to have offended against, and others to have belonged to, the sacred body; not only from their signatures, but from the churches and belfries which they have scratched against the walls."

With great vividness, power, and feeling, says Mr. Whyte

"Like an unrighteous and an unburied ghost'

do I nightly haunt that Tartarus of antique masonry, the interior canals of Venice, uniformly entering or departing from them by the Bridge of Sighs. To me their hideous height, their appalling gloom (for the meridian cannot touch their waters, and the moon glides like a spectre over their huge parapets), their bewildering intricacies, their joyless weltering floods, the countless bridges, each with its sculptured monsterheads yawning as if to swallow up the silently sweeping gondola in its arch of shadow; their deep dead silence only broken by the sullen plash of the oar, the dreary word of warning uttered by the gondoliers before turning a sharp angle, or the shrill rattling creak of innumerable crickets; but principally those old Gothic posterns with deepribbed archways, like rat-holes in proportion to the enormous piles, and their thresholds level with the water, some blockaded with ponderous doors, others developing their long withdrawn passage by a lamp, that not only makes darkness visible, but frightful; while others (as in the Martinengo palace to-night) disclose wide pillared halls, and stately staircases, and moonlight courts-to me, I say, all these attributes of the interior of Venice are irresistible. Were you to see these old porticoes by a summer's daylight, you would not fail to find an old fig-tree in broad leaf and full fruit, or a lattice-work of vine, most pleasantly green in its deep court, where sun and shadow hold divided reign; while the hundred-shaped windows of those gloomy walls are variegated with geranium and carnation, and perhaps a sweet dark eye fairer than either.

They are so obviously the symbols of her hollow oligarchy itself, which to the world

and to the sun in heaven (like the brave palaces on her chief canal) displayed a gallant guise, at once sublime, glittering, and august; while, within, its tortuous policy was twisted into murky and inextricable labyrinths, of which Necessity, Secresy, and Suspicion, formed the keystone; where Danger lurked at every winding, and whose darkling portals were watched by Mystery, and Stratagem, and Disgrace, and Fate!

"It is impossible to scrutinise these dread abysms of mansions without experiencing that strange mixture of repugnance and attraction which certain spectacles are wont to call forth in animated nature. It is impossible to mark their melancholy and downfallen, yet portentous aspect, without deeming them at once the theatre and monument of those secret, black, and midnight crimes,' which history and tradition ascribe to the domestic, as well as to the state policy, of this Gehenna of fourteen centuries' dominion.

'Visendus Ater flumine languido
Cocytus errans.'

"Perhaps it would be difficult to conceive anything more abhorrent to the soul and body of man than the time, manner, and place of death, distinguishing those executions which have rendered the gulfs of the Canal Orfano immemorably infamous.

"To me, the element, in its most serene and smiling state, wears a look of furtive menace; and I am free to confess, that even when gliding on a midsummer night over that sweetest lake of Derwentwater, beneath the shadows of its moonlit isles and fair pavilions, I have not been without a certain sensation of uncomfortable awe. But what must have been the feelings of the victim, whether criminal or innocent, who, from this accurst Maranna, cast around him his last straining look of agony, and uttered his last cry of supplication or despair! The conviction that his family, parent, wife, or son, were at that hour of horror in profound ignorance sometimes of his very absence, often of its cause, or at least, only perplexed with conjecture, and always unconscious of its horrible event, must have constituted no trifling pang in that mortal hour. Then that old familiar, though melancholy water, more terrible to his feelings than the dreariest wilderness of ocean! For, girdling the dusky horizon, could he not see the domes and campaniles of Venice, perhaps the very lamps in his own palace windows, from whose festal saloons he had just been decoyed; just distant enough to be beyond the reach of help; but too, too near for that despairing gaze, that recognised and bade adieu for ever at the same glance? There, too, were not those nestling lovely islands, each with its convent tower gleaming to the moon, and from which the sonorous bells were tolling, the sacred anthems swelling for the last time on his ear! Alas! those chanted masses were not for his conflicting soul; yea, it would have a strange comfort to feel that passing bell was proclaiming to the world that his spirit was parting from its scarcely worn weeds! But no even that miserable solace was prohibited to him; he was to be obliterated from society, and his inexorable judges had decreed that society was not to know that he was gone. Το grave for his dust, no monument for his name, to palliato his faults and perpetuate his virtues. The ghastly element that moaned and shuddered under the gondola, as if remorseful for its own involuntary cruelties, was to spread its weltering pall over his hearseless bones."

The first sight of the grand square of St. Mark, especially when the stranger comes upon it unexpectedly, after threading the narrow canals of the city, is extremely striking. It is an oblong area, about eight hundred feet by three hundred and fifty, and flagged over. Two sides of it consist of regular buildings, of rich and varied architecture, with deep arcades. On the north side are two edifices which take their name from having been originally erected for the accommodation of the procurators of St. Mark. On the western side is the grand staircase of the Imperial Palace.

The principal objects which meet the eye at the further end of this grand architectural

avenue, are the Cathedral, the Orologio, and the Campanile. In front of the church are three tall, red, mast-like poles, supported on handsome bases of bronze, from which, in former days, the flags of Candia, Cyprus, and the Morea-the three vassal kingdoms of the haughty republic-floated in the wind. They are still decorated, on festival days, with gaudy streamers. The Orologio, or Clock Tower, forms the termination of the left hand, or northern side.

The Campanile is interesting, as having been the scene of Galileo's astronomical observations while resident at Venice. It was erected about the year 1150 on older foundations. The ascent is by means of a series of inclined planes, "broad enough for a coach;" and one of the French kings, Evelyn says, actually went up on horseback. The bell is of great size; and, to a person on the summit, the sound is almost deafening, and produces the most unpleasant sensations. A magnificent panoramic view is obtained from the summit. The eye can distinctly trace, from this elevation, every channel and shoal in the lagoon; the long, narrow chain of islands that separates them from the main; the wide and busy part just beneath; "the whole city lying," as Evelyn says, "in the bosom of the sea, in the shape of a lute;" the branching canals and numerous bridges (said to amount to four hundred and fifty); the sinuous course of the Great

Canal, broken only by the apparently slender and graceful arch of the Rialto; the distant suburbs, occupying the surrounding islands, with the low, flat shores of Lombardy, the rugged Euganean hills, backed by the Tyrolese Alps, and far across the Gulf of Trieste, the blue mountains of Istria, rising like distant clouds above the eastern horizon. The busy crowds in St. Mark's Place immediately below look like ants crawling about without any apparent object."

To adopt Mr. Ruskin's description of the Church of St. Mark, after alluding to an English cathedral:-" There rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe that we may see it far away; a multitude of pillars and white domes clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light; a treasure heap, it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother of pearl, hollowed bencath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory,-sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm-leaves and lilies, and grapes, and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptered and robed to the fcet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the

gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatralike, 'their bluest veins to kiss'-the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs all beginning and ending in the cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life-angels and the signs of heaven, and the labours of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches, edged with scarlet flowers, a confusion of delight, amid which the breasts of the Greek horses are scen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted on a blue field, covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers of the Lido shore had been first bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst.

"Between that grim cathedral of England and this what an interval! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for instead of the restless crowd, hoarsevoiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every motion, with the tints hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years."

The Piazza is almost the only place in which the population can assemble for the purpose of public festivity. On this spot, therefore, passed the strangest vicissitudes :

"The sea, that emblem of uncertainty,

Changed not so fast, for many and many an age,

As this small spot. To-day 'twas full of masks,

And lo! the madness of the carnival

The monk, the nun, the holy legate, masked;

To-morrow came the scaffold and the wheel;

And he died there, by torch-light, bound and gagged,
Whose name and crime they knew not."

The bridge called the Rialto, a name originally derived from the island of Rivo-alto, the cradle of Venice, was commenced in 1588, and completed in 1591. It is situated nearly in the middle of the Great Canal, which traverses the whole city, dividing it into two nearly equal portions. It is formed of one elegant elliptic arch, about eighty-three feet wide. A double row of shops-twenty-five on each side-are built upon the bridge, which divide it, in fact, into three distinct though narrow streets. As it is of great height in the centre, it is ascended and descended by long flights of steps.

The church of St. Rocco has been erroneously ascribed to St. Rocco; its architect was Scalfarotto. The school of St. Rocco has been admired, but the architecture is more fanciful than beautiful. The walls of this ancient convent are covered with frescoes by Tintoretto, among which are some fine representations of the ravages of the plague. Mr. Rose describes these paintings as peculiarly interesting. He had previously seen at Florence many works of this master; but these, he says, "viewed separately, give no more idea of the powers of the painter, than a stray canto of Ariesto does of those of the poet. The seeing of this grand assemblage of his paintings produces something like the effect of reading the Orlando; and Tintoretto may be truly characterised as the Ariosto of pictures."

Other churches of Venice we have no space to particularise, only remembering that the one of Alexander III., at San Aponal, is at present a house of correction for beggars. An inscription over a gateway records that the Pope coming here incog., when chased by Frederick Barbarossa, the gondoliers would not row him over to Carità, and he slept all night on the beach, where is now a small niche chapel, with a taper.

The Dogana, or custom-house, claims notice from its connexion with the commerce that long formed the glory of Venice. The present edifice has, however, been erected only about two hundred years. The Arsenal, which opens on the port at no great distance from the quarter of St. Mark, was, at one time, the finest and largest in Europe. Venice has been famed for its manufactory of beads for more than four hundred years. Sheaves of glass, waving like corn, may be seen in the laps of women, who sit assorting the vitreous harvest according to its size. In another stage, a number of men, with shears, are clipping the long threads into very small bits, the elements of the beads. In the next room lie fragments of three hundred colours, and feathers innumerable, filling forty or fifty baskets. A very distressing part of the operation is to be seen below, where, on approaching a long shed, open on one side to the air, and glowing with thirty fires in all its length, stand a number of wretches, whose daily and hourly employment it is to receive the bits of sifted glass, cut as we have just seen, and to melt them into beads, by means of charcoal and sand, in the midst of these dreadful fireblasts, which they are constantly feeding, and within three feet of which they stand, streaming at every pore, stooping to draw out the cauldron and pour its contents upon a tray, which they then, in this state of their bodies, drag forth into the air. A new copper of cold materials already awaits them, which must be thrust forthwith into the furnace, and the superintendent is there to see that there is no remission. The turning, the feeding, the renewed sweat, cease not till night comes to put a pause to miseries which are to last for life! No wonder that the workmen all die young.

Venice has long been the great book-shop of the south. It still prints for Italy in general, and for modern Greece, and exports largely to Germany. Most of the gondolieri, it is said, as well as the artificers and tradesmen, can read and write. There are sixteen or eighteen public schools, each corporation of tradesmen having one: the buildings appropriated to them are mostly handsome, adorned with marble statues and pictures. There are also four musical schools for instructing young women, which are efficiently conducted. The public library is frequented by few, but there are several circulating libraries for novels.

The most interesting printing establishment at Venice is that conducted by the Armenian monks in the Isola San Lazzaro, from which the convent derives a considerable part of its revenue. When all monastic institutions were abolished by the French, in 1810, this was excepted by a special decree. The island, which is entirely occupied by the convent and its gardens, is between four and five miles from the city. The fathers, who are about forty in number, have the reputation of being very learned. The prior in 1816, a noble Armenian of high birth, spoke English with great accuracy, and had translated the prayer of St. Nierses, the patron of the order, into fourteen languages. One principal object of the founder was, to afford to young Armenians the means of a liberal education. None but youth of that nation are admissible, and they are taken at an early age. The chief design of the press, which is worked by the hands of the monks themselves, is the preservation of the Armenian language, and the multiplication of works in that dialect. The library is said to be rich in Armenian manuscripts. These labours, together with the cultivation of the little vineyard which surrounds the cloister, and dips into the sea, leaves not much idle time to these truly respectable ecclesiastics. "Venice," says a modern traveller, "was always an unintelligible place, and is still unintelligible. I knew before that it was situated on many islands; that its highways were