My limits leave me no room to dilate upon our visit to the Accademia.
Indeed, in the visit itself, we could do little more than pause here
and there as a Titian or Tintoretto cast up in the multitude of
pictures, or when we came before some specimen of the very early
masters, of whose works there are many dating so far back as the end
of the fourteenth century. There were some pictures representing
transactions in Venice, of not much later date, which I regarded with
interest, as preserving to us the appearance of men and things in that
age; particularly one depicting some miracle, in which several grave
ecclesiastics are seen swimming about in the Grand Canal, while ladies
look on from windows and balconies, which I convinced myself still
exist there. I must be equally brief with that place which no
countryman of Shakspeare can avoid visiting, though the present Rialto
is, after all, later than his time. It is of a curious structure as a
bridge; there being three rows of building along it, containing shops,
with two roadways for passengers. One crosses backwards and forwards,
muttering: 'On the Rialto thou hast rated me,' &c.; goes distractedly
into a shop, to purchase a breastpin, as a memorial of the place; and
then plunges down the stairs, to resume his place in the gondola. We
took a couple of hours to pay a visit to the Armenian monastery, on
the island of San Lazzaro--the place to which Byron resorted in order
to study the Armenian language. It is a curious old establishment,
with some modern activity about it in the diffusion of literature; the
monks having a printing-office in tolerable briskness, whence they
issue books in various languages. We were delighted with the flush of
beautiful flowering, from the oleander bushes in the central court,
and the vine-hung alleys in the garden behind. I must not forget, in
this hurried close of my adventure, the two moonlight sails we had
through those mysterious watery streets, where, the associations of