trouble, and they don't like trouble. Their delightful garrulous
language helps them to make Venetian life a long
conversazione. This language, with its soft elisions, its
odd transpositions, its kindly contempt for consonants and other
disagreeables, has in it something peculiarly human and
accommodating. If your gondolier had no other merit he would have
the merit that he speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit even-
-some people perhaps would say especially--when you don't
understand what he says. But he adds to it other graces which
make him an agreeable feature in your life. The price he sets on
his services is touchingly small, and he has a happy art of being
obsequious without being, or at least without seeming, abject.
For occasional liberalities he evinces an almost lyrical
gratitude. In short he has delightfully good manners, a merit
which he shares for the most part with the Venetians at large.
One grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one's
fondness is the frankness and sweetness of their address. That of
the Italian family at large has much to recommend it; but in the
Venetian manner there is something peculiarly ingratiating. One
feels that the race is old, that it has a long and rich
civilisation in its blood, and that if it hasn't been blessed by
fortune it has at least been polished by time. It hasn't a genius
for stiff morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in that
direction. It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the
true, and has been accused of cultivating the occasion to grasp
and to overreach, and of steering a crooked course--not to your
and my advantage--amid the sanctities of property. It has been
accused further of loving if not too well at least too often, of
being in fine as little austere as possible. I am not sure it is
very brave, nor struck with its being very industrious. But it