piety and learning. He founded at Sebaste, therefore, a religious order of
which the seat was presently removed to Constantinople, where the friars
met with so much persecution from Armenian heterodoxy that it was again
transferred, and fixed at Modone in Morea. That territory falling into the
hands of the Turks, the Mechitharists fled with their leader to Venice,
where the Republic bestowed upon them a waste and desolate island, which
had formerly been used as a place of refuge for lepers; and the monks made
it the loveliest spot in all the lagoons.

The little island has such a celebrity in travel and romance, that I feel
my pen catching in the tatters of a threadbare theme. And yet I love the
place and its people so well, that I could scarcely pass it without
mention. Every tourist who spends a week in Venice goes to see the
convent, and every one is charmed with it and the courteous welcome of the
fathers. Its best interest is the intrinsic interest attaching to it as a
seat of Armenian culture; but persons who relish the cheap sentimentalism
of Byron's life, find the convent all the more entertaining from the fact
that he did the Armenian language the favor to study it there, a little.
The monks show his autograph, together with those of other distinguished
persons, and the Armenian Bible which he used to read. I understood from
one of the friars, Padre Giacomo Issaverdanz, that the brothers knew
little or nothing of Byron's celebrity as a poet while he studied with
them, and that his proficiency as an Armenian scholar was not such as to
win high regard from them.

I think most readers who have visited the convent will recall the pleasant
face and manners of the young father mentioned, who shows the place to
English-speaking travelers, and will care to know that Padre Giacomo was
born at Smyrna, and dwelt there in the family of an English lady, till he
came to Venice, and entered on his monastic life at San Lazzaro.