left. It was only partly paved with brick, and was very dirty. The houses
which surrounded it were on the outside old and shabby, and, even in this
Venice of lofty edifices, remarkably high. A wooden bridge crossed a vile
canal to another open space, where once congregated the merchants who sell
antique furniture, old pictures, and objects of vertu. They are now,
however, found everywhere in the city, and most of them are on the Grand
Canal, where they heap together marvelous collections, and establish
authenticities beyond cavil. "Is it an original?" asked a young lady who
was visiting one of their shops, as she paused before an attributive
Veronese, or--what know I?--perhaps a Titian. "_Si, signora,
originalissimo_!"

I do not understand why any class of Jews should still remain in the
Ghetto, but it is certain, as I said, that they do remain there in great
numbers. It may be that the impurity of the place and the atmosphere is
conducive to purity of race; but I question if the Jews buried on the
sandy slope of the Lido, and blown over by the sweet sea wind--it must
needs blow many centuries to cleanse them of the Ghetto--are not rather
to be envied by the inhabitants of those high dirty houses and low dirty
lanes. There was not a touch of any thing wholesome, or pleasant, or
attractive, to relieve the noisomeness of the Ghetto to its visitors; and
they applauded, with a common voice, the neatness which had prompted
Andrea the gondolier to roll up the carpet from the floor of his gondola,
and not to spread it again within the limits of that quarter.

In the good old times, when pestilence avenged the poor and oppressed upon
their oppressors, what grim and dismal plagues may not have stalked by
night and noonday out of those hideous streets, and passed the marble
bounds of patrician palaces, and brought to the bedsides of the rich and
proud the filthy misery of the Ghetto turned to poison! Thank God that the