and decrepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have care of the
inmates. It is a good end enough, but I think it would be the true
compensation if all the rubbish of the old cloister were cleared from the
area of those walls, and a great garden planted in the space, where lovers
might whisper their wise nonsense, and children might romp and frolic,
till the crumbling, masonry forgot its old office of imprisonment and the
memory of its prisoners. For here, one could only think of the moping and
mumming herd of monks, who were certainly not worth remembering, while the
fame of Paolo Sarpi, and the good which he did, refused to be localized.
That good is an inheritance which has enriched the world; but the share of
Venice has been comparatively small in it, and that of this old convent
ground still less. I rather wondered, indeed, that I should have taken the
trouble to look up the place; but it is a harmless, if even a very
foolish, pastime to go seeking for the sublime secret of the glory of the
palm in the earth where it struck root and flourished. So far as the life-
long presence and the death of a man of clear brain and true heart could
hallow any scene, this ground was holy; for here Sarpi lived, and here in
his cell he died, a simple Servite friar--he who had caught the bolts of
excommunication launched against the Republic from Rome, and broken them
in his hand,--who had breathed upon the mighty arm of the temporal power,
and withered it to the juiceless stock it now remains. And yet I could not
feel that the ground _was_ holy, and it did not make me think of
Sarpi; and I believe that only those travelers who invent in cold blood
their impressions of memorable places ever have remarkable impressions to
record.

Once, before the time of Sarpi, an excommunication was pronounced against
the Republic with a result as terrible as that of the later interdict was
absurd. Venice took possession, early in the fourteenth century, of
Ferrara, by virtue of a bargain which the high contracting parties--the