while affecting, in the Italian manner, to be perfectly informed on the
subject. I was passed, with my curiosity, from one to another, till I fell
into the hands of a kind of foreman, to whom I put my questions anew. He
was a man of Napoleonic beard, and such fair red-and-white complexion that
he impressed me as having escaped from a show of wax-works, and I was not
at all surprised to find him a wax figure in point of intelligence. He
seemed to think my questions the greatest misfortunes which had ever
befallen him, and to regard each suggestion of Sarpi--_tempo della
Repubblica--scomunica di Paolo Quinto_--as an intolerable oppression.
He could only tell me that on a certain spot (which he pointed out with
his foot) in the demolished church, there had been found a stone with
Sarpi's name upon it. The padrone, who had the contract for building the
new convent, had said,--"Truly, I have heard speak of this Sarpi;" but the
stone had been broken, and he did not know what had become of it.

And, in fact, the only thing that remembered Sarpi, on the site of the
convent where he spent his life, died, and was buried, was the little
tablet on the outside of the wall, of which the abbreviated Latin
announced that he had been Theologue to the Republic, and that his dust
was now removed to the island of San Michele. After this failure, I had no
humor to make researches for the bridge on which the friar was attacked by
his assassins. But, indeed, why should I look for it? Finding it, could I
have kept in my mind the fine dramatic picture I now have, of Sarpi
returning to his convent on a mild October evening, weary with his long
walk from St. Mark's, and pacing with downcast eyes,--the old patrician
and the lay-brother at his side, and the masked and stealthy assassins,
with uplifted daggers, behind him? Nay, I fear I should have found the
bridge with some scene of modern life upon it, and brought away in my
remembrance an old woman with an oil-bottle, or a straggling boy with a
tumbler, and a very little wine in it.