the many beautiful and costly things which the art of the establishment
produces. Here, besides pictures in mosaic, there are cunningly inlaid
tables and cabinets, caskets, rich vases of chalcedony mounted in silver,
and delicately wrought jewelry, while the floor is covered with a mosaic
pavement ordered for the Viceroy of Egypt. There are here, moreover, to be
seen the designs furnished by the Crown Princess of Prussia for the
mosaics of the Queen's Chapel at Windsor. These, like all other pictures
and decorations in mosaic, are completed in the establishment on the Grand
Canal, and are afterward put up as wholes in the places intended for them.

In Venice nothing in decay is strange. But it is startling to find her in
her old age nourishing into fresh life an art that, after feebly
preserving the memory of painting for so many centuries, had decorated her
prime only with the glories of its decline;--for Kugler ascribes the
completion of the mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to the
year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark's to the tenth or eleventh
centuries, when the Greek Church had already laid her ascetic hand on
Byzantine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed its motives,
and forbidden its inspirations. I think, however, one would look about him
in vain for other evidences of a returning prosperity in the lagoons. The
old prosperity of Venice, was based upon her monopoly of the most
lucrative traffic in the world, as we have already seen,--upon her
exclusive privileges in foreign countries, upon the enlightened zeal of
her government, and upon men's imperfect knowledge of geography, and the
barbarism of the rest of Europe, as well as upon the indefatigable
industry and intelligent enterprise of her citizens. America was still
undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only one known; the
people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty serfs, ruled and
ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world's ignorance, pride, and sloth
were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions of the day, which,