One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the
stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and the
byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief part
in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian theatre),
and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters. We could not help
seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the villain of the piece,
pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all tears and desperation, upon
the stage; and we were dismayed to behold the injured husband and his
abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the scenes. All the shabbiness of
the theatre was perfectly apparent to us; we saw the grossness of the
painting and the unreality of the properties. And yet I cannot say that
the play lost one whit of its charm for me, or that the working of the
machinery and its inevitable clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the
least. There was so much truth and beauty in the playing, that I did not
care for the sham of the ropes and gilding, and presently ceased to take
any note of them. The illusion which I had thought an essential in the
dramatic spectacle, turned out to be a condition of small importance.

It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at
another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE,
which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to
every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in
Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without
learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it
in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help seeing from my
point of observation the sham and cheapness with which Venice is usually
brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the same time, it has
never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise and regard, nor the