of my own, except as allusion to them may go to illustrate Life in Venice;
and positively he shall suffer no annoyance from the fleas and bugs which,
in Latin countries, so often get from travelers' beds into their books.

Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors
concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves hereafter,
but which no doubt form a large part of every one's associations with the
name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that pathetic swindle, the
Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will hear it mentioned
without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the taciturn justice of
the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the Serenest Republic's
policy. When I entered it the first time I was at the pains to call about
me the sad company of those who had passed its corridors from imprisonment
to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent tourists have done the same. I
was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward that I had, on this occasion, been
in very low society, and that the melancholy assemblage which I then
conjured up was composed entirely of honest rogues, who might indeed have
given as graceful and ingenious excuses for being in misfortune as the
galley-slaves rescued by Don Quixote,--who might even have been very
picturesque,--but who were not at all the material with which a well-
regulated imagination would deal. The Bridge of Sighs was not built till
the end of the sixteenth century, and no romantic episode of political
imprisonment and punishment (except that of Antonio Foscarini) occurs in
Venetian history later than that period. But the Bridge of Sighs could
have nowise a savor of sentiment from any such episode, being, as it was,
merely a means of communication between the Criminal Courts sitting in the
Ducal Palace, and the Criminal Prison across the little canal.
Housebreakers, cut-purse knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a
poetic interest to places which have known them; and yet these are the
only sufferers on whose Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has