looked with pathetic sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The
name of the bridge was given by the people from that opulence of
compassion which enables the Italians to pity even rascality in
difficulties. [Footnote: The reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said
in a few words, much better than I have said in many, the same thing of
sentimental errors about Venice:--

"The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere
efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of daylight
must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth remembering, or
whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs, which
is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice
ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with breathless
interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address at one of his great
ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years
after Faliero's death."--_Stories of Venice_.]

Political offenders were not confined in the "prison on each hand" of the
poet, but in the famous _pozzi_ (literally, wells) or dungeons under
the Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been
uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for their
exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom some
foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to be
afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say now
that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with prison-
life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped. They are
not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants could have
suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden casing of
the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the state to
inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.