dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin
Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground--at the
end of Lord Byron's tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of the
Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed the
traitor's death to the people from between the two red columns in the
southern gallery of the palace;--that facade was not built till nearly a
century later.

I suppose,--always judging by my own average experience,--that besides
these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up scenes of
brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the brightest
picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight, romantic
adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old merry-
making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this way, the
conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is become as gross a
fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of which I have but
spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social dullness and
sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.

The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the whole
world's civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the city, doomed
four hundred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly (the Venetians
would be apt to tell you wholly) in the implacable anger, the inconsolable
discontent, with which the people regard their present political
condition.

If there be more than one opinion among men elsewhere concerning the means
by which Austria acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she holds the
province, there would certainly seem to be no division on the question in
Venice. To the stranger first inquiring into public feeling, there is