Tintoretto, delight me with their golden hues, and rich carnation tints. "The eloquent blood" seems to speak in each transparent cheek, and tingle in each delicate finger. Then how admirably are the fleshy portions relieved by the rich and varied colours of the draperies, and accessories! One of these fine pictures seems to light up a room, and the eye always turns to them with pleasure.

The walls of the great council chamber present an epitome of the doings, thinkings, and feelings of Venice in her palmy days. On them are painted, in colours less fading than the glory they were meant to illustrate, the various conquests achieved by the republic. Nor are religious or political events excluded from this historical panorama, in which doges, emperors, kings, ambassadors, and vanquished foes, are introduced with the apotheosis of Venice, ever triumphant.

This mixture of history and allegory is very unsatisfactory to the beholders, although it permitted the artists a latitude that gave scope for introducing much decoration, generally considered effective. Venice, among the gods, looks down on the victory of Stefano Contarini, on the Lake Garda, or on that of the naval one achieved by Francesco Bembo, while presentations of ambassadors, receptions of emperors, and the return of conquering doges, are heterogeneously mingled.

When gazing on the portraits of the doges in the

great council hall, the eye turns with a melancholy interest to the place that should have held that of Marino Faliero, and where the following inscription is inscribed on a black ground:-" Hic est locus Marini Falithri, decapitati pro criminibus." Byron

has excited for Marino Faliero an interest and sympathy, which historical facts do not justify; for a doge who could violate his oath of allegiance, and, instigated by a spirit of vengeance against a state, because it punished not with what he deemed to be a necessary severity, an insult offered to him, must have been wanting in generosity, as well as in a sense of duty to his country, that entitle him to little respect. Had his motives for plotting to subvert the government, of which he was the head, been purely patriotic, he would have merited the pity of posterity; but as a retaliation for a personal affront they were most unworthy.

Nevertheless, Byron has thrown a halo over Marino Faliero; and made us forget the weak and doting old husband, in the interest with which he has invested the insulted sovereign. Hence I looked more at the place once destined for Faliero's portrait, than at all the portraits of the other doges-such is the power of genius!

How must a Venetian feel humiliated when he gazes on the decaying walls of the magnificent palaces of his once proud city, or contemplates the mementos of her glory perpetuated by artists to whom she gave birth, and on whose canvas he finds the only traces

of those conquests of which the victors were once so vain!

"I stood at Venice on the Bridge of Sighs" today, and involuntarily repeated Byron's fine lines on the subject. To appreciate their truth and beauty one must have visited the place, for the reflections are at once so natural and profound, that all who can think, and see the spot that gave rise to them, will experience the same, although incapable of expressing them as he has done :

I stood at Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand :

I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying glory smiles

O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged lion's marble piles,

Where Venice sat in state, throned on her hundred isles!

She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers:

And such she was ;-her daughters had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deem'd their dignity increased.
In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone-but beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade-but nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,

The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!
But unto us she hath a spell beyond

Her name in story, and her long array

Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond
Above the dogeless city's vanished sway;
Ours is a trophy which will not decay
With the Rialto; Shylock and the Moor,
And Pierre, can not be swept or worn away-
The keystones of the arch! though all were o'er,

For us repeopled were the solitary shore.

Byron has created for his memory an enviable fellowship with that of Shakspeare in the minds of at least all the compatriots of both, who wander through Venice; for the attention is continually drawn from the historical recollections of the place, to the associations awakened by both these poets. One feels as if Venice could not be strange ground to us, who from infancy have learned to know its whereabouts from the immortal bard, who with, as it were, an intuitive knowledge of the place, its manners and customs, has imbued our minds with them, and rendered this City of the Sea familiar as our household names to us. I could no more pass the Rialto without thinking of Shakspeare, than I could see the Bridge of Sighs without remembering Byron.

The last mentioned place is nevertheless well calculated to excite other, and gloomy recollections. How many victims have passed the Bridge of Sighs never to return, with hearts chilled with terror and dismay, by the certainty of the near approach of a violent death, or the scarcely less to

be dreaded imprisonment in the damp and dreary dungeons beneath, or in the burning Piombi above. The heart shudders when the imagination conjures up the misery that this gallery must have witnessed, and the very air seems pregnant with heaviness and sorrow, as if the grief which gave it its cognomen, had left behind it those sighs that burst from so many tortured hearts.

I was pressed to enter the prisons, but a description of their horrors satisfied my curiosity; and the Bridge of Sighs had rendered me anxious to bask again in the sunshine, which never appeared more delightful to the senses, than after having left that gloomy spot.

The near vicinity of the splendid palace and the fearful prisons has something in it very appalling to the feelings. This close proximity of luxury and wretchedness, pleasure and despair, is terrible. They reminded me of an occurrence witnessed in my early youth, and which I never have forgotten, so powerfully did it affect me. It was at a ball, my first ball too, anticipated, as a young girl's first ball only can be, for weeks before: thought of the last thing before going to sleep, and the first on awaking. The sallede-bal was brilliantly illuminated, and decorated with flowers; gay music resounded, and joyous faces were seen on every side. I was delighted, danced as if dancing was an enjoyment of which one could never tire; and, in short, felt all the elasticity of spirits peculiar to a girl at her first ball.