CHURCHES AND BEGGARS.

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own account addressing Heaven, opposite the altar which best he loved. Priests were attending to their duties with apparent unconcern at the various guides with their parties who crossed and recrossed in every direction, and walked round this pillar and round that. There is a crypt of St. Mark in the church and one down in the vaults; the latter is empty, as the floods which visit Venice caused the authorities to remove the body of the Saint into the church some hundred years ago. But walking about is the same in all the churches. They are so large, the service so continuous, and yet so disjointed, that any one goes in and out as he lists, beggars bothering him inside and outside. In the depth of yonder recess is a poor woman praying very devoutly. Heaven is in her thoughts; her prayers are for some far-off son, a bedridden husband or perhaps for the Church militant. Ah! sad mistake. You pass her; she jingles a money box; she importunes you by the patron saint of that very church. She pleads in vain. You do not believe in such devout annoyances, and inwardly wish that the Church of Rome were less friendly to the professional beggar. Her boxes at every corner for the poor, her civil officials who show us through her solemn aisles, crypts, and sacristies, we endeavour so to remunerate that they may not speak disparagingly of the "six Anglais." But from beggars within churches and beggars without churches, beggars at the porch, and beggars at the very altar, may the Holy Father Pio Nono find time to deliver us, and we shall not grudge him a tablet. In St. Mark's we saw one artist quietly copying a mosaic while the services were going on. He had all the appliances of his craft, but in such an immense building not one in twenty would see him, or feel any violence.

Of the 500

done to their notions of propriety. columns used in the constructing of St. Mark's; of the many many thousand piles driven into the lagoons to find it or its predecessors a site; of the millions of mosaics required to form floors and pictures; of the gold "brought" from Constantinople, and the cedar of Lebanon doors from somewhere else; of the elaborately engraved brass doors from some other somewhere; and of the pillars from the Temple of Solomon, I mean not to speak. Are they not written in the Italian Murrays and Bradshaws? Perhaps they are; but we have neither, and so cannot tell.

Leaving St. Mark's we went to the Palace of the Doges, a few yards off. It forms, like most public buildings in Italy, a quadrangle. It is now used in part for picture galleries, sculpture rooms, library, &c. "To what base uses may we return, Horatio!" At the end of the building, on each side of the street, I may add, lest I forget, are the famous columns holding the Lion of St. Mark, and the statue of St. Theodore, the protector of the Republic of Venice. They are but I may

poor affairs.

St. Mark's lion has got wings. also state that at the other side of St. Mark's are two lions, very old, very thin, and apparently turned out of some menagerie as unfit for use. The rooms are not all as they were in the days of the Doges, the French at their first revolution having done much mischief, and the Venice populace having upset the old standing arrangements in the prisons.

The Halls of the Doges are filled with paintings of their great victories over their enemies. The lion has been painter and, of course, the lion wins the fights, cases killing 30,000 Turks in three hours. The magnificent halls into which we were taken have

THE HALLS OF THE DOGES.

279

names connecting them with the Republic. One is the Council of This, another of That. A third is the Hall of the Three, who were selected by ballot from the names in the Golden Book, the said names being those of the men who had paid rates and taxes, were not convicted of crime, and 24 years of age. We should have called it the Parliamentary Voting List, and have nailed it on the Church doors. The Three selected one of themselves as Doge, the names of the two never being known even to each other; so that every man, or rather any man, might be one of the two, and yet not know his fellow. The Doges have their portraits round the hall, with the exception of one who turned traitor. His space is blank, and hence his name is better known than the others, as one naturally asks the reason why. Floors, ceilings, walls, stairs, balconies, are covered with paintings or marbles. Amongst the most noticeable is Tintoretto's large picture of the "Reception of the Blessed." It is 70 feet long, and called the largest in the world. But that is an error. Lord Lyndhurst's father painted a larger, showing the relief of the crew of the enemy's gunboats at Gibraltar; and Sir R. Ker Porter's picture of the "Storming of Seringapatam" was upwards of 200 feet long.

LETTER XLVI.

VENICE, THE

DOGE'S PALACE,

THE BRIDGE

OF SIGHS.

IN one room are two map blocks showing us to be a little nation in the fifteenth century. One of them is in Arabic, and has a mass of descriptive matter which I could not have conceived anything but letterpress could give. Wood engraving was at a high point in 1440. [I had sent home a short description of these maps, but substitute for it a fuller and far more accurate one from the never-wearying pen of Mr. Beamont, written at my request.*]

I now hasten to the Prisons and Bridge of Sighs. The theory of the Venetian Republic was that demagogues must be put down, and that on the most comprehensive scale. Hence into a box, through a hole in a wall shown us, any one might drop a letter charging any one else with a crime against the Republic. "Where are mine accusers?" was then a useless query. Down to a gloomy prison you were sent. Certainly stones a prison make, and iron bars a cage, in Venice. They beat Peter's prison at Rome out and out for horror. On your trial the Three had powerful means of extorting confessions from youracks, thumbscrews. If you had powerful friends, or courageous witnesses, you might escape; if not, you *See Appendix B.

THE DOGE'S PALACE.

281

were walked over a covered bridge to cells, out of which none came alive, and the poor wretch was supposed to sigh as he looked out of the grated windows of the bridge which showed him Venice for the last time. In dreary cells-one of which we entered-he waited till it suited the convenience of the Three to come and see him strangled, put into a sack, and gondoled away to a distance, and then dropped into the Adriatic, the waters of which feed the canals. Apart from their their deeds of darkness, however, the Doges are supposed to have acted for the glory and safety of the Republic. We were glad to get out of the prisons, and see more of the halls and rooms. Amongst the books I observed a "Codex Diplomaticus" from 686 to 1512; amongst the statues one to Marco Polo, who was a native of Venice. Titian and Canova -both Venetians-are fairly represented in the Galleries, especially Titian. A very fine "Adoration" of his introduces a Doge on his knees. The room of the Syndic is full of his paintings, elaborately framed, or painted on gorgeous ceilings. Albert Dürer's "Christ,' with which we are familiar from engravings, is here, and the old hall for meeting foreign Ministers is filled entirely by Paul Veronese's pictures the most beautiful in Venice. Without naming them in order, I call attention to a few whose whereabouts one would do well to know. For instance, of Tintorettos, there are the ambassadors appearing before Frederic I.; the naval battle of Salvore, and capture of Otho; the first and the second conquest of Constantinople by the French and the Venetians; the capture of Zara; capture of Riva; Brescia defended by the Venetians; the capture of Gallipoli; the forge of Vulcan; the wedding of St. Catherine, &c.