INTRODUCTION xxvii

and painful associations-especially the great square, filled as it is with spiritless loungers, and a degenerate race of caterers for their amusement-the distant successors of the jugglers and tumblers of old times, now consisting chiefly of broken-down violin players and other refuse of the orchestra, ragged children who achieve revolutions upon their heads and hands and beg for broken biscuits among the eaters of ices-the crumbs from the rich man’s table-and exhibitors, not of puppet shows, for Venice is too lazy now to enjoy Punch, but of dramatic spectacles composed of figures pricked out in paper, and turned in a procession round a candle. Among which sources of entertainment the Venetians lounge away their evenings all the summer long, helped a little by the Austrian bands which play for them, more or less every night, the music fitted to their taste, Verdi, and sets of waltzes. If Dante had seen these people, he would assuredly have added another scene to the Inferno-a Venetian corner, with a central tower of St. Mark’s with red-hot stories, up which the indolent Venetians would have been continually driven at full speed, and dropped from the parapet into a lagoon of hot café noir. Nor is the excitement of the lower classes less painful than the indolence of the upper on the days of drawing lottery tickets-days recurring but too often-and, as it seems to me, deeply condemnatory of the financial and educational policy of the Government. These lotteries are, I think, the only thing in which the Austrian Government is inexcusably wrong; they deserve to be embarrassed in their finances when they adopt such means of taxation. I do not know a more melancholy sight than the fevered and yet habitually listless groups of the poorer population gathered in the porches of St. Mark’s, and clustered about its pillars, not for any religious service, but to wait for the declaration of the prize tickets from the loggia of Sansovino!

“You will, however, rather wish I had never written to you from Venice at all, than written to give these accounts of it; but there is little else to give, and I fear that now there is but one period of beauty or of honour still remaining for her. Perhaps even this may be denied to her, and she may be gradually changed, by the destruction of old buildings and erection of new, into a modern town-a bad imitation of Paris. But if not, and the present indolence and ruinous dissipation of the people continue, there will come a time when the modern houses will be abandoned and destroyed, St. Mark’s Place will again be, what it was in the early ages, a green field, and the front of the Ducal Palace and the marble shafts of St. Mark’s will be rooted in wild violets and wreathed with vines. She will be beautiful again then, and I could almost wish that the time might come quickly, were

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