than their words, and few can resist their asking eyes and pleading "per carità."

There are ninety-seven churches in Venice, few of which will not reward a visit. Certainly twenty of them may be I called churches of first-rate interest. Their size, height, costly materials and elaborate construction are equaled by the boldness, novelty and beauty of their designs, and by the splendor of the painting, sculpture and carving with which they are filled. It seems as if all the Arts had met at their maturity and united to do their utmost for the ecclesiastical adornment of Venice. For the first time in our journey we find Sculpture occupying as large a space as Painting in our attention. They wait on each other, as sisters should, in these beautiful churches, where the altars are commonly wrought in elaborate bas-reliefs, while tombs of mingled architecture and sculpture occupy almost every foot of space in the walls. The ships of Venice must at some time have groaned under the weight of the marble, porphyry, red granite and other still more precious stones for which the East was ransacked, wherewith to furnish the magnificent requirements of the Church, in one of its proudest realms and at its most powerful day. The sack and spoil of the Crusaders, pillars and friezes from temples and mosques, are wrought into these churches, and a statue of Hercules and a Mahometan capital form part of the frieze of St. Mark's. The wealth and labor lavished upon these churches is worthy of the faith that produced them. But what a different kind of faith it was, and how little we can appreciate it by confounding it with the modern notions of religion! Venice never had more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, and her churches could have held her whole population at one moment, and then have invited all the Paduans over to fill the still vacant room. But these churches were not built with

any reference to human accommodation. They were built as votive offerings to God and the saints, to express gratitude for deliverance from the hands of enemies, or from the wrath of pestilence—to expiate old wrongs and to propitiate new favors. No sooner had the plague in 1576, which swept forty thousand souls out of Venice, ceased its awful ravages, than the Republic voted a vast sum to erect the Church of the Redentore, as a sign that they accepted the scourge as a divine punishment, and owed its cessation to a mercy they would magnify with their utmost powers. The same thing occurred when the still greater plague of 1631, which destroyed sixty thousand people in Venice, had passed over, and the glorious Church of Maria della Salute, the chief ornament of the Giudecca, and the most conspicuous building, on the whole, from its situation and its architecture, in all Venice, still stands to prove how lavish the gratitude of the people must have been, and from what depths of despair they must have sprung to vault into such heights of exultation. These terrific pestilences, the opprobia of sanitary science and medical skill in the middle ages, and compared with which modern cholera is a slight evil, have left their monuments in many beautiful forms. The club-houses of the old lay brotherhoods which answered to our Aid Societies in time of war and cholera, still stand in Venice, to attest the sempiternal fidelity of human nature to the claims of humanity. Beneficence and humanity are not modern graces only. Hospitals, monasteries, and places of refuge for pilgrims, and for sick and wounded, abounded in Venice. One monastery of purely medical monks still exists, who hold themselves ready to serve in times of pestilence. The splendor of the buildings erected by the religious clubs, lay associations for benevolent purposes, would shock modern notions touching the economy with which benevolent enterprises should be

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conducted. The Scuola de San Rocco (the French St. Roch), one of these benevolent fraternities which still has a corporate existence and holds its original edifice, is one of the most magnificent buildings and one of the richest interiors in Venice. The company adopted Tintoretto as their painter, and for eighteen years he continued to paint here, enriching the walls with his gigantic works and splendid genius. The lower Sala, one of the most splendid halls in the world, is perfectly covered with his works. There is an affluence in his inventive powers equaled by his skill in composition, and by the boldness and facility of his execution. He is evidently one of the greatest masters in the greatest school of painting at its greatest day. But such a gala building as this, regarded as the home of a charity toward the most wretched objects, presents an incongruity of the least intelligible kind to modern feelings and experiences.

The churches in Venice illustrate four different styles of architecture-the Gothic of the plainer, more massive and solemn kind; the Lombard, or Romanesque; the Italian, or Palladian school, and the florid Italian, full of flaunting statues and gilded stucco. Very few of them are finished. The plan was to start with a grand design in which size and splendor were both aimed at; to build them in such a way that some important portion of the edifice could be used at an early period of the construction; to add, as they had means, the other parts; to finish the interior before the exterior, and to leave the façade to the last. The towers were, of course, seldom completed, and many of the most elegant churches are still without any front finish. Coarse brick walls have stood for ages waiting for the marble which was to cover them with costly designs. There is certainly something very dignified in presenting boldly, upon the most conspicuous front of these churches, the failure or deficiency which mod

ern prudence keeps in the sides and rear of its churches, which are often without any finish except on the face.

San Marco, for ages the famous Basilica, and since 1807 the Cathedral of Venice, is a building worthy of all wonder and praise. Built somewhat on the plan of the great Mosque of the Sophia, it has a marked Byzantine character in its whole style. Spreading over an immense surface, its flat domes add little to the architecture of the city, seen from a distance; but viewed from beneath, they present a most solemn and sublime appearance. The broad nave is divided from the aisles by curtains of stone resting on magnificent pillars, and open at the top, so that the whole roof can be seen at once. There is a noble severity and simplicity about the general plan which all the sumptuousness of the marbles and capitals, and decorations of mosaic and gold, does not impair. The curves of the arches and domes meet the eye almost with the effect of the curves of the sky and water as they meet at sea. Such repeated flowing lines wrap the soul in mysterious folds of harmony. The entire ceiling and all the walls are in mosaic, but the colors are so deep and sober that no tawdriness suggests itself anywhere. The sides of St. Mark's are even finer than its front. Every one of its five hundred columns may be said to present a separate study and to offer a distinct pleasure. Their richness, variety and elegance can not be exaggerated.

The famous Square of St. Mark has two distinct areas, one known as the Piazza and the other as the Piazzetta. The Piazzetta fronts the harbor, bounded on the opposite by the southern side of the cathedral, and with the Ducal Palace and the Libreria Vecchia for its other sides. In this square, near the Molo, stand the two famous columns of granite, one sustaining the bronze Lion of St. Mark, the proud symbol of Venetian power, the other the statue of St. Theodore, the

original patron saint of the Republic, and older than St. Mark in the devotion of the people. These columns were so identified with the sway and pomp of the Venetian name that they were copied in most of the cities that fell under her sway. The lion, like most other precious or storied movables in Europe, was stolen by Napoleon, and carried off to adorn the Invalides at Paris, but restored under the treaty of Vienna. The columns, three, were brought from the Holy Land in 1127. One was lost in the harbor in an attempt to land it. The others lay for fifty years waiting for an engineer bold enough to lift them to their pedestals. At length a certain Nicolo placed them there, and claimed as his reward that games of chance, forbidden by law elsewhere, might be played between these columns. The Venetian council granted his boon, but outwitted him by enacting that public executions should take place on the privileged spot, which so overshadowed it that none dared to take any pleasures in the illstarred place. The Ducal Palace, with its glorious portico at the bottom and magnificent gallery resting upon that, and then the great expanse of marble wall, unpierced with windows, supported above all, presents an unparalleled grandeur, in its massive and yet elegant and almost light effect. The absence of any cornice may not be a defect to architects, who remember what a weight the under pillars have to carry already, but certainly the eye feels the want of a more elegant finish of the sky line. Within, the Ducal Palace is a miracle of grandeur, in its vast halls and elegant rooms. The great Council Hall, 175 feet long, 84 broad and 51 high, is, perhaps, the finest room in the world. Titian, Bellini, Tintoretto and Paul Veronese united in decorating its walls with the vastest oil paintings ever made on canvas. Round the hall runs the frieze containing the portraits of seventytwo of the one hundred and twenty-five Doges who have