waters. These palaces are no longer brilliantly illumined, as heretofore, in the days of pleasure, sports, and dissipations of this brilliant city, and the moon, called by artists the sun of ruins, is particularly suited to the grand ruin of Ve

nice.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Isle of Saint Clement.- Malamocco. - Republican hatreds. - Marazzi.—Chioggia —Origin and end of

It requires a day to see the Murazzi, situated about eighteen miles from Venice. At the isle of St. Clement there was formerly a convent of Camaldules, whose small detached houses, with a garden, are yet to be seen. These pious men surrounded by the waves, were doubly anchorets. A Madonna, with ber lighted lamp, as in the cross-road of a town, was fixed upon one of the posts that marked the route across the canals, and her pious glimmering light almost touched the sea, in the midst of which it was thrown. We pass before the isle of Malamocco, that illustrious shore which witnessed the heroic efforts of the Venetians in the war of Chiozza, when, in one of those fits of hatred peculiar to republies, more implacable and more violent than the enmity of kings, as being the mutual abborrence of one people for another, Genoa thought it possible to annibilate ber rival. Venice, like Rome when Hannibal was at its gates, displayed that aristocratic patriotism, the most constant and firmest of all, which will never suffer a country to be degraded by shameful treaties, and whose proud bearing is noble and glorious, as it is displayed in the midst of dangers and sacrifices.

The Murazzi are not a simple military cause way, like the jetty of Alexander or of Richelieu, much more celebrated, as are the works of conquerors or of despots; they form the rampart of a great city, for centuries the seat of freedom. Neither is this marble bank the polders, of wood, fascines, and clay, of Holland, which must rather resemble the palisade of beavers, than the magnificent work of the Venetians. The so much admired inscription ausu romano, ære veneto, did not appear to me deserving its reputation; independently of the vicious mixture of the plain and the figurative, this vain-glorious allu

sion to money, like that of the Simplon,' is not very noble. After all, the famous inscription was perhaps only proposed, for it is impossible to discover it. The most ancient of the thirty-eight inscriptions indicating the epoch when the different parts were successively executed, though simple, is not the less imposing, since it proves the fourteen centuries of free existence enjoyed by the republic: Ut sacra æstuaria urbis et libertatis sedes perpetuum conserventur colosseas moles ex solido marmore contra mare posuere curatores aquarum. An. Sal. MDCCLI. ab urbe con. MCCCXXX. The Murazzi, formed of enormous blocks and supported on piles, rise ten feet above high-water mark, for the length of 5,267 metres; the construction occupied thirtynine years, and the outlay was 6,952,440 fr. In some places the marble, polished, worn, and wasted by the waves, becomes somewhat spongy, and its brilliant whiteness gives it the appearance of petrified froth. Never was there an example of restraint more striking for meditation on this side of the Murazzi is a tranquil lake: on the other, is the sea, whose long reiterated billows roll up and break themselves against the foot of their steps. The Murazzi are only of the middle and end of the last century; it is difficult to believe that a State capable of such gigantic works could so soon be annihilated: it is easier to curb the fury of the waves than to arrest the machinations of the wicked.

The smiling coast of Chioggia deserves to be visited for the character of its lively, original, laborious, and numerous population, whence Titian derived his expressive but not too ideal heads; Goldoni, the sallies of the wrangling and noisy personages of his Gare chiozzotte; and the unfortunate Leopold Robert, the melancholy scene of his Fishermen of the Adriatic.

When I returned from the Murazzi to Venice, in the autumn of 1827, there was not a single vessel in quarantine at the lazaretto. This vast deserted enclosure, no longer animated by commerce or war as in the time of the republic, recalled the menaces of the prophets against Tyre: "How art thou destroyed that wast inhabited of sea-faring men, the renowned city, which was strong in

See book 1., chap. 11V.

CHAPTER I.

Banks of the Brenta.-Foscari palace.-Padua.Its extension.

I will confess that the banks of the Brenta, before reaching Padua, seemed to me far from deserving the praise lavished on them. Near the viceroy's palace they are disfigured by a long embankment or towing path supported by a great wall of brick; in other parts the gardens which border them, with their yoke-elm hedges, well-trimmed trees, and symmetrical alleys, are real parsonage gardens. It is true that many fine palaces have already disappeared, and the destruction now prevailing at Venice, began long since on the borders of the Brenta. In their actual state, I think them altogether inferior to the banks of the Seine near Suresne, or on the SaintGermain road.

The Foscari palace, near the little insalubrious village of Malcontenta, has hitherto escaped the ravages of time and man; it is one of Palladio's most elegant chefs-d'œuvre.

Padua appeared to me a great, long. melancholy-looking town, although I arrived first there in June, during the celebration of a kind of Olympic games in honour of Saint Anthony, and even met the bronzed triumphal car of the victorious jockey, who was parading the streets amid the shouts of all the raga

Ezekiel, cap. xxvi., 17, 18.

The free port, decreed the 20th of February, 1829, and opened the 1st of February, 1830, has somewhat reanimated the languishing remains of Venetian commerce, which attained its greatest developement in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen

muffins that surrounded him. This town, however, is every day gaining what Venice loses; the population amounts to forty-four thousand; but, with the single exception of the Pedrocchi coffeehouse,3 its prosperity is plain and without display.

CHAPTER II.

University.-Vertebra of Galileo.-Library.-Chapter library. Botanical garden.-Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts.-Ladies of the Academy.

The organisation of the university of Padua is the same as that of the university of Pavia (except that the latter has no faculty of theology), and the professorships are theology for the use of parish priests (pastorale); ecclesiastical history; moral theology; biblical archeology; introduction to the books of the Old Testament; Hebrew exegesis and language, and oriental tongues; biblical hermeneutics; introduction to the books of the New Testament; Greek language; exegesis of the New Testament; doctrinal theology. This ancient university, which arose in the beginning of the thirteenth century, and had as many as six thousand students in the sixteenth and seventeenth, numbered no more than fourteen hundred and thirty-seven in 1832; it is still distinguished, however, by able professors. For instance, Rachetti, professor of law; Santini (like Michael Angelo, born at Capresa, à village near Arezzo),

turles, and began to decline with the seventeenth: this free port, without arresting the destiny of Venice, has nevertheless had the advantage of preserving to the people of the lagoons their ancient maritime and manufacturing character. 3 See post, chap. vii.

professor of astronomy, and his very able deputy Conti; Catullo, professor of natural history. Under the marble peristyle, now dreadfully damaged, are the armorial bearings of many professors and students; this elegant peristyle has been included in Palladio's unpublished works, but incorrectly; it may more safely be attributed to Sansovino; to judge from the exterior, this university would appear the most aristocratic in the world. In the vestibule is a good marble statue of the celebrated Helena Lucrezia CornaroPiscopia, who died in 1684 aged thirty- | eight; an illustrious lady learned in the Spanish, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic languages, who sang her own verses with an accompaniment by herself, lectured on theology, astronomy, mathematics, and received the degree of doctor in philosophy from the university. Helena Piscopia was very handsome; she wore the habit of the Benedictine order, the severe rules of which she always followed, although her parents had, without her knowledge, procured a dispensation from a vow of virginity which she had rashly made at the age of eleven, and notwithstanding the offers of marriage from several of the highest nobles.

In the cabinet of natural history is a vertebra of Galileo enclosed in a meanlooking little pedestal of varnished wood, executed at the expense of the abbé MeDegbelli, under whose rectorship its installation took place; in the account published concerning it by the worthy rector, he ingenuously flatters himself with not having been able to find a better model for his pedestal, surmounted with the bust of the immortal astronomer, than that on which the divine Canova placed the lyre of Terpsichore. The vertebra is the fifth lumbar; it was purloined by the Florentine physician Cocchi, who in 1737 was charged with the translation of Galileo's bones to the church of Santa Croce in Florence; after becoming by Inheritance the property of Cocchi's son, it belonged to the patrician Angelo Qui

• The rectors of the university, chosen from snag the professors, are only appointed for a year This custom was established during the republic, and has never been interrupted.

•st of Venice, book xi. Dara, who had appiled himself during the last year of his life to laborious researches respecting Gallico and his condemnation states in a note to his poem entitled Astronomy (the 19th of canto rv.) that the jesuits,

rini, the mathematician Vivorio of Vicenza, and lastly to doctor Thiene, his physician, who presented it to the university of Padua. The finger of Galileo, obtained in a similar fraudulent manner, is exhibited at the Laurentian.-How singular was the destiny of this great man's body! imprisoned by envy while living, and torn in pieces through admiration when dead. The Italians from enthusiasm practise a kind of burglary towards the remains of the illustrious; and at Arquà, near Padua, the place of Petrarch's burial, may still be seen the rent in his tomb made by the Florentine who succeeded in tearing off one arm. The vertebra of Galileo is not however ill placed at the university of Padua. For eighteen years he held the professorship of philosophy there, and to retain his services the Venetian senate had tripled his salary; it was in presence of the doge and the chiefs of the state that, in 1609, he made his first experiments with the telescope and pendulum. How much, rightly remarks Mr. Daru, must he not have regretted that hospitable land where the inquisition would not have extorted a disavowal of the new truths of which he was the declared advocate!

The theatre of anatomy was erected in 159, when Fabricius d'Acquapendente occupied that chair. The first idea of it seems to belong to the celebrated Fra Paolo, who was both architect and anatomist, and made the important discovery of the venal valvules. In the vestibule is the bust of Morgagni, consecrated to him while living by the German nation. There is a collection of extraordinary fœtus, which were prepared and classed by this great anatomist.

The cabinet of natural history is a fine creation of great utility due to the French administration.

Among the presents made to this cabinet by the learned Acerbi, formerly Austrian consul in Egypt, is a fine mummy unwrapped, with a hieroglyphical inscription, proceeding from the necro

who were great sticklers for the doctrine of Aristotle and the Peripatetics, were opposed to Galileo, at the university of Padua, respecting the spots in the sun; so that," he adds, to the shame of feeble humanity, it is not impossible that a philosophical party spirit might contribute as much as religions Intolerance to the persecution the philosopher experienced at their bands." See book x.

polis of Thebes; it is supposed to be four thousand years old; the skull presents a remarkable prolongation beyond the occapital cavity, which is much deeper than in the skulls previously seen. I am indebted for the following conjecture to my ingenious friend Doctor Edwards, of the Institute, known by his important work on the physiological characters of the various races of man as connected with history: "This great prolongation of the hinder part of the head is not found in the races of Europe, eastern Asia, or those of America in general, nor even in the negro race, in which however this part is more developed the Carribean race, nevertheless, exhibits it in a high degree. This shape is the farthest removed from the ordinary form, except that of some heads found in the Cordillera mountains. It may then be regarded as of the lowest order. It would be very interesting to discover such heads in the tombs of Egypt; such a fact would prove that this shape indicates an epoch when civilisation had but just commenced."

In the room of the medical section are three good paintings, the Marys at the sepulchre, by Darius Varotari; a well preserved fresco; the Virgin and infant Jesus; the two latter by unknown authors of the sixteenth century.

The observatory, supplied with good instruments, has obtained renown through Galileo's discoveries; it is erected on the top of a high tower, which, in the days of the brave and cruel tyran Eccelino, was a dreadful prison. A Latin distich, over the door, felicitously expresses this fact and its new scientific appropriation.

The University library contains seventy thousand volumes; and, as it is solely devoted to educational purposes, the manuscripts have been sent to Saint Mark. The library is placed in the very spacious ancient hall of the Giants and Emperors; the walls are covered with portraits of great Romans from Romulus to Cæsar, who is immediately followed by Charlemagne. It is said that some of these bad figures were executed on Titian's designs, a part of the art in which he did not excel. Above these extremely well preserved figures, are the principal exploits of the personages, fine paintings

MCCXLIII.

Quæ quondam infernas turris ducebat ad umbras, Nune Venetum auspiciis pandit ad astra viam.

by Domenico Campagnola, a pupil of Titian, who, with Tintoretto, Paris Bordone, and others of his clever disciples, had the honour of making him jealous; by his assiduous companion Gualtieri, Stefano dell'Arzere, a good fresco painter of Padua in the sixteenth century, and perhaps even by Titian, to whom is attributed the portrait of Cardinal Zabarella, among the illustrious Paduans. A full length fresco portrait of Petrarch, of the same epoch, is more suitably placed in a library, as this great poet was certainly one of the first and most intrepid readers known, and even died sitting in his library with his head bent over a book.

A small miniature of the Virgin, full of grace and elegance, is preserved in this library it was painted by the abbot of Latran, Felice Ramelli, and is greatly extolled by Della Vale, Vasari's commentator.

A copy, without either frontispiece or preface, of the scarce Quadragesimale of the famous Fra Paolo, printed at Milan in 1479, has furnished S. Federici, the under-librarian, with various readings which had till then escaped the numerous commentators of Dante. It is seen by these sermons of Fra Paolo that the Divina Commedia was quoted in the pulpit, and that its verses were at times piously parodied to amalgamate with the sermon.

The chapter library has only about four thousand volumes, but it contains some fine old manuscripts and scarce editions of the fifteenth century, The most ancient manuscript is a Sacramentarium of the eleventh century, in good preservation, and the most ancient printed book is the Rationale, by Guillaume Durand (Mayence, 1459). The manuscripts of Petrarch's library, who was a canon of the chapter, were the beginning of this library, which was increased by the books of Sperone Speroni. In an adjoining room, six paintings, two of them, a Madonna, and a Trinity, and the other four certain incidents of the Life of St. Sebastian, are remarkable specimens of ancient painting; they were executed in 1367 by the Venetian Nicaletto Semitecolo; the proportions of the figures are elegant, the naked is well executed; the style is different from Giotto's, and if the drawing be inferior, the colouring is equal to him.

The Botanical garden of Padua, founded by the Venetian senate in 1545, is

probably the oldest in Europe.

It still occupies the same spot; and an old Eastern planetree with a knotted trunk and short but still verdant boughs, has stood there ever since its creation. I could not contemplate it without a sort of veneration; I fancied there was something learned in this contemporary of so many illustrious professors, whose stone statues were only a few paces distant, whom it had received under its shade, and it seemed to me a kind of patriarch among the scientific trees of botanical gardens. The garden of Padua, without having the splendour of our fashionable greenhouses, is sufficient for the purposes of instruction; I was informed in 1827 that it contained from five to six thousand species, and the number is increasing every year. The warmth of Italy begins at Padua to show itself in a very perceptible way: the magnolias have no occasion for shelter nor mats during winter; they seem to flourish as well there as those I have since seen in the open air in the English garden of Caserte, and many were as high as great line-trees.

The pursuit of the sciences, letters, and arts was always eagerly followed at Padua. Its celebrated old academy of the Ricovrati received women, a custom which the French Academy has been often inclined to imitate: under Louis XIV. Charpentier supported the admission of mesdames Scudéry, Deshoulières, and Dacier; in the last century, the candidates of d'Alembert were, it is said, mesdames Necker, d'Épinay, and de Genlis; in our days, the same proposition would be nothing strange, and the poetical talents of certain ladies would make them very worthy and agreeable academicians.

I had the bonour of attending the

Doctor Smith is mistaken in making it begin in 1333 (Doctor Smith's Introd. Discourse to the transactions of the Linn. soc., p. 8); he probably cosfounded its foundation with that of a botanical profesorship at the university, which took place precisely in the year 1533. See also Book XI., rhap. ill. on the date of the foundation of the botanical garden at Pisa.

The Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts of Padua, formed in 1779 by the junction of the RicoFrail academy and an Academy of agriculture, pubshes certain Memoirs or notices, the collection of which, from 1788 to 1825, forms seven quarto volames, and contains many excellent papers such are the Medico-chirurgical memoirs of Leopoldo

The different churches of Padua are its first and most interesting monuments, The Duomo, finished last century, is of indifferent architecture. The primitive plan was sent by Michael Angelo; but during the two centuries occupied in the building, it must have been strangely altered by the divers generations of architects. On the right of the entrance stands the tomb of Charles Patin, a French physician, who, being suspected of having dispersed a scandalous paper, and being obliged to fly on account of his bad notions, went to Padua and professed surgery there; he was the last son of the witty and impassioned Guy Patin, whose correspondence is such a gay, amusing, and true commentary on Molière. Charles maintained the honour of his medical name by his science and talents. Sperone Speroni is also interred in this church; he was a great orator, philosopher, and poet in his day,

Caldani, Ludovico Brera, Fanzago, Gallini, and Montesanto; those of Marco Carburi on Chemistry; a Memoir on the Metaphysics of equations by Pietro Cossall, on the Vibrations of the drum by Jordano Riccati; the Memoirs of Simon Stratico on the course of rivers, on the diffraction of light; one by Assemani on Arab coins; by Cesarotti on academical duties; by Ippolito Pindemonte, ou English gardens, and by Geronimo Polcastro, on extempore poetry. The volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts, have not hitherto appeared at any determined interval; but after 1830 a volume was to appear every two years.