had
lavished all the delicate beauty of his architecture, some flaunting and
gaudy rags are hung out to dry. You enquire what is the building, and to
whom it belongs, and you are answered: It is the palace of one of the
classic nobility of ancient Venice--now tenanted by a Hebrew, who lets
out the apartments at so many _lire_ a month!

But let Mr Whyte speak for himself.

THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS.

"The Canal Orfano, the Ponte di Sospiri! what a day to behold these
long pictured images of darknes and terror, for the first time!
Such a blaze of May sunshine, such a soothing repose broken by a
few distant bells or the nearer laugh of the gay Gondoliers. I
looked upon the narrow, immured waters under the Bridge of Sighs,
then to the high arch that like the heavy embossed clasp of some
old solemn book united its decorated Gothic Piles (those volumes of
bloody Story) on either side, and instead of shuddering at
inquisitions and racks, and Piombi and Pozzi, as in common decency
I ought, away fled my intractable thoughts to merry England's old
Sabbath Chimes, her village spires, village greens, village elm
lanes, and decent peasantry.

"Yet those high and antique abodes of venerable crime, those wild
barbaric piles, in which old age palliates and almost hallows
infamy! giving it somewhat the same prescriptive sanctuary as
Milton bestows on the Palace of his Pandemonium! That cruel
slinking flood, the only firmament the stone vaulted pits below
were conscious of! Each looked as malignant and dangerous as they
could, beneath the triumph of such a glorious sun; that light to
which their aspect once was hateful, and their deeds untold.

"My gondolier dipt his oar into the canal just under the Bridge of
Sighs, and at half its length it was arrested by a hollow substance
which he told me was the marble roof of the Pozzi, whose
unfathomable tiers of dungeons stretched one under another beneath
this dreadful water gallery. It was not here, however, that the
secret midnight drownings took place, (as I had fancied,) but in
that widest, deepest portion of the Canal Orfano, far out in the
Lagoons situated between the towery Isola Servilio and the lovely
groves and monastery of San Grazia. This murder-hole of the
Adriatic is called Marani, and to this day it is forbidden to fish
in i