top of its garden-wall: some
antique, like the kind to be seen at the corner of the New Road, and
some of clumsy grotesque dwarfs, with fat bodies and large boots. This
is the architecture to which her studies of the Renaissance have
conducted modern Italy.

Sec. VIII. The sun climbs steadily, and warms into intense white the walls
of the little piazza of Dolo, where we change horses. Another dreary
stage among the now divided branches of the Brenta, forming irregular
and half-stagnant canals; with one or two more villas on the other side
of them, but these of the old Venetian type, which we may have
recognised before at Padua, and sinking fast into utter ruin, black, and
rent, and lonely, set close to the edge of the dull water, with what
were once small gardens beside them, kneaded into mud, and with blighted
fragments of gnarled hedges and broken stakes for their fencing; and
here and there a few fragments of marble steps, which have once given
them graceful access from the water's edge, now settling into the mud in
broken joints, all aslope, and slippery with green weed. At last the
road turns sharply to the north, and there is an open space, covered
with bent grass, on the right of it: but do not look that way.

Sec. IX. Five minutes more, and we are in the upper room of the little
inn at Mestre, glad of a moment's rest in shade. The table is (always, I
think) covered with a cloth of nominal white and perennial grey, with
plates and glasses at due intervals, and small loaves of a peculiar
white bread, made with oil, and more like knots of flour than bread. The
view from its balcony is not cheerful: a narrow street, with a solitary
brick church and barren campanile on the other side of it; and some
coventual buildings, with a few crimson remnants of fresco about their
windows; and, between them and the street, a ditch with some slow
current in it, and one or two small houses beside it, one with an arbor
of roses at its door, as in an English tea-garden; the air, however,
about us having in it nothing of roses, but a close smell of garlic and
crabs, warmed by the smoke of various stands of hot chestnuts. There is
much vociferation also going on beneath the window respecting certain
wheelbarrows which are in rivalry for our baggage: we appease their
rivalry with our best patience, and follow them down the narrow street.

Sec. X. We have but walked some two hundred yards when we come to a low
wharf or quay, at the ex