re for ever defaced, and many in desecrated ruins,
there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried
traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect
has been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her
origin, and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at
least, are little to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities of
the imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to
repress the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is
ignoble, and disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its
remembrances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the
imagination there must be no permission during the task which is before
us. The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of
this century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those
mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and
they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see
them as they stood in their own strength. Those feelings, always as
fruitless as they are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of
protecting, but even of discerning, the objects to which they ought to
have been attached. The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing
of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the
first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name
is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed
that "Bridge of Sighs," which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of
Venice;[139] no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which
the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue which
Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors was
erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after
Faliero's death;[140] and the most conspicuous parts of the city have
been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries,
that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari[141] could be summoned from
their tombs, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance
of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favourite
subject, the novelist's favourite scene, where the water first narrows
by the steps of the Church of La Salute,--the mighty Doges would not
know in what part of the world they stood, would literally not
recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose
ingratitude, th