r to save me both trouble and
expense in the different arrangements relative to the custom-house,
remise, &c.; and the good-natured assiduity with which he bustled about
in despatching these matters, gave me an opportunity of observing, in
his use of the infirm limb, a much greater degree of activity than I had
ever before, except in sparring, witnessed.

As we proceeded across the Lagoon in his gondola, the sun was just
setting, and it was an evening such as Romance would have chosen for a
first sight of Venice, rising "with her tiara of bright towers" above
the wave; while, to complete, as might be imagined, the solemn interest
of the scene, I beheld it in company with him who had lately given a new
life to its glories, and sung of that fair City of the Sea thus
grandly:--

"I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sat in state, throned in her hundred isles."

But, whatever emotions the first sight of such a scene might, under
other circumstances, have inspired me with, the mood of mind in which I
now viewed it was altogether the very reverse of what might have been
expected. The exuberant gaiety of my companion, and the
recollections,--any thing but romantic,--into which our conversation
wandered, put at once completely to flight all poetical and historical
associations; and our course was, I am almost ashamed to say, one of
uninterrupted merriment and laughter till we found ourselves at the
steps of my friend's palazzo on the Grand Canal. All that had ever
happened, of gay or ridiculous, during our London life together,--his
scrapes and my lecturings,--our joint adventures with the Bores and
Blues, the two great enemies, as he always called them, of London
happiness,--our joyous nights together at Watier's, Kinnaird's, &c. and
"that d----d supper of Rancliffe's which _ought_ to have been a
dinner,"--all was passed rapidly in review between us, and with a flow
of humour and hilarity, on his side, of which it would have been
difficult, even for persons far graver than I can pretend to be, not to
have caught the contagion.

He had all along expressed his determin