y with his young wife and
toiled at the minutiae of his great book; here too he entertained David
Roberts and other artists with his father's excellent sherry, which they
described as "like the best painting, at once tender and expressive".

And now the hotels begin, almost all of them in houses built centuries
ago for noble families. Thus the first Grand Hotel block is fourteenth
century--the Palazzo Gritti. The next Grand Hotel block is the Palazzo
Fini and is seventeenth century, and the third is the Manolesso-Ferro,
built in the fourteenth century and restored in the nineteenth. Then
comes the charming fourteenth-century Contarini-Fasan Palace, known as
the house of Desdemona, which requires more attention. The upper part
seems to be as it was: the water floor, or sea storey, has evidently
been badly botched. Its glorious possession is, however, its balconies,
particularly the lower.

Of the Grand Canal balconies, the most beautiful of which is, I think,
that which belongs to this little palace, no one has written more
prettily than that early commentator, Coryat. "Again," he says, "I noted
another thing in these Venetian Palaces that I have very seldome seen in
England, and it is very little used in any other country that I could
perceive in my travels, saving only in Venice and other Italian cities.
Somewhere above the middle of the front of the building, or (as I have
observed in many of their Palaces) a little beneath the toppe of the
front they have right opposite to their windows, a very pleasant little
tarrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building, the edge
whereof is decked with many pretty little turned pillers, either of
marble or free stone to leane over. These kinds of tarrasses or little
galleries of pleasure Suetonius calleth Meniana. They give great grace
to the whole edifice, and serve only for this purpose, that people may
from that place as from a most delectable prospect contemplate and view
the parts of the City round about them in the coole evening."--No modern
description could improve on the thoroughness of that.

Next is the pretty Barozzi Wedmann Palace, with its pointed windows,
said to be designed by Longhena, who built the great Salute church
opposite, and then the Hotel Alexandra, once the Palazzo Michiel. For
the rest, I may say that the Britannia was the Palazzo Tiepolo; the
Grand Hotel de l'Europe was yet another Giustiniani palace; while the
Grand Canal Hotel was th