--The two
campanili--Armenian proverbs--Chioggia--An amphibious town--The
repulsiveness of roads--The return voyage--Porto Secco--Malamocco--An
evening scene--The end.

As one approaches the Lido from Venice one passes on the right two
islands. The first is a grim enough colony, for thither are the male
lunatics of Venice deported; but the second, with a graceful eastern
campanile or minaret, a cool garden and warm red buildings, is alluring
and serene, being no other than the island of S. Lazzaro, on which is
situated the monastery of the Armenian Mechitarists, a little company of
scholarly monks who collect old MSS, translate, edit and print their
learned lucubrations, and instruct the young in religion and theology.
Furthermore, the island is famous in our literature for having afforded
Lord Byron a refuge, when, after too deep a draught of worldly
beguilements, he decided to become a serious recluse, and for a brief
while buried himself here, studied Armenian, and made a few
translations: enough at any rate to provide himself with a cloistral
interlude on which he might ever after reflect with pride and the
wistful backward look of a born scholiast to whom the fates had been
unkind.

According to a little history of the island which one of the brothers
has written, S. Lazzaro was once a leper settlement. Then it fell into
disuse, and in 1717 an Armenian monk of substance, one Mekhitar of
Sebaste, was permitted to purchase it and here surround himself with
companions. Since then the life of the little community has been easy
and tranquil.

The extremely welcome visitor is received at the island stairs by a
porter in uniform and led by him along the sunny cloisters and their
very green garden to a waiting-room hung thickly with modern paintings:
indifferent Madonnas and views of the city and the lagoon. By and by in
comes a black-bearded father, in a cassock. All the Mechitarists, it
seems, have black beards and cassocks and wide-brimmed beavers; and the
young seminarists, whom one meets now and then in little bunches in
Venice, are broad-brimmed, black-coated, and give promise of being hairy
too. The father, who is genial and smiling, asks if we understand
French, and deploring the difficulty of the English language, which has
so many ways of pronouncing a single termination, whereas the Armenian
never exceeds one, leads the way.

The first thing to admire is the garden once more, with its verdant
cedars of L