the whole large enough to build and fit out a navy for the British empire.  The pleasure-boats of Napoleon and his empress, and that of the present Viceroy, are there:  but the ships of war belonging to the republic have mouldered away with the Bucentaur.  I saw, however, two Austrian vessels, the same which had conveyed the Polish exiles to New York, lying under shelter in the docks, as if placed there to show who were the present masters of the place.  It was melancholy to wander through the vast unoccupied spaces of this noble edifice, and to think what must have been the riches, the power, the prosperity, and the hopes of Venice at the time it was built, and what they are at the present moment.  It seems almost impossible that any thing should take place to arrest the ruin which is gradually consuming this renowned city.  Some writers have asserted that the lagoons around it are annually growing shallower by the depositions of earth brought down by streams from the land, that they must finally become marshes, and that their consequent insalubrity will drive the inhabitants from Venice.  I do not know how this may be; but the other causes I have mentioned seem likely to produce nearly the same effect.  I remembered, as these ideas passed through my mind, a passage in which one of the sacred poets foretells the desertion and desolation of Tyre, “the city that made itself glorious in the midst of the seas,”

“Thy riches and thy fairs, thy merchandise, thy mariners and thy pilots, thy calkers and the occupiers of thy merchandise, and all thy men of war that are in thee, shall fall into the midst of the seas in the day of thy ruin.”

I left this most pleasing of the Italian cities which I had seen, on the 24th of June, and took the road for the Tyrol.  We passed through a level fertile country, formerly the territory of Venice, watered by the Piave, which ran blood in one of Bonaparte’s battles.  At evening we arrived at Ceneda, where our Italian poet Da Ponte was born, situated just at the base of the Alps, the rocky peaks and irregular spires of which, beautifully green with the showery season, rose in the background.  Ceneda seems to have something of German cleanliness about it, and the floors of a very comfortable inn at which we stopped were of wood, the first we had seen in Italy, though common throughout the Tyrol and the rest of Germany.  A troop of barelegged boys, just broke loose from school, whooping and swinging their books and slates in the air, passed under my window.  Such a sight you will not see in southern Italy.  The education of the people is neglected, except in those provinces which are under the government of Austria.  It is a government severe and despotic enough in all conscience, but by providing the means of education for all classes, it is doing more than it is aware of to prepare them for the enjoyment of free institutions.  In the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, as it is called, there are few children who do not attend the public schools.