That was a pleasant autumn in Venice!  By that time I had become pretty well over head and ears in love with the girl by whose side I generally contrived to sit in the gondolas, in the Piazza in the evening, etcaetera.  It was lovely September weather—­just the time for Venice.  The summer days were drawing in, but there was the moon, quite light enough on the lagoons; and we were a great deal happier than the day was long.

Those Scientific Congresses, of which that at Venice was the seventh and the last, played a curious part, which has not been much observed or noted by historians, in the story of the winning of Italian independence.  I believe that the first congress, at Pisa, I think, was really got up by men of science, with a view to furthering their own objects and pursuits.  It was followed by others in successive autumns at Lucca, Milan, Genoa, Naples, Florence, and this seventh and last at Venice.  But Italy was in those days thinking of other matters than science.  The whole air was full of ideas, very discordant all of them, and vague most of them, of political change.  The governments of the peninsula thought twice, and more than twice, before they would grant permission for the first of these meetings.  Meetings of any kind were objects of fear and mistrust to the rulers.  Those of Tuscany, who were by comparison liberal, and, as known to be such, were more or less objects of suspicion to the Austrian, Roman, and Neapolitan Governments, led the way in giving the permission asked for; and perhaps thought that an assembly of geologists, entomologists, astronomers, and mathematicians might act as a safety valve, and divert men’s minds from more dangerous subjects.  But the current of the times was running too strongly to be so diverted, and proved too much for the authorities and for the real men of science, who were, at least some of them, anxious to make the congresses really what they professed to be.

Gradually these meetings became more and more mere social gatherings in outward appearance, and revolutionary propagandist assemblies in reality.  As regards the former aspect of them, the different cities strove to outdo each other in the magnificence and generosity of their reception of their “scientific” guests.  Masses of publications were prepared, especially topographical and historical accounts of the city which played Amphytrion for the occasion, and presented gratuitously to the members of the association.  Merely little guide-books, of which a few hundred copies were needed in the case of the earlier meetings, they became in the case of the latter ones at Naples, Genoa, Milan, and Venice, large and magnificently printed tomes, prepared by the most competent authorities and produced at a very great expense.