owe to the Italian storytellers.  They went to their novels for the plots of their plays, as the novelists of to-day go to the criminal calendar for the plots of their stories.  Shakspeare appears so familiar with Italian life that Mr. Charles Armitage Brown, the author of a very curious work on Shakspeare’s Sonnets, declares that he must have visited Italy, basing this conclusion on the minute knowledge of certain Italian localities shown in some of his later plays.  At home in Verona, Milan, Mantua, and Padua, Shakspeare is nowhere so much so as in Venice.

It is impossible to think of Venice without remembering the poets; and the poet who is first remembered is Byron.  If our thoughts are touched with gravity as they should be when we dwell upon the sombre aspects of Venice—­when we look, as here, for example, on the Bridge of Sighs—­we find ourselves repeating: 

    “I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs.”

If we are in a gayer mood, as we are likely to be after looking at the brilliant carnival-scene which greets us at the threshold of the present number of THE ALDINE, we recall the opening passages of Byron’s merry poem of “Beppo:” 

“Of all the places where the Carnival
Was most facetious in the days of yore,
For dance, and song, and serenade, and ball,
And masque, and mime, and mystery, and more
Than I have time to tell now, or at all,
Venice the bell from every city bore.”

* * * * *

“And there are dresses splendid, but fantastical,
Masks of all times, and nations, Turks and Jews,
And harlequins and clowns, with feats gymnastical,
Greeks, Romans, Yankee-doodles, and Hindoos
All kinds of dress, except the ecclesiastical,
All people, as their fancies hit, may choose,
But no one in these parts may quiz the clergy,
Therefore take heed, ye Freethinkers!  I charge ye.”

The Bridge of Sighs (to return to prose) is a long covered gallery, leading from the ducal palace to the old State prisons of Venice.  It was frequently traversed, we may be sure, in the days of some of the Doges, to one of whom, our old friend, and Byron’s—­Marino Faliero—­the erection of the ducal palace is sometimes falsely ascribed.  Founded in the year 800, A.D., the ducal palace was afterwards destroyed five times, and each time arose from its ruins with increasing splendor until it became, what it is now, a stately marble building of the Saracenic style of architecture, with a grand staircase and noble halls, adorned with pictures by Titian, Tintoretto, Paul Veronese, and other famous masters.