Vain wisdom all! and false Philosophy,
    Which finds no end, in wandering mazes lost.

And better is it to travel, as Dr. Johnson says Browne did, from one place where he saw little, to another where he saw no more—­than write books to confound common sense, and make men raise up doubts of a Being to whom they must one day give an account.

We will return to the Bucentoro, which, as its name imports, holds two hundred people, and is heavy besides with statues, columns, &c.  The top covered with crimson velvet, and the sides enlivened by twenty-one oars on each hand.  Musical performers attend in another barge, while foreigners in gilded pajots increase the general show.  Mean time, the vessel that contains the doge, &c. carries him slowly out to sea, where in presence of his senators he drops a plain gold ring into the water, with these words, Desponfamus te mare, in fignum veri perpetuique dominii.[Footnote:  We espouse thee, O sea! in sign of true and perpetual dominion.]

Our weather was favourable, and the people all seemed happy:  when the ceremony is put off from day to day, it naturally damps their spirits, and produces superstitious presages of an unlucky year:  nor is that strange, for the season of storms ought surely to be past in a climate so celebrated for mildness and equanimity.  The praises of Italian weather, though wearisomely frequent among us, seem however much confined to this island for aught I see; who am often tired with hearing their complaints of their own sky, now that they are under it:  always too cold or too hot, or a seiroc wind, or a rainy day, or a hard frost, che gela fin ai pensieri[Footnote:  Which freezes even one’s fancy.]; or something to murmur about, while their only great nuisances pass unnoticed, the heaps of dirt, and crowds of beggars, who infest the streets, and poison the pleasures of society.  While ladies are eating ice at a coffee-house door, while decent people are hearing mass at the altar, while strangers are surveying the beauties of the place—­no peace, no enjoyment can one obtain for the beggars; numerous beyond credibility, fancy and airy, and odd in their manners; and exhibiting such various lamenesses and horrible deformities in their figure, that I can sometimes hardly believe my eyes—­but am willing to be told, what is not very improbable, that many of them come from a great distance to pass the season of ascension here at Venice.  I never indeed saw any thing so gently endured, which it appeared so little difficult to remedy; but though I hope it would be hard to find a place where more alms are asked, or less are given, than in Venice; yet I never saw refusals so pleasingly softened, as by the manners of the high Italians towards the low.  Ladies in particular are so soft-mouthed, so tender in replying to those who have their lot cast far below them, that one feels one’s own harsher disposition corrected by their sweetness; and