preserved in the British Museum; some of which I copied over for Doctor Johnson to print, at the time he published his Lives of the English Poets.  My curiosity led me to look in the Pastor Fido for the famous passage of Legge humana, inhumana, _&c._ and it was observable enough that he had written it three different ways before he pitched on that peculiar expression which caused his book to be prohibited.  Seeing the manuscript I took notice, however, of the beautiful penmanship with which it was written:  our English hand-writing cotemporary to his was coarse, if I recollect, and very angular;—­but Italian hand was the first to become elegant, and still retains some privileges amongst us.  Once more, every thing small, and every thing great, revived after the dark ages—­in Italy.

Looking at the Mint was an hour’s time spent with less amusement.  The depuration of gold may be performed many ways, and the proofs of its purity given by various methods:  I was gratified well enough upon the whole however, in watching the neatness of their process, in weighing the gold, &c. and keeping it more free from alloy than any other coin of any other state:—­a zecchine will bend between your fingers from the malleability of the metal—­we may try in vain at a guinea, or louis d’or.  The operation of separating silver ore from gold by the powers of aqua fortis, precipitating the first-named metal by suspension of a copper plate in the liquid, and called quartation; was I believe wholly unknown to the ancients, who got much earlier at the art of weighing gold in water, testified by the old story of King Hiero’s crown.

Talking of kings, and crowns, and gold, reminds me of my regret for not seeing the treasure kept in St. Mark’s church here, with the motto engraven on the chest which contains it: 

    Quando questo scrinio s’aprira,
    Tutto il mondo tremera[R].

[Footnote R: 
    When this scrutoire shall open’d be,
    The world shall all with wonder flee.
]

Of this it was said in our Charles the First’s time, that there was enough in it to pay six kings’ ransoms:  when Pacheco, the Spanish ambassador, hearing so much of it, asked in derision, If the chest had any bottom? and being answered in the affirmative, made reply, That there was the difference between his master’s treasures and those of the Venetian Republic, for the mines of Mexico and Potosi had no bottom.—­Strange! if all these precious stones, metals, &c. have been all spent since then, and nothing left except a few relics of no intrinsic value.

It is well enough known, that in the year 1450, one of the natives of the island of Candia, who have never been men of much character, made a sort of mine, or airshaft, or rather perhaps a burrow, like those constructed by rabbits, down which he went and got quite under the church, stealing out gems, money, &c. to a vast amount; but being discovered by the treachery of his companion, was caught and hanged between the two columns that face the sea on the Piazzetta.