Night! fable goddess! from her ebon throne,
    In rayless majesty here stretches forth
    Her leaden sceptre o’er a slumb’ring world.

Accordingly I never did meet with any description of Night in the Venetian poets, so common with other authors; and I am persuaded if one were to live here (which could not be long I think) he should forget the use of sleep; for what with the market folks bringing up the boats from Terra Firma loaded with every produce of nature, neatly arranged in these flat-bottomed conveyances, the coming up of which begins about three o’clock in a morning and ends about six;—­the Gondoliers rowing home their masters and ladies about that hour, and so on till eight;—­the common business of the town, which it is then time to begin;—­the state affairs and pregai, which often like our House of Commons sit late, and detain many gentlemen from the circles of morning amusements—­that I find very entertaining;—­particularly the street orators and mountebanks in Piazza St. Marco;—­the shops and stalls where chickens, ducks, &c. are sold by auction, comically enough, to the highest bidder;—­a flourishing fellow, with a hammer in his hand, shining away in character of auctioneer;—­the crowds which fill the courts of judicature, when any cause of consequence is to be tried;—­the clamorous voices, keen observations, poignant sarcasms, and acute contentions carried on by the advocates, who seem more awake, or in their own phrase svelti than all the rest:—­all these things take up so much time, that twenty-four hours do not suffice for the business and diversions of Venice; where dinner must be eaten as in other places, though I can scarcely find a minute to spare for it, while such fish wait one’s knife and fork as I most certainly did never see before, and as I suppose are not to be seen in any sea but this, in such perfection.  Fresh sturgeon, ton as they call it, and fresh anchovies, large as herrings, and dressed like sprats in London, incomparable; turbots, like those of Torbay exactly, and plentiful as there, with enormous pipers, are what one principally eats here.  The fried liver, without which an Italian can hardly go on from day to day, is so charmingly dressed at Milan, that I grew to like it as well as they; but at Venice it is sad stuff, and they call it fegao.

Well! the ladies, who never hardly dine at all, rise about seven in the evening, when the gentlemen are just got ready to attend them; and sit sipping their chocolate on a chair at the coffee-house door with great tranquillity, chatting over the common topics of the times:  nor do they appear half so shy of each other as the Milanese ladies, who seldom seem to have any pleasure in the soft converse of a female friend.  But though certainly no women can be more charming than these Venetian dames, they have forgotten the old mythological fable, that the youngest of the Graces was married to Sleep. By which it was intended we should consider that state as necessary to the reparation not only of beauty but of youth, and every power of pleasing.