performed the coffin was carried by firemen to the massive and highly decorated funeral barge, on which it was guarded during the transit by four ‘Uscieri’ in gala dress, two sergeants of the Municipal Guard, and two firemen bearing torches.  The remainder of these followed in their boats.  The funeral barge was slowly towed by a steam launch of the Royal Navy.  The chief officers of the Municipality, the family, and many others in a crowd of gondolas, completed the procession.  San Michele was reached as the sun was setting, when the firemen again received their burden and bore it to the principal mortuary chapel.”

Later the municipality of Venice fixed the memorial tablet to the wall of the palace.  The quotation, from the poet, cut under his name, runs thus:—­

    Open my heart and you will see
    Graved inside of it, Italy.

The tablet is a graceful recognition of the devotion of Browning and his wife to their adopted country.  Did the authorities, I wonder, know that Browning’s love of their city led him always to wear on his watch-chain a coin struck by Manin in 1848 commemorating the overthrow of Austrian power in Venice?

The Rezzonico was built by Longhena, the architect of the Salute.  Carlo Rezzonico, afterwards Pope Clement XIII, lived here.  The Emperor Joseph II stayed here.  So much for fact.  I like far more to remember the Christmas dinner eaten here—­only, alas, in fancy, yet with all the illusion of fact—­by Browning and a Scandinavian dramatist named Ibsen, brought together for the purpose by the assiduous Mr. Gosse, as related with such skill and mischief by Mr. Max Beerbohm.

Next the Rezzonico is the commonplace Nani; then a tiny calle; and then an antiquity store, one of the three adjoining palaces of the great Giustiniani family, in the second of which once lived Richard Wagner.

But first a word as to the Giustiniani’s great feat, in the twelfth century, of giving every male member to the Republic.  It happened that in 1171 nearly all the Venetians in Constantinople were massacred.  An expedition was quickly despatched to demand satisfaction for such a deed, but, while anchored at Scio, the plague broke out and practically demolished this too, among those who perished being the Giustiniani to a man.  In order that the family might persist, the sole surviving son, a monk named Niccolo, was temporarily released from his vows to be espoused to the daughter of the Doge, Vitale Michiel.  Sufficient sons having been born to them, the father returned to his monastery and the mother sought a convent for herself.

In the first of the three Giustiniani palaces Mr. Howells, moving from the Casa Falier across the way, wrote his Venetian Life.  In the next Wagner wrote part of Tristan and Isolda.