it, each with a pea-green blind, and a classical architrave in bad perspective; and a fourth, with stucco figures set on the top of its garden-wall: some antique, like the kind to be seen at the corner of the New Road, and some of clumsy grotesque dwarfs, with fat bodies and large boots. This is the architecture to which her studies of the Renaissance have conducted modern Italy.

The sun climbs steadily, and warms into intense white the walls of the little piazza of Dolo, where we change horses. Another dreary stage among the now divided branches of the Brenta, forming irregular and half-stagnant canals; with one or two more villas on the other side of them, but these of the old Venetian type, which we may have recognized before at Padua, and sinking fast into utter ruin, black, and rent, and lonely, set close to the edge of the dull water, with what were once small gardens beside them, kneaded into mud, and with blighted fragments of gnarled hedges and broken stakes for their fencing; and here and there a few fragments of marble steps, which have once given them graceful access from the water's edge, now settling into the mud in broken joints, all aslope, and slippery with green weed. At last the road turns sharply to the north, and there is an open space, covered with bent grass, on the right of it: but do not look that way.

Five minutes more, and we are in the upper room of the little inn at Mestre, glad of a moment's rest in shade. The table is (always, I think) covered with a cloth of nominal white and perennial grey, with plates and glasses at due intervals, and small loaves of a peculiar white bread, made with oil, and more like knots of flour than bread. The view from its balcony is not cheerful: a narrow street, with a solitary brick church and barren campanile on the other side of it; and some conventual buildings, with a few crimson remnants of fresco about their windows: and between them and the street, a ditch with some slow current in it, and one or two small houses beside it, one with an arbour of roses at its door, as in an English tea-garden; the air, however, about us having in it nothing of roses, but a close smell of garlic and crabs, warmed by the smoke of various stands of hot chestnuts. There is much vociferation also going on beneath the window respecting certain wheelbarrows which are in rivalry for our baggage; we appease their rivalry with our best patience, and follow them down the narrow

street.

We have but walked some two hundred yards when we come to a low wharf or quay, at the extremity of a canal, with long steps on each side down to the water, which latter we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation; another glance undeceives us,— it is covered with the black boats of Venice. We enter one of them, rather to try if they be real boats or not, than with any definite purpose, and glide away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy. It is something clearer than any water we have seen lately, and of a pale green; the banks only two or three feet above it, of mud and rank grass, with here and there a stunted tree; gliding swiftly past the

small casement of the gondola, as if they were dragged by upon a painted scene.

Stroke by stroke, we count the plunges of the oar, each heaving up the side of the boat slightly as her silver beak shoots forward. We lose patience, and extricate ourselves from the cushions; the sea air blows keenly by, as we stand leaning on the roof of the floating cell. In front, nothing to be seen but long canal and level bank; to the west, the tower of Mestre is lowering fast, and behind it there have arisen purple shapes, of the colour of dead rose-leaves, all round the horizon, feebly defined against the afternoon skythe Alps of Bassano. Forward still: the endless canal bends at last, and then breaks into intricate angles about some low bastions, now torn to pieces and staggering in ugly rents towards the waterthe bastions of the fort of Malghera. Another turn, and another perspective of canal; but not interminable. The silver beak cleaves it fast,-it widens: the rank grass of the banks sinks lower, and lower, and at last dies in tawny knots along an expanse of weedy shore. Over it, on the right, but a few years back, we might have seen the lagoon stretching to the horizon, and the warm southern sky bending over Malamocco to the sea. Now we can see nothing but what seems a low and monotonous dockyard wall, with flat arches to let the tide through it;-this is the railroad bridge, conspicuous above all things. But at the end of those dismal arches there rises, out of the wide water, a straggling line of low and confused brick buildings, which, but for the many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English manufacturing town. Four or five domes, pale, and apparently at a greater distance, rise over the centre of the line; but the object which first catches the eye is a sullen cloud of black smoke brooding over the northern half of it, and which issues from the belfry of a church. It is Venice. (From Padua to Venice.-Stones of Venice, vol. i., chap. xxx., § 7, 8, 9, and 10.)*

The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of discerning, the objects to which they ought to have been attached. The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow

* By kind permission of the Author.

deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs," which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries, that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from their tombs, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favourite subject, the novelist's favourite scene, where the water first narrows by the steps of the Church of La Salute,-the mighty Doges would not know in what spot of the world they stocd, would literally not recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their grey hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave. The remains of their Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail over them for ever. It must be our task to glean and gather them forth, and restore out of them some faint image of the lost city; more gorgeous a thousandfold than that which now exists, yet not created in the day-dream of the prince, nor by the ostentation of the noble, but built by iron hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity of nature and the. fury of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be grasped by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank inquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene, whose restless tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the city, but long denied her dominion.- (The Venice of Modern Fiction.-Stones of Venice, v. ii., ch. i., § 2.)*

The current literature upon the strikes of our workmen, being almost entirely under the command of the Masters, has consisted chiefly in lectures on the guilt and folly of strikes, without in any wise addressing itself to point out to the men any other way of settling the question. "You can't have three shillings a day in such times; but we will give you two-and-sixpence: you had better take it-and, both on religious and commercial grounds, make no fuss. How much better is two-and-sixpence than nothing! and if once the mill stop-thinkwhere shall we be all then?" 46 "Yes," the men answer, "but if today we take two-and-sixpence, what is to hinder you, to-morrow, from observing to us that two shillings are better than nothing, and

By kind permission of the Author.

we had better take that sum on religious and commercial principles, without fuss? And the day after, may not the same pious and moral instructors recommend to us the contented acceptance of eighteenpence? A stand must clearly be made somewhere, and we choose to make it here, and now."

The masters again have reason to rejoin: "True, but if we give you three shillings to-day, how are we to know you will not stand for three-and-sixpence to-morrow, and for four shillings next week? A stand must be made somewhere, and we choose to make it here, and now."

What solution is there, then? and of what use are any quantity of homilies either to man or master, on their manner of debate, that show them no possible solution in another way? As things are at present, the quarrel can only be practically closed by imminence of starvation on one side, or of bankruptcy on the other: even so, closed only for a moment,-never ended, burning presently forth again, to sink silent only in death;-while, year after year, the agonies of conflict and truces of exhaustion produce, for reward of the total labour, and fiat of the total council, of the people, the minimum of gain for the maximum of misery.

Scattered up and down, through every page I have written on political economy for the last twenty years, the reader will find unfailing reference to a principle of solution in such dispute, which is rarely so much as named by other arbitrators; or, if named, never believed in: yet, this being indeed the only principle of decision, the conscience of it, however repressed, stealthily modifies every arbitrative word.

The men are rebuked, in the magistral homilies, for their ingratitude in striking! Then there must be a law of Grace, which at least the masters recognize. The men are mocked in the magistral homilies for their folly in striking. Then there must be a law of Wisdom, which at least the masters recognize.

Appeal to these, then, for their entire verdict, most virtuous masters, all-gracious and all-wise. These reprobate ones, graceless and senseless, cannot find their way for themselves; you must guide them. That much I told you years and years ago. You will have to do it, in spite of all your liberty-mongers. Masters, in fact, you must be; not in name.

But, as yet blind; and drivers-not leaders-of the blind, you must pull the beams out of your own eyes, now; and that bravely. Preach your homily to yourselves first. Let me hear once more how it runs, to the men. 06 Oh foolish and ungrateful ones," you say, "did we not once on a time give you high wages-even so high that you contentedly drank yourselves to death; and now, oh foolish and forgetful ones, that the time has come for us to give you low wages, will you not contentedly also starve yourselves to death?"

Alas, wolf-shepherds-this is St. George's word to you :

"In your prosperity you gave these men high wages, not in any kindness to them, but in contention for business among yourselves. You allowed the men to spend their wage in drunkenness, and you

boasted of that drunkenness by the mouth of your Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in the columns of your leading journal, as a principal sign of the country's prosperity. You have declared again and again, by vociferation of all your orators, that you have wealth so overflowing that you do not know what to do with it. These men who dug the wealth for you, now lie starving at the mouths of the hell-pits you made them dig; yea, their bones lie scattered at the grave's mouth, like as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. Your boasted wealth-where is it? Is the war between these and you, because you now mercilessly refuse them food, or because all your boasts of wealth were lies, and you have none to give?"-(On Strikes.-Fors Clavigera, New Series, Letter II.)*

I think the experience of most thoughtful persons will confirm me in saying that extremely good girls, (good children, broadly, but especially girls), usually die young. The pathos of their deaths is constantly used in poetry and novels; but the power of the fiction rests, I suppose, on the fact that most persons of affectionate temper have lost their own May Queens or little Nells in their time. For my own part of grief, I have known a little Nell die, and a May Queen die, and a queen of May, and of December also, die ;-all of them, in economists' language, 'as good as gold,' and in Christian language, only a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour.' And I could count the like among my bestloved friends, with a rosary of tears.

It seems, therefore, that God takes care, under present circumstances, to prevent, or at least to check, the glut of that kind of girls. Seems, I say, and say with caution-for perhaps it is not entirely in His good pleasure that these things are so. But, they being so, the question becomes therefore yet more imperative-how far a country paying this enforced tax of its good girls annually to neaven is wise in taking little account of the number it has left? For observe that, just beneath these girls of heaven's own, come another kind, who are just earthly enough to be allowed to stay with us; but who get put out of the way into convents, or made mere sick-nurses of, or take to mending the irremediable,-(I've never got over the loss to me, for St. George's work, of one of the sort). Still, the nuns are always happy themselves; and the nurses do a quantity of good that may be thought of as infinite in its own way; and there's a chance of their being forced to marry a King of the Lombards and becoming Queen Theodolindas and the like: pass these, and we come to a kind of girl, just as good, but with less strong will—who is more or less spoilable and mis-manageable; and these are almost sure to come to grief, by the faults of others, or merely by the general fashions and chances of the world. In romance, for instance, Juliet-Lucy Ashton-Amy Robsart. In my

* By kind permission of he Author.