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us in Venice, I shall mention only one--the church of Santa Maria dei
Frari. It is about five hundred years old, I believe, and stands on
twelve hundred thousand piles. In it lie the body of Canova and the
heart of Titian, under magnificent monuments. Titian died at the age of
almost one hundred years. A plague which swept away fifty thousand lives
was raging at the time, and there is notable evidence of the reverence in
which the great painter was held, in the fact that to him alone the state
permitted a public funeral in all that season of terror and death.
In this church, also, is a monument to the doge Foscari, whose name a
once resident of Venice, Lord Byron, has made permanently famous.
The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, is a curiosity
in the way of mortuary adornment. It is eighty feet high and is fronted
like some fantastic pagan temple. Against it stand four colossal
Nubians, as black as night, dressed in white marble garments. The black
legs are bare, and through rents in sleeves and breeches, the skin, of
shiny black marble, shows. The artist was as ingenious as his funeral
designs were absurd. There are two bronze skeletons bearing scrolls, and
two great dragons uphold the sarcophagus. On high, amid all this
grotesqueness, sits the departed doge.
In the conventual buildings attached to this church are the state
archives of Venice. We did not see them, but they are said to number
millions of documents. "They are the records of centuries of the most
watchful, observant and suspicious government that ever existed--in which
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