The Birth Of A Son To The Grand Duke Has Been Signalized, I Have Just
Learned, By A Display Of Princely Munificence.
Five thousand crowns have
been presented to the Archbishop who performed the ceremony of christening
the child; the servants
Of the ducal household have received two months'
wages, in addition to their usual salary; five hundred young women have
received marriage portions of thirty crowns each; all the articles of
property at the great pawnbroking establishments managed by goverment,
pledged for a less sum than four livres, have been restored to the owners
without payment; and finally, all persons confined for larceny and other
offences of a less degree than homicide and other enormous crimes, have
been liberated and turned loose upon society again. The Grand Duke can
well afford to be generous, for from a million and three hundred thousand
people he draws, by taxation, four millions of crowns annually, of which a
million only is computed to be expended in the military and civil
expenses of his government. The remainder is of course applied to keeping
up the state of a prince and to the enriching of his family. He passes,
you know, for one of the richest potentates in Europe.
Letter VI.
Venice. - The Tyrol.
Munich, _August_ 6, 1835.
Since my last letter I have visited Venice, a city which realizes the old
mythological fable of beauty born of the sea. I must confess, however,
that my first feeling on entering it was that of disappointment. As we
passed in our gondola out of the lagoons, up one of the numerous canals,
which, permeate the city in every direction in such a manner that it seems
as if you could only pass your time either within doors or in a boat, the
place appeared to me a vast assemblage of prisons surrounded with their
moats, and I thought how weary I should soon grow of my island prison, and
how glad to escape again to the main-land. But this feeling quickly gave
way to delight and admiration, when I landed and surveyed the clean though
narrow streets, never incommoded by dust nor disturbed by the noise and
jostling of carriages and horses, by which you may pass to every part of
the city - when I looked again at the rows of superb buildings, with their
marble steps ascending out of the water of the canals, in which the
gondolas were shooting by each other - when I stood in the immense square
of St. Mark, surrounded by palaces resting on arcades, under which the
shops rival in splendor those of Paris, and crowds of the gay inhabitants
of both sexes assemble towards evening and sit in groups before the doors
of the coffee-houses - and when I gazed on the barbaric magnificence of the
church of St. Mark and the Doge's palace, surrounded by the old emblems of
the power of Venice, and overlooking the Adriatic, once the empire of the
republic. The architecture of Venice has to my eyes, something watery and
oceanic in its aspect. Under the hands of Palladio, the Grecian orders
seemed to borrow the lightness and airiness of the Gothic. As you look at
the numerous windows and the multitude of columns which give a striated
appearance to the fronts of the palaces, you think of stalactites and
icicles, such as you might imagine to ornament the abodes of the
water-gods and sea-nymphs. The only thing needed to complete the poetic
illusion is transparency or brilliancy of color, and this is wholly
wanting; for at Venice the whitest marble is soon clouded and blackened by
the corrosion of the sea-air.
It is not my intention, however, to do so hackneyed a thing as to give a
description of Venice. One thing, I must confess, seemed to me
extraordinary: how this city, deprived as it is of the commerce which
built it up from the shallows of the Adriatic, and upheld it so long and
so proudly, should not have decayed even more rapidly than it has done.
Trieste has drawn from it almost all its trade, and flourishes by its
decline. I walked through the arsenal of Venice, which comprehends the
Navy Yard, an enormous structure, with ranges of broad lofty roofs
supported by massive portions of wall, and spacious dock-yards; the whole
large enough to build and fit out a navy for the British empire. The
pleasure-boats of Napoleon and his empress, and that of the present
Viceroy, are there: but the ships of war belonging to the republic have
mouldered away with the Bucentaur. I saw, however, two Austrian vessels,
the same which had conveyed the Polish exiles to New York, lying under
shelter in the docks, as if placed there to show who were the present
masters of the place. It was melancholy to wander through the vast
unoccupied spaces of this noble edifice, and to think what must have been
the riches, the power, the prosperity, and the hopes of Venice at the time
it was built, and what they are at the present moment. It seems almost
impossible that any thing should take place to arrest the ruin which is
gradually consuming this renowned city. Some writers have asserted that
the lagoons around it are annually growing shallower by the depositions of
earth brought down by streams from the land, that they must finally become
marshes, and that their consequent insalubrity will drive the inhabitants
from Venice. I do not know how this may be; but the other causes I have
mentioned seem likely to produce nearly the same effect. I remembered, as
these ideas passed through my mind, a passage in which one of the sacred
poets foretells the desertion and desolation of Tyre, "the city that made
itself glorious in the midst of the seas,"
"Thy riches and thy fairs, thy merchandise, thy mariners and thy pilots,
thy calkers and the occupiers of thy merchandise, and all thy men of war
that are in thee, shall fall into the midst of the seas in the day of
thy ruin."
I left this most pleasing of the Italian cities which I had seen, on the
24th of June, and took the road for the Tyrol.
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