speedy maturity.
In the middle of the last century several of the German States
passed laws making it compulsory upon parents to send their
children to school at a certain age; but these laws were not
really obeyed until the beginning of the present century. German
schools are now open to the poorest as well as the richest
children. The only people, except the Germans, who thought of
common schools at an early period are the Scotch.

It cost, we see, some centuries of mental blindness to discover
the need of, and some centuries of struggling to establish
schools.

[Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS.]

_A GLIMPSE OF VENICE._

The spell which Venice has cast over the English poets is as
powerful, in its way, as was the influence of Italian literature
upon the early literature of England. From Chaucer down, the
poets have turned to Italy for inspiration, and, what is still
better, have found it. It is not too much to say that the
"Canterbury Tales" could not have existed, in their present
form, if Boccaccio had not written the "Decameron;" and it is to
Boccaccio we are told that the writers of his time were indebted
for their first knowledge of Homer. Wyatt and Surrey transplanted
what they could of grace from Petrarch into the rough England of
Henry the Eighth. We know what the early dramatists owe to the
Italian storytellers. They went to their novels for the plots
of their plays, as the novelists of to-day go to the criminal
calendar for the plots of their stories. Shakspeare appears so
familiar with Italian life that Mr. Charles Armitage Brown, the
author of a very curious work on Shakspeare's Sonnets, declares
that he must have visited Italy, basing this conclusion on the
minute knowledge of certain Italian localities shown in some of
his later plays. At home in Verona, Milan, Mantua, and Padua,
Shakspeare is nowhere so much so as in Venice.

It is impossible to think of Venice without remembering the
poets; and the poet who is first remembered is Byron. If our
thoughts are touched with gravity as they should be when we dwell
upon the sombre aspects of Venice--when we look, as here, for
example, on the Bridge of Sighs--we find ourselves repeating:

"I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs."

If we are in a gayer mood, as we are likely to be after looking
at the brilliant carnival-scene which greets us at the threshold
of the present number of _THE ALDINE_, we recall the opening
passages of