t its blunt and clumsy contour at once makes
us feel that all the care has been thrown away, and well it may be, for
it has been entirely bestowed in cutting gouty wrinkles about the
joints. Such as the hand is, I looked for its fellow. At first I thought
it had been broken off, but, on clearing away the dust, I saw the
wretched effigy had only _one_ hand, and was a mere block on the inner
side. The face, heavy and disagreeable in its features, is made
monstrous by its semi-sculpture. One side of the forehead is wrinkled
elaborately, the other left smooth; one side only of the doge's cap is
chased; one cheek only is finished, and the other blocked out and
distorted besides; finally, the ermine robe, which is elaborately
imitated to its utmost lock of hair and of ground hair on the one side,
is blocked out only on the other: it having been supposed throughout the
work that the effigy was only to be seen from below, and from one side.

Sec. XLIII. It was indeed to be so seen by nearly every one; and I do
not blame--I should, on the contrary, have praised--the sculptor for
regulating his treatment of it by its position; if that treatment had
not involved, first, dishonesty, in giving only half a face, a
monstrous mask, when we demanded true portraiture of the dead; and,
secondly, such utter coldness of feeling, as could only consist with an
extreme of intellectual and moral degradation: Who, with a heart in his
breast, could have stayed his hand as he drew the dim lines of the old
man's countenance--unmajestic once, indeed, but at least sanctified by
the solemnities of death--could have stayed his hand, as he reached the
bend of the grey forehead, and measured out the last veins of it at so
much the zecchin?

I do not think the reader, if he has feeling, will expect that much
talent should be shown in the rest of his work, by the sculptor of this
base and senseless lie. The whole monument is one wearisome aggregation
of that species of ornamental flourish, which, when it is done with a
pen, is called penmanship, and when done with a chisel, should be called
chiselmanship; the subject of it being chiefly fat-limbed boys sprawling
on dolphins, dolphins incapable of swimming, and dragged along the sea
by expanded pocket-handkerchiefs.

But now, reader, comes the very gist and point of the whole matter. This
lying monument to a dishonored doge, this culminating pride of the
Renaissance art of Venice, is at least veracious, i