ittle more than twelve pounds; and I am sure the
gratification to you would be high. I am lodged in quite a wonderful
place, and would put you in a painted room, as big as a church and much
more comfortable. There are pens and ink upon the premises; orange
trees, gardens, battledores and shuttlecocks, rousing wood-fires for
evenings, and a welcome worth having.

Come! Letter from a gentleman in Italy to Bradbury and Evans in London.
Letter from a gentleman in a country gone to sleep to a gentleman in a
country that would go to sleep too, and never wake again, if some people
had their way. You can work in Genoa. The house is used to it. It is
exactly a week's post. Have that portmanteau looked to, and when we
meet, say, "I am coming."

I have never in my life been so struck by any place as by Venice. It is
_the_ wonder of the world. Dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible,
wicked, shadowy, d----able old place. I entered it by night, and the
sensation of that night and the bright morning that followed is a part
of me for the rest of my existence. And, oh God! the cells below the
water, underneath the Bridge of Sighs; the nook where the monk came at
midnight to confess the political offender; the bench where he was
strangled; the deadly little vault in which they tied him in a sack, and
the stealthy crouching little door through which they hurried him into a
boat, and bore him away to sink him where no fisherman dare cast his
net--all shown by torches that blink and wink, as if they were ashamed
to look upon the gloomy theatre of sad horrors; past and gone as they
are, these things stir a man's blood, like a great wrong or passion of
the instant. And with these in their minds, and with a museum there,
having a chamber full of such frightful instruments of torture as the
devil in a brain fever could scarcely invent, there are hundreds of
parrots, who will declaim to you in speech and print, by the hour
together, on the degeneracy of the times in which a railroad is building
across the water at Venice; instead of going down on their knees, the
drivellers, and thanking Heaven that they live in a time when iron makes
roads, instead of prison bars and engines for driving screws into the
skulls of innocent men. Before God, I could almost turn bloody-minded,
and shoot the parrots of our island with as little compunction as
Robinson Crusoe shot the parrots in his.

I have not been in bed, these ten days, after five in the mo