t
three o'clock in a morning and ends about six;--the Gondoliers rowing
home their masters and ladies about that hour, and so on till
eight;--the common business of the town, which it is then time to
begin;--the state affairs and _pregai_, which often like our House of
Commons sit late, and detain many gentlemen from the circles of morning
amusements--that I find very entertaining;--particularly the street
orators and mountebanks in Piazza St. Marco;--the shops and stalls where
chickens, ducks, &c. are sold by auction, comically enough, to the
highest bidder;--a flourishing fellow, with a hammer in his hand,
shining away in character of auctioneer;--the crowds which fill the
courts of judicature, when any cause of consequence is to be tried;--the
clamorous voices, keen observations, poignant sarcasms, and acute
contentions carried on by the advocates, who seem more awake, or in
their own phrase _svelti_ than all the rest:--all these things take up
so much time, that twenty-four hours do not suffice for the business and
diversions of Venice; where dinner must be eaten as in other places,
though I can scarcely find a minute to spare for it, while such fish
wait one's knife and fork as I most certainly did never see before, and
as I suppose are not to be seen in any sea but this, in such perfection.
Fresh sturgeon, _ton_ as they call it, and fresh anchovies, large as
herrings, and dressed like sprats in London, incomparable; turbots, like
those of Torbay exactly, and plentiful as there, with enormous pipers,
are what one principally eats here. The fried liver, without which an
Italian can hardly go on from day to day, is so charmingly dressed at
Milan, that I grew to like it as well as they; but at Venice it is sad
stuff, and they call it _fegao_.

Well! the ladies, who never hardly dine at all, rise about seven in the
evening, when the gentlemen are just got ready to attend them; and sit
sipping their chocolate on a chair at the coffee-house door with great
tranquillity, chatting over the common topics of the times: nor do they
appear half so shy of each other as the Milanese ladies, who seldom
seem to have any pleasure in the soft converse of a female friend. But
though certainly no women can be more charming than these Venetian
dames, they have forgotten the old mythological fable, _that the
youngest of the Graces was married to Sleep._ By which it was intended
we should consider that state as necessary to the reparatio