ked when all her palaces were painted. Pictures by Gentile
Bellini, Mansueti, and Carpaccio help the fancy in this work of
restoration. And here and there, in back canals, we come across coloured
sections of old buildings, capped by true Venetian chimneys, which for a
moment seem to realise our dream.

A morning with Tintoretto might well be followed by a morning with
Carpaccio or Bellini. But space is wanting in these pages. Nor would it
suit the manner of this medley to hunt the Lombardi through palaces and
churches, pointing out their singularities of violet and yellow
panellings in marble, the dignity of their wide-opened arches, or the
delicacy of their shallow chiselled traceries in cream-white Istrian
stone. It is enough to indicate the goal of many a pleasant pilgrimage:
warrior angels of Vivarini and Basaiti hidden in a dark chapel of the
Frari; Fra Francesco's fantastic orchard of fruits and flowers in
distant S. Francesco della Vigna; the golden Gian Bellini in S.
Zaccaria; Palma's majestic S. Barbara in S. Maria Formosa; San Giobbe's
wealth of sculptured frieze and floral scroll; the Ponte di Paradiso,
with its Gothic arch; the painted plates in the Museo Civico; and palace
after palace, loved for some quaint piece of tracery, some moulding full
of mediaeval symbolism, some fierce impossible Renaissance freak of
fancy.

Rather than prolong this list, I will tell a story which drew me one day
past the Public Gardens to the metropolitan Church of Venice, San Pietro
di Castello. The novella is related by Bandello. It has, as will be
noticed, points of similarity to that of "Romeo and Juliet."

V.--A VENETIAN NOVELLA.

At the time when Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini were painting those
handsome youths in tight jackets, parti-coloured hose, and little round
caps placed awry upon their shocks of well-combed hair, there lived in
Venice two noblemen, Messer Pietro and Messer Paolo, whose palaces
fronted each other on the Grand Canal. Messer Paolo was a widower, with
one married daughter, and an only son of twenty years or thereabouts,
named Gerardo. Messer Pietro's wife was still living; and this couple
had but one child, a daughter, called Elena, of exceeding beauty, aged
fourteen. Gerardo, as is the wont of gallants, was paying his addresses
to a certain lady; and nearly every day he had to cross the Grand Canal
in his gondola, and to pass beneath the house of Elena on his way to
visit his Dulcinea; for this