Venice especially outdid all her rivals, and printed an account of the Queen of the Adriatic, embracing history, topography, science in all its branches, and artistic story, in four huge and magnificent volumes, which remains to the present day by far the best topographical monograph that any city of the peninsula possesses.  This truly splendid work, which brought out in the ordinary way could not have been sold for less than six or eight guineas, was presented, together with much other printed matter—­an enormous lithographed panorama of Venice and her lagoons some five feet long in a handsome roll cover, I remember among them—­to every “member” on his enrolment as such.

Then there were concerts, and excursions, and great daily dinners the gayest and most enjoyable imaginable, at which both sexes were considered to be equally scientific and equally welcome.  The dinners were not absolutely gratuitous, but the tickets for them were issued at a price very much inferior to the real cost of the entertainment.  And all this it must be understood was done not by any subscription of members scientific or otherwise, but by the city and its municipality; the motive for such expenditure being the highly characteristic Italian one, of rivalling and outdoing in magnificence other cities and municipalities, or in the historical language of Italy, “communes.”

Old Rome, with her dependent cities, made no sign during all these autumns of ever increasing festivity.  Pity that they should have come to an end before she did so; for at the rate at which things were going, we should all at least have been crowned on the Capitol, if not made Roman senators, pour l’amour du Grec, as the savant says in the Precieuses Ridicules, if we had gone to the Eternal City!

But the fact was, that the soi-disant ’ologists kicked up their heels a little too audaciously at Venice under Austria’s nose; and the Government thought it high time to put an end to “science.”

For instance, Prince Canino made his appearance in the uniform of the Roman National Guard!  This was a little too much; and the Prince, all prince and Buonaparte as he was, was marched off to the frontier.  Canino had every right to be there as a man of science; for his acquirements in many branches of science were large and real; and specially as an entomologist he was known to be probably the first in Italy.  But he was the man, who, when selling his principality of Canino, insisted on the insertion in the legal instrument of a claim to an additional five pauls (value about two shillings), for the title of prince which was attached to the possessor of the estates he was selling.  He was an out-and-out avowed Republican, and was the blackest of black sheep to all the constituted governments of the peninsula.  He looked as little as he felt and thought like a prince.  He was a paunchy, oily-looking black haired man, whose somewhat heavy face was illumined by a brilliant black