each no bigger than the point of your finger would cover!  But this is not all.  The wide-extending pavement is seen to be composed in like manner of small pieces of marble and precious stones, set so as to form regular figures, all most exact, and still wonderfully entire, though it has endured the feet of daily thousands for several centuries.  Unfortunately, from some infirmity in the vaulting below, this singular floor is thrown into undulations, in some places so great as to require care in walking over them.  I spent hours in wandering about and examining the many curious things which are to be seen in this church, including those of its famous treasury.  It is truly surprising that, after so many revolutions, so many of these valuables have been preserved.  The fidelity of the priesthood to their charge is surely deserving of some admiration, considering how many opportunities there must have been of making away with precious articles, after which no inquiry would probably have ever been made.

A campanile, or bell-tower, has been erected in the square near the church, and is one of the most conspicuous objects in Venice; rising, as it does, above every other building.  It seems slender; but I was surprised to find, on a rough measurement, that the sides are not less than fifty feet wide.  A paved way, instead of a staircase, conducts to an open loggia near the top, whence you can have a complete view of the city.  I remarked that the tops of many of the houses are of use in the same way as gardens and summer-houses are in other countries.  People go there to smoke, or to take their coffee—­the chimneys being a very slight obstruction to such enjoyments in a country where little fire is used.  We here also had a good view of the celebrated orologio of Venice; a tower containing an ancient clock of peculiar elaborateness of construction.  On the top stand two metal giants, armed with ponderous hammers, with which to strike the hours and quarters on a huge bell, placed between them.  There is something terrible in these automata; and the feeling is not allayed when you hear that one of them once committed a murder, having with his hammer knocked an incautious workman over the battlements!  The campanile was begun in 902; and I felt interested in tracing its resemblance, both in architecture and relative situation, to the square tower of St Andrews, which is supposed to be of nearly the same age.

My limits leave me no room to dilate upon our visit to the Accademia.  Indeed, in the visit itself, we could do little more than pause here and there as a Titian or Tintoretto cast up in the multitude of pictures, or when we came before some specimen of the very early masters, of whose works there are many dating so far back as the end of the fourteenth century.  There were some pictures representing transactions in Venice, of not much later date, which I regarded with interest, as preserving to us the appearance of men and things in that age; particularly