In this church, also, is a monument to the doge Foscari, whose name a once resident of Venice, Lord Byron, has made permanently famous.

The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, is a curiosity in the way of mortuary adornment.  It is eighty feet high and is fronted like some fantastic pagan temple.  Against it stand four colossal Nubians, as black as night, dressed in white marble garments.  The black legs are bare, and through rents in sleeves and breeches, the skin, of shiny black marble, shows.  The artist was as ingenious as his funeral designs were absurd.  There are two bronze skeletons bearing scrolls, and two great dragons uphold the sarcophagus.  On high, amid all this grotesqueness, sits the departed doge.

In the conventual buildings attached to this church are the state archives of Venice.  We did not see them, but they are said to number millions of documents.  “They are the records of centuries of the most watchful, observant and suspicious government that ever existed—­in which every thing was written down and nothing spoken out.”  They fill nearly three hundred rooms.  Among them are manuscripts from the archives of nearly two thousand families, monasteries and convents.  The secret history of Venice for a thousand years is here—­its plots, its hidden trials, its assassinations, its commissions of hireling spies and masked bravoes—­food, ready to hand, for a world of dark and mysterious romances.

Yes, I think we have seen all of Venice.  We have seen, in these old churches, a profusion of costly and elaborate sepulchre ornamentation such as we never dreampt of before.  We have stood in the dim religious light of these hoary sanctuaries, in the midst of long ranks of dusty monuments and effigies of the great dead of Venice, until we seemed drifting back, back, back, into the solemn past, and looking upon the scenes and mingling with the peoples of a remote antiquity.  We have been in a half-waking sort of dream all the time.  I do not know how else to describe the feeling.  A part of our being has remained still in the nineteenth century, while another part of it has seemed in some unaccountable way walking among the phantoms of the tenth.

We have seen famous pictures until our eyes are weary with looking at them and refuse to find interest in them any longer.  And what wonder, when there are twelve hundred pictures by Palma the Younger in Venice and fifteen hundred by Tintoretto?  And behold there are Titians and the works of other artists in proportion.  We have seen Titian’s celebrated Cain and Abel, his David and Goliah, his Abraham’s Sacrifice.  We have seen Tintoretto’s monster picture, which is seventy-four feet long and I do not know how many feet high, and thought it a very commodious picture.  We have seen pictures of martyrs enough, and saints enough, to regenerate the world.  I ought not to confess it, but still, since one has no opportunity in America to acquire