“Well, then, I’ll tell ye,” said our humorous friend, with a merry twinkle in his eye, and a really comic aspect; “d’ye know, docthor, when I have been in India this time of the year I have often made the natives dig a grave for me to lie in, half fill it with grass and pour buckets of cold wather on me to keep me from melting. I’ll tell ye another thing—cholera is so bad at this time of the year, that, by the Viceroy’s orders, coffins of all sizes are kept ready at the railway stations, and when the ticket-collector goes round, saying, ‘Yere tickets, plase,’ he finds a poor divil in the corner who does not respond; looks at him, finds him dead, pulls him out, finds a coffin the right size, puts him in, and by St. Pathrick he’s buried before the sun sets. Now what d’ye think of that? That’s what India’s like this time of the year.”
Of course we all roared with laughter at the voluble and comical way in which this was said, and I mentally made a note that I should not start for India in May for my first visit.
Amongst our passengers were two sons of Sir Salar Jung, the Prime Minister of the Nizam of Hyderabad, on a visit to England. The elder one, though young, was a very Colossus, and an extremely intelligent, agreeable fellow, who spoke English fairly well, and was very chatty. He invited me, if I visited India, to visit him, and promised I should have some tiger-hunting. Whether I shall ever do so, or he would remember his promise, I don’t know—probably not. Dr. Kilkelly and I put up at the same hotel (the Hôtel d’Italie), and spent a few days very pleasantly. I cannot say I should like to live in a place where, if I enter my front door, I must step out of a gondola, or if I want to visit a friend I must cross the street in a gondola; but it is a charming place to pay a visit to for a few days, especially for a person with a romantic and poetic turn of mind, and although romance has, to a great extent been knocked out of me, I still have sufficient of the poetic temperament to have been highly pleased with my visit to Venice, short though it was.
Pursuing the course I have hitherto adopted, I will not leave Venice without a brief sketch of it and my visits to various places of great interest, although, perhaps, repeating an oft-told tale. The man who ventures on a description of a visit to Venice ought to be thoroughly imbued with romance and poetry ere he can do justice to his subject. Under such circumstances I cannot hope to rival many another; but, as the Yankees say, “I’ll do my level best.” On the evening of my arrival, I met, by appointment, one of the officers of the Mongolia, whom I accompanied to St. Mark’s Place. The side of the Piazza facing St. Mark is a line of modern building erected by the French, somewhat in the style of the Palais Royal at Paris, but yet having some sort of keeping with the edifices on the south side. They are termed the Procuratie Nuove, and form the south side, the Procuratie Vecchie the north side. The end is composed of a French façade uniting the two. Near the east end of the Procuratie Nuove, just by the point where it makes an angle with the Piazetta, stands the Campanile of St. Mark. It is, in fact, the belfry of the Cathedral, although it stands some considerable distance from it. The separation of the belfry from the church is very common in Italy, and there are a few instances of it in our own country. On the summit of the Campanile is a large open belfry to which you ascend in the inside by means of a series of inclined planes. The sides of the belfry are formed by sixteen arches, four facing each quarter of the heavens. A gallery with a parapet runs round the outside. I was told that the First Napoleon ascended the inclined plane by means of a donkey. I, however, had to walk it, and was well recompensed for my trouble by the magnificent view obtained from the summit. Southward lies the noble Adriatic, with the Pyrenees to the right; northward the Tyrolese Alps; immediately spreading round this singular post of observation lies the city of Venice, map-like, with its canals and neighbouring isles; and just under the eye, to the east, is St. Mark’s Church, considerably below, with its fine domes, its four bronze horses, its numerous pinnacles, and in front of it its three tall, red standards.
It is impossible to describe the effect produced on the mind, on a summer’s evening, as the sun is going down in his glory over the mainland beyond the lagoons, lighting them up with his parting rays, while the murmurs of the crowd assembled in St. Mark’s Place ascend like the hum of bees around the hive door, and the graceful gondolas are seen noiselessly gliding along the canals. Traversing the Piazza, we find ourselves in the Piazetta running down from the east end of the great one by St. Mark’s Church to the water-side, where the eye ranges over the lagoons and isles. The next side of this open space contains a continuation of the walk under arcades, which surround St. Mark’s Place. The upper part exhibits a specimen of the Italian style, designed by Sansovino. The whole belonged to the royal palace, or Palace of the Doges, which extends along the south and west sides of the Piazza. Turning round the west corner of the Piazetta, on the Mole, with the canal in front, we see another of Sansovino’s works, called the Zecca, or Mint, from which the gold coin of the Republic derived the name of Zecchino. In front of the open space and landing steps of the Piazetta are two lofty columns, which appear so prominently in the pictures of that part of Venice. They are of granite, and came from Constantinople—trophies of Venetian victories in the Turkish wars. The right hand column, looking towards the sea, is surmounted by a figure of St. Mark, standing on a crocodile. The left hand is surmounted by the lion of St. Mark. The west front of the ducal palace forms the east side of the Piazetta; the south front runs along the whole, and looks out upon the sea. They are its most ancient portions. The front, overlooking the Piazetta, is composed of two rows of arcades, one above the other; the lower a colonnade, the upper a gallery, surmounted by a very large and lofty surface of wall of a reddish marble, pierced by fine large windows. One gentleman says of it, “The ducal palace is even more ugly than anything I have previously mentioned.”
Mr. Ruskin, on the other hand, says that, “Though in many respects imperfect, it is a piece of rich and fantastic colour, as lovely a dream as ever filled the imagination, and the proportioning of the columns and walls of the lofty story is so lovely and so varied that it would need pages of description before it could be fully understood.”
Having done the Campanile, and strolled round the Piazza and Piazetta, we took our seats in the Piazza. On the west and south sides, as well as the north, the lower part of the buildings under the arcades is appropriated to shops or cafés. The latter are particularly celebrated. Towards sunset the area of St. Mark’s Place is overspread with tables and chairs, where ladies and gentlemen are seated at their ease, as if in a drawing-room, taking refreshments. A space in the middle is left for promenaders, and when the military band is playing, which it does two or three times a week, the concourse is immense, and the scene very lively and charming, enabling one to realise the saying of Bonaparte, “The Place of St. Mark is a saloon of which the sky is worthy to serve as a ceiling.”
Having enjoyed the sweet strains discoursed by the military band to our heart’s content, we took our departure, my companion to his ship, and I to my hotel.
The following day was occupied in various ways by Dr. Kilkelly and myself. In the first place we, of course, paid a visit to the Palace of the Doges. If those walls could speak, how many tales of horror and cruelty they could unfold! Our visit to some portions of the Palace enabled us to vividly imagine some of them. Of course, in many of the trials here, whatever may be thought of the sentence inflicted, guilt, and that of a heavy kind, was proved against the accused. The place was not always a slaughter-house for innocence, a butchery for men guilty of light offence. Grave crimes against the State were here disclosed, and the memory especially dwells on that night in the April of 1855, when Marino Faliero, a traitor to the Government of which he was the head, was arraigned before his old companions in office, and when the sword of justice, covered with crape, was placed on the throne which he had been wont to fill. A very minute inspection of the Doge’s Palace was not practicable, for two reasons; one was want of time, the other the impatience of my friend. Whilst in the Council Chamber of the Senate, and for a minute or so looking at the largest painting I ever saw in my life, “The Day of Judgment,” my hasty friend seized me by the arm, exclaiming, “Come along, do;” and soon afterwards, when I was deeply engaged in the futile endeavour apparently of dislocating my neck by looking at the painted ceilings, and getting up the requisite enthusiasm for the marvellous productions of some of the masterpieces of Titian, Paulo Veronese, and Tintoretto, I was told to “Come along, docthor. Sure ye’ll have a crick in yer neck, and not be able to eat yer dinner at all, at all, if ye stand looking at the ceiling in that kind of way;” and so I allowed my volatile friend to rush me through the Palace of the Doges, coming away with a hazy recollection of thousands of books, wondrous paintings, the Council Chamber of the Senate, before whom an undefended prisoner had formerly appeared; the Council of Ten, where he generally got deeper in the mire; the Council of Three, whose decrees were like the laws of the Medes and Persians; and, finally, the dungeon, or condemned cell, just by one end of the Bridge of Sighs, where he was strangled within, I think, three days of his condemnation. I was also shown a dungeon, but not so low down as the condemned cell, where no ray of light could be admitted, but where the poor wretch had a stone slab, such as we have in our cellars, to lie upon, and let into the wall was an opening through which the Grand Inquisitor could calmly gaze on the torturing process produced by the rack and thumb-screw, and other ingenious but painful arrangements constructed for blood-letting. Some of the blood of deceased victims was shown to me on the walls, possibly like the blood of Rizzio on the floor in Holyrood Palace, renewed once a year. Of course there were many objects of great interest in the Doge’s Palace that I should have, no doubt, made many notes of had I been by myself, but mental notes were all I was permitted to take. Many people give a free rein to their fancy, and argue much on the origin of species. This is a free country, and I may form my own idea of the General Post-Office. Suppose I were to say that it originated from the Doge’s Palace? but fortunately for us, with a more agreeable class of men as letter-carriers. I remember to have seen a lion, griffin, or “goblin damned,” at the head of one staircase, with open mouth, whose sole object was to receive accusations, true and false, against citizens of the State, and woe betide him if he came before the Council of Three, from whom there was no appeal. Here our accusers have to prove us guilty, there the accused had to prove himself innocent; and I doubt not that, in those dark ages of cruelty, such a mode had its inconveniences, necessitating a considerable amount of trouble for nothing on the part of the accused.