I used frequently to walk among the arcades of the Piazza di S. Marco, where crowds of both sexes are continually assembled, for purposes of business, conversation, or pleasure. I am not ashamed to own, that I have often witnessed the performances of mountebanks. Those actors are of higher merit in Venice, than elsewhere in Italy. They erect their stages every morning and evening near the church of S. Marco. Some of them wear masques, like fools in plays, and the others are dressed agreeably to the characters they sustain. Music, both vocal and instrumental, is the commencement of the entertainment. During the music, the Coryphæus of the party, who is generally dressed in a black gown, opens a trunk, and displays his goods, and when the music has ceased, he harangues the audience at great length, (often speaking for more than half an hour,) and frequently with considerable eloquence, on the virtue of his drugs, oils, waters, and confections. He then sells his articles, talking all the while in jest or seriousness as his wit serves.

The most impudent mountebank was always most successful. The credulity of the people

kept pace with his assurance.

was regarded with most devotion,

The man that

used to hold

a viper in his hand, play with its sting for a

quarter of an hour, and receive no hurt; assuring his audience, that the same viper was lineally descended from that very viper which leapt out of the fire on Saint Paul's hand, in the island of Malta, and did the man of God no harm. While the Coryphæus delivered out his commodities, the jester or fool played his antics, and there were various little pieces of acting, in dumb show, between the rest of the company. I have seen, at least, a thousand people witness an exhibition of this kind. The performance lasted for two hours, and when the audience, cloyed with the superfluity of the orator's conceits, offered only gazettes for what a short time before they had given ducats, the merry mountebanks removed their trinkets and stage. (67) But to resume the subject of letters and the fine arts.

As a Greek, my attention was often turned from the hum of business or pleasure of S. Marco, to contemplate the church itself. The marble columns were brought from Greece, and the mosaics which adorn it were worked by Greeks in the eleventh century. There is neither grandeur nor elegance in the church. But the Venetians are proud of it, as affording some support to the national boast, that the fine arts were patronized at Venice earlier than in any other city of Italy. I was attracted by the four

bronze horses which stand on the portico of the church that faces the piazza. Perhaps they are the work of Lysippus. But whoever was the artificer, they once adorned the city of Rome. Constantine removed them to the new seat of empire, where they remained till the commencement of the thirteenth century, when the knights of France and the nobles of Venice turned aside from their intended voyage to the Holy Land, overthrew the Greek dynasty, and sacked Constantinople. The French destroyed the remains of ancient art, but the Venetians were a more civilized nation, and the four bronze horses of the Hippodrome were removed to Venice. (68)

LASCARIS.

ONE of my first anxieties on arriving at Venice was to visit my old master, John Lascaris. He was there in quality of ambassador from Francis I., King of France; for, after establishing the Greek academy at Rome, he had quitted Italy and entered into the service of the French king. The mildness of his manners qualified him for the office of conciliation, yet a sort of nervous diffidence, arising from his consciousness of ignorance in worldly matters, gave him an ap

pearance of incapacity. In the course of his embassy for Louis XII. to Venice, the Spanish ambassador told the senate to judge of the respect in which the king held them, in sending a pedant instead of a politician. But Lascaris' reputation for abilities was higher at his second visit than at the first, and the insult was not repeated. He was then nearly ninety years old, and incapable of active employment, his delight was to live in recollection. To Lascaris every Greek was dear, and I was particularly so, as my mind bad been formed by his instructions. While speaking with gratitude of the noble reception which he and his lettered countrymen had met with from the princes of Italy, a smile of joy irradiated his face, that, though the political glories of Greece were sunk, yet her literary honours were reviving in a fresh spring. He boasted that a relation of his, Constantine Lascaris, who taught Greek at Milan and Messina, in the last half of the fifteenth century, had digested from the fragments of Herodian and Apollonius, the first Greek grammar ever known in the West, and that it was the first Greek book printed in Italy. It was published at Milan in 1476. Lactantius' Institutes was the first book printed in Italy with Greek quotations. It issued from the press in the monastery of Subiaco, in the year 1465.

After dwelling for a while upon these circumstances, Lascaris, recurring to the merits of the refugee Grecians, said, that he did not deny the truth of Erasmus' opinion, that Theodore Gaza of Thessalonica, who had died at Rome in 1508, at a very advanced age, was even a superior Greek grammarian to Constantine. My old master repeated to me with admiration the story that Theodore had indignantly cast into the Tiber a paltry present which Pope Sixtus IV. had given him in return for some of his immortal works. Lascaris dwelt with fond satisfaction on the service which he himself had rendered to literature, by assisting, as a corrector of the press, the elder Aldus; and that he was the first who traced from medals, and other memorials of antiquity, the real capitals of the Greek alphabet, and had directed the formation of type accordingly. On the comparative merit of the two great collections of classical literature, we, as Grecians, had but one opinion; yet I thought he was too strict in his nationality, when, after praising Plato and Homer as the princes of philosophy and poetry, he would accord no praise at all to Virgil and Tully. Lascaris was as great an exclusionist as the famous John Argyropylus, who had once been professor of the Greek Academy founded at Florence by Lorenzo de' Me