the water all day, a sign that she is now closeted with someone else. There is an echo here from _Antony and Cleopatra_: ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, Burned on the water...!’ At this point the other half of the cast enters the poem: Bleistein the Jew. Burbank walks through Venice with a Baedeker, that is, with a melancholy respect for the past. Bleistein, on the contrary, walks through Venice with a cigar, a symbol of vulgar and ignorant self-enjoyment. The name Bleistein itself is a caricature of the common Goldstein or ‘Goldstone’: it means ‘Leadstone’. But this or such was Bleistein’s way: A saggy bending of the knees And elbows, with the palms turned out, Chicago Semite Viennese. A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot. Money in furs. The boatman smiles, Burbank sees the strength and wealth of Venice departed, the remnants of her glory enjoyed by an upstart Chicago Jew who probably started life as a tailor’s apprentice in Galicia (whose origin is Austria, whither Hercules first went from Venice in 1814). Canaletto was a painter of the eighteenth century whose aristocratic pictures of Venice are a long way from Bleistein’s kind. The smoky candle end recalls the Latin motto: ‘the rest is smoke’. Burbank pictures sorrowfully the Rialto of other days. The rats are underneath the piles now, and the Jew (the eternal Shylock) is the rat of rats. The jew (Jew is written with a small initial letter like rat) is apparently a rat because he has made money and because for some reason Jewish wealth, as opposed to Gentile wealth, has a mystical connection with the decline of Venice. This may not be Burbank’s private opinion or even Mr. Eliot’s. It at any rate expresses for Mr. Burbank and Mr. Eliot the way Venice at present feels or should feel about the modern Jew strutting through its streets. ‘Money in furs’ refers not only to the fact that the fur trade is largely in Jewish hands and that this is how Bleistein probably made his money, but also to some proverbial witticism, perhaps, about the ability of a Jew to make money even out of rats’ skins, out of the instruments of decay, that is. The smiling boatman, who has for centuries seen everything, stands as an ironic fate between Bleistein and Princess Volupine. Princess Volupine extends A meagre, blue-nailed, pthisic hand To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights, She entertains Sir Ferdinand Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings And flea’d his rump and pared his claws? Thought Burbank, meditating on Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.