The gondolier contemporary with Byron was correctly described as songless. At a date closely coinciding with the overthrow of Venetian freedom, the boatmen left off waking the echoes of the Grand Canal, except by those cries of warning which, no one can quite say why, so thrill and move the hearer. It was no rare thing to find among the Italians of the Lombardo-Venetian provinces the old pathetic instinct of keeping silence before the stranger. I recollect a story told me by one of them. When he was a boy, Antonio--that was his name--had to make a journey with two young Austrian officers. They took notice of the lad, who was sprightly and good-looking, and by and by they asked him to sing. "Canta, canta, il piccolo," said they; "sing us the songs of Italy." He refused. They insisted, and, coming to a tavern, they gave him wine, which sent the blood to his head. So at last he said, "Very well, I will sing you the songs of Italy." What he sang was one of the most furiously anti-Austrian songs of '48. "Ah! taci, taci il piccolo!" cried the officers, but the "piccolo" would not be quiet until he had sung the whole revolutionary repertory. The Austrians knew how to appreciate the boy's spirit, for they pressed on him a ten franc piece at parting. To return to Venice. In the year 1819 an English traveller asked for a song of a man who was reported to have once chanted Tasso _alla barcaruolo_; the old gondolier shook his head. "In times like these," he said, "he had no heart to sing." Foreign visitors had to fall back on the beautiful German music, at the sound of which Venetians ran out of the Piazza, lest they might be seduced by its hated sweetness. Meanwhile the people went on singing in their own quarters, and away from the chance of ministering to their masters' amusement. It is even probable that the moral casemate to which they fled favoured the preservation of their old ways, that of poetising included. Instead of aiming at something novel and modern, the Venetian wished to be like what his fathers were when the flags on St Mark's staffs were not yellow and black. So, like his fathers, he made songs and sang songs, of which a good collection has been formed, partly in past years, and partly since the black-and-yellow standard has given place, not, indeed, to the conquered emblems of the Greek isles, but to the colours of Italy, reconquered for herself.