off; if it be a Nicoloto, bid him come in." On the night of the Redeemer (in July) still takes place what was perhaps one of the most ancient of Venetian customs. A fantastic illumination, a bridge of boats, a people's ball, a prize-giving to the best gondolas, a promiscuous wandering about the public gardens, these form some of the features of the festival. But its most remarkable point is the expedition to the Lido at three o'clock in the morning to see the dawn. As the sun rises from his cradle of eastern gold, he is greeted by the shout of thousands. Many of the youths leap into the water and disport themselves like wild creatures of the sea. A word in conclusion as to the dialect in which Venetian songs are composed. The earliest specimen extant consists in the distich-- Lom po far e die in pensar E vega quelo che li po inchiontrar, which is to be read on the facade of St Mark's, opposite the ducal palace. The meaning is, Look before you leap--an adage well suited to the people who had the reputation of being the most prudent in the world. This inscription belongs to the twelfth century. There used to be a song sung at Ascension-tide on the occasion of the marriage of the doge with the Adriatic, of which the signification of the words was lost and only the sound preserved. It is a pity that it was never written out phonetically; for modern scholars would probably have proved equal to the task of interpreting it, even as they have given us the secret of the runes on the neck of the Greek lion at the arsenal. We owe to Dante a line of early Venetian--one of those tantalising fragments of dialect poems in his posthumous work, _De Vulgari Eloquentia_--fragments perhaps jotted down with the intention of copying the full stanzas had he lived to finish the treatise. Students have long been puzzled by Dante's judgment on the Venetian dialect, which he said was so harsh that it made the conversation of a woman resemble that of a man. The greatest master of the Italian tongue was ruthless in his condemnation of its less perfect forms, to the knowledge of which he was all the same indebted in no slight degree. But it must not be overlooked that the question in Dante's day was whether Italy should have a language or whether the nation should go on oscillating between Latin and _patois_. For reasons patriotic and political quite as much as literary, Dante's heart was set on the adoption of one "illustrious, cardinal, aulic and polite" speech by the country at large, and to that end he contributed incalculably, though less by his treatise than by his poem. The involuntary hatred of _patois_ as an outward sign of disunion has reappeared again in some of those who in our own time have done and suffered most for united Italy. Thus I once heard Signor Benedetto Cairoli say: "When we were children, our mother would on no account let us speak anything but good Italian." It is possible that Dante's strong feeling on the subject made him unjust.