“Last night there was a concert of voices and instruments at the Hospital of the Incurabili, where there were two girls that in the opinion of all people excel either Faustina or Cuzzoni. “I am invited to-morrow to the Foscarini to dinner, which is to be followed by a concert and a ball.” The account of a regatta follows, in which the various nobles had boats costing £1000 sterling each, none less than £500, and enough of them to look like a little fleet. The Signora Pisani Mocenigo’s represented the Chariot of the Night, drawn by four sea-horses, and showing the rising of the moon, accompanied with stars, the statues on each side representing the Hours, to the number of twenty-four. Pleasant times, these, for Venice! one’s Bucentaur launched, wherein to eat, buoyantly, a magnificent collation—beautiful ladies driving their ocean steeds in the Chariot of the Night—beautiful songs, at the Hospital of the Incurabili. Much bettered, these, from the rough days when one had to row and fight for life, thought Venice; better days still, in the nineteenth century, being—as she appears to believe now—in store for her. You thought, I suppose, that in writing those numbers of Fors last year from Venice and Verona, I was idling, or digressing? Nothing of the kind. The business of Fors is to tell you of Venice and Verona; and many things of them. You don’t care about Venice and Verona? Of course not. Who does? And I beg you to observe that the day is coming when, exactly in the same sense, active working men will say to any antiquarian who purposes to tell them something of England, “We don’t care about England.” And the antiquarian will answer, just as I have answered you now, “Of course not. Who does?” Nay, the saying has been already said to me, and by a wise and good man. When I asked, at the end of my inaugural lecture at Oxford, “Will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light—a centre of peace?”—my University friends came to me, with grave faces, to remonstrate against irrelevant and Utopian topics of that nature being introduced in lectures on art; and a very dear American friend wrote to me, when I sent the lecture to him, in some such terms as these: “Why will you diminish your real influence for good, by speaking as if England could now take any dominant place in the world? How many millions, think you, are there here, of the activest spirits of their time, who care nothing for England, and would read no farther, after coming upon such a passage?” That England deserves little care from any man nowadays, is fatally true; that in a century more she will be—where Venice is—among the dead of nations, is far more than probable. And yet—that you do not care for dead Venice, is the sign of your own ruin; and that the Americans do not care for dying England, is only the sign of their inferiority to her.