The birth of a son to the Grand Duke has been signalized, I have just learned, by a display of princely munificence. Five thousand crowns have been presented to the Archbishop who performed the ceremony of christening the child; the servants of the ducal household have received two months' wages, in addition to their usual salary; five hundred young women have received marriage portions of thirty crowns each; all the articles of property at the great pawnbroking establishments managed by goverment, pledged for a less sum than four livres, have been restored to the owners without payment; and finally, all persons confined for larceny and other offences of a less degree than homicide and other enormous crimes, have been liberated and turned loose upon society again. The Grand Duke can well afford to be generous, for from a million and three hundred thousand people he draws, by taxation, four millions of crowns annually, of which a million only is computed to be expended in the military and civil expenses of his government. The remainder is of course applied to keeping up the state of a prince and to the enriching of his family. He passes, you know, for one of the richest potentates in Europe. Letter VI. Venice.—The Tyrol. Munich, _August_ 6, 1835. Since my last letter I have visited Venice, a city which realizes the old mythological fable of beauty born of the sea. I must confess, however, that my first feeling on entering it was that of disappointment. As we passed in our gondola out of the lagoons, up one of the numerous canals, which, permeate the city in every direction in such a manner that it seems as if you could only pass your time either within doors or in a boat, the place appeared to me a vast assemblage of prisons surrounded with their moats, and I thought how weary I should soon grow of my island prison, and how glad to escape again to the main-land. But this feeling quickly gave way to delight and admiration, when I landed and surveyed the clean though narrow streets, never incommoded by dust nor disturbed by the noise and jostling of carriages and horses, by which you may pass to every part of the city—when I looked again at the rows of superb buildings, with their marble steps ascending out of the water of the canals, in which the gondolas were shooting by each other—when I stood in the immense square of St. Mark, surrounded by palaces resting on arcades, under which the shops rival in splendor those of Paris, and crowds of the gay inhabitants of both sexes assemble towards evening and sit in groups before the doors of the coffee-houses—and when I gazed on the barbaric magnificence of the church of St. Mark and the Doge's palace, surrounded by the old emblems of the power of Venice, and overlooking the Adriatic, once the empire of the republic. The architecture of Venice has to my eyes, something watery and oceanic in its aspect. Under the hands of Palladio, the Grecian orders