The priest looked at all of them with the air of a man who fears that he has fallen into the midst of a set of lunatics: then flashing a fiery glance upon the young man, he exclaimed with a sinister smile, "There is not a shadow of truth in it, fortunately." "Oh!" they all exclaimed, turning toward the son. The latter, without seeming disconcerted, looked fixedly at the priest, and said to him, in a half-sorrowful, half-contemptuous voice, "Only, reverend father, do not say 'fortunately.' You are an Italian: say, 'What a pity that it is not so!'" And all the others flew once more at the priest, and, as is generally the case, more incensed against the one who had destroyed the illusion than against him who had created it, they repeated almost involuntarily, "Decidedly! Say rather, 'What a pity!'" "I?" answered the priest, turning toward his breast a long knotty finger: then, in a bitter vibrant voice, "Never!" The old man, thus suddenly wounded and so rudely deprived of the delightful emotion which had agitated him, lost his wits as usual, and stretching out his arm toward the door framed with his lips the word "Begone!" The priest disappeared, slamming the door behind him. The son threw his arms around his father's neck: the latter, looking toward the door, muttered in a feeble voice, "Heartless man!" A VENETIAN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. A strange figure, a man almost wholly forgotten, but one to whom Goethe, Schiller, Tieck and Schlegel owed not a little, is yet to be known by whoever cares to rub the dust from old memoirs and turn the pages of some rare and racy volumes. And in knowing this Venetian much may be learned of the decadence of Venice, which had come to produce, not the great and reverent and serious men who laid her stones and covered her walls with sweet and splendid works expressive of the endurance and piety of great souls, but such men as Casanova the gambler, Goldoni the play-writer, Longhi and Canaletto the painters; and then, as the best among them all, the honest Venetian whom we now meet, sometimes called the Shakespeare of Venice, but in fact only a play-writer, a Venetian nobleman, who depicted in a dispassionate temper the trivialities of his age, and lacked both the _milieu_ and the material to produce a great work.