An elaborate statue of Sarpi, erected in 1892, is in the Campo Fosca, near the scene of his attempted murder, and on his direct way between his cloistered home and the Ducal Palace. The Greatest of the Venetians stands, in monumental bronze, with his face to the street and his back to the canal, and in figure as well as in features he suggests in many ways the younger, and the greater, of the D’Israelis, with whom, except in nationality, he had so little in common. The D’Israelis, it will be remembered, were descended from a line of prosperous Jewish merchants who had lived here in the days when Venice was still, in a measure, [Illustration: A CHARACTERISTIC CANAL] the Queen of the Adriatic. Neither of the two men of the race who made it famous in the annals of literature was born here, but they were both of them visitors here, although neither of them has left any record as to where or when. Isaac D’Israeli, however, in a paper upon “Venice,” among his _Curiosities_, in refuting Byron’s statement that “In Venice Tasso’s Echoes are no more,” takes bodily and literally, without credit, Goethe’s description of how he “entered a gondola by moonlight. One singer placed himself forwards and the other aft, and then proceeded to S. Giorgio.” Then follow, in Goethe’s words, D’Israeli’s remarks upon the music of the gondoliers, closing, still in Goethe’s words, with an experience familiar to all subsequent visitors here: “The sleepy canals, the lofty buildings, the splendor of the moon, the deep shadows of the few gondolas that moved like spirits hither and thither, increased the striking peculiarity of the scene; and amidst all these circumstances it was easy to confess the character of this wonderful harmony.” In another chapter of _The Curiosities_, which is entitled “The Origin of the Newspaper,” D’Israeli, stealing, perhaps, from somebody else, tells us that the first expression of Literature in the form of a periodical was made in Venice. It was, he says, a Government organ originally issued once a month; and even long after the invention of printing it appeared in manuscript. It was called _La Gazetta_, he adds, perhaps from “gazzera,” a magpie, or chatterer, or more likely from “gazzeta,” the small Venetian coin which was its price after it appeared in type. If this fact establishes another Literary Landmark for Venice, let Venice have all the credit of it.