Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, during one long and happy summer in Venice, wrote the story of his _Winter on the Nile_. He lived in the Barbaro Palace, on the Grand Canal, not far from the Falier house of Mr. Howells, on the same side of the stream, but on the other side of the Iron Bridge, and nearly opposite the modern-mosaic-frescoed ancient establishment of Murano-work, which Mr. Howells occupied later. Over the front door of Mr. Warner’s house is a great carved head of some ancient worthy, perhaps a Barbaro, perhaps a saint or a god, whose rank or title is to-day unknown. Mr. Warner’s writing was done in a little room with a balconied window, on the top floor of the neighboring Palazzo Fosclo. Of the other later-day historians of Venice, it may be stated that Dr. Robertson, the annalist of Sarpi and of St. Mark’s, lives in the Casa S. Leonardo, on the Rio S. Maria della Salute, and by the side of the church of that name; that Mr. Augustus J. C. Hare took most of his _Walks in Venice_ from the Hotel Milano, fronting on the Grand Canal; that Mrs. Clara Erskine Clement designed her crown for _The Queen of the Adriatic_ at the Hotel Europa; and that Mrs. Oliphant made _The Makers of Venice_ in a house in the Campo S. Maurizio. To go back to the men of other days. Addison came to Venice in the winter of 1699-1700. His remarks upon Italy are entertaining enough, although of the guide-book order, and he is uniformly silent regarding his experiences here. As Walpole said of him, he travelled through the poets and not through Italy; all his ideas were borrowed from the descriptions, not from the reality, and he saw places as they had been, not as they were. Goldoni is one of the few native actors of Venice who merit an encore here. He is as interesting to-day as he was to the audiences who crowded the theatres of Venice to [Illustration: GOLDONI’S STAIRCASE] witness his performances. He seems to have been born in the Calle dei Nomboli, at the corner of the Ponte and the Fondamenta S. Tomà, in the fine old house which contains the medallion portrait of the poet, and an inscription stating that here Carlo Goldoni first saw the light in 1707. It is still known as the Palazzo Centani, and it still possesses a beautiful Gothic staircase, upon the railing of which a little marble lion still placidly sits. But, as Mr. Howells points out, notwithstanding the assertions of the guides and the guide-books to the contrary, the dramatist could hardly have written many of his immortal comedies here, unless he was unusually precocious even for a poet, for he was a small child when his family moved to Chioggia.