How much Goethe did for Venice, and for the Hotel of the English Queen, Goethe himself probably never knew. But ever since Goethe expressed, in print, his romantic love for the place, German brides have been coming here on their wedding-trips, and have been trying to see Venice as Goethe saw it, and have been quoting Goethe to their husbands-of-a-day-or-two, and have been pretending an enthusiasm for Venice which they do not always feel, simply because, somehow, this is considered, on Goethe’s account, the proper thing for German brides to do. The biographers of Samuel Rogers have printed only fragmentary portions of the _Diary and Letters_ written during his visit to Italy in 1814, and very few of his personal experiences here have been preserved. We learn that Venice greatly delighted him, and that he was particularly fond of loitering about the Square of St. Mark. No doubt he was wont to break his fast at the Restaurant Quadri, and very likely he was accustomed to break the fast of the doves who loitered there too. Byron spent the winter of 1816-’17 in Venice. On the 17th of November, 1816, he wrote to Moore: “I have fallen in love, which, next to falling into the canal (which would be of no use, as I can swim), is the best, or the worst, thing I could do. I have got some extremely good apartments in the house of a Merchant of Venice, who is a good deal occupied with business, and has a wife in her twenty-second year.” He spoke more than once of these lodgings, but he gave no hint as to where they were, and he asked Murray to address him _Poste Restante_. Moore, however, says that for many months he continued to occupy the same rooms “in an extremely narrow street, called the Spezzeria, at the house of a linen-draper.” The Spezzeria is not a street, but a district of the town, near the Rialto Quarter. It was devoted, in Byron’s day, to the dealers in spices. His Merchant of Venice, therefore, should have been a vender of drugs, sugars, coffees, spices, wax-candles and the like, in wholesale. But, alas for the romance of it all! tradition, in Venice, says that he was a plain, commonplace baker who lived, in good enough style, not in the Spezzeria, but in the Frezzeria, the Street of the Makers of Arrows. In December Byron wrote to Murray: “I have begun, and am proceeding in, a study of the Armenian language, which I acquire, as well as I can, at the Armenian Convent here, where I go every day to take lessons of a learnèd friar, and have gained some singular and not useless information [Illustration: BYRON’S STUDY IN THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY]