James Fenimore Cooper, on his arrival here in 1838, “spent a day or two at the Hotel Leone Bianco, on the northwest side of the Square”; but later he “took apartments near the Palazzo, where he set up his own gondola.” He did what we all do on our first visit to Venice; but his conclusions are so unlike those of most of us that they are worth recording. “Although Venice was attractive at first,” he says, “in the absence of acquaintances it became monotonous and wearying. A town in which the sound of wheels and hoofs is never known, in which the stillness of the narrow, ravine-like canals is seldom broken, unless by the fall of an oar or the cry of a gondolier, fatigues one by its unceasing calm. I do not remember to have been so much struck with any place on entering it. I do not recollect ever to have been so soon tired of a residence in a capital.” The very absence of the noise of hoof and wheel, the very silence of which he complains, are, to most tired-minded travellers, the greatest of the charms of the capital city of Venice. But happily we each have our own points of view. Dickens came first to Venice in 1844, when he wrote to Forster: “Here I sit in the sober solitude of a famous inn, with the great bell of St. Mark ringing twelve at my elbow; with three arched windows in my room (two stones high) looking down upon the Grand Canal, and away, beyond, to where the sun went down to-night in a blaze.” He did not tell the name of the famous inn; but it sounds like Hotel Danieli. Elsewhere he said to the same correspondent: “My Dear Fellow--Nothing in the world that you have ever heard of Venice is equal to the magnificent and stupendous reality; the wildest visions of _The Arabian Nights_ are nothing to the Piazza of St. Mark, and the first impression of the inside of the Church. The gorgeous and wonderful reality of Venice is beyond the fancy of the wildest dreamer. Opium couldn’t build such a place, and enchantment couldn’t shadow it forth in vision.” In 1853 he wrote to Forster: “We live in the same house I lived in nine years ago, and have the same sitting-room--close to the Bridge of Sighs and the Palace of the Doges. The room is at the corner of the house, and there is a narrow street of water running round the side.” Again, no doubt, Hotel Danieli. In 1845 Mrs. Jameson wrote to Catharine Sedgwick: “Did you visit Venice? I forget. In the world there is nothing like it. It seems to me that we can find a similitude for everything else, but Venice is like nothing else--Venice the beautiful, the wonderful. I had seen it before, but it was as new to me as if unbeheld; and every morning when I arose I was still in the same state of wonder and enchantment.” She made several visits to Venice, but she gave no hint as to her places of lodgement here. George Eliot and Lewes arrived in Venice on the night of the 4th June, 1860. “What stillness!” she wrote, “what beauty! Looking out from the high windows of our hotel, I