Venice, with all her literature, has brought forth but few literary men of her own. There are but few poets among her legitimate sons, and few were the poets she adopted. The early annalists and the later historians were almost the only writers of importance who were entitled to call her mother; and to most of these she has been, though kindly, little more than a step-mother or a mother-in-law. Shakspere, who wrote much about Venice, and who probably never saw it, remarked once that all the world’s a stage. Venice, even now, is a grand spectacular show; and no drama ever written is more dramatic than is Venice itself. Mr. Howells prefaces his _Venetian Life_ by an account of the play, and the by-play, which he once saw from a stage-box in the little theatre in Padua, when the prompters, and the scene-shifters, and the actors in the wings, were as prominent to him as were the tragedians and comedians who strutted, and mouthed, and sawed the air with their hands, in full view of the house; and he adds: “It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at another and grander spectacle, and that I had been suffered to see this Venice, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to everyday, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua.” It has been my own good fortune to spend, at various seasons, a short time in the pit--“on a standee ticket”--just to drop in for a moment now and then, when the performance is nearly over, and to look not so much at the broken-down stage and its worn-out settings, not so much at the actors and at the acting, as to study the audiences, the crowds of men and women in parquet, gallery, and boxes, who have been sitting for centuries through the different thrilling acts of the great plays played here; and have applauded, or hissed, as the case may be. So strange and so strong is the power of fiction over truth, in Venice, as everywhere else, that Portia and Emilia, Cassio, Antonio, and Iago, appear to have been more real here than are the women and men of real life. We see, on the Rialto, Shylock first, and then its history and its associations; and the Council Chamber of the Palace of the Doges is chiefly interesting as being the scene of Othello’s eloquent defence of himself.