in the seventh novella of the third decade of Giovanni Battista Cinthio’s collection of stories, called the _Ecatomiti_, in which the name of the heroine is the same, and in which the original Iago suggested to Othello that a stocking filled with sand might be an admirable weapon against his wife if it were judiciously applied to her back. Mr. Hare quotes Bishop Bollani as writing in 1602, June 1st: “The day before yesterday, a Sanudo, living in the Rio della Croce, on the Giudecca, compelled his wife, a lady of the Cappello family, to go to confession, and the following night, towards the fifth hour, plunged a dagger into her heart and killed her. It is said that she had been unfaithful to him, but the voice of her neighborhood proclaimed her a saint.” The voice of the gallery has proclaimed Desdemona a saint ever since! The Venetians still believe implicitly in the statue of the sunburnt warrior, and in Shakspere’s history of his life. And Mr. Howells’s gondolier not only showed him the house of Cassio, near the Rialto Bridge, but was ready to point out the residence of the amiable Iago and of Emilia, his wife. Cassio, I may remark, is said here to have been Desdemona’s cousin, and Iago is believed to have been the major-domo of the distracted household. The modern Venetian dealers in second-hand portraits, and the venders of bric-à-brac of all kinds, seem to have learned their strict and universal Economy of Truth from the memorial tablets over their shops. If you are offered here an article of original, homemade, present-time antiquity for five lire, you may depend upon getting it for two lire and a half, and you may be sure that it costs you, even then, about twice as much as it is worth. If an inscription in old Latin or in choice Italian tells you that “Here lived” some particular Venetian hero of sword or pen, you may put down in your diary that he probably visited next door, or that he died over the way. The tablet devoted to Marco Polo, however, being upon the side of a play-house where fiction is supposed to reign supreme, seems to have established itself as the exception which proves this rule. Only a small portion of the Palazzo dei Polo now remains. What is left of it is little more than a fragment of an outside staircase in a corner of the Corte Millione in the Canareggio District. The mansion at one time covered no small part of the neighboring territory, which still bears distinct traces of wealthy and aristocratic occupancy. Over the door-way of the Malibran Theatre, on the Rio del Teatro Malibran, is an inscription stating that “This was the house of Marco Polo, who travelled in the remotest parts of Asia, and described them. This tablet was placed here by the Commune in 1881.”