We emerged again upon the marble piazzetta; and more welcome than ever was the bright light, and the noble grace of the buildings. At its southern extremity, where the piazzetta looks out upon the Adriatic, are two stately granite columns; the one surmounted by St Theodore, and the other by the lion of St Mark. These are the two gods of Venice. They were to the Republic what the two calves were to Israel,--their all-powerful protectors; and so devoutly did the Venetians worship them, that even the god of the Seven Hills became jealous of them. "The Venetians in general care little about God," says an old traveller, "less about the Pope, but a great deal about St Mark." St Theodore sheltered the Republic in its infancy; but when it grew to greatness, it deemed it unbecoming its dignity to have only a subordinate for its tutelar deity. Accordingly, Venice sought and obtained a god of the first water. The Republic brought over the body of St Mark, enshrined it in a magnificent church, and left its former patron no alternative but to cross the Lagunes, or occupy a second place. Before bidding adieu to the piazza of St Mark, around which there hovers so many historic memories, and which every style of architecture, from the Greek and the Byzantine down to the Gotho-Italian, has met to decorate, and which, we may add, in point of noble grace and chaste beauty is perhaps not excelled in the world, we must be allowed to mention one object, which appeared to us strangely out of keeping with the spot and its edifices. It is the tall Gothic tower that rises opposite the Byzantine front of S. Mark's Cathedral. It attains a height of upwards of three hundred feet, and is used for various purposes, which, however, it could serve equally well in some other part of Venice. It strikes one the more, that it is the one deformity of the place. It reminded me of the entrance of a clown at a royal levee, or the appearance of harlequin in a tragedy. Betaking ourselves again to a gondola, and gliding noiselessly along the grand canal,-- "For silent rows the songless gondolier," we visited the _Academia delle Belle Arte_. It resembled a great and elaborately compiled work on painting, and I could there read off the history of the rise and progress of the art in Venice. The several galleries were arranged, like the successive chapters of a book, in chronological order, beginning with the infancy of the art, and going on to its full noon, under the great masters of the Lombard school,--Titian, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and others. The pictures of the inner saloons were truly magnificent; but on these I do not dwell. Let us sit down here, in the midst of the seas, and meditate a little on the great _moral_ of Venice. We shall let the poet state the case:--