at night, while a great many did not close till midnight, and some never shut at all. In Venice, he continues, you would find eatables exposed for sale at midnight exactly as at midday, and all the eating-houses were open. It was not the custom to give many dinners or suppers in Venetian society, but a few such occasions have remained famous, and the invited guests appear to have behaved with as little restraint as if they had been in a common eating-house. A certain noble, of the Labia family, once gave a supper at which he showed all his finest plate, and the guests could not refrain from admiring the magnificent chiselled pieces of gold and silver that covered the table. Suddenly, as the gaiety increased, the master of the house jumped up and began to throw the plates and dishes through the open windows into the canal, accompanying this mad proceeding with one of the worst puns ever made in the Italian [Sidenote: _Tassini, under ‘Labia.’_] language, or rather in the Venetian dialect: ‘L’abia o non l’abia, sarò sempre Labia’--the words mean, ‘Whether I have it or not I shall always be Labia.’ The conditions of married life in the decadence were such amongst the nobles that it is best not to inquire too closely as to what went on. In [Sidenote: _Rom. viii. 303; Mutinelli, Ult. 86._] a great number of cases husband and wife were like strangers to each other, and the children were utterly neglected, when there were any. When divorce becomes common, the family, which is the first of social institutions, soon ceases to exist, and no country has ever shown vitality or long endurance where society was not based on the relations of father, mother, and children to each other. There never was any divorce law in Italy, but there was, and is, such a thing as the annullation of marriage. In Venice, between 1782 and 1796, the Council of Ten registered two hundred and sixty-four applications for annullation, and the great part of them were admitted. As generally happens when a form of government is exhausted and is about to go to pieces, the Venetian [Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 71._]