At that date (1869) people used still to go round Venice with Byrons, just as they go round with Ruskins now. It was Byron’s Venice that attracted them--the Venice of Marino Faliero and the Foscari, not the Venice of Carpaccio. As they could not conveniently Stand Upon The Bridge Of Sighs, they used to stand upon the Ponte della Paglia, and spout the famous lines at it from there. And they all went to see the Armenian Monastery, because it was a place where Byron stayed. Hardly anybody goes there now. My father used always to take a Byron with him, when he went abroad, and he used to write things in the margin. Thus, his comment on The Castled Crag is “Drachenfels. 31 July 1839. Good description--very correct.” I believe it was the usual thing to annotate your Byron as if it were a guide-book. From my father’s diary, Exeter, 23 October 1838:--“When did I dream that the Ada of Childe Harold would ever appear to me as an ordinary, unnoticed and unadorned woman. I am half vexed I should have seen her, and yet would not have it otherwise.... I recollect, when I first saw Brougham, and was standing opposite to him, I could not believe he was the extraordinary man I had been accustomed to hear so much about. But, now some years have passed away, my idea of him is very little lessened by his actual presence at that time. So may it turn out here. I hope it will: but, until it does, I shall read Byron with diminished satisfaction.” After a tour in Italy, my father writes home from Ragatz in Switzerland, 16 September 1851:--“From Italy one dared not write about the Government, for the Austrians open the letters; but the Government is the most despotic tyranny I ever heard of: an Italian cannot get a passport, or leave the country; nor can any foreign paper reach him; nor is he allowed to talk politics. “Venice was placarded whilst I was there with a Government proclamation, by way of warning to the people, that six persons had just been sentenced to the galleys (some for ten years, and one of the persons a lady) for daring to speak disrespectfully of the Government and the Emperor. The prisons are full of prisoners for talking politics: that by the Bridge of Sighs is crammed. “An Englishman was sent out of Florence for saying he thought the Government was right in having sentinels in the theatres. The Chief of the Police told him that the Government tolerated no remarks upon its acts, approving them or otherwise.