they are sparing and very modest; outside they are very liberal. The city of Venice retains its old manner of dress, and they never change it; that is to say, they wear a long garment of whatever colour they choose. No one ever goes out by day without his toga, and for the most part a black one, and they have carried this custom to such a point that all nations of the world who are lodging here in Venice, from the greatest to the least, observe this style, beginning from the gentlemen to the mariners and galleymen; a dress certainly full of confidence and gravity. They look like doctors of law, and if any were to appear outside his house without his toga he would be thought a fool.” Without doors the women also belonged to this sober company, or at least the marriageable maidens and those who were no longer of the number of the “belle giovani”; so sombrely were they covered when outside their houses, and especially in church, that Casola says he at first mistook them all for widows, or nuns of the Benedictine Order. But for the “belle giovani” it is another matter; they give relief to the week-day sobriety of these Venetians, so decorous and black when off duty, though revelling in such richness of velvet and brocade when the trumpet of a public function stirs their blood. [Illustration: THE SHADOW OF THE CAMPANILE.] We are indebted to Casola for a picture of a Venetian domestic festival at the birth of a child to the Delfini family. He realised fully that he was admitted, together with the orator of the King of France, in order that he might act as reporter of Venetian magnificence. It was in a room “whose chimney-piece was all of Carrara marble shining as gold, so subtly worked with figures and leaves, that Praxiteles and Pheidias could not have exceeded it. The ceiling of the room was so finely decorated with gold and ultramarine, and the walls so richly worked, that I cannot make report of it. One desk alone was valued at five hundred ducats, and the fixtures of the room were in the Venetian style, such beautiful and natural figures, so much gold everywhere, that I know not if in the time of Solomon, who was King of the Jews, when silver was reputed more vile than carrion, there was such abundance as was here seen. Of the ornaments of the bed and of the lady ... I have thought best rather to keep silence than to speak for fear I should not be believed. Another thing I will speak the truth about, and perhaps I shall not be believed--a matter in which the ducal orator would not let me lie. There were in the said room twenty-five Venetian damsels, each one fairer than the last, who were come to visit the lady who had borne a child. Their dress was most discreet, as I said above, _alla veneziana_: they showed no more than four to six finger breadths of bare neck below their shoulders back and front. These damsels had so many jewels on their heads and round their necks and on their hands--namely, gold, precious stones and pearls--that it