And the "divinity that doth hedge a king" can be kept up nowhere so cheaply as in Venice. Venice is the dress-coat of cities, making all men equal. Well might Wordsworth dub her "the eldest child of liberty"! For in the streets of Venice you cannot drive or ride--walk you must. No gleaming broughams, no spanking steeds: nothing--be you monarch or mendicant--but your two legs. 'T is strange, in a land of no horses, to find Venetians styled "Cavalier" for title of honour. They should surely be called "Gondoliers." For the gondola is your only chance of display. Rich Americans may flaunt it with four gondoliers and print "Palazzo" on their visiting-cards. But doctors and lawyers live in Palaces, and even a moderate purse can keep a horseless carriage. And your St. Mark's Square, which is the largest drawing-room in the world, is also the most democratic. Ladies of quality jostle shawled street-walkers, a German sailor galls the kibe of a beautiful Browning duchess, officers with showy epaulettes glitter among respectable shopkeepers; helmeted cuirassiers, Austrian admirals, policemen with coloured tufts like lamp-cleaners, German baronesses, bouncing bonnes with babies, garlic-scented workingmen, American schoolgirls, and kings in exile, are mixed pell-mell, all in perfect freedom and equality, and, though in the shadow of St. Mark's Church, quite Christian. And an Italian crowd is also Christian in its freedom from crush. It does not turn a fete into a fight and a concourse into a competition. Thus, as the Prince Consort was amused to find we English said of our pleasure-parties, all "passes off well." Except when there is rain. And the heavens threw unmistakable cold water on the Triple Alliance. The day of the Emperor's stay was the one wet day Venice had known for months--so dank and chill, with so sooty a sky, that my friend the artist, who had just been reading in the London paper that his work had not caught the glamour and the colour of Venice, that the South had not yet revealed its passionate secrets to him, chuckled grimly. What is all this nonsense about an Italian hothouse? At Florence I was afraid of being snow-bound in the sunny South. For, long and heavily, though the London meteorologists registered sunshine, Cadeva dal cielo la neve Con tutta la sua quiete. (Down from heaven fell the snow With all its quietness.) This perfect description of snowfall--which I found rudely chalked on the wall of a Venetian alley--could never have been conceived in the Italy of popular imagination. The superstition about Italian sunshine is like that about Italian beauty. If the country about Florence is the loveliest in Europe, surely the plain of Lombardy around Padua is the ugliest--a land of symmetrical tree-stumps and stony villas flaunting themselves on the roadway in pompous publicity.