No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering,
or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs,"
which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of
Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with
breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of
one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred
and fifty years after Faliero's death; and the most conspicuous parts of
the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three
centuries that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned
from his tomb, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance
of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite
subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the water first narrows by
the steps of the Church of La Salute--the mighty doges would not know in
what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one
stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their
gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave.
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