Story, and what may be found scattered in the
works of Henri Beyle. But Mr. Story's volumes recorded only the chance
observations of a quick and familiar eye in the intervals of a
profession to which one must be busily devoted who would rise to the
acknowledged eminence occupied by their author; and Beyle's mind, though
singularly acute and penetrating, had too much of the hardness of a man
of the world and of Parisian cynicism to be altogether agreeable. Mr.
Howells, during four years of that consular leisure which only Venice
could make tolerable, devoted himself to the minute study of the superb
prison to which he was doomed, and his book is his "Prigioni." Venice
has been the university in which he has fairly earned the degree of
Master. There is, perhaps, no European city, not even Bruges, not even
Rome herself, which, not yet in ruins, is so wholly of the past, at once
alive and turned to marble, like the Prince of the Black Islands in the
story. And what gives it a peculiar fascination is that its antiquity,
though venerable, is yet modern, and, so to speak, continuous; while
that of Rome belongs half to a former world and half to this, and is
broken irretrievably in two. The glory of Venice, too, was the
achievement of her own genius, not an inheritance; and, great no longer,
she is more truly than any other city the monument of her own greatness.
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