Italian storytellers. They went to their novels for the plots
of their plays, as the novelists of to-day go to the criminal
calendar for the plots of their stories. Shakspeare appears so
familiar with Italian life that Mr. Charles Armitage Brown, the
author of a very curious work on Shakspeare's Sonnets, declares
that he must have visited Italy, basing this conclusion on the
minute knowledge of certain Italian localities shown in some of
his later plays. At home in Verona, Milan, Mantua, and Padua,
Shakspeare is nowhere so much so as in Venice.

It is impossible to think of Venice without remembering the
poets; and the poet who is first remembered is Byron. If our
thoughts are touched with gravity as they should be when we dwell
upon the sombre aspects of Venice--when we look, as here, for
example, on the Bridge of Sighs--we find ourselves repeating:

"I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs."

If we are in a gayer mood, as we are likely to be after looking
at the brilliant carnival-scene which greets us at the threshold
of the present number of _THE ALDINE_, we recall the opening
passages of Byron's merry poem of "Beppo:"

"Of all the places where the Carnival
Was most facetious in the days of yore,
For dance, and song, and serenade, and ball,
And masque, and mime, and mystery, and more
Than I have time to tell now, or at all,
Venice the bell from every city bore."