society's long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted tapers. Priests
follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the bier,--with a gilt crown
lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to indicate the triumph of
innocence. Formerly, hired mourners attended, and a candle, weighing a
pound, was given to any one who chose to carry it in the procession.

Anciently there was great show of mourning in Venice for the dead, when,
according to Mutinelli, the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having
seen his body deposited in the church, "fell to weeping and howling, tore
their hair and rent their clothes, and withdrew forever from that church,
thenceforth become for them a place of abomination." Decenter customs
prevailed in after-times, and there was a pathetic dignity in the ceremony
of condolence among patricians: the mourners, on the day following the
interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the court of the Ducal
Palace, and their friends came, one after one, and expressed their
sympathy by a mute pressure of the hand.

Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible in modern Venice. The
corpse is hurried from the house of mourning to the parish church, where
the friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. Then it is
placed in a boat and carried to the burial-ground, where it is quickly
interred. I was fortunate, therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral at
which I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There was a church on
this island as early as the tenth century, and in the thirteenth century
it fell into the possession of the Comandulensen Friars. They built a
monastery on it, which became famous as a seat of learning, and gave much
erudite scholarship to the world. In later times Pope Gregory XVI. carried
his profound learning from San Michele to the Vatican. The present church
is in the Renaissance style, but not very offensively so, and has some
indifferent paintings. The arcades and the courts around which it is built