dissolute life, but with the social toleration of the impure, and with the
wanton habits of scandal, which make all other life incredible, and deny
to virtue the triumph of fair fame.

I confess that what I saw of the innocent amusements of this society was
not enough to convince me of their brilliancy and attractiveness; but I
doubt if a foreigner can be a trustworthy judge of these things, and
perhaps a sketch drawn by an alien hand, in the best faith, might have an
air of caricature. I would not, therefore, like to trust my own impression
of social diversions. They were, very probably, much more lively and
brilliant than I thought them. But Italians assembled anywhere, except at
the theatre or the caffe, have a certain stiffness, all the more
surprising, because tradition has always led one to expect exactly the
reverse of them. I have seen nothing equal to the formality of this
people, who deride colder nations for inflexible manners; and I have
certainly never seen society in any small town in America so ill at ease
as I have seen society in Venice, writhing under self-imposed restraints.
At a musical soiree, attended by the class of people who at home would
have been chatty and sociable, given to making acquaintance and to keeping
up acquaintance,--the young men harmlessly talking and walking with the
young ladies, and the old people listening together, while constant
movement and intercourse kept life in the assembly, and there was some
real pleasure felt amidst a good deal of unavoidable suffering,--I say, I
found such a soiree in Venice to be a spectacle of ladies planted in
formal rows of low-necks and white dresses around the four sides of one
room, and of gentlemen restively imprisoned in dress-coats and white
gloves in another. During the music all these devoted people listened
attentively, and at the end, the ladies lapsed back into their chairs and
fanned themselves, while the gentlemen walked up and down the floor of
their cell, and stopped, two by two, at the door of the ladies' room,