exchange more than a word with the hostess. In winter, the stove is heated
on these reception days, and little cups of black coffee are passed round
to the company; in summer lemonade is substituted for the coffee; but in
all seasons a thin, waferish slice of toasted rusk (the Venetian
_baicolo_) is offered to each guest with the drink. At receptions
where the sparsity of the company permits the lady of the house to be
seen, she is commonly visible on a sofa, surrounded by visitors in a half-
circle. Nobody stays more than ten or fifteen minutes, and I have
sometimes found even this brief time of much greater apparent length, and
apt to produce a low state of nerves, from which one seldom recovers
before dinner. Gentlemen, however, do not much frequent these receptions;
and I assert again the diffidence I should feel in offering this glance at
Venetian social enjoyment as conveying a just and full idea of it. There
is no doubt that the Venetians find delight in their assemblies, where a
stranger seeks it in vain. I dare say they would not think our own
reunions brilliant, and that, looking obliquely (as a foreigner must) on
the most sensible faces at one of our evening parties, they might mistake
the look of pathetic dejection, visible in them, as the expression of
people rather bored by their pleasure than otherwise.

The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the conversazioni of the rigid
proprietarians, where people sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at a
soldo the point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the _demi-
monde_ where they say any thing. There are persons in Venice, as well
as everywhere else, of new-fashioned modes of thinking, and these strive
to give a greater life and ease to their assemblies, by attracting as many
young men as possible; and in their families, gentlemen are welcome to
visit, and to talk with the young ladies in the presence of their mothers.
But though such people are no more accused of impropriety than the
straitest of the old-fashioned, they are not regarded with the greatest