An old custom of rejoicing over the installation of a new parish priest is
still to be seen in almost primitive quaintness. The people of each
parish--nobles, citizens, and plebeians alike--formerly elected their own
priest, and, till the year 1576, they used to perambulate the city to the
sound of drums, with banners flying, after an election, and proclaim the
name of their favorite. On the day of the _parroco_'s induction his
portrait was placed over the church door and after the celebration of the
morning mass, a breakfast was given, which grew to be so splendid in time,
that in the fifteenth century a statute limited its profusion. In the
afternoon the new parroco, preceded by a band of military music, visited
all the streets and courts of his parish, and then, as now, all the
windows of the parish were decorated with brilliant tapestries, and other
gay-colored cloths and pictures. In those times as in these, there was an
illumination at night, throngs of people in the campo of the church, and
booths for traffic in cakes of flour and raisins,--fried in lard upon the
spot, and sold smoking hot, with immense uproar on the part of the
merchant; and for three days afterward the parish bells were sounded in
concert.

The difficulty of ascertaining any thing with certainty in Venice attends
in a degree peculiarly great the effort to learn exactly the present
influence and standing of the nobility as a class. One is tempted, on
observing the free and unembarrassed bearing of all ranks of people toward
each other, to say that no sense of difference exists,--and I do not think
there is ever shown, among Italians, either the aggressive pride or the
abject meanness which marks the intercourse of people and nobles elsewhere
in Europe, and I have not seen the distinction of rich and poor made so
brutally in Italy as sometimes in our own _soi-disant_ democratic
society at home. There is, indeed, that equality in Italian fibre which I
believe fits the nation for democratic institutions better than any other,