CHAPTER II.

[FIRST OF SECOND VOLUME IN OLD EDITION.]

THE THRONE.


SECTION I. In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in
which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the
countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of
the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he had
surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest,
scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the
long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for
the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of
sunset--hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of
the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men,
an equivalent,--in those days, I say, when there was something more to
be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive
halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder,
there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly
cherished by the traveller than that which, as I endeavored to describe
in the close of the last chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as
his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but
that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of some
slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its buildings are
far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy;