Not a spot was more
distinguished for elegance, luxury, and enjoyment. It was indeed the
inner shrine of the temple of pleasure, and very strange and amusing
would be the annals of its picturesque arcades. We must not, however,
step behind their blue awnings, but content ourselves with the
exterior scene; and certainly the Place of St. Marc, with the
variegated splendour of its Christian mosque, the ornate architecture
of its buildings, its diversified population, a tribute from every
shore of the midland sea, and where the noble Venetian, in his robe
of crimson silk, and long white peruque, might be jostled by the
Sclavonian with his target, and the Albanian in his kilt, while the
Turk, sitting cross-legged on his Persian carpet, smoked his long
chibouque with serene gravity, and the mild Armenian glided by him
with a low reverence, presented an aspect under a Venetian moon such
as we shall not easily find again in Christendom, and, in spite of the
dying glory and the neighbouring vice, was pervaded with an air of
romance and refinement, compared with which the glittering dissipation
of Paris, even in its liveliest and most graceful hours, assumes a
character alike coarse and commonplace.
It is the hour of love and of faro; now is the hour to press your suit
and to break a bank; to glide from the apartment of rapture into the
chamber of chance.
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