DICKENS IN VENICE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 11 September 1924, Page 7

DICKENS IN VENICE.

“THE WONDER. OF THE WORLD.”

I have never been struck by any place as by Venice. It is the wonder of the world. Dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible, wicked, shadowy, detestable old place. I entered it by night (wrote Dickens), and the sensation of that night and the bright morning that followed, is a part of me for the rest of my existence. And, oh! the cells below the water, underneath the Bridge of Sighs, the nook where the monk came at midnight to confess the political offender, the bench where he was strangled, the deadly little vault in which they tied him in a sack, and the stealthy, crouching little door through which they bore him into a boat, and bore him away to sink him where no fisherman dare cast his net; all shown by torches that blink and wink, as if they were ashamed to look upon the gloomy theatre of such horrors; past and gone as they are, these things stir a man’s blood, like a great wrong or passion of the instant. And with these in their minds, and with a museum there, having a chamber full of frightful instruments of torture as the devil in a brain fever could scarcelv invent, there are hundreds of parrots, who will declaim to you in speech and print by the hour together on the degeneracy of the times in which a railroad is building across the water at Venice, instead of going down on their knees, the drivellers, and thanking Heaven they live in a time when iron makes roads instead of prison bars and engines for driving screws into the skulls of innocent men!