"On our road we passed through Ulm,[18] and visited the cathedral, some parts of which (especially the portico) are very beautiful and elegant; the interior contains a magnificent and highly elaborate tabernacle, and some wood-carving by Syrlin of exquisite workmanship; the whole, however, left a melancholy impression on both of us, especially on Steinle, who is an ardent Catholic. It stands neglected and half-finished, in the midst of a miserable, rambling town-village, a thing of olden times, for whose presence one can hardly account. It was built, or rather, begun, as a monument of Catholicism; the country round it has become Protestant; itself has been protestantized; it has been disfigured by an incongruous heap of business-like pews; it is no longer accessible at every hour of the day, from Sunday to Sunday its walls re-echo no sound but the occasional tread of the pew-opener, as he dusts the seats of those who pay him for it; the soul has left the grey old pile; it is a stately corpse. What artist, however uncatholic in his belief, can contemplate those old Gothic churches, with their glorious tabernacles and other ornaments equally beautiful and equally disused, without painfully feeling what an almost deadly blow the Reformation was to High Art, what a powerful incentive it removed, irrecoverably? Who, in his heart of hearts, can but dwell with melancholy regret on the times when art was coupled with belief, and so many divine works were virtually expressions of faith? What a purifying and ennobling influence was thus exercised over the taste of the artist! an influence which nothing can replace. This influence was incalculably great; no dwelling was so humble but it owned a crucifix; no artist so poor in capacity but endeavoured to produce something not unworthy of his subject; the general tone of taste thus produced reacted on everything; witness the most insignificant doorlatch or ornament that remains to us from the Middle Ages. Is it not remarkable that the first artists of the modern day, in the higher walk of art, I mean, are Catholics? Cornelius and Steinle were born in the Church of Rome; Veit and Overbeck went over to it; Pugin, too, our great architect, was converted by his art to the Catholic faith.

"From Friedrichshafen a delightful sail took us across the emerald coloured Lake of Constance to Bregenz, where I parted from Steinle.

"I am sitting at my window in the inn (hôtel, I'll trouble you!) at Meran. For the first time since I left Innsbruck I have leisure again to take up my pen. As I look back on my journey through the Tyrol, so far as it goes, I am forcibly struck with the reflection that my enjoyment of it has been much keener this time than ever it was before; this increased enjoyment has not, I feel, arisen from any external or adventitious circumstances; last time that I was in this lovely country, I contemplated it with ease and comfort from the rumble of our own carriage; this time I have jolted through it under all the disadvantages attendant on an Eilwagen and indifferent weather; it has arisen in the greater development of my artistic sensibilities, in my sharpened perception of the charms of nature, which discloses to me now a thousand beauties that found no echo in me when I saw them last. I congratulate myself on this reflection. If any man should be constantly penetrated with gratitude for a gift bestowed on him, it is the artist who has realised as his share a genuine love for nature; for his enjoyment, if he puts his gift to usury, increases with the days of his life.

"Another circumstance, which has greatly augmented my relish of the Tyrol, is that, at every step, it assumes more and more the character of my darling Italy; I have watched with fond anxiety every little token that whispered of the south; the gently purpling tints that steal gradually over the distant hills, as one advances towards the land of the amaranthine Apennines, the slow but steadily progressive change of vegetation, the gaunt and ragged fir giving way by degrees to the encroachment of a richer and more gently rustling shade, the anxiously watched gradations, the climax at last; the walnut, first, 'few and far between,' but warmly welcome, with its clustering leaves of juicy green; the chestnut, with its long, graceful, dark-hued foliage; the vine, again, no longer, as in the north, tied stiffly to a row of sticks (like a regiment of gooseberry bushes), but luxurious, wildly spreading, gracefully trained along rows of outward-slanting, basket-like trellis-work, and wreathed here and there by a pious hand up a roadside image of the Crucifixion in illustration of the words of Christ: 'I am the true vine.' Now, too, the dark striped, portly pumpkins, with their gorgeous flame-like flowers, begin to appear, sometimes drowsily lolling under the tremulous shade of the mantling vines, sometimes basking with half-closed eyes down the sunscorched lizard-haunted walls, sometimes trained across from house to house, hanging like Chinese lamps over the heads of the passers by. Presently, a fig-tree—two—three—more—plenty! A cypress—and, by Jove! look at that terrace of stately, heavy-laden citron and orange trees! Nothing is wanting now but the olive. How could I pass by such dear old friends without loitering a little among them? A faithful lover, I return, after six years of longing absence, to the home of her of my inward heart; I hurry along, I have already crossed the garden gate. I breathe the air she breathes, I see from afar the bower where she dwells; but as I hasten along the well-known path, a thousand reminiscences of her arise from every object around me, and cling to me, and throw a gentle net across my faltering step, and whisper softly to my dream-wrapt brain—I am spellbound—I linger, even in my impatience.

"I must not forget the excessively picturesque appearance of all the towns and villages south of Innsbruck; long, narrow, tortuous streets, lined on each side with never-ceasing vistas of arcades, and enclosed by houses of most fancifully artistic irregularity; as one passes along the vaulted galleries the eye is constantly caught by some picturesque object; either the peasants, as they stroll along in their divers costumes, or the many-coloured, richly piled fruit stalls that every now and then fill the arches, or, through an open door, the endless depth of vaulted passages and fantastic staircases and irregular inward courts and yards, offering to the artist's eye a play of lights and shades and mysterious, dreamy half-tints that might shame even a Rembrandt or an Ostade. As the exterior of all the houses is (with the exception, of course, of the ornaments) scrupulously white, the streets, narrow as they are, reflecting, by the luminous nature of their local tint, the light of day into the remotest corner, have a most cheerful aspect.

"Of the Tyrolese themselves, three qualities seem to me to characterise them, qualities which go well hand in hand with, and, I think it is not fanciful to say, are in great measure a key to, their well-known frankness and open-hearted honesty. I mean Piety, which shines out amongst them in many little things, a love for the art, which with them is, in fact, an outward manifestation of piety, and which is sufficiently displayed by the numberless scriptural subjects, painted or in relief, which adorn the cottages of the poorest peasants, and, last not least, a love for flowers (in other words, for nature), which is written in the lovely clusters of flowers which stand in many-hued array on the window-sills of every dwelling. The works of all the really great artists display that love for flowers. Raphael did not consider it 'niggling,' as some of our broad-handling moderns would call it, to group humble daisies round the feet of his divine representation of the Mother of Christ. I notice that two plants, especially, produce a beautiful effect, both of form and colour, against the cool grey walls: the spreading, dropping, graceful carnation, with its bluish leaves and crimson flowers, and the slender, anthered, thousand-blossomed oleander.

"One of the sights in Innsbruck has left on me a deep and, I hope, a lasting impression: the bronze statues in the Franciscan church; they are the finest specimens of German mediæval sculpture that I ever saw, and grew on me as I gazed at them in a manner which I hardly ever felt before; their great merit consists in combining in the most astounding manner the most consummate knowledge of the art with all the simplicity of nature and the most striking individuality (that first of artistic qualities), and exhibiting at the same time the most elaborate finish in the details, with greatest possible breadth and grandeur of general masses; this quality is particularly conspicuous amongst the women, three, especially, standing side by side, show, by three perfect examples, the whole secret of ornamental economy; the one, whose dress is ornamented with all the richness of which a luxurious imagination and an unparalleled power of execution were capable, recovers its simplicity of outline and mass by having a tightly fitting body and sleeve and a skirt of moderate amplitude; the second, whose ornaments, though richly, are more broadly disposed, retains its balance by a slightly increased amplitude of drapery; while the third, whose dress is altogether without embroidery, acquires a corresponding effect by large, loose sleeves and richly folded skirt, and two large plaits hanging down her back. What an opportunity this would be, backed by these giants of breathing bronze, to make an indignant descent on some paltry and muddle-headed moderns, who don't know how to discriminate between that kind of finish which proceeds from the love of a smooth surface, and makes the artist equally careful of his pumps and of his pictures, and that other kind of minuteness which is the beautiful fruit of a refined love for nature, and proceeds from a feeling of piety towards the mother of art, and who complacently call 'niggling,' a quality above the appreciation of their breadth-mad brains; who, in their art-made-easy system of 'idealising' (forsooth), look for artistic 'beauty' in a facial angle of so and so much. What with the Greeks was an abstract of MAN, and very appropriately applicable in the cases of demi-gods (that the ancients could, and did, 'en tems et lieu,' individualise, may be sufficiently seen in their admirable portraits), becomes with them an absurdly misapplied average of mankind, not a man, or men. The leading feature in Nature is a MANIFOLD INDIVIDUALITY, AN ENDLESS VARIETY; she is like a diamond, that glances with a thousand hues. 'Indeed!' I hear them contemptuously sneering, 'you don't seem to be aware, sir, that ideal beauty is the great centre of all these extreme varieties, and the only thing worthy of a great artist's attention.' 'Well, gentlemen,' say I, 'without inconsistency, you can't get out of the way of the following mouthful: there are (perhaps you will allow) three elementary colours, which in different combinations produce every variety of hue; but, the great centre of these three extremely various colours is grey, non-colour ... the ideal of a bit of colouring, "the only thing worthy of the attention of a great colourist" is a picture with no colour in it at all.' However, Messrs. the Generalisists and Apollinisists 'have every reason to congratulate themselves on the extensive circulation of their views, for their ideal' is visible in every haircutter's window. Never mind, I must contain myself—but the rod is in pickle!

"A glorious amphitheatre of lofty mountains! On one side rugged, sternly rising, crenelated, grey, snow-strewn; on the other, dreamy, far outspreading, gently vanishing, southward luring, softly glowing, wrapt in tints of loveliest azure, gradually blending with the silver-fretted sky. A spreading, fertile gushing valley. Down the sunny, swelling slopes, across the embosomed plain, an endless, curling, wreathing flood of gold-green vines, foaming and eddying with purple grapes. Through the verdant waves, like rushes in a stream, the Indian corn raises its slender form and feathered head in long array. Beneath, outstretched at ease, the pumpkin winks and yawns. At the foot of a steep-fronted, purpling rock, skirting the glowing vineyards, a foaming mountain stream, emerald and silver. Along the heights, nestling in verdure, rise thickly scattered, castellated villas, looking, with their bright, white walls, like smiles on the face of the earth. An epitome of what is rich and joyous and unfettered in landscape. The Alpha and Omega of all that is charming in the Tyrol. Meran!

"I can say no more for it.

"To my mind, it is inferior to Italy only in one respect: it is wanting in that glowing, strongly marked individuality, that earnest beauty, that 'charm that is in melancholy,' which fascinates so powerfully in the land of wine and oil.

"To be able to say that, on returning after long years to a country whose image memory has, during the whole of that time, fondled with all the partiality of ardent attachment, one has found one's best expectations realised, is, in this world of disappointments and frustrated expectations, indeed a rare thing; but to find imagination surpassed by reality is rarer still; yet it is my case now that I once more breathe the air and tread the soil of Italy. For this, I feel more grateful than I can say; for to have been disappointed in these hopes would have been to me the greatest of miseries; as it is, my enjoyment is a double one: that which is occasioned by the positive, intrinsic beauty of what I see, and that, not less great, of recalling at the same time a happy, long-dwelt-on past. This I have more particularly experienced since my arrival in Verona; and here a queer feature in my queer idiosyncrasy obtrudes itself to notice, i.e. the extraordinary dominion exercised over me by the senses of smell and hearing! That I do labour under these peculiarities I always knew, but to what a ludicrous extent, I did not find out till, on arriving here (Verona), I was suddenly seized by a gust of a thousand smells and a din of a thousand sounds, some always remembered, others long-forgotten, suddenly rising up again to my memory. I was spellbound, the veil of the past was torn up, I was fairly carried back against the stream of time. Ridiculous as it may sound, my enjoyment of Italy, independently, of course, of the art (which is an extraordinary tissue of reality and illusion), would be very imperfect without this combination of trifles. One thing, I think, must affect every one agreeably; I mean the exquisitely humorous cries of the vendors in the thoroughfares and market-places; who could hear and not remember the loud, expostulatory shriek with which the one dwells on the excellencies of his handkerchiefs, the argumentative and facetious tone in which another infers that comfort is not possible without a supply of his matches, that urgent wail with which a third deplores that man should have so little appreciation of his baked apples, the muddy, half-suffocated tenor with which a fourth proclaims his water-melons, or the rabid, piercing soprano which seems to warn the public that 'if those violets are not bought pretty quick, there will soon be none to buy'?"

"I do not think there exists anywhere a more powerfully and fantastically individual town than Verona; it is to Italy what Nuremburg is to Germany; but it is a transfiguration of Nuremburg; in point of wildly picturesque variety it defies description and surpasses expectation; it is saturated with art; wherever one turns, the eye is struck by some beautiful remnant of the taste—that was; of that glowing, sterling feeling for art, which spread itself over everything, and ennobled whatever it touched. Hardly a house that cannot boast of a sculptured archway, or some such token of ancient splendour; not a church, even the most insignificant, but is crowded with old paintings in oil and fresco, few of which are bad, some very good, a few excellent, but all in a far higher tone of feeling than nine-tenths of the shallow, papery daubs with which the nineteenth century covers its carcase of steam engines. No wonder—they are all scriptural or apocryphal subjects, and were all painted with an ardent belief in the faith to which they all owe their existence; from thence arose, amongst other excellencies, a certain naïf, ingenuously childlike treatment of the miraculous, which, combined with the manly dignity of consummate art, gives them an indescribable charm, which nothing can replace. Now—with us, at least, of the cold belief—men throw really eminent talents—to the dogs. But, for us Protestant artists, things are made much worse than they in any way need be, by the total rejection of pictures and statuary in our churches. Now, three centuries back, in the first ebullition of reformatory fanaticism, such a practice was not only comprehensible, but even a natural and necessary consequence and token of their total disavowal of everything approaching to the Romish form of worship; but its continuance at present amongst us is, not only contrary to the spirit of the Anglican Church, which after all, when compared to Lutheranism and Calvinism, is a conservative one, but is founded on arguments altogether untenable with any degree of consistency; for if, as we are told, pictures and statues distract the attention and produce a worldly frame of mind, if it be true indeed that works of high art (for, of course, no others are here taken into consideration), than which surely nothing is more calculated to raise the tone of the mind and prepare it for the reception of elevated impressions, have indeed so pernicious an effect, then, it is evident, by the same argument, the beauties of architecture, the eldest of the sister arts, must be equally rejected; at the sight of a Gothic church, that offspring of Christianity, we must shrug our shoulders and say with pious aversion: 'Vanitas vanitatum!' But the Church of England has not gone as far as that; indeed, great attention is paid to our Church's architecture; is there no inconsistency here? Or does the Church, terrified by the example of Romish image-worship, fear a similar evil amongst us, whose belief is so infinitely more circumscribed than that of Rome? Or is she so tender of admitting symbols into her bosom, she, whose corner-stone is a symbol: the Last Supper?

"To return to Verona.

"As Gamba, owing to the time which my letter took in reaching him, was not able to meet me at the time appointed, I remained two days at Verona, days to which I shall always look back with unmixed pleasure. I indulged, this time (the more that I knew the town already), in the luxury of not 'sight-seeing,' but strolled about the whole town in every direction, dropping into churches, staring at tombs and palaces and piazzas and pictures, just as if rolled past me in the ever-varying panorama. I was struck, in the Tyrol, with the profusion of flowers everywhere displayed; but here I see far more, and those, too, more artistically distributed; they rise in double and treble tiers on, in, and about the gracefully curved balconies, and assert their sway wherever human ingenuity makes it possible to place a flower-pot, and in a great many other places besides; creepers wreathe from window to window, and vines actually springing from holes in the walls, with no visible root or origin at all, spread their graceful mantle over the walls of crumbling palaces. Of the Veronese themselves, I cannot say that they are a handsome race; the women especially, though they have a great deal of character in their features, are generally far from good-looking. Amongst the peasants I saw some very fine men; they have, some of them, very good legs, slender and well shaped as a Donatello or a Ghiberti.

"On Thursday Gamba came, just as I was giving him up in a high state of despair and mystification. We hurried at once by Padua to Venice, where I found your letter.

"As I look through what I have written, before sending it off to you, I feel, painfully, that my style is clumsy, stuttering, incoherent; that I am wordy, without saying enough; that I am overfree in my use of fanciful epithets, without giving an adequate idea of the suggestive beauty of what I see; that I am sometimes almost mawkish, without saying half I feel; that I am incorrigibly slovenly and forgetful; that I can't write, that I can't spell. In answer to all this, I can only answer by referring to a little premonitory observation at the foot of my first page, i.e. Quality of Pebbles not warranted.

BATCH No. 2.

(This blank represents three weeks.)

"September 16.—Many happy returns of the day, dear Gussy! The other day I took a pair of scales, and put into the one vessel the price you would have to pay for the postage of a congratulatory letter to be received by you on your birthday, and into the other a pleasure which a surprise might afford you; the postage outweighed its rival; so I wrote no letter. If my directions have been attended to, you will, no doubt, have received a far more satisfactory outward and visible sign of my good wishes.

"September 18.—The same to you, Papa!... Can the river offer its fountain a drink?

"Three weeks (apparently months) have elapsed since I last soared on the descriptive pinion; now, and only now, on the eve of my departure from Venice, I find time and leisure again to pour on the past a libation of pen and ink. I resume the quill with a feeling of disheartenment. With what intentions did I begin to write this (journal)? Had I not hoped to note down, at once and in all their freshness, my emotions and impressions just as I should receive them? and to speak also sometimes of the thousand little incidents that fall in one's path, and which form the arabesque round the chapter of life? And how are my hopes fulfilled? Behold me, on the morning of the last day, the day of parting, packing, paying, and passports, forced to throw in a hurried and disconnected heap a few general remarks concerning what I have seen and heard and felt and found, and not found, during my stay in the home of Titian. And even that, how difficult! For in this short stay, sight has succeeded sight, emotion has followed emotion, in one continued merry-go-round; I have been alternately grave and gay, melancholy and jocose, dejected and enraptured; add to this that in my mind, as in the dissolving views, one picture always effaces its predecessor, and you will at once perceive that I am in the position of a man trying to see the pebbles at the bottom of a muddy brook, or his natural face in a basin of gruel.

"Now, I again repeat what I made a preliminary condition: that I send you the pebbles, loose and disjointed, and that I don't undertake to make a necklace of them.

"'But whose fault is all this?' (I hear you ask).

"During my stay here (I continue, without attending to your question) I have been up nearly every day before the sun (about five o'clock), and after working and tearing about the town all day, towards evening I was not sorry to....

"Do you guess how it was I wrote so little?

"Here a little observation obtrudes itself to my notice. Man (for there is nothing like throwing your own frailties on mankind in general) is born with an irresistible tendency to talk at something or somebody; eighteen pages back I was talking to nobody; or, if I did address anything, it was that very vague personage, the future; now I find myself getting more and more personal; you's, I expect, will soon get up to fifty per cent.

"Venice! Mighty word, city of endless associations, image that fills the mind! What impressions has it left on me? I shrink from answering a question so difficult to answer fairly, and from dissecting a point of such intricate anatomy. Whilst I think it over, I will give you a picture or two to look at; you shall have a peep out of the window where I sit writing. It is early morning, everything is cool and calm, in silent, almost breathless expectation of the not yet risen sun. Before your eyes rises one of the most splendid views in Europe, that of the Grand Canal from the steps of the Academy; the stately, dark green street of waters reflects on its wide-spreading mirror the grey and crumbling palaces, and the lovely form of Sta. Maria della Salute, with her domes of dazzling white. Not a ripple mars its glossy surface, except where, at rare intervals, some silent gondola glides swiftly along, scattering the sparkling drops from its graceful oar, or where, here and there, the playful 'aura mattutina' has left too rough a kiss upon its slumbering cheek. No sound is heard, but the distant, even, measured chimes, that seem to be rocking on the silence of the morning. Along its marge, singly, or clustering in close array beneath roofs of vine-covered trellis, lie the far-famed, ebon-coloured, swiftly gliding gondolas of Venice. 'Gondolas!' Whilst the sun is rising, let me say a word or two on gondolas. It has always excited my great surprise that these barks, which are graceful almost beyond imagination, are, in point of fact, in their present shape the offspring of a period, next to our own, the most execrable in point of taste which the world has produced. I mean the end of the seventeenth, or rather the beginning of the eighteenth century. Yet, so it is. In the time of Carpaccio and the Bellinis they were queer, tolerably uncouth contrivances, about two-thirds of their present length, pointed and equally curved at both ends, so as to resemble as nearly as possible a slice of melon, dead of the cholera. In Titian's day the shape began to taper out a little, and the iron points or knobs, at both ends, rose to a greater height, and were enriched with a serrated ornament; but they did not assume their present slender proportions and graceful ornament, at the prow only, till the eighteenth century; as also the mysterious and exquisitely comfortable little cabins or coffins, which now surmount them, and which formerly were open behind and before, forcing the passenger to sit upright! They contained then the rudiment of an idea of grace, which took its natural growth and development in spite of man. Meanwhile, for I have been watching him, the sun has appeared above the horizon; not that I see his own, real, glorious face, for he is hidden behind an ancient palace, but I see his reflection glowing in the eye of nature. First a gentle, tremulous, golden light began to steal along the dappled morning sky, warning all the little, distant, fleecy clouds to shake their plumes, for that it was going to begin; then, of course, the water took up the tune; and then (it was fit the biggest building should set the example) the 'Salute' assumed a saffron hue, and gradually one by one all the palaces on one side of the Canal, right up to our windows, and, did not you notice? your own face took quite a shine. For a while you yourself and everything round you seems wrapped in a trance; presently you begin to write. How is this? The whole picture begins to dance and quiver. Our Lady della Salute glows with a deeper blush, and trembles. Then, suddenly, her redness vanishes, her glorious countenance sparkles, and she raises her stately form in a garment of burnished silver; the gondolas that nestle round her feet, and hem in the whole length of the Canal, seem like a fillet of sparkling gems around a web of emerald and gold; the sky is a sea of light; the sun is in the wide heavens—it's time for breakfast. Waiter, coffee and rolls!

"'Do you mean,' I hear you urge, 'to come to the point, and tell us how you like Venice?'

"Another picture! (pretending not to hear). The same scene, but under a different aspect. How different! Just now it was a scene of dawning life, a burst of gladness—now it is a mild, a gentle dream, an Italian moonlight night, a Venetian moonlight night—calm, clear, soft, fancy stirring. You lean idly out of the window; there are two of you, or ought to be, but you don't say anything to one another; you are rocked in silence; you feel the sweet, warm breath of night pass over your cheek; you think of Shakespeare's exquisite verses on what he never saw but with the eye of his boundless fancy; you are sitting with Jessica and Lorenzo (that is his name, I think) on a bank of violets; you are anxiously waiting for Portia and her company; your ear is attentive to every sound; presently a sweet, half-heard strain, like a distant echo, dawns on your ear; then it is lost again; again it swells, and seems to glide gently along the shadowy waters towards you, nearer, still nearer. You see a track of gleaming light along the water, and at intervals a shower of tiny stars; it's no illusion; they glide along towards you, the voices that rose from the distant waters; they are almost beneath your window. Quick, quick, a gondola; a dozen or more musicians, with every kind of instrument, sit together in a bark, and alternately play and sing lovely melodies by the musicians of Italy. As long as the strain lasts the oar is suspended, and the floating orchestra drifts slowly along with the slowly ebbing tide; round it, a cluster of gondolas, full of breathless listeners whose very soul seems to melt with the delicious sounds, and combine with them—at least, you can answer for yourself, for you are one of them. Those are moments which you, I am sure, will never forget.

"'You are beating about the bush, we want an ans....'

"Another picture! (taking no notice of you)—a bit of Giorgione, coloured by Veronese. You are in an atelier; pictures and sketches in different stages of advancement lie about the tables and cover the easels; at one end of the room you see a large cupboard; its open doors betray within layers of rich old silks and damasks, some made up, some in pieces, as they were found at the antiquary's; further, an old mandoline, that perhaps could tell of the days of Titian. Through the large, gaping window you look upon a group of the most picturesque Venetian houses, with their fanciful basket-shaped chimneys and irregular windows and thousand-fold tints; the foreground is gracefully supplied by a screen of slender, net-like trees, amongst which heavy-laden vines wreathe in fanciful festoons. But where is Werner? the amiable inmate of this charming snuggery; where his pupils? Ah, I hear them! Hark! in the garden, a merry laugh, a clattering of cups, a sound of several voices, a suggestion of enjoyment; you rush to the scene of action; on your road you nearly break your neck over a table covered with the remains of a hearty dinner. A few yards further, you see half-a-dozen young men (of course artists) stretched, in every variety of ingeniously comfortable attitude, on a temporary floor of Turkey carpets, in a cool, clear, shady spot beneath arches of roof-weaving vines; in the middle, at comfortable arm's length, coffee, and heaps of purple grapes, whilst the intervals of conversation are filled by affectionate and earnest appeals to long Turkish pipes. You approach; you are recognised; seized by the hand, thrown down on the carpet; and presently you perceive that an entire afternoon is gone by! But that afternoon becomes a landmark to you. May not such reminiscences well endear a place to one's memory?

"'Well, then, I suppose....' (say you).

"Never mind, let me continue.

"Another impression. You are sitting, early in the morning, in a spacious, picturesque court; you have got your sketch-book, and you are busily poring over a drawing of a beautiful old Saracenic well; you are intent on doing it well, on cutting out that friend you have got with you. Presently you are seized with a peculiar sensation; you have heard, all of a sudden, the voice of an old, old friend, who speaks to you of things you don't see round you; a veil falls from your eyes; you feel that you have missed something for some time past; a vision rises before your eyes—a sweet vision of wooded hills and grassy fields, teeming with a thousand wild flowers and sending forth a sweet smell, and of flowing streams, of fresh waters, of birds singing merrily as they fly from tree to tree, and swing on the slender branches; and then you remember that you dwell in a mysterious city, closed in by the salty sea. Who was the friend that called up these lively images in your mind? It was a poor, solitary, wandering Bee. But he suggested something else to you, the roaming honey-gatherer—he reminded you of freedom; reminded you that Freedom had no home there; and he made you feel how much you had felt it, how much you had been unconsciously haunted by the breath of oppression that hovers over poor, browbeaten Venice, and whose pestilence clings to its rocky shore, as the rankling seaweed to the skirts of its palaces. Poor Venice! once resounding with joyous voices, now its walls seem, as you pass them, to mutter mournfully of arrests, condemnations, executions! Its narrow streets re-echo with the heavy tread of exulting soldiers, with the watchword of a foreign tongue. Palaces and convents are become barracks and infirmaries, and Slavonian troopers loll and spit where the proudest lords and loveliest ladies of Venice used to assemble to the banquet or the ball. But I turn away from such sad reflections, lest they may seem to outweigh all the delight that I have spoken of before.

"I have rehearsed to you a few of my impressions for good and for evil, and I think that was the only way of answering your (imaginary) questions. I need make no apologies for not describing Venice to you, as you have all seen it, and it is a place the image of which does not easily fade. I might say a word or two about the Venetians. Whatever some people may say (and, if I am not mistaken, Byron amongst them), the female Venetian type, such as it is transmitted to us by Titian, Giorgione, Pordenone, &c. (i.e. stout, tall, round-faced, small-mouthed, Roxolane-nosed) has either totally disappeared, or only manifests itself to a chosen few; one feature only I recognise, and that is a profusion of fine hair, which they plait in the most elaborate manner. A thing that rather puzzles those who go to Venice with the idea of seeing Titians and Veroneses at the windows and in the streets, is that the women have altogether left off dyeing their hair auburn as they used in former times. To show you that vanity made the fair sex go through the greatest personal discomfort as far back as the sixteenth century, I will tell you what the process of dyeing was. On the top of nearly every house in Venice is a kind of terrace-like scaffold, or scaffold-like terrace ('you pays your money and takes your choice'), which has the noble vocation of drying linen; in former days, however, they were built for a different purpose. In the middle of the day, during the greatest heat of the sun, the party anxious to impart to her hair a tint between sugar-candy and radishes repaired to these lofty spots, and there regularly bleached her hair in the following manner: she put on her head the brim of a large straw hat, so that the top of the head was exposed to all the power of the sun, whilst the face and neck were kept in the shade. Through the hole thus left in the middle of this extraordinary headgear the whole of the hair was drawn, and spread out as much as possible; which done, different kinds of waters, made for the express purpose, were passed over it by means of a little sponge fastened to the top of a reed. History does not give the exact number of coups-de-soleil caught in this manner; a few, I should imagine. However, I can warrant the accuracy of my statement, which is borrowed from a contemporary author of the highest standing. The men of Venice are neither handsome in the face nor well made in the body. The Venetian dialect is amusing; in the mouth of a woman, if well spoken, it is pretty, musical, childlike, lisping; but in the mouth of a man, for the most part, muddy, stammering, unintelligible.

Speaking of his elder sister's suffering, he continues:—