“It is wet this morning, and very dismal, for we are in a ghastly new Inn, the old one being shut up; and there is always a re-action after a strong excitement like the beauty of the Simplon yesterday, which leaves one very dull.  But it is of no use growling or mewing.  I hope to be at Milan to-morrow—­at Verona for Sunday.  I have been reading Dean Swift’s life, and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ again.  Putting the delight in dirt, which is a mere disease, aside, Swift is very like me, in most things:—­in opinions exactly the same.”

At Milan, next day, he went to see the St. Catherine of Luini which he had copied, and found it wantonly damaged by the carelessness of masons who put their ladders up against it, just as if it were a bit of common whitewashed wall.

On the 8th he reached Verona after seventeen years’ absence, and on the 10th he was in Venice.  There, looking at the works of the old painters with a fresh eye, and with feelings and thoughts far different from those with which he had viewed them as a young man, in 1845, he saw beauties he had passed over before, in the works of a painter till then little regarded by connoisseurs, and entirely neglected by the public.  Historians of art like Crowe and Cavalcaselle[16] had indeed examined Carpaccio’s works and investigated his life, along with the lives and works of many another obscure master:  artists like Hook and Burne-Jones had admired his pictures; Ruskin had mentioned his backgrounds twice or thrice in “Stones of Venice.”  But no writer had noticed his extraordinary interest as an exponent of the mythology of the Middle Ages, as the illustrator of poetical folk-lore derived from those antique myths of Greece, and newly presented by the genius of Christianity.

[Footnote 16:  Their “History of Painting in North Italy,” containing a detailed account of Carpaccio, was published in 1871.]

This was a discovery for which Ruskin was now ripe, He saw at once that he had found a treasure-house of things new and old.  He fell in love with St. Ursula as, twenty-four years earlier, he had fallen in love with the statue of Ilaria at Lucca; and she became, as time after time he revisited Venice for her sake, a personality, a spiritual presence, a living ideal, exactly as the Queen of the Air might have been to the sincere Athenian in the pagan age of faith.  The story of her life and death became an example, the conception of her character, as read in Carpaccio’s picture, became a standard for his own life and action in many a time of distress and discouragement.  The thought of “What would St. Ursula say?” led him—­not always, but far more often than his correspondents knew—­to burn the letter of sharp retort upon stupidity and impertinence, and to force the wearied brain and overstrung nerves into patience and a kindly answer.  And later on, the playful credence which he accorded to the myth deepened into a renewed sense of the possibility of spiritual realities, when he learnt to look, with those mediaeval believers; once more as a little child upon the unfathomable mysteries of life.