“I am getting on well with all my own work; and much pleased with some that Mr. Bunney is doing for me; so that really I expect to carry off a great deal of Verona....  The only mischief of the place is its being too rich.  Stones, flowers, mountains—­all equally asking one to look at them; a history to every foot of ground, and a picture on every foot of wall; frescoes fading away in the neglected streets—­like the colours of the dolphin.”

As assistants in this enterprise of recording the monuments of Venice and Verona, and of recording them more fully and in a more interesting way than by photography, he took with him Arthur Burgess and John Bunney, his former pupils.  Mr. Burgess was the subject of a memoir by Ruskin in the Century Guild Hobby Horse (April, 1887), appreciating his talents and lamenting his loss.  Mr. Bunney, who had travelled with Ruskin in Switzerland in 1863, and had lately lived near Florence, thenceforward settled in Venice, where he died in 1882, after completing his great work, the St. Mark’s now in the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield.  A memoir of him by Mr. Wedderburn appeared in the catalogue of the Venice Exhibition, at the Fine Art Society’s Gallery in November, 1882.

At Venice Ruskin had met his old friend Rawdon Brown[17], and Count Giberto Borromeo, whom he visited at Milan on his way home, with deep interest in the Luinis and in the authentic bust of St. Carlo; so closely resembling Ruskin himself.  Another noteworthy encounter is recorded in a letter of May 4th.[18]

[Footnote 17:  Whose book on the English in Italy (from Venetian documents) was shortly to be published, with funds supplied by Ruskin.]

[Footnote 18:  This date ought to be “June 4th,” as Mr. E.T.  Cook notices (Library Edn.  XIX., p. liv.).]

“As I was drawing in the square this morning, in a lovely, quiet, Italian, light, there came up the poet Longfellow with his little daughter—­a girl of 12, or 13, with springy-curled flaxen hair,—­curls, or waves, that wouldn’t come out in damp, I mean.  They stayed talking beside me some time.  I don’t think it was a very vain thought that came over me, that if a photograph could have been taken of the beautiful square of Verona, in that soft light, with Longfellow and his daughter talking to me at my work—­some people both in England and America would have liked copies of it.”

Readers of “Fors” will recognise an incident noted on the 18th of June.

“Yesterday, it being quite cool, I went for a walk; and as I came down from a rather quiet hillside, a mile or two out of town, I past a house where the women were at work spinning the silk off the cocoons.  There was a sort of whirring sound as in an English mill; but at intervals they sang a long sweet chant, all together, lasting about two minutes—­then pausing a minute and then beginning again.  It was good and tender music, and the multitude of voices prevented any sense of failure, so that it was very lovely and sweet, and like the things that I mean to try to bring to pass.”