“I was out of health and out of heart when I first got here.  There came much painful news from home, and then such a determined course of bad weather, and every other kind of annoyance, that I never was in a temper fit to write to anyone:  the worst of it was that I lost all feeling of Venice, and this was the reason both of my not writing to you and of my thinking of you so often.  For whenever I found myself getting utterly hard and indifferent I used to read over a little bit of the ‘Venice’ in the ‘Italy’ and it put me always into the right tone of thought again, and for this I cannot be enough grateful to you.  For though I believe that in the summer, when Venice is indeed lovely, when pomegranate blossoms hang over every garden-wall, and green sunlight shoots through every wave, custom will not destroy, or even weaken, the impression conveyed at first; it is far otherwise in the length and bitterness of the Venetian winters.  Fighting with frosty winds at every turn of the canals takes away all the old feelings of peace and stillness; the protracted cold makes the dash of the water on the walls a sound of simple discomfort, and some wild and dark day in February one starts to find oneself actually balancing in one’s mind the relative advantages of land and water carriage, comparing the Canal with Piccadilly, and even hesitating whether for the rest of one’s life one would rather have a gondola within call or a hansom.”

He then goes on to lament the decay of Venice, the idleness and dissipation of the populace, the lottery gambling; and to forebode the “destruction of old buildings and erection of new” changing the place “into a modern town—­a bad imitation of Paris.”  Better than that he thinks would be utter neglect; St. Mark’s Place would again be, what it was in the early ages, a green field, and the front of the Ducal Palace and the marble shafts of St. Mark’s would be rooted in wild violets and wreathed with vines: 

“She will be beautiful again then, and I could almost wish that the time might come quickly, were it not that so many noble pictures must be destroyed first....  I love Venetian pictures more and more, and wonder at them every day with greater wonder; compared with all other paintings they are so easy, so instinctive, so natural; everything that the men of other schools did by rule and called composition, done here by instinct and only called truth.

“I don’t know when I have envied anybody more than I did the other day the directors and clerks of the Zecca.  There they sit at inky deal desks, counting out rolls of money, and curiously weighing the irregular and battered coinage of which Venice boasts; and just over their heads, occupying the place which in a London countinghouse would be occupied by a commercial almanack, a glorious Bonifazio—­’Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’; and in a less honourable corner three old directors of the Zecca, very