very narrow and slippery, in regard they are all paved with smooth bricke, and joyning to the water, the horse would quickly fall into the river, and so drowne both himselfe and his rider.  Therefore the Venetians do use Gondolaes in their streets insteede of horses, I meane their liquid streets:  that is, their pleasant channels.  So that I now finde by mine owne experience that the speeches of a certaine English Gentleman (with whom I once discoursed before my travels), a man that much vaunted of his observations in Italy, are utterly false.  For when I asked him what principall things he observed in Venice, he answered me that he noted but little of the city, because he rode through it in post.  A fiction, and as grosse and palpable as ever was coyned.”

From the horses’ gallery there is a most interesting view of the Piazza and the Piazzetta, and the Old Library and Loggetta are as well seen from here as anywhere.

Within the church itself two things at once strike us:  the unusual popularity of it, and the friendliness.  Why an intensely foreign building of great size should exert this power of welcome I cannot say; but the fact remains that S. Mark’s, for all its Eastern domes and gold and odd designs and billowy floor, does more to make a stranger and a Protestant at home than any cathedral I know; and more people are also under its sway than in any other.  Most of them are sightseers, no doubt, but they are sightseers from whom mere curiosity has fallen:  they seem to like to be there for its own sake.

The coming and going are incessant, both of worshippers and tourists, units and companies.  Guides, professional and amateur, bring in little groups of travellers, and one hears their monotonous informative voices above the foot-falls; for, as in all cathedrals, the prevailing sound is of boots.  In S. Mark’s the boots make more noise than in most of the others because of the unevenness of the pavement, which here and there lures to the trot.  One day as I sat in my favourite seat, high up in the gallery, by a mosaic of S. Liberale, a great gathering of French pilgrims entered, and, seating themselves in the right transept beneath me, they disposed themselves to listen to an address by the French priest who shepherded them.  His nasal eloquence still rings in my ears.  A little while after I chanced to be at Padua, and there, in the church of S. Anthony, I found him again, again intoning rhetoric.

S. Mark’s is never empty, but when the rain falls—­and in Venice rain literally does fall—­it is full.  Then do the great leaden spouts over the facade pour out their floods, while those in the courtyard of the Doges’ Palace expel an even fiercer torrent.  But the city’s recovery from a deluge is instant.