But the most populous occasion on which I ever saw S. Mark’s was on S. Mark’s own day—­April 25.  Then it is solid with people:  on account of the procession, which moves from a point in front of the high altar and makes a tour of the church, passing down to the door of the Baptistery, through the atrium, and into the church again by the door close to the Cappella dei Mascoli.  There is something in all Roman Catholic ceremonial which for me impairs its impressiveness—­perhaps a thought too much mechanism—­and I watched this chanting line of choristers, priests, and prelates without emotion, but perfectly willing to believe that the fault lay with me.  Three things abide vividly in the memory:  the Jewish cast of so many of the large inscrutable faces of the wearers of the white mitres; a little aged, isolated, ecclesiastic of high rank who muttered irascibly to himself; and a precentor who for a moment unfolded his hands and lowered his eyes to pull out his watch and peep at it.  Standing just inside the church and watching the people swarm in their hundreds for this pageantry, I was struck by the comparatively small number who made any entering salutation.  No children did.  Perhaps the raptest worshipper was one of Venice’s many dwarfs, a tiny, alert man in blue linen with a fine eloquent face and a great mass of iron-grey hair.

This was the only occasion on which I saw the Baptistery accessible freely to all and the door into the Piazzetta open.

One should not look at a guide-book on the first visit to S. Mark’s; nor on the second or third, unless, of course, one is pressed for time.  Let the walls and the floors and the pillars and the ceiling do their own quiet magical work first.  Later you can gather some of their history.  The church has but one fault which I have discovered, and that is the circular window to the south.  Beautiful as this is, it is utterly out of place, and whoever cut it was a vandal.

But indeed S. Mark’s ought to have a human appeal, considering the human patience and thought that have gone to its making and beautifying, inside and out.  No other church has had much more than a tithe of such toil.  The Sistine Chapel in Rome is wonderful enough, with its frescoes; but what is the labour on a fresco compared with that on a mosaic?  Before every mosaic there must be the artist and the glass-maker; and then think of the labour of translating the artist’s picture into this exacting and difficult medium and absolutely covering every inch of the building with it!  And that is merely decoration; not structure at all.