This incident showed the change that was coming over my companion.  His principle had always been that a man who could not help himself was not worth helping.  He never asked for aid himself, and never gave it to his own sex, as a rule.  I believe his rescuing me at B——­ was a solitary case, and I took it as a great compliment.  You will say this one was only an act of common humanity.  If you had known the man, you would have thought, as I did, that the words of her, who was an angel then, were bearing fruit already.

Nothing happened of the slightest interest as we ran down through the Straits of Messina, and up the eastern coast of Calabria.  We did not stay to see Sicily then, for we had settled to be in Venice by a certain day, to meet the Forresters.

If I were to be seduced into “word-painting,” the Queen of the Adriatic would tempt me.  I know no other scene so provocative of enthusiasm as the square acre round St. Mark’s.  All things considered, the author of the “Stones of Venice” seems very sufficiently rational and cold-blooded.

We can not all be romantic about landscapes.  Nature has worshipers enough not to grudge a few to Art.  For myself, admiring both when in perfection, I prefer hewn stones to rough rocks—­the Canalazzo to any cascade.  The glory of old days that clings round the Palace of the Doges stands comparison, in my mind’s eye, with the Iris of Terni.

But why trench on a field already amply cultivated?  I will never describe any place till I find a virgin spot untouched by Murray, and then I will send it to him, with my initials.  Does such exist in Europe?  “Faith, very hardly, sir.” Nil intentatum reliquit. What obligations do we not owe to the accomplished compilers?  Rarely rising into poetry (I except “Spain”—­the field, and bar one), never jocose, they move on, severe in simplicity, straight to their solemn end of enlightening the British tourist.  Upright as Rhadamanthus, they hold the scales that weigh the merits of cathedrals, hotels, ruins, guides, pictures, and mountain passes, telling us what to eat, drink, and avoid.  Let us repose on them in blind but contented reliance.

I heard of one man, clever but eccentric, who became so exasperated at seeing the volumes in every body’s hand, and hearing them in every body’s mouth, that he conceived a sort of personal enmity to them, impiously dissenting from their conclusions and questioning their premises.  The well-known red cover at last had the same effect on him as the scarlet cloak on the bull in the corrida, making him stamp and roar hideously.  The angry gods had demented him. Vae misero! How could such sacrilege end but badly?  Braving and deriding the solemn warning of the prophet, he attempted a certain pass in the Tyrol alone, and, losing his way, caught a pleurisy which proved fatal.  He died game, but, I am sorry to say, impenitent, speaking blasphemy against the book with his last breath. Discite justitiam, moniti, et non temnere—­