William Michael Rossetti has summed the matter up well by saying:  “Perfection is so rare in this world that when we find it we must pause and pay it the tribute of our silent admiration.  It is very easy to say that Meissonier should have put in this and omitted that.  Had he painted differently he would have been some one else.  The work is faultless, and such genius as he showed must ever command the homage of those who know by experience the supreme difficulty of having the hand materialize the conceptions of the mind.  And yet Meissonier’s conceptions outmatched his brush:  he was greater than his work.  He was a great artist, and better still, a great man—­proud, frank, fearless and conscientious.”

TITIAN

Titian by a few strokes of the brush knew how to make the general image and character of whatever object he attempted.  His great care was to preserve the masses of light and of shade, and to give by opposition the idea of that solidity which is inseparable from natural objects.  He was the greatest of the Venetians, and deserves to rank with Raphael and Michelangelo.

    —­Sir Joshua Reynolds

[Illustration:  Titian]

The march of progress and the rage for improvement make small impression on Venice.  The cabmen have not protested against horsecars as they did in Rome, tearing up the tracks, mobbing the drivers, and threatening the passengers; neither has the cable superseded horses as a motor power, and the trolley then rendered the cable obsolete.

In short, there never was a horse in Venice, save those bronze ones over the entrance to Saint Mark’s, and the one Napoleon rode to the top of the Campanile.  But there are lions in Venice—­stone lions—­you see them at every turn.  “Did you ever see a live horse?” asked a ten-year-old boy of me, in Saint Mark’s Square.

“Yes,” said I; “several times.”

“Are they fierce?” he asked after a thoughtful pause.  And then I explained that a thousand times as many men are killed by horses every year as by lions.

Four hundred years have made no change in the style of gondolas, or anything else in Venice.  The prow of the Venetian gondola made today is of the same height as that prescribed by Tommaso Mocenigo, Doge in the year Fourteen Hundred.  The regulated height of the prow is to insure protection for the passengers when going under bridges, but its peculiar halberd shape is a thing not one of the five thousand gondoliers in Venice can explain.  If you ask your gondolier he will swear a pious oath, shrug his fine shoulders, and say, “Mon Dieu, Signore! how should I know?—­it has always been so.”  The ignorance and superstition of the picturesque gondolier, with his fluttering blue hatband and gorgeous sash, are most enchanting.  His lack of knowledge is like the ignorance of childhood, when life has neither beginning nor end; when ways and means present no vexatious problems; when if food is not to be had for the simple asking, it can surely be secured by coaxing; when the day is for frolic and play, and the night for dreams and sleep.