The Venetian displays no marked enthusiasm for fair hair, notwithstanding the fame of Giorgione's sunset heads and the traditional expedients by which Venetian ladies of past times sought to bring their dark locks into conformity with that painter's favourite hue. In Venetian songs there is nothing about the "golden spun silk" of Sicily; if a Venetian folk-poet does speak of fair hair, he calls it by the common-place generic term of blond. The available evidence goes rather to show that in his own heart he prefers a brunette. "My lady mother always told me that I should never be enamoured of white roses," says a sententious young man; "she told me that I should love the little mulberries, which are sweeter than honey." "Cara mora," _mora_, or mulberry, meaning brunette, is an ordinary caressing term. Two frank young people carry on this dialogue: "Will you come to me, fair maid?" "No; I will not come, for I am fair." "If you are fair, I am no less so; if you are the rose, I am the spotless lily." Beauty, therefore, is valued, especially by the possessors of it. But the Venetian admits the possibility of that which Keats found so hard to comprehend--the love of the plain. A girl says, and it is a pretty saying, "Se no so bela, ghe piaso al mio amore" ("If I am not fair, I please my beloved"). A soldier, whose _morosa_ dies, does not weep for her beauty, for she was not beautiful; nor for her riches, for she was not rich; he weeps for her sweet manners and conversation--it was that that made him love her. The universal weakness for a little flattery from the hand of the portrait-painter is expressed in a sprightly little song: What does it matter if I am not fair, Who have a lover, who a painter is? He will portray me like a star, I wis; What does it matter if I am not fair? We hear a good deal of lovers' quarrels, and of the transitoriness of love. "Oh! God! how the sky is overcast! It seems about to rain, and then it passes; so is it with a man in love; he loves a fair woman, and then he leaves her." That is her version of the affair. He has not anything complimentary to say: "If I get out of this squall alive, never more shall woman in the world befool me. I have been befooled upon a pledge of sacred faith: mad is the man who believes in women." Another man says, with more serious bitterness: "What time have I not lost in loving you! Had I lost it in saying so many prayers, I should have found favour before God, and my mother would have blessed me." A matter-of-fact girl remarks, "No one will grow thin on your account, nor will any one die on mine." When her lover says that he has sent her his heart in a basket, she replies that she sends back both basket and heart, being in want of neither; and if he should really happen to die, she unfeelingly meditates, "My love is dead, and I have not wept; I had thought to suffer more torment. A Pope dies, another is made; not otherwise do I weep for my love."